Heaven (2 page)

What made it all the worse was that the jib halyard had jammed when the first gales hit, making it impossible to bring down
the jib sail, and the air currents hitting the coarse cloth triangle had made steering next to impossible until the sail had
ripped away altogether. By then they were already well off course, and the winds and currents were becoming less favorable
by the minute. It had been a race against disaster, and disaster had romped home.

Right now Second-Best Sailor had little idea where they were, except that it had to be a long way to the west of where they
ought to be. As soon as the waves reduced to a rough swell, he would have to make an excursion ’bovedecks and carry out some
navigational observations. Until then . . . He instructed Fat Apprentice to keep the boat on its present heading, except to
avoid rocks. He took another look through the maze of periscopes that No-Moon’s sea captains used to check the set of their
sails and the state of their ropes, and it didn’t look good. The sheets were tangled, and the mainsail, hastily lowered, was
a crumpled heap. The jib, he already knew, had ripped into shreds and blown away. Short Apprentice had watched it go, and
a few tattered strips of sailcloth straggled across the deck in mute confirmation.

This kind of thing always seemed to happen to him—something that Second-Best Sailor found unfair and irksome.

The mast, at least, was still attached to the airside face of the boat’s deck.

The gale had subsided to a strong breeze, just right for sailing if he could get the mainsail up and replace the missing jib.
He opened one of the sallyports that flanked the sides of the hull below the roofline, and swam out into the tumbling ocean
to find out how Short Apprentice was getting on.

Second-Best Sailor’s squat body pulsed as water squirted through his siphons, propelling him away from the shell-encrusted
planking of the hull. The keel, a large triangular lignoid slab, hung down from the hull to catch the ocean currents. Through
the air-bubbled water of the ocean roof he could see enough to be satisfied that the keel’s integrity was unbreached.

He swam closer to the keel and brushed away some tangled weed with an expert tug of one tentacle. Then he headed for the stern,
to assess the results of Short Apprentice’s efforts.

Second-Best Sailor was a polypoid, a free-floating male belonging to a coral-like species. The females formed vast reefs,
and only their husbands were mobile. He was shaped rather like a shortened squid, and slightly smaller than a ’Thal trader.
His body was a cylinder of highly viscous jelly, tapered at one end and dividing into nine strong, flexible tentacles at the
other. Every third tentacle trifurcated at its tip, for more delicate manipulations. Three large hemispherical eyes were arranged
at equal angles around the cylinder, just forward of the base-ring, where tentacles met body. Between them, at the front center
of his body, was a sphincter that could open to ingest food or expel digested waste. Three longitudinal fins, each aligned
with an eye, ran from just aft of the tentacles all the way to the tip of the tapering tail, where they narrowed and merged
into a complicated fanlike structure. Clusters of siphons were arrayed between the fins, where they ran into the tentacles.
Most of them were devoted to the extraction of oxygen from the sea and the ejection of seawater to control movement. A few
were more specialized. At the moment Second-Best Sailor’s skin was mottled in patches of brown and gray, and it was as smooth
as silk . . . but those features could change in an instant to reflect his mood.

He arranged his approach to keep him in Short Apprentice’s blind spot, which would be quite big in one of such youth. To his
surprise and relief, he quickly saw that the youngster was making an excellent job of tying down the thole-boards. Five of
them were already secure, and the young polypoid was swarming all over the sixth and last, using three tentacles to braid
a strong net of ropeweed while the other six held the board in place against the planking-rail. A few of the nodes were tighter
than they ought to be, but Second-Best Sailor was content to let the apprentice find that out later, when he had to replace
the temporary repair with permanent bindings. After he’d struggled with the tight nodes for a few hours, his captain would
impress him with one of the lesser-known uses of an awlfish spike and fix the problem in seconds.

Second-Best Sailor was a great believer in the positive approach to training apprentices, and he turned until his speech-siphon
pointed straight at the youngster, bellowing encouragement. Short Apprentice displayed the stripes of gratitude for a few
seconds and carried on braiding his net.

