Across the Sea of Suns Read online

  If he drank seawater he would take in a quantity of dissolved salt. The body did not need much salt, so it had to get rid of most of what he took in. The kidneys would sponge up the salt from his blood and secrete it. But doing that took pure water, at least a pint a day.

  The waves churned before him and he felt the rocking of the deck and he made it into a chant.

  Drink a pint of seawater a day. The body turns it into about twenty cubic centimeters of pure water.

  But the kidneys need more than that to process the salt. They react. They take water from the body tissues.

  The body dries out. The tongue turns black. Nausea. Fever. Death.

  He sat there for hours, reciting it, polishing it down to a few key words, making it perfect. He told it to Rosa and she did not understand but that was all right.

  In the long afternoon he squinted against the glare and the world became one of sounds. The rattling of their cans came to him against the murmur of the sea and the hollow slap of waves against the underside of the raft. Then there was a deep thump. He peered to starboard. A rippling in the water. Rosa sat up. He gestured for silence. The planks and logs creaked and worked against each other and the thump came again.

  He had heard dolphins knocking under the raft before and this was not their playful string of taps. Warren crawled out from the lean-to and into the yellow sunlight and a big green form broke surface and rolled belly-over, goggling at them with a bulging eye, its mouth was like a slash in the blunt face. The teeth were narrow and sharp.

  Rosa cried in terror and the Swarmer seemed to hear her. It circled the raft, following her awkward scuttling. She screamed and moved faster but the big thing flicked its tail and kept alongside her.

  Warren’s concentration narrowed to an absolute problem that took in the Swarmer and its circling and the closed geometry of the raft. If they let it come in when it chose, it would lunge against the raft and catch them off-balance and have a good chance of tumbling them into the water or breaking up the raft.

  The green form turned and dived deep under the raft.

  “Rosa!” He tore off his shirt. “Here! Wave it in the water on the side.” He clipped the shirt, crouching at the edge. “Like this.”

  She hung back. “I … but … no, I …”

  “Damn it! I’ll stop it before it gets to you.”

  She gaped at him and the Swarmer broke water on the far side of the raft. It rolled ponderously, as if it were having trouble understanding how to attack a thing so much smaller than a ship, and attacking it alone.

  Rosa took the shirt hesitantly. He encouraged her and she bent over and swished a tip of it in the surf. “Good.”

  Warren brought out the crude arrow he had made with a centimeter-thick slat from the Manamix lifeboat. He had tapered it down and driven a nail in the head. He tucked the arrow into the rubber strip of his bow and tested it. The arrow had a line on it and did not fly very straight. Not much good for fish.

  He slitted his eyes against the glare and looked out at the shallow troughs. The sea warped and rippled where the thing had just disappeared. Warren sensed that it had judged them now and was gliding back in the blue shadows under the raft, coming around for its final pass. It would not see the shirt until it turned and that would bring it up and near the corner where Warren now stood, between its path and Rosa. He drew the arrow back in a smooth motion, sighting, straining, sighting—

  Rosa saw the dim shape first. She flicked the rag out of the water with a jerk. Warren saw something dart up, seeming to come up out of the floor of the ocean itself, catching the refracted bands of light from the waves.

  Rosa screamed and stepped back. The snout broke water and the mouth like a cut was leering at them and Warren let go the arrow thunk and followed it forward, scrabbling on all fours. The thing had the arrow in under the gills and the big flaps of green flesh bulged and flared open in spasms as it rolled to the side.

  Warren snatched at the arrow line and missed. “Grab the end!” he called. The arrow was enough to stun the Swarmer but that was all. The thing was stunned with the nail driven deep in it, but Warren wanted more of it now, more than just the killing of it, and he splashed partway off the raft to reach the snout and drag it in. He got a slippery grip on a big blue ventral fin. The mouth snapped. It thrashed and Warren used the motion to haul it toward the raft. He swung himself, the wood cutting into his hip, and levered the body partway onto the deck. Rosa took a fin and pulled. He used the pitch of the deck and his weight to flip the thing over on its side. It arched its back, twisting to gain leverage to thrash back over the side. Warren had his knife out and as the thing slid away from him he drove the blade in, slipping it through soft tissue at the side and riding up against the spine. Warren slashed down the body, feeling the Swarmer convulse in agony. Then it straightened and seemed to get smaller.

