Cachalot Page 14

  She thanked Merced, cut off, and left her room. Vai'oire was not so enormous that she wouldn't be able to locate him. In the air of a muggy afternoon she asked questions of the townsfolk.

  For a while the answers were identical. "No, haven't seen him; yes, know who you mean, but I've been out fishing all day; no, sorry…"

  As she wandered around the town she came to feel progressively more isolated. The differences hadn't been so obvious back on Mou'anui. Many technicians from off-planet worked at the Administration Center and its processing facilities. Here on Vai'oire the majority of the population was of traceable Polynesian ancestry. Their massive bodies and cafe au lait color, encased only in pareus or skimpy diving gear, made her feel like an awkward splinter of jet set among twenty-karat topazes. She felt smothered by sweaty, heaving flesh, pressing in on all sides.

  Eventually she ran into someone who had seen Sam. "The peaceforcer captain?"

  She nodded energetically.

  "He was headed over that way." The young man pointed, added good-naturedly, "Two buildings down, you turn to the left Town Communications. I'll bet he was going there."

  Communications—yes, that made sense. She thanked the youth, followed his directions carefully. She needn't have been so intense. One could not become very lost on Vai'oire, since all steps led eventually to the sea.

  The structure was clearly marked, with curved corners. Its walls, like all on Vai'oire, were formed of a light but extremely durable honeycomb plastic that was impervious to salt corrosion and placed little burden on the supporting polymer base. Several small domes protruded from its upper sides and roof, along with a broad dish antenna. An impressive array of electronic webwork connected antennas and domes and other projections, spun of titanium and magensoy and glass instead of silk.

  Inside she found not a single worker. She was not surprised. Automation and robotic sensors could handle the prosaic, monotonous chores of aligning antennae and distributing long-distance bulletins. The bulk of radiowave information went directly into the inhabitants' homes, ready for display on individual tridee units.

  She finally found a man using one of several public viewers. His home unit had blown a module and had not yet been repaired.

  "Mataroreva? Big fellow, real easygoing?" She nodded. He jerked a thumb to his right, his attention still wholly on the viewscreen. "Went into the library, I think."

  Two rooms farther on she found the town storage bank. Thousands of tape chips with information on everything from how to dissect local forms of poisonous fish to entertainment shows imported all the way from Terra filled the slots in the bank. The room was very small. No one except the librarian needed to use the room, since the chipped information could be called up on any screen in town.

  Maybe Sam was hunting a restricted chip, or providing information to be stored and shipped hard copy to Mou'anui, to back up his broadcasts. She tried the transparent door. It wasn't locked. Yes, he was probably encoding a chip. For all his seeming frivolity, she knew he was a diligent and conscientious worker.

  She could surprise him as effectively as he had surprised her. She opened the door quietly and slipped inside. There was no sign of him… no, there, toward the back of the room, some noise. A local technician was probably helping him, she realized. That would spoil some of her surprise.

  As it developed, her surprise was as total as she could have wished, but she drew no joy from its effect. A technician was also present, as she had suspected. The trouble came from the fact that Sam and the woman weren't engaged in research or programming.

  Cora simply stood and stared, her expression completely blank, like a mindwiped idiot awaiting imprinting.

  Oddly enough, her attention was focused mostly on the technician, the stranger, who was taller, fuller, at least ten years younger, than Cora. Sam moved slightly away from the woman, shattered the incredibly awkward tableau by doing the worst possible thing. He smiled apologetically.

  "Pardon me," Cora finally managed to say, with the incredible calm that so often occurs in times of emotional paralysis. "It wasn't anything important."

  "Cora?" She had already left the room. He did not follow.

  Still icily composed, she exited the building. She managed to get halfway back to the visitors' apartments before she broke into a run. A few locals eyed her curiously. There was no need to run on Vai'oire. Everything was close to everything else.

