Seas of Ernathe (16 page)

We'll be on land, first, so you can wait for those,
Lo'ela said. She called out in her Nale'nid language, and Ga'yl came into the dome, dressed in shorts like Seth's. His body was slim and muscular; he beamed at both of them with an expression of readiness.

They traveled. Together, the three arrived on a rocky shoreline beneath a burning sun. One of the endless seas of Ernathe gleamed and flashed beneath the spanking rays, blue tropical water stirred only by the faintest whisper of a breeze. Lo'ela had said that the place was not far from the city; but as far as Seth could tell it might have been half a kilometer or a thousand. He squinted through the faint distortion caused by the dry film-mask, and guessed that they must be relatively near the Ernathene equator. Lo'ela and Ga'yl spoke briefly, gesturing toward the water; they waited, while Seth put on his foot fins.

You will like the water?

"Of course. I hope so," he grunted through the mask. Standing awkwardly, first on one foot and then on the other, he stretched the fins into place over his feet. He nodded.

Lo'ela touched his hand, and dove smoothly and effortlessly into the water, hardly disturbing the surface as she plunged. Ga'yl waited. After a moment, Seth followed Lo'ela's example by launching himself in a clumsy, shallow dive. Water crashed and muttered about his ears, and the sea closed over his head with a sparkle and a rush, and carried him gently over a mounded reef before he regained his sense of stability and control. He descended feet first, pinching his nostrils together to coax air into his middle ears, and looked up to see the shimmering mirror of the surface falling away from him as he came down along the bottom line of near-shore reef.

Ga'yl was beside Lo'ela now, both of them watching him silently, their mouths open breathing seawater; Lo'ela was lithe and slim as a true sea-creature, her hair blossomed out like fine ochre-brown plant fronds, her eyes bright and sharp blue. She asked:
Are you comfortable? Is the water cold for you?

"Yes and no," Seth said, drawing close, his voice booming queerly through the water. "You are very beautiful."

Come
—with a trace of laughter.

He followed with energetic fin strokes as Lo'ela and Ga'yl moved quickly and easily through the water. He felt clumsy at first, but breathing in the mask was so effortless that he quickly began to feel at home in the water, and he enjoyed the weightlessness. His ears popped and squeaked as he descended, but he felt nothing else unusual; he concentrated on the view, and the feel of smooth and rhythmical movements. The water was relaxing, warm but not suffocatingly so. Blue sunlight, filtered from Lambern's gold, streamed in great dancing beams through the water, turning deeper and bluer until it splashed suddenly white and brown against the bottom sand, and yellow against the outcroppings of skeletal
krael
reef.

Seth's hands, sticking from the sleeves of his jacket, were pale in the altered light. On Lo'ela, the effect seemed healthy and (of course, he thought) Nale'nid-like. He hurried and caught her extended hand, held it and her glance for a moment, and followed her beckoning tug. The outcropping was a comforting cupped hand rising beside them, and they followed the edge of sand beneath its bold overhang while Ga'yl led the way some distance ahead of them, a small figure gliding with quick breast-stroke surges beneath the elkhorn eaves of
krael
. Seth marveled at Ga'yl's fishlike movements, among the lazy clusters of reef fish crossing and re-crossing their paths. Lo'ela, it was clear, loved the water as her home—but for Ga'yl it was more than a love, more than a belonging, it was clearly a
focus
, an intense and irrepressible
focus
, a communion with the sea on the most bare and basic levels of his existence. For Seth it was a marvelous and awesome trait to observe. The understanding of it came so naturally that he was hardly aware of his own growing attunement to the Nale'nid way of thinking.

Lo'ela spoke without turning, swimming smoothly ahead of him.
He wishes us to hurry, he is impatient to see the grotto-heralding.

Coming, love.

Lo'ela stopped and turned to him with a delighted smile—and only then he realized that he had just addressed her without speaking aloud. Yes, he thought to her—and shrugged, because he knew that it had not worked that time. "Yes. Yes, indeed," he croaked through his plastic mask. Ga'yl, ahead, glanced back at the sound; the voice had traveled far through the water. Seth, however, had his eyes on Lo'ela, and was startled to find himself not the least bit embarrassed at the thought that had slipped. Her face was pleasantly framed by flying hair and blue mist, her limbs dark and lithe and smooth—a beautiful not-quite-human, who was very human indeed. Love? Yes, the thought fit.

