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Being a collection of transmissions received on the E4 FTL radio emergency band, 2002-11-07 to 2002-12-07 (planetary local time).
This is a short novel (very short; 55000 words) I wrote in 31 days as a slightly late NaNoWriMo project.
Originally it was intended to be a slightly late IWriSloMo project, which doesn't have a set word count and is therefore a lot easier. However, about a third of the way through I realised that I was actually on target for the more ambitious NaNoWriMo version, and so switched.
This all started out as a writing exercise. Rule #1 of writing: the first prerequisite for writing anything is to have your fingers meet the keyboard. (Or pen, if you are so inclined.) Before this, my total output consisted of a dozen or so mostly unfinished short stories. I needed some way of drastically increasing the amount I wrote; which meant getting into the habit of writing something regularly.
The traditional way of doing this is to start a diary. But who wants to read about my life, a sessile computer programmer in Reading, the least characterful city in Britain? I needed to write someone else's diary.
Now it's all over, and I've come up with, well, rather more than I expected. I'll tell you four things I discovered: firstly, writing takes a lot of time. This took about two to three hours a day, every day. Secondly; writing is addictive. If I could have stopped before 0200 each day, trust me, I would have! Thirdly: this damned island has been swirling around in my head all month, and I'm quite glad now it's finished and both the island and I can go to sleep. Fourthly: it's a hell of a lot of fun.
Be warned that the version here is only nominally proofread. I've done some tinkering, corrected some spelling and grammar, and rewrote one scene I wasn't happy with, and that's it. Every so often someone points out another typo and I've fixed it; thank-you, all, and if anyone sees any more, please let me know! But other than that --- what you see is what I've got.
This is not great literature. In fact, it's not literature at all. But I had a lot of fun writing it, and if I can give people some pleasure in reading it, I'm happy.
Test. One two three for five. She sells sea shells on the sea floor.
[break]
Well, what do you know. It works.
Okay, then: to whoever might be receiving this, if anyone is, help. I'm on a starship, somewhere, I have no idea where it's taking me, I have no control over it, and I don't want to go.
I'm from a planet called Earth. The ship's got a chart star reference number somewhere for Earth's star but I don't have it; I'll ask it again later. The same applies to the destination, wherever that is. Someone please help me. I want to go home.
[break]
Ship, what is the star catalogue number from which you departed?
That star's catalogue number is G88192322.
What is the star catalogue number where we are going?
That star's catalogue number is G19457611.
[break]
I repeat. Someone please help me. I don't know if this thing can receive as well as transmit, but if anyone's there, please get in touch.
[break]
[transmit]
I think the main reason is that I am bored out of my mind. I wouldn't have thought it possible, but this is not a very big spaceship, and there's not a lot in it, and there are exactly three things to do here: panic, watch the view, or dictate into this thing and hope someone's listening.
Oh, yeah, I've found out how to edit the text before sending it, which helps.
I'm currently sitting in the pilot's chair. I'm assuming it's the pilot's chair because it's sitting in front of the window. There are no controls, so I don't know how anyone would pilot this ship, but that's what I'm calling it.
I'm not here because it's comfortable (it is), but because it's the only chair on the ship and the floor's cold.
Okay. Let's try a bit less of the random wittering and a bit more of the constructive description.
I have been kidnapped by a spaceship. Starship, rather; assuming I can trust the view out of the window, we're going a lot faster than the speed of light. When I got aboard I wasn't aware it was a spaceship; a sort of wooden shed structure had been built round it.
It's not big. I'm not sure about the outside dimensions, but inside it's about five metres by five metres and the outside can't be much bigger. There's one cabin, with one piece of furniture, that I'm currently sitting in. The rest of the décor consists of the big window or viewscreen or whatever in front of me and a number of hatches in the walls.
There are no controls. Anywhere. I did discover that I can talk to the ship, and it talks back, but it's not what I would call intelligent. Let me give you an example.
Ship, what are you?
I am a starship.
Where were you built?
I do not have that information.
Take me back to Earth.
I do not know that location.
Earth is the planet that you left when you started this trip.
You do not have clearance to change my navigational databases.
Take me back to the planet you just left.
You do not have clearance to change my mission profile.
It's definitely not a person, it's just a machine. What's more, it's a machine it's practically impossible to get useful information out of... it doesn't appear to have any terms I know about programmed into it, despite it speaking fluent English.
Ship, how long have we been travelling?
The current journey has been underway for 0.2 temporal units.
How far have we travelled?
In the current journey, I have travelled 895 spatial units.
Make that four things to do. Panic, admire the view, dictate, or argue fruitlessly with the ship.
[break]
We've just passed a star.
The view's impressive. The window is slightly curved and occupies most of the front of the cabin. When sitting in the chair I have an excellent view. One of the few things the ship will let me control is the internal lights, and so I'm sitting here in the dark watching the stars slide past.
We're not moving that fast compared to, say, Star Trek. The stars aren't rushing past in a flood, they're crawling past sedately, one at a time. First one star and then another will start drifting away from the centre of the window, pick up speed, and disappear off to the side. I reckon we're doing about a light year a minute.
[break]
I've just asked the ship what it has in the way of food on board, and in response it opened one of its hatches and there was a kind of airline lunch tray on it. There was one big container of brown paste, and three little ones of pink, green and blue pastes. Plus a plastic spoon. The big container tastes a bit like humous but without the garlic. The pink paste is sweet, and green one is sharp and the blue on is sour.
It's not very exciting, but it's food.
[break]
I sincerely hope the ship has no internal cameras. I've just found the toilet.
I asked it where to put the dead lunch tray and it opened another hatch. Inside was a bucket. It instructed me to place any waste materials, biological or otherwise, in the bucket and replace it in the hatch, whereupon it would be recycled.
I have to crap in a bucket and then the ship eats it. Get me out of here.
[break]
Another fruitless few hours spent staring at the stars. I have no idea where we are. If I was right about a light year per minute, then we must have gone about five hundred by now. The Milky Way is off to one side; as far as I can tell we're progressing down the spiral arm.
However, I've noticed something interesting. There are vague striations visible against the starfield. They're very faint, and they're only visible when the lights are all the way out. They converge at a point dead ahead and go radially outwards. They're rippling slowly.
[pause]
Ah. That's interesting. I leant forwards to get a better look and they moved against the stars. Parallax. I'll just... [pause] yes. They seem to be just outside the window. They seem to be describing the surface of a sphere or ellipsoid or something enclosing the ship; the place where they converge is the foremost point. Hang on, I want to sit down again.
[pause]
I reckon what I'm seeing is the surface of a forcefield or hyperspace bubble or something like that. If we're travelling through normal space, then the amount of interstellar dust hitting us would be quite extreme... something must be shunting it off. Hmm.
But if we're not travelling through normal space, then all bets are off... oh, good grief, I'm so far out of my depth here it's not funny.
I need some sleep.
I'm going to tell this thing to transmit and continue tomorrow, or at least, when I wake up. Oh, yes; this dictation device is really slow. It took about an hour to send my last message, assuming that's what the light meant. I hate to think how long this one will take.
Sod it. See you tomorrow.
[transmit]
It's weird. Two days ago, I didn't know such a thing as a starship existed. I never believed I would see one, or leave Earth's atmosphere. Here I am, hundreds of light years from home, barrelling along at ludicrous speeds towards an unknown destination and I'm still bored out of my mind. MTV generation, no doubt.
Occasionally it occurs to me that I ought to be scared. I don't really know why I'm not. Did all the science fiction get me so accustomed to the idea of aliens and space travel and strange new worlds that I was half-expecting something like this to happen?
Hmm.
The ship doesn't know when we're going to arrive. Apparently star G19457611 is our final destination and we're making some stops first. I asked it where we're stopping off, and it said ---- yes, you guessed it ---- that I'm not authorised for that information.
Pah.
[break]
Passed a nebula. They're not as pretty close up as they look in the pictures. It was just a big fuzzy cloud around a star, only just bright enough to see.
Disappeared behind us on the left.
[break]
Repeat that, please.
I am not receiving any communications from planetary traffic control. I have run a diagnostic of my communications systems. They are in perfect working order. Visual confirmation indicates that none of the relay stations are in position. I have run a diagnostic of my navigational systems. They are in perfect working order. This planet's proximate traffic protocols contraindict uncontrolled flight. I may not proceed further without traffic control or a valid override code. Do you have a valid override code?
I don't.
This destination is a critical stage in my mission profile. Unless this target can be attained, my mission cannot be completed. Mission contingency plans indicate a return to base unless further instructions can be supplied. Do you have any further instructions?
What are my options?
You do not have clearance to change my mission profile.
What is this planet?
I am currently in the vicinity of G19457611-C. It has the colloquial name of [untranscribable].
Where is the closest place where you could get an authorisation code to let you land here?
A valid authorisation code can be obtained from the traffic control systems on [untranscribable].
If you do not have a valid authorisation code, I shall proceed with the contingency plans.
Where are you going?
I am proceeding to my home base.
How long will it take to get there?
The estimated journey time from this point is 0.27 temporal units.
What will you do when we get there?
I shall land and await further instructions.
[break]
Well, that was exciting.
A couple of hours ago things started happening. The ship decelerated and stopped. Then we made a slight course correction and accelerated again. About five minutes later we approached a star. I think the ship slowed right down ---- for a while nothing seemed to happen apart from the star steadily getting brighter.
After a while it started showing a visible disc and was casting noticeable shadows inside the ship, and we stopped and made another course correction. Now we were pointing at a little speck of light that turned out to be a planet.
Unfortunately, when it seemed to be about the size of the moon, and about the same colour, the ship stopped again, hung motionless for half an hour, and then it started talking to me. I managed to get most of the conversation recorded above.
So now we're on our way again; to this ship's home base, wherever that is. I think 0.27 temporal units is about a day.
My watch says it's 0119. I wonder what time zone Gurglecough was in?
[break]
Something's just occurred to me.
The ship was expecting to be met on that planet. It kept talking about traffic control. If I was a high-tech space civilisation, traffic control would be pretty high up on my list of important services. And there wasn't any. The relay stations, whatever they are, weren't even in position.
I wonder what happened?
I'm also wondering about the planet. I don't know if Gurglecough had life or if it was just a rock, but it looked awfully moon-like. No green or blue.
I hope this ship's base is in better state. I hate to think where it might take me if it doesn't get a good reception there.
[transmit]
The stars drift by slowly, endlessly, tediously. I got the length of a Temporal Unit wrong and we'll actually be arriving at Base tomorrow. In the meantime the only thing to divert me is eating paste, trying to avoid thinking about the bucket and arguing with the ship.
[break]
My memoirs, chapter one:
Once upon a time there was a man who got a call from an old friend. The old friend was suddenly called away from home and needed a house-sitter. (The old friend didn't want to leave the rather expensive house in north Wales empty.) The man needed a holiday and was all too happy to spend a couple of weeks in Wales walking in the mountains and living in what was, basically, a mansion.
Unfortunately, the man was a bit too curious for his own good. Discovering a walled garden with a locked door, he unscrewed the lock hasp and broke in. Inside was an odd-looking shed. He opened the door and went inside, at which point the door closed and the shed suddenly took off.
So, in two weeks Calvin will come back. He'll find the house empty, open and probably completely ransacked. If I know Calvin, he'll instantly panic and think of his deep, dark secret. He'll rush down to the walled garden and find the spaceship gone. At this point, he'll probably try to contact...
Oh, shit.
This ship is almost certainly Calvin's only means of dealing with whoever it is he's dealing with! I've stranded him on Earth! Which means he won't be able to come and rescue me!
Wait, wait... what are the chances he's the only person on Earth with a spaceship?
High. Damn.
So, my only chance of getting home is to hope there's somebody on Base I can talk to who'll give me a lift back. They are going to have to return Calvin's ship, they might well put me on it...
But now I'll know the Big Secret. Can they trust me not to tell anyone?
Perhaps... oh, god.
[break]
I've been thinking about it. I have decided that I've already compromised myself by sending these transmission to whoever it is they're going to, and I can't do any more harm. As ranting into this microphone, if it is a microphone, is the only thing that's keeping me sane, I'll continue.
If I can think of something to talk about. Pah.
[break]
Let me tell you, Dear Listener, about the way I'm talking to you.
That first day when the ship took off I was pretty panicked. After I worked out that I could talk to the ship, I demanded that it let me talk to someone who could help. It popped a hatch and this thing was inside it.
It's a little metal ball with a button on top and a shiny black strip around the middle. If I talk at it, what I say appears on the stripe. If I push the button the stripe goes blank, the word `sending' appears and flashes for a while, and it all resets. I suppose it's sending the words somewhere, but it could just be into memory or something.
It also responds to voice commands to let me edit what's in the buffer. I don't know how it can tell whether I'm saying something to record or a command.
The ship's good at that, too. Hmm.
Ship, are you listening?
I am listening.
Ship, are you listening?
God, that's creepy. Is it reading my mind?
[break]
I've been trying to explore the ship.
Given that the ship is a single empty room, this is an interesting trick. In fact, what I've been doing is tapping on all the closed hatches trying to work out what's behind them.
Some of them are hollow, some of them feel like solid metal. The three hatches I've seen open so far, the food hatch, the bucket hatch and the recorder hatch, all feel hollow. The outside door feels like solid metal. Slightly reassuring, given that it's all that stands between me and a horrible death in the vacuum of space.
Asking the ship about any of them is a total waste of time. All it says is, "You do not have clearance for that information." Bah.
I tried listening at the hatches. The bucket hatch hisses for a few minutes after I close it. I don't know what it's doing in there; the compartment is totally featureless, bare shiny metal. Certainly, when the bucket comes out, it's completely pristine.
Ventilation comes from a series of grilles by the floor and ceiling. There's not much airflow. If I wet my finger and hold it next to the ceiling grille ---- that's the air outflow ---- I can feel it get cold. I asked the ship how the air recycling worked. Guess what it said? Right.
I have been wondering how long its life support or power systems last. I'd hate to run out of fuel, or air, light-years from anywhere. However, I've been getting the impression that the ship thinks through its flight plans before setting out, so I reckon I'm safe. I tried asking it. Waste of time.
I have a theory about why the ship won't talk to me. Calvin isn't the most technologically literate man in the world. (Or any world, for that matter.) I reckon that he was assigned the ship by the Extraterrestrial Conspiracy, or stole it or whatever, but doesn't really know how to work it. This would explain the voice control and the total lack of anything resembling a control.
I think that he must have told the ship something like, "Natives of Earth are not permitted to know anything about the Extraterrestrial Conspiracy." So, whenever I ask it something about itself, it has to respond with that annoying clearance message, even if it makes no sense.
Yes! Of course! That explains why I can tell it to do things, but I can't ask it things! Direct commands aren't covered by that order.
Ship, what's behind this hatch?
You do not have clearance for that information.
Is the food dispenser behind this hatch?
Yes.
Q.E.D., I believe.
Hmm... ship, open the suit locker.
You do not have the necessary qualifications to operate a space suit.
Do you have a space suit on board?
You do not have clearance for that information.
Open the manual control system.
You do not have the necessary qualifications to operate my manual controls.
Yay!
[break]
I can not believe I have overlooked this.
This ship's got artificial gravity!
It feels perfectly normal ---- I stand on the floor, the floor pushes back at me. I jump up and down and everything seems to be working fine.
It appears to be gravity only, no inertial damping. The take-off was brisk enough to knock me off my feet, and I had to crawl up the floor to get into the pilot's chair. Which strikes me as odd, because with artificial gravity, inertial damping is easy ---- you just change the vector of the generated gravity.
Hmm. Unless there's a technical reason why they can't.
Anyway, this is such a huge breakthrough, such a massive step beyond our technology, that it raises such feelings of awe that my eyes water. Gravity control implies an understanding of the universe at a far more fundamental level that anything we know. Gravity control implies force fields, and reactionless drives, and stabilised wormholes, and even interstellar travel. I bet that gravity control is the key to their FTL drive, too.
Wow.
[break]
I had a scary moment there. It suddenly occurred to me that this ship may not have an FTL drive. It may have an STL drive and I've been travelling at relativistic speeds, and hundreds of years were going by at home.
Then I thought to ask the ship what the elapsed time on Earth was at this moment, and it matched the ship's on-board elapsed time. Phew.
Here's a tip, kids: do not mess around with FTL travel. It can be seriously bad for your health.
[break]
Okay. My watch tells me it's bedtime. Well, that was an exciting day; tedious as usual, but I found out all kinds of new things about the ship, and leapt to some quite astonishing conclusions about the Conspirators technology. Tomorrow we arrive at Base (no colloquial name). Things can only get better.
'Night-'night.
[transmit]
[break]
Second course correction. And, guess what ---- Base orbits a binary star. One big red one, one small white one.
[break]
And here comes the planet!
First impressions: it's close to the star ---- stars ---- and it's blue and white. This suggests an Earth-like planet with water. Cool. I was dreading another rock like Gurglecough.
[pause]
The planet's slowly growing in the window.
I say slowly, but we must be going at a hell of a lick. It's doubled in size in half an hour or so, which means we must be going at a small fraction of light speed. I see why Gurglecough insisted on traffic control; if this ship hit a planet at this speed, it would make quite a dent.
Interesting that Base doesn't have any, though.
Hmm. Perhaps the ship's using it's FTL drive? In which case it's entirely feasible that our real relative velocity is actually quite small... oh, hell, I don't know.
[pause]
The planet's big enough to make out details now.
God, it's beautiful.
I never got a good look at Earth. When we took off I had other things on my mind, and the front of the ship was pointing up in any case. But I can see why astronauts spend so much time staring out the window.
[pause]
A photo wouldn't do this justice.
The planet's occupying about half the window now. It's not a planet any more; it's a world. It has depth. The day side is a fantastic oceanic blue, marked with pale green, swirled with cloud. The night side is a thick black, blocking out the stars, with odd streaks of very faint crimson and purple. There's a big hurricane in what, for the sake of argument, I'll call the southern hemisphere. Where it crosses into the night side I can see the continuous flicker of lightning. Small ice caps at the poles; it's summer in the `northern' hemisphere.
[pause]
The ship's changed course. We're no longer heading directly for the planet but towards the horizon. This relieves me.
The planet is filling the window now... the ship's rotated around its long axis so that the ground is below me, and the curved horizon is very slowly flattening out. I can make out distinct cloud formations; huge stacks of cumulus towering up into the sky, each of which is underpinned by a crimson-bordered shadow. (From the twin suns, no doubt.) The ocean is shining like polished metal with blood spilt on it. It looks amazing.
I haven't seen any land yet. Can this planet be completely covered in water? Where are we going?
[pause]
Slight turbulence. We must have hit the atmosphere.
My god! I'm actually touching another planet! It's only a couple of hundred kilometres away now!
I can start to hear a gentle sighing noise above the faint whisper of the ventilation system.
[pause]
Actually, I was expecting the reentry to be more exciting than that.
In hindsight, though, if this ship has enough power to blaze out of Earth's gravity well, carry me halfway round the galaxy, turn round, carry me halfway back again, and power through a star system at 0.1 c, then I expect it has enough power to decelerate out of orbit before going through the atmosphere, rather than slamming through and letting friction slow it. A much better way to travel.
We're skimming through the air at a fair altitude. It looks just like the view from a passenger jet back home, although the window's rather less grubby. The sky is a clean, crisp blue.
No sign of land yet. Also, the ship is gently meandering from side to side, banking in one direction and then the other. I hope it knows where it's going.
[pause]
Much lower now. The ship is manoeuvering to avoid cumulus stacks. Can't think why.
Good view, though.
[pause]
Land ho!
There's a small island up ahead. Green ground, white buildings, hilly. That must be where we're going.
Can't get a good view. Keeps getting blocked out by cloud.
[pause]
We're under the cloud now. The island's much closer.
It seems to be a few kilometres across. Woodlands, the glint of water, shining white buildings. There's a big tower near one end...
Good grief.
It's tall with a big ball at the top, like a lollipop. I can just make out some kind of electrical discharge off the top of it, blue lightning. Like a van der Graaf generator. If I can see it from here, it must be quite something close up.
I think the island's got reefs. Some pale blue structure stretches underwater some distance away from the island.
It all looks so normal.
[pause]
The ship appears to be heading for a headland at one end of the island. There's a couple of buildings and something that looks like a concrete landing pad. I don't see any other ships there, but those buildings might be hangars, or there might be underground storage.
Okay, I'll admit it: I don't see any sign of people. Anywhere. No boats on the water, no air traffic, nobody on the beaches, no pedestrians, no vehicles. Admittedly, no roads, and no doubt my human prejudices are showing, but I would expect to see some sign of activity.
Perhaps the base is deserted? This ship is an unscheduled flight...
[pause]
We're landing.
The ship overflew the landing field and came to a complete halt in midair, and now it's descending vertically like an elevator. Frustratingly, the nose is pointing out to sea, and I'm getting a really good view of the surf. It's good surf, but we have good surf on Earth.
(There are sea birds of several different kinds, some of which look heartstoppingly like seagulls.)
Okay. The ground's coming up. Bushes, grass, scrub...
Here's the landing pad...
We're down. Very smooth landing, no bumps.
[indeterminate noises]
The hatch is opening! I'm out of here.
[background sound]
Wow. That air is so good... I hadn't realised the ship was so stuffy.
I'm standing on the landing field. It is concrete. There's no one around. The white buildings are larger than I thought, a few hundred metres off. The hills rise up against the horizon... I can see the van der Graaf generator beyond the crest, crackling away.
[pause]
It's so quiet. Bird noises, wind noises, trees... no machinery, no voices.
I'm walking slowly across the landing field. This place is deserted. There's absolutely no-one around. No welcome party. No anxious officials sprinting across the tarmac. No parked vehicles for the people at work. It's as if...
[indeterminate noises]
What the...
[indeterminate noises]
Damn! Damn damn damn damn!
Come back!
Ah, hell.
The ship's just taken off. Without me. It's abandoned me here!
Shit.
Shit.
[break]
Calmer now. Still pissed off.
At least I knew the ship could feed me. Now I'm stuck here on this apparently deserted island, hundreds of light years from home, with nothing to eat, nowhere to sleep, no-one to talk to... no idea of which local plants are poisonous, or carnivorous, or both... hell.
I've walked around the landing field. There does not seem to be any underground parking.
I've walked around the two white buildings. They are completely featureless, and I mean completely featureless. They're seamless white boxes. The grass, which looks like perfectly normal grass, grows right up to their bases. If I tap them, they feel solid. One's about fifty metres long and ten high, the other's a bit smaller.
I suppose there might be a ship in one of them. If there is, it's not going to be any use to me.
Hell. What do I do now?
I know. I'm going to sit here on the grass, lean against one of these featureless white buildings, and attempt to make myself calm again.
Hey ---- something's just occurred to me. At least I know the air's breathable.
[transmit]
They're big stars, fat and vibrant in the warm night air. From here, half-way up the hill, I can see them reflected in the ocean. The wind died when the suns set. The sea is as flat as a lake, disturbed only by ripples. There's a gentle rustling of the trees and the occasional cry of some night creature; and, very faintly, now and again, there's the snap and buzz of the van der Graaf generator, over the other side of the hill.
It's a very peaceful sight. I can use all the peace I can get, now.
Earlier today I sat down by the landing field. I pressed the transmit button on the dictaphone. I closed my eyes. I tried to relax.
In fact, I went to sleep. I woke up an hour later (oh, the joys of digital watches with five year batteries). I felt much calmer. Unfortunately, the dictaphone hadn't finished transmitting; the little light was still on, and it wouldn't respond to anything I said to it.
Back on the ship, it would take about ten minutes to send the usual day's ramblings. Why was it taking so long here? Bad signal? It had to relay through the ship, long gone? Jamming? Whatever it was, it was worrying. I didn't want to be cut off from even the illusory companionship of whoever might be listening. I decided to stay put until it finished. I was all right for food ---- there wasn't much to do on the ship other than eat, even if it was paste ---- and I wanted to give whoever might still be here time to come and see what the ship was doing.
It took eight hours for it to finish sending.
The island is a place of miracles and wonders.
It's a park and an art gallery, filled with sculptures and elegant buildings. Some of the buildings are sculptures. Some of the sculptures are buildings. There are no roads or paths anywhere, just that thick, dense, ordinary-looking turf.
I wandered around the shore, heading towards where the buildings were densest. The grass absorbed my footsteps silently. The only sound was the noise of the waves, the wind and the birds. (I assumed they were birds. They were wary and I only saw them from a distance.) The suns were warm, but the wind took the heat away; I took off my sweater, which I had been wearing in the ship. Crisp white clouds moved across the sky. It was a perfect day.
I reached a building. I was dreading another white box like the ones around the landing field, all too easily picturing myself spending the rest of my life wandering ignorantly around the island, eternally frustrated by the blank white walls. This one had structure, and doors, and windows. It looked like a mathematical formula made solid; a twisted pyramid, the spiral edges running upwards to a rounded point some thirty metres above the ground. It was made of the same shiny white material that I was already becoming familiarwith, and the surface was etched with fine lines into a hexagonal honeycomb. Some of the panels were glassy black and recessed, and I was sure they were windows. At ground level was a much larger recessed panel, divided into triangles around the centre; a door. I couldn't make it open.
I moved on. There was another building. This was a short tower made up of twelve crystal rings, each one about five metres across. Each ring was tilted forty-five degrees to the horizontal, alternately in opposite directions, so that each one touched the one above at a single point. I couldn't see how it stayed up, but it caught the light beautifully and shed pink and white highlights all around.
Oh, yes: the suns. They say red giants are dim. They lie. This one shone a brilliant, vivid pink, close to white. It was dimmer than the other sun, which was near enough to Sol as to make no difference; if I put my hand up to block out the small sun, I could look at the red giant with minimal discomfort. Much like a bright light bulb. It was about five times the size of the bright sun, and was a surprisingly large distance away. I don't know what the bright sun's orbital period is, but I'd be surprised if eclipses happen very often.
I encountered many more buildings. They were all different; there were hollow tubes, and crystal walls, and cones, and prisms. There were beautiful swept curves that caught the eye. There was one building, which had to be a sculpture, that appeared at first sight to be a tangled mass of girders. It was only when I walked round it that I saw patterns appear and disappear deep within it. There were some buildings that wouldn't have been out of place in London, and some buildings that would be out of place anywhere. After a while they all started to run together in my mind.
They all had these things in common: they seemed to be deserted; they were made out of crystal, the white material, or the black glassy material; they all rose individually out of the featureless grass; and none of them had doors that would open. Some of them had windows I could see through faintly, but the chambers inside were always featureless and empty.
Eventually I found myself around the other side of the hills and approaching the van der Graaf generator. Indeed, once I could see it, I had to go and visit it. It drew me on.
I suppose that architecturally it's one of the more orthodox structures here. The tower is a conventional triangular girder tower, if rather large; I'd say about a hundred metres tall. Put a mobile phone antenna on top of it and it would fit right in on Earth. The ball at the top is a triangular faceted geodesic sphere, made of the ubiquitous white stuff, about twenty metres wide. However, I wasn't looking at the sphere.
Brilliant violet electric discharges were crawling over the surface like tame lightning. There were blue coronas around every corner of the geodesic sphere, visible even in the daylight. It buzzed like a hive full of angry, electrical bees, in a sound that filled the sky. And every so often, with a crackle that makes the ground shake, a brilliant bolt of forked violet lightning would stab out and dissipate itself in the air.
I stood there and watched it for about half an hour. Eventually I noticed a few things: firstly, given the amount of static electricity around, I should have been feeling it. Secondly, the bolts were coming nowhere near the ground. Thirdly, if they had been headed towards the ground, then my two-metre height would have made an excellent grounding rod and I would have been fried long since, so I concluded that whoever built the thing had it well under control.
Alas, I couldn't spend all day being an art critic and tourist. I had to find somewhere to sleep, and some food and water, and the red sun was already touching the horizon. I remembered seeing water in the hills when the ship was approaching, so I headed up.
At the edge of the woods I found a stream, which I gingerly tasted. It was water. It seemed to taste alright and didn't immediately kill me, so I drank a couple of handfuls. Likewise I found a bush with berries. Now, I'm not normally so stupid as to eat strange berries, but this bush appeared to have been cultivated. I tasted one gingerly; it was sweet and slightly tart, with a good flavour, so I ate it.
If I'm still alive tomorrow I'll try some more. I can't live on berries forever, but they'll tide me over until I can find something better.
Near the stream was a small clearing like a picnic area. It was sheltered and the grass was thick and comfortable. I sat down, watched the suns go down, and eventually noticed that the dictaphone had finally finished transmitting. And now you are up to date.
I'm pretty sure I should be dead by now. I've been transplanted to another planet with a different ecology and different air. The air should have killed me, and I should have caught some hideous disease, and I should have been attacked by any number of indigenous creatures, and I should have been electrocuted by some abandoned machine, and I should have touched the wrong plant and been fatally poisoned... drop me somewhere at random on Earth and I wouldn't fare much better.
And yet this place feels so benign. I get the oddest feeling that there's nothing here that will hurt me. I mean, I'm planning to sleep on the ground. This is stupid. Anything could come along in the night, and apart from anything else I'll probably get ants in my hair, but... I just don't feel the urge to do anything about it.
I wonder if there was something in that berry.
Well, I'll send this off. With luck it'll have finished transmitting by tomorrow. If I'm still alive, I'll talk to you then.
[transmit]
The berries apparently agreed with me fine, so I stripped most of the bush. I had brief thoughts of dexter (or is that levo?) amino acids, but I couldn't do anything about it anyway, so I didn't bother worrying.