  Cora entered the reception area. The fates had chosen to bestow a small favor: Rachael was not to be seen. Stumbling into her room, Cora sealed the door behind her. Then she collapsed on the woven bed and lay there interminably, trying to cry. She discovered that she could not. She laughed wildly, her throat burning. Out of practice. Old habits die hard. No tears fell from her eyes. Not for Sam, not for herself.

  Exhausted, she eventually rolled over. Her head hung toward the floor. Rainbows danced and swirled beneath the distant water.

  Why so upset? she asked herself silently, angrily. What do you have to be so upset about? He promised you nothing, he forced you into nothing. It was the mildest possible seduction.

  Yes? What about the cavern, then? Beauty that he knew would overcome you. And you were overcome, but he and the beauty were separate, and you willingly drank of both. So you wanted to make love to him.

  Integrate critical query: do you want more than that? Don't know, don't know god I don't know. You went into this with your eyes open. Yes, eyes open and brain shut. Serves you right You deserve what you get in this life.

  Then stop acting like a sixteen-year-old! You're always harping at Rachael for acting immature, and you're acting worse than she ever has. When you see him again, you go right on as if nothing has happened. Yes… he's still in charge of the security end of this expedition. You treat him that way. Polite, friendly— and distant. If he so much as touches you…

  Again the fury rose like lava in the throat of a volcano, subsided as quickly. How interesting to speculate, she told herself, on man's continuing familial relationship with the ape. Don't blame Sam for a species-wide lack of progression.

  She rolled onto her back, studied the ceiling. Always the male must prove himself. You cannot be mad at the leader of the baboon pack for acting like himself.

  She could cope with that reality. She had done so for years. No reason to regress now. Sam had made his point. She did not bother to debate the thoughts behind his ludicrous little grin, back there on the floor. How jejune!

  Running back to her room, memory and confusion and hurt all mashed together in her mind, she had thought he had been taunting her, deliberately flaunting the woman at her. The male peacock flares his feathers, she mused.

  But that was asking too much of him. He had never laid claim to eloquence or cunning, and now he had demonstrated his lack of both. You were the one, Cora reminded herself with satisfaction, who took the situation in hand and spoke, made the decision to move. That smile was nothing more than a truthful mirror of his inner vapidness. She had made a mistake. Sam Mataroreva was not merely boyish in appearance and manner, he was a boy in all things. She should simply treat bun as such. Her expectations had been too, too high. How she had permitted herself to regard him as an admirable man she now could not imagine.

  Enough. She would relax with some tapes the remainder of the afternoon, dine with the others as pleasantly as possible, and have a good night's rest. There was still much of the town to be seen, for who knew wherein might lie the critical clue? Perhaps she might even seek out that girl and ask her to show them about Vai'oire. Yes, that was it, show her how a mature woman can act. Let the other be the nervous one, awaiting the explosion that would never come.

  For now a nap would be a good idea. She would have no trouble falling asleep. The autochef could dispense things other than food. At the last moment she changed her mind. Naturally induced tranquility was better than drugged.

  She lay back down on the bed, rolled over, and darkened the window and floor. The anger had subsided, the an
xiety vanished. But though the room was now as dark as night, she could not shut out the afterimage burned into her retinas of two bodies entwined on a floor.

  Dinner proceeded with a forced amiability that fooled no one. Rachael knew something was wrong with her mother, but for once had the sense not to open her mouth. Mataroreva ate with an unusual single-mindedness, letting Rachael and Merced carry the conversation.

  After dessert he brightened, however, at a thought. "Listen, there's going to be a spectacle on the reef to-night. The townsfolk are used to it already, so we ought to have the entire reef to ourselves."

  "What kind of spectacle?" Cora displayed more interest than she felt.

  "Well," Mataroreva hurried on, believing that he had genuinely aroused her interest, "it involves a native cephalopod. It doesn't look like a squid or sexathorp. More like a ball with tentacles."