  The two stood back and looked at the scaly green body, three meters long. Its weight made the raft dip and turn in the swell.

  Something sticky was beginning to drain from the long cut. Warren fetched a can and scooped up the stuff. It was a thin, pale yellow fluid. He did not hear Rosa’s whimpering, stumbling approach as he lifted the can to his lips.

  He caught the cool, slightly acrid taste of it for an instant. He opened his mouth wider to take it in. She struck the can from his hands. It clattered on the deck.

  His punch drove her to her knees. “Why?” he yelled. “What do you care—”

  “Wrong,” she sputtered out. “Ugly. They’re not … not normal … to … to eat.”

  “You want to drink? Want to live?”

  She shook her head, blinking. “Na … ah, yeah, but … not that. Maybe …”

  He looked at her coldly and she moved away. The carcass was dripping. He wedged it against a log and propped cans under it. He drank the first filled can, and the second.

  The dorsal and ventral fins sagged in death. In the water he had seen them spread wide as wings. The bulging brain-case and the goggle eyes seemed out of place, even in the strange face with its squeezed look. The rest of the body was sleek like the large fish. He had heard somebody say that evolution forced the same slim contours on any fast thing that lived in an ocean, even on submarines.

  The Swarmer had scaly patches around the forefins and at each ventral fin. The skin looked as though it were getting thick and hard. Warren did not remember seeing that in the photographs of dead ones, but then the articles and movies had not said anything about the Swarmer scouts either until a year ago. They kept changing.

  Rosa crouched under the lean-to. Once, when he drank, she spat out some word he could not understand.

  The third can he set down on the boards halfway between them. He cut into the body and found the soft pulpy places where it was vulnerable to an arrow. He learned the veins and arteries and ropes of muscle. There were big spaces in the head that had something to do with hearing. In the belly pouch the strand was shriveled and laced with a kind of blue muscle. Around the fins where the skin became scaly there were little bones and cartilage and gristle that did not seem to have any use.

  Rosa edged closer as he worked. The heat weighed on her. She licked her lips until they were raw and finally she drank.

  THREE

  He kept track of the days by making a cut each morning in a tree limb. The ritual sawing became crucial, part of the struggle. The itching salt spray and the hammering of the sun blurred distinctions. In the simple counting he found there was some order, the beauty of number that existed outside the steady rub of the sea’s green sameness.

  Between the two of them they made the killing of the Swarmers a ritual as well. The scouts came at random intervals now, with never more than three days of waiting until the next thumping probes at the planking. Then Rosa would stoop and wave the shirt in the water. The thing would make a pass to look and then turn to strike, coming by the jutting corner, and Warren would drive the arrow into a soft place.

  Rosa would crouch under the she
lter then and mumble to herself and wait for him to gut it and bleed the watery pouches of fin fluid and finally take the sour syrup from behind the eyes.

  With each flesh kill he learned more. They cut up some cloth and made small bags to hold the richer parts of the carcass and then chewed it for each drop. Sometimes it made them sick. After that he twisted chunks of the flesh in a cloth bag and let the drops air in the sun. That was not so bad. They ate the big slabs of flesh but it was the fluid they needed most.

  With each kill Rosa became more distant. She sat dreamily swaying at the center of their plank island, humming and singing to herself, coiling inward. Warren worked and thought.

  On the twenty-first day of drifting she woke him. He came up reluctantly from the vague, shifting sleep. She was shouting.

  Darting away into the bleak dawn was something lean and blue. It leaped into the air and plunged with a shower of foam and then almost in the same instant was flying out of the steep wall of a wave, turning in the gleaming fresh sun. “A Skimmer,” he murmured. It was the first he had ever seen.

  Rosa cried out.

  Warren stared out into the hills and valleys of moving water, blinking, following her finger. A gray cylinder the size of his hand floated ten meters away.