Her smile flashed and vanished, and she was off again, with Seth swimming hard close behind. They moved quickly, Seth puffing inside his plastic headgear; they skimmed beneath the
krael
reef-edge like eels, Lo'ela happily breathing water and pointing first one way and then another at reef formations, schooling fishes and solitary lurkers in the crevices and shadows of the
krael
. Sand and water and distance fell away behind them, well beyond Seth's ability to measure.

Ga'yl, always at a considerable lead, took them through tall, clustering formations that seemed a queer animal-plant hybrid of
krael
and kelp, and then upward along a smooth-bottomed incline until the surface once again flashed close and silvery over their heads. Seth's ears creaked like rusted hinges as they ascended; he hoped that Lo'ela was remembering to
focus
within his body and do whatever she did to prevent nitrogen from bubbling in his blood.

They swam around an enormous
krael
mount, and then dived back downward alongside a tumbling palisade, which turned in sharp angles as it fell, and drew them like a magnet around its corners into a breathtaking deepsea-blue basin. Seth stopped kicking and slowly sank, astonished speechless, oblivious to Ga'yl's intent grin and Lo'ela's quirky smile. They were at the mouth of a great deep undersea lagoon, an enormous bowl, which was like a sea within the sea, encircled at its rim with forests of horny
krael
that stood so boldly against the lighted surface they seemed to stand against the sky—though even the highest of the features were many meters removed from the world of air. Submerged though they were already, Seth and the two Nale'nid were poised at the shores of another, a deeper crystal-water sea.

They sank, swooping and gliding in exhilaration.

The basin initially seemed dark, but as Seth's eyes adjusted to the relative gloom, he could see well enough to realize that they had company—or they were company. The Grotto Gateway, as Lo'ela named it, was swarming with Nale'nid. Sea-people came to this place from all the cities, she had said, and Seth believed it; they flocked like fishes, swimming laterally across the wide basin or lazing upward past the descending trio. A very young, small Nale'nid darted downward past them out of nowhere, followed by an older sea-girl, less hurried. An adult male-female pair gazed curiously at Seth and Lo'ela, but did not alter their leisurely course, which carried them over the heads of the three and off into the edge of gloom. The water grew slightly cooler in stages, but even the coolness of depth was dispelled, at least in Seth's mind, by the crystal clarity of the water and the magnificently blued sunlight that, now that his eyes had adjusted, seemed to sparkle and penetrate everywhere with its cerulean illumination. Even the reds and yellows, which were at this depth absent from the light altogether, were restored to his vision by memory, imagination, and guesswork.

The basin, flattened at the bottom, was paved with stone and white sand. Ga'yl led the way, with an easy, fluid style Seth matched with a hard, steady fin kick. He glided playfully with his nose flying just above the sand, and looked up occasionally to check for Lo'ela's presence or to gauge the flow of traffic of Nale'nid toward the other end of the basin. Amidst the random-seeming movements of the sea-people, there was a general migration toward a narrowing point where the basin appeared to become a valley of sorts, channeling into a break in the far wall.

Ga'yl took them straight through the gateway and into a dark cavern or tunnel, through which Nale'nid moved like vehicles in a two-way flow. Seth shuddered a bit at the forbidding appearance of the channel walls, and for the first time felt a sense of claustrophobia, of discomfort with the weightlessness of immersion and with the weight of the water he knew to be pressing against his face. The feeling passed, as the tunnel gave way to a true open cavern, mammoth and lighted softly and indistinctly with an apparently source-less yellowish glow. It took him several minutes of staring about, past the swarming and congregating Nale'nid, to gain a sense of the cathedral formation. The light, he realized, came from the nooks and crevices of the cavern walls. Many of the luminous plants and animals used by the Nale'nid for night lighting in their city were tucked discreetly out of view.