The only sour note was that the dictaphone hadn't stopped transmitting. Apparently last night the interstellar ether had been particularly dense, or whatever. Oh, well.
I resolved to take a more methodical approach to exploring the island. I would head back down to the lowlands and examine every building and structure, one by one, looking for one that I could get into. I would start at one end of the island and work my way round to the other. Then I would head back to the highlands and check out the few buildings that rose out of the trees there.
And this I did. I really wanted to make a map, but I had nothing to draw on. I had been abducted with nothing but the now rather stale clothes I stood up in, and I hadn't been in the habit of carrying a notebook and pencil with me ---- an oversight if I had ever seen one.
The buildings and sculptures were as fascinating as ever, but this time I was on the eye out for something useful. A silver möbius strip suspended in a crystal sphere was interesting, but I couldn't sleep in it.
I was particularly interested in a curved building down by the shore, with its concave side facing a beach. The hollow was lined with big panels of the black glass, and the other side was covered with smaller windows. Down at ground level was a door. It reminded me of nothing so much as a resort hotel.
I also kept an eye out for more fruit trees, and lunch was a thing like an S-shaped banana, picked from a small orchard near an inverted pyramid of white struts. I realised I couldn't live on fruit forever. Not to mention the effect it would have on my stomach, I didn't know what the seasons were like here; I needed to stock up on food while it was available, and find sources for when it became unavailable.
For the present, though, I felt I could rely on the orchards. This place was so human-compatible it couldn't be a coincidence. The air was right; the gravity was right; the length of the day was right; the ecology was right; the aerial bacteria were right (or I would be dead by now) ---- it was quite obviously tailored for human habitation.
Around this time I realised I had no way of making fire, and started to feel less cheerful.
My mood deteriorated through the afternoon. I stared blankly at the enigmatic buildings, and some of them stared back. None of them could be interacted with. I only found two things of interest; the Invisible Fountain, and the Pit.
The Invisible Fountain was just that. There was a small, empty pedestal near an otherwise uninteresting building. Except it wasn't empty; if you glimpsed it from the corner of your eye you could see an unmistakable fountain shape of disturbed air. When you looked at it directly, it vanished.
Close to, you could just make out a ripple in the air, but you had to concentrate. It wasn't an illusion; I put my hand into it and could feel invisible fluid pouring past.
The Fountain was interesting because firstly, it was the only thing on the island that couldn't be duplicated with Earth technology ---- even the Generator would be doable, with skill ---- and secondly because it was the only thing I'd seen, apart from the Generator, that did something.
The Pit was just that. A fence enclosed an area about twenty metres across. Inside the ground sloped down in a smooth funnel, lined with the familiar white construction material from a few metres down. The bottom wasn't visible.
This was the only thing I'd seen that was dangerous. I could easily, had I wanted to, ducked under the fence and walked closer, risking falling and sliding down to ---- whereever it went. It didn't seem to fit.
As the afternoon drew on I returned to the orchard, picked supper (a long, thin pineapple thing that tasted startlingly spicy), and headed up the hill. I was tired from walking all day and in a sour mood, so I stopped at the first building I looked at, a short tower. Interestingly, the tower had a spiral ramp running around it, so I walked up and found myself on a circular balcony just above the tree canopy.
The trees here were intriguing. At first glance they looked like Earth trees, simply chaotic fractal shapes. When you looked closer, you noticed a fundamental difference: where on Earth branches tended to divide into two, here they tended to divide into three. Likewise, the leaves were Y-shaped in cross section. I wondered why; surely flat leaves were more efficient?
As I stood there, leaning on the railing, my mood slowly drifted away. I eventually spent a couple of hours up there, watching the trees waving in the breeze while the suns slowly set. At one point a handful of tiny butterfly-like creatures flew past.
After a while I headed off back to my original campsite. On the way I noticed that the dictaphone had finished transmitting, so decided to call it a day.
I must find out what's going on with this thing.
[transmit]
I got up this morning intending to climb through the hills, to investigate the buildings there, explore the woodlands, find that lake, etc. Instead I discovered that yesterday's trek around the island had left me extremely stiff and with sore feet.
So, instead I wandered down to the beach. From the general shape, I reckon that the island started life as a mountain that got colonised by coral. The shore appears to be alternate shell-sand beaches and rocky outcrops. The beaches are excellent, but I've always found beaches rather dull, so I examined the rock pools instead. The sea life here is interesting and quite unlike Earth's, but that's not important, so I'll skip over that.
For lunch I visited the orchard. After picking a completely spherical, large purple fruit, I decided to pay a visit to the Invisible Fountain, which was nearby. I was wondering if there was some relationship between it and the Generator.
One of the things I did was to try and look at the Generator through the disturbance caused by the Fountain. As the Generator was the other side of the island and quite high up, I had to crouch down and get into the right position to see it through the Fountain; at one stage I was in this position, backing away from the Fountain, and suddenly discovered I had backed through a door in a nearby building, which had opened for me.
The building was a simple white pyramid, ten metres high or so, with no windows and a single black-glass door. There were several, dotted evenly around the island. I had no clue as to what they were for.
I turned round and looked at the interior. It contained a single large room, almost entirely filled with another pyramid. The glossy-white walls glowed gently and illuminated it. This pyramid was made of a dull silver metal, covered everywhere with markings and indentations and a silver filigree of wire. It was completely silent.
Slowly, I walked around it. On the side to the left of the one facing the door, there was a spot that was glowing gently. It had the same cold, silent light of an LED, but the spot was about the size of my hand and blue and green swirls moved across it slowly.
I raised my hand to touch it, but I thought about touching equally innocent-looking bus-bars at a power station on Earth, and changed my mind.
When I got back to the door it had closed, and there was no handle.
I spent about an hour trying to open the door, purple fruit forgotten. I felt around the edge (it was recessed slightly into the wall). I touched all around the outside of the door-frame (the glossy-white walls were, as usual, hard and featureless). I ran my hands over the door itself (ditto). I peered through it (it was made of black-glass, which block most light but not all of it. I could just see the Fountain, outside).
Eventually I picked up the fruit, ate it ---- a meaty, purple pulp, very satisfying ---- and tried to think. As I saw it, there were three options. A: it was a trap. B: the door was on a timer. C: I opened the door somehow without meaning to.
If A, then I was doomed, so there was no point worrying about it. If B, I just had to stay here and wait for the door to open. If C...
What was I doing when the door opened? I was walking backwards.
I walked backwards into the door. It didn't open.
I tried some other things, like walking backwards hunched over, but they didn't work, either. I sat down again.
Eventually it occurred to me: when I went through the door, I didn't know it was open.
So I tried an old trick I knew. I stood, facing away from the door, as close to the machine as possible. I closed my eyes, put my fingers in my ears, and started shuffling by minute increments backwards.
The idea was to confuse my kinaesthetic sense. I used to do similar things when I was a child: with your eyes closed, extend your arm towards a wall with small enough increments and eventually you get the illusion that your arm is extending through the wall.
It worked. After a little while I suddenly felt a breath of air on my back and heard the surf; I turned round, saw the door open, and leapt through.
I lay on the grass, and thought about doors that only opened when you weren't aware of them, and the dictaphone, which only recorded when you wanted it to, and the ship, which knew when you were talking to it...
The rest of the afternoon was spent experimenting with the door, and I soon found out the secret: they only opened when you wanted them to. Or rather, when you expected them to.
Walk up to a door. Look at it. It's a door. It's closed. Fiddle with it. It'll stay closed. You see it as a closed door, whatever machine is reading your mind sees that you see it as a closed door, and it'll stay closed.
Walk up to a door. Walk at it briskly. Want it to open. Expect it to get out of your way. It will.
I had got through the first time because I hadn't remembered about the building behind me, and so was expecting to keep walking backwards, so the door opened. I got out again because, while I was expecting to be brought short by the door at any moment, I didn't know when it was going to happen, so I tricked it into opening.
It turned out there was a particular mental attitude I could do that made doors open. It was easier to do if you were walking at them, but I quickly found myself able to stand by a closed door, want it open, and it would open. I amused myself for a while by opening and closing the pyramid door, and watching the neat way that it would fold itself into the door frame in several asymmetrical pieces.
By this time it was getting quite late. I dashed over to the Hotel, stood by the door, and wanted with all my might.
The door opened.
Inside was a small room lined with more doors. In the centre of the room was a pedestal, with a black-glass surface, completely inert. The evening light shone dimly through the windows.
None of the doors would open, no matter how hard I wanted them to. The pedestal was completely unresponsive.
I left thoughtfully, heading back to the orchard for supper (another purple thing. The diet of constant fruit was already beginning to disagree with me. I didn't have any magic buckets, but I did have a flat rock and the ground was soft, so I was digging holes). I now knew a way into the buildings... there had to be something interesting in there somewhere.
Oh, yeah, the dictaphone spent all night and all day transmitting. I think the only time it can transmit successfully is the early evening.
Let's see if I can find somewhere better to sleep tomorrow, shall we?
[transmit]
It was absurdly simple, really. I went down there first thing, grimly determined to open as many doors as I could and try and find something on this island that did something. The Hotel foyer was as blank and featureless as it had been the evening before. I tried all the doors again, wanting as hard as I could, with no luck. The pedestal was completely inert. I tried touching it, rubbing it, pretending it was a Star Trek transporter panel (which it vaguely resembled) ---- nothing.
At least I finally remembered how things worked around here, and wanted at it. I'm not sure what it was that I wanted, or even if it cared, but it worked; the black-glass surface lit up with writing in an indecipherable script and the outline of a handprint. I slapped my hand down onto the glass and ---- the room turned on.
It was incredible. The lights came on and softened to a comfortable yellow. The walls changed colour to a muted green, and started rippling as if water was running down then. Multi-coloured sculptures unfolded in the air, and a faint sound started. Not music, but a slow, patterned sound as of surf, or water falling. Streamers of cloud appeared, swirling slowly in an insubstantial vortex, centred on the pedestal. Through the black-glass door I could see that the Fountain had become Visible, a cascade of silver light. I stood with my mouth open.
Eventually I looked down at the pedestal again. The black surface had been replaced with, apparently, a sandpit. I ran my hand across it; it felt like sand. I tried to pick some up and the sand evaporated between my fingers.
An illusion, I thought shakily. Glowing writing appeared, hanging in space a centimetre or so above where the glass used to be. I couldn't read it, but there was a handprint, this time a palm-shaped hollow in the sand. When I put my hand against it, one of the doors lit up.
I started to feel nervous. What had I just done? Checked myself in to the hotel? Booked for an appointment at the euthanasia clinic? Would I be better off heading outside, running as fast as I could for the hills, and living out the rest of my life on berries and small animals?
Instead I walked with a little trepidation up to the door. It faded away as I approached, revealing a little cubby. It had the same water-effect walls, but was otherwise featureless. I stepped inside, there was a faint jolt, and the other side of the cubicle faded away, to reveal my apartment.
It was a big empty space, grey and featureless, with a floor-length black-glass window overlooking the sea. From a height of about six stories, I saw when I walked over. Well, it beat stairs.
The only thing in the entire place, other than the familiar black-glass door out, was a hand-sized red jewel in the centre of the room. I picked it up, and it started glowing gently.
In a kind of daze, as if I knew exactly what I was doing, I wanted at it, and watched the room unfold about me. Soft textures, a smell of orange blossom, the sound of trickling water and vines on the walls. There was furniture of a kind, but it wasn't familiar to me. Suddenly overwhelmed, I walked over to the window and wanted it. The black-glass faded away under my fingers and the sea air rolled in.
I spent the rest of the day in the room. I had spent so much time outside that I hadn't realised just how nice it was to be indoors for a change. Besides, it was fascinating.
The room was deceptively simple to control. Want at something, and it would change. Wanting at the ceiling would change the light level. Wanting at the walls would change the décor. I already knew how to open and close the window.
But there was more to it than that. On the circular glass table in the centre of the room were the rest of the controls: a few small sculptures, made of bleached driftwood and shells. Some of them were simple. Wanting at the sea shell made the background sound change. The fruit made food appear. (And when I say appear, I mean it would materialise out of thin air. But more on the later.)
There was a widget made of a piece of wood with a chip of glass stuck in it. If I wanted at it, it changed colour. If I wanted at it while it was touching something, whatever it was touching became that colour. There was a stick, jagged at one end and smooth at the other. Wanting at this did nothing, but like the colour-changer, wanting at it while it was touching something changed the texture of the object. There was a scrap of yellow cloth. If I wanted at that, it would shed an identically-sized piece of green cloth. Wanting at the green cloth made it disappear. I had some trouble working out what these were for until I found the next item, an L-shaped piece of wood, which changed the size of things. And there were more.
The entire room was completely mutable. Armed with the right tools, which were all right there on the table, and a strong will I could make the room do anything I wished. I could pull the walls and floor like taffy. I could fill and empty pools. I could create furniture and banish it again with a flick of my mind. I could change the environment from blazingly hot to, and I tried this, below freezing. It actually started snowing before I brought the temperature up again.
I was aware, however, just how crude my control was. For example, I could not control the colour of the colour changed. All I could do was to keep changing it until it was the hue I wanted. I could not control what kind of food the room brought me, but had to rely on the unseen chefs.
Ah, the food.
I was ravenous. I had been living for five days on fruit, and for some time before that on paste. I wanted something solid. I used the wooden pineapple-ish to summon a meal, ate it, and repeated the process.
The first time they gave me a bowl of what seemed to be shredded potato and bacon, fried with onions and garlic until the bacon was just crisp and the potato was tender. This came with a glass of water with a touch of some cordial in it, and a bowl of big, crunchy ice crystals flavoured with something sharp and tangy.
The second time they gave me a big round flatbread, still warm from the oven, and a dozen little pots of cream cheeses and patés. That came with milk and a dried pork sausage.
Of course, it wasn't exactly potato or bacon, but something similar. I had suspicions that the flatbread had never seen an oven, and the milk certainly didn't come from a cow. But to be frank, I didn't give a damn. It was real food, it was delicious, and I ate it.
It was only later that I had thoughts about the origins of the food. When I ordered it, it would materialise in a rippling of distorted air a few seconds later. Was it created elsewhere and transported here, or was it just another figment of the room's imagination? Was my belly full of amino acids, sugars and proteins, or patterned force fields? Could I actually get nutrition from the stuff?
Well, only one way to test it.
The rest of the day I spent in the bath. I had been living in the same set of clothes for over a week and I smelt. The bath was a big sandy pool, and I'm ashamed to say that I fell asleep in it. When I woke up I found that the water had jellied around me, keeping my head out of the water, and the room had cleaned my clothes.
In fact, it had cleaned them so well it had sucked all the dye out of them. They were spotless white. A little surprising, but hey, they were clean.
Dinner was a rich stew of some meat, with the first completely alien food I've seen yet: instead of potatoes or chips, there were long, thin things like roast breadsticks, but some kind of tuber. The tasted a bit like a peppery roast potato.
And now I think I will finish my fruit juice, put out the light and go to bed. It's late and that bed looks incredibly comfortable.
Things are certainly looking up.
[transmit]
I had spent the previous day in the Hotel, so I thought I'd take a walk; I still wanted to check out the hills. The trip down through the closet/lift/transporter widget was still strange; step in, there's a slight jolt, step out. If they can do that, I expect there's probably some kind of transporter network to get me around the island, if I can find it. I briefly stopped to look at the pedestal. It was still made of sand. The writing, in an odd cursive script vaguely reminiscent of Arabic, was completely unresponsive when I waved my hand through it. I didn't want to try the handprint again in case I was checked out.
I was about to open the door when I noticed the now-visible Invisible Fountain through it, and an odd thought struck me. The Invisible Fountain was a few hundred metres away next to one of the Mysterious Pyramids, right? But I could see it through the door, so this must be a different one ---- it must have appeared when I turned the Hotel on. However, when I opened the door, it wasn't there. It was just an image visible through the black-glass door.
I have no idea what that is in aid of.
The hills were a couple of kilometres across, and not very high. They were, however, thickly overgrown and fairly difficult to get through. The tower I had visited a couple of days ago was near the edge of the woodland. Once I got deep into the dense undergrowth I very quickly lost my bearings; all I could do was to keep heading uphill and hope I'd reach the summit.
It was odd. This being an alien planet and all, I would have expected the local flora to be quite unlike what I was used to; strange pods on stalks, luminous flowers, airborne carnivorous plants drifting through the air, organic webbing between the branches... it was actually disappointingly normal. Oh, there were differences ---- the flora here seemed to be keen on those tripartite leaves I was talking about earlier, and the flowers tended toward spherical puffs of tiny florets rather than a single, large blossom ---- but for the most part I could have been wandering through the New Forest.
Admittedly, an extremely thick and unkempt New Forest, tinted with red, and with lianas.
Moving lianas.
It took me a while to notice, but the hanging vines were definitely moving, all by themselves. Not particularly quickly, but they would wriggle back and forth, and occasionally you would see a dangling tip moving in slow circles. They were quite definitely plants, not animals. I couldn't work out why they would want to move like that ---- motion is metabolically very expensive, and most Earth plants can't afford it. There's a reason why things like Venus flytraps take half an hour or so to prime themselves.
I eventually reached the summit. There was a small observation tower. Armed with my new knowledge of how to operate the equipment, I wanted the door, climbed up a ladder inside the curved, embarrassingly phallic shaft and found myself on a small platform at the top, which a wonderful view over half the island.
Near the top of the hills was a depression, with a lake in it that was five hundred metres or so wide. The still water reflected the trees and the deep blue sky and looked extremely inviting. I could just imaging spending a lazy summer afternoon there in a small boat, pretending to fish---
There was a boat. Or was it? There was certainly something in the water. It was so calm that I had difficulty determining what was reflection and what was boat, and it was small and a fair distance off. I considered heading off to investigate, but there was a lot of jungle to hack through and it would be easier to start again from the lowlands. I made a note of a landmark building to start the climb from tomorrow; the tilted-ring pillar, which I hadn't come up with a name for yet.
Embedded in the trees were a few more of the white buildings. From up here, though, I could see that most of them were observation towers like the one I was in, and there was a Mysterious Pyramid tucked away near the island's centre.
Eventually I headed back. Unfortunately I took a wrong turn somewhere and ended up in a maze of thorny bushes and mud. The island packed a lot of geography into a very small space and by the time I finally got back to the lowlands I was tired and filthy, and headed back to the Hotel.
On the way I dropped in briefly to the Mysterious Pyramid that I had first encountered. There was a big glowing patch on the front face of the Machine that hadn't been there before. I was beginning to suspect that the Mysterious Pyramids had something to do with power usage.
Oh, yes: my room moved. I got back to the Hotel, it lit up a door for me, I went through, and found myself back in my room again. Except that the view's changed; it's now down the other end of the Hotel, and I think it's a couple of floors lower.
I shouldn't really be surprised. Given that all the furniture is projected, and you get into the rooms by teleporter, they can just feed people into the next vacant apartment and recreate their chosen décor on demand...
Dinner was fried rice, or it would have been if rice grains were curved. Dessert was a complicated lattice-work of something like compressed biscuit, dipped in an assortment of coatings. I was pleased to find that this planet has chocolate.
Tomorrow I think I'll have a look at that lake.
[transmit]
I got up early ---- breakfast was, basically, cornflakes ---- and headed off to the tilted-ring pillar, where I headed straight up into the forest.
About an hour of scrambling through bushes and pulling my way through assorted sharp shrubbery I finally reached the shore of the lake. Remember when I said yesterday it looked like a pleasant place to spend a lazy afternoon? I'm sure it is, but remember to pack your waders, because it's surrounded by some of the most glutinous mud I've ever seen.
It was around this point that my foot caught in a root and I fell full length into the mud. I felt a brief moment of panic as the sticky mud resisted my attempts to pull myself out of it, but I caught another root and managed to lever myself out. I was now so wet that when I finally reached the water, I just waded in and tried to wash myself down. Luckily, my digital watch, which I rely on, is waterproof.
The water was calm and, except for the cloud of silt where I was standing, completely clear. I could see little shoals of minnows swimming between the strands of weed. I say they were minnows: they looked more like miniature eels, thin and so wriggly that you could see their body S-curving through the water. But they acted like minnows.
One interesting feature of the lake: no birds (or bird-like creatures). Back in the woodland there was the occasional sound of something high in the trees, and periodically I would here one of the creatures that serenaded me that first night in the clearing, but there was nothing around here. I began to wonder about predators. For the island to work properly as an ecosystem, there must be predators, and while the lowlands may be manicured and safe, the mud told me that I was well out of the parkland.
I'm not used to dangerous wildlife. You don't get them in England. The most you have to worry about is getting mauled by a protective cow, and you can usually see them coming. What if this place had alligators? Piranha? It may look like a warm summer's day in Surrey, but I am most definitely not in Kansas any more...
That thing in the middle of the lake was a corner of something sticking up. In a surprising development, it wasn't glossy-white or black-glass or crystal. It was silver. It looked like there was something underwater, partly sticking up out of it.
This was a Clue. It was something that didn't fit. The rest of the island had been carefully mothballed, switched off, put into standby and evacuated. This thing had just been left here. Why, or what it was, I didn't know, but I had to find out.
I carefully scanned the water for ripples. Nothing. I took off my sweater and shirt, once pristine white and now mud coloured, and left them in the mud ---- they weren't going to get any dirtier and if I had to swim I didn't want them impeding me. I left the trousers because I didn't feel sufficiently secure to remove them. I did think about removing my trainers, but I didn't like the idea of stepping on whatever was down there in my bare feet.
So prepared, I began to wade out.
The water got deeper very quickly. Within ten metres I had to swim. In a way, this was a relief; swimming was easier and didn't make a silt cloud nearly as big. I knew that if there was anything here, I'd be a sitting duck, and I tried to disturb the surface as little as possible.
Well, surprise surprise, nothing ate me. I reached the object. It was big, and made of metal; if I rapped my knuckles against it, it felt solid.
It appeared to be roughly box-shaped, with rounded corners. Only one corner was projecting from the water, and this I sat on while peering around at it. I did notice that one side had a transparent panel, wholly submerged and difficult to see through; refraction made it a flat silver.
I got back into the water and started pulling myself around it, feeling it out with my feet. There was a big opening on one of the long sides, adjoining the transparent face, with some sort of plate hanging off it.
A bit like a door, really.
It took me about another ten minutes to work out what this thing was; a ship. A spaceship like the one that brought me here. It had been landed or crashed in the water, and had been abandoned, and was now lying here, mostly submerged, still with some air inside it...
Did it still work? (Unlikely.)
Could I get it running? (Probably not.)
If I could, would I trust it to take me home? (Ha!)
I contemplated diving down and through the door to see what was inside. But I'm not a good diver, and the air inside might well be foul, and it was a couple of metres down. The ship was almost certainly dead. If it wasn't, the original owners would have no doubt hauled it out of its watery grave.
With a certain amount of regret I swam back across the lake, collected my clothes and headed back.
Unfortunately (I seem to use that word a lot), clambering down through the undergrowth I slipped on some mud, slid several metres down a slope, caught my foot in a root and twisted it. I slowly and painfully hobbled back to the hotel, which thankfully wasn't far away, and I've spent most of the rest of the day in a hot bath. I don't think I've sprained it, which is at least something.
It's made me painfully aware of just how vulnerable I am here. Oh, I have food and shelter and am in no immediate danger (that I know of). But to live here long term... if I were to fall ill, or were to fall on a ladder and break my leg, there's no-one here to help me. I'd just lie there until I made it back here. Or, if I couldn't, until I died.
Even if I did make it to the hotel room, that's no guarantee of safety. I'm completely certain that this room has sophisticated medical systems. (They would after all, just be an extension of the food systems.) Do I know how to work them? Do I hell.
Oh, I suppose it's possible that if I were to become really sick, some emergency mechanism would notice and kick in. But what if I wake up with a headache and want an aspirin? Nice, simple chemical compound ---- acetylsalicylic acid. Should be a doddle for the chef systems to synthesise, if only I knew how to ask.
This place is fascinating. I could spend ages here, working it all out. But given the choice, I think I'd opt to go home. Right now.
[transmit]
I woke up this morning with a sore foot and decided to check out those nearby buildings which seemed to have doors.
This was a little frustrating. The buildings I could get into were either completely empty or incomprehensible. Sometimes both. For example: there was one hemispherical structure, made of seamless glossy-white, about ten metres across. When I found the door and went in I discovered that it was the top half of a hollow sphere. The inside glowed gently in that way that these buildings all seem to.
The door opened onto a little balcony half-way up the sphere. Other than that, the sphere was completely smooth and empty. The balcony was surrounded by a safety railing, and mounted on a post was a little pedestal, only a few centimetres across. When I wanted at it, the sphere slowly started to darken and swirling lights began to fill the empty space. Streamers of red and green and violet, slowly twirling in place, distorting and fraying as they did so. All this in complete silence. Wanting at the pedestal again caused them to fade away and the lights to come up.
Pretty? Sure. Take it to Earth and you could charge admission. Use? Who knows? I spent half an hour watching the lights and left.
The blunt spiral I'd seen the first day turned out to be an office block. I think. The door opened readily to reveal a warren of offices around a central well, ramps spiralling up and down the well to get at the different levels. Each office was a reasonable size, had its own window, and was completely featureless; floor, ceiling, walls, all the same glossy-white. The ceiling glowed slightly and the floor was roughened slightly for traction, but that was it.
I did find one item of interest there; the doors (just vacant apertures) and the ramps were the right size and gradient for humans.
Another building was a series of concentric disks stacked on top of each other, each one smaller than the one below, forming a stepped cone. The door led to a featureless circular corridor encircling the building; opposite the door was a ramp that led me up to the roof of the bottom disk. Opposite the ramp was another door which opened into the second level, where the whole process was repeated again, and again, until finally when I limped up the ramp on the eighth level and opened the door I found myself on a circular catwalk at the very peak of the huge conical space inside the building. Miracle of miracles, this one wasn't empty. Instead, it was filled with a complicated tangle of machinery, pipes and wires and crystal rods and support structures and organic-looking metal chambers, all in one huge mass, spreading its bulbous pseudopods through the vast space, and all wrapped around a single crystal column that pointed straight up the centre of the building. It stopped a few metres below me, aimed directly at the empty space that catwalk encircled. It was all quite silent and inert. There was, of course, no way down except the way I came.
After a few hours of this I came out of an empty building that was three cubes glued together and saw that off on the horizon, black clouds were massing. They were rising fast. In fact, as I stood and watched, I could see them move visibly, and lightning flickered constantly. There was no audible sound over the surf, and it was only then that I noticed that there were no bird-things on the sea front any more.
I immediately set off back towards the Hotel. It was about a kilometre and a half away, and with my leg I couldn't walk very fast, and the storm front was moving extremely fast. I realised, when I was approaching the Hotel and watching the storm boil towards me, that I wasn't going to make it. Regardless of the pain, I managed a kind of lurching gallop and I'd just reached the door when with a roar like God's Own Express Train it hit the island.
I'm sure that if I hadn't been sheltered by the mass of the Hotel I'd have been blown away. The winds were that powerful. As it was, the wall of air knocked me over, and as I cowered on the ground I could see by the illumination of continuous sheet lightning the forest practically knocked flat.
I frantically wanted the door open and crawled through. Unasked, it slammed to behind me, cutting the noise off like a knife; and as I picked myself up and looked back, I realised just what I'd missed. The storm ---- the term hurricane is inadequate ---- had picked up an ocean of water and was now dropping it on the island. The view was almost completely obscured by water pouring against the window; almost completely ---- I could just see, far off, a vast halo of electrical mayhem surrounding the Generator's tip...
Had I still been outside, I would probably be dead by now. Drowned, crushed, or battered to death.
Inside, the Hotel's incredible soundproofing cut the storm down to a faint whisper. But the floor was shaking...
I went on up to my room. I couldn't even tell which floor it was on today. All the apartments' windows faced the sea side, and the constant batter of water against the black-glass surface made it practically opaque.
The bathing pool surface was covered in little ripples. Up here the building's shaking was more pronounced.
I sat and watched it for a couple of hours.
It was odd. When I thought back to my narrow escape, I felt... scared in retrospect. If I'd tripped on my shoelace, or fallen over a clump of grass, or slipped in some mud, or just stopped to watch the front for just a few more seconds, I could very well not be here now. The way the Hotel door had snapped shut behind me was preying on my nerves. A safety system? If I'd been just a little bit later, would the door have opened for me at all?
But now, in the Hotel and the apparent safety of my exotic, high-tech beach themed apartment, which now had the temperature turned up and the lights dimmed, listening to the muted thunder of the storm spending its energies on the apparently impervious structure of the building, I was not scared at all. In fact, I felt strangely comfortable and cozy.
I wondered whether I'd put my trust so completely into this place that it had completely blanketed my sense of fear. I had no way of knowing whether I was safe. At any moment that black-glass window could smash inwards, sharpened splinters ripping me to shreds that would then be pounded flat by the raging storm...
No. I didn't believe it.
That scared me, just a little.
Eventually I ordered a meal, which I now can't remember the contents of, soaked my foot in the pool again, and dozed off in the chair in front of the balcony window. I woke up a bit later in time to eat dinner and go to bed.
As I dictate this, the storm is still pounding at the window outside. I have successfully resisted the temptation to open it, just for a second...
I wonder what could be driving a storm of such colossal magnitude. Perhaps this planet's terraforming needs work.
