Warren slammed the tiller over full. It groaned and the collar nearly buckled but he held it, throwing his shoulder into it.
Rosa grunted and glared at him. The raft tacked to port. He pulled the twine and brought the plywood farther into the wind.
Small youth schlect uns. The Swarmers were bigger than the Skimmers, but they might mean smaller in some other way. Smaller development? Smaller brain? Schlect uns. Something about us and the Swarmers. If they were younger than the Skimmers, maybe their development was still to come. Something told him that schlect was a word like gefahrlich, but what the difference was he did not know. Swarmers dangerous us? There was nothing in the words to show action, to show who us was. Did us include Warren?
Rosa stumbled toward him. The swell was coming abaft now and she clutched at him for support. “Wha’? Land! Go!”
He rubbed his eyes and focused on her face but it looked different in the waning light. He saw that in all the days they had been together he had never known her. The face was just a face. There had never been enough words between them to make the face into something else. He …
The wind shifted and he shrugged away the distraction and worked the twine. He studied the dark green mass ahead. It was thickly wooded and there were bare patches and a beach. The white curves of breaking surf were clear now. The thick brown reef—
Things moved on the beach.
At first he thought they were driftwood, logs swept in by a storm. Then he saw one move and then another and they were green bodies in the sand. They crawled inland. A few had made it to the line of trees.
Small youth. Young ones who were still developing.
He numbly watched the island draw near. Dimly he felt Rosa pounding on his chest and shoulder. “Steer us in! You hear me? Make this thing—”
“Wha—what?”
“You afraid of the rocks, that it?” She spit out something in Spanish or Portuguese, something angry and full of scorn. Her eyes bulged unnaturally. “No man would—”
“Shut up.” His lips felt thick. They were rushing by the island now, drawn by the fast currents.
“You fool, we’re going to miss.”
“Look … look at it. The Skimmers, they’re telling us not to go there. You’ll see. …”
“See what?”
“The things. On the beach.”
She followed his pointing. She peered at it, shook her head, and said fiercely, “So? Nothing there but logs.”
Warren squinted and saw logs covered with green moss. The surf broke over some of them and they rolled in the swell, looking like they were crawling.
“I … I don’t …” he began.
Rosa shook her head impatiently. “Huh!” She bent down and found a large board that was working loose. Grunting, she pried it up. Warren peered at the beach and saw stubs on the logs, stubs where there had once been fins. They began to work against the sand again. The logs stirred.
“You can stay here and die,” Rosa said clearly. “Me, no.” The reef swept by only meters away. Waves slapped and muttered against its flanks. The gray shelves of coral dipped beneath the water. Its shadowy mass below thinned and a clear sandy spot appeared. A passage. Shallow, but maybe enough …
“Wait …” Warren looked toward the beach again. If he was wrong … The logs had fleshy stubs now that pushed at the sand, crawling up the beach. What he had seen as knotholes were something else. Sores? He strained to see—
Rosa dived into the break in the reef. She hit cleanly and wallowed onto the board. Resolutely she stroked through the water, battling the swells of waves refracted into the opening.
“Wait! I think the Swarmers are—” She could not hear him over the slopping of waves on the reef.
He remembered distantly the long days … the Skimmers … “Wait!” he called. Rosa was through the passage and into the calm beyond. “Wait!” She went on.
Where he had seen logs he now saw something bloated and grotesque, sick. He shook his head. His vision cleared—or did it? he wondered—and now he could not tell what waited for Rosa on the glimmering sand.
He lost sight of her as the raft followed deflected currents around the island. The trade wind was coming fresh. He felt it on his skin like a reminder, and the sunset sat hard and bright in the west. Automatically he tacked out free of the reef and turned WSW. When he looked back in the soft twilight it was hard to see the forms struggling like huge lungfish up onto their new home. Under the slanted light the wind broke the sea into oily facets that became a field of mirrors reflecting shattered images of the burnt-orange sky and the raft. He peered at the mirrors.
The logs on the beach … He felt the tug of the twine and made a change in heading to steady a yaw.
He gathered speed. When the thin scream came out of the dusk behind him he did not turn around.
PART THREE
2076 RA
ONE
Nigel watched Nikka carefully arrange her kimono. It was brocaded in brown and blue and, as tradition dictated, was extravagant by more than ten centimeters. Nikka drew it up until the hem was just level with her heels, once, twice—at the fifth try he stopped counting and fondly watched her turn this way and that before the polished-steel mirror. She arranged a red silk cord at her waist and smoothed down the slack of the kimono. Then came the obi: a broad, stiff sash, fully five meters long. She wrapped it around herself at breast level, frowned, wrapped it again. Each time he watched this ceremony it seemed more subtle, revealed more of her shifting mind. He murmured a detailed compliment and a knot of indecision in her dissolved; she firmly fastened the two small cords that secured the obi. This layering and sure smoothing done, she tried a brass front buckle. Pursed her lips. Changed it to an onyx clasp. Turned, studied the effect. Plunged an ivory comb into her butterfly chocho mage crown of hair. Then a pale, waxy comb. Next, a brilliant yellow one. Then back to the ivory. He loved these pensive, hovering moments when she revealed the light and childlike core of herself. Lancer tended to iron out the graceful, momentary interludes, he thought, and replace them with clear, sharp decisive certainties.
“You must have the largest wardrobe on board.”
“Some things are worth the trouble,” she said, fitting on zori of worn, woven stalks. And smiled, knowing he too sensed how important such age-honored moments were to her.
A knock at the door. He went for it, knowing that Bob Millard and Carlotta Nava would be there, coming a bit early. The shipscene multifass began in ten minutes: time-bracketed communality.
Lancer was organized in the now-accepted mode. Whenever possible, decisions about work were made at the lowest level, involving the most workers possible. The intricately structured weave of social and political forces was a sophisticated descendant of an old cry—ownership of the means of production by the workers!—without the authoritarian knee jerks Marx left in the original model. It was flexible; it allowed Nigel to work on whatever odd bit of astronomical data caught his eye, as long as he also pitched into overall drudge jobs as they came up. The details were worked out by small labor cells.
To break down the ever-forming rigidities of hierarchy, the Shipwide Multifaceted Social Exchange blended all workers together; Mixmastering them into a classless puree. There were a minimum of classlike distinctions. Ship command officers ate the same boring commissary food and griped about it in the same sour, hopeless way. They wore the same blue jump suits and had no privileges. Nigel had some perks because of his age, not his rank; within the limits of efficiency, there were no ranks. Ted Landon headed the shipwide assembly, but his vote weighed the same as an obscure techtype’s.
Nigel liked it: smorgasbord socialism, without a true profit motive, since Lancer had only to return to Earth to be a success. This simplified the sociometric analysis; consensus communities, as the jargon had it, were notably stable. Nigel ignored most of the earnest entreaties that he participate more. He liked the community well enough, while distrusting its bland surface, its solicitous sensitivity. But the swelling exuberance of the multifass could sweep him along, drown his reserve. Bright, young people had an undeniable momentum.
