Now he had the urge to go swimming back to Hitode and not think of Ilmatar’s history again.
Tizhos broke the silence. “Your civilization claims an age of four or five thousand years. My species has fragmentary records perhaps twelve times as old. Compared to these beings we seem like infants.”
“If we are the infants, why do you insist on protecting them from us? Shouldn’t it be the other way around?” asked Alicia.
“I leave such matters for Gishora and others. Show me your other trap sites.”
The next site was the highest point of the ridge. “I picked this location because it gets lots of little transient currents. The main circulation driven by the Maury rift passes to the north of us.”
“You so easily give these things your own names,” said Tizhos. “Maury, Shackleton, Dampier. They sound alien to this world. Even the name Ilmatar comes from a human legend.”
“How else can you describe something if you don’t give it a name? We can hardly use the Ilmataran sounds,” said Alicia.
“I understand,” said Tizhos. “But I also remember history. On my world—and on yours, too—when conquerers come they change all the names.”
Rob suddenly discovered he had no patience left for Tizhos. “Why are you guys so damn suspicious of us? All our exploration has been perfectly peaceful—our spacecraft don’t even have weapons! Why all the talk about us trying to act like some kind of invading army? If you haven’t noticed there are only thirty of us.”
Tizhos touched his arm, probably trying to soothe him. “I do not doubt that you mean no harm and wish only to learn. I sympathize. But history shows cultures always struggle, and the strong destroy the weak. We Sholen nearly destroyed ourselves four times, and when we did not fight each other we ravaged our world until it nearly lost the ability to support life.”
“So? That’s your problem, not ours!”
“The Consensus has expressed a desire to help other worlds avoid our mistakes. We offer you our wisdom.”
“Oh, I get it—if you screw up your own planet enough, that gives you the right to go around telling other people how they should live.”
“It pleases me that you understand.”
Alicia was touching his other arm. “Robert, let it go.”
He looked at her, then back at Tizhos. “Right. Sorry. I probably need to get more sleep or something.”
There was a slight awkward silence. Then Alicia spoke up. “Tizhos, could I suggest a small change of plan? There’s something else I’d like to show you.”
“I do not feel fatigue yet.”
“Good. It’s about half a kilometer to the west. We’ll have the current with us coming back.”
As they swam, Rob managed to get up next to Alicia. He turned the hydrophone as low as possible for privacy. “What’s all this about?”
“Something I want Tizhos to see. I was planning to show you, but then they dropped in on us and I never got the chance. Maybe we can come back together.”
“But what is it?”
“You’ll see,” was all she would tell him.
The three of them crossed a section of flat silty bottom, then came to a little hummock of jumbled stones. Rob was no archaeologist, but this looked older than most of the other ruins. The stones were all rounded off, and silt filled in all the crevices.
“This side,” said Alicia. She led them around to the north side of the hill. “This is an old vent, and the flow is too irregular and cold for the Ilmatarans to use for agriculture. Now, let’s all hold hands, and then everyone turn off all your lights. Even the ones inside your helmets.”
Rob was in the middle, so he had to use his voice interface to get everything turned off; he didn’t want to risk letting go of Alicia in the darkness. When the lamp on Tizhos’s chest flicked off, the three of them were in complete blackness. For a moment Rob couldn’t even tell if his eyes were open or closed.
Then he saw something out of the corner of his eyes. A faint shine, like moonlight. As his eyes adjusted, the shine got brighter, and he could see that it was the rocks. There were swirls of pale light on the stones around the vent mouth, extending out across the bottom to where they were standing.
He began to notice colors. The vent itself was now glowing faintly green, and there were green streaks where the current was strongest. Around the green was a pale halo of orange, and tendrils of blue and yellow followed the paths of eddy currents across the old stones.
Now he could see more clearly. The swirls were made up of millions of tiny points. It was like looking at a galaxy. He began to lose his sense of scale. Now he could see slow waves of brightening moving across the swirls of color as the water temperature changed. It was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.
Tizhos was the first to turn her lights back on. The dim safety light on her backpack was like an arc lamp after the darkness. Rob reluctantly cued up his own lights and displays, and saw with some surprise that they had been watching the glow for nearly twenty minutes.
“I certainly did find that phenomenon interesting,” said Tizhos. “Although I expect your eyes could see it better than mine. Have you determined the cause?”
“Microorganism colonies. I think the colors relate to chemical concentrations in the water. The luminescence is just a byproduct of phosphorus metabolism. That’s not what’s important. Tizhos, nothing on Ilmatar has eyes. You and Rob and I are the only things in the entire universe that have seen this.”
There was another moment of silence while Rob and Tizhos digested that.
“Wow,” was all Rob could say.
“If we weren’t here, studying Ilmatar, nothing would ever have witnessed that. If we don’t make contact with the Ilmatarans, they’ll be like those little colonies, shining in the dark with nobody to see them.”
Broadtail’s expedition is proceeding well. He has a dozen pouches full of interesting finds: some small creatures he doesn’t recognize, a couple of plants new to him, some lovely old stone tools from a ruined settlement, and a piece of shell pierced with regular patterns of holes that he is convinced are old writing. He also has an entire reel of notes, including tentative translations of half a dozen old inscriptions. What he does not have is any trace of the strange creatures he’s looking for.
The team is camped at a ruin—yet another extinct vent, with the usual jumble of silted-up houses, scattered pipes, and domestic trash. There is a thick coating of silt over everything, and Broadtail is pleased to note that his theory correlating silt depth with the language of inscriptions and the style of artifacts seems to be holding.
His two helpers are working well. Sharphead is one of Longpincer’s employees, a coldwater hunter with lots of terrifying tales of dangerous creatures and bandits. Shortlegs is a small adult, still growing and barely able to read or tie knots. But she can lead a towfin, moor the beast downcurrent from camp, prepare simple meals for the group, and carry Broadtail’s spare note reels when he goes exploring.
Shortlegs bangs a stone to call them to eat. She has mixed a fresh egg from the towfin with some shredded jellyfrond and the last of the vent-cured roe. Sharphead is already eating when Broadtail swims up. They don’t follow any order of pre ce dence out here.“Eggs and roe,” says Sharphead. “No more meat?”