Seas of Ernathe (11 page)

You are hungry. Would you like to eat and see the city?
This time she really did turn to him. Her face was pixielike—a young girl asking her older man-friend to go for a stroll.

"Yes—both. Will I have to swim?"

Not immediately.
She led him out of the dome and into another, connecting dome and then through a series of large, echoing passageways to what Seth had to think of as a "hall"—a much larger dome-section divided by partitions and scaffolds of various sorts, mostly made, as were the dome structures themselves, from a plasticlike seaweed product Lo'ela called
glid
. Seth had yet to find out how
glid
was made; he was beginning to wonder, actually, how many of his questions might never be answered. As they walked through the hall he felt that he was strolling through a transmogrified seafloor garden, flowering with great rigid fronds, smooth and glossily translucent, and with hanging filmy sheets fairly frosted with particles of sea-growth. There were also several alcoves exiting to the sea: open wells in the floor from which occasionally a Nale'nid would emerge, shedding water, or into which someone would drop as nonchalantly as Seth would walk through a door, and disappear with barely a ripple.

Mostly, the other Nale'nid either ignored Seth or observed him with indifferent curiosity. There were many of the people moving about in the hall, and he was disconcerted by the casual reception. Couldn't they see that he was of the outside race—weren't they supposed to have some quarrel with him? The fact was, though, that he could not gauge the reactions of the Nale'nid with any precision. Though apparently quite human, they had facial and muscular expressions that he found incomprehensible—an assortment of quick feature-changes and ripplings of the skin. Only Lo'ela communicated with him in recognizable smiles and lopsided grins—the execution of which she was mastering rapidly as she spent time with Seth.

She gave him one of her flashing smiles now and hopped up to a higher deck, nearly a full meter above the floor. Her jump was light, effortless, causing her thin wraparound garment to swirl and cling softly against her figure.
Come up.
She grinned down at him, beckoning.

"Uh, sure," he mumbled, and boosted himself up clumsily onto his knees, then clambered to his feet. "Now what?"

The next step was not quite so high, and Lo'ela brought him around a partition to an alcove, where an aged sea-man sat, overseeing several large baskets of shellfish, and several more baskets of fruits, which apparently had been harvested from benthic plants. Lo'ela made a silent gesture to the man, as she told Seth,
Sit on the cushions and prepare yourself to eat.
Seth obeyed, though he had not the faintest idea what she meant by "prepare yourself." The cushions she indicated were stiff but comfortable, leathery and slick on the surfaces—apparently also of seaweed origin.

Lo'ela brought a handful of the fruits, put them before Seth, and returned for two bowls of shellfish, which the old sea-man had quickly and expertly shucked. She seated herself beside Seth, looked at him quickly without speaking, then shifted her position nervously, crossing one leg over the other. A moment later she shifted again, rather awkwardly, and finally settled into what appeared a relaxed attitude, legs drawn up and crossed beneath her. She glanced at him again, but still did not speak.

Though somewhat puzzled by her behavior, Seth picked up a fruit and rubbed it on his sleeve until it shone. He hesitated. Finally it dawned on him; what Lo'ela probably was doing was refocusing her attention from him to the food, or to the act of eating. He wondered if he should refrain from speaking. Perhaps she always ate in silence. Or perhaps she thought
he
did. Best to play it safe and keep quiet, he decided.

He bit the fruit, took a good mouthful; it was soft inside and watery sweet.
Malan,
he was told. He smiled to himself, stealing a glance at his concentrating friend, and consumed the fruit with relish. Next, following Lo'ela's example, he tasted the shellfish, and found that a different matter altogether—it was raw, tough, and gaggingly bitter. Seth steeled himself, and gulped it down. He gasped at the burning aftertaste.
Bollins,
he was told, sorrowfully. Apparently Lo'ela, despite her concentration, was still sensitive to his reactions, which was always reassuring in case he became ill from the food. He ate one more
bollins,
to prove he was made of strong stuff, and he glared indignantly when Lo'ela's chuckle filled his head.

"Fine . . . food," he choked with mocking enthusiasm. Lo'ela's face darkened, filled with uncertainty. He hastily explained that he was joking, good naturedly. She relaxed and hummed softly in his mind. She still was learning basic things about him; but he was beginning to realize what a good companion she was.

