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.
Back in the caves of New Zealand, it had been concentration on something external — survival — that first eased the tensions between them. Even now, Teresa found it easier to talk while straining to tighten a bolt or giving some old instrument its first taste of power in forty years. So for the first time, last night, Alex heard the full story of her prior acquaintance with June Morgan, his part-time lover. It made him feel awkward — and yet Teresa said she liked June now. She seemed glad the other woman was coming back, for Alex’s sake.
And happier still because of what everyone assumed June would be carrying with her — Colonel Spivey’s surrender.
It had been hinted in George Hutton’s latest communique and confirmed in action. Since Alex’s demonstration yesterday — blasting a mountain of ice all the way to the moon — there had been a sudden drop in aggressive activity by other gazer systems worldwide. The Nihonese still pulsed at low “research” levels, and there were brief glimmers from other locations. But the big new NATO-ANZAC-ASEAN resonators were silent, mothballed, and the original four now obeyed Alex’s steady program unperturbed — pushing Beta gradually out of the boundary zone, where those intricate, superconducting threads flickered so mysteriously.
The number of pulses could be reduced now, and each beam targeted more carefully. Few additional civilian losses were expected, and diplomatic tension had been falling off for hours. Even the hysteria on the Net had abated a bit, as word went out about the new tribunal.