The Long Twilight (25 page)

"Wh—why, Gon's been swimming every day since we arrived; he's suffered no ill effects—"

"He's been lucky."

"The locals seem safe enough!" Brother Glad snapped.

"They're used to it," O'Royle came back. "Gon isn't. He's led a sheltered life until now. How long has he been gone?"

"Perhaps an hour, a little more. But, look here—"

"Did he have a set course, any communication link?"

"No set course . . . he was to swim out a few miles, then cast about. I'm not in direct communication with him at all—"

"I'm going after him with scuba gear," O'Royle snapped. "Do you have a flitter you can take out to search the surface with?"

"No—nothing . . ."

"Then stand by on shore, in case he makes it back here." O'Royle turned to the door, giving the missionary a hard look. "If Gon dies," he said, "I'll be back to see you."

IV

Gon saw the Meried at a depth of forty feet, two miles offshore. It was a slim female who appeared before him out of the darkness, her body glowing faintly to Gon's sea-eyes, slightly magnified by the lens effect of the watery medium. Gon halted, staring into the grotesque mask that peered wide-eyed at him. Then the sea-girl's small mouth opened, emitted rasping speech resembling the squeaks and chirps of dolphin-talk. For a moment the young half-breed was baffled; then he caught the rhythm of the Meried speech, which he had heretofore heard only on tapes in a sunny classroom on Terra.

"You're the half-man; I've seen you playing in the surf."

"I . . . I'm Gon O'Royle," the boy said. His voice, coming through the specially designed speaking mask that covered his mouth and nostrils, echoed and grated in his ears. The rehearsed speech he had memorized against this moment froze on his lips as the Meried swam closer, moving herself effortlessly with small flutterings of her fingers and toes, turning to look at Gon from all sides as she circled him, carrying a light spear gun in her hand.

"You are like a sea-man and yet . . . not like," the stranger said. "What is that you hold in your teeth?"

"I have to have it—to breathe," Gon said.

"Indeed? Still, you swim well—for a dryman."

"I'm no dryman!" Gon blurted, and paused, experiencing for the first time in his life a sense of shame at his land-dweller traits.

"You're far afield," the Meried said. "We seldom swim these waters. The grampus lairs here. I came searching for a strayed swoat, never thinking to find a half-man instead!" The sea-girl's mouth puckered into an expression Gon recognized as a smile.

"I want to talk to you," Gon said hurriedly. "I have news for you—wonderful news. You haven't been forgotten—"

"I must go. Will you come with me?" the stranger cut in. "Many will want to see you, to welcome you. We hoped you'd venture out to us in time."

"You've been . . . watching me?"

"We're curious folk. We welcome any diversion."

Gon hesitated, remembering Brother Glad's instructions: to deliver his speech, arrange a second meeting, then return. But it had been so long with no results. What if this creature swam off and never came back? He owed it to Brother Glad to cement relations now, while he had the chance . . . .

"Yes, I'd . . . I'd like to come."

The Meried flashed her strange smile again, turned with the flexible grace of an eel and was gone into the murk. Gon paddled hurriedly after her. Half a minute later the Meried reappeared.

"You must learn to use your strength in the water," she said. "Not to waste it in floundering."

Swimming slightly ahead, she led the newcomer out across the edge of the continental shelf and down toward the lightless Deeps of the Continental Sea.

Using the wet-jet strapped to his back, and following the beam of his sea-light, O'Royle covered three miles in a quarter of an hour, alert for a signal from the locator on his wrist, set to resonate to a moving body of the mass of a man.

Twice he picked up traces that led him into detours; the first time a great mollusk scuttled away at his approach; the second, a wild sea-dog approached, fangs bared in its seal-like snout. He drove it off with a beam of sound from his 'caster. He could have killed it as easily, but the scent of mammalian blood would have attracted a pack of its fellows. The Terran transplants had thrived on native fare, multiplied hugely in their adopted home; but their taste for red meat clung in instinct, even after three hundred years of sea-life.

Now the offspring of strays and runaways had claimed huge volumes of the sea as their own, in competition with their former masters.

O'Royle pictured Gon, alone and helpless, surrounded by sea-carnivores with the smell of Terran blood in their nostrils. Grimly, he swam on.

It had been a long time since he had cruised here, in the purple-black waters of Meries. Not since Gon's birth, in fact, and the death of Onide, his mother.