  He picked up the tree limb they used for marking the days. His hands were puffed up now from the constant damp, and the bark of the limb scraped them. No green shapes moved below. He rocked with the swell, waiting at the edge of the raft for a random current to bring the gray thing closer.

  A long time passed. It bobbed sluggishly and came no closer. Warren leaned against the pitch of the deck and stretched for it. The limb was short at least a meter.

  He swayed back, relaxing, letting the clenching in his muscles ease away. His arms trembled. He could swim to it in a few quick strokes, turn and get back in a few—

  No. If he let go he would be sucked into the same endless caverns that Rosa was wandering. He had to hold on. And take no risks.

  He stepped back. The thing to do was wait and see if—

  White spray exploded in front of him. The lean form shot up into the air and Warren rolled back away from it. He came up with the knife held close to him.

  But the Skimmer arced away from the raft. It cut back into a wave and was gone for an instant and then burst up and caught the cylinder in it slanting mouth. In the air it rolled and snapped its head. The cylinder clunked onto the raft. The Skimmer leaped again, blue-white, and was gone into the endlessly shifting faces of green marble.

  Rosa was huddled in the shelter. Warren picked up the cylinder carefully. It was smooth and regular but something about it told him it had not been made with tools. There were small flaws in the soft, foamy gray, like the blotches on a tomato. At one end it puckered as though a tassel had fallen away.

  He rubbed it, pulled at it, turned the ends—It split with a moist pop. Inside there curled a thick sheet of the same softly resistant gray stuff. He unrolled it.

  SECHTON XMENAPU DE AN LANSDORFKOPPEN SW BY W ABLE SAGON MXIL VESSE L ANSAGEN MANLATS WIR UNS? FTH AS-DLENGS ERTY EARTHN PROFUILEN CO NISHI NAGARE KALLEN KOPFT EARTHN UMI

  He studied the combinations and tried to fit them together so there was some logic to it. It was no code, he guessed. Some of the words were German and there was some English and Japanese but most of it was either meaningless or no language he knew. VESSE L might be vessel.ANSAGEN—to say? He wished he remembered more of the German he had picked up in the merchant marine.

  The words were in a clear typeface like a newspaper and were turned into the sheet.

  He could make no more of it. Rosa did not want to look at the sheet. When he made her she shook her head, no, she could not pick out any new words.

  A Swarmer came later that day. Rosa did not back away fast enough and the big shape shot up out of the water. It bit down hard on the shirt as Warren’s arrow took it and the impact made the blunt head snap back. Rosa was not ready for it and she stumbled forward and into the sea. The Swarmer tried to flip away. Warren caught her as she went into the water. The alien lunged at her but Warren heaved her back onto the deck. He had dropped the bow. The Swarmer rolled and the bow washed overboard and then the tail fins caught the edge of the raft and it twisted and came tumbling aboard. Warren hit it with the tree limb.

  It kept thrashing but the blows stunned it. He waited for the right angle and then slipped the knife in deep, away from the snapping jaws, and the thing went still.

  Rosa helped with the cutting up. She started talking suddenly while he looked for the bow. He was intent on seeing if it was floating nearby and at first did not notice that she was not just muttering. He spotted the bow and managed to fetch it in. Rosa was discussing the Swarmers, calmly and in a matter-of-fact voice he had not heard from her before.

  “The important thing is to not let one get away,” she concluded.

  “Guess so,” Warren said.

  “They know about the raft, the Swarm comes.”

  “If they can find us, yeah.”

  “They send out these scouts. The pack, it will follow where the long ones tell it.”

  “We’ll get ’em.”

  “Forever? No. Only solution is land.”

  “None I’ve seen. We’re drifting west, could be—”

  “I thought you are sailor.”

  “Was.”

  “Then sail us to land.”

  “Not that easy,” Warren said, and went on to tell her how hard it was to get any control of a raft, and anyway he didn’t know where they were, what the landfalls were out here. She sniffed contemptuously at this news. “Find an island,” she repeated several times. Warren argued, not because he had any clear reason, but because he knew how to survive here and a vague fear came when he thought about the land. Rosa was speaking freely and easily now and she thought fast, sure of herself. Finally he broke off and set to work storing away the slabs of Swarmer meat. The talk confused him.