  He withdrew a sketch film from his pareu pockets, then a stylus. The instrument was wielded with surprising delicacy by his thick digits. The creature he outlined was actually more ellipsoidal than spherical. Four squat fins protruded from one end while a ring of six or seven tiny eyes orbited the other. Each eye had a long tentacle set just above it. A single round mouth rested in the center of the ocular ring.

  "They range in color from a vitreous green to a light lavender," Sam told them animatedly. Rachael and Merced were listening with interest. "They school in the thousands over this reef."

  "How big?" Merced asked.

  "About the size of my fist." He made one by way of example. "Plus the tentacle length."

  "The town hunts for them?" Cora was intrigued despite herself.

  "No, not for them. There's a small fish, about the size of my little finger…"

  "You have expressive hands," she cut in. "Two examples already."

  He eyed her uncertainly for an instant, hunting for hidden meanings before continuing. "The fish live in millions of crevices in the reef. When they school, the cephalopods arrive to hunt them—and to mate. When they're mating they pulse like fireflies: the males, different shades of blue; the females, of red. They're powerful bioluminescents. And they dance, a kind of figure-eight weave. Thousands and thousands weaving together, and pulsing every shade of red and blue."

  "Sounds like a subject for a new composition," Rachael admitted, thinking of the neurophon languishing back in her room. As she did so, her expression drooped. "But I promised to do that concert."

  "You didn't promise a particular night," Merced reminded her. "You can put off our hosts for a couple of days."

  "All right, tomorrow would be as good as tonight, I suppose." She rose from the table. "Sure. I'll go tell them, and get into my suit." She suddenly glanced over at Cora, asked concernedly, "You coming along, Mother?"

  What an odd tone to her voice, Cora thought. Surely I'm acting perfectly normal. "Of course I'm coming along. It sounds very exciting."

  "Good." Mataroreva put away his sketch film, from which the drawing of the cephalopod was already fading. "At the northeast end of town you'll find a long, isolated pier. It's tangent to the nearest portion of the reef shallows." He checked his chronometer. "Sundown's in about an hour. We should meet at two in the morning."

  "That long?" Rachael was looking out a window. "It's dark already."

  "Clouds," he replied, following her gaze. "It's not the darkness—the cephalopods have a particular time of night. We'll all simply have to remain awake for a while. The rain won't affect them, if it comes."

  Excitement overcoming her sleepiness, Cora made her way through the dimly lit streets of the town. So late at night (early in the morning, she corrected herself), the majority of the townsfolk were long since sound asleep.

  She reached the edge of town, heard the water lapping at the polymer raft. Ahead lay the pier. At its far end she could make out several shadowy figures.

  "We're all here," Rachael offered as Cora joined them. She was already poured into her gelsuit. Merced was adjusting his mask. In fact, they were more than all there. Now five figures were standing at the end of the pier.

  "This is our guide." Sam pointed to another shape making final tunings of its own equipment. "There are enough ins and outs to nightdiving a strange reef to make it tricky. It would be hard to lose anyone, but this is safer."

  "I know that. You think I'm a complete idiot?" Rachael looked sharply at her mother, and Cora could see the puzzlement on her daughter's face through faceplate and darkness.

  "I'm sorry—I know you don't," she apologized. "Naturally it would be sensible for us to have a guide."

  "I'll do my best, Ms. Xamantina," a voice said. The fifth figure turned toward her. Cora stared. She trembled just a little, and the quivering passed quickly. It was the girl Sam had been with.

  She extended a hand. Even in the dim light Cora could discern the tenseness in the youthful face across from her. "My name's Dawn. I'm the town librarian." Cora resisted the urge to say something like, "That's not all you are, lynx." Besides, Cora was not going to lapse into adolescence now. She reached out with her own hand, tried to will the nerves to numbness as they shook.

  "It's an honor to meet you." The girl spoke with apparent sincerity. "We all know that you've been brought in by the government and the administration all the way from Terra to help us with our misfortunes. If anyone can solve them, I'm sure you can."