And now—so close to the day when Gon would have been graduated, able to take a post with the University Foundation—a meddling fanatic had come along to destroy the whole careful structure built up over two decades of hard labor.

O'Royle switched trains of thought again, concentrated on his compass readings, heading outward toward the sea-city where he had met and wooed a sea-woman once, long ago.

Close behind his guide, Gon threaded his way down, down, toward a faint, water-diffused glow spreading out below. Dark spires of rock swept past to left and right; the Meried woman turned and twisted, rounding craggy, weed-grown buttes, sailing under fragilely balanced arches, plunging downward at last into a near-vertical cavern mouth to emerge in an amphitheatre of terraced stone asparkle with pastel glows. Only then did Gon realize that he was in the ruins of one of the undersea cities built three centuries before for the sea colony.

Suddenly, Meried faces were all about. A cacophony of alien voices called greeting, asked questions, made observations.

"Back so soon, Seryl? And who's this with you?"

"Mama—why is he a funny color?"

"Hello, young one. What's that across your mouth?"

"Does he really sleep on the rocks?"

A large, scar-faced sea-man with a tattered crest was before Gon, looking at him with eyes that seemed covered with a grayish film. "Who are you?" he demanded plaintively. "
What
are you?"

"I'm Gon O'Royle," he said, and once again his prepared speech deserted him. "I want to be your friend," he stammered.

"I remember," the old man said. "Onide. She bore a son to the dry-man. He took the infant away."

"Yes—you must be the son of Onide!" a woman said. "How like her he is—and yet how strange he is."

"So, so. Strange things happen as the world grows old." The aged Meried drifted away. Gon looked around bewildered at the slim, swift shapes gliding in and out of the rounded doorways—or were they windows?—that reminded him of the toy castles in fishbowls— and of sunken ships, drowned sailors. Abruptly, the sea seemed to close in on him. He sucked air frantically through the mouthpiece, feeing terror rise in him. He struck out in what he thought was the direction of the passage through which he had entered, but found only a slimy barrier of volcanic stone. Seryl called, but he pushed frantically on, hearing a shrilling in his head, the thud of his heart, banging his head, bruising his hands as he scraped and fumbled, forcing his way through narrow passages that opened only into other pockets, ending in a dark cul de sac. He tried to orient himself, but the infallible sense that had always before told him in which direction to move seemed numbed, amputated. Even the phosphorescence was gone from the water. For an instant he thought that he was blind; then he caught the infinitely faint glow of his own skin.

"Seryl!" he shouted, and almost lost the breather, choking as a jet of water sprayed past the mouthpiece. He doubled up in a paroxysm of coughing. He recovered—weak, trembling, with a pounding pain in his head—to find himself in total darkness and total silence— alone and utterly lost.

V

Inside O'Royle's scuba suit the pressure and the cold were as oppressive as a filled grave. He wasn't as young as he had been when he had first swum here—not by a lifetime. He realized quite suddenly that he might fail, might not find Gon, might not even find the sea-city of the Merieds.

But he had to find it. He knew its location; his compass would lead him there. And there he'd find his old friends and tell them what had happened, enlist their help. . . 

He swam on, tiring, but driven by the mental image of Gon, alone and in danger, needing him. He was taken by surprise by the trio of sea-men that were suddenly around him.

"Benoroyle!" a familiar voice came scratchily through his helmet. "Is it you indeed?"

"Dreen—thank God you're here! It's my son—the half-man you told me about. I've got to find him!"

The sea-men conferred. "The lad visited City," another Meried said. "But we sensed he was discomfited. So we left him alone, until he should feel more at ease. He soon departed, perhaps to meditate in solitude."

"Departed? Where did he go?"

"Who knows, Benoroyle? No one was so discourteous as to follow him."

"You damned fool! Gon's no Meried! He'll drown! Why the devil didn't you help him?" O'Royle cut off his outburst with an effort. "I'm sorry, Dreen. Will you help me find the boy?"

"As you wish, Benoroyle—but the sea is wide, and filled with perils—"

"Don't treat me to any of your Meried philosophy now! Just find Gon before it's too late!"

Alone in the labyrinth, Gon felt a sudden swirl of deeper coldness around him. Something was moving nearby. He backed water, retreating into a niche in the rock. Then a familiar twittering voice spoke:

"Gon—where are you?"