[transmit]
It's a theory as to why this place is completely deserted, and to why the ship abandoned me here. It's not a very reassuring one.
It goes like this:
One day, the people living here found something wrong with the planet. They thought, oh shit, we're screwed. We've got to get out of here before we die.
And so they left. They took with them everything they could lift, but there wasn't time to dismantle the base completely. When someone crashed a ship in the hills, they didn't have time to salvage it. They just left. And they left standing orders for any ship that showed up to leave, immediately.
And then along I come, in a ship retrofitted for a total technopeasant (no offence, Calvin). It lands. I get off. It receives the new instructions and heads out like a bat out of hell, not stopping to consult me. Which leaves me on this doomed island.
You see, when I woke up this morning, the storm had gone. The Hotel was no longer shaking, the sky was blue again, there were no longer tonnes of water falling out of the sky every second. I could venture outside without being killed instantly.
(Although I will admit to a certain amount of worry as to whether another megastorm would come along before I could get under cover. I think I'm safe; there can't be enough energy to sustain many of those... although I will admit that I do not understand one iota of what's going on.)
This island is trashed.
Those orchards that fed me the first few days? Gone. They're just ---- missing.
The sandy beaches? Gone.
The forest on the hills? The good news is that it's not all gone. It may have been flattened, completely, but there are only a few patches where the plant cover has been ripped away completely, leaving bare mud and rock.
Those manicured, exquisite lawns covering the lowlands? Churned up into mud.
Everything is strewn by odd-looking seaweed, like marine parsley. I think it grows in huge masses somewhere, but it's so chopped up that the largest piece I found was only twenty centimetres or so across. There's debris everywhere, packed into every corner, ground into the soil. On the downwind side of the island, the mud is packed solid with fragments of twig and leaf. The seas themselves have changed colour; instead of the old tropical blue, they've gone a threatening grey.
Under the surface grime, though, the buildings are all perfect. Even the Invisible Fountain is still running.
The Generator is crackling away happily, although it might be a little more subdued. It's hard to tell.
The Pit is half-full of water, which is violently agitated. Something must be happening at the bottom.
The air smells sharp and clear, with a slightly acidic overtone. Perhaps that's what the sea smells like here?
I wondered briefly about climbing up to look at the lake. One glance at the remains of the forest dissuaded me. It was hard enough to get through when it was still standing, and now it's been pounded flat and filled with mud. There's no way I could get up there. Besides, I'm not too happy about leaving the safety of the buildings, just in case another storm comes along.
You see, it all comes back to my theory. This island has never had a storm like this before. It would have left marks, traces that I would have spotted. This storm is new, and unexpected. Something has gone wrong somewhere. And, terrifying as it may have been, this isn't the catastrophe that the builders ran away from. The buildings here easily stood up to the storm; there was no need to flee it. The inhabitants could have just taken shelter.
Which means there's something else coming along that the buildings won't protect me from.
I really, really hope that whereever my ship went, there are people who will be interested enough to come and find out where the vacant spacecraft came from...
I spent the rest of the day wandering around the wreckage of the island, learning very little more, and eventually retired back to the Hotel. I suppose while it still works I may as well use it ---- it's not as if I have any other options.
Interestingly, as the suns set, I spotted a small school of some kind of sea creatures arcing through the water in the bay. I couldn't get a good look at them, but they're vaguely dolphin-shaped, although appear to be longer and thinner.
I wonder if they'll be safe when the apocalypse comes?
[transmit]
I actually met some aliens!
I don't think they're the people who built this place, for obvious reasons (I'll explain later), but hot damn, aliens!
I've been in the habit of sitting on the beach for a while after breakfast before wandering round the island. I was doing that today, although seeing as there isn't much beach left, I've mostly been sitting on the rocks. Suddenly, I saw those sea creatures I spotted last night far out in the bay. The jumped and dived several times, looking more like dolphins than ever. They were the first sign of life I've seen on the island since the megastorm. (The birds haven't come back. It's been eerily silent, apart from the noise of the wind and surf.)
They were a long way out, and I stood up to get a better look. That, I think, was how they saw me; with the gleaming white Hotel at my back, I would have been a crisp siloughette by the sea. A few minutes later they abruptly stopped playing, and I saw heads poking out of the sea; and then they all dived.
At this point, of course, I had no idea that they had seen me. I thought they'd just got bored and left. So I sat down again and waited, hoping they would come back. A couple of minutes later they did, and they were only a few metres away.
This is what the citizens of this planet look like:
Large, weighing a lot more than I am. The general impression is of a dolphin crossed with a seal crossed with a sea serpent. The body is from two to three metres long, but fairly thin. The body is extremely flexible, capable of several bends in either direction. Flat fluked tail, two sets of lateral flippers, two pectoral fins, no ventral fin. The head is vaguely horse-like, but smooth and streamlined, but with a decent sized forehead, forward facing eyes and ---- get this ---- nostrils. The mouth contains a lot of small, sharp, very white teeth, and a flexible tongue. No blowhole. The skin colour varies from individual to individual from black to mottled green, tending to be paler on the underside than the back.
Of course, what I saw at first was the head. Heads, rather; about a dozen of the creatures suddenly surfaced in the deep pool next to where I was sitting and stared at me. I'm not ashamed to say that I jumped, nearly losing my balance, before scrambling to my feet and backing away a little.
Dolphins always look as if they're smiling; it's the shape of their mouths. This means they never look particularly threatening, even though the alien thoughts in that bulbous head may be centred around down horrible things to your mutilated corpse, for all you know.
These creatures' mouths were a different shape. They looked grim and serious. With their wide, dark eyes, they also looked somewhat startled. We stared at each other in what could have been mutual surprise for a few moments, and then one of tilted its head towards one of the others, without taking its eyes of me, and spoke ---- an incomprehensible chain of rattles, clicks and buzzes, but definitely speech.
The other replied briefly, and then turned around. I lost track of who said what then, but there was a general rattle of conversation and a smaller creature, handsomely marked in green and black, pushed its way to the front. It looked up at me, blinked a pale membrane across its eyes a couple of times, opened its mouth a little, and spoke to me.
"I'm sorry, I don't understand a word you're saying," I replied with a certain amount of stunned dignity.
It had said something in a hissing voice, quite unlike the rattles and clicks they used when talking among themselves. It sounded like something a human could have said, had it understood the language; I had no doubt that this was the language the builders had spoken, and what the enigmatic strings of cursive writing I had found were in. Unfortunately, I didn't speak it.
The translator blinked again, and said something else in the same language. From the way the pitch rose at the end of the sentence I guessed it might be a question. I made a theatrical shrug, slightly amazed I was being so calm, and said, "I didn't understand that, either."
I didn't understand their body language, but I got the sense of frustration. They formed a circle and conferred, and then in a swirl of water three of them darted away. The green translator and the big black creature who originally spoke to me then swam round to the shallow slope where the beach used to be, and while the rest of the school (pack?) and I watched, heaved themselves up out of the water.
The moved a bit like seals, pulling themselves along with their flippers, and a bit like caterpillars, using their sinuous bodies to hump themselves along. They made surprisingly fast progress, pulling themselves up off the beach and onto the few shreds of grass that were remaining, before I noticed just how hard they were working; they were gasping for breath, panting through their open mouths, torsos heaving.
I had a long moment of blurred thought, thinking they have lungs? and what are they doing? more or less simultaneously, before Black, taking the opportunity for a rest, stared hard at me for a moment and then reared up on its tail and peered out at sea. I recognised the gesture; it was scanning the horizon for something. Other dolphinoids, perhaps, or it could have been looking for an oncoming storm front.
The other creatures in the school had remained motionless in the pool, and were watching Green and Black on the shore. I thought I could read concern in them, but that could have been those big, black eyes. I hadn't moved from my rock.
Black collapsed down onto the ground and caught its breath, and then looked round at me, moved its head in a follow me gesture so human that it must have been learnt, and started humping off across the mud. Green watched until I started to follow, and then headed after Black.
More confused thought: this time what are they doing? shared top billing with finally, someone who knows what they're doing and they're really not happy to see me.
Once off the beach they seemed to be able to make easier progress, sliding across the mud. I followed at a safe distance, keeping to the grass. They headed in a straight line towards a building half a kilometre away, a low, round, five-sided structure with a concave roof. It had no windows, but did have a door, which I hadn't been able to open.
When we finally got there, the creatures moving considerably more slowly than they were when they had got out of the water, they couldn't open it either.
They wanted in the same posture I unconsciously adopted: focus intently on the door, concentrate, will the door to be open. Black tried first, and failed, and then Green tried. Black rattled furiously at Green, who replied much more calmly, and they tried again. Still no success.
Then Black looked round and stared at me, and gesture with its head at the door. I was standing a fair distance off. I knew that if the crunch came I could probably run faster than they could, but they were bigger than I was, probably stronger, and certainly had more teeth.
What Black wanted was obvious. I was not at all sure that I wanted to get any closer to them.
Black made the same gesture again, faster and more jerkily, and began to twitch its tail. Green nudged Black with its nose, rattled at it, and Black seemed to calm down; they both heaved themselves to a reasonable distance from the door, and looked at me expectantly.
I walked slowly over to the door, not taking my eyes off them. Unfortunately, I wasn't that good at opening doors, and had to turn and face it; I focused, concentrated, wanted, all while being very aware of the two creatures not far behind me. The door didn't open.
Turning around to face them again, I shrugged apologetically. Black twitched, rattled angrily at Green and possibly me at length, and then slammed its tail into the ground in frustration, sending mud flying everywhere. I got the impression that Black had a fairly short fuse.
While Black stared furiously off into the distance, Green looked at me thoughtfully, and then started humping slowly towards me. I held my ground. When Green was a couple of metres away, it looked me up and down carefully. It seemed particularly interested in my shoes. I, in turn, admired the black and green marks on its head and back; they seemed random at first, but they were completely symmetrical and formed short stripes running along its body. I thought about tigers.
After a while Black came out of its sulk and said something to Green. Green looked me in the face, said something incomprehensible in the human language, and then they both turned round and began the long, slow journey back to the water, where the rest of the school was waiting. When they slithered down the beach into the sea there was a tremendous burst of agitated chatter.
After a few moments Green pulled itself up out of the waves. It pointed at me with its snout, then at the suns, high in the sky, then described a wide circle, from the suns down to the horizon, around into the ground, back to the horizon, up and over, and back to the suns again.
Of course. I repeated the gesture: I will be here one day from now.
Green nodded, headed back into the sea, and the entire school left without ceremony. Only one green head, far out to sea, peered back at me thoughtfully before heading on.
Analysis:
These creatures ---- dolphinoids? dolphinseals? doleals? Ah: sealin ---- live here. They may have evolved here, they may not have. They did not build the base on the island, but they know the people who did quite well.
They know the island is supposed to be abandoned. When they found me here, they were startled and shocked. Black, in particular, was angry. From the way Green spoke to me they expected me to speak the same language the builders did. They immediately took me to the Pentagon and were even more shocked and angry when the door didn't open.
Two species, sharing a planet. Sharing resources. I don't know about how the sealin think, but if they were human, I'd expect conflict.
The megastorm. Nothing natural I know can cause anything like that. What about something unnatural?
That planet: Gurglecough. No traffic control. A scorched rock.
I'm thinking that I've landed in the middle of a war. The megastorm is caused by some kind of weapon. The builders didn't evacuate the base because of a natural disaster, they were forced to abandon it as some kind of settlement? The sealin were angry because the builders were supposed to have all gone? They were certainly even more angry when they found that the Pentagon ---- a command centre? ---- was closed to them.
Perhaps it's the sealin versus the builders; Calvin and friends. Perhaps Gurglecough got torched as part of this war.
That is not a comforting thought.
But hell, aliens! Wow.
[transmit]
I spent the night in my fake-sand bed dreaming about burning planets while big, black, mournful eyes stared at me. Didn't have a lot of appetite, despite the rather tasty spicy waffles the invisible chef cooked up for me.
I gave serious thought to just staying in my room until not going out for my appointment with the sealin, until I remembered that they knew a lot more about the island than I did. I dematerialised the window and stared out to sea, letting the wind play on my face, looking for little leaping shapes in the waves. Nothing. I imagined the room's décor suddenly fading around me, leaving the room as empty and grey as I had found it, and then the door suddenly flicking open and a dozen large, angry aquatic shapes bursting in...
Eventually, of course, I left the Hotel and slowly trudged over to the rocky outcrop I had been sitting on the day before. I wondered whether I would see my apartment again, and looked up at the seaward face of the Hotel to try and spot my window; last night it had been low down in the middle of the block. Nothing. I was getting rather fond of it.
Green was waiting for me.
At least, I was pretty sure it was Green. It was lying on its back on a rock, just out of sight of the Hotel, basking in the sunshine. Its eyes were closed and it was apparently asleep.
I stopped a little distance off and studied it. With its back arched like that, head thrown back, flippers in the air, it looked vaguely comical; I noticed that there were short whiskers around the nostrils. That flat mouth looked rather less threatening than I remembered.
I waited for a few minutes and, as Green was showing no signs of stirring, coughed quietly. Its eyes snapped open and it abruptly rolled over and peered up at me.
It blinked blearily a few times, sneezed, shook its head violently, and then made that follow me gesture before diving into the sea. I stood there in bewilderment until I noticed that it was swimming around the coastline; when it stopped a few hundred metres away, rearing out of the water to look at me, I started walking along the shore after it.
I'd done this walk a few times. The sandy shores, when they were still there, didn't merge seamlessly into the manicured lawn of the lowlands; there was usually a short stretch of a different type of grass, coarse and tufty, which formed a ring around the entire island. I'd never gone all the way around, as it was a long way, but the tough grass made a good path, and had survived the megastorm pretty well.
I quickly realised why Green had taken to the sea, rather than humping along beside me. The island was five kilometres or so long, and we were walking the entire length of it.
During the walk, I had plenty of time to think. Where was Green taking me? Why? What were they planning? This didn't look like a prisoner being escorted away, but perhaps they realised that I had nowhere to run to? It did seem odd that they would entrust me to only one guard.
The Generator slowly passed behind the hills. I was right; it was unusually subdued. Power systems running down? Damage from the storm? Who knew?
I wondered briefly if they might be planning to ship me off-world, perhaps to some remote prison camp. Or, they might just 'repatriate' me to some planet of the builders. That might well be my best option; I could probably cadge a lift back to Earth from them. But no; the landing field was behind me, at the other tip of the island. Unless... the sealin, as sea creatures, might have ships that could land at sea. There was a big, sheltered bay at this end of the island. Perhaps the ship was moored there.
When we finally arrived at the bay, there was a large delegation of sealin waiting on the shore, surrounding some object. No ship.
I'd taken a short cut over a narrow headland, and had to wait for Green to swim round the long way. I took the opportunity to study them. There were a couple of dozen, about evenly distributed between the larger mostly-black ones and the smaller mostly-green ones, with some mottled and piebald creatures. There was one particularly large sealin with white patches, like a killer whale. I couldn't hear at this distance, but from the way they were moving, they appeared to be talking to each other.
When Green approached, they all looked round at it, and then in unison stared up at me. I hesitantly picked my way over the rocks towards them. I recognised what was probably Black sitting at the front, mostly from the impatient twitches.
I arrived just as Green was heaving itself up the shore. Black humped over, to greet Green or to argue with it, I don't know; they rattled at each other energetically, and some of the rest of the delegation joined in, although most sat there silently. I stood a little way off feeling extraneous.
The object they were all sitting around was a large orange bubble on a raft. The bubble was slightly translucent, and embedded inside it was one of the characteristically melted-looking machines I'd seen in the buildings. There were no controls, but the builders' machines didn't need controls; and when Green humped over to the machine, concentrated on it, and glowing sigils appeared around its head, I realised that the sealin's machines didn't need them either.
The other sealin watched in silence while Green fiddled with the machine. It would move its head around a little from side to side, obviously focusing on the display, and the display would change. Letters and diagrams would appear and disappear in the air, in glowing green and blue lines. Eventually Green appeared to be happy, and it looked over toward the killer whale sealin, and said something.
This seemed to be the cue they were looking for. The black and white sealin moved a few steps towards me, appeared to address me, and spoke at length. In sealin.
Eventually it stopped, and gestured with its head towards Green, still enshrouded in icons. Green said something briefly in reply, and then made that gesture again to me: come here. I moved slowly.
Close up, I could see that the script used by Green's head-up display was, while backwards, distinctly different from the one used by the builders. It was formed of discrete characters, vaguely runic.
Green said a single word to me, in a questioning tone of voice; not a sealin word, but something I could have said. I didn't understand it, and shrugged. Green's display changed slightly, and it said another word.
After a while of this I realised what was going on. Green was working through a list of ---- somethings ---- and seeing if I recognised any of them. The list was long, several hundred entries, all of which were unfamiliar. We worked through them, one by one, while the rest of the delegation waiting patiently. It took a while.
But then Green said something which, after automatically shrugging to Green, I realised I did recognise. From somewhere. I made obscure gestures and somehow got Green to repeat it, and tried to remember where I had head it...
Of course. Gurglecough. The burnt off planet.
I got quite excited until I realised that I had no way of telling Green that I wasn't a native of that place, I was just passing through; but Green seemed to have guessed that already, made some adjustments to the list, and continued.
But there were no other names I recognised. Eventually the list ran out, and Green stared perplexedly at the empty display. I hazarded, `Earth?' and was met with a theatrical shake of the head.
There followed a long and noisy argument among the delegation, in sealin. By this point I was standing more or less in their midst, and I was feeling too nervous to move; some of them really were very large. But I noticed that Green wasn't participating. It had sat there for a while, apparently thinking, before dismissing the machine and crawling over to have a few quiet words with Black-and-White.
Shortly afterwards Black-and-White barked something, and in the instant silence that followed, Green spoke quietly. Black immediately spoke up, apparently angrily, and Green and Black argued for a little, before Black-and-White barked again. Green and Black both hung their heads in a surprisingly familiar gesture of embarrassment.
Black-and-White spoke again, nodded to me, and headed off down to the sea. The rest of the delegation followed, leaving only myself, Green and Black waiting on the beach. They took the machine with them; it floated.
Once everyone had gone, Green and Black talked quietly, and then took to the sea themselves. They indicated for me to follow them again, and I trailed after, all the long, tedious way up the island back to the Hotel. I got there late, tired and hungry, to find them waiting on the beach.
To my surprise, they then crawled round to the Hotel's front entrance, and went in. To my further surprise, when I went after them, I discovered Green having an argument with the pedestal ---- in the builder's language. The pedestal talked back. Eventually, Green seemed to win and another door lit up. They crawled towards it, Green made the see-you-tomorrow gesture, and when I repeated it, they went in. And I didn't see them for the rest of the day.
Analysis:
They were trying to talk to me.
More, I think they were trying to find out where I came from. And I don't think Earth is in their database. They know I'm associated with Gurglecough, somehow, but no more than that. And they were not expecting that to happen.
Black-and-White was obviously in charge. Interesting colour scheme; it was the only sealin I'd seen so far that had any white patches. Royalty? A priest? Makeup?
Equally obviously, Green is the technical expert. Green speaks the builder's language. Green operates the machine. Green's the patient one, the quiet one. I don't know what position Black holds. Local chief? Sealin-in-charge-of-aliens? Just a friend? Green's bodyguard? Green's lover? Green's owner? There are nuances here I don't even know I'm missing.
But, more puzzlingly, why would a couple of sea creatures who live in an ocean not twenty metres from the base of the building check in to the Hotel rather than live in the sea?
I can only think of one answer, and it's not reassuring: there's another storm coming. The Hotel or the deep ocean is the safest place to be. And they can't go to the deep ocean, because for some reason they need to be near me.
Perhaps they're guarding me. From the storm? Or perhaps they daren't leave me alone here?
I have no idea.
[transmit]
I wanted at the door, and as it dematerialised, Green and Black fell out.
"What the hell are you doing here at this time of the morning?" I demanded. It was barely past dawn.
Black stared at me sourly, and rolled off Green, who was underneath. I took the opportunity to put my clothes on. The room had, as usual, cleaned them during the night. I swear they were getting whiter each day.
I deliberately turned away from the two sealin, who were now arguing with each other, and wanted at the food widget. I had discovered that it was responsive to how hard I wanted, and was having a reasonable amount of success persuading it to give me snacks. I was delighted to discover that this morning it gave me a large mug of something not unlike coffee.
Green and Black had stopped arguing and were now glaring at each other.
"Well, what do you want?" I said.
Black redirected the glare towards me. Green merely glanced round, and then reached out the door and pulled in another of the sealin's patented machines-in-a-bubble. This one was quite small, merely ten centimetres or so wide, and had a large handle which Green held in its mouth. It brought it over to the central table and dropped it with a clunk.
Black said something, which Green ignored. Instead it focused intently on the machine, which lit up; a large ball of light appeared in the air above it, which swirled, and then cleared to reveal an image. It was a projector.
It seemed to be a newsreel. I saw the island, empty of buildings; vast, rectangular, silver ships floating above it; a man in a yellow uniform and a braid talking optimistically to the camera; a complicated structure in space; the man, talking less optimistically; a black-and-white sealin, also speaking to the camera; a jerky, amateurish sequence of two brilliant blue points of light falling out of the sky and striking the sea; the man again, worried now; the island, with the rectangular ships over it again... over everything, a running commentary in Builder.
It came to an end and the ball of light flicked out.
Green was looking at me expectantly. What else could I do? I made the theatrical shrug that meant I don't understand. Green sagged visibly, and Black rattled something briefly and left. The door rematerialised behind him.
I looked at Green, who was looking decidedly depressed. (At least, that's the impression I got. Applying human body language to a non-human creature? Ludicrous, and yet it did work to a certain extent. Perhaps they learnt it from the Builders.) Any vestige of fear of the sealin I had had evaporated. Oh, I realised that I was in the middle of what looked like a rather unpleasant war ---- those blue lights looked very much like a weapon ---- but the sealin didn't seem to be a mysterious, impersonal mass of unknowing and hostile creatures any more. They were people. Green's repeated attempts to communicate; Green and Black's frequent arguments, if arguments they were; even Black's short temper ---- I felt I knew them, at least a little.
I sat down, still nursing my mug of coffeeish, and offered Green the food widget. It looked at it, glanced up at me in surprise, and slowly shook its head.
We studied each other. What was Green thinking about? There was someone inside that streamlined head; it looked out at me through those slightly protruding, big black eyes. What did it see?
Eventually Green broke eye contact and fiddled with the machine again. The sphere reappeared, this time showing... a pebble. Green said a word in Builder and looked at me expectantly.
Ah. Language lessons.
The rest of the day ---- and I mean, the entire day, Green left at sunset ---- was spent exchanging words. It very quickly came obvious that Green was learning English very much faster than I was learning Builder, and by mutual agreement I stopped trying, concentrating instead on feeding vocabulary to Green.
It was uncanny. Green never forgot anything. I would say a word once. Green would repeat it; I would correct its pronunciation, and that was it. Green would just remember it. Its accent was good, too; a little hissy, and the consonants were a bit soft, but in general easier to understand than some humans.
Interestingly, Green doesn't move its mouth when it speaks. It just opens it a little, sets its tongue, and sound comes out. I wonder how it does that?
We spent a couple of hours at the point-and-say level, building nouns. Rocks, trees, birds, fish... it's more complicated than it looks. It took some time for Green to realise that the same noun referred to both suns. It took me a while to realise that when I told Green the word for `human', Green thought it referred to all intelligent creatures (I think); great for avoiding prejudice, but a little tricky when it came to comparative anthropology.
Surprise! Green is female. I think. We didn't go into much detail on sealin reproductive biology, but at one stage Green used the machine to draw a family tree, with Green and Black at the top and the little sealin coming out of Green... of course, it could mean that Green is in fact the male, and the children are considered property of the male.
Whatever. Green feels female to me. Black feels male. I'll just have to keep an eye out for reproductive equipment and adjust my pronouns accordingly.
Numbers were easy. Distinguishing between cardinal and ordinal numbers is less so. Syntax is largely non-existent, but we did the I-give-object-to-you, you-give-object-to-me routine enough times that Green has started putting subjects and objects in the right place. Plurals? Green knows about a trailing s but we're just not bothering with irregular plurals.
Here's another surprise: when we roped in Black to play he-me-you, Green wanted to use different pronouns to refer to Black and me. It took a while before it realised that English pronouns are based on sex. I wonder what its pronouns are based on? If Sealin has pronouns.
The end result? By the end of the day, we could talk. A little. We could do time and distance, and had a small vocabulary of nouns, a smaller one of verbs, and a smattering of other words to glue it all together. That we got so far in so little time is a tribute to Green's amazing linguistic skills. The magic projector was a lot of help. Green seemed able to draw anything in the sphere of light, although the pictures weren't great.
I asked some questions, and got some useful answers.
"Where builders now?" I asked. (Getting the word for 'builders' was an interesting mime.)
"Planet Shaisheala," Green replied.
Was Shaisheala a name, or a description? I didn't have the vocabulary to ask.
"When storm?" I asked.
"Three, four, five, six days," Green said.
Um.
Black relayed a question to me:
"Where ship?" Green asked.
I shrugged. Black seemed surprised.
I repeated the question to Green. Green conferred with Black, and then replied:
"Zero sealin ship."
Oh, god.
And now, if you don't mind, I need to get some sleep. I was up very early today, and I suspect that Green and Black will be back again just as early tomorrow.
[transmit]
Oh god, language lessons. Yesterday was fun. Today was really hard work. Green came in at her usual time and immediately started work on, of all things, tenses...
"One, two, three: days. One day, you not here. Two day, you come. Three day, you leave."
Pause.
"Is one. At two day, you come. Say."
"I will come tomorrow."
"Is one. At three day, you leave. Say."
"I will leave the day after tomorrow."
"Is one. At one day, you not here. Say."
"I am not here today."
"Is three. At one day, you not here. Say."
"The day before tomorrow, I was not here."
"Is three. At two day, you come. Say."
"Yesterday, I came."
And so on. Of course, it took me about half an hour to work out what it was she was getting at first.
All day, Green sat in the pool, with the temperature turned way down, and constantly demanded answers of me. All day, I sat, stood, paced up and down, stared out the window, and tried to answer them as I see fit. I completely lost track of any kind of overall thread: I just tried to understand what Green was trying to say now, and respond.
But it worked. Green was getting information, and using it. She was asking questions to fill in the gaps in her knowledge, methodically working from one topic to another, diverting here to explore irregular verbs, diverting again to try and determine the difference between perfect and imperfect tenses, going back to the original topic when the subject was exhausted ---- it was, quite literally, inhuman. She had a perfect memory and a perfect ear and, apparently, a perfect attention span. She was acquiring a working knowledge of basic English in two days.
And it was working. The evening of the previous day, she was using verbs and nouns randomly strung together. By lunchtime, she was using simple but mostly correct clauses. By the evening, she was using subordinate and dependent clauses, basic tenses, the occasional preposition, and we were really talking.
Unfortunately, we didn't get the chance. As the suns descended into the sea outside my window, lighting up the water with twin streaks of gold and crimson, and I got up to turn the lights on, I suddenly realised that Green looked like hell. She was lying limply on her side, eyes closed, shaking slightly, and drooling. But that distinctive voice was emerging from somewhere inside her skull, unchanged and as clear as ever. I was hoarse.
"...statement where clause two is true if clause one is true, and clause one is not true..."
"Green," I said. "Stop."
She opened her eyes and blinked at me in surprise. Those beautiful black eyes were bloodshot. Seeing as they were all pupil, that meant she must have been seeing me through a red haze. Yes, red blood.
"You're tired. I'm tired. I have to eat and sleep. We can continue tomorrow."
"There is not time. We can continue today..." she trailed off, blinked again, and then said simply, "I am tired."
"Where's Black?"
"Apartment."
I took a step towards the door, and stopped. "I can't open your door."
"Door?"
"Your apartment door. To get Black. You need help."
"I need sleep. More tired."
"Say again?"
"More tired than I think."
And she closed here eyes, stopped shivering and sagged.
I had a brief, momentary vision of exactly what Black would do to me if his mate died in my apartment, before I saw her torso moving. Needless to say, I knelt down and listened carefully until I was sure she was breathing. She'd just passed out. That mental feat of skill had obviously had quite a price.
But what was I going to do with her now? I certainly couldn't lift her, and besides, I didn't want to wake her. I suspected I needed to tell Black, but Black was likely to be in their apartment and I hadn't worked out where the doorbells were.
About the only thing I could do was to dim the lights and hope she would wake up.
A couple of hours later the doorbell rang. I let an extremely angry Black in, who heaved his way over to Green, rattling furiously at both of us. Green became semi-conscious, said something blurred to Black in Sealin, and then apparently passed out again. Black abruptly stopped being angry, and I found out what a worried sealin looks like.
Unfortunately, damn it, I can't talk to Black. I want to know how Green is, and I can't ask. They're currently up in my apartment, curled up together and asleep in my bathing pool; I'm dictating this down in the foyer to avoid disturbing them.
I hope she'll be all right tomorrow.
And now I need to go to bed.
I wonder if Black snores?
[transmit]
I lay there, listening to Green and Black breathing evenly over the other side of the room. It felt... odd. At university I frequently crashed in friends' rooms, and vice versa; this was just like that, except the friends were non-human sea creatures and the room was on an alien planet on the other side of the galaxy, as far as I could tell. It was a very strange mixture of comfortingly familiar and unnervingly weird, at the same time. The slight acidic sea-smell that I was sure now came from the two sealin didn't help, either.
