Seas of Ernathe (12 page)

Seth withdrew again from the vision and studied the old sea-woman watching him with quiet, smiling eyes. He wondered what resided behind that smile. He felt Lo'ela stir beside him, drawing herself slowly out of the link. Silently, she rose and slowly turned to leave, though she had not shown him the third
focus
. Seth followed hurriedly, rubbing a hand over his brow to clear his vision; he nodded and half shrugged to the other Nale'nid, none of whom gave any sign of notice.

Lo'ela did not stop to face him until they were well away from the area, and back near the portal leading from the dome. She stood silent, watching him, touched her hands to his arms and then dropped them again. She seemed pale, though that might have been the changing sunlight filtering its way into the dome. Her eyes were quick, but tender as if testing a wound. Seth breathed with sudden difficulty, not entirely due to the air. He laid a hand on her shoulder. "That was—" he started. "Was it hard for you?"—though he knew the answer.

She hesitated, and seemed to regain strength.
Challenging
, she told him, with a touch of impetuousness he found a relief. He squeezed her delicate shoulder blades with impulsive affection; he was beginning to feel quite close to this gentle Nale'nid.

"You do not do that often," he said, trying to steady his voice and failing.

No
, she answered.
No
. A flicker of a smile lit her face, and the color in her skin deepened—but rather than turning away in embarrassment, as he half expected, she gazed deeply and steadily into his eyes. Seth was the one, finally, who blushed and looked away.

Do you understand, now?

"Well—better, anyway." He considered. "Is that the way those people see the world at all times?" The idea was rather much to accept; surely the images would become overwhelming.

Most of the time. Some have only one real focus, others have several at different times. There are many more. Some see all things as mechanical-crystalline structures. Some see geometric patterns, or colors. Some focus upon plants, some animals. Some, individual people
. She smiled shyly, and went on.
Sometimes sound, or feelings
—
as you would say, intuition. Sometimes motion of matter, momentum-energy. Or time, stability
.

She stopped. Seth had raised his hand to halt the list. "Uh-huh. I think I get the idea." Which was true, but it was more than he could assimilate at once. The demonstration had given him plenty to think over, and it had been draining for him, as well as for Lo'ela. "Why don't we go do some more looking," he suggested. Lo'ela agreed and towed him off for further sights of the city.

They toured a line of dwelling-domes suspended like a string of beads in the water, and they walked in several layers of what Seth dubbed the "wall scraper," a structure that rose vertically along the seawall and also descended a good distance into the rock of the seabed. Seth hesitated to go very far up or down, for fear of possible decompression illness. This was the first time that the matter of decompression had even occurred to him, and now that it had it worried him considerably. Sooner or later he would want to go out of the city. Lo'ela acceded gently to his caution, though she assured him that there would be no problem. Seth filed that worry for future consideration.

He noticed that they had encountered virtually no Nale'nid children—only one or two in the company of adults—and he finally questioned Lo'ela on that fact. She explained that most of the children (there were not many, and fewer every year) lived in a different common area, where they were cared for and taught by those who
focused
upon such activities. "Family" relationships were established as a matter of
focus
compatibility, during childhood. This was somewhat analogous to the choosing of mates, in that it depended as much upon the presence of harmonious differences between individuals as upon similarities. Birth parentage was irrelevant, and Lo'ela was surprised that Seth even asked about it. She herself had never had "parents," which made her unusual but not extraordinary. Her "brothers" both had "parents," though they did not have the same ones.

"Why are the numbers declining?" Seth asked cautiously.

Fewer people focusing on child-bearing.

That seemed sad, but his interest in the children was piqued. "Could we visit the place where they live?" he suggested.

Lo'ela smiled suggestively.
Better not, yet
, she advised.
It could be
 . . .
awkward . . . if one of the children should focus on you. It can happen that quickly. Are you ready to be a parent?

Seth cleared his throat briskly. "Let's, ah, head on back to your place, shall we?"

