Across the Sea of Suns (6 page)

One night he took Rosa with a power and confidence he had not felt since years before, with his wife. It surprised him.

They ate the cans of provisions. He used some scraps for bait and caught a few fish, but they were small. She knew a way to make the twine tight and springy. He used it to make a bow and arrow and it was accurate enough to shoot fish if they came close.

Their water began to run out. Rosa kept their stores under the lean-to and at seven days Warren found the water was almost gone. She had been drinking more than her share.

“I had to,” she said, backing away from him at a crouch. “I can’t stand it, I … I get so bad. And the sun, it’s too hot, I just …”

He wanted to stop but be could not and he hit her several times. There was no satisfaction in it.

Through the afternoon Rosa cringed at a corner of the raft and Warren lay under the lean-to, and thought. In the cool, orderly limits of the problem he found a kind of rest. He squatted on a plank and rocked with the swell, and inside, where he had come to live more and more these past years, the world was not just the gurgle and rush of waves and the bleaching raw edge of salt and sun. Inside there were the books and the diagrams and things he had known. He struggled to put them together:

Chemistry. He cut a small slit in the rubber stopper of a water can and lowered it into the sea on a long fishing line.

The deeper water was cold. He pulled the can up and put in inside a bigger can. It steamed like a champagne bucket. Water beaded on the outside of the small can. The big can held the drops. The drops were free of salt but there was not much.

Nine days out the water was gone. Rosa cried. Warren tried to find a way to make the condensing better but they did not have many cans. The yield was no more than a mouthful a day.

In the late afternoon of that day Rosa suddenly hit him and started shouting filthy names. She said he was a sailor and should get them water and get them to land and when they finally did get picked up she would tell everybody now bad a sailor he was and how they had nearly died because he did not know how to find the land.

He let her run down and stayed away from her. If she scratched him with her long fingernails the wound would heal badly and there was no point in taking a risk. They had not taken any fish on the lines for a long time now and they were getting weaker. The effort of hauling up the cans from below made his arms tremble.

The next day the sea ran high. The raft groaned, rising sluggishly and plunging hard. Waves washed them again and again so it was impossible to sleep or even rest. At dusk Warren discovered jelly sea horses as big as a thumbnail riding in the foam that lapped over the raft. He stared at them and tried to remember what he had learned of biology.

If they started drinking anything with a high salt content the end would come fast. But they had to have something. He put a few on his tongue, tentatively, and waited until they melted. They were salty and fishy but seemed less salty than seawater. The cool moisture seemed right and his throat welcomed it. He spoke to Rosa and showed her and they gathered handfuls of the sea horses until nightfall.

On the eleventh day there were no sea horses and the sun pounded at them. Rosa had made hats for them, using cloth from the wreckage. That helped with the worst of the day, but to get through the hours Warren had to sit with closed eyes under the lean-to, carefully working through the clear hallways of his mind.

The temptation to drink seawater was festering in him, flooding the clean places inside him where he had withdrawn. He kept before him the chain of things to keep himself intact.

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 shelter 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.