* * *
Groggy again. Still in the passenger\freight compartment of the Velpin. He brought the little gascraft’s systems back up. The wall-screen crazed, came clear, showed stars fixed, then swinging, and finally settled on a greeny-blue and white planet. Fassin’s first reaction on seeing it was that the place looked alien, unsuitable for life without an esuit. Then he realised that it looked like ’glantine or Sepekte; like images of Earth, in fact. Going gas-giant native, he told himself. Thinking like a Dweller. It didn’t usually happen so quickly.
“Oh, fuck!” Y’sul said angrily, staring at the image on the screen. “It’s not even a proper fucking planet!”
The waves came booming in like blindness, like stubbornness bundled and given liquid form, an unending slow launching against the ragged fringe of massively sprawled rocks, each long, low rough ridge of water heaving skywards to tumble like some ponderously incompetent somersaulter, rolling up and falling forward, hopeful and hopeless at once, disintegrating, exploding in spray and foam, coming to pieces amongst the fractured bone-yard of rock.
The waters drained after each assault, rattling boulders, stones and pebbles between the massive jabs and points of granite, sloughing like a watery skin and falling away again, that stony chattering speaking of a slowly aggregated success, the waves -the ocean — rubbing away at the land, breaking up and breaking away, using rock against rock, tumbling it and crashing it and cracking it, abrading over centuries and millennia to a kind of stubborn accomplishment.
He watched the waves for some time, admiring their vast mad pounding, reluctantly impressed by such sheer clamorous inces-sancy. The salt spray filled his hair and eyes and nose and lungs. He breathed in deeply, feeling joined, feeling linked to and part of this wild, unceasing elemental battle.
A low, golden light struck out across the ruffled nap of sea, sunlight swinging slow beneath a great piled series of cloud escarpments to the west, layers of vapour draped over distant peaks and spires of rock disappearing into the long misted curve of north-facing shore.
Seabirds wheeled across the wind and waves, diving, flapping away, clutching slim fish like wet slices of rainbow.
It had felt strange, at first, coming out of the little gascraft. It always did, it always had, but this time seemed different, more intense somehow. This was an alien homeland, a familiar yet utterly different place; closer to what ought to be home, further from what was. Eleven thousand light years away from Ulubis this time, though they had travelled further than the last time to get here. And just twelve days’ travel.
When he’d opened the gascraft’s hatch and stood, he’d staggered and swayed, needed holding up by Y’sul. He’d coughed and nearly retched, feeling scrawny and weak and thin and hollowed-out, shivering in the strange ultra-nakedness of returning to the basic human condition, as slimed and wet and naked as a newborn, and even the retreating tendrils of the gill-fluid and shock-gel tubes there too, umbilical links to image birth. He felt lighter and heavier at once, blood draining, bones complaining.
Then, after a while, being naked — even naked in ordinary clothes — started to feel normal again. Every now and again, though, he shivered. The Velpin’s pattern-follower had done its best to make human wearable clothes, but still the results felt strange and slick and cold.
They were on Mavirouelo, a ninety per cent Earthlike not far from the galactic outskirts, though less isolated than Ulubis. A Waterworlder-colonised planet, a Sceuri world.
Waterworlds were the single most common type of rocky planet in the galaxy, even though you never saw the rock, which was, on average, a metal-rock core about the size of Earth buried under five thousand kilometres of pressure-ice, finally topped by a hundred klicks of ocean. Such planets provided the next most common planetary environments after the near-ubiquitous gas-giants themselves, and had given the Mercatoria three of its eight principal species: the Sceuri, the Ifrahile and the Kuskunde.
Mavirouelo was not a classic waterworld — it wasn’t even as water-covered as Earth itself — but it had been colonised by the Sceuri before any native animal — of air, land or sea — had developed sufficiently to claim it as their own, and so had become one of the Sceuri far-worlds, an outpost of their own semimperia within the greater commonwealth of the Mercatoria.
The Sceuri weren’t conventional waterworlders, either. They were Cetasails, resembling sea mammals but with backs ridged by spinnaker spines which they could hoist to the wind and so sail as well as swim across their worlds.
Y’sul, in his esuit, rose out of the sea like a submarine conning tower, frightening the seabirds. He floated up and out and made his way across the turmoil of waves to the low cliff where Fassin stood. The human was suddenly reminded of the time he had stood with Saluus Kehar, watching Hatherence, in her esuit, float out across the chaos of artificial surf surrounding the waterspout house.
“Fassin!” Y’sul boomed, floating, dripping and humming, in the air ten metres above him. “No sign yet?”
“No sign yet.”
Y’sul held up a mesh basket of glistening, flapping, wriggling stuff. “Look what I caught!” He brought the basket in front of his forward mantle to look at it. “Think I’ll take it back to the ship.”
Y’sul flew over Fassin, dropping water and small shells on top of him, then headed inland a couple of hundred metres to the ship-section resting on the scrubby ledge of vegetation fringing the jagged ranks of cliffs, pinnacles and mountains beyond. The fifty-metre-long lander made up the nose section of the Velpin, the rest of which, with Quercer Janath aboard, was still in orbit.
Fassin watched the Dweller go, then turned back to the ocean. He was here to meet with a Sceuri who had seen the Dweller Leisicrofe, who had been here until, they’d been told, twelve years ago.
They hadn’t met a Sceuri yet. The Velpin had been challenged by the planet’s orbital traffic control and targeted by several military units and so had had to reveal something of its reasons for being there.
“Looking for some Dweller geezer called Leisicrofe,” had been Quercer Janath’s exact words.
They’d been told to go into orbit and stay there. Targeting beams never left them. They were regarded as suspicious because their ship looked “hole-capable and they hadn’t come through the local portal.
“Sceuri,” Quercer Janath had told Fassin and Y’sul. “Suspicious.”
“Paranoid.”
They’d spent three days watching the planet revolve beneath them. Y’sul had muttered about how flat and boring the storms looked, Fassin had found endless fascination in the great snowflake city-structures spread across water and land, and the truetwin passed the time inventorying ship-stuff they’d forgotten about and playing noisy image-leaf games. They answered questions from planetary traffic control about where they’d come from -Nhouaste, the largest of the system’s four gas-giant planets, was the answer given — and then a signal had come through. A scholar named Aumapile of Aumapile had had the honour of playing host to the Dweller scholar Leisicrofe and would be flattered to be allowed to extend the same courtesies to these new arrivals.
Another step along the way, another step closer, perhaps, to finding the wandering Dweller and the data he carried. If he still lived, if he still had the data, if the data was what it was supposed to be, if Valseir had been telling the truth, if it was not all utterly out of date, without point, overtaken by the seeming certainty that there was a network of secret wormholes accessible only to Dwellers, but they weren’t sharing it and it might have nothing to do with the Dweller List.