The hill that formed the cap of the cylinder rose from the far edge of the ocean, at the rim. The hill supported an ice field on one slope, hot springs on another. Their cold and warm currents circulated the seawater and helped drive the weather.
Zev stopped beside her, staring out at the ocean. He glanced at J.D., his face glowing.
"You go on ahead," she said softly. "I want to talk to Victoria for a minute."
He hesitated, then whooped in excitement and took out for the sea. He skidded down the face of the dune and dropped the beach blanket. Racing across the narrow crescent beach, kicking up bright showers of dry sand, he flung off his shirt; he hopped on one foot, then the other, while he stripped off his shorts.
Zev splashed into the shallow water, pushed forward, swam a few strokes, kicked his heels in the air, .and vanished.
"He's eager, , Victoria said, a smile in her voice. She stopped beside J.D. "He's homesick, I think."
"He doesn't act it."
"He doesn't mope . . . but . . . when you spend time with the divers, you get used to a lot of contact. A lot of touch. He doesn't get that here."
"He docsn't?" Victoria sounded skeptical, and amused. "Could have fooled me."
"Not like back at his home."
The dune grass ended abruptly. J.D. and Victoria
crossed the beach: soft deep dry white sand, a narrow line of drying seaweed and small shells, then damp, yielding dark sand. It was easier to walk, here where the tide had just gone out, where the siphon-holes of clams pocked the surface and squirted when J.D. stamped her foot.
Out in the low breakers, Zev surfaced, waved, beckoned, and disappeared again.
"Are you going to join him?"
"In a while," J.D. said. "Let's go over by that piece of driftwood." She scooped up the beach blanket, and then she thought: Driftwood?
The huge, gnarled tree trunk lay above the highwater line, down where the beach began to curve out to a low headland. Its twisted, weather-silvered roots reached into the air. The trunk itself was larger in diameter than J.D. was tall. The top of the trunk had been broken off in a jagged point, as if wind had uprooted it and the fall had shattered it.
If it had ever lived.
J.D. touched the trunk. It felt like wood, and when she knocked against it with her knuckles, it resounded with a familiar, woody thunk "It is wood! I thought it'd be rock foam. How-?"
Victoria grinned. "Realistic, eh? Cellulose and lignin and what-all.
Crimson sculpted it. She said any self-respecting beach should have cedar driftwood on it."
"It's handsome." J.D. stroked the smooth, weathered surface. "I miss big trees."
"There are some, over on the wild side. Twenty years old, from one of the O'Neills."
"Twenty years old?" J.D. smiled. The broken end of the driftwood revealed the sculpted growth rings. "This would be hundreds of years old."
"Crimson's good, isn't she? She told me she'd grown it layer by layer, and cooked the sculptural material so even the isotopic ratios would be right." "She's very talented." J.D. let her day pack slide off her shoulders, spread out the blanket beside the tree trunk, and sank down crosslegged.
"I don't remember the last time I went swimming," Victoria said. "I've never swum in Starfarer's ocean." She took off her floppy red T-shirt and kicked off her sandals. She was wearing a shiny blue two-piece bathing suit.
Zev had paced them as they walked along the shore. He waved again, called to J.D., bodysurfed halfway to the beach, then did a flip-turn and vanished into the waves again.
"Good lord, he's going to break his neck!" Victoria said.
"No, don't worry. He knows where the bottom is."
"Shall we swim?"
"I want to talk to you for a minute, first."
Victoria knelt beside J.D.
"I'm listening."
Zev was used to older adults gathering to talk while the younger adults swam and played. He was patient, and he knew J.D. would join him soon. He looked forward to casting off the restrictive land manners for a few hours, and he wished he had someone to swim with now while he waited for J.D. and Victoria. He wondered if Victoria's presence meant he and J.D. would have to maintain land manners. How would Victoria know diver manners?
Victoria's intensity both scared and intrigued him. He knew she did not altogether approve of his being along on the expedition. Still, she had let him accompany the alien contact department, so she must like him just a little.
Among the divers, Zev had spoken for J.D. to Lykos; J.D. must have spoken for him to Victoria.
While he waited for J.D., he swam through the shallow ocean.
The starship spun one direction; he swam the other direction, minus-spin, because it felt as if he were swimming downhill. The sensation amused him.
Paralleling the shore, he followed the wide curve of the crescent beach, rounded the headland, and skirted close to the dangerous and exciting rough water. He probed the ocean with sound. He heard and tasted the weathered gnarls of the rock, and the seaweed and barnacles, periwinkles and limpets, anemones and starfish that inhabited the intertidal zone. Offshore, a school of fish scintillated past.
On the other side of the headland, the beach sloped shallowly into the sea, then rose again to form a barrier island half a kilometer offshore. Zev swam through the channel, staying on the surface. The water was silty and brackish and the bottom sand turned to mud. The taste of algae and reeds, shrimp and crabs and the bottomdwellers of sheltered bays, filled his mouth and nose. He stroked toward shore till he could stand, chest deep, in the water. He put his feet into the deep warm mud of the river delta, for the pleasure of feeling the life it succored vibrating against his skin. He pushed off backwards and kicked along like an otter, looking up, tracing out the shore of Starfarer's ocean belt.
He passed the end of the island. Another headland stretched into the sea, separating the delta from an open beach. Zev swam around it and into cold, exhilarating water. He dove, touched bottom, pushed off, exploded all the way out of the water at the apex of his jump, and splashed back into the waves.
Ahead he heard the steady splash of another swimmer. Not J.D. or Victoria, someone swimming near the small crescent beach. Zev turned over and swam hard, glad to find a swimmer to play with. When J.D. was ready, she would call his name and he would hear her.
He reminded himself to maintain his land manners, even though he was in the water. The ordinary humans owned this place, and the customs of divers carried no weight.
Even J.D. had taken time to get used to diver man ners. He remembered how shy she had been at first. For at least - a week, when she came to live with his family back on Earth, she had worn a bathing suit that covered most of her body. Sometimes she even wore a wet suit.
Zev could not imagine swimming in clothes. Now J.D. swam naked, just like a diver. She was not shaped like a diver, but that was all right. He remembered the first time she had joined in playing with him and his siblings and cousins; he remembered the first time he had swum beneath her and stroked her body from her throat to her knees. fie loved the way her body felt against his hands, against his skin. He loved the weight of her breasts, the taste of her tongue. He liked it when they played together in the water, and he liked land sex as well. It felt more serious to Zev, somehow, though that might be because it was just him and J.D. and they concentrated only on each other.
He felt excited. The tip of his penis protruded from his body, into the cold water.
He gave up trying to figure it all out. Making love seriously, making love playfully: he liked both.