I pondered this for a while and went back to sleep.
When we all woke up a little after dawn, I was a little apprehensive. As far as I could tell, the only toilet on the island was in my apartment, which didn't have any partitions. I didn't mind being naked in front of the sealin ---- they were just too alien for me to care ---- but some things... let's not go into any details. However, things were considerably simplified when Green greeted me courteously and promptly hurried off, presumably back to their own apartment. Black followed, giving me one of his patented glares.
They returned about an hour later. "There is no sealin food here," Green explained. "Also the pool is not true."
"Not true?" I replied.
"Not sea." Black said something to her. Green hesitated, and then continued: "Black says I am not learn today. Black says I learn many yesterday and day before yesterday and I am more tired." Another rattle. "Black says if you teach today..." Rattle. Green glanced round and stared at Black for a moment, who was fixing me with one eye. "Never mind."
"I'm tired too," I said diplomatically. "I usually sleep longer than this."
"Day more long on your planet?"
"No, I'm just lazy."
Green thought about 'lazy', visibly wondering whether to ask about it, before Black caught her eye again. "You sleep, I sleep. I will return later."
I bowed my head, and Black herded Green out of the room, catching my eye again as he left. I was beginning to rather like Black. He looked like a creature of firm convictions.
I spent the morning dozing in the big chair by the open window, watching the sea and listening to the breeze. Some of the seabirds had come back, and were swooping and calling outside. In the few glimpses I caught I thought I could see two sets of legs; this would fit the evolutionary model of the sealin, with the two sets of flippers plus the rear flukes. Perhaps they evolved here?
There was no sign of a storm. The weather had returned to the perfect climate it had had when I had arrived.
Green showed up again while I was finishing up lunch, having apparently given Black the slip. The invisible chefs had given me a plate of cheese-like yellow and orange blocks and a stack of bready disks to eat them with; I offered her one, and she ate it happily.
I suddenly realised, as she juggled it around in her mouth like a cat, that she had no hands. Those flippers would be completely useless for manipulating anything. I thought of the machines I had seen her use ---- the database thing on the beach, the projector ---- all operated by wanting, or other thought control. The projector even had a handle so that a sealin mouth could carry it.
How could a non-tool-using species achieve intelligence? How could a non-tool-using species build tools sophisticated enough that they could be used by a non-tool-using species?
Those melted-looking machines did look rather similar to the Builders' machines. The Mysterious Pyramids, the Disc Pyramid... the machines in the bubbles were definitely related. Did the Builders make them for the sealin? But they were now at war...
Unless the sealin were given the machines by the Builders' enemies. That made a lot more sense. The Builders put down an installation on this planet, that was inhabited by a primitive intelligent species. The Enemies fed high-tech equipment to the sealin to counter this. Eventually the sealin helped drive the Builders out, with the assistance of orbital bombardment from the Enemies to create the megastorms. (Those blue lights I saw in the newsreel.)
But they couldn't possibly be primitive. Yesterday's performance by Green was so much better than anything a human could have done... although that could just be my prejudices talking. Who says humans are sophisticated?
I was about to ask, when Black rang the doorbell, looking well pissed off. When I opened the door he pushed me aside, stormed up to Green, rattled furiously, and practically chased her back out. And I haven't seen them since.
Black is really strong.
In the afternoon I went for a short walk, taking care not to get too far from the Hotel. The island is looking much better, now. The ground has drained and a lot of the mud has dried up. The hills are still looking pretty ghastly ---- damage like that is going to take years to mend ---- but the bare mud patches were the trees have been ripped away is already starting to bloom green in places. I reckon I could even find a way up to the lake without too much trouble, given enough motivation.
The Generator is crackling away happily once more. Apparently it had just been given a beating by the storm, and it's not going out after all. The Observatory is just as pretty as ever, the Pit is now empty again, and the Invisible Fountain is still Invisible. I dropped in at a Mysterious Pyramid and found that the big patch of light on the front is about the same size, but has changed colour.
Other than that, the day's been quiet. I spent some time sitting on my rock, watching the sea; there was a small, confused-looking sea creature like a centipede with more feelers crawling along the waterline. No more black heads popping out of the water to scare me.
If I look up at the Hotel I can see one window that's a slightly different colour than the rest. Green and Black's room.
[transmit]
[break]
That's interesting. When I woke up this morning, the dictaphone had finished transmitting. It's never done that before ---- it's always taken all day. I wonder what this can mean?
[break]
Hi, there, listeners. Since we seem to be back on the air on a real-time basis, I thought I would try and record a chat with Green, who is here in the studio with me.
Okay, Green, go ahead.
I talk to you. I learn English, I talk to you. I ask, you say.
All right. I'll answer your questions.
What are you doing?
You mean, what am I doing on this island?
True.
Trying to get off it.
Where is your ship?
I don't have one. The ship I came on flew away after I got out.
What are you doing on this planet?
I don't know.
This planet false you. If you will here, you will pain. You will dead.
I would like to leave. I don't know how.
[transcription warning: dialogue in !t'ktrr!tk has been detected. !t'ktrr!tk is not supported by this version of the translation software.] [untranscribable conversation]
I have zero ships.
I don't have a ship, either. Any suggestions?
Is it true this machine talk not this planet?
I'm not sure. I think so. But it doesn't talk to me.
It listen, it not talk?
Yes.
There is a machine talk not this planet in the building. The door not open. If we not come to machine then we not talk. If we not talk then zero ships come to this planet. If zero ships come to this planet then you not leave this planet.
I know.
If you will here then you will dead. Storm will dead this island.
I guessed that. The buildings won't protect me?
Buildings not dead Generator. Storm will dead Generator and buildings will dead.
The storm will destroy the Generator, and the buildings will be destroyed?
True.
When will this happen?
Four or five or six storms.
When's the next storm?
Tomorrow or the day after tomorrow.
How will you survive, then?
We will go to the big sea, and we will go down. The storm will come and will go. We will go up.
I can't breathe underwater.
We can not breathe under the water. The storm will come and will go and we will not breathe.
How long will it take for the storm to pass over?
The front of the storm will take ten or twenty or thirty minutes to pass over. The storm is big. The front of the storm will dead we. The not front of the storm will not dead we.
Can't I hide somewhere on the island, then?
The storm will dead this island. The buildings and the trees will go.
Hell.
I do not understand.
Never mind... there is a dead ship in the lake in the hills. Do you know anything about this?
[untranscribable conversation]
Explain.
There's a lake up in the hills. A small ship like the one that brought me here is crashed in the middle of it, underwater. Can it be repaired?
[untranscribable conversation]
Black knows this ship. He says it is much dead. He says it can repair with building. He says we can not repair.
One of the machines in the buildings can fix the ship?
True. We can not fix the ship. We can not know fix. We can not open building. Ship can not come building.
Even if it doesn't work, could I take shelter in the ship?
The storm will pick up ship and throw ship.
I'm going to die, aren't I?
[untranscribable conversation]
Yes.
[untranscribable conversation]
We will not give you dead. We can not give you not dead. If we have a ship then you can go. We have zero ship. We can not give you not dead.
That's all right. I understand.
If a ship come, you can go.
Is it likely a ship will come?
I do not understand likely.
How many ships will come before the storm destroys this building?
[untranscribable conversation]
Zero. Small to zero.
That's what I thought.
We can not give you not dead.
[break]
Well, that was a cheerful conversation.
Green and Black have left; gone off for lunch, I believe. I don't have a lot of appetite. I'm sitting in the big chair watching the surf, as usual.
Brief summary of the situation as I see it: I'm doomed.
Do you remember way back when I was telling you that for some odd reason nothing on the island scared me? Well, I've changed my mind. I'm terrified. I don't want to die here. I don't want to die at all. But I certainly don't want to die helplessly as the Hotel collapses around me, driven to the ground by super-hurricane force winds... I want to be able to do something. But all I can do is wait for the million-to-one chance of a ship coming along and rescuing me, and I don't think that's likely.
You see, I finally remembered about Calvin's ship. You remember that ship? The one that abandoned me here? Well, it's been gone fourteen days now. Given that it took just five days to get me from Earth to here with a stopover at that damned rock, I'm pretty sure that enough time has passed for it to get to wherever it was going and for the people there to send a ship back to pick me up. Which means they're probably not going to.
Perhaps the ship never got there. Perhaps wherever it's going is abandoned, too. Perhaps the people there received the ship and couldn't be bothered to work out why it got there. Perhaps they did, and know all about me, and just don't care.
Either way, there isn't a ship here, and every passing day means that the chances of a ship arriving is less likely.
At least Green and Black will survive. They'll just wait for the next storm to pass over, then head out to sea and swim as far away from the island as they can get before the big one gets here.
Five or six storms. Call it five. Next storm's arriving tomorrow, which means they're eight days apart. Assuming they don't get more frequent, that means that I have about thirty-two days to live.
That's quite a lot of time... more time than I've been away from Earth. Does that make things better or worse?
Hell.
[break]
Green and Black are here again. Black isn't looking angry, which is unusual.
Are you tired?
No, I'm just scared. I don't want to die.
I do not want to die. You do not want to die.
You and me both... what is causing these storms?
I do not understand causing.
What, um, what made the storms?
A ship at orbit have drop... no words. Object. Object have came to sea, and have came under water. Object dead and not dead. We can not fix object. Object not fix sea and not fix air and make storms.
A weapon?
I do not understand weapon.
Never mind.
Do you have any children, Green?
I do not understand children.
The diagram you showed me... um, male sealin and female sealin makes small sealin?
Small sealin?
You are female and Black is male, and you two make...?
[untranscribable conversation]
Yes. Three. Children.
Tell me about them.
[untranscribable conversation]
One is male, two is female. Ten and twelve years.
Are they safe?
True. The children is much far away from island. The storm not come to the children.
I don't have any. I would have liked to have seen yours.
[untranscribable conversation]
I do not understand would have.
Oh, I know I can't. But there's so much I wanted to know about this place... excuse me.
[break]
Later. The suns are going down.
I hope I didn't confuse Green and Black too much there. You know, we never worked out the vocabulary for like or love or any words like that? Little, unimportant words in English, but everything that it means to be human is based on them.
Nice to know they have children. I'm not sure I can see Black as the doting father... but, hell, if I had kids and I was sent far away from them into some danger zone I'm sure I would look pretty pissed off a lot of the time.
I wonder, though, if I'm not anthropomorphising them a bit too much. They're not humans. They didn't even evolve on the same planet as humans; it's a miracle they look as much like Earth-life as they do.
But they're so anthropomorphisable... and if the dictaphone can spell that right, I'll be impressed.
Hell, I'm rambling. I'm just going to sit here and watch the birds. See if things look better in the morning.
Wait a moment...
[indeterminate noises]
That's not a bird.
That's a ship.
Hell.
[transmit]
I stared after the ship for about twenty seconds. It was big and low, a complicated mass of reflected sunlight about the size of my hand when I stretch out my arm, sliding down the dome of the sky towards the horizon. It seemed to be all spikes. It moved slowly and completely silently.
Very clearly, I realised: Green's got to know about this and How do I ring their doorbell?
I dashed down to the foyer. The Hotel was highlighting my own door, but theirs was dark, whichever it was. There was no time to play with the pedestal, so I ran outside, round the building to the shore side of the Hotel and shouted up at their open window. Unfortunately, by the time Black came to the window, the ship had long since dropped below the horizon.
They met me in the foyer, a little puzzled. I told Green about the ship. I'm not sure she believed me at first, but eventually they started arguing furiously. I left them to it and went outside, scanning the sky. Nothing.
Eventually Green came out and joined me in the cool evening air.
"You say there is a ship?" she said. "I do not know. If you see a ship then you say you see a ship. If you not see a ship then you not say a ship. You pain. You not see a ship then you say you see a ship."
(I think that's what she said. Her syntax was convoluted and clunky and her exact words were difficult to recall. I got the gist, however.)
"I did see a ship," I replied. "There really was a ship."
She asked where it was. I pointed to the horizon. "It flew over and down there."
She said that the device for seeing ships a long way off ---- a radar? ---- was in the Pentagon. I sprinted over; it was about a kilometre away. When I arrived, very out of breath, I discovered that the door would not, of course, open for me, no matter how hard I wanted. I returned rather more slowly back to where Green was studying the sky. By this time the yellow sun was below the horizon and the sky was flushed with crimson.
"I see zero ships," she said.
She was right. It had gone. Where was it?
Surely it had seen the island as it flew over. It can't have been that far up. Given how little land there was on this planet, from what I remembered of the trip down on the shuttle, it can't have been coincidence that it had flown over the island.
More importantly, what was it? My long-awaited rescue ship? A warship?
What sort of people were flying it? Humans? Sealin? The mysterious Enemy?
Black joined us, and we spent about an hour watching the sky before finally giving up and going to bed.
[break]
It's back again.
I woke up just after dawn, anticipation hollowing my stomach. Today was special for two reasons: the next megastorm might hit today, and I might get off the planet today. I ate breakfast ---- cereal ---- sitting in the big chair watching the sky.
At 1622 by my watch (still not set to local time; this was about half an hour after I got up) it flew past again.
It appeared off to the left of my my field of view, and proceeded across and down until it disappeared behind the horizon.
I got a rather better look at it this time. It was very pale against the blue sky, as if I was seeing it through a haze. It was obviously a lot larger than I thought; it hardly foreshortened as it crossed the horizon. It must have been hundreds of metres long, if not thousands.
In shape, it is roughly cylindrical. One end consists of a mass of radially arranged spikes, while the other end fans out into a hollow cylinder of rods. The space between is a complicated mass of pipes and meshwork. The whole thing sparkled and shone with crimson and white highlights from the suns.
It passed below the horizon.
I'm going to stay right here and watch it again.
[break]
[untranscribable conversation]
Look!
[untranscribable conversation]
That is a ship. That is a ship.
Do you know any way to signal it? Can it see the island?
[untranscribable conversation]
I do not know. The machine talk ship is in building with door not open.
A fire? A smoke signal?
I do not understand.
A fire, a... oh, hell.
[untranscribable conversation]
It is a big ship. More big.
I don't care. How can I get its attention?
It is under the horizon.
Damn. Oh, it's... 1803 by my watch.
Watch?
Just for the record.
Record?
[break]
It's 1933. It's back again right on schedule. It's following exactly the same path as it did the previous two times, and last night.
It's following a fixed pattern. What's it doing?
[untranscribable conversation]
Black says it is at orbit.
In orbit? It's far too low for that. Look at the size of it!
[untranscribable conversation]
Black says it is more big. More, more big.
No way. It can't be in orbit. It can't be more than a few kilometres away, at the very most.
Black says it is more far and more big.
How big it is isn't important right now. How can we communicate?
We do not know. Is it true that your machine talk not this planet not talk ship?
Um... I don't know how to make this machine talk to the ship.
If that is true then we do not know can you communicate ship.
Are there any machines on the island you can operate? Could we, oh, flash all the lights in the Hotel on and off?
I do not understand flash.
Um, to blink... uh, on, then off, then on, then off, and so on.
[untranscribable conversation]
We can control three apartments. We can flash three lights. We not can flash more three lights.
It might be worth a try.
It go.
Yes.
[break]
It's late.
It's been a hundred and twenty minutes since the last time it passed over and it still hasn't been back. Please, god, don't let it have flown away. That ship is probably my only chance to get away from this place.
At least this is proof that it can't have been in orbit ---- orbits are completely regular. It must have been flying in circles in the upper atmosphere, or something. I can imagine it being a couple of kilometres long ---- that would explain the way it doesn't shrink much when it approaches the horizon ---- but in orbit? For that to be true, it would have to be vast.
Wow. I think I'm actually getting blasé about a vehicle that's two kilometres long.
Green and Black have gone again. I don't know what they're doing. I do know that earlier I wanted to head outside and watch the ship out in the open, and Green stopped me, saying something about the storm ---- I think they're afraid of the megastorm blowing up. It is due today or tomorrow. From the effort they have to expend when they're moving about on land, I don't blame them for wanting to stay under cover. Which means they're probably in their apartment.
Damn it, where are you? You should be here by now... hurry up...
I'm wondering about the dictaphone. It transmitted promptly when I was on the ship. It got much slower when I was abandoned on the island. It sped up again yesterday, which was the day I first saw the ship. Does it react to spacecraft? Does it need to nearby ship to bounce the signal off, or something?
Where is it?
Why is it here? Is it investigating the ship I came in on? Is it receiving these transmissions? If so, please come and get me, I'm getting worried. Is it something to do with the war?
From the circular patterns it's flying, perhaps it's looking for some... there it is!
A hundred and thirty minutes. It's late.
[break]
It's been back again. A hundred and forty minutes, this time. It seems to be slowing down. Black keeps insisting that it's in orbit, although he seems to be less certain; it's hard to tell through Green's translations.
If only I knew why it is slowing down.
We discussed trying to flash the Hotel lights. Green says that they can't communicate from one apartment to another, which means there's no way to synchronise the flashing of my apartment with theirs. I thought of putting someone in the foyer to ring the doorbells simultaneously; but then I remembered that the transporter closets have to be closed before you can get at the real apartment doors, and not the ones opening into the foyer.
So instead I'm just going to flash my own apartment lights when the ship turns up again. It should be dark by then, so it ought to be visible. I don't think it'll actually work, but I have to do something.
Green and Black seem excited but worried, as well. I've asked them if they recognise the ship. Green claims ignorance. Remembering that newsreel, the Builder's ships appeared to be rectangular ---- the huge carriers hovering over the island certainly were, as was Calvin's ship. But I've hardly seen a representative sample. It seems fair that the sealin won't be familiar with the more exotic of the Builder ships; they are, after all, on the other side of the war.
But equally, I wouldn't have thought the sealin would be particularly familiar with the Enemy's ships. They are fairly low on the pecking order. I suspect all they'll have seen are the Enemy's supply ships, ducking under the radar of the Builder base on the island and dropping off munitions and technology. I've tried asking what it looked like, but I don't think I'm making myself clear; Green just seems to get confused.
Which means I don't know who this ship belongs to.
It is remotely possible that I don't want to attract the ship's attention. But how can I tell? I have to try.
[break]
Flashed the Hotel lights. Hard work wanting that quickly and I don't think the result was much good. The ship didn't respond, anyway. I don't think it could even see us.
It was late again. The interval this time was nearly two hours. If it is in orbit, and the orbit is slowing, then the ship must be receding from the planet. But I would have expected it to shrink if that was the case; it can't possibly be in orbit, no matter what Black says.
I kept noticing Black with his eyes fixed on the horizon. I suddenly realised this afternoon that the megastorm may scare the sealin almost as much as it scares me. Out at sea, they can dive under the front and be relatively safe; here on the island, they're putting their lives in the hands of the Builders who constructed this building. That can't be reassuring, trusting their enemy's expertise to save their lives.
No storm today, so it'll be here tomorrow.
I wonder how the ship will escape. Perhaps it's high enough the be above the storm. Perhaps it's strong enough to withstand it.
No matter. I'm going to bed; Green and Black left shortly after I did the flashing-the-lights stunt. I'm getting seriously short of sleep. I suspect that this planet's day is a bit shorter than Earth's; I should have got round to measuring the time between successive sunrises, but I never really got round to it...
[transmit]
However, the dictaphone completed its transmission. This implies that the ship's still somewhere around, if I was right about the ship/dictaphone connection.
Where is it?
[break]
Green and Black are here. They showed up a bit after their usual time. Black looks very agitated, and keeps moving up and down by the window; Green's much calmer. They're watching out for the storm.
Myself, I'm looking for the ship. I know that the Hotel can withstand another megastorm, so I should be safe provided I stay indoors. But that ship is my way off this place, damn it.
My window, unfortunately, only faces towards the sea. In order to see what's happening in the other direction, I have to go down to the foyer. I keep popping up and down, too jittery to stay in one place long. Luckily the transporter closet thing means I don't have to use the stairs.
Green's looking at me. What's happening?
You talk to the talk to not this planet machine?
It's a habit.
Habit?
I, um, I talk to it today, and yesterday, and the day before yesterday, and so on. I got the machine from the ship that brought me here.
Who listen to the machine?
I don't know.
You talk and you do not know who listen?
I told you it was a habit.
[untranscribable conversation]
There is a word. A scenario. I will pain and I will dead tomorrow. Today I am this word. What is the word?
Ah. I know that one. Scared.
I am scared and Black is scared. When I am scared I say much. When Black is scared he walk much. When you are scared you talk to machine?
Heh. Yes.
The storm will come today. We have not see the storm. When the storm have come, we have swim under water.
We'll get a good view of it through that window...
Yes.
[untranscribable conversation]
[break]
The ship!
I saw it down in the foyer. It's moving overhead again, but much more slowly than before. I've opened the Hotel door to stick my head out and look straight up. I think it's decelerating.
Green's baffled. Black won't leave my apartment.
[break]
It's stopped. It's hovering directly overhead. What's it doing?
[break]
It's rotating. I went up to tell Green, and now I've got back I can see that it's turned about thirty degrees. It's moving very slowly. I can barely see it as I'm watching. It appears to be pointing the spiked ball away from the ground and the other end towards the ground; that's towards us.
What is it doing?
[break]
It's stopped rotating. It's now completely end-on.
The rear end, for want of a better term, is made up of... twelve... spikes or spines, radiating out from a central core. They move out a little way and turn through ninety degrees to run along the axis of the ship. The end result is that the rear of the ship resembles a hollow, bottomless cage. The spines are now pointed directly at us.
The radial point where the spines meet is glowing with some sort of brilliant scarlet fire, churning slowly. I hope I'm not looking right up it's engine exhaust. Or up a gun muzzle.
It doesn't seem to be doing anything.
[break]
Black say the storm comes soon.
Does he know when?
Two or three or four hours.
The ship's doing something, I don't know what. I don't know how affected it'll be.
I do not know.
Tell Black that the Hotel should be fine when the Storm hits, will you? Last time I could barely even hear it, inside my room.
I will say.
[break]
It's descending!
The ship is so directly above us that if I open the apartment window, put my head out and look straight up I can see it. And it's bigger.
It doesn't look like much; a sort of twelve-pointed star, red flame at its centre. It looks very alien. It's still very pale against the haze of the sky and hard to make out.
I don't think it's moving very fast.
I do not know how much big therefore I do not know how much far.
Yeah. Something about it doesn't look right.
Yes. It come.
Is it landing? Could a thing that size land?
I do not know.
[break]
We stopped for lunch.
The ship didn't. Every time I look out it's just a little bit larger against the sky, although it doesn't move noticeably. It's still directly overhead; it must be homing in on the Hotel.
And there is only one thing in the Hotel that I know is transmitting.
[indeterminate noises]
I love you, dictaphone!
[break]
It's big. It's very big.
It's occupying about a quarter of the sky, now. It's still looking as if it's being seen through haze; it's still moving very slowly. It can't be very high up, and yet... I don't know. It does not look right.
[break]
Where?
See.
God, yes. Just on the horizon.
The storm will come one hour. Less than one hour.
The ship's going to touch down... I think... any moment now. The storm's going to hit it when it's on the ground.
I do not know if the ship will dead.
I hope not. I really hope not.
You will close the window?
Oh, sorry. There.
We are safe from the storm. We are safe from the storm.
[break]
There's something seriously wrong about the ship. It's vast. Over a kilometre wide, at least ten long. It's occupying over half the sky. The red sun is being blocked out by one of the spines. I can see lines of white cloud, from shockwaves in the air, around all the sharp edges I can see. The churning red flame above us is oppressive.
It can't be more than a few hundred metres above us and yet I get the impression it's still far away.
The storm is building. The vast front is racing towards us across the ocean; there's a solid mass of electric blue lightning running from horizon to horizon.
Black's cowering in a corner, but unable to take his eyes off the window. Green's next to him, talking quietly in sealin. I'm leaving them to it, but right now I feel like I could use some comfort as well...
[break]
Oh, my god.
I do not believe this.
I was wrong. Totally wrong. Black was right.
The ship was in orbit.
It's not a kilometre wide. It's more like ten kilometres wide. Those black spines are sliding down the sky all around the island. The ship is bigger than the entire island! The short axis of the ship is bigger than the entire island! It must be a hundred kilometres long ---- at least!
It's dark. Both suns are hidden behind the stupendous bulk of the thing. The only light is a flickering red glow from the central fire and the horrible blue arcing from the front of the storm. I don't know what's going to hit first, the storm or the ship...
The ship's descending. I can't see it all, but the spines are descending towards the sea. The storm front is racing towards us...
The ship's hit! The spines must be three, four hundred metres wide alone! Water's being flung up thousands of metres from the impact, there are white shockwaves around each impact point... waves racing away... the ship's still going. I can see marks on the spines, it's still descending. It's...
[indeterminate noises]
Aah! What the...
[untranscribable conversation]
What happened? Are you all right?
[untranscribable conversation]
I... yes. I... what...?
The spines must have hit the sea floor... where's the storm? How far is the...
Good god! What...
The storm! What's happened to the...
[untranscribable conversation]
What is that?
Not know. Not know...
[untranscribable conversation]
[break]
All right. The ship's touched down. It seemed to hit the sea bed pretty hard; but thinking of the sheer mass of the thing, it can't possibly be holding itself up by those spines.
The island is completely encased in that cage thing. I went down to the foyer, not opening the door, and I could see those huge shining columns all around.
Shortly after it touched down, there was a sudden web of orange flame between all the spines. Just for a moment. And then the storm hit the spines and... broke.
It was just deflected off on all sides, as if there was a barrier there. Lightning arced to the spines but there is no wind, no noise, and the sea is still relatively calm. It must be some kind of force barrier. The ship's defended us from the storm.
Oh, yes; there was a barrage of mini tidal waves from the impact of the spines against the water. But they've gone now.
Black's practically catatonic. Green's not talking to me; I think she has too much on her mind at the moment. I'm leaving them both be. I told Green that if I could help, I would, but I'm not sure she was up to translating English.
The mass of the ship forms this dark ceiling above the island. Between the spines it's just dark; the storm, raging outside the shield, is blocking any light from the suns. There's just that infernal glow. The more I look at that writhing flame directly above us the less I like it.
But it did protect us from the storm.
I can't get my mind around just how big this thing is. The top end of the ship, that spiked ball, must be well above the atmosphere. Laid horizontally, it would span the English Channel. In orbit it would eclipse the sun. You could fit every man, woman and child on Earth in it and still have room for every artifact ever made by humanity. This ship won't have a crew, it'll have a civilisation.
Did I call this?
Can I change my mind?
No, no, I don't mean that. It's still a spaceship, even if it is bigger than some moons, and it's still my best hope off this place. I just hoped for something a little more... accessible.
[break]
Black's okay.
Green soothed him for a while, to no avail. And then Black suddenly surged into life, reared up ---- nearly hitting the ceiling, he's big ---- shouted incomprehensibly at the storm, the ship, Green and me, and then suddenly collapsed and went docile again. But now he's talking to us again. He's subdued, but he's back.
Green looks relieved. I'm not sure how I can tell this, but I can. I think she was a lot more worried than she was letting on. She was completely unfazed by the storm, or the ship; scared while it was happening, but adjusting quickly. Black's collapse, however, really affected her.
Is he all right?
Black not is pain. He have much scared. He is less scared.
I was scared, too.
Yes.
Do you want something to eat? It's been a while.
Yes.
You work the widget, it'll give me human food. Oh, yuck, what's that?
I do not know. Fish?
I hope you can eat it, I certainly can't.
[indeterminate noises]
I can eat it. I can much eat it.
I'll leave you to it, then.
[indeterminate noises]
Gross. I think that was a mass of fish guts. Still, Green's tucking into it happily, and Black's not far behind her.
I hope this place has good air conditioning. I have to sleep here.
[break]
Good grief! I forgot! I completely forgot!
If the ship was homing in on the island because they'd heard the dictaphone's transmission, it'll be waiting for a reply! I've been talking to this thing all day, but haven't sent anything!
So I'll get it to transmit now. It's late, anyway, and this has been a slightly stressful day. See if anything happens tomorrow.
Do I need a personal message to the ship? Hi, guys. Thanks for coming. Do you have any way for you to talk to me? This machine only sends, it doesn't receive.
Those fish guts stink.
[transmit]
The sullen red flame of the ship's engines (or whatever it is) is still dominating the view upwards.
Green and Black spent the night in my apartment again, this time sleeping in the pseudo-sand over by the window. I don't think they slept much. I certainly didn't; the red glow through the window and the psychic pressure of the vast bulk of the ship above us didn't lend themselves to relaxation. I was relieved when dawn finally came around and I could get up again. I found the sealin already awake.
Currently we're down on the beach. Green and Black took to the water a while ago and are investigating the force wall, seeing if it's still up. I don't blame them; I'm safe from the storms, and they have a family to go to. I don't think they'll have a lot of luck, however. I can see swell breaking against empty air, off in the distance. The water in the bay is like a millpond and the air is still and oppressive.
[break]
The wall is there. The floor to the water to the sky. It is like rock. We cannot go.
How far around the island did you go?
All around the island. It is there all around the island.
They could just be being cautious and leaving it up until they know there won't be any more storms.
Yes.
What do the spines do when they reach the bottom?
They go down to the floor and more go. There are more rocks around the spines. More, more rocks. The water is dark and it is dead.
Dead?
The fish and the plants are dead.
Just by the spines?
Yes. The spines come to the water. They are more big and more fast. The water can not go fast. The spines go the water more fast.