Second-Best Sailor returned to his boat, entering through the nearest sallyport and closing it behind him. The seas were calming,
and it was time to don a suit and penetrate the alien world ’bovedecks.

May and Stun tired of dabbling their toes in the ocean swell, and put their sandals back on.

“You are troubled,” said Stun. “But you do not know what you should be troubled by. And that troubles you further.”

May stared blankly toward the horizon. “I feel that something terrible is going to happen.”

“Here?”

“I am not certain. I know that it involves this world, though I have no idea how I know. We have been taught to be rational,
Stun, as our kind has spread between the stars. But you know, as do I—as do all Neanderthals—that there is more to the mind
than the rational.”

Stun agreed and offered an explanation. “Our minds evolved to recognize patterns, for survival. And many are the patterns
that cannot be captured by rational thought. It is not so strange that we can sense patterns that have no rational basis.
It does not mean they have no basis at all. Is a friendly touch rational? A mother’s love? An enemy’s hatred? Yet these things
have been obvious to our minds since the time our monkey ancestors swung from the branches of trees. Rationality is a tool,
not the sole reliable style of thinking.”

“I would like to argue against you, but what you say makes too much sense,” said May. “Our ancestors were Beastmasters before
the Rescue opened the universe to them. They knew the minds of animals; they could sense a leopard’s bite before the cat itself
began to flex its jaw muscles. We have inherited that talent.” Her tawny eyes went wide. “I fear, Stun, that a great beast
is coming to this world, and its bite will be terrible and sudden.” She paused. “And yet I doubt my fear, for I cannot find
anything to support it.”

She got to her feet. “We are wasting our time waiting here; it is as we expected—the mariner is late as usual. He will not
make port today, the tides are running against him. And I am getting old and my mind is wandering, and I am seeing shadows
where there is nothing to cast them.”

Stun laughed, but her laugh was quickly silenced.

She was seeing shadows, too.

Polypoids are sea creatures, and their boats are mostly underwater. But being boats, they float, and their upper parts protrude
into a more alien environment—air. And air holds its own new possibilities, though it took many generations before the polypoids
began to understand them, and even longer before they learned to bend them to their will. The No-Moon boats had evolved from
simple wooden structures, the equivalent of underwater carts, barely protruding from the water into the air above, propelled
by the polypoid “sailors” who towed the unwieldy vessels behind them as they swam through the ocean. Later, the carts became
more elongated, like a galley, and trained teams of sailors coordinated their siphons to direct the boat wherever it was intended
to go. The reason for having a boat at all was to carry cargo; even a small crew could convey many times their own weight
of goods to ports hundreds of miles away. They topped up basic food supplies by hunting whenever they got the opportunity.

Soon the rudimentary carts became transformed into more elaborate structures, underwater homes where the sailors could live
and work unhampered by the vagaries of the ocean just outside the solid hull. Sallyports, underwater doors, offered instant
access to the ocean whenever the fancy took them. They had the best of both worlds.

The first really big breakthrough in technology was the invention of keels—flat boards of dense, strong lignoid, which caught
the current and improved the vessel’s stability, at the expense of drag. Keels were raised when moving against the current,
and angled when moving cross-current. It was a difficult skill.

The second and more significant innovation was to take advantage of air currents as well as water currents. The triangular
sail, initially an expanse of heavy shugskin and later of thick, specially woven cloth, was attached to an assembly of wooden
poles so that it could catch the wind. The boat was rolled on one side to rig the sail from the safety of the water, and then
tipped upright again so that the sail could catch the wind. It was adjusted by ropes that ran over the bulwarks, down the
side of the hull, and underneath to the main deck. If anything jammed or broke, the boat could be temporarily capsized to
make repairs, or sailed into port if that was easier.

