Now she stopped her journey. There was no reason why she should not continue up the gulf coast, around the curve to Mexico and finally South America. But she had no heart for it. She turned her boat around and started poling through the placid waterways, back to the Atlantic.
When the water was blue again she picked a spot near the ancient ruins of Miami and built a hut. For the first time she began to cultivate a patch of ground with seeds given to her by the natives, to experiment with pottery, and to raise wild chickens and rabbits.
The local tribes respected her privacy except for certain holy days when they came and asked for religious rites which were obscure to her but seemed mainly aimed at procuring good hunting. She was willing to pray for them, as long as they left her alone during the rest of the year.
There was plenty to do to keep busy. When she needed relaxation she went out in her boat and fished. She liked that; she could just sit and watch the water and not think about anything. She no longer felt bitterness for what had happened to her. When she thought of anything, it was of Makel.
Lilo had stayed aloof from everyone since the day he died. Nothing in her life had moved her as deeply as the boy's death. It had been such a pointless, such an ignominious way for a human being to die. Since then she had seen the deaths of many people, and it was always with the same feeling. We were not made for this. The human race deserves better.
Lilo was not used to such strong illogical feelings. She had wrestled with herself for years, on the one hand telling herself that a human was just another animal and could die like any other animal. But it never satisfied her. Logic wasn't enough. It could not encompass the issues. She began to feel that the land she walked on should belong to the human race. It had, once. Maybe the people who lived before the Invasion had done a sorry job of taking care of it, but they had been trying, even then. Now all the humans on Earth had been thrown back into savagery. It hurt her to see it.
Going to Earth had made Lilo a Free Earther.
One day a huge dark shape appeared from under the water, not three meters from her boat. There was a tremendous, hooting rush of air, and a column of spray dispersed around her.
She stood and stared at it. It was at least twenty meters long, and blunt at the front end. The Sperm Whale.
Lilo hurled her reed basket of fish at the shape, and it bounced into the water. The hide gleamed, unhurt. She threw her paddle, a rough clay bowl she used to hold bait, and anything else she could find in the bottom of the boat.
Slowly, the leviathan rolled. Huge flukes appeared and waved for a moment in the air, then sliced soundlessly into the water.
Lilo shook for an hour.
The next day, silent yellow shapes appeared at the horizon. She stood on the beach and watched them, though it hurt her eyes to do so. They were at the limits of visibility, but that was not the problem. They were shapes. They were all shapes at once; they would not hold still.
She had seen them before, below her, as she fell through the Jovian atmosphere, just before her senses fragmented and she found herself on the beach—found that she had been on the beach for some time, as she was still falling through Jupiter. She had blanked the experience from her mind; now it came back: the incredible, stop-action, living lap dissolve that had left her on Earth.
Again she could not control her shaking, but this time it was much more from anger than fear.
She cut down a suitable tree and spent her days sitting on the sand looking out over the water, working the wood. She made it three meters long, and tipped it with steel painstakingly beaten from scraps she had collected. Then she waited.
The spouts appeared early one morning. Lilo watched them, taking deep breaths of the sea air until her fingertips tingled. Every nerve in her body was singing as she stripped away her leather jerkin and loincloth and raced across the sand to her boat. She was no longer afraid to die. The day was right for it, and the whales waited to taste her harpoon.
Did they know she was there, intent on killing them? She did not know or care. She rowed strongly out to the mass of rolling black bodies.
Overhead, the Invaders darted. They did not accelerate or slow down; they simply moved. They entered and left the water without sound or splash, occupying one volume of space as easily as any other. Lilo stood and shook the harpoon at them, then checked herself. Even in the mania of her anger, the blood-red depths of her rage at them and what they had done to her people, she knew that certain things were beyond her. She would take her revenge on flesh and blood, then die because there was nothing left to do, no sense in walking endlessly down bare beaches or in sitting placidly beside a mud hut.
It was there in the water beside her, a broad dappled black hide just below the surface. She reached to the metal flower on her collarbone and was transformed into a creature of bright blue distortion, hot as the broken sun that blazed from her face.
She heard a scream. Her arm came up, straightened, jerked, and the wooden shaft shivered in her hand as it sank into the mountain of blubber.
The Silver Huntress, Diana, stood on the whale's back, shouting. She held the harpoon in both hands as the monster's tail came up and smashed down on the boat.
The whale dived.
24
The film reached its end, and for a moment it flapped noisily around the reel until one of the men reached over to turn the projector off. The lights came up, and Lilo, Javelin, Vaffa, and Cathay were confronted with eight faces, all looking at them expectantly. The atmosphere in the room was tense; the Traders were waiting for something.
For some reason, Lilo was convinced they were about to break into a song-and-dance routine. The situation was divorced from reality in almost the same way as a musical comedy, where characters pause in the midst of action to sing. If they do, I'll go crazy, Lilo thought.
"Well," William said. "Well. What do you think?"
Lilo looked from William to Alicia to Thomas to... whatever her name was.
"Effective," Cathay ventured.
"Solid. To the point," said one of the Traders.
Javelin cleared her throat.
"Uh... yes. It's a nice piece of work. But did we really come here to discuss the artistic merits of your propagandists?"
"We would like to know what you think," William said. His voice oozed sincerity. "Of course we realize you have no powers of your own to either accept or reject what we've offered. You're not envoys for your race."
"What are you going to do with it? I assume you didn't put it together just for us."
"We'll broadcast it. Not over the Hotline; this time it goes directly to every inhabited planet of your system. It's customary for us to work this way. You must have realized that we have never used our transmitter at full strength. Our laser is not big enough to broadcast across seventeen light-years, but we can send a stronger signal than any you have yet received. We deliberately garble and distort the signal at this end, simulating what you would expect to happen to it if it had come from 70 Ophiuchi. We wanted you to think of us as being very far away.
"When we know that being discovered is only a matter of time, we send the first message that you received. Someone usually shows up. If no one does, we wonder if we're wasting our time. You did very well."
Javelin shifted in her chair, a sour look on her face.
"Yes, but what do you expect anyone to make of it?"
"Please?" William looked down his nose at her.
"What I'm saying is, you want something in trade for the free information you've been sending us. Okay, anyone can understand that. But what you want is our culture. I'm afraid I didn't follow just how you intended to get it."