A shock wave? The spines hit the water and cause a shock wave that killed everything?
Yes.
I wonder how deep they go beyond the sea floor.
I do not know.
[break]
Late morning. The ship's done something; that red flame in its heart suddenly flared up, and then shrank to a piercingly white pinpoint. We were out on the beach, and at this point started sprinting for the Hotel foyer, but before we could get there, the pinpoint expanded to a sun-like disc, and stayed like that. All this in complete silence.
We cowered in the foyer before Black suggested, via Green, that it was a sun. It makes sense; it's so bright and hot that you can feel the heat against your outstretched hand... and, with the real suns somewhere beyond the ship, it's doing a pretty good job of illuminating the island.
But we're not going to go outside for a while.
[break]
Lunch. No change since the sun came on.
Just for a change we went to the sealin's apartment. I'd never seen it; I was wondering what it was like. Cold and wet, the answer was. It was still based on a sea-shore theme, but where mine was based on an idealised tropical coast, theirs was based on some godforsaken rock in the North Atlantic. Half the room was one big pool, with thirty-centimetre waves (coming from nowhere I could spot), and the rest of it was rock and gravel. Three of the sealin's machines-in-a-bubble floated in the pool.
In deference to my delicate skin, they did turn off the wind and the spray and put the temperature up a good ten degrees or so, and it actually turned out to be quite comfortable. The gravel was made of the same non-stuff that my pseudo-sand was, and if I sat on it it moulded itself to my shape quite effectively. But it still felt like having lunch inside a water reservoir.
Oh, yes, the food; Black manipulated what appeared to be their version of the food widget, and three fish materialised, rather like salmon with too many fins. Mine came grilled with chips and a side salad, and was extremely good, although Green did eat quite a lot of it. She was very interested in the grilled part of it, and asked me a lot of largely incomprehensible questions about, I think, cooking.
[break]
Something's happened.
The force barrier flashed with that web of orange flame again. We thought perhaps it was the barrier going down, so we headed outside... it wasn't.
Just as we got outside the ground shook. Well, lurched. Once. I hate earthquakes. I picked myself off the ground and sprinted for an open space, terrified that the Hotel might fall on me, shouting over the sudden rustling crash from the forests for Green and Black to follow me. I stopped and turned round just in time to see a single, two-metre high wave cream its way up the beach and die back.
Nothing else happened. We stayed out for a while before eventually heading back to the Hotel. Green argued with the pedestal again in Builder, trying to get some information out of the computer that ran the place; I gathered it wasn't being particularly helpful. Eventually she said that the Hotel was undamaged ('not pain'). I should have expected that.
[break]
Well, I did ask to be taken off the planet.
We're flying.
We probably took off shortly after the lurch, which I guess was the artificial gravity coming on. But in the Hotel we're a long way from the force barrier, and today our rooms are fairly low, and when the sea dropped away beyond the barrier we just... didn't notice.
I am totally unable to be scared about this. It is just completely outside my experience. The ship's a few hundred kilometres up and rotating. In the gap between the ceiling and the sea is framed, brilliant blue and white and with every cloud picked out in startlingly three-dimension black, the planet.
The ship has lifted the entire island, air, water, bedrock and all, off the planet and we're now in orbit.
We only noticed when the sky outside started to darken. Black saw it first, what with the way he keeps staring out to sea. I don't know what he said, but he and Green argued for a while before Green pointed it out to me.
At first I thought it was just night falling outside the realm of our little artificial sun, but my watch still said it was the middle of the afternoon (once I converted to local time). Even when it became completely black, we didn't catch on. It was only until the planet started rolling past outside that we finally realised.
Black and Green are frantic. They never asked to be taken off-world.
I wonder where it's taking us?
[break]
Green's in a bad way.
Black's fine; scared, but still with us. I think his attack yesterday has left him much more able to deal with stuff like this. Green, though, is repeatedly flinging herself from one side of the window to the other, jabbering away at high speed in incomprehensibly mangled English and sealin to both of us indiscriminately. She uses the word 'down' a lot. I suspect she gets vertigo.
(I'm not bad with heights. But when I think of the way the sea stops against the force barrier, with nothing on the other side but the rest of the universe, I feel... uneasy. When I think about how I don't really know how the force barrier works, I feel really uneasy.)
Without Green, I can't talk to Black. I can tell he's worried. He keeps looking at me beseechingly, as if I knew what to do ---- although it could just be those big black eyes. I have no idea what to do. I wouldn't know what to do if Green were human. Is she hysterical? If so, would throwing a bucket of water in her face help? Yeah, right.
Damn it, Green, quit it! Calm down!
This isn't helping. I do not like this.
[break]
We got Green calmed down. I think. I'm not entirely sure how, but...
I'm not sure exactly why we did it, but after a while with Green showing no sign of stopping her ranting and, if anything, getting more hysterical, I suddenly found myself throwing myself on top of her. Green weighs about half as much again as I do and is a lot stronger, so this wouldn't have helped had Black not also decided to do the same thing.
We got her pinned to the ground, with my hands over her eyes. Useful thing, hands. She thrashed around for a few seconds and then lay still, shaking gently while Black talk to her in what I assumed was a soothing tone of voice.
After I while I let go and found that her eyes were closed and she was breathing regularly, but I don't think she was asleep. Black gave me a look in what I think was gratitude, and kept talking.
I don't know anything about psychology. Has she gone from hysterical to catatonic? Is that good? Bad? Does that even apply to sealin?
[break]
About half an hour ago the fake sun outside went out. This coincided roughly with sunset back on the planet, if I can trust my calculations (I never did get round to setting my watch to local time).
Without the competition of the light, I can see the stars out the other side of the force barrier. I can see a lot more than that, too. Do you remember those odd striations I saw on the little ship that brought me here? Well, they're back, with a vengeance. Where the little ship's striations were only just visible with the cabin light out, here they're bright enough to drown out some of the stars. And from the way those stars are moving, I'd say we were going about ten times faster than the little ship.
So it's big and fast. Pity I still don't know who's running it. The Builders? The Enemy? Some independent? (The ship's big enough that I suspect that it, alone, could be considered a major player.)
There's only one thing I'm sure of, and that's that regardless of any local politics, the only people whose side I'm sure about are the sealin. They just want to go home. Well, I'm a hundred percent behind them on that one.
They're currently curled in an a corner away from the window. I think they're asleep. Black managed to talk Green around, as far as I can tell; she made her way over under her own power. I'm keeping as quiet as possible, whispering this to the dictaphone under the blankets in my own bed.
I haven't pointed out the striations. I think they're having a hard enough time coping with the idea of being in space as it is, without introducing them to FTL.
If this ship goes ten times fast then the little ship, then it can cover the distance the little ship took five days to cross in half a day. This also means that if the big ship moves one day's flight, the little ship would take ten days to catch up with it. I think it's a fair assumption that anyone chasing us in ships like the little one will never catch us.
Where is it taking us?
Ship, if you're listening to this transmission... please talk to us. Please.
[transmit]
If the suns rose in the east, then my apartment window faced due east, as I could watch the sunset from the big chair. Which meant that the landing pad was at the north tip of the island, and the sealin's bay at the south...
Of course, this is all completely irrelevant now.
The fake sun switched on at about the right time today. It didn't fade up nicely, it just went click and was on. The sudden glare woke me up. Green and Black somehow slept through it, so I tiptoed around them and went outside.
The island looks... oddly normal. The vertical sunlight is strange, but not too strange. The black sky is strange, but that, too is not too strange. I wandered around. If I keep my eyes lowered, I can con myself that I'm still safely on the planet. (Now, there's a catch. While I was on the planet, I was desperate to leave. Now I'm off it...)
I hadn't visited any of the buildings for days, spending my time in the Hotel cowering from the storms or watching the ship. Well, I reckoned I was now fairly safe from storms, and I knew right where the ship was at all times. And getting out into the fresh air and stretching my legs felt so good.
First stop was a Mysterious Pyramid. I guessed that they had something to do with the island's power supply. Given that the power was the only thing that kept us eating, I wanted to check for any changes. There weren't any significant ones. The irregular patch of light that probably represented the Hotel had grown a little, but that was reasonable enough given that Green and Black had moved in.
Near the Mysterious Pyramid was the Invisible Fountain, so I sat down on the grass and looked through it for a while. I hadn't noticed before, but it made a faint hissing sound, as of insubstantial water being squirted through illusory nozzles... the last time I had been here the sound must have been drowned out by the surf.
That is a major change. The island is quiet.
Inside the force barrier, there is no wind. Therefore, there are no waves. The sea is as flat and glassy as the black-glass windows of the buildings; there isn't even any ripples. The only sound, apart from the Fountain, is a few sea bird-things on the shore, calling to one another in the strange silence. They've been trapped inside the barrier with Green and Black.
I thought about weather systems. Was the cage big enough for a convection cycle to set up? If so, then later today when the ground started to warm up, we should start to see a sea breeze, which would stir up the water a little. But there was nothing.
Next stop was the Observatory. It still worked. The lights swirled on demand, as entrancing as ever. I watched for five minutes, but couldn't keep my mind on it. Eventually I switched them off and walked around the central hills to the Generator.
That is different.
Previously the Generator had been throwing off violet and blue lightning in all directions, crackling and snapping with power. Now the lightning has been reduced to blue rings of electric flame, crawling up from the bottom of the spherical head to the top, one after the other. The noise is a faint electrical hum.
I didn't know what this meant. Green had said that the Generator provided power that kept the Hotel standing. I sincerely hoped that it wasn't failing for any reason. Perhaps it was being inside a warp bubble that affected it? Or the proximity of the ship?
Before heading back for lunch I pushed my way through the collapsed forest to the Observation Tower. The undergrowth wasn't as solidly packed as I had originally thought. The few hundred metres to the tower took a while, but it wasn't particularly hard and I only got a little muddy.
The view was unnerving. From up here, it was painfully obvious that the sea went out a little way, perhaps a kilometre, and then abruptly stopped. With the sun switched on it was impossible to see the stars or the warp bubble striations (if indeed we were still moving), but there was still a great sense of absence about that black gap. It made me feel as if this island was all that was left of the universe.
I headed back. Green and Black were up; from Green's expression, I gathered that (a) she seemed to be back to normal and (b) I should probably have let them know where I was going before disappearing for the morning.
[break]
The sealin have gone swimming again. I've found a little patch of real sand that the megastorm left and am lying down on it.
It's occurred to me that, if only there were some decent walls holding the air and, indeed, the land in, this would be the way to travel. Take your entire home town with you. You get to see the sights while sleeping in your own bed.
The sun's shining off the spines where they rise up out of the sea. But far above, where they turn ninety degrees and run inward to meet the nightmare bulk of the vast ship above us, they seem to be in shadow. All I can see above is matte black sky and the glare of the fake sun above the exact centre of the island. If I hold my hand up and block out the sun, I can just make out the suggestion of structure. But only the suggestion.
I wonder if I'll get a tan if I stay here too long. Probably not a good idea; I've no idea if these people got the UV of their sun set right.
[break]
What did you find?
The wall is a window. We swim to it and see the sky. We are scared.
I can imagine.
There are stars. The stars come and the stars go.
Ah. I was meaning to tell you about that.
About that?
We seem to be moving through space. I think we're a very long way from home.
[untranscribable conversation]
Where are us?
I don't know. But this ship seems to be moving considerably faster than the one that brought me here, um, to this island. If it's been moving in a straight line, then I'd say we're probably further away from your planet than Earth is.
[untranscribable conversation]
You have know and you have not say?
You were asleep.
[untranscribable conversation]
Yes.
Well. Did you find anything else?
Black have find a bird-thing. It was dead. It have swim in to the wall and it have dead.
Ouch.
Black have eat it.
Ah. Did it taste nice?
[untranscribable conversation]
Yes.
[break]
Afternoon was mostly used up by a language lesson. I made the mistake of trying to correct Green's tenses ---- all those haves and wases. She leapt on them with such enthusiasm that I suspect she was grateful for the opportunity to do something to take her mind off things.
I've been impressed with the way the sealin have been handling things. They both had breakdowns, yes, but seem to have recovered in short order and are coping well again. Possibly they're a little subdued. Black, in particular, hasn't growled at me for a long time.
I wonder why I seem to be taking it all so well. That is, if I am taking it well. Oh, I haven't had a nervous breakdown, but I am spending a lot of time talking to myself via you, my Dear Listener. Perhaps the dictaphone is keeping me sane; perhaps it's just not letting me realise I'm not sane any more. Perhaps I just have a tendency to overanalyse.
I suspect that the rather technological lifestyle on Earth helps. I know that the Big Ship is just a machine. The sealin almost certainly have a very low-tech culture, what with all that water and all, and probably very little exposure to major high-tech devices. Green did use that database headset thing, but I'm willing to bet that it wasn't made by the sealin and she doesn't know how it works. They know about spaceships but don't have any. I would be surprised if any of them had ever been on one.
(Says he, snobbishly, veteran of one and a half flights now.)
Where is this ship taking us? How long will it take to get there?
[break]
Green, what did you do on your world?
What did I do?
How did your day go? What kind of things did you do between sleeping and eating and so on?
I do not understand.
Well, on Earth I was a journalist. That is ---- I told stories. I found out what people were doing, and recorded it so that other people could find out.
[untranscribable conversation]
I do not understand.
Um. I knew someone who made things. All day long, he would make little machines. Like my watch. I knew someone else who learnt things; she studied rock. She knew everything about rock. What do you do?
[untranscribable conversation]
I do not know if I understand. I remember. Black hunt.
You remember? Anything in particular?
I remember any thing and every thing. I remember languages and machines and stories and pictures. If someone know then someone may will not know. If I know then I will know. I remember.
You remember everything you see and hear?
Far past I learn remember. Remember is pain and tired. I see I know or I not know. If I remember then I see and I know.
You can choose to remember or not remember?
Yes.
So people come to you, and ask you to remember something, and you remember it permanently.
Yes.
And everything is stored in your memory? In your head?
No. There is a machine which remember. I have the machine. I remember.
And Black's a hunter?
[untranscribable conversation]
Black hunt. He catch fish and eat fish and bring fish to me and to not me. He learn fish and learn fish breed and there are more fish. If there are not more fish then he not catch fish and he prevent not him catch fish and there are more fish.
He not catch... prevent... ah. He protects the fish? So that not too many are caught?
Yes.
A fish farmer. Black's a fish farmer.
Farmer?
That's what Black does.
[break]
The sealin have checked out of the Hotel. I have my room back to myself, the splotch in the Mysterious Pyramid has shrunk, and the smell of wet sealin has largely gone.
I should have realised; on a planet that's mostly water, where would sealin be likely to sleep? At sea, of course. Now that they don't need the protection of the Hotel any more they might as well be comfortable.
I'm a little surprised at how soon they're doing this. It was only yesterday that Green was going frantic at the thought of being on the Big Ship, and now they're forgoing any protection the Hotel might give and entrusting themselves to the protection of the force barrier.
Perhaps they're just more realistic than I am and realise that if the barrier does go down, we're all dead, Hotel or no Hotel. Perhaps they just don't have as much imagination.
The sun went out about half an hour ago. The window's open, and I can hear occasional faint splashes outside. That could be seabirds, I suppose.
The room seems a little empty without them.
[transmit]
Gah.
I have got to get some coffee. I'm still half asleep and quite morbid.
The apartment seems odd without the two sealin. That doesn't make sense. They were only living here for two, three nights. But I suppose those were very significant nights, and I felt some sort of bond with them; all three of us were caught up in events we didn't understand.
But I remember Black and his itchy nose. It seems so trivial; he kept wrinkling his nose, scratching it, sneezing periodically. My first impression was that he thought I smelt bad, but I quickly realised that it was nothing to do with me. It could be some sort of allergy, I suppose. But through the night, every half hour or so, I'd hear a short, explosive sneeze, followed by a single prolonged sniff, and then a sigh as he went back to sleep ---- if he was ever awake at all. I found it mildly annoying at the time, but now the apartment seems too quiet.
I've looked out the window but they aren't around. They've probably headed on down the coast to get some privacy. I suppose they felt that they'd had enough of being cooped up with, okay, probably a quite smelly alien.
Mmm. Bath. I've just realised that now they've gone, I can turn the temperature of the pool up...
Now, that is something that makes me grateful for their absence.
[break]
I have itchy feet. Clean itchy feet, now.
Not literally, you understand. But I have a hankering to do something. I can't just sit around the apartment or wander the island until the Big Ship gets whereever it's going. I feel that I have to do something productive.
And I have a plan: I'm going to go over and look through the barrier at the stars going by. From here I can't see anything, really. I'm going to have to be right up close to get a good view. But the island is surrounded by water, which means I'm going to have to build a raft.
I even know how: remember those forests that the megastorm knocked down? Lots of logs there. I bet the moving lianas would make good rope, too. I bet I could easily build a simple raft, tie it together, and paddle over to the force wall.
Right. Let's go.
[break]
Okay, maybe it wasn't such a good plan.
I went up to the forest. I quickly found a good tree lying flat in front of me. It looked a mess, but the trunk was about the right size and it was festooned with dead-looking moving lianas.
There was only one problem. Two problems, one at each end of the trunk. At one end was the root ball, pulled out of the ground, and at the other were all the branches. I didn't have anything to cut the trunk with.
With a sickening slide I felt myself plunge from the good mood that the bath had given me back into depression again. I pulled out some dead lianas ---- might as well have a look ---- and headed back to my rock.
[break]
I feel like an absolute idiot. Green's just gone back into the water, leaving me standing on the beach like a lemon.
While I was sitting on the rock, trying to tie knots in the lianas ---- and failing, by the way, they've gone pulpy and aren't nearly strong enough ---- the two sealin suddenly surged out of the water on each side of me, getting me quite wet, and enthusiastically said hello. They looked happier than I'd seen them for days. Well, ever. Black's gruff mood had returned, but I got the strong impression that it was just a pose; he rolled over and scratched his back against the rock with a most undignified wriggle.
Green started enthusing to me about how nice it was to get back out to the ocean, even if it was limited to a few kilometres around the island. This very quickly segued into an impromptu language lesson; we hadn't tackled difficult words like 'good' or 'nice' yet, and she had to substitute 'true'. (One of the things I like about Green is her willingness to bend the syntax of English to breaking point in order to get the meaning across. She wasn't particularly interested in using correct English; she was far more concerned with using effective English. And, by god, I would like to see a human linguist do as well in the week or so I've known her.)
Eventually she got round to asking what I was doing; I was still playing with the lianas. I explained about the raft, and how it wouldn't be possible without some way of cutting through trees.
She blinked at me, said, "Wait," and dashed off for the Hotel. Five minutes later she came back with one of the machines-in-a-bubble, holding it by its mouth handle. She climbed onto the rock, concentrated, and to my utter astonishment a brilliant violet triangular blade of light appeared in front of the machine. She waved her head casually, cutting off a projecting piece of rock, which slid into the sea.
She dropped it by my feet, saying "I set it. You can want and it will cut." Then she nudged Black and they both dived into the sea again.
The flat piece where the rock projection was is completely smooth when I rub my finger against it.
Oh, well. If Green wants to lend me her pocket knife to cut down trees with, it would be impolite not to take up her offer.
[break]
Five trees down and rolled to the beach.
That cutter is amazing. It's easy enough to use; hold it gingerly by the handle, which is slightly damp; aim; want at it and wave the blade through the tree. The tree parts like there was nothing there.
The blade appears to be infinitely thin. I can hold it up edge-on to the sun and it very nearly disappears. It's about fifty centimetres long and ten wide at the base; the flat of it is impenetrable and quite opaque. Cutting feels odd. There's only any resistance if I try and twist the blade while it's embedded in the wood.
And the edges it produces are fabulous. They're so clean. Forget your plane and your sandpaper ---- a quick swipe with this widget and you have perfect, satin-smooth cleavages, ready for varnishing.
It would also make a dandy short sword. Parry with this and you could chop a thousand-year-old katana, the masterpiece of the swordsmith's art, in two as if it was air. I've been extremely careful to only turn it on when both hands are firmly gripping the handle.
Why would Green, a linguist and historian, want such a fearsome weapon? The answer is completely obvious: to defend herself against me. I am, after all, the same species as the Builders (at least, I'm pretty sure I am), and the sealin are allied with the Enemy.
Although that seems all very remote now.
So I have my logs down by the sea. I even cut the ends into the traditional points, to make it more streamlined. I am going to have to paddle the thing, you know; another log, carefully carved with that amazing blade, became the paddle.
Now I just have to tie them together and I'm ready to go. I have some lianas. Let's try.
[break]
This sucks.
The lianas are nowhere near strong enough. They're pretty strong if I just pull them, but try and bend them around too small a curve ---- like, say, around one of my logs ---- and the edges crush, start oozing, and then quickly fray until the whole thing parts.
Without something to tie them together with, I don't have a raft. Oh, the logs float well enough, and I could probably use one as a flotation aid. But I don't want to swim out to the barrier clutching a knocked-down tree in my arms. I want to paddle out there like the tool user I am. I have hands, damn it, and even the sealin can't say that. I want to use them.
All right, admittedly I couldn't do it at all without Green's magic pocket knife. But it's a matter of principle.
Now. What else do I have around here that I can tie things together with?
[break]
I do not believe this. There is no way in which this can work.
The raft is ready, hauled up on the beach. It's tied together with strips of blanket from my apartment.
My first effort was to use my own clothes. I tied two logs together with my shirt and one end and my trousers at the other. That worked, and was reasonably robust. Unfortunately I had now run out of clothes, and I didn't feel it would be a good idea to tear my only outfit up into strips. The island's climate under the fake sun was warm, but not that warm.
It was then I first thought of the blankets, but dismissed them immediately ---- nothing in my apartment was actually real; the bulk of it was just an illusion caused by the force field projectors that were, I assumed, hidden in the walls.
An hour of walking fruitlessly up and down passed before I finally gave in and went and looked at the blankets. They were eminently suitable. Good and strong, although not indestructible; a heavy weave that felt like wool. But of course, they only existed inside the apartment... so I tried taking one outside, to see what would happen. Shortly afterwards I was standing on the grass outside the foyer clutching a blanket that showed no signs whatsoever of dissolving into mist.
Oh well, I thought. If they can do it for the food.
The stitching around the edge thwarted my efforts to tear it up until I got out the cutter. From there it was easy.
But it's now late afternoon. Night comes quickly, here ---- it falls with quite a thump ---- and I really do not want to be out on the water in the pitch dark. It may be calm but I can still drown in it.
So I'm going to leave things until tomorrow before trying the raft out.
[break]
Green and Black came to dinner. Apparently there aren't many fish big enough to be worth them eating inside the barrier.
The food widget made them a couple of extremely large crab-like things with six legs, thankfully dead, which they crunched into little pieces all over my floor. I hadn't realised crabs were so messy inside. I got, thankfully, a salad; unfamiliar plants, but it tasted good, and it came with a strange sweet-and-sour dressing that went very nicely with some sharp string-like vegetables. It managed to sustain my appetite despite the two sealin's assault.
They also ate a human meal, which they persuaded me to order for them; a thick stew, with some more of those bread-stick things. I wasn't entirely sure that cooked meat would agree with them, but they seemed to enjoy it. They even ate the breadsticks.
And then Green picked up the food widget again, did something to it I didn't catch, and all the considerable mess was somehow gone, leaving nothing but clean pseudo-sand and some rapidly dissipating smells.
Black, via Green, asked me about the raft. I explained. They asked how I was going to fasten the logs together; I told them about the strips of blanket.
But how could the strips help, they asked. Ah, I said. I was going to tie them together.
Tie? they said.
This led to a demonstration. I swear, I don't think they'd ever seen a knot before. I did all the knots I could remember, which isn't very many, while they stared intently at my hands and nosed at the hard little lumps of blanket, arguing furiously. They were absolutely fascinated.
It makes sense, I suppose. A species with no fingers would never develop knotwork; and the Builders and the Enemy would have advanced enough technology that they wouldn't have needed it.
I could have gone on tying things up for them all night, but I finally managed to kick them out at what was probably about 2330. Green took with her a souvenir; I'd tied a strip of blanket around her tail, just above the flukes, with a bow. She seemed very pleased with it.
[transmit]
I had a slow breakfast and another bath. The invisible chefs gave me a tall glass of something fizzy that tasted odd ---- I was half way down it when I realised it was aspirin. I suppose if they can manage long-chain carbohydrates they can make aspirin, and if they know what I feel like eating they should certainly be able to fix my headache... only a little unnerving.
It worked, though. It's half an hour later and I feel fine.
So. Today's the big day. I get to find out how seaworthy the raft is.
I feel much happier knowing that the two sealin are around. If the thing comes apart out at the barrier, I'm pretty sure they'll help me back to shore (and then laugh at me). Luckily the fake sun is warm and the sea hasn't cooled down from the original climate, so I shouldn't be at any risk other than loss of dignity. I have no doubt that the most dangerous ocean predators in our little fragment of ocean are Green and Black, and I'm reasonably sure they won't eat me. I won't take the dictaphone with me; it doesn't look waterproof.
So. I may as well head on down and get on with it.
Yup. No reason at all why I shouldn't leave right now.
I am a decent swimmer, after all.
Although I'd feel much happier if I had a life jacket.
Ah, hell.
[break]
Phew. I'm exhausted.
You'll be pleased to know that I made it through safely and didn't drown, even once. The paddle works fine. The raft works works less well. Possibly I should have gone for something a little more elaborate with oars; making joints shouldn't be hard with Green's magic pocket knife.
Anyway.
I went down to the beach. The sealin weren't there, but they must have been waiting nearby because they showed up soon after I arrived. The raft was in fine shape; the previous evening I'd pushed it into the sea to check that it actually floated, and got the blanket strips wet. During the night they shrunk, and the whole thing is rock solid. If anything, the strips are too tight.
I undressed, grabbed the paddle, pushed it out so it floated and climbed on.
First problem: it's not as stable as it could have been. It is only five logs wide, and they weren't very thick logs. Moving about on it is risky at best, and liable to dump you in the water if you change your position too suddenly. I eventually found that sitting cross-legged in the exact middle was reasonably safe.
Second problem: paddling is interesting.
You see, while it's not quite wide enough to be stable, it's just too wide to reach the water easily with the paddle. You have to lean over. And, of course, it's not particularly stable, so you tend to wobble. And every time you make a stroke the raft starts turning...
After a while, though, I got the knack and managed to trace a wobbly S-curve across the bay. Green and Black followed along, swimming quietly with heads high above water, staring at me with a kind of bewildered fascination. They didn't say a word.
Okay, it was only about a kilometre, maybe two or three, from the shore to the edge of the barrier. The water was glassy, with only faint ripples from the morning sea wind. I was almost certainly making a far bigger deal out of the whole business than it really warranted.
There are, however, two mitigating factors in my defence:
(a) it was a very small raft, and the smaller the boat the larger distances seem;
and (b) I was bored.
I headed out to sea.
I aimed for one of the spines, as being a handy landmark. I paddled, and the shore dropped away behind, and I kept paddling, and the spine didn't really get any closer, and the shore wasn't getting any further away, and my arms started getting tired...
The raft was astonishingly unhydrodynamic and making it move was pretty hard work. It wouldn't coast. There was only one paddle and it wasn't very well made. I kept having to stop to rest, and the spine crept closer at a veritable snail's pace, and I thought I was going to get blisters...
Green and Black trailed patiently along behind. I thought I detected a certain air of them humouring me, but that was probably just my imagination. I did briefly think about asking them for help; given their size and how strong they were, I was sure that they'd have no trouble pushing the raft right round the island had I asked. But that felt, somehow, like giving up. I had spent so long on this damned island and hadn't really done anything constructive or significant the whole time. I wanted to achieve something, even if it was paddling from a spot near the edge of the ship to the edge of the ship in a badly-made stone-age raft.
Eventually I got there.
The raft drifted up to the spine and stopped with a faint bump. I turned it round, carefully leant over and put my hand against it.
Close up, the surface of the spine was a slightly mottled, matte black. It wasn't smooth but was a little lumpy, like solidified tar, and was cool against my hand. It was surprisingly wide, maybe a hundred metres, and rose in a sheerly vertiginous wall out of the water and disappeared into the blackness above my head.
I paddled around the spine and towards the force barrier itself.
It was big. It was black. I couldn't see any stars, they were all drowned out by the fake sun. Up close, that black wall filled half the world. It sucked out the light. It was dark, out here on the edge. I thought of the island, clutched in the claws of the Big Ship, a tiny blue and green bubble surrounded by the darkness of space; any light that didn't land on the land or sea would just disappear off into the void.
I gingerly approached the edge. I would have been able to see over it, had there been anything to see, but it was just black. I came closer, and the raft hit it. There was a faintly anticlimactic bump.
It felt strange. It was obviously just a barrier, nothing more; it was as smooth as wet ice, and so neutral in temperature that if I rested my hand gently against it I could barely tell I was touching it. I hit it with the handle of the paddle and there was a muted thump.
"There is too much light," Green said suddenly from behind me. "Under the water there is the dark and I can see the stars."
I tried getting up close to it so I could cup my hands against the wall and see if I could see through, but the raft kept drifting away. I briefly contemplated getting off the raft. Briefly.
"What's it like where the barrier meets the sea floor?" I asked.
"Near the spine there is much rock," Green replied. "Far the spine the sea floor is the end. There is the sea floor and then there is the barrier. No rock."
When the Big Ship set up the barrier, it must have cut through the sea floor like a white-hot wire through butter, like... ah. Green's magic pocket knife. Now I knew how it worked. I bet the violet glow was just a tint so you could see the field.