They did not stay long in this chamber, however. Ga'yl and Lo'ela took him straight through, across its length, and into another, wider, lighter tunnel, which slanted upward, twisted and crooked, and spilled into a great sunlit pool, a clear shallow sea whose surface danced brightly and gaily only ten meters or so overhead.

It was an amphitheater, an arena beneath the sea.

They stopped here, finally, and Seth was able to look about; he estimated that well over a hundred Nale'nid were present, most of them gliding about like theatergoers, or simply relaxing and drifting without effort. The sky above the sea must have been clear, because the light, even after his eyes readjusted, was dazzling; in fact, when he rolled on his back and looked carefully, he could see—through the half-silver, mirror of the surface—the fuzzy white shapes of a few scattered clouds. That other world, that sky, seemed alien to him now.

Some sort of activity seemed about to get underway—Seth recognized this without any overt signals from Lo'ela, but he decided that he was picking up hints or at least moods and expectations from her on a subverbal level—and he followed his two hosts around the outside of the arena to find a better place to settle in. Along the perimeter of the area there were a great many caves and archways and entrances to large grotto chambers. Lo'ela informed him that they would visit some of these later. Presently, they found a niche in the rock basin where the crowd was relatively sparse, and there waited and relaxed; and Seth took time to pay more attention to Lo'ela. She looked better than ever: bright, alert, and happy. She beamed right back at him, and intertwined her fingers with his.

Something was happening down in the arena's center. A pathway was opening among the sea-people closest to the sandy "stage." A nude female Nale'nid came into view from the misty edges of the space, swimming leisurely to the center—and following her was a long, slithering creature, an eel of some sort, and behind it another eel, and then two more—and bringing up the rear a male Nale'nid, also nude. Seth crossed his legs and sat, valving off some buoyancy-gas from his belt, to watch. The short parade concluded at center stage, a circle of two Nale'nid and four eels. They floated, nearly still, all seemingly aware only of each other. A general stillness came over the amphitheater—no one was moving—and an air of tense anticipation struck Seth as surely as though he actually knew what was to take place. Was this the grotto-heralding?

Yes.

He nodded, smiling to himself, and waited, imagining what kind of music might fit this scene. Something slow, perhaps, a contained, restrained rhythm. And then, hardly had the thought crossed his mind when a low drumming sounded through the water—a curious sound, muted, like the synchronized thrumming of a troop of bellows-fishes, which perhaps, he realized, was actually the source. The drumming was quickly joined by a second, a watery popping sound,
pôk-pôk-pôk-pôk-pôk
, like sonar pulses. The rhythms of the two sounds were at first dissonant, uncoordinated, but after a minute they began to coalesce, to match in tempo, and from that point on were never out of phase regardless of the patterns and syncopations chosen by the separate sources.

At the first coordinated refrain, the performers on stage began to move, at first in a limited and constrained pattern, back and forth, back and forth, side to side; and then in more intricate modes, the Nale'nid swaying legs and heads and arms with only the hips remaining stationary, and the eels undulating in place and then forward and backward from the center of the circle in a suggestively controlled dance. The movements became energetic as the drumming quickened, and soon grew to a form of violent thrashing, always perfectly controlled, but straining at the edge of that control and threatening . . .

The movements stopped, and the musicians fell silent. A moment passed, and a half of another, and without warning one eel from each side of the circle streaked smoothly into the center—and fell to war. Each connected on its first strike and rebounded and slashed with flashing teeth, striking, striking, lashing with convulsive tail jerks—and when for a split second they parted and circled and recircled it was plain that neither had been harmed, neither cut—and then one feinted and the other dived, and they locked into a gyrating tangle, which like a tiny storm drifted about the arena center as it spun, an impersonal dervish that occasionally touched bottom, flicking little spumes of white sand up into the blue water. The eels broke, and weaved like spent runners.

Then the circling and the fighting began once more.

Not a sound marred the intensity of the performance. Seth allowed a small fraction of his own attention to wander over the audience; everyone,
everyone,
was staring raptly at the demonstration of speed, agility, viciousness and stamina being played out in the arena center. Even Lo'ela seemed to have forgotten him, her hand limp in his. Seth brought that fraction of his viewing attention back to join the rest watching the skirmish, the brawl of the eels.