There was nothing mechanical. He swam past quilted; blurred boundaries, the surfaces were smooth, with a resisting softness when he pressed. Some were curved, others flat. He found a ledge and crawled up onto it.
He rested, surrounded by a play of filtered jade light. The white stuff that made the walls was, he saw, assembled nearly seamlessly from the kind of blocks that had washed up on the island, that Tseng had showed him. The ledge was narrow and bumpy. Crawling along it took him to a low wall he could climb. Beyond lay a flat floor, pitted by random holes nearly a meter wide. Beyond that, more.
He explored the labyrinth for a long time, cautiously, slipping in the slick, narrow corridors. There seemed no scheme to it, only twisting passageways and small rooms. About a third of the whole structure held trapped air. Water-filled tubes intersected irregular rooms in a kind of curvilinear logic.
He worked his way up, following the shafts of shadow that descended through milky walls, There—equipment, carelessly dumped into piles, soaked. Wreckage from ships—twisted superstructure, jumbles of electronics, valves and pipes and cables. An entire combustion assembly. There was a whole radio rig, compact, sealed against water, intact with emergency battery. A good ship’s set, with high-frequency bands.
The debris was unsorted, scattered around a long room which had more of the round openings in the floor. No sign of how it got here.
He worked on the radio for a while. Some hookup wire was missing but he scavenged some from nearby and got it up and running, it would be heavy, but maybe he could take it up to the raft. He peered at the thick cable lancing up to the raft.
Green fingers of sunlight came down obliquely now; dusk. He found a hole in the floor that weaved for ten meters and then gave onto the outer wall of the structure. He panted for two minutes, filling his blood with oxygen, and then slipped through, working his way down a wide tube and then out, into open water. Once he was free the tightness in his chest vanished and he opened his mouth and let the air rush out. As he rose, the ocean’s pressure eased and more air filled him, a seeming unending fountain of it, fat bubbles wobbling upward toward the raft.
The swell lapped at creaking boards. Fish jumped and the horizon was a clean line. The sea was gathering itself again after the long time of the Swarmers, blossoming, the schools returning. He could live here now.
He got his fishing lines and the rifle and then dove in, carrying them down, entering the structure again. As the light ebbed, schools of fish gathered in the sheltered openings and tube. He trailed his lines down to them and got three.
Darkness came swiftly. He lay on the floor. There was enough air in the labyrinth to last for the night, and plenty of time to think tomorrow. He dozed fitfully, and in the night his thoughts were ragged.
There had been no more flashes over the horizon. So one part of it was finished, he thought. To set one kind of life against another. To upset the precarious balance and give humans what they thought at first was a simple fight with something from the sea.
The men had done what they always did in groups and somehow the thing had gotten away from them. And they had killed the Skyhook, too.
All without knowing that somewhere something wanted life to cancel other life and for each form to pull the other down. Clearing the way for the gray ships that now hurled themselves into the sea, far from the futile battles raging on the continents.
Something was moving beyond the walls.
He woke instantly, muscles stiff, and searched the pearly shafts of light nearby. Air and water bled into each other, catching the cool gleam of dawn, fooling the eye—
There. Quick, darting movements. Skimmers.
They entered through the tubes of water, swimming close to his room. And somehow these Skimmers knew about the time before, knew the difficult slow progress, knew the patience it demanded.
It took hours to understand and more still to get the words right. They had brought something they probably thought would serve as writing implements. The crude pen barely made scratches on the oily, crinkled pages they gave him. He wrote and they replied and he tried to see through the packed strings of words.
THE GRAY THINGS FLOAT FAR DOWN. THEY MINE THE SEA THEIR FACTORIES CLANK WE CAN HEAR THEM. THEIR SOUNDS TRAPPED IN THE PLANES OF WATER COME LONG DISTANCES. THEY MAKE MORE COPIES OF THEMSELVES. THE SWARMERS ARE GONE TO LAND THE GRAY THINGS THINK THEY ARE SAFE.