Thank you
.

Thank you? he wondered, startled. He asked, suspiciously, "Did I transmit—
focus
—that thought to you?" Her chuckle filled his head again, and he grinned helplessly. Apparently Lo'ela was not the only one learning and adapting. When are we going to see the city? he wondered. No reply. Oh well. "When are we going to see the city?" he asked.

As soon as you eat that other malan you are hungry for.

Seth ate.

* * *

When they began touring the city, finally, Seth could not contain his wonder. It was one thing to see myriad shapes in the distance, blurred by seawater—but quite another to actually walk through dome after dome, all thirty to forty meters (he estimated) beneath the surface of the sea. This was not the work of a primitive or undeveloped folk, as his own people considered the Nale'nid. But neither was it the work of a technological people. What was it, then—aside from a marvel?

Though most of the dwellings were clear domes, some were opaque or translucent. Interior illumination in the opaque structures was provided by bioluminous, anemonelike animals, which were kept and nurtured in many clear
glid
basins; it was not bright illumination but it was sufficient. Many of the structures were not domes at all, but spheroids or toroids. Many were unconnected by the main passageways, and apparently only accessible by water; others began above the seafloor and extended downward, straight into bedrock. Seth stopped in a passageway, pressed his face to the
glid
wall, and looked down at one such burrowing structure.

Many craft-focusers live there
, Lo'ela said, anticipating his question.

"They are builders?"

Yes, many of them
.

"But they don't have machinery, do they, Lo'ela? How do they build structures like this? Our engineers couldn't do what your people have done—not with seaweed, for heaven's sake." Seth shook his head, and tapped on the rigid
glid
surface. He ran his fingers along the fused seams of the woven ribbons. The material was moist and cool.

Focus. I can't tell you, because I know little of their craft.

"But—" Seth sighed. He could see from the wrinkles of confusion in her face that he was unlikely to get farther on that tack. Still—"Lo'ela, if there is no machinery, how do you get your air and circulate it through the domes?" He had wondered about that often. From time to time he was still conscious of the effort he constantly put forth in breathing, of the considerable density of the air at this depth and pressure.

Lo'ela tapped the
glid
wall.
From the water. We do not need machinery. The wall lets in good air, releases bad
.

A selectively permeable membrane? Conceivable, in a laboratory. But here? "Lo'ela."

"Yes?" she said aloud.

"We're going to—" He stopped. "Did you just say 'yes'?" Lo'ela was grinning mischievously. "Oh. And I was just getting used to your speaking the other way."

Yes, I like this better, too.

"Lo'ela, please stay serious for a minute. There are a lot of things confusing me, but right now I want to know about this
focus
business."

Of course.

"Yeh. Good. Now, you keep bringing it up, but you never explain what you mean by it.
Focus
. You said that you were the only one of your people to have
focused
upon me, that that was the reason you were the only one who could speak to me, and understand me."

Yes. That may mean, I think, that I am in love with you.

"Hah?" That remark stopped him. He decided to sidestep it, but couldn't remember, for a moment, what he was going to say. "Uh. Okay. That is, if you say so."

Yes
. She was grinning again.

Seth coughed. "Yes. All right. But what has that to do with, oh,
craft-focus
, or—what was it you said Al'ym and Ga'yl
focused
on?"

It is the same, only those people find different foci. Craft-focusers are able to create things
—
artifices, homes, useful objects. Others focus upon plants, or sea animals, and grow with them and cause them to grow in new ways, or old ways
.

"You mean that people have specialties—things that they're especially good at? My own people are like that."

No, no. Much more. It is, oh
 . . . perceptual focus . . .
focus of the senses, and the thought, and the body
. She frowned gravely.
It is a way of seeing the world
. The
way, though we each may change our way, and do. It is what is natural, it is the view from the world within the world
.

Seth was losing ground rapidly. "The world within—? This is something which helps your craftsmen build?"

Naturally. That is where power is wielded.

"Lo'ela." He felt his voice beginning to run away without him. "You're going to have to start over. Um—tell me of another sea-person's
focus
."

