“How long will you be there yourself, in the dome?”
“I don’t know. I hope for not more than a few days. If things look promising, I—” Flandry preened—“won’t be needed so much. They’ll need me more on land again.”
“I will be gone by then,” Dragoika said. “The Archer still has an undelivered cargo, and the Sisterhood wants to take advantage of the truce while it lasts.”
“You’ll return, won’t you? Call me when you do, and I’ll flit straight to Ujanka.” He patted her hand.
She gripped his, “Someday you will depart forever.”
“M-m … this isn’t my world.”
“I would like to see yours,” she said wistfully. “The stories we hear, the pictures we see, like a dream. Like the lost island. Perhaps it is in truth?”
“I fear not.” Flandry wondered why the Eden motif was universal in the land cultures of Starkad. Be interesting to know. Except for this damned war, men could come here and really study the planet. He thought he might like to join them.
But no. There was little pure research, for love, in the Empire any more. Outwardness had died from the human spirit. Could that be because the Time of Troubles had brutalized civilization? Or was it simply that when he saw he couldn’t own the galaxy and consolidated what little he had, man lost interest in anything beyond himself? No doubt the ancient eagernesss could be regained. But first the Empire might have to go under. And he was sworn to defend it. I better read more in those books of Abrams’. So far they’ve mainly confused me.
“You think high thoughts,” Dragoika said.
He tried to laugh. “Contrariwise. I’m thinking about food, fun, and females.”
“Yes. Females.” She stood quiet a while, before she too laughed. “I can try to provide the fun, anyhow. What say you to a game of Yavolak?”
“I haven’t yet straightened out those cursed rules,” Flandry said. “But if we can get a few players together, I have some cards with me and there’s a Terran game called poker.”
A head rose sleek and blue from the waves. Flandry couldn’t tell if it belonged to Evenfall or someone else. The flukes slapped thrice. “That’s our signal,” Ridenour said. “Let’s go.”
He spoke by radio. The team were encased in armor which was supposed to withstand pressures to a kilometer’s depth. Wish I hadn’t thought of “supposed” Flandry regretted. He clumped across the deck and in his turn was lowered over the side. He had a last glimpse of Dragoika, waving. Then the hull was before his faceplate, and then green water. He cast loose, switched his communicator to sonic, and started the motor on his back. Trailing bubbles, he moved to join the others. For one who’d been trained in spacesuit maneuvers, underwater was simple … Damn! He’d forgotten that friction would brake him.
“Follow me in close order,” Ridenour’s voice sounded in his earplugs. “And for God’s sake, don’t get trigger happy.”
The being who was not a fish glided in advance. The water darkened. Lightbeams weren’t needed, though, when they reached bottom; this was a shallow sea. Flandry whirred through a crépuscule that faded into sightlessness. Above him was a circle of dim radiance, like a frosted port. Below him was a forest. Long fronds rippled upward, green and brown and yellow. Massive boles trailed a mesh of filaments from their branches. Shellfish, often immense, covered with lesser shells, gripped lacy, delicately hued coraloid. A flock of crustaceans clanked—no other word would do—across a weed meadow. A thing like an eel wriggled over their heads. Tiny finned animals in rainbow stripes flitted among the sea trees. Why, the place is beautiful!
Charlie—no, Evenfall had directed the fleet to a spot in midsea where ships rarely passed. How he navigated was a mystery. But Shellgleam lay near.
Flandry had gathered that the vaz-Siravo of Zletovar lived in, and between, six cities more or less regularly spaced around a circle. Tidehome and Reefcastle were at the end of the Chain. The Kursovikians had long known about them; sometimes they raided them, dropping stones, and sometimes the cities were bases for attacks on Tigery craft. But Shellgleam, Vault, Crystal, and Outlier on the verge of that stupendous downfall of sea bottom called the Deeps—those had been unsuspected. Considering how intercity traffic patterns must go, Flandry decided that the Sixpoint might as well be called the Davidstar. You couldn’t make good translations anyway from a language so foreign.
A drumming noise resounded through the waters. A hundred or more swimmers came into view, in formation. They wore skull helmets and scaly leather corselets, they were armed with obsidian-headed spears, axes, and daggers. The guide exchanged words with their chief. They englobed the party and proceeded.
Now Flandry passed above agricultural (?) lands. He saw tended fields, fish penned in wicker domes, cylindrical woven houses anchored by rocks, A wagon passed not far away, a skin-covered torpedo shape with stabilizer fins, drawn by an elephant-sized fish which a Siravo led. Belike he traveled from some cave or depth, because he carried a lantern, a bladder filled with what were no doubt phosphorescent microorganisms. As he approached town, Flandry saw a mill. It stood on an upthrust—go ahead and say “hill”—and a shaft ran vertically from an eccentric drive wheel. Aiming his laser light and adjusting his faceplate lens for telescopic vision, he made out a sphere at the other end, afloat on the surface. So, a tide motor.
Shellgleam hove in sight. The city looked frail, unstable, unreaclass="underline" what a place to stage that ballet! In this weatherless world, walls and roofs need but give privacy; they were made of many-colored fabrics, loosely draped so they could move with currents, on poles which gave shapes soaring in fantastic curves. The higher levels were more broad than the lower. Lanterns glowed perpetually at the corners, against night’s advent. With little need for ground transport, streets did not exist; but whether to control silt or to enjoy the sight, the builders had covered the spaces between houses with gravel and gardens.
A crowd assembled. Flandry saw many females, holding infants to their breasts and slightly older offspring on leash. Few people wore clothes except for jewelry. They murmured, a low surf sound. But they were more quiet, better behaved, than Tigeries or humans.
In the middle of town, on another hill, stood a building of dressed stone. It was rectangular, the main part roofless and colonnaded; but at the rear a tower equally wide thrust up and up, with a thick glass top just below the surface. If, as presumably was the case, it was similarly sealed further down, it should flood the interior with light. Though the architecture was altogether different, that whiteness reminded Flandry of Terra’s Parthenon. He had seen the reconstruction once … He was being taken thither.
A shape darkened the overhead luminance. Looking, he saw a fish team drawing a submarine. The escort was a troop of swimmers armed with Merseian-made guns. Suddenly he remembered he was among his enemies.
8
Once a dome was established outside town and equipped for the long-term living of men, Flandry expected to make rapid progress in Professor Abrams’ Instant Philosophy of History Course. What else would there be to do, except practice the different varieties of thumbtwiddling, until HQ decided that sufficient of his prestige had rubbed off on Ridenour and ordered him back to Highport?
Instead, he found himself having the time of his life.
The sea people were every bit as interested in the Terrans as the Terrans in them. Perhaps more so; and after the horror stories the Merseians must have fed them, it was astonishing that they could make such an effort to get at the truth for themselves. But then, while bonny fighters at need and in some ways quite devoid of pity, they seemed less ferocious by nature than humans, Tigeries, or Merseians.