Joe Haldeman - Worlds Enough and Time

Go into the sea. Eat or die. This is real .

I tried to ask it mentally whether I could breathe under the fluid, like a fish, but the connection had evidently been broken. I would find out when I got to the sea.

At first, trying to operate the eight limbs, all I did was push pebbles rattling away in all directions. I had never paid much attention to the way a crab or spider walked. Then I figured out that going sideways was the key: reach out with all the right-“hand” ones, set them down, then a little hop with the left ones. Turning was pretty simple, by coordinating upper and lower pairs.

The trick, though, was not to think about it at all. This body did know all it needed. In fact, to use a mundane analogy, it was a lot like VR in the abstract mode; you just un -concentrate and trust the brain to tune in to whatever the environment throws at it.

I looked up and the sinister roiling poisonous sky was calmingly beautiful, like a sunset after a storm. I liked the way the pebbles slid around under the paddles of my feet, and deliberately skidded in a 360-degree twirl. The smell of the ocean was the smell of life: life to be taken. I was famished.

I slid quietly into the greasy surf and the breathing holes on the top of my carapace automatically closed with a soft sneeze; the gill plates on my belly opened and sucked in the earth-flavored shallows. A little deeper and it would be refreshing. I discharged wastes and kicked forward and down.

Blind at first, confused. As the rattle of surf diminished behind me, I realized this was a world of sound, of ranging distances by loudness, and relative speeds by a kind of color, blue things approaching and red things fleeing. Sonar interpreted as sight. The rocks of the shoreline were dimming rust, then out of the billowing darkness in front of me a bright blue S undulated, an eel or a snake with outsized jaws. I instinctively pulled in the soft tentacles and extended the muscular ones en garde ; all eight paddle-feet slapped together to make a cage protecting the thorax.

The thing halted and regarded me for a moment, and then slipped away, reddening. The lesson was obvious, though. I was hungry, but I was also food.

So what did this body eat? I had no inclination to pursue the predator; there was a vague impression of how vile they tasted when you had to bite one in defense.

There were things under the mud here that were delicacies, spiny clusters like sea urchins on Earth, but I would be vulnerable, digging for them. Why? The body’s memories were unspecific, childlike. Nice to eat but ooh watch out. Safer to go into the deep coldness where nothing can sneak up on you, chase down the small swift things that live on the hard bottom.

Swam over a precipice and down deeper, pressure painful but then the carapace creaked, valves fluttered and popped, the pain went away. I bumped once against the cliff face but then paddled away from it. No noise going down.

The things on the bottom resembled the king crabs I remembered from Alaska, absurdly small bodies and long legs full of meat. They were all over the rocky bottom; all I had to do to catch one was extend my legs like a cage and envelop one at random. As it tried to scrabble away, I reached in with the claws and snipped off two legs, then crunched into the thorax.

I had to eat carefully. The noise of cracking the crab’s shell momentarily blinded me, and I was certainly the biggest meal in town, if something larger than me was hunting. Instinct took over while I was anxiously looking around, and the thing’s long serrated tongue slipped into the broken-off claw and sucked the meat out quietly.

The crabs were no smarter than they had to be. They stayed a few meters away while I was feeding, but when I was through with one, all I had to do was spring up, paddle sideways, and drift down on top of another. The females were best, with exquisitely sour egg cases.

Suddenly there was an explosion of pain behind the mandibles and I was jerked up away from my meal, rising faster and faster toward the surface of the sea. I was hooked! My claws found the line that was hauling me but couldn’t break it. All I could do was ease the pain by pulling back, so the barbs in the soft part of the jaw and tongue weren’t dragging all of my weight, but when I pulled, whoever was on the other end of the line jerked back.

I splashed out of the sea and onto a low flat raft. A thing twice my size but with six legs—no, four legs and two arms, one arm holding a huge club—scuttled toward me with obvious intent, while another one held the line taut. Their heads were insectoid and they had a chitinous exterior like mine, but wore boots and gloves and chains of gold and silver.

Suddenly the floating spider appeared between us, throwing out tentacles to hold itself fast to the raft, looking fragile as it bobbed in the random gusts of wind. The one with the club stopped and froze. The pink tendril floated toward me and lay across my back, then slapped a couple of times. It couldn’t make contact.

I was fading, fainting from the shock and pain—and then realized that in the confusion and panic I hadn’t breathed; I was still in the gill mode. The blowholes on my back sneezed open and I could feel the tendril slide in.

I was looking down at my bare human feet. Between them was a metal line that ended in a cluster of bloody hooks. I looked up just in time to see the two fishing creatures shriek in unison and jump off the raft. Unbalanced, the raft tilted and the cold sea splashed up between my legs—

And I was in absolute darkness, absolute silence. I tried to speak but there seemed to be no air in my lungs. I tried to feel for a pulse but there was no sense of where my hands were; neither could I feel whether the creature was still connected to me. There was no smell or taste, no sense of balance or imbalance, not even the feeling of having bone, muscle, and gut that still remains in VR when it’s set to null input.

Could I be dead? I asked the thing: Am I dead?

Nothing.

Perhaps it was giving me a chance to reflect on what I had been shown. Try to find a common thread. Antarctica and the center of the Earth were just demonstrations of its power. Then there was the dinosaur tribunal. John’s bed of pain. The transformation and hooking. Three situations about empathy, two of them also about judgment.

There was something there in the dark with me. Something large.

The spider thing was there, too. I couldn’t tell what they were doing.

I felt it enter my brain. This may be the last thing. Hold on to the rope very tightly A crude hairy rope several centimeters thick appeared in one hand. I grabbed it with both.

The darkness snapped off and I was blinded by a brilliant yellow glare from below. Gravity dragged me down and I clamped the rope between foot and ankle, wrapped it around a wrist. I swung wildly, sneezed, and coughed. The atmosphere was smoky, sulfurous with a tinge of chlorine or something.

Ten meters below me bubbled a river of molten rock, so hot it ran like syrup, bright yellow with scabs of black shot through with red. The pain on my bare soles was terrible; I could feel the skin burning, blisters swelling.

Sandra swung a few meters away, shrieking incoherently, a similar rope binding her wrists together. Younger and stronger, she pulled herself up into a gymnast’s ball, to get as much of her as far from the heat as possible, but her naked back and buttocks were angry red, blistering as I watched. Her hair started to smoke.

Hang on for twenty seconds and you will be spared. But your daughter will drop to her death. Let go and your daughter will live .

I screamed one word on the way down, maybe her name, and was surprised not to die instantly. It was blowtorch hot as I fell, but when I hit the river it was like fluid ice; I bobbed up once and saw the terrible ruin of my hands, flesh running in strings, smell of cooked meat in my throat, tried to scream but my mouth was melted closed.