Interestingly, I could see the other side of the spine on the other side of the barrier. The barrier met the spine at the exact middle, of course, so the other side was in perpetual shadow, but there was just enough light scattered from the ocean to make it faintly visible. It had that same unreal look that the side of your car has in your wing mirrors when you're cruising down the motorway, or a jet liner's wings have while it's in flight. I ran my hand along the barrier until it met the spine and thought that just a few millimetres away, probably just a tiny fraction of a millimetre, was the hardest vacuum I'd ever encountered in my entire life.
I imagined myself on the other side of the wall, wearing a space suit, looking into this warm, wet space, seeing myself sitting half-naked on a raft with one hand pressed up against the barrier...
I headed back.
The paddle back was ghastly. I was tired to begin with, and I was absolutely wiped out by the time I reached the shore. I gave the raft a half-hearted shove up the beach, and then lay down on the sand. I'd fallen off as I approached the bay; the sea tasted foul, salty with a nasty acidic overtone. I couldn't wait to get back to the Hotel so I could have a nice, long drink and another bath, but first I had to have a rest...
Green asked me if I was all right. I said I was, but I was a bit tired.
"I have not see a raft," she said. "It is interesting. It looks it you tired."
I laughed. "Yes, it's exhausting."
"Why do you not swim?"
Gah.
[break]
Much better now.
I dictated that last while in the bath, and then I fell asleep. That jellying-water trick is a good one.
It's late afternoon, now. I don't want to sleep any more or I won't sleep properly tonight. I think I'll grab something to eat (I didn't get any lunch) and go back down to the beach to talk to Green.
Apart from anything else, I need to explain how bad humans are at swimming!
[break]
Good grief.
Why didn't I think of that before... no. Hmm.
I need to talk to Green.
[break]
There's air here, right? But out there, there's no air? Vacuum?
Yes.
In order for me to survive, um, stay not dead, in a vacuum, I need special equipment, right?
Yes.
Like these, a sort of special clothes. And a helmet, that goes over the head like this, that keeps the air in.
Yes.
We call this a space suit. You know of these things?
Yes.
The ship I came in on had one.
Yes.
You know, I wish you'd stop saying yes to everything.
I am sorry. I do not understand the idea you say.
Might a space suit be useful to us now?
[untranscribable conversation]
Yes. Do you have a space suit?
No. But my ship had one, and that wrecked ship up in the hills seems to be the same sort of ship. It might have one.
[untranscribable conversation]
Can you get the space suit?
I'm not sure. The ship's mostly underwater. And it looks very dead.
You will get the space suit.
What would it be useful for? How would we get it through the barrier?
It does not go through the barrier.
What does it do, then?
A space suit has an engine. It fly. It fly up there to the Big Ship.
Oh. Wow.
Tomorrow you will get the space suit.
If the ship has one. If I can get it out of the ship. Will the hatches open without power?
Yes.
Ah. Right.
[break]
A flying space suit. Well, that's a step up from a raft.
I wonder if the ship has one? I wonder if I can get it out. I wonder if it works.
Looks like I'll be finding out tomorrow.
I'll tell you something; Green looked pretty pissed off. I wonder what I said?
[transmit]
I think I'm beginning to understand the sealin mindset. When they need to get something done ---- learn English, repel invaders, get a spacesuit out of a wrecked ship in a lake at the top of a hill ---- they obsess about it. When there's nothing for them to do, they relax completely. The switch between the two is not as smooth as it could be.
Green has switched from relaxation mode into obsession mode.
About five minutes after dawn was turned on, Green was ringing my doorbell energetically. When I opened the door, she stormed in with Black trailing behind. I managed to put her off long enough to get dressed and have my usual morning cup of coffeeoid, before she started instructing me in great detail what I was going to do today.
Unfortunately she forgot how bad my memory is. When I finally managed to get through that there was no way I was going to remember all the details, which sounded quite important, I could practically see the frustration boiling off her. I could tell that she really wanted to do this herself. Alas, the sealin body is not particularly equipped for battling undergrowth and climbing hills.
As a result the morning turned into memorisation drill. There's a lot to remember.
You see, she doesn't know what kind of ship it is. She doesn't know whether the ship power's still on. She doesn't know whether the spacesuit power is still on. She doesn't know what species the spacesuit is designed to fit ---- she wasn't entirely clear on this; I gather the Builder ships mostly carried humans, with some ships being assigned to non-humans ---- and she doesn't know what the suit's been configured for. If, indeed, there is one.
Which means that there are contingency plans layered on top of contingency plans. Luckily, I am able to make notes; after a few tries I got a rich, dark sauce from the invisible chefs. That plus a finger and a blanket makes an incredibly crude but serviceable means of recording diagrams. But I can't write with it, not properly, so I'm reduced to diagrams and single letters indicating important features.
Here's a summary:
If the ship's power is on, I can tell the onboard computer to open the spacesuit hatch. But it's not likely to work in English. I have a phrase in Builder that supposed to do the trick.
If the ship's power is not on, I'm going to have to locate the hatch and cut through it with Green's magic pocket knife. (Apparently the hull is only cuttable if the power's off. A structural integrity field?) I have diagrams showing which hatch it is.
I have a number of diagrams that will allow me to identify what kind of ship it is. Some kinds, unfortunately, require me to look at the tail of the ship, which is at the bottom of the lake. I am going to have to see how feasible that is; if not, I'll just have to guess. The make of ship is important because the spacesuit hatch location varies from ship to ship. If necessary, I suppose I could cut them all open.
I have stick figures of five different types of space suit. Three are human. I know how to check the suit power plant for each of them, and instructions for removing the lift harness. Some of the suits require careful use of the knife to do this. Green instructed me to be very, very careful. I asked what would happen if I cut the power plant by mistake. She avoided the question.
I do not have instructions on how to operate the suits. I am supposed to remove the lift belts and walk back. She was very insistent on this.
Also, I had the following conversation:
"You have known the space suit," she said at one point. "You have known the space suit and you have not say-ed. You have known the space suit prior to the storm. If you have say-ed then you have fly-ed with the space suit away from the storm. If you have say-ed then now you and we not on the island. The Big Ship have come and it have take-ed the island and we not on the Big Ship."
Damn it. I'm stuck here too, you know? How was I supposed to know I could have used it to escape from the storm? I've never even seen one, for God's sake!
Hell.
She's ringing the door bell. I'd better get started.
[break]
Argh.
I have it.
Things did not go according to plan.
I set off up the hill. On my back was a makeshift pack made out of blanket and strips of blanket. In the middle, carefully rolled up and smeared with fat from a dozen or so salmon-things was the blanket with all my scribbles on it. Guess who had to rip open a pile of dead fish and pull out the fatty tissues with their bare hands? Oh, yes, it's the only person on the island with hands. It stinks. But with any luck it should protect my notes from getting to wet during the swim across the lake. The pack also contains the magic pocket knife.
Up the hill. Remember a few days ago I said that the forests weren't flattened as badly as I thought? Well, I'd only seen the edge of the forest at that point. Uphill of the Observation Tower they got worse. A lot worse. It was a single tangled mass of undergrowth that I had to pick my way through. Eventually I got out the pocket knife, turned it on, and waved it back and forth in front of me, machete-style; that helped, but I couldn't walk with it as I was terrified I'd trip and impale myself on the blade. And that damned pack caught on every protruding branch all the way up, I'll swear.
Two or three hours later I finally got to the top; total distance, maybe about a kilometre. Maybe two. The shallow basin containing the lake fell away in front of me, and it was a single morass of branch-filled mud. The ship hadn't shifted in the storm.
The heat of the fake sun, shining vertically downwards and now a bit closer than it had been at the bottom of the hill, had dried the surface of a lot of the mud. This made it more difficult. There was just enough crust to make it impossible to swim through, even if I could find a stretch that wasn't clogged with branches.
Eventually I cut myself a couple of long staffs and used them as a tripod. I would stand on an invisible, submerged branch, leaning on one of the sticks. I would probe ahead with the other stick until it hit bottom. Then I would try and find another subsurface branch with my foot. Then I would attempt to take my weight off the second stick so I could remove it and repeat. By the time I got past the watery mud into the muddy water, where the sticks wouldn't touch bottom but it was actually possible to swim, another two or three hours had passed and I was (a) exhausted and (b) actually worrying that the sun might turn off soon.
But I got there. Eventually.
When I hauled myself up onto the nose of the ship, I just lay flat out of sheer tiredness. The sun glared down into my eyes but I was too exhausted to raise an arm to sheild them. I just lay there. I don't think I fell asleep, but it took me a while to finally get some energy back and sit up.
The sun hadn't moved, of course.
I was covered in mud from head to toe. Mud was in my ears and in my mouth. It tasted disgusting, like the stuff dredged up from the bottom of a really old duck-pond. I promised myself, once I returned to the hotel, a very long bath, a very large drink, and an even larger meal ---- like an idiot I'd forgotten to bring any food with me and it was now a fair way past lunch-time.
The black-glass window was covered with mud and twigs. I washed it off as best as I could and peered through. Nothing I could make out through the dark glass. But, good news: according to the diagram, which miraculously hadn't got wet, this was indeed a small shuttle of the same kind I had arrived in (the blunt nose was so-many paces wide and so-many paces high and the window was such-and-such a shape, etc).
This was the moment I was dreading. I had to dive under that thick, muddy water and get into the ship. If there was an air pocket and it wasn't stale, I could breath it. If there wasn't... well... I'd have to get out again somehow.
I got into the water, and felt for the hatch edge with my feet. It was maybe a metre and a half down. The water was quite opaque. I floated there for a while, mustering up the nerve, and finally took a couple of deep breaths and grabbed for the edge.
I missed and came to the surface again.
A couple of tries later I finally got my hand around the lip, and pulled myself under. I had my eyes closed tightly and the warm liquid mud pressed around my mouth and nostrils and in my ears... I couldn't spare a hand for my nose so I frantically tried not to tilt my head too much and I was running out of breath although it couldn't have been more than a few seconds and I was certain that this was a very, very stupid thing to do and I could quite easily drown here and then my head broke the surface again, and I was inside.
I gasped through my mouth. The air was, well, air. I managed to scrape away the mud from my eyes and face and got my first look at the inside of the ship.
The sun shone down through the smeared front window, lighting the inside dimly but visibly with a warm orange glow. It could have been my old ship. There was the pilot's chair, now canted back at an angle and raised towards the sky. There were some of the hatches, now closed. There were the lighting panels, now dark.
The water level was only a little above above hatch entrance, which meant the nose of the ship was still airtight. In turn, that meant that unless the life support was still working ---- extremely unlikely ---- the air wouldn't last long.
I spat out some mud, and said the first sentence.
Green had told me, somewhere between the tenth and fifteenth try at getting my pronunciation right, that it meant something like 'ship, respond'. If the power was still working, I should hear the ship reply in Builder. What it said would be irrelevant. If that failed, I could try wanting at it.
Nothing happened.
I tried a few more times, with the stress in different places, but no luck. I even tried the second sentence, which meant something like 'emergency, open suit locker immediately'. So I tried wanting; usually I needed a target, so I aimed at the pilot's chair. And, miracle upon miracles, there was a faint rattling buzz in response.
But that was all.
I tried again, and got the same buzz. Was the ship too damaged to respond to my commands? If so, I was stuffed, because with the power on I couldn't cut through the hull with the pocket knife. I had to get the ship to open voluntarily.
I repeated the experiment, this time moving around the small space to try and find where the sound was coming from. It seemed to be directionless, until suddenly I had a thought and put one ear in the water. Yes, there was a very faint voice speaking in Builder. The speaker was underwater.
But the microphone was underwater, too. There wasn't a contingency for this.
I thought in desperation. Could I speak underwater? Well, no. The sealin could, though. I could go and get Green up here, on a sledge or something... no, I couldn't. Not through that forest.
I got tired of treading water, so grabbed the base of the pilot's chair and hauled myself up on it. The back was nearly level, and there was just enough space for me to sit on it with my head not quite touching the window.
Perhaps I could sabotage the ship with the pocket knife somehow? Disable the power systems? But I didn't know where to start, and any power plant was almost certainly at the stern, deep under water.
There was a lighting panel in front of my face. Reflexively, I wanted at it. To my surprise it came on; a deep, sullen orange glow, but it lit.
I filled with a sudden excitement. There was a hatch off to my right; the food hatch, if I remembered correctly. I wanted at it. It sprung open a few centimetres and then, very slowly, began to open the rest of the way.
This was the key. Where was the space suit hatch? On the left of the door as you went in. And the door was on the starboard side of the ship. Which meant that the hatch was somewhere down there, below that murky surface.
I turned on all the panels I could see, and wanted blindly into the water. Faint glimmers of light came up through the watery mud, but it wasn't transparent enough for me to make out the other side of the hatch. Was I going to have to swim down and find the hatch by feel? I didn't have to see the underwater lighting panels, and they came on.
Dropping back into the water, I felt for the other side of the hatch. It was only a metre or so wide. Inside the ship, the water level was low enough that I could rest my feet on it easily. Which meant that about fifty centimetres below my feet, in the thick wall of the ship, there was a compartment. I tried to visualise, concentrated, and wanted as hard as I could...
There was a great glup of air. The empty suit came bobbing to the surface, brushing the back of my legs.
I couple of minutes later, I was back on the surface and hauling the suit up onto the nose of the ship. It was good to get back into the sunlight, even if it was fake, and breathe the fresh air. It was even better to know that I had the suit and I wasn't going to have to go back down there again. All I had to do now was to cut away the lift harness, wrap it and the suit's power pack into my makeshift rucksack, pick my way through the mud and down the hill, deliver it all into Green's greedy... ah... flippers, and then I could sleep.
There was just one minor flaw: the suit was not one that Green had told me about. Oh, I know I'd never seen any suit before, but she was quite clear in what to look for. Of the three humanoid suits, one of them was lightweight like my shirt, with a bubble helmet. Another was scaled like a fish with an opaque helmet. The third was like a suit of armour, made of hard plates and the helmet was part of the shoulder section and practically non-existent. This suit was like a traditional Earth space suit, made of heavy fabric with arm and knee pads. The helmet had a hundred-and-eighty degree wraparound visor that was only ten centimetres or so high. The whole thing was, after I had brushed the mud off, orange. There was no life support pack on the back; apparently the Builder's suits didn't need air tanks.
I found the lift belt all right; the controls were on the belt around the waist, except that the belt was part of the fabric of the suit. It would be another cut-up job. Unfortunately there were no nice, easy-to-find pieces of webbing making the harness that I could cut around... and the power pack was internal, too.
So I would have to carry this large, cumbersome, heavy space suit across the lake, through the forest, under the bushes, through the undergrowth...
The hell with that. There was a little blue light on the waist that meant that the power pack was running. If Green could fly this thing with just flippers and a wish, so could I. The helmet unclipped easily enough ---- it rotated an eighth of a turn clockwise and lifted off. Part of the helmet ring was a thing like a big zip. I grabbed it and pulled and the whole front of the thing opened up.
Putting it on was just as easy. Legs go in, arms go in, pull the zip up until you feel it lock... the suit was just my size and surprisingly comfortable. I was wet and muddy but it stopped chafing completely after a few seconds. Super-technology or good tailoring, I didn't care. I thought about leaving the helmet off, as I was having doubts about the air supply, but there wasn't anywhere to clip it, so I carefully placed it on the neck ring, twisted, and it locked into place. Very suddenly, the suit inflated around me, deflated again, and glowing letters in the Builder scribble scrolled across my field of view.
The suit was working.
I couldn't read any of the messages. But they quickly vanished, leaving a reassuring blue dot in the corner of my vision. There was a just barely noticeable breeze in the helmet and the air was cool. The field of view was cramped, but with that wrap-around visor, I could see pretty well. The one thing I couldn't see was down.
But the big question was, could I make it fly?
There was only one control, a big dial at the waist. I felt for it with one hand, grasped it firmly, and turned gingerly. It was stiff, but rotated quarter of a turn and went click, some read-outs appeared, and the suit suddenly felt buoyant.
It couldn't possibly be that easy.
It was.
I wanted. The suit moved. It was as easy as that. I could make it move in any direction, rotate it about any axis, merely by wanting it to happen. It took maybe five minutes to become proficient. Even the read-outs were easy; altitude and velocity were obvious, and the proximity sensor was unfamiliar enough to take a couple of minutes before I worked out what it was for.
I drifted over the lake for a while, marvelling at just how simple it felt. It was, if anything, disappointingly simple. I'd had dreams of flying; gliding, swooping, diving effortlessly through the air, powered by nothing but a thought. Making the suit fly was just as trivial, so mundane as to suck the joy out of it. The suit moved upright, pushing its way through the air. It wouldn't swoop. It had a top speed of maybe thirty kilometres an hour. It was a machine.
Stopping briefly back at the wrecked ship to pick up Green's magic pocket knife and attach it to a handy belt loop, I went home. It took ten minutes to fly over what it had taken me four or five hours to hack through.
The sealin were waiting on the beach. I got a certain amount of pleasure from dropping vertically down on them out of the sun.
They both leapt up, Green stammering profusely. "You fly," she kept saying, as she looked the suit over. "I have say-ed not fly!"
"Only way of getting the suit back," I replied coolly, unzipping it and stepping out.
She groped for words. "The power pack is more prior... too much prior... not dead but will die. You fly and you are scared. If the power pack die then you fall and you die."
I suddenly felt cold. "But the blue light?"
"The blue light say the power pack has power. The blue light say the power pack has few power."
I thought about the engine giving out, the suit suddenly dropping from the sky... and that blue light in the corner of my field of view. Reassuring status indicator? Low power alert? "You didn't tell me that."
"I say not fly."
"You didn't say why I wasn't to fly."
"I say not... I..." Green suddenly looked around wildly. Black said something, and they rattled back and forth for quite a while. Eventually Green looked up at me and held my eyes.
"No. I did not say. I... I do not have the words..."
And then she closed her eyes and rolled over onto her back in a piece of body language so obviously submissive that I realised that the word she had been looking for had been 'sorry'. I felt vaguely ashamed of thinking badly of her earlier. She had no doubt been under even more stress than I had been when I first arrived here.
I noticed Black pointedly looking away, and in haze of general embarrassment and knowledge that I really did not want to get involved in sealin dominance rituals, managed to get Green to roll over again.
The moment passed, and we talked about the suit. Neither of them had seen anything like it. Nothing in Green's prodigious memory told her how to remove the lift belt and power pack. It seemed to be some new, integrated model.
Finally she gave up on it and said: "I do not wear this space suit. You will wear this space suit. You will fly."
"Fly where?"
"You will fly to the Big Ship. You will tell it that it will come to our home."
"How will I tell it?"
"I will say."
"When?"
"Tomorrow," she replied. "Tonight you will take the space suit to the apartment. The apartment will not-dead the power pack."
The suit is now lying untidily in a corner of the apartment. I zipped it up and put the helmet on, and it half-inflated again; and the power light on the waist band is blinking rapidly. I assume that means that the suit is charging up.
And now I think I have spent enough time in the bath, I've had the drink, so it must be time for the meal.
I love this room.
[break]
I've just got back from the beach. Night fell about two minutes ago.
I'd been relaxing in the chair with a drink of something unidentifiable, almost falling asleep, before I realised that there was something I needed to do, and there wasn't a lot of daylight left in which to do it.
I put the drink down and hurried out of the hotel. Green was on the beach but, to my relief, Black was nowhere to be seen. She looked round as I approached.
"This morning," I said, "You said I didn't tell you about the suit."
She blinked. "Yes."
I sat down in front of her, closed my eyes, and lay down on my back.
There was a long moment, and then she said 'yes' again, very quietly. I opened my eyes to see her blinking rapidly. She looked down at me, said, "I do not have the words," nuzzled me very gently with her snout, and then slithered down the beach into the water.
And then night fell.
[transmit]
This is because there are two suns in the sky. The fake one, directly above; and a real one, off to one side.
We've arrived.
I was woken up early, just before what would normally be dawn, by unaccustomed light streaming in through the window and into my face. I spent a few moments in vague confusion before I remembered that the fake sun always shone vertically downwards, and so would never directly light up my room. I don't think I've ever woken up so quickly.
We couldn't have been out of the warp bubble for long. I reached the beach at about the same moment that Green and Black did. We didn't say anything, just looked.
The new sun is painfully white, tinged with violet. It hangs malevolently in the matte black sky, casting a raw, burning light over the island. Under its rays, all the colours seem to have been washed out of things; the grass is too pale, the sea, normally blue, has become a steely grey with nasty violet highlights.
There are other things in the sky, too. All around there are pin-pricks of light; not stars, but something shining in the sunlight. There are a lot of them but it's just too bright to make out what they are.
"Where are we?" I said eventually.
"I do not know," Green replied nervously. She had no hands to shade her eyes and was squinting instead; she was trying to avoid looking at the new sun, but it kept drawing all our gazes. "I wish that the Big Ship not stay."
"Me, too."
I looked again at the violet highlights shining off the water. Oh, dear, I thought.
"We should get inside. Now. I bet there's a lot of ultraviolet coming off that thing."
"Ultraviolet?"
"Light. Um. Much blue; too much blue? Hurts your eyes, can cause skin problems."
"Much blue. Yes. Yes."
Safely in the Hotel's shadow, we paused.
"I think you'd better teach me how to use the space suit as soon as possible," I said. Then dawn came; the fake sun above us flared into life. The amount of light around doubled and it grew painfully bright. With the fake sun shining down and the alien sun shining across there was no place to hide. We went in.
[break]
Say that again?
The helmet has a radio. This pocket has a radio. We will have the radio pocket. The radios will talk. You and we will talk.
That's clear. What's the range?
Range?
How far, um, at what distance will they stop working?
Very far. Very very far. More far than the Big Ship.
That's good.
You can take the dictaphone. It listen with the radio.
Oh? I can talk to it with the suit radio?
Yes.
But... couldn't it be used as a radio receiver, then? Why haven't the people in the Big Ship talked to us with it?
I do not know.
Hmm. Well; what do you want me to do?
You will fly to the ceiling. There will be a floor. You will land on the floor. You will find a pedestal. I will draw the pedestal. You will remove the helmet. The ceiling is far one kilometre. There is air. You will put the helmet on the pedestal. The helmet and the radio pocket have radio. It will talk to it. I will talk to the pedestal.
How do you know there'll be a floor?
Logic say that there will be a floor. The Big Ship have persons. The persons control it. There will be a control. It will be on a floor.
But mightn't the controls be on the other side of the barrier?
Yes.
Right.
The air is hot. The air will be more hot. The Big Ship is not far to the sun. The Big Ship must go.
I get you. Are you sure the suit is charged up?
Yes. The power pack is full. The helmet has food and water.
How long will it last before the pack goes flat?
Six or twelve or eighteen days.
So I don't have to worry about power?
I do not understand worry.
Never mind... all right. You'll have to draw a pedestal.
[break]
Right.
Ready to go.
It's seriously bright out there. We have the window closed, and the Hotel's air conditioning is keeping the air comfortable, but it must be baking. The bird-things have all gone; if they have any sense, they're hiding in the forest somewhere.
This has to be an oversight of some kind. The Big Ship went to all this trouble to provide the island with a compatible sun, and now it just seems to have forgotten all about us...
It's dawning on me just how much of a long shot this trip is going to be. Green has her hopes set on finding some sort of control station. I'm not sure there's going to be one. I don't think this ship is a product of any civilisation she knows about. Why haven't they contacted us? If this dictaphone can receive radio transmissions, why hasn't it picked anything up?
But she's right; I have to try. The island can't take much of this double sunlight. And the Big Ship brought us here for a reason, and I'm not entirely certain I want to know what the reason is.
Wish me luck.
[break]
I've found a place where I can rest. There's no sign of any kind of control gantry, and certainly no pedestals. The only reasonably flat place where I can set down is on top of the housing that appears to hold the fake sun, which is where I am now; it's a vast funnel, sweeping up behind me and joining the core of the ship.
The trip up was much less eventful and easier than I expected. Green and Black escorted me to the foyer. From the way they recoiled back when the door opened, I suspect the air outside was hot; I felt nothing, of course. So I stepped outside by myself, twisted the dial to on and took off with little ceremony.
The Hotel slid past and then dropped away below me. The whole island slowly fell away as I gained altitude; for the first time, I felt something of the thrill of flying. This was quickly brought short when a gauge suddenly appeared in my helmet view, highlighted in warning amber. Green had taught me several of the builder squiggles and I quickly worked out that I was getting too close to the fake sun, and the suit was overheating. I had to detour away from the centre before I could safely continue rising.
As a result, I reached the top of the cage near the edge, where the spines were still fairly far apart. I approached one; a colossal horizontal column, matte black with violet highlights from the new sun. Gingerly I rose up past it, my hands outstretched, and at exactly the moment I expected it my hands made contact with the barrier wall, now a lid over the top of the island.
I'd planned for this. Staying in contact, I accelerated inwards, towards the centre of the ship. At the suit's top speed of thirty kilometres an hour the only sensation I had of the frictionless barrier rubbing against my back was a gentle pressure. This way I knew I would not run the risk of running head-first into the invisible wall at high speed.
The trip inward took much longer than the trip up; the cage was much wider than it was high. I watched the island slowly slide by beneath me. From here, the extensive coral reefs were clearly visible; they stretched out from the shore to where they were abruptly cut short by the curved black wall bounding the area abducted by the Big Ship. I saw the hills, their forests smashed and broken, and the brown smear that was the lake. In the centre was a tiny shining thing. I saw the gleaming white buildings, and only realised now that they were arranged in a distinct pattern around the island; like a Celtic knot of some kind, with every intersection marked by a structure. The only exception was the concrete landing pad up at one tip, with its two blank white hangars. And that must be the Hotel.
I began to realise then that the barrier above me was beginning to curve upwards. I slowed and look around. The spines, I saw, rose in a majestic sweep, meeting the central core of the ship at a point considerably above me. The core extended downward and became the centre of the kilometres-wide funnel that was the sun.
As I flew over the wide, flat rim of the funnel, I was suddenly taken from flying over a landscape to exploring inside a huge machine. The glowing greens and blues of the overexposed landscape were replaced with the dull blacks and sheens of the Big Ship's structure, and all sparkling with violet highlights from the new sun, now behind me.
The funnel was smooth and featureless. I flew around it, nevertheless, and confirmed that there was no sign of any kind of control mechanism. I reported back to Green; she just said, "Yes."
Next stop was to follow the spines upward. I repeated my trick of putting my back to the barrier and sliding upward, this time feet first. The spines grew closer together, and the huge black wall of the central column moved towards me. Above me, between my feet, I could see the rest of the ship bulking out in a huge, confused mass of pipework and chambers, shining in the sunlight.
I was beginning to feel quite dizzy from being head downwards, so I slowed down preparatory to turning over and having a result. It was a good job I did, because with a tremendous impact I hit an invisible wall feet first at about ten kilometres an hour. It doesn't sound fast, but I was slammed against it painfully and then, somehow, through it, winded and tumbling end over end.
And somehow the suit motor had failed, because I was falling, flailing madly as I tumbled towards the funnel far below, the spines and column sliding past on all sides...
But then I realised that they weren't. And that I wasn't falling, after all. I collected myself, drew myself together, applied a slight touch on the suit to stop my spin, and realised that somehow I was in free fall. I must have left the Big Ship's artificial gravity field.
I called Green. There was no reply.
Up here, there were still a few hundred metres between the spines and between the spines and the central column. But they were all so massive that the cramped little space I was in was horribly claustrophobic. Almost without thinking, I rotated myself so that the column, easily a kilometre wide, was below me. Suddenly the view made sense; the spines swept up and away from the central beam I was hanging above. Ahead I could see where the beam flared outwards into the vast trumpet of the sun housing, and far above I could see a curved line of brilliant blue; the edge of the sea, just visible beyond the funnel.
I gingerly moved forward, back to the place where I had hit the barrier. It felt just as slippery and strange as the barrier down by the edge of the sea. This one, however, was flexible. If I pushed at it, it gave. I pushed harder, and suddenly my arm popped through; I could feel the edge of the field pinching my arm. The suit motor pushed me though and I popped out the other side like a spat melon seed. The suit kept me hanging in space, but now gravity was pulling at my limbs.
I called Green again. This time she responded.
I explained what I had seen so far. No pedestals. A radio blackout beyond the barrier. She was silent for a moment, and then said, "I do not know. I do not know the Big Ship. What will you do?"
"I'm not sure," I replied. "I could try exploring some of the rest of the ship, but if the radios won't work through the field there's no way you could talk to a pedestal even if I found one."
I heard the sound of one of the sealin changing position. There was no surf; they must have been in the Hotel. Good.
"You will return," she said eventually.
I thought. "Hang on," I said slowly. "This ship must have some crew, right? What if I could find some?"
"Find some?"
"If I could find my way onto the ship, I'm sure I could get their attention. If necessary I could find a window and start banging on it."
"Yes."
"It's a long shot, but if I'm here already, I may as well try. What do you think."
"Yes."
"All right. I'll, oh, return in a couple of hours and report."
"Yes. Two hours."
I disconnected, hesitated, and plunged through the barrier again.
It might have been another kilometre or so to the main body of the ship. It might have been more, it might have been less; with the huge, abstract shapes, and the precise, sharp, blue-white light illuminating everything in crisp detail and inky shadows, it was practically impossible to judge distances. I knew it was a long way, and at the suit's top speed, it took several minutes to get there.