  The next day a Skimmer came and leaped near the raft and there was another cylinder, it swam away, a blur of silvery motion. He read the sheet.

  GEFAHRLICH GROSS HIRO ADFIN SOLID MNX 8 SHIO NISHI. KURO NAGARE. ANAXLE UNS NORMEN 286 W SCATTER PORT-LINE ZERO NAGARE. NISHI.

  He could make no sense of it. Rosa worked on it, not much interested, and shrugged. He tried to scratch marks on the sheets, thinking that he could send them something, ask questions. The sheet would not take an impression.

  A Swarmer surfaced to the west the next day. Rosa shrieked. It circled them twice and came in fast toward Rosa’s lure. Warren shot at it and hit too far back. The tip buried itself uselessly in a spot where he knew there was only fatty tissue. The Swarmer lunged at Rosa. She was ready, though, falling back from the edge, and it missed. Warren yanked on the line and freed the arrow. The Swarmer flinched as the arrow came out and rolled off the raft. The Swarmer sank and was gone.

  “Don’t let it get away!” Rosa cried.

  “It’s not coming up.”

  “You hit it in the wrong place.”

  “Went in pretty deep, though. Might die before it can get back to the pack.”

  “You think so?”

  Warren didn’t but he said, “Might.”

  “You, you have got to find us an island. Now.”

  “I still think we’re safe here.”

  “Incredible! You are no kind of sailor at all and you are afraid to admit it. Afraid to say you don’t know how to find land.”

  “Bullshit. I—” But she interrupted him with a flood of words he couldn’t keep up with. He heard her out, nodding finally, not knowing himself why he wanted to stay on the raft, on the sea. It just felt better, was all, and he did not know how to tell her that.

  When the argument was finally over he went back to thinking about the second message. Some of it was German and he knew a little of that, but not those particular words. He had never learned any Japanese even though he had lived in Tokyo.

  The next morning at dawn he woke suddenl
y and knew there was something near the raft. The swell was smooth and orange as the sun caught it. On the glassy horizon he saw nothing. He was very hungry and he remembered the Swarmer from yesterday. He had used the meat from the first kills to bait their lines but nothing bit. He wondered if that was because the fish would not take Swarmer meat or if there were no fish down there to have. The aliens had been changing the food chain in the oceans, he had read about that.

  Then he saw the gray dot floating far away. The raft was drifting toward it and in a few minutes he snagged it. The message said

  CONSQUE KPOF AMN SOLID. DIAOLEN MACHEN SMALL YOUTH SCHLECT UNS. DERINGER CHANGE DA. UNS B WSW. SAGEN ARBEIT BEI MOUTH. SHIMA CIRCLE STEIN NONGO NONGO UMI DRASVITCH YOU.

  He peered at the words … and squatted on the deck and felt the long dragging minutes go by. If he could—

  “Warren! Wa—Warren!” Rosa called. He followed her gesture.

  A blur on the horizon. It dipped and rose among the ragged waves. Warren breathed deeply. “Land.”

  Rosa’s eyes swelled and she barked out a sharp cackling laughter. Her lips went white with the laughing and she cried, “Yeah! Yeah! Land!” and shook her fists in the air.

  Warren blinked and measured with his eyes the current and the angle the brown smudge ahead made with their course. They would not reach it by drifting.

  He worked quickly.

  He took the tree limb and knocked away the supports of the lean-to. In the center of the raft he knelt and measured out the distances with hands and fingers and worked a hole in between two planks. He could wedge the limb into it. He made a collar out of strips of bark. The limb was crooked but it made a vertical beam.

  He took the plywood sheet of the lean-to and lashed it to the limb. With the knife he dug stays in the plywood. The wire that held the logs in place in the deck would have been good to use but he could not risk unlashing them. He used the last of their twine instead, passing it through the stays in the plywood and making them into trailing lines. The plywood was standing up now like a sail catching the wind, and by pulling the twine he could tack. The raft took the waves badly but by turning the plywood sheet he could take the strain off the weak places where the logs and boards met.