Warren knew he was a hard man, uninterested in talk, never easy with fellow crew members, comfortable only with his wife, and that for a mere few years, before the gray shield had descended between them. There was an emptiness inside him he knew that too without feeling shame or loss, not a lack but a blank space—a vacancy that made him hear the wind whisper and the slosh of waves and, because of the vacancy, to truly listen, not thinking of them as background to man’s incessant mad talk, but as a separate song, the breathing of the planet. So he had an ear for the Skimmers and things meant and shown but not said. He made it into words because he was irreducibly human and the writing of it was a way of fixing it, a mere human impulse against the rub of time, to pin things with words. And the vacancy had saved him, years of interior silence had made a quietness that was solid now, stonelike.
THEY THINK THEY ARE SAFE. THEY THINK THERE IS ONLY US, TRAPPED IN THIS NEW WORLD. WE BRING YOU TOOLS. WE KNOW THE WATERS. GRAY MACHINES MOVE NOW DO NOT SENSE CANNOT KNOW. CANNOT TASTE THE WATERS.
That afternoon the Skimmers carried more shipwreck debris in, hauling it awkwardly in rope cradles they had made, whole teams sharing the weight. He picked among it, sorting and thinking. Later they brought him a skipjack to eat.
He was tinkering with an antenna, making one from cables, when the light abruptly faded. As he peered upward a long shadow drifted against his raft. The underside was a jumble of planking and timbers.
It held to his raft and Warren wondered wildly if it could be from the gray ships, something made to float and find survivors. He crouched down among the motors and parts, staring upward, unable to see any Swarmers.
Something struck the water and fanned into a cascade of bubbles. It twisted and flailed and suddenly Warren saw it was a woman, swimming around the big shape, inspecting it from below. She tugged at something, found it firm, and went on. She glanced down, stopped stroking and hung there, staring. He had the sense that she was looking through the milky blocks of light and could see him. Just before she fan out of air she made a gesture, a brief, choppy signal—and darted upward, air rushing from her.
People. Other men and women who had learned to live on the sea. Remnants.
Now a Skimmer came lazily into view, then more, and Warren saw they had led these people on their large raft, led them here. Bringing together a ragtag bunch of survivors and aliens without hands, adrift in an ocean already infested by the gray machines.
They would have little to work with. Wrecks. Salvage. Maybe some ships fleeing from the mainland, where the death was still spreading. But they could fashion things.
He was pretty sure that if he spread an antenna across the raft the radio could reach the deep orbit space stations, get word to them, if anyone still lived.
He would have to build a parabolic antenna, to broadcast in a narrow cone, with no side-lobes. If he kept the transmissions short the only chance of being detected was if one of their orbital craft passed through the cone.
Even if not, there must be more humans on the sea. They would have to be careful to avoid detection.
The gray things would wait until the fighting was over on land. Then they would move. They would have to come up, ready to take the solid ground. But they would have to cross the remaining ocean first, and now it was a sea with Skimmers in it and men upon it, life that had fought and lost and endured and fought again and went on silently, peering forward and by instinct seeking other life, still waiting when the gray things began to move again—life still powerful and still asking as life always does, and still dangerous and still coming.
He finished the skipjack, waiting. Presently the silvery sky overhead broke into jewels and the woman splashed through the bubbles, stroking downward powerfully. She circled, studying. Even this deep he felt the slow roll of waves that made the structure creak.
He rose. She caught sight of him and waved. Suddenly excited he threw his hands into the air, waving madly. Shouting. Though he knew she could not hear him yet.
PART TEN
POCKS
ONE
Downward, into an ocean of night. The submersible was a bright, gaudy Christmas ball with spangles of running lights. It cast a wan glow on the massive shelves of carbon dioxide ice that walled the vent. Motors whirred. In the tight cabin the air chilled and pressure climbed.
Lancer’s recon analysis had located dozens of warm spots on the surface. They were cracks in the ice layers, where warming currents below had worked their way up the fracture faults of the ice continents. The mountain ranges of ice and rock moved and shifted in gravid tectonics, breaking and folding and splintering.
This moon was bigger than Ganymede. Below its icy skin, a huge volume of slush and liquid circulated. At the center, a core of rock and metal became hotter as the radioactive elements decayed. Earth itself gained most of its internal heart from decay of radium and uranium. Here the heat from below sought an exit, working at the thin spherical cap of ice, seeping upward, finding an opening here, a weakness there, and at last breaking onto the surface in short-lived victory.