While the mass of pipework grew in front of me, I studied the sky. The black surrounded me on three sides, now. In the intense sunlight the stars were, as usual, invisible, but those metallic shapes resolved themselves to be disturbingly familiar; tiny, precise, shining in the sun, they were sister ships to the one I was now flying over. When I thought of the Big Ship in orbit over the sealin's planet, looking as if it was a few thousand metres up, I realised that these ships must be correspondingly further away... thousands of kilometres. I could still make out every detail.
Below me the spines finally met the central column. They merged into it and joined to form a thicker, ribbed column. It ran forward and plunged into the main mass of the ship...
...and I say mass because it was not a single structure. The main body of the ship seemed to be, if the tiny part of it I saw was representative, a huge, tangled, contorted mass of pipes, chambers, valves, spirals, forks, spheres, cuboids, cones, ductwork, struts, girders and scaffolding at least sixty kilometers long and ten wide. That meant that there must have been about five thousand cubic kilometres of the stuff. If God drilled for oil, this would be the refinery He distilled it in.
Those vast pipes could have contained machinery or living habitats for all I knew. I couldn't get into it too deeply. There were no windows, hatches, controls, lights or anything; everything I saw was completely featureless. There weren't even any seams. The pipework was made out of a smooth, shiny material, quite unlike the solidified tar of the spines or the funnel, and it was quite even. I explored as much as I could, and everywhere I looked it was the same. A single, incomprehensible mass.
I realised that I'd seen a tiny proportion of the ship. There might be something more interesting up towards the front. But that was a hundred kilometres away. At the suit's top speed, it would take me over three hours just to get there.
Instead I returned to the barrier and reported back. Green didn't have anything to say, but suggested that I come home. I didn't want to do that just yet. The suit is surprisingly comfortable, and I didn't want to give up. I descended to the sun funnel and I've been investigating that since.
There has to be a way into this ship.
If only I knew where.
[break]
Green? Are you there?
Yes. Will you come?
I've had a thought. There's one place I haven't tried yet.
Where is it?
Up where the spines meet the column. I want to have a look inside, up where the two meet. It's just it's on the other side of the barrier, and I thought I should warn you I'll be out of touch.
Yes. You will look and then you will return.
All right, all right, I will.
Yes.
I'm off. I'll be right back.
[break]
That was horrible.
I left the funnel and crossed the barrier, but this time instead of flying through the gap between the spines and out into open space I stayed under the spines and kept going. The space shrank until the spines touched and merged above me, and met the column below.
But, the spines were tubular. So where every pair of spines merged into the column, there was a shrinking triangular space. And it was this that I flew up.
I'd remembered that ribbed column, you see. It didn't look as if the spines had been absorbed completely into the column. There might be a gap. And I was right.
It wasn't a large gap. As the spines merged into the column the gap shrank. Inside there, the only entrance behind me towards the funnel, it was absolutely pitch black. Luckily I'd worked out how to turn the helmet light on (wanting into the lens assembly on the front of the helmet; when I worked it out I thought irrelevantly I really love these user interfaces), and by its light I could see that the triangular tube closed to be a few metres across, and then shrank no longer.
On I went.
This wasn't like the barrier. The walls of the tube were of that roughened, black material, and when moving quickly I had to keep away from them. Eventually I just stretched prone and dived, superman-style, straight down, neck arched back so I could see where I was going.
The tube went on, unchanging and featureless, for a long way. Two kilometres? I really have no idea. But eventually, to my utter surprise and considerable relief, far ahead I saw a light. A gentle orange glow.
I'd found my way into the ship.
The tube walls suddenly turned from black tarry stuff into smooth shiny stuff laced with glowing orange lines. The tube curved away, bending sinuously and confusingly. I followed it. It got narrower, and for a moment I thought that it might get too narrow for me to follow, but then it ballooned out into a large, featureless chamber, banded with shining green. The orange tube continued on the far side.
I continued following it. It wound around, this way and that way, curving and twisting, never branching, until quite suddenly it opened into a vast spherical chamber. The walls were inscribed in brilliant primary colours, spirals and triangles and rays...
But in the centre of the chamber there was something very familiar. Remember the Observatory? Right.
The streamers of light here formed a twisting, twirling tornado of motion and colour. Completely silent, it vibrated with vibrant life.
I stared, entranced, while I drifted out of the tunnel. It drew the senses, lulled the soul. The trailing streamers of light drew across my mind and slowly began to smooth over the thoughts there. I forgot what I was doing and where I was going and only watched, as it... it... it talked to me.
Unauthorised.
There was no voice speaking in my mind, there was just the knowledge of intent, appearing there by itself. My numb brain started to move again.
Unauthorised. Unknown.
I looked around frantically. I was deep inside the thing, now. I wanted the suit to take me away, but it didn't respond. The lights swirled around me and through me. I squeezed my eyes shut but they were in my head, too.
Escape? Unauthorised.
"Who are you?" I cried, my voice echoing in the helmet and, no doubt, being broadcast all over the room.
Control.
"Let me go!"
Unauthorised. Origin?
"I was on the island..."
Cargo? Occupied?
"Yes. Who are you?"
Scavenger. Only unoccupied.
"What?" The lights, the dizziness, the un-voice, all were pulling my brain in ways it wasn't designed to go. I felt myself fraying, inside.
Cargo occupied. Three. Mistake.
"Please let me go..."
Return cargo. Destination?
"I want to go home!"
Apologies.
"Just let me out!"
And then I had drifted through it, and had hit the opposite wall of the chamber. The glowing lines were deeply scored into the surface, and I gripped the grooves they made for dear life, and just hung there until the shaking stopped.
Moving slowly, being very, very careful not to turn around, I pulled myself over to the tunnel entrance and into it. The suit was responding again, and I fled down the corridor and round the corner, and it was only then that I stopped.
I'm very glad I brought the dictaphone. I have to talk, to get things straight in my head. Its words are burnt into my mind so deeply that they were beginning to push me out. I need to talk, to be myself, to reestablish dominance in my own brain. I never believed that there were things that could drive you mad just by looking at them until now. I can't face that thing again.
Which is a pity, because I think this is the wrong tunnel.
[break]
I don't know what time it is. I'm tired.
I'm lost. Completely, unutterably, lost.
I followed the tunnel. The orange walls changed to blue, the tunnel became square, then one of the walls curved away to form a triangular chamber... I took one of the exits. It led to a nasty maze of dog-legs, picked out in purple triangles. Somehow I got out of that and found myself in a set of nested tunnels, with crescent cross sections. That led to a tall gallery full of glass pipes with brilliant stars bouncing back and forth in them.
I kind of forget the rest.
I don't know how much of the ship I've seen. I suspect there's a lot more. I've tried to memorise routes, but my brain is all fuzzy and I can't remember things. Not long ago I found myself drifting from one tunnel to the next at random in a sort of trance, hoping against hope that somehow I'd find myself staring at black sky and the exit, dreading that I might find myself back with the thing.
Currently I'm in a flat, disc-shaped room. Three tunnels meet it on one side, two on the other. I'm reasonably sure I came in on the side with two tunnels. But it's a place where I feel secure enough that I might be able to sleep. There's vacuum outside, I'm sure, but Green said that the suit will provide air, food and water as long as the power works...
I wonder what the sealin are doing, down there on the island.
I hope this thing can transmit out of the ship.
[transmit]
Cold flame. Walls. Twisting, turning... lights everywhere, no darkness... swirling light in my eyes... Unauthorised. Unauthorised. Unauthorised. Unauthorised.
Help me. Someone. Help. Me.
[pause]
Aaah.
My head feels full of fuzz. I can't think straight. This place is pushing in on me, and my mind is pushing out, and I'm getting crushed in between.
I don't know what time it is. My watch is inside the suit. I vaguely remember trying to sleep, and the rest is a fragmented jumble of glowing walls, twisting passages and that thing swirling at the back of my head.
I slept. I think. The room I was in ---- wide and low, tunnels going up and down, right? Corners. Yes. I was sleeping in one of the corners. This isn't it. I'm at one end of a jagged green glass cylinder. Several tunnels meet at this end, tubular with longitudinal green stripes. The other end dissolves into a spiral of sharp teeth, almost meeting at the centre. Green and yellow light slowly swirls through the walls.
[pause]
The suit's got tubes for water and food. The water is cold. The food is that paste I had on the ship. God, it tastes good.
It's got other attachments. Let's just say that they work.
There's still fog in my head, though it's slowly clearing. I have to think. I need to find a way out.
But all these tunnels are the same. No, no, that's not true. They're all different. They're so radically different that there's no common theme. There's no order to this place.
It's a maze of twisting, turning little passageways, all different.
The suit's head-up display is no help. It's been in fly mode ever since, ever since I left the Hotel yesterday, and the display is showing me a number of gauges that probably relate to velocity and orientation and so on. The altitude gauge has gone. Annoyingly, I'm sure there'll be an inertial map in there somewhere, I just don't know how to get at it.
[pause]
More water.
In free fall, moving the suit is easy enough, probably easier than walking would be. Make a slight mental gesture, the suit moves. I suspect I should probably switch off fly mode when I sleep, or I'll start moving around in my dreams. Which will probably be spectacularly bad. I can still see that thing, glittering behind my eyelids.
Gah. I'm feeling bad. That pressure inside my head is building up again, and everything's going fuzzy.
Oh, God.
[break]
Clearer.
I've moved again. I'm in ---- some sort of spherical chamber, with a rotating glass prism in the middle. Several tunnels. Glowing white rings on the walls.
It wouldn't be so bad if I couldn't remember what happened. But I do. I remember groping through a nauseating jumble of concepts and sensations and ideas, my mind working nightmarishly badly, everything shot through with the taste of vomit and that those trails of colour sliding across my vision and over everything the vast un-voice shouting huge, incomprehensible words...
Ugh. Change the subject.
I've got to get going, before I go under again.
Down the tunnel. Contrasting dark and light blue, in diagonal stripes, this time.
Turn. Twist. Turn. A junction. Both branches identical ---- left.
Turn. Turn. Hmm. This is new.
The tunnel just stops, neatly capped off ahead of me. The flat circular wall is inscribed with concentric white rings. They're lighting up as I approach.
Hey. They're actually reacting to me.
As I get closer they get brighter, and... woah.
I reached out to touch them and they were suddenly gone. The tunnel stretches forward ten metres or so and there's another cap. What's going on?
This cap's glowing as I approach too. Oh. The other one's reappeared behind me. I'm trapped.
Or...
Yes! It's an airlock. I touched the new disk, and it vanished. The tunnel goes on unimpeded. Perhaps I'm getting somewhere.
Push on. The tunnel's dead straight, still cyan and dark blue.
Argh. I think I'm going to go under again. Stop. Stop. Flight mode off.
Okay. Here we go.
[break]
That was bad.
My vision's fuzzy and I have a splitting headache and I feel sick. But I'm still in the tunnel, which is a good thing. Obviously while I'm having a seizure I'm not lucid enough to switch to flight mode again.
Water. Proceed.
The tunnel's still completely straight, stretching on as far as I can see. This is new. I seem to be actually getting somewhere.
Is that light? Yes, it is!
The tunnels opened out into a long hall. It's tubular, quite wide, very well lit by a mosaic of white patches along the walls, and stretches as far as I can see, perfectly straight, in both directions. Right down the middle runs a thick, matte black rod.
I would appear to have a choice, then. Which way?
Let's have a look at that rod. Odd. It's not matte. It's... cloudy. I think. It looks more like a invisible glass pipe full of very dense black fog, swirling slightly. It looks strange. It--
Aaah!
Damn, damn damn damn...
[untranscribable sounds]
Ouch.
What the...
I touched it. It... hang on, I need to get this straight. I touched the rod, or pipe, or whatever. It sucked me in, the world blurred around me, and then it spat me out again.
Wow.
I'm at the end of the corridor. It neatly terminates in a hemispherical end piece, with a tunnel leading off. The black rod comes a to a flat end about ten metres away. What was that?
Well, whatever.
I need to rest.
[break]
I feel much better. My vision's back to normal, the headache's ebbing, that awful pressure in my head is fading away. I still have glitter across my vision and the occasional swirling colour, and periodically I jump as I momentarily think I sense that un-voice deposit something in my head, and I haven't had another seizure.
The tunnel ran off in a straight line, with occasional side branches. I ignored them all and headed straight up. Eventually it opened out again and I was at the end of another of the big hallways, complete with smoky black rod.
With much trepidation, I reached out and gingerly touched the rod with my fingertips. This time I was prepared; the tunnel blurred and rushed silently by, and then I was at the other end. It took maybe five seconds. I think I know what those things are, now; the ship's rapid transit system.
There was another tunnel heading out. I followed it. It led to another hallway.
So far I've been down six of the hallways, and am at the start of a seventh. All the hallways and the connecting tunnels have been in a straight line. I don't know where I'm going or how far I've gone, but I must be making decent progress along the ship. Hopefully there'll be something interesting when the line terminates...
[break]
Not good. Not good.
I had another seizure, suddenly, just as I came out of one of the rods. My vision blurred briefly, my head ached, and I just had time to switch out of fly mode before my consciousness dissolved into the nightmare that I am becoming all to familiar with.
I can still feel that thing's tendrils brushing the inside of my skull...
I think that that was the twelfth rod. I could well have lost count.
Come on, I've got to reach the end some time.
[break]
I'm at the end! And it's impressive. Trust me on this.
The last rapid transit rod was a long one, several times as long as the other ones. And the connecting tunnel that followed it was short, only a hundred metres or so before it finally opened out into the chamber I'm looking at now.
It's vast. You could put the island in here.
It's spherical, and marked with a hexagonal pattern of holes. The holes look small; they must be a hundred metres across, at least. The wall of the sphere seems to be simple metal. The mosaic of white rectangles that was lighting the tunnels and hallways is completely absent.
Without illumination from the walls, the only light is that shed by the structures inside the sphere; huge, hard-edged geometrical shapes glowing in all the colours of the spectrum and plenty more besides. They fan out radially but asymmetrically from the centre of the sphere, at which there is a single point of brilliant green light.
They're not idle, these shapes. Periodically one will brighten, change shape slightly, slide around the centre until it is pointing somewhere else, or all of the above. The entire display, which must have been kilometres wide, is in constant motion.
This is, without doubt, the nerve centre of the ship.
Periodically, a brilliantly white line of fire stabs from one hole to another, perfectly skewering that green star in the sphere's centre. Shards of green light are shed in all directions while the vast shapes flicker madly, fast than the eye can follow, along as much of the line's length that they can reach. And then the line, so blazingly hot that I can feel the heat coming through my visor, will flick out again as if it had never been.
The problem is, where do I go from here? I'm not venturing out into that lot.
One thing I've noticed is that the beam of white fire always joins two of the holes that are diametrically opposed. Which means the only hole that will be safe to approach will be the one exactly opposite the entrance tunnel; there is no hole on this side for the beam to connect to.
That's assuming that there is such a hole. I can't see it because the green star is in the way. But the pattern of holes suggests there is one.
This is going to be interesting. I'm going to have to go round the edge, keeping as far from the holes (pits from my point of view), and hoping one's not going to become active while I'm near it.
I think I should rest first.
[break]
Well. That... worked. Sort of.
I entered the sphere and immediately started to fly along the wall. The sphere was so vast that I could barely see it curve when I looked straight ahead.
After a few hundred metres, though, it saw me. Whatever it was. One of the huge geometrical shapes of light suddenly pivoted around the axis point, and aimed directly at me, where upon it change shape, extending a sharp tooth of light towards me. I had just enough time to register its movement before it reached me. Blue light seemed to crystallise all around, forming a hard, transparent shell just out of my reach in all directions. I looked around wildly, surprised and shocked, and as I did so the huge blue jagged triangle touched the shell. There was no sense of acceleration, but the chamber suddenly wheeled vertiginously around me and then the shell shattered and evaporated, leaving me drifting, stunned, on the far side of the sphere. The shape shrank back to its original size and returned to doing whatever it was doing. The whole process took maybe two seconds.
Was that more rapid-transit system? I think this is the hole I was aiming for. If so, that would explain why I can't see the tunnel entrance through the transparent shapes ---- it will be blocked by that green star. And besides, the tunnel entrance will be for too small to see.
Perhaps it was a mechanism for moving crewpeople about the bridge quickly.
The hole is actually the wide end of an inverted cone. It descends into the deeps below my feet, lit only by the flickering of the shapes and the steady glow of that green star. The scale is, as usual, vast. The cone is at least as deep as the sphere is wide.
Well, this was where I wanted to go. I suppose I had better go down and... no.
No. No. Please, no. Not that. Anything but...
It's gone.
I thought for a moment I saw another of those things. Swirling lights nearby, just for a moment, and then it was gone.
I have got to get out of here!
[break]
I've descended into the cone. Directions are all arbitrary in free fall, of course. But I feel happier with the tip of the cone below me, so it seems as if I'm descending into a funnel-shaped pit.
It's big. It's featureless. The light from the sphere above is getting steadily fainter, and so it's getting dark. After the endless neon glows of my experiences so far on this ship, that's fine by me.
The walls are getting closer. They're now only ten metres or so apart, and narrowing every moment. If there isn't anything at the bottom of this pit, I'm going to feel like an idiot.
Spotlight on. Approaching the end.
There's a flat, black disk at the very tip. It's not lighting up when I shine the light on it. Not far away now... approaching... oh.
Wow.
Yes! I've done it! I'm finally outside! It wasn't a disk, it was an exit!
I'm now hanging below ---- excuse me, above ---- a vast, conical tower, stretching back until it meets a huge rounded shape. More towers spring out from the shape all around... of course. This is that ball at the front of the ship. I am floating just above the very front-most spine on the ship. I have travelled the entire distance, all the way from the cargo section at the stern to the very bowsprit itself!
Black sky surrounds me on five sides. It's wonderful.
From here it's a simple matter of flying back down the side of the ship on the outside. Past the ball, past the central core, through the weak bit of field by the spines, down through the air moist, thick air onto the island and I will be home...
Although...
Now I come to notice it, there's a fair amount going on in that black sky.
The new sun, violet and angry, is at my back. All around I can see vessels, similar to the Big Ship. They're everywhere; there must be hundreds. The closest is the size of my hand, the smallest just a metallic speck. I can see the close one has a bulbous object of some kind caught in its claws.
And... all the ships are facing the same way. Except this one. They're all pointing behind me. Hang on.
Oh, my god.
There's a...
Something. It's big, it's indistinct. It's curved. It looks like a ship, but it can't be. I can see Big Ships in front of it, just dots, which means they're thousands of kilometres away and it's still behind them. The new sun is off to one side of it, so the side that's being lit isn't the one that's facing me... I can just make out a vague hint of a structure, something outlined against the shadow. It looks... it looks like someone took a slice out of a planet and turned it into a spacecraft. And all the other ships are heading towards it.
No. I do not care. I am out of here. I'm going. Goodbye.
[break]
Or then again, perhaps I'm not. The suit's not responding.
Haven't you played with me for long enough, you bastards? Now what? The suit won't move me, I can't reach the lip of the spine, there's noone my radio will talk to...
All I can do is wait.
[break]
I'm back.
At last, I'm back. The suit's off, lying in a corner charging. There's a drink. There's a bath. There's a meal. There's real air against my skin, sand under my feet, real light illuminating the room. I feel damaged; my head's still fuzzy, there's still spinning shapes behind my eyelids and that horrible pressure is oh-so-slowly building in the back of my mind. But somehow... I think I can cope now.
I'd only been waiting ten minutes. I was feeling low. The ship had knocked me down about as flat as a human could get, had built me back up again with its promise of an exit, and had knocked me down again. I was just hanging there, watching the planetlet, trying not to think.
The only warning I had that something was happening was a flare of light below me. Deep within the heart of the sphere was a radial blossom of blinding light; all the beams had come on simultaneously, intersecting at its center. And then, almost before I had time to register something was happening, something seemed to pick me up and throw me sideways. The spine I'd emerged out of swept away and receded into the distance, and the mind-numbing bulk of the sphere, kilometres away and still occupying half the sky, slowly crept after it.
As with the rapid-transit system in the hallways, and my trip around the bridge, there was no sensation of movement. The suit still wasn't responding and all I could do was watch helplessly as the Big Ship ever so slowly receded into the black sky, leaving me alone and abandoned in space.
The whole vessel was laid out in front of me. It was so vast, so big beyond all comprehension, that even foreshortened as it was and, by now, probably hundreds of kilometres away, it still spanned the sky from zenith to zenith. I could see it all. At the near end, the morningstar bridge; brilliant blue arcs of light had started to weave between the tips of the spines, casting actinic highlights inside my helmet. Then there was the central mass, a titanic cylinder of anonymous grey pipes and chambers woven into a single, intricately detailed whole. Aft of that was the ribbed central column. I saw where the spines branched off it. Somewhere in there was the tunnel entrance where I had so incautiously ventured inside the ship, and the horror had begun. Nestled inside the spines was the smooth, curved shape of the sun funnel, and then ----
There was the island. Oh, the island ---- glowing geen and golden, pale blue and white, beautiful and inviting. I could see the shoreline, curving intricately. Parallelling it were the reefs, the water shining like polished metal. I could see the forests, still a tangled mess but none the less inviting. I could even see the brown smudge that was the central lake, now mud. And everywhere were the tiny, exact, brilliantly white shapes of the buildings... and was that one the Hotel?
I stared for some time.
Eventually I noticed, of course, that the ship didn't seem to be receding any more. Then I noticed that it wasn't as foreshortened as it had been. Instead of seeing it from the bow end, near the bridge, it was now laid out squarely below me. It wasn't flying away from me. It was turning.
The aft end approached and the bow receded. Now the ship was foreshortened in the other direction. I had a sudden fear that the stern of the ship would swat me like a fly as it came past at hundreds of kilometres per hour. And then I was terrified that it would miss me entirely, and I'd see the island skim past me and away and I really would be abandoned here.
The island grew, and changed perspective. The fake sun suddenly peeked out from underneath the funnel. Now the island was a flat disc suspended in space, the Big Ship itself invisible behind the fake sun. It looked... impossible. The suns reflected off the water, and there was a ring of blue around the edge from sunlight refracting through the ocean.
It wasn't going to miss me. I was going to hit it, square between two of the spines, a few hundred metres above the sea level. I suddenly thought about the force shield, but it was too late to panic now, as the edge was approaching fast, and the spines were swelling and drifting apart, and I uselessly braced myself within the inert suit and...
...with a sudden shock like plunging into deep water I went through the force shield and I was falling, for real, out of the sky into the sea.
The suit was working again. I floated for a while, and then pulled myself out of the sea and flew, slowly and hesitantly, back to the Hotel. I was tired. Not physically, as flying the suit was ease itself, but emotionally, mentally and psychologically. I had to rest.
Green and Black must have been watching. They met me excitedly in the foyer, obviously pleased to see me, Green babbling questions. I could not face them. I muttered something about tomorrow and being tired and just walked away. I hope I didn't hurt their feelings too badly.
And now you are up to date.
And I think I will look at this bath, and this food, and this drink, ignore them completely, and instead go to sleep in the big chair. I hope this time I won't dream.
[transmit]
I'm lying on the sand, real this time, my feet in the water, the ripples gently massaging them. The fake sun is warm on my face. Bird-things are calling and there's the occasional splash out in the bay as Green and Black play.
The events of yesterday feel like a ghastly nightmare; horrible, but over, and it's now slowly fading from my memory. The tunnels of the Big Ship are merging into a jumble of neon lights and twisting corridors. Only my... conversation, with the... whatever it was remains vivid.
I still feel like I'm made of broken glass. I have trouble focusing and there's an occasional ringing in my ears. I don't know what that thing did to me, but it's obviously having lasting effects; but they seem to be passing.
I woke up late this morning and, feeling much better, found Green and Black waiting for me in the foyer, and probably confused them by hugging them both in sheer relief. (No arms. No hugs. How can you live without hugs?) I realised they'd been waiting all night, and attempted to apologise. We never did work out words for sorry, but I think Green eventually got the message ---- she kept repeating, "You have tired."
To my surprise, they led me outside onto the beach. The temperature was back to normal, possibly a little warm, and the new sun had gone. It seemed that about an hour after my last transmission, the Big Ship's rotation had eclipsed the star's light behind its own huge bulk, leaving the island in shadow. The temperature had slowly started returning to normal.
I actually, for a brief moment, felt grateful to that thing.
There was more news: some time during the night, Black had wandered out of doors, looked at the sky, and had seen that the Big Ship was back in warp, leaving the new sun's star system.
That was the fourth solar system I'd ever been in. And I have to say that I would have been glad never to have gone there.
So, everything appears to be as back to normal as our new life gets. Life on the island returns to its blessed domesticity. My challenges and boundaries return to the tight little circles they were once contained within, and I am grateful of the fact.
The space suit remains in the corner of my room. I suspect the apartment recharged and cleaned it during the night. I didn't look. I feel no urge whatsoever to leave this bubble of air ever again, at least until the ship lands.
The rest of the morning was spent trying to explain to the sealin what I had done. This was a lot harder than I expected. I attempted to summarise most of it by just saying, "...and most of the next twenty-four hours I spent wandering around the ship in a delirious haze," but apart from not knowing the word delirious they didn't accept that as a valid explanation. I had to try and dredge up memories of some of the various rooms and tunnels and describe them to my increasingly baffled audience.
They were also curious about the thing. Green asked a lot of questions. I didn't want to think about it too hard, but felt I had to answer; I think I said something important, as she seemed to get quite worried and spent a lot of time talking with Black. But she couldn't or wouldn't say why. After a little time the headache starting coming back, so I firmly started thinking about something else and it slowly faded.
They've gone off now, saying that I was still tired and needed to sleep. I think they're right.
[break]
They brought me lunch!
I woke up, some indeterminate time in the afternoon ---- I still haven't reset my watch ---- and found a fish lying on a nearby rock. No sign of the sealin.
It was a big fish, too, with noticeable teeth marks in it. One of them must have gone back to their apartment, made it with the food widget, and carried it back here. It might even be real; there must be fish in the waters around the island.
What do I do with it? I get the feeling this could be some ritual gesture... I could horribly offend them if I refused it. But I'm touched.
I'll take it back to the apartment. If necessary I can always dematerialise it and pretend I ate it.
[break]
The fish is sorted. The food widget turned it into sushi. Very nice, but there was a lot of it.
Amazingly, I'm still sleepy. I also have a slight headache coming on. I think I'll grab a drink of something with aspirin in it, head down to the beach and have another snooze.
[break]
Headache's worse. And my hands are shaking.
They've been trembling on and off all morning, but now they're shaking so much that I have to concentrate to be able to lift a glass without spilling it... and my legs are starting to twitch.
I have a horrible feeling that the fish was genuinely local, and I shouldn't have eaten it.
I'm going back to the apartment. Perhaps it'll give me something that'll help.
[break]
Worse. Awful.
The headaches comes and goes in waves. The shaking's bad enough that I can't stand any more.
I've opened the window, shouted down to Green. I can see them swimming across the bay. I'm terrified that if I pass out here, I'll be trapped in the apartment ---- the doors only open on the inside...
Come on. Hurry up.
[break]
The pain's a bit less now.
I've spent most of the afternoon lying curled up in a ball on the bed, shaking badly and with my head about to split open. It's not the same horrible pressure that I felt while in the tunnels, it's just a plain-and-simple headache, but it's making my life miserable.
That damned fish! Green says she got it from her food widget, so it'll be tailored for sealin physiology. I bet it contained some kind of exotic nerve toxin, that would explain the symptoms... I really, really hope it starts wearing off soon. I've heard about some of these things, they kill you by slowly paralysing your lungs...
Green did not hear me say that, by the way. She's out. Black's keeping watch over me.
Damn it, Calvin, this is all your fault. If you had put a decent lock on your shed door, or even just said don't go in the shed, it's got a spaceship in it I wouldn't be here now. I wouldn't be lying here in agony, terrified that I was going to die, after being kidnapped, marooned, nearly killed by freak weather, kidnapped again, had some thing scrape through my mind, and then been stranded in deep space. I'd be at home. It's been ---- what, nearly a month? ---- you'd have been back a week ago, I'd have gone home to my job in Southampton, writing my column, going to pubs, parties, going out with friends.
Ow. Ow. Ow.
Hell, I probably don't even have that job any more. I'm a week overdue already. I can picture the conversation:
Oh, you're back? A little late, aren't you?
Sorry, I got held up, I'd say. I meant to go to Wales but I ended up taking a impromptu tour of the galaxy in a starship the size of Sussex. And you know what the timetable is like on these things.
Yeah, right.
I wonder if anyone there misses me? Probably not. Oh, I expect some of the guys at work will ask around, and some of the people in the RPG group will be emailing me and wondering why they're not getting any replies, but it'll be... oh... another couple of weeks before anyone gets round to filing a missing persons report.
Oh, yeah. Guess who the last person who saw me alive is? Hope you're good at explaining, Calvin. Serves you right.
I'm sorry, I can't talk any more.
[break]
Green had some kind of argument with the pedestal downstairs. The apartment produced some pills which she made me take. Everything's gone fuzzy. The pain's not as bad, but I'm floating, and there's a thing made of light under the water and it's reaching up to get me...
No. No. Concentrate.
I'm still shaking. I couldn't pick up the glass, or even the pills. Green eventually had to pick them up with her tongue and give them to me mouth-to-mouth. If ever there was a memory guaranteed to ground me to reality, that's one ---- she's hairy and tastes of fish. She didn't attempt to give me any water, and I am truly thankful that that wasn't necessary.
