Robert Silverberg - Homefaring

“You are warned,” said the lobster. “You are not selecting your victim wisely.”

Again came a muddled response, sluggish and incoherent, the speech of an entity for whom verbal communication was a heavy, all but impossible effort.

Its enormous mouth gaped. Its fins rippled fiercely as it siphoned itself downward the last few yards to engulf the lobster. McCulloch prepared himself for transition to some new and even more unimaginable state when his host met its death. But suddenly the ocean floor was swarming with lobsters. They must have been arriving from all sides— summoned by his host’s frantic dance, McCulloch wondered?—while McCulloch, intent on the descent of the swimmer, had not noticed. Ten, twenty, possibly fifty of them arrayed themselves now beside McCulloch’s host, and as the swimmer, tail on high, mouth wide, lowered itself like some gigantic suction-hose toward them, the lobsters coolly and implacably seized its lips in their claws. Caught and helpless, it began at once to thrash, and from the pores through which it spoke came bleating incoherent cries of dismay and torment.

There was no mercy for it. It had been warned. It dangled tail upward while the pack of lobsters methodically devoured it from below, pausing occasionally to strip away and discard the rigid rods of chitin that formed its superstructure. Swiftly they reduced it to a faintly visible cloud of shreds oscillating in the water, and then small scavenging creatures came to fall upon those, and there was nothing at all left but the scattered rods of chitin on the sand.

The entire episode had taken only a few moments: the coming of the predator, the dance of McCulloch’s host, the arrival of the other lobsters, the destruction of the enemy. Now the lobsters were gathered in a sort of convocation about McCulloch’s host, wordlessly manifesting a commonality of spirit, a warmth of fellowship after feasting, that seemed quite comprehensible to McCulloch. For a short while they had been uninhibited savage carnivores consuming convenient meat; now once again they were courteous, refined, cultured—Japanese gentlemen, Oxford dons, gentle Benedictine monks.

McCulloch studied them closely. They were definitely more like lobsters than like any other creature he had ever seen, very much like lobsters, and yet there were differences. They were larger. How much larger, he could not tell, for he had no real way of judging distance and size in this undersea world; but he supposed they must be at least three feet long, and he doubted that lobsters of his time, even the biggest, were anything like that in length. Their bodies were wider than those of lobsters, and their heads were larger. The two largest claws looked like those of the lobsters he remembered, but the ones just behind them seemed more elaborate, as if adapted for more delicate procedures than mere rending of food and stuffing it into the mouth. There was an odd little hump, almost a dome, midway down the lobster’s back—the center of the expanded nervous system, perhaps.

The lobsters clustered solemnly about McCulloch’s host and each lightly tapped its claws against those of the adjoining lobster in a sort of handshake, a process that seemed to take quite some time. McCulloch became aware also that a conversation was under way.

What they were talking about, he realized, was him.

“It is not painful to have a McCulloch within one,” his host was explaining. “It came upon me at molting time, and that gave me a moment of difficulty, molting being what it is. But it was only a moment. After that my only concern was for the McCulloch’s comfort.”

“And it is comfortable now?”

“It is becoming more comfortable.”

“When will you show it to us?”

“Ah, that cannot be done. It has no real existence, and therefore I cannot bring it forth.”

“What is it, then? A wanderer? A revenant?”

“A revenant, yes. So I think. And a wanderer. It says it is a human being.”

“And what is that? Is a human being a kind of McCulloch?”

“I think a McCulloch is a kind of human being.”

“Which is a revenant.”

“Yes, I think so.”

“This is an Omen!”

“Where is its world?”

“Its world is lost to it.”

“Yes, definitely an Omen.”

“It lived on dry land.”

“It breathed air.”

“It wore its shell within its body.”

“What a strange revenant!”

“What a strange world its world must have been.”

“It is the former world, would you not say?”

“So I surely believe. And therefore this is an Omen.”

“Ah, we shall Molt. We shall Molt.”

McCulloch was altogether lost. He was not even sure when his own host was the speaker.

“Is it the Time?”

“We have an Omen, do we not?”

“The McCulloch surely was sent as a herald.”

“There is no precedent.”

“Each Molting, though, is without precedent. We cannot conceive what came before. We cannot imagine what comes after. We learn by learning. The McCulloch is the herald. The McCulloch is the Omen.”

“I think not. I think it is unreal and unimportant.”

“Unreal, yes. But not unimportant.”

“The Time is not at hand. The Molting of the World is not yet due. The human is a wanderer and a revenant, but not a herald and certainly not an Omen.”

“It comes from the former world.”

“It says it does. Can we believe that?”

“It breathed air. In the former world, perhaps there were creatures that breathed air.”

“It says it breathed air. I think it is neither herald nor Omen, neither wanderer nor revenant. I think it is a myth and a fugue. I think it betokens nothing. It is an accident. It is an interruption.”

“That is an uncivil attitude. We have much to learn from the McCulloch. And if it is an Omen, we have immediate responsibilities that must be fulfilled.”

“But how can we be certain of what it is?”

May I speak? said McCulloch to his host.

— Of course.

— How can I make myself heard?

— Speak through me.

“The McCulloch wishes to be heard!”

“Hear it! Hear it!”

“Let it speak!”

McCulloch said, and the host spoke the words aloud for him, “I am a stranger here, and your guest, and so I ask you to forgive me if I give offense, for I have little understanding of your ways. Nor do I know if I am a herald or an Omen. But I tell you in all truth that I am a wanderer, and that I am sent from the former world, where there are many creatures of my kind, who breathe air and live upon the land and carry their—shells—inside their body.”

“An Omen, certainly,” said several of the lobsters at once. “A herald, beyond doubt.”

McCulloch continued, “It was our hope to discover something of the worlds that are to come after ours. And therefore I was sent forward—”

“A herald—certainly a herald!”

“—to come to you, to go among you, to learn to know you, and then to return to my own people, the air-people, the human people, and bring the word of what is to come. But I think that I am not the herald you expect. I carry no message for you. We could not have known that you were here. Out of the former world I bring you the blessing of those that have gone before, however, and when I go back to that world I will bear tidings of your life, of your thought, of your ways—”

“Then our kind is unknown to your world?”

McCulloch hesitated. “Creatures somewhat like you do exist in the seas of the former world. But they are smaller and simpler than you, and I think their civilization, if they have one, is not a great one.”

“You have no discourse with them, then?” one of the lobsters asked.

“Very little,” he said. A miserable evasion, cowardly, vile. McCulloch shivered. He imagined himself crying out, “We eat them!” and the water turning black with their shocked outbursts—and saw them instantly falling upon him, swiftly and efficiently slicing him to scraps with their claws. Through his mind ran monstrous images of lobsters in tanks, lobsters boiling alive, lobsters smothered in rich sauces, lobsters shelled, lobsters minced, lobsters rendered into bisques—he could not halt the torrent of dreadful visions. Such was our discourse with your ancestors. Such was our mode of interspecies communication. He felt himself drowning in guilt and shame and fear.