  Come on, dear, Cora thought to herself. You're overdoing it. Nonetheless, staring at the unlined young face, she sensed that, given half a chance, this was a woman she could come to like. At the moment she was unsure whether she still hated her or merely felt sorry for her. This was an oceanographic expedition, no matter its aesthetic coloration. Not a sequence from a tired old tridee fiction chip. "Let's get going," she said briskly. "It's late. Very late." That was true enough. The sun would rise in another few hours.

  Clouds blotted out the stars. A few drops, harbingers of nocturnal precipitation to come, dampened their now masked faces. Mataroreva produced a set of diving lights, tiny high-intensity beam throwers that could be held easily in one hand.

  "What about predators?" Merced was speaking through his headphone system now. "I'd expect there would be many, unless Cachalot's carnivores are all day feeders."

  "They're not," Dawn informed him, "but the large pelagics never swim in the reef shallows. Those that do are too small to trouble more than one swimmer, and there are five of us."

  How obvious, Cora mused. Was Merced trying to make the girl feel comfortable with them by providing her with a chance to display some knowledge? It had to be that. She had seen and heard enough of the little scientist to suspect him of several things, but naivete wasn't one of them.

  Naturally there wouldn't be a swarm of dangerous predators about, or the cephalopods would not have chosen this place and time for mating.

  One by one, they turned on their hand beams, the projectors clipped protectively to individual wrist latches, and slipped quietly into the water.

  The beam throwers were necessary to illumine their surroundings. It was not necessary to search out a companion with the lights because the gelsuits, in addition to being thermosensitive, were also thermolumiescent. While the gel controlled body heat, that same heat was enough to excite the atoms of the suit material to fluorescence. So each swimming figure glowed a soft yellow.

  As they moved farther into the reef they encountered a myriad of phosphorescent hexalates and other creatures, but nothing particularly unique. Cora had observed similar phenomena on other worlds.

  Then the reef seemed to drop abruptly away on all sides and they were swimming in a vast open hollow, a natural underwater amphitheater. Within that watery bowl was one of the most magnificent sights anyone could imagine. For a time Cora forgot her worries about their assignment, forgot any memories of the painful confrontation with Sam and Dawn back in the town library. Forgot everything. Before her was glory that eclipsed all anxiety.

  If anything, Sam had underestimated the number of cephalopods they could
expect to encounter. Tens of thousands wiggled and fluttered before them, around them. Some danced in threes and fours. Others were naturally partnered, while thousands more sought partners amid the iridescent orgy of liquid copulation. Myriad searchlights flared and pulsed around her. Soon something neither Sam nor Dawn had mentioned commenced about them.

  The gelsuits shone yellow. Not red or blue. That mattered not. Driven by curiosity, passion, or forces unimaginable to mankind, the cephalopods began to scurry around each bipedal figure. Cora discovered herself enveloped in a multiple waltz of other-worldly beauty and grace. She let herself drift, suspended in luminescence, as blue and red spheres jigged and courted about her hands and head and legs.

  Peering through the tentacled brilliance, she saw the yellow figure of Rachael surrounded by an attentive court of dazzling luminaries, a flavescent nucleus orbited by blue and crimson electrons.

  She raised one of her hands. Immediately two of the blue cephalopods began a stately pirouette about her fingertips, twisting and somersaulting with gravity-defying grace. Another bumped against her faceplate, making her jerk instinctively. But it was a soft, powder-puff collision. She stared into septuple alien eyes, cat-slitted and rich purple, trying to bridge a chasm of intelligence and evolution. Blankly, the disappointed creature drifted away with a hypnotic wave of its tentacles.

  Treading water easily, she remained above the bottom, below the surface. There was no sky above, no ground below. She was adrift in a sea of stars. She had to force herself to think of the proximity of sharp hexalate blades which could rip gelsuit or airflow headpiece. In such light, devoid of reference points, one could easily become disoriented and swim into the reef wall.

  Despite such dangers, she found herself wishing she could slip free of the suit skin to swim naked and clean in the dark water, convoyed by gently bobbing blue and red lights.