"Seryl!" The stab of relief that went through the boy was as sharp as physical pain. "Seryl! Get me out of here, back to the surface!"

"Gon, you've hurt yourself! I sense blood in the water!"

He felt her touch on his arm; seeing her face hovering before him, her immense eyes wide, he wondered how he had ever thought her ugly.

"Please—help me . . .!" He fought down the rising panic. The air in his throat seemed hot, stale. He was choking, drowning. He had to get out. He caught at Seryl's arm, but it slipped away.

"Come—this way!" she called.

"I can't see you!" He choked on the words, struck out blindly, smashing face-first into sharp-edged stone. Then her hand gripped his, tugging gently.

"Poor half-man. You're blind; I didn't know. Come now, I'll lead you."

It seemed to Gon that for an endless time they wormed their way through a serpentine route, up, down, twisting, turning, at times forcing their way along passages barely wide enough to pass, then swimming a few strokes until the way narrowed again. Attempting to squeeze through a vertical crevice, he stuck fast. The girl tugged at his hands, uselessly.

"No good. I'll have to go back." He tried to retreat, found that he was wedged equally tightly against withdrawal. He attempted to turn his body, succeeded only in cutting his hide on the sharp edges of volcanic rock.

"Gon—careful!" Now there was anxiety in the girl's voice. "The sea-hunters roam here! If they scent blood . . ."

He fought silently then, in blind panic. He was only dimly aware of the girl's voice calling to him, of her hands trying to hold his flailing arms.

"Gon—they're here!" Her cry cut through his panic. He went slack then, hung, half in, half out of the fissure, watching a thing like an eight-foot otter or beaver, black and sinuous, armed with a tiger's jaws. It cruised past at a distance of ten feet, stroking with broad, seal-like flukes, studying him with wide, dark-glistening eyes. Gon recognized it as a mutated dog, a remote descendant of a retriever or herder brought from Terra centuries before, now grown large, wild and fierce, the ancient subservience of its kind to man forgotten. With sudden decision, it started in, jaws gaping.

Seryl set the butt of her spear gun against her shoulder, followed the patrolling carnivore as it shot forward and fired. A plastic-feathered quarrel sprang out and sank to half its length in the side of the predator. Instantly, the creature whirled to bite at the shaft, fighting like a hooked tarpon; but as the smoky blood wafted from the wound in a widening veil, a second sea-dog closed; in a lightning snap it opened the dying animal's throat. Through water abruptly opaque with an ink-black stain, Gon caught glimpses of swift-darting bodies that struck, and struck and struck . . .

Time had passed. How long, Gon didn't know. But his air was running out. Where was Seryl? How long had he been trapped here? How long since Brother Glad had bade him farewell on the shore?

A long time—too long. His air was gone.

Here he would die—

The flash of teeth brought him from his state of shocked reverie; a creature half again as large as the sea-dog Seryl had killed had swept past him close enough to buffet him where he lay, wedged in the rock— a porpoise, once a mild-mannered friend of man, here on Meries driven by the competition of competing mammals into the role of voracious killer, hungry for the flesh of warm-blooded sea-beasts.

The killer-porpoise turned, patrolling back past him. Beyond it Gon saw others of its kind, gliding like grim torpedoes in formation. In a moment one would turn on him; with one snap of those spike-studded jaws, it could take off his arm—or his head.

Better to drown than to be torn to pieces. He reached, found the quick-release latch, and slipped the tank harness. The mouthpiece was ripped away as, with a twist and a kick, he tore tree from the harness, pushed away from the rock, and shot toward the surface a hundred and fifty feet above.

The pain struck O'Royle without warning, like a blow in the chest with a spiked club. He gave a single gasping grunt and doubled over, tumbling as the powerful water jets drove him erratically on. He managed to switch off power and hung, afloat now in a sea of agony wider than the Continental Ocean.

Time passed—how long, he had no idea. Slowly, he became aware that he was drifting, head-down, in black water. Fire still burned in his chest, but it was a bed of embers now, not a roaring blaze. He moved, and pain lanced through his rib-cage. Slowly, awkwardly, like a crippled insect, he straightened his body, began to move slowly toward the mile-distant shore. Gon was still out there; but Dreen and the others would find him. He had done that much, anyway. Now the trick was to reach shore alive, to be there waiting when they brought the poor lad back.