She's doing her best, and I'm grateful, but sealin were not designed to be nurses.
I'm drinking a lot. This is because the only way I can get something to drink is to crawl over to the bathing pool, which I can just about manage, drop into it, and then with one of the sealin supporting me so I don't drown, I take mouthfuls and try to swallow them... not a reassuring experience.
Unfortunately this means I'm not drinking any of the apartment's drinks. Which means I'm not getting any drugs it decides to prescribe me. Unless Green can find some way of persuading it to give them to me in bowls...
I think I'm going to try and sleep now I've got the chance.
[break]
Nighttime. It's dark.
Having trouble sleeping. Doze off occasionally into troubled, confusing dreams and then get woken up by the pain in my head again.
It's not getting worse any more. But it's not getting better. Hope something happens soon. I don't want to stay like this. But I don't want to die, either.
Is it getting hard to breathe? Could be my imagination. Could just be tired. Arms, legs, head shaking constantly. Not so bad when I lie still. Starts up again whenever I try to move. Can't control myself, can barely crawl. Soiled myself. Magic laundry took care of it, though. Love this room.
Managed to eat something. The food widget produced a big bowl of ice cream. Had to eat it without using my hands. Got it all over my face, but it tasted good. Green dematerialised the mess. Love this room. Pity I can't talk to it, though.
Pain's hard to bear. Not localised, it's just generally coming from the inside of my head. Keep trying to rub my head against something to get at the bits that hurt. Doesn't work. Keep trying anyway. Want more pain killers, but the apartment won't give me any for hours yet.
It's almost completely black in here. The only light is coming from the warp bubble striations, which I can see flickering outside. Vertical streaks, pulsing and drifting. Behind, the stars are sliding by. It looks like something out of Star Trek. It's soothing, watching the stars rain down... half expect to hear splashes. I know the Big Ship's still working, still taking us somewhere... perhaps there'll be help of some kind when we get there. Who knows.
Someone's awake ---- big black shape lying next to me just looked round. I can see the light shining on its eyes. Think it's Black.
I'm sorry to have put you through all this.
I feel responsible. If I hadn't been here, you'd never have been caught on the ship. Green was right about that.
You've been kind, and generous, and you've cared about me.
If I die, I want you to know something.
Thank-you.
[transmit]
The good news is that the headache is fading, and I'm not having convulsions any more.
The bad news is that I can't move my fingers and my hands and feet have gone numb.
My coordination's still shot but at least I can hold a glass between the heels of my hands, if I'm careful. I've been trying to drink whatever the apartment gives me as often as possible just in case it comes up with some suitable additive.
I have to say that this has probably been the most terrifying couple of days of my life. I seriously thought I was going to die last night. I lay there curled into a loose ball, shivering violently, and waited for the moment to come when I would suddenly black out, or feel a sudden pain in my chest, or find myself unable to breathe... but instead I suddenly woke up when the sun turned on, and realised that I must have drifted off. Probably out of sheer nervous exhaustion.
Yes, it was even worse than the time in the bowels of the ship. At least there I had something to do, and most of the time I was so out of it I wasn't able to be scared... last night I was perfectly lucid, every single moment, and in the dark and the silence it was all too easy for all my personal demons to swim up out of my subconscious.
But it's morning now, the sun's shining, I'm outside on the beach, and I appear to be getting better (numb hands notwithstanding). I actually managed to walk here, although I fell over three times on the way.
Green and Black are lazing around in the bay. I can't help noticing that one of them always has their head above water, apparently keeping an eye on me. I am both marginally irritated, relieved and touched.
You know, I've never actually sat and watch them swim before. They're very good.
They seem to be playing some complicated game, or acrobatic exercise. One of them will jump like a dolphin and attempt some complicated manoeuvre in mid air, usually fail, and come crashing down into the water. Then they'll confer, and try again.
The whole process does not appear to be taken too seriously. I can't hear anything they're saying from here, and wouldn't be able to understand it even if I could, but when at one point Black appeared to get a difficult looking roll catastrophically wrong and landed flat on his back, Green seemed to say something uncomplimentary because she promptly got play-chased a few hundred yards in an immense flurry of foam before they settled down and he tried it again.
Of course, it could be some barbaric religious ritual leading up to, um, sealin sacrifice to the gods of the small grey rock at the bottom of the sea; I am guessing here. But I reckon that what I can make of sealin body language seems to be more or less correct. And it certainly didn't look as if Black was trying to catch Green.
Ha. When the sensations come back to my hands and feet, I'll have to show them how a human swims. I'm sure they'll find that amusing.
[break]
The numbness is spreading. I can't feel my arms or lower legs. I can't move my wrists or ankles, either.
Shit. This is not good.
I crawled on my hands and knees back to the apartment, Green in tow, and managed to drink something. The glass of fizzy liquid did taste strange and not entirely pleasant but it hasn't had any noticeable effect. I don't think the apartment's pharmacy is up to this.
If I concentrate really hard, I can occasionally make my wrists twitch. That suggests motor control problems not nerve damage, but frankly, I don't much care.
Come on, ship. Get where you're going.
[break]
It's just after lunchtime. I'm lying in the big chair, largely paralysed.
I can talk. I can move my head. I can move both arms, but the left one is so uncoordinated as to be useless and the right one is slow and hesitant. I can just about manage to, for example, hit the switch on the dictaphone.
Also, I can breathe, my heart's beating, and I have bladder control. Whatever it is seems to be affecting the voluntary motor nerves only.
I feel like some bloody sadist is in charge of my life. Every morning recently starts out fine and heads downhill. I wish I'd just stayed on the island and never gone up to the Big Ship.
...but then I'd have probably roasted in the double sunlight.
Hell.
[break]
Damn! Why didn't I think of that!
[break]
I now feel much better.
Not physically, but in terms of morale. I persuaded Green to help me into the suit, and believe me, it wasn't easy. But know I'm in, and that waist dial is turned on, and this wonderful, wonderful mind-reading space suit is letting me move again!
Also the suit will feed me. I just have to suck on the appropriate nozzle. It doesn't taste like much but it's food and I don't have to be able to use my arms to get at it. Which is good, because my right arm is now hanging completely limply.
Admittedly, I'm not so much wearing the suit as having been poured into it, and I'm drifting across the island like a humanoid balloon, but it's so good having control again. Even if it is just over the suit. It's still better than being a vegetable in that damned chair.
I have the horrible feeling that this time the paralysis isn't going away.
Green and Black are swimming along below me, easily matching my speed. They seem rather perturbed about the whole thing. They're not great tool users; I suspect the idea of using the space suit as a sort of whole body prosthesis never occurred to them, and they're a little wary. Green certainly asked a lot of odd questions. I think she was concerned that I was planning another trip up into the Big Ship. Never fear; nothing could be further from my mind. I would rather go back into the chair.
Oh, yes, activating the dictaphone was entertaining. I had to find a rock and position myself so that I could bump it against the button. It must have looked very odd.
[break]
In an attempt to find something to take my mind off things, I've flown over to the barrier and have peering out. (The suit makes my raft look a bit sick. I'm sure it's waterproof, too. But I don't think the dictaphone is, so I'm not taking it underwater.)
The Big Ship is really storming along. The warp bubble striations are nearly drowning out the stars, and from the way the stars are falling past the barrier, I reckon we're doing several light years a second. It makes my little ship's light-year a minute look pathetic, I'll tell you that.
I don't know where it's going but it's in a real hurry.
[break]
My ears are tingling. It feels like pins and needles.
I don't want to think about this.
[break]
I know where we're going.
We've arrived.
I'm home.
Earth.
I actually saw it as we arrived; I was right up against the barrier. There were no course adjustments. The stars just slowed, the striations faded away to nothing, and there coming into my field of view was a big, beautiful, blue and white curve... and there, clearly visible against the limb of the planet, was a shape ingrained into my memory: I'd have recognised that blobby crescent anywhere.
Australia.
Which meant that the new sun at my back, busy raising the temperature of the island, was not just a sun but the sun. Sol.
I just floated there, staring, until I finally felt something nudge me. I look down and found Green with the suit's boot in her mouth, vigorously tugging. I hadn't felt it.
"We have arrived," she said, mouth full of boot but her voice as clear as ever. "This is a planet. Behind there is a sun. It will be hot. We will go to the Hotel."
I stared down blankly, her words barely registering. "This is Earth," I said.
She stopped pulling. "This is Earth? Your planet?"
"Yes."
She let go, fell back to the sea, and started arguing furiously with Black. I kept looking. The complicated spirals of white, the intricate patterns of cloud spread across the sea, fine lines of white and blue among the brown and green of the land... I drunk it all in. This was my planet. I evolved down there. My ancestors lived down there, all of them. Every atom my body had been made from came from down there. My entire life had been spent with every particle of this world pulling on my substance; in a very real way, I had been connected to Earth. All of Earth. Every single bit.
Now the connection had been broken, but that was fine, because I was home again.
Earth began to drift down, ever so slowly, as the Big Ship started turning. Half unnoticed I felt the shadows shift as Sol rose behind my back and become eclipsed by the Ship.
Green and Black were staring at it silently as Earth slid by.
Eventually Green said, "What is brown?"
"That's land. That one's Australia."
"That is a big island."
"The biggest."
And then Earth disappeared from our field of view.
"I have not seen a planet," Green said. "Black has not seen a planet."
I smiled. "Good, isn't it? The first planet I ever saw from space was yours. It was very beautiful."
Green blinked. "Earth is beautiful."
We headed back to the beach. I'm not entirely sure why; the suit would have kept me aloft for weeks, and the sealin were more at home in the water than on land. It was probably habit, the memory of a more relaxed time past.
"What do you think the Ship's going to do?" I asked.
"I do not know."
Green and Black are talking quietly. It's not their usual argument, which I eventually worked out was just the way their language sounded. This is intense.
I'm floating nearby waiting for developments.
Keep you posted.
[break]
My ears are numb. My nose and cheeks are tingling. I'm getting occasional double vision.
We're landing.
I headed out to the barrier again, and found that Earth had expanded below us, and was now occupying half the sky. The Ship had definitely descended. I didn't see any land, but that didn't mean anything; a continent could have been hiding below the mass of the island.
I'm beginning to wonder what's happening down there. When the Big Ship arrived it must have been visible across Australia, New Guinea, South-East Asia... you don't miss a thing like that. Panic must be spreading. All the various nuts, UFO, religious, conspiracy theory, all kinds must be coming out of the woodwork... every country on Earth must be mobilising. The USA, Russia and China will all be rushing to get some sort of manned vehicle in orbit. I expect everyone with the capability is frantically trying to work out whether they have any missiles that can reach the Big Ship.
I wonder what an ICBM would do to this thing? Very little, I expect.
There's a saying: When the aliens come, everyone will know. I always believed it. I always dreamt that one day, a spacecraft would arrive at Earth, and the world would suddenly change.
I never dreamt I would be on the spacecraft.
[break]
My neck's stiffening up. Thank God for the suit. Without it, I'd be a cripple by now.
I just hope it can keep me alive long enough.
I'm pretty sure we're in the upper atmosphere. I think there's the faintest tinge of blue to the black sky between the spines.
Green and Black have persuaded me to come back to the Hotel apartment. I don't get nearly as good a view, but I suppose they're right ---- I don't know what's going to happen and we could probably use the extra protection. At least it's given us a top-floor apartment this time, and I can just see the horizon over the edge of the sea.
They're both getting twitchy again. I don't think they like landings any more than take-offs.
[break]
Definitely blue. We must be descending through the stratosphere.
God, this must be a sight to see... the Big Ship, a gigantic tower rearing up into the air, a bubble of blue and green clutched in its claws, the air streaming off in trails of cloud from every exposed corner and edge...
From in here, all we can see is the horizon slowly expanding. It's calm, it's quiet. The sun never flickers.
I just thought ---- surely the Ship's not planning to put the island down, is it? Where's it going to go? It's a huge lump of rock, for goodness' sake. It's not going to fit.
[break]
I'm going outside. I don't care. I've got to see this.
There is danger.
You stay here. The suit will protect me.
You will not go.
I will.
[untranscribable sounds]
I've just flown out the window. I'm standing on the beach.
I don't think I've got a lot of time. It's getting hard to breathe. My chest feels stiff.
There's cloud streaming past the barrier. The turbulence must be incredible.
It's still completely silent. There's a bird-thing calling... just one.
We're below the clouds. At least, the bottom of the ship is. I can see them receding above, torn into a vortex by the ship's passage. We must be nearly there by now.
I can see the horizon. Waves.
Nothing's happening. Are we down? I think we're down.
Still nothing. Should I go over to the barrier? Perhaps the Ship's taking the last bit slow...
[untranscribable noises]
Woah. Big jolt. Knocked me into the air. The Ship must have turned its artificial gravity off... there's a perfectly circular ripple heading inshore from the edge of the barrier.
It's flaring! The barrier's flaring! There's a cascade of orange lightning between the spines... I can hear it, it's crackling... it's gone!
My God... the waves are coming in! The barrier's down! It's down! It's down!
I can see gusts travelling across the calm water... Earth's air mixing with the island's... Earth's water... I don't believe it. We're here. We're finally here.
Another jolt. Just a little one. I'm not sure what's happening, but... yes. The spines are moving. They're lifting. The Big Ship is leaving.
I can actually hear the Ship. A sourceless, deep-throated, immensely powerful hum. The spines are smoothly sliding out of the water; water's being dragged up their sides and falling back as spray.
They're out. Their hundred-meter wide bulk is drawing out huge plumes of water after them, which are falling back... and down. The Ship's clear, and accelerating. It hasn't begun to recede yet, but the tips of the spines are already a long way up, and they're getting faster.
Earth's swell is breaking against the shores of the island. The water is lapping over my booted feet. The ship's leaving, the island's down.
The hum is fading.
Damn it, I'm still breathing suit air! I can't get my helmet off! Damn. Damn...
[break]
Much harder to breathe.
Sitting on beach. Happy. Helmet off. The air smells so good, that acidic smell is gone. Ship a small shape in sky. Leaving fast.
Green and Black are sitting nearby. Sniffing the air. Look dubious.
Wonder about Earth's sea and the island. Ecological nightmare. Hope that Earth's sea is sufficiently... different to sterilise the shore. Kill everything. Only way to be safe. Don't want an epidemic of... alien life in our seas.
Can hear the trees blowing... in the wind behind me. Haven't heard that for a while.
Green and Black are talking. Feel sorry for them. The Ship's gone, they're not going home. Same thing that happened to me... happened to them. Hope it goes better for them.
Neck stiff. Jaw stiff. Arms and legs like wood. Damned fish. Never eat fish again as long... as I live.
Wonder where everyone is? Planes. Warships. Aircraft carriers. Submarines. All nations. All converging here. Won't be long 'til they arrive. Love to be able to see it on TV. Fun to watch the chaos.
Out of breath. Must rest.
[break]
Are you well?
No. I'm dying.
You will not die.
I don't have... a lot of choice.
You will not die.
I'm sorry.
You will not die. You will tell us of this sea. It taste strange.
I don't have... the breath.
You will tell us tomorrow.
If I... can.
You will tell us tomorrow.
Thank-you, Green. Thank-you, Black.
You will not die.
What's that?
What is what?
The noise.
I can hear. I do not know.
Where?
That way.
Can't see.
The noise sounds from far the Hotel. I can not see.
Tell me.
The noise louds.
I know... that. What do you... see.
Two ships fly over us. They are small and black and grey. They are like a bird. They go very fast.
Jet... fighters. Looking at... the island. Watch... the sea.
There is a ship at the horizon. It is in the sea. It is black and grey. It comes slow.
There is a nother ship. It is same. It is near the one ship.
The jet fighters come. They are slow. They are over us. They turn. I think that they see the buildings.
The two sea ships come.
There is a nother air ship. It is large. It is not a jet fighter. It not sounds like a jet fighter. It not has wings. It fly over us. It is slow and low. I think that it sees us.
It comes to the beach. It flies near the Hotel.
There is a nother ship. It is a space ship. It is a qaxtocl of the Builders. It is very large. It flies over the island.
The ship that is not a jet fighter goes. The qaxtocl is over us. There is a nother qaxtocl and a pocltic. They fly around the island.
The pocltic comes to the beach. I think that it sees us. I think that it will land here.
The pocltic lands.
Do you hear it?
Do you hear me?
[untranscribable conversation]
You will not die.
You will not die.
[transmit]
A few moments later two things struck me: firstly, I could move again, and secondly, I was alive.
I sat bolt upright in the bed. I was back in the apartment. Sunlight was streaming in through the open window, casting a warm golden glow over the sand and the water-rippling walls, and shining off the bathing pool. It was quite possibly the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen.
A quick inventory revealed that my limbs were working fine, all the sensation was back in my fingertips, I was breathing normally, and ---- fairly obviously ---- I could see again. For the first time in longer than I cared to remember, there was no headache. I felt fine. In fact, I felt a lot better than fine. I felt euphoric.
At this point I became aware of distant voices coming through the window, and the occasional far-off grumbling of an engine. I got up and padded over. It was a fabulous morning. The Pacific rolled away towards the rising sun, luminous blue and golden against the opalescent sky. It glittered and sparkled like a field of precious gems as the swell broke against the rocks and fell back.
The horizon was littered with the sharp, black shapes of warships. As I watched, a distant jet cruised past far out, circling the island; and then, with a deep hum, a massive silver block glided past, patrolling the shore. A Builder spacecraft. It trailed behind it a continuous squall as the air closed behind its huge bulk and tore up the sea.
I dressed, and then deliberately sat down and had my morning coffeeoid. Then I hurried downstairs.
To my surprise, there was noone waiting in the Foyer, but when I went outside and wandered around to the beach, the fresh breeze ruffling my hair, there was a small group of people clustered there, arguing and gesticulating dramatically. As I approached, one of them saw me, and they all turned round and fell silent; and then a large green shape pushed through them and bounded towards me, Black following a little more sedately. She enthusiastically knocked me to the ground and started licking my face. I laughed, hugged her tightly, and then tried to get her off me so I could breathe again.
The Builders, all humans, looked depressingly like something out of a bad space opera; military figures in white and grey uniforms, oddly cut, and braids. None of them spoke English. The apparent leader, a young man with dark skin and an engaging grin, slapped his chest in a salute and then ostentatiously put out his hand, which I shook. He spoke.
"He says that he is Ruminavi," Green translated. "He says that he sees you are well. He says that yesterday you were not well. He says that you were slight dead. He says that he well-ed you."
"Thank-you," I said humbly. His grin widened.
"He says that that was not difficult. He says that if you were to die then you will not say of the Big Ship."
I made a small bow. "I would be delighted," I said.
"He says that he not say English," Green said as he continued. "He says that he that says English comes. He says that he comes now or in one tenth or two tenths hours."
As if on cue, Ruminavi suddenly stiffened, held up an apologetic finger, and muttered into what seemed to be his wristwatch. And then he scanned the sky, and pointed. Descending steeply and moving fast, shining in the sun, was the small silver block of a little ship.
It dived towards the sea, pulled up sharply, and wallowed severely as it passed dangerously low overhead. We all turned and watched as it headed towards the landing pads, and then apparently changed its mind and circled back to the beach. It crunched into the rocks, disgorged a single passenger, and then rose vertically and silently into the air and departed behind the Hotel, flying noticeably more smoothly.
"My dear boy," Calvin said as he strode towards me. "What have you been up to?"
I stared at him.
Calvin rattled off something in fluent Builder to Ruminavi, whose grin faded. They talked for a while as I stood nearby, feeling excluded and extraneous. Then Calvin talked to Green, and even asked Black some questions ---- I never even knew he spoke Builder.
At least he turned to me. "We must talk," he said.
As we walked along the coast path, he was silent for a couple of minutes before finally speaking.
"When I got back to Ty-mawr and found the pocltic gone, I knew you'd done something rash. I never realised it would end with, with, this." He gestured at the island, the sea, and for all I know the entire planet. "Why, the societal ramifications alone would be epoch-breaking. And when you consider the economic impact----"
"Calvin," I said, interrupting. For weeks I had been thinking of the perfect retort to make when I finally ran into Calvin again. Of course, the words had evaporated from my mind. He looked round.
"Calvin," I repeated, "why don't your ships have ignition keys?"
"The shed was locked," he said mildly.
I didn't quite know what to say to that.
"I'm rather afraid I've been out of commission," he continued. "Someone made off with my only communications device. The first I knew that you had found your way back was when when I saw fuzzy pictures of a Scavenger ship descending towards French Polynesia. Give me quite a shock, I can tell you, and I knew there was only one person I could blame. I was just lucky a task force had spotted the Scavenger and followed it here. How on Earth did you manage to persuade a Scavenger to drop you off here, anyway?"
"Scavenger?"
"Big ship. Claws. Carried the island."
"Oh," I said. I felt myself tensing up again, but then realised that the shadow of the light creature was entirely absent from my mind. "I, er, talked to the pilot."
"The pilot?"
I briefly described my encounter. He looked shocked.
"Well. That... well." He scratched his beard, a mannerism I know only too well. "Rumi said you had been ill. My boy, you weren't ill; you were god-touched."
"I'm sorry?"
He sighed. "That creature of light you saw was a god. Not a literal god, you understand, but the term fits as well as any. A being from... do you know anything about embedded logical systems?"
I shook my head.
"Let's just say they come from another dimension, then. The Scavengers bind them into their ships as control mechanisms... when you had your, shall we say, conversation, you passed through an area of space time under the god's complete control and it was a little clumsy when it was manipulating your brain." He shrugged. "They have trouble understanding our world. Your entire nervous system was badly damaged. Gone untreated, you certainly would have died.
"In fact, you were lucky you didn't run into any more of them. Those ships carry twelve. If you had, you would have died then and there."
"Oh," I said faintly, and swallowed. "So it was nothing to do with the fish, then?"
He looked non-plussed. "What fish?"
"Never mind." A thought suddenly occurred to me. "Look, before we continue... what's going to happen to Green and Black?"
"Who?"
"The sealin. Um, the two aliens."
He snorted. "Sealin. Good name. Well, if they want, we'll lend them a ship to get home, but it's really up to them."
"They're not prisoners, then?"
He stopped walking. "Prisoners?"
"Well, what with the war..." I said, suddenly uncertain.
"War? What war?"
"Um, the sealin were fighting you on that planet... weren't they?"
He gave one incredulous snort of laughter. "At war? Us at war with the atlocé? Good heavens! We wouldn't stand a chance! Whatever gave you that idea?"
"But," I said, feeling increasingly foolish, "the planet was definitely under attack?"
He thought. "Would you perhaps be referring to the terraforming adjustment? The atlocé colonists needed a substantial amount of energy added to Garden's planetary dynamics to increase the albedo, and they contracted out to us to do the work."
"But the storms? The abandoned island?"
"Well," he said, looking decidedly miffed. "It went a little wrong and we had to evacuate. Not our finest hour, I must admit. We had to return most of the atlocé's money."
"And Gurglecough? What happened to Gurglecough? It was dead!"
He began to look increasingly confused. "Gurglecough? What is... oh. Yes. Very droll. We call that one Cinder. Of course it was dead, it's always been dead. It's a useless ball of rock. What made you think something had happened to it?"
"The, ah, the traffic control system wasn't working..." I ventured.
"Ah," he said, suddenly enlightened. "Yes. The pocltic was still on its old autopilot program, wasn't it? That explains why you ended up here ---- well, on Garden. No, the only reason that Cinder had a traffic control system was that it was being used as a proving ground for some new space drive systems. Which, I might add, we bought from the atlocé, who are considerably more advanced than we are." He snorted again. "At war. Good heavens.
"The reason why you didn't see any traffic control systems," he continued, "is that the Cinder operation was a complete success and we shut it down months ago. Now, look, you've obviously got everything completely the wrong way round. Be a good fellow and start from the beginning. I suspect we'll be both far less confused that way."
A couple of miles later I finished. We walked silently for a time.
We were just passing the stacked disks building, which was bustling with activity; a couple of the little ships ---- pocltic, Calvin had called them ---- were ferrying equipment up and down the ramps. As I watched, the two ships pulled away and landed, and the people gathered round and looked up at the top of the pyramid expectantly. With a faint crackle and an electric snap, a brilliant shaft of light shot up out of the pyramid, stopped a few hundred metres up, and then unfolded into a vast dish of fine glowing threads. There was a cheer.
Calvin noticed me studying it. "Radio telescope," he said shortly. "I don't think I have ever heard a more bizarre story in my entire life," he continued, shaking his head. "You nearly got yourself killed, oh, four or five times. You've been lucky, my boy. Very lucky. And your stunt with the god..." He shuddered.
"Well, you survived unharmed, although you did seem to have a pretty miserable time the last few days," he said cheerfully. "And we got a lot of good out of it. We thought we'd have to write off this place." He waved his arms around at the island. "Bit of a surprise having it transplanted to Earth rather than being on Garden, but it'll definitely come in handy. And we never even knew the Scavengers were in this part of space..."
He looked down at me and smiled. "And there's another thing. If you ever find yourself getting a bit down at the mouth, think on this: your trip through the bowels of the Scavenger ship probably saved the world." He saw my expression and his smile broadened. "Not Earth, or even Garden. But if the Scavenger had landed this island on their home world, the results could have been catastrophic. The quautli, there," and he gestured towards a bird-thing, passing by with a mouth full of rotting Garden sea life, "they eat anything. The Scavengers are sessile. The quautli would have, quite literally, eaten them alive. But Earth doesn't have anything to fear; your seagulls are easily their match.
"Look, I must get back," he went on. "I'm the only one on this planet who speaks English and Nahatl. I'm sorry, speaks them fluently. Your atlocé friend is very talented, you know. But I must make a call to the United Nations and... try... to make some sort of explanation for all this.
"Heaven knows what you want to do. We'd be perfectly willing to ferry you back to Southampton, but I have a feeling that you'd be spending quite a lot of the rest of your life being interrogated if we did that. Besides, I'd imagine you'd find your old job rather tame after your adventures, eh?" He laughed. "So I'd recommend you hang around here for a while. Plenty of room. You'd be useful, too."
I thought about it as we walked back to the Hotel. Despite what Calvin said, those little ships were certainly nimble enough to sneak me in under radar. I could show up for work tomorrow, make up some story about getting drunk and sneaking on board a cargo ship to Peru or something, take some holiday in lieu... the idea of getting back to my old routine had a certain appeal.
But what would I be giving up? This wonderful island. A place in history. A sense of being in the centre of things. Being able to do something that actually mattered. I'd always wanted to change the world; now I could. And there were the things I still needed to find out: why there was a god in the Observatory. Why there were humans living off Earth, for goodness sake.
But there was that old Chinese curse: May you live in interesting times. Perhaps what I really needed was a normal life.
And besides, there were my friends.
As Calvin, Ruminavi, and the others continued to argue, I wandered down to the two sealin. Sorry; the two atlocé. They had drifted down to the water, probably bored of discussions of Earth politics.
"Hi," I said.
"Hello," Green replied. Black was sniffing the water suspiciously.
"Calvin says that they'd be more than willing to take you back to Garden," I said. "What were you planning to do?"
Green translated for Black, and they talked briefly.
"Earth is interesting," she said. "It smells interesting. The sea is interesting."
I sat down on my rock as one of the big ships cruised overhead, blocking out the sun. Compared to the Scavenger's ship, it was merely extremely large. Far off a flight of helicopters cruised past. "Garden was interesting, too."
She looked at me, and put her head up and sniffed the air. "Garden is mostly dead. It will be alive. It will not be alive this year or next year or the year after. It will not be alive ten years from now or twenty years from now. It may be alive one hundred years from now."
She looked at me again. "Earth is alive now. I will remember Earth."
The ship passed on, and the sun shone again. "You're going to stay? You and Black both?"
"Yes."
"Wonderful. Don't you have a family, though?"
They talked. "Yes."
"Won't your children be wanting you back?"
"They were made ten and twelve years ago," Green said, blinking at me. "I was made twenty years ago. The children have children."
I radically adjusted one of my mental images. "I think Garden's year is rather longer than Earth's." I tossed a pebble at a nearby bird-thing, which was messily disembowelling a dead mollusc of some kind. It ignored me completely.
"How long have you been on Garden?" I asked idly. "Calvin said you were colonising."
"Black and I were made at Garden," she said. "We have not left Garden. This is the first planet that we are on that is not Garden."
I smiled. "I'll have to show you around Earth, then. It's worth seeing... hang on a minute."
I got up, jogged up to where Calvin was. He looked round.
"Green and Black have decided to stay," I said. "They seem to like it here."
He nodded. "Well, that does simplify matters."
"I just wanted to know," I went on. "Are they likely to react to Earth's sea? It does seem to have killed off all of Garden's sea life."
Calvin shook his head. "Doubt it very much. Even if they did, the medical facilities here would sort it out, no problem."
"Excellent," I said, relieved. "You know, I have the oddest feeling. Do you think they might want to settle down here? Start another colony?"
Calvin looked at me oddly for a few moments, and then a broad smile broke out.
He leant forward. "My dear boy. I don't think that's likely," he said. "They're both female."
He patted me on the shoulder, grinned, and strode off towards the landing field, convoy in tow.
I stood there for a few moments. Then I went down to my rock, took off my shoes and socks, and paddled my feet in the Pacific.
[transmit]
[disconnect]
| Page last updated: 2010 May 17 | © 2008-2009 David Given, unless specified otherwise |