Perhaps I can show you.

Seth agreed, lightheadedly, and she led him by the hand down several corridors and into a large living sphere near her own home. She ushered him into a curtained-off section, a sitting area sided by the dome wall itself. It looked out, not onto the topography of the city, but onto an upward scaling rock slope. The room was gloomy, and Seth looked twice before even noticing the several sea-people lounging near one corner; one was a woman much older than Lo'ela, another a girl perhaps Lo'ela's age, and the third—was Al'ym, Lo'ela's brother. All three were sitting silently, looking at one another, and now they moved their eyes slowly to watch the newcomers.

They made no attempt to greet Seth and Lo'ela, but as the two seated themselves on empty nearby cushions, Lo'ela spoke several words in her own tongue. No one spoke in return; nevertheless, she seemed satisfied. Seth, watching, felt distinctly uncomfortable, and he wondered what had just passed among the sea-people. Lo'ela addressed him:
This will be difficult for me. Please be attentive and don't wander from me if I falter
. She was clearly rather nervous, and Seth wondered how much of that was a reflection of his own high strung feelings. He spoke no answer, but tried to settle his thoughts and relax the tenseness in his body—and to open himself for whatever was to follow.

A glimmer of gratitude came into his mind; and he guessed that he had satisfied Lo'ela's request so far. Perceiving, then, that he was to receive mental images from his friend, he bent his thoughts toward her; he tried, as though he were gazing at a starship's flickering control panel, to focus attention upon the information, the thoughts he knew to be reaching for him. Sensations touched him and grew like a welling bowl of spring water: the concentration of a young sea-woman, gently touching one thought-flow with a nervous and curious man of a different world, while reaching with another to touch someone elsewhere, someone close, familiar . . . brushing, touching the surface impressions of . . .

Images coalesced like fine, settling grains of colored sand. Forming, shifting, reforming: a human-shaped figure, inhumanly colored and patterned, and fuzzed outwardly by convection swirls. The body was a network of pulsing fluids, rivers channeling in a maze, propelled by a force centered in the chest, an invisible force—fluid pooling, surging into another pool, and spurting in a magically powered stream into the maze of unceasing flow. And weaker streams—free-flowing but slower, and seeping. The viewpoint shifted inward, magnifying—amidst the clutter of heavy streams were smaller ones, and within those others smaller still. Densely branched webs of liquid motion, leading to obscure but ubiquitous seepages, transfers—and takeups, merging back again into the primary streams. Tributaries upon tributaries. And gaseous interfaces so intricate, so saturating the pattern as to be visible only on a polarized viewpoint, tuning the liquids out of focus. Always there was movement, exchanges, transfers of fluid and particles, moving, always moving. Then in an eye-blink, the viewpoint shifted outward, wide: the human figure was only one in a sea of atmospheric convections, airy convections entering the body at only one point, rhythmically, but everywhere drawing heat energy from it. Four human figures in all, each similar to the first but with differences of size, energies, pressures of fluids. Two, side by side—one intense and controlled, the other pulsing with greater excitement, the excitement rising now . . .

Withdrawing momentarily from the thought-images, Seth opened his eyes with effort to see Al'ym staring intently at him, his eyes sparkling with energy, his face relaxed with concentration. It was Al'ym's vision, then—his
focus
, read and conveyed by Lo'ela. How hard must it be for her to
focus
telepathically upon both Al'ym and . . .

New images cascaded upon him, startlingly different. In the darkness: four human figures, each haloed by an auroral glow, colors radiating in diffuse spikes both inside and outside the bodies. This time, Seth was a more objective observer. The human auras, lighted by the energy-potentials within the bodies—perhaps not so different, he thought, from the circulatory flows and the external convections of Al'ym's perception—and yet, after all, very different, static, colors waxing and ebbing in intensity only slowly if at all. One pair drew his attention, a small person rimmed with subdued, almost monochromatic violet, a cool purple corona reaching toward the viewing point and toward the larger person nearby, whose halo was fired by flecks of crimson and ochre and green, discharging in seemingly random confusion. The two haloes touched and mingled, a still-life frame of captured blending color . . . .