Authors: Ian Stewart
HER FISHES ARE NOT SHOALING PROPERLY. THEIR MOVEMENTS ARE TOO CHOREOGRAPHED. NOT FLEXIBLE ENOUGH.
“She don’t
have
fishes!”
THAT EXPLAINS WHY THEY TASTE SLIGHTLY DRY. AND THEIR MOTIONS ARE OBSESSIVELY CYCLIC. I AM INTERPRETING HER THOUGHT PATTERNS
IN TERMS THAT I FIND FAMILIAR, THAT IS ALL.
“She can’t get the horrors out of her mind,” Second-Best Sailor explained. “It’s such a tragedy she can’t be cured.”
Never before had he had the sense of catching the pond unawares. Suddenly, his mind was filled with it.
SHE CANNOT BE CURED?
“No. Our medical science can heal her body, but her mind is beyond its scope.”
IT MAY NOT BE BEYOND MINE.
A lengthy silence. “Say that again.”
IT MAY NOT BE BEYOND MINE. I HEALED YOUR PHYSICAL WOUNDS. I MAY BE ABLE TO HEAL HER MENTAL ONES.
Second-Best Sailor’s siphons squeaked with the release of repressed frustration.
“Why the flounce didn’t ya tell us that before?”
I WAS NOT ASKED. I DO NOT KNOW WHAT HUMANS WANT.
“Sam would have told you!”
FOURTEEN SAMUEL HAS NOT MADE CONTACT WITH ME.
Second-Best Sailor reached out with a couple of tentacles, grabbed Sam by the ankles, and threw him into the water. As the
startled human broke the surface, spluttering, the mariner directed a cogent thought at the pond.
“Now he has.”
Understanding surged through the collective mentality of the pond as it sampled Sam’s neural chemistry. A
H . . .
So
that
is what he wants. If the child can be persuaded to join samuel in the water, their molecular coupling should be strong enough
for me to redirect her mental processes. Her thoughts are close enough to fishes that i
think
i can restore them to normality.
The mariner passed the pond’s instructions on to Sam. He swam over to where Fall sat, and held out his arms to her. She looked
puzzled and didn’t budge. Should he reach for her and pull her in? He would hate to do that; enough had been done to her against
her will already. Even something small might make her condition worse. Torn between difficult choices, he hesitated.
The sand upon which she sat began to flow. Still looking puzzled, Fall slid into the water. The pond had taken its own steps
to ensure contact.
IT WILL TAKE A FEW MINUTES.
Sam wrapped his arms around the child’s body and waited. He would wait like that forever, if need be.
Fall made no move to escape. Her lips moved, but no sounds emerged. The movements slowed, ceased. Time seemed frozen.
Then the Neanderthal child did something that Sam had never seen her do before.
She smiled.
No-Moon was shrouded in dense, impenetrable banks of cloud; it shivered in the clutches of volcanic winter. The reefwives’
Pyrrhic victory over the missionaries of Cosmic Unity had wrecked their planet. Its ecosystems were dying one by one, unable
to survive the increasingly harsh conditions.
The previously stable ocean beds had shattered into a crazed maze of cracks, trenches, and volcanic hot spots. Molten lava
spouted into ice-cold water, solidifying where the two met, breaking open again under the pressure, surging upward to form
tall, hollow columns of rock.
On the land, lava flowed over what had once been woods, plains, deserts. Mountain ranges rose and fell. Unquenchable fires
ravaged the forests, adding their own smoke to the planetwide pall, even as heavy rains fell from the darkened skies. Hurricanes
howled; spun-off tornadoes wreaked havoc. Uprooted trees and the carcasses of animals washed down the swollen rivers and into
the toxic seas in an unending cascade, choking the shallows with decaying organics, churning the once-pellucid lagoons into
lakes of thick mud. Reefs that had taken four hundred thousand years to build were washed away in seconds. Continental shelves
gave way under the pressure, slipping into the depths and leaving only huge chasms to mark their demise. The eons-old circulation
of the oceans faltered, then disintegrated. No-Moon’s sea creatures perished by the trillion, tumbling to the ocean floor
in a ceaseless downpour of death.
In those few places where volcanic vents had previously existed, delicate pink fanworms peeped from their square tubes and
basked in water as hot as molten lead. Their tiny colored lights flickered on and off in response to the chemical condition
of the surrounding ocean. To them, the drizzle of dead and dying was no ecotragedy but a feast. A bonanza. The more food that
rained down, the more excited their flashing lights became. The fanworms greedily absorbed the food and grew. Their attendant
symbiotic algae, bacteria, and archaeans grew with them.
Before, even when food had briefly been plentiful for some chance reason, there had been nowhere else for the fanworms to
go. But now the entire ocean floor was a forest of volcanic vents, dark smokers where heat and pressure combined to create
endless streams of superheated water, rich in the exotic minerals that the worms alone could tolerate—that they alone found
essential.
Surging vortices ripped them from their safe homes, scattering them to the three corners of the world. Most died. But occasionally,
a few would alight upon a new smoker, find the location congenial, attach themselves to the cooling lava—and reproduce like
wildfire.
What No-Moon’s major lifeforms had lost, the fanworms would take back.
Perhaps, one day, their chemosensitive patterns of flashing lights would blossom into intelligent communication . . . or even
evolve into extelligence.
It could happen. Given time.
In a healthy Galaxy a mere twelve billion years old, there was no shortage.