Lo'ela laughed. They returned to her home-dwelling, and while Seth sprawled wearily on one of the mats, she went to find more food.

They relaxed for a time, eating the fruits, talking, and just resting. Eventually, though, Seth got around to asking two of the questions most bothering him: How did the Nale'nid live with equal ease in the air and in water? And how, by what magical means, had they brought him here in the first place?

Lo'ela was surprised.
I already explained that
.

"You did. You did? You explained
focus
 . . ."

Same thing.

Seth eyeballed her with one eye shut. He thought quickly—in circles. Finally he sighed and reached for another malan, and wished it were a draught of ale.

The next day, Seth rolled out of his hiking blanket to follow Lo'ela for a quick plunge in and out of the water in the sea entry well. The sea, surprisingly, was comfortably warm, but it woke him enough to feel like pouring a large bowl of fresh water over his head before dressing again. He joined Lo'ela for a pleasant breakfast under a clear blue morning sea, during which he found himself on the receiving end of the questions, for a change.

Tell me about starship flying
, she began with a huge, expectant grin. She wanted to hear, not only about his actual job as a pilot second, but also everything he knew to tell about all the worlds he had visited, the worlds he had
not
visited, and about the Star Cluster itself (who the Lacenthi were, and the Querlin, why he called them a "threat," what the Cluster Council was all about, and how the human worlds had managed to build themselves—again—an interstellar society, if a struggling one). Seth told her of his home worlds Rorcan and Venecite, the former a mighty industrial planet of great endless mines and foundries, the latter the home world of much of the scientific and intellectual expertise of the Central Worlds. He told her of Rethmere, the political and financial nerve center of the Cluster, and the home port of his own ship,
Warmstorm
. And he told her of the Galaxy Beyond, now all but forgotten—where, by the accounting of some historians, humankind first arose, and perhaps lingered even today.

Lo'ela kept him talking constantly, so long that he had hardly an inkling of the passage of time. Seth was exuberant in speaking of such matters, and was slightly astonished to realize how completely, for a day or more, they had slipped from his mind. He vowed not to allow such a lapse again and reminded himself sternly of his
Warmstorm
mission—to find a means of dealing with the Nale'nid. Which of course, he told himself, was precisely what he was doing.

Lo'ela got him back to the actual flying of the starship.
You do not travel as we travel?

Seth tapped his cheek. "No," he said weightily, "the distances are very, very much greater—and we are dependent upon machines."

You do not like dependence upon machines.

"They do their job as well as can be expected, and actually I'm rather fond of them, but—" but there was always that uncertainty, the marginal control of the human operator. In the control pit of a starship, when everything had been done that could be done, when the normal-space trajectory was optimal and the probability-probe signaled
on
to the fluxdrive . . . in that moment, the ship was already beyond the help of human control and interference. It trembled and shuddered to its core, and plunged into the cold, light-dark realm of flux-space, where both men and instruments were for all important purposes blind, and only the guess-factoring of the probe could guide the ship intact through to normal-space. The pilots, even the Captain, had no important duties except riding herd on the wildcatting, consuming flux-fires carried in the ship's belly. The levels of space reached by the brutish fluxdrive were cold, resisting, a biting psychic darkness which—even as it skirted the appalling interstellar distances of normal-space—exacted a fearsome toll in return. For the machine—an incredible energy drain, tearing at the fabric of the ship itself. For the crew—a toll of the mind, the terrible fear of misplotting, of winding forever downward into the shifting, coruscated nexus of dimensions that was flux-space; and the demand, even with the crew at their most helpless, of sorting reality from unreality, of remembering location-sense and geometric sanity even as the ship itself shimmied in grotesque self-distortions. And, ultimately, the awful surrender of judgment to the machine, the probability-probe, which used not human wisdom but guesswork and sub-particle harmonics to determine, to order the course itself and the final retreat. And only when it was done, only when the ship coasted easily again in normal-space, could control revert at last to the human crew.

But what, Seth wondered aloud—what of the other regions of flux-space, beyond or beneath the terrors of the realm reached by fluxdrive?