At first, sails were used for added speed in the same general direction as the water currents. But as the centuries passed,
No-Moon’s sailors learned to combine the forces of wind and waves to perform astonishing feats. They could sail against the
water currents, provided the wind was coming from the right quarter, and they could even tack up-current in favorable winds.
An important (and difficult) step was to redesign the keel as a rigid fixture, which went against the grain of centuries of
sea lore but increased the vessel’s speed dramatically.

Now major voyages thousands of miles long became practical. And direct two-way trade supplanted the previous cumbersome circumnavigation
of the globe, simplifying commerce and creating a new business in passenger boats.

This was only the start. The sail opened up regions of the planet that had previously been accessible only to superfit, specially
trained teams of polypoids. New ports festooned the continental coastlines and the countless archipelagos. And where the sailors
went, so did their sessile, coralline wives, though these could take up residence only in shallow, warm waters.

Like all of No-Moon’s mariners, Second-best Sailor always carried a piece of his wife with him, locked away in a mesh closet
in his cabin so that the waters could flow over her and keep her healthy. A wifepiece was the best way to maintain mental
equilibrium and physical condition on the long voyages away from the home lagoon. Many a new colony had been established from
just such a “seed” in the past, but those pioneering days were long gone.

On this particular voyage, however, his usual chunk of female company had been supplemented by a second piece of living coral,
also part of his wife. And this second wifepiece wasn’t just there for sexual companionship.

Second-Best Sailor had been spawned in a rocky crevice beneath the warm, shallow waters of Crooked Atoll, one of the hundreds
of tiny islands belonging to the Mosaic Isles, some four hundred miles southeast of the jutting sickle of rain forest known
as The Claw. To its north, the rainforest gave way to the rock-strewn tundra of the Cloudless Continent. Few mariners had
ventured inland of The Claw’s jagged coastline, and fewer still had penetrated to the spine of the rain forest, but Second-Best
Sailor’s father, Talkative Forager, had won a sailor suit in a game of float-the-cube.

Talkative Forager was the kind of person who always got value out of anything he owned, so one day he had set off in a small
skiff alone; and half a year later he had returned with several scars and wondrous tales of brightly colored creatures that
swam through the air like the familiar coastal buzhawks and ocean-faring blannies but made their nests in tall woodweed trees.
And weird things covered in fur that lived in holes in the ground and collected fruit husks. And much else, little of which
was believed by anyone who listened to him. But they were wonderful tales nonetheless, and Talkative Forager became extremely
popular.

Second-Best Sailor knew none of this, for he was fertilized in a mass spawning by the light of the Quadricorn meteor shower,
along with a billion other microscopic prepolyps. He had no idea who his father had been. But his mother knew. His mother
knew everything.

Second-Best Sailor’s mother was Crooked Atoll. All of it.

Individual polypoid wives were only corals, reefwives, completely immobile. But when these corals became a reef . . .

Like most of the reefs on No-Moon, Crooked Atoll was an episodic network coral. Sometimes it was much like any normal coralline
reef on any of a million planets: a seething slow battleground of chemical warfare, in which dozens of different species of
coral-like organisms competed for space, nutrient, and light. No two corals on different worlds were ever the same. But the
universals of life were similar on all worlds—the environmental constraints gave rise to the same interlocking systems of
self-defining niches, and on any world with an ocean there automatically arose a niche for organisms that could grow their
own reefs.

Yes, sometimes Crooked Atoll was a coral reef like any other. But the rest of the time it was like nothing anywhere else in
the Galaxy. Acting on a common impulse, the separate corals could link their rudimentary nervous systems into a gigantic web
that spanned the entire atoll. And when they did, their combined brain outperformed the most intelligent individuals anywhere
else by a factor of billions.

The network was linked now. And the separate reefwives became one, and the one was like nothing ever seen on any other world
in the vast universe.

Across the planet, each atoll’s collective consciousness functioned like the brain of a single organism, the reefmind. And
the separate atolls were also linked, by thick cables of nerve fibers that wandered across the sea beds. These cables conveyed
information from each atoll to her neighbors. It was a small world network, and no two atolls were ever separated by more
than eight links.