He sighed in frustration. Too late to bury his cargo, then. There was only one chance now. To pretend to surrender, and then, at the last moment, maybe he could destroy what he carried. Of course the only object hard enough to smash it against would be the side of the sub itself… Maybe Remi or Roland could have thought up something better, he reflected, but this was the best he could come up with on short notice. Crat started walking toward the light. It was terribly bright.
Too bright, in fact. He’d never seen such a searchlight before.
Moreover, it was vertical, not horizontal. Could it be someone up above, casting about down here from the surface? But that didn’t make sense!
Then Crat noticed for the first time… the brightness seemed to throb in tempo with the strange music flooding his helmet. It’s too big to be a searchlight, he realized when he saw the dolphins again, cavorting around the luminous perimeter. The column was nearly a hundred meters across.
They weren’t running away, after all. They were headed toward this thing! But what is it?
There was no shadow of a vessel on the surface. The brilliance had no specific source. It just was. Shuffling nearer the dazzling pillar, Crat’s foot caught on something bulky in the mud. A large, black, roughly egg-shaped object. Ironically, it was one of the nodules he’d expected to be sent after when he was hired. To a Sea State citizen, it was a fabulous find. Only right now that didn’t seem to matter as much as it might have only minutes ago.
The music grew more intricate and complex as he ap-proached the beating column. Crat pictured angels singing, but even that didn’t do it justice. The dolphins cried peals of exhilaration, and that somehow made him feel less afraid. They swooped, executing pirouettes just outside the shaft of brightness, squealing in counterpoint to its song.
Crat approached the shimmering boundary and stretched out one arm. He felt his blood drawn through the vessels in his hand by strange tides, returning to his heart changed with every beat. The fingertips met resistance and then passed through, tingling.
His black glove glowed in the light. He watched, dazed, as fizzing droplets hopped and danced on the rubber before evaporating in tiny cyclones. So. Within the glow there might be air… or vacuum… or something else. For sure, though, it wasn’t seawater.
He felt his arm nudged. A dolphin had come alongside to watch, and the two of them shared a moment’s soul-contact, each seeing glory reflected in the other’s eye. Each knowing exactly what the other one saw. Crat couldn’t help it,- he grinned. Crat laughed exultantly.
Then, gently, the dolphin nudged his arm again, pushing it out of the shining beam.
Breaking contact tore at him instantly, as if something had ruptured inside. Crat sobbed at a sudden memory of his mother, who had died when he was so young, leaving him alone in a world of welfare agents and official charity. He tried to go back, to throw himself into the embrace of the light, but the dolphins wouldn’t let him. They pushed him away. One thrust its bottle nose between his legs and lifted him bodily.
“Let me go!” he moaned, reaching out. But even then he heard the music climax and begin to fade. The brilliance turned golden and diminished too. Then it ended suddenly with a clap that set the ocean ringing.
In the rapid dimness, his irises couldn’t adapt fast enough. He never saw water rush in to fill the empty shaft, but he and the dolphins were taken by a spinning, tumbling chaos that yanked them like bits of weed in the surf. Crat grabbed his air-hose and just held on.
When, at last, the tugging currents let him go, for a second time Crat shakily picked himself up from the muddy bottom. It took a while to look around without everything spinning. Then he realized the dolphins were gone. So too were the light, the music. Even the ringing in his ears. The stinging afterimages faded till at last he heard an insistent voice yammering.
“… you need help? We had our comm messed up for a while. Some think maybe we were near one of those boggle things people are talking about. What a coincidence!
“Anyway, Courier Four, our telltales show you’re all right. Please confirm.”
Crat swallowed. It took some effort to relearn how to speak. “I’m… okay.” He looked around quickly and found the cargo — only a few meters away. Crat picked it up, shaking off more muck. “Want me to start back on course?”
The voice at the other end interrupted. “Good attitude, Courier Four. But no. We’re sending a sub that way anyway with some bigwigs to inaugurate Site Six. It’ll pick you up shortly. Just stand by.”
So he was going to get there after all… and Crat found that now he didn’t care a bit. Standing there waiting, more than ever he wished his fingers could pass through the glass faceplate as they had briefly penetrated that shining boundary. For those few moments, his hands had sought and found his life’s first real solace. Now he’d settle for just the memory of that gift, and a chance to wipe his streaming eyes.
□ I sometimes wonder what animals think of the phenomenon of humanity — and especially of human babies. For no creature on the planet must seem anywhere near so obnoxious.
A baby screams and squalls. It urinates and defecates in all directions. It complains incessantly, filling the air with demanding cries. How human parents stand it is their own concern. But to great hunters, like lions and bears, our infants must be horrible indeed. They must seem to taunt them, at full volume.
“Yoo-hoo, beasties!” babies seem to cry. “Here’s a toothsome morsel, utterly helpless, soft and tender. But I needn’t keep quiet like the young of other species. I don’t crouch silently and blend in with the grass. You can track me by my noise or smell alone, but you don’t dare!
“Because my mom and dad are the toughest, meanest sumbitches ever seen, and if you come near, they’ll have your hide for a rug.”
All day they scream, all night they cry. Surely if animals ever held a poll, they’d call human infants the most odious of creatures. In comparison, human adults are merely very, very scary.
• CORE
The Maori guards wouldn’t let Alex go to Hanga Roa town to meet the stratojet, so he waited outside the resonator building. The afternoon was windy and he paced nervously.
At one point, before the incoming flight was delayed yet again, Teresa came by to help him pass the time. “Why is Spivey using a courier?” she asked. “Doesn’t he trust his secure channels anymore?”
“Would you? Those channels go through the same sky everyone else uses. They were secure only because the military paid top dollar and kept a low profile. These days, though?” He shrugged, his point obvious without further elaboration. If this messenger carried the news he expected, it would be worth any wait.
Teresa gave his shoulder an affectionate shove. “Well, I’ll bet you’re glad who the courier is.”
Teresa’s friendship was a fine thing. She understood him. Knew how to tease him out of his frequent dour moods. Alex grinned. “And what about you, Rip? Didn’t I see you eyeing that big fellow Auntie sent to cook for us.”
“Oh, him.” She blushed briefly. “Only for a minute or two. Come on, Alex. I told you how picky I am.”
Indeed, he kept learning new levels to her complexity. Last night, for instance, they had spent hours talking as he handed her tools and she wriggled behind Atlantis’s panels. If things went as expected, they’d be off to Reykjavik tomorrow or the next day, to testify before the special tribunal everyone was talking about. Alex thought it only fair to give her a hand tidying up the old shuttle before that.