The promised regions, deeper and more smoothly flowing regions—where the currents and ways were clearly visible to eyes that could see them, where the landscaped fantasies of the mind became one with topographic reality. The realm in which the rigger-ships once flew, coasted, and sailed.

"We have hopes," Seth said, and then stopped. It was the hope that had brought all of them to Ernathe—and had sent him on an expedition to find the Nale'nid. For contact and capture. Well, he had communication, if not capture—but it would behoove him to keep perspective of his situation here. And he had to find out if there was news to be learned of Racart; poor Racart, he had nearly forgotten about him!

What, what? What hopes?
Lo'ela prodded. Her face had been alight with awe and terror during his description of fluxdrive travel, and now her stare urged him on. Seth put his intruding thoughts aside. "Sorry," he said. He explained to her the proposed methods of starship-rigging, as deduced by theory and history. He told her just as he once told Racart, including his participation in the unsuccessful
mynalar-g
experiments.

Lo'ela listened closely and sympathetically, but for some reason seemed less moved than she had been only moments earlier. Seth studied her quizzically. "I'll bet you'd make a good rigger," he said half seriously.

Lo'ela tilted her head playfully.
Thanks
. She frowned.
Would you like to see the other parts of our world, since you have shown me your worlds with your word-thoughts?
Her face wrinkled and brightened alternately and intently.

Seth was caught off guard by the change of subject; but he was becoming used to her unsettling conversational habits. "Does that mean you are going to let me into your thoughts for a look?" he asked cautiously. "So far you've never done anything like that."

"No, yet . . .
not
yet," Lo'ela said, speaking aloud for the second time. She seemed to enjoy trying out verbal speech, and she continued: "May be later I can."
When I first saw you, you know, I could read only your very most surface thoughts. I drew your personality, your intents and your meanings only from my focus. But we are learning, together
.

Seth agreed with her there. Indeed, he had the feeling that he would soon be opening his chosen thoughts for her direct inspection. If he were not already. "How will you show me your world, then? Not in person."

Of course
. Lo'ela got to her feet.

He might have known. The sea-girl disappeared briefly and returned with Ga'yl. The older, male Nale'nid observed Seth with deference if not overt friendliness. He stood alertly, but reservedly so, as if a part of his concentration were elsewhere, on other matters. Lo'ela spoke with him at length in her own tongue, beaming every so often in Seth's direction. But if her glances were intended to be reassuring, they had precisely the opposite effect. Seth took this time to wonder just what was going on, and to worry. He had such a hard time keeping his mind on what he was
supposed
to be doing! Did it make sense, now, to go off on some expedition with Lo'ela? Shouldn't he be asking to meet with the Nale'nid leaders? Except, it didn't seem that they had leaders. Well, then, what of Lo'ela herself—what sort of relationship was he getting himself into, anyway?

As a kind of role-sorting exercise, he tried to splice together two mental images he carried of himself: starpilot striving for the limits of his profession—and—friend of Lo'ela, guest of the Nale'nid. He shook his head; he could not put the roles together, and he did not know anymore which was closer to the real Seth Perland. He glanced about at the almost magical pressed-seaweed dwelling, at the open well where he had dunked himself into the sea. Could he not be a friend here, and still get on with business?

Starman Seth. Are you ready?

Jerked back to the moment, he looked up with consternation. Lo'ela was smiling broadly and expectantly. Well—why not? He nodded.

Good
. Lo'ela moved to one side of him, Ga'yl to the other. They touched his arms, and Lo'ela thought a calming thought to him, adding:
Keep breathing
.

"Huh? Hey!" He was suddenly alarmed. "What about decompression?" He looked up through the
glid
bubble, through the many meters of pressing ocean, and he envisioned himself crippled by the bends.

Do not worry. But keep breathing. It will be easier for me that way.

He gulped and complied, breathing quickly, nervously, now that he had thought—not only of the bends—but of the danger of air expanding in his lungs.