Jack Chalker - Priam's Lens

Chicanis laughed. “No, of course not! But they’re one of several great ranges on Eden, and the only one that actually does go round in sort of a U-shaped pattern. The passes are almost two kilometers up or higher, and it’s an effective barrier. It’s actually more than one range, and if you saw the maps you’d know that it only seems to make the U here, but, of course, for all practical purposes, it does and is. The landform and its proximity to the coast made it ideal for agricultural growth. You could grow anything in there. I think that’s why our indications are that there are many human survivors about on the plain. By the time they had to crawl out of their holes and forage, the place had been scoured and then the old plants started to grow and bloom once more. It’s all wild now, of course, but I’ll wager I can find the old company patterns.”

The priest had seemed energized since landing on the planet; for all the horrors and the unknown perils to come, he was home.

Harker looked around. The tide from Achilles’s pull was fairly strong, and it would take them in eventually no matter what they did. He wondered, though, what might be lurking below.

“Father, what sort of creatures live in these oceans? Anything we need to be worried about?”

“Not in this close, I shouldn’t think,” the priest replied. “There wasn’t a whole lot of land-based animal life when this world was discovered and developed, but the sea was filled with it. This is a water world, really; the two continents are relatively small, perhaps both of them together making up no more than thirty percent of the surface. Let us just say that the deep ocean creatures are not terribly friendly and are quite large, but that they are also quite alien in form. It’s the small creatures, the viswat as we called them, the ones that have the kind of ecological niche of small fish or shellfish here, that are nasty. They move by the thousands in swarms and they are very hard and have very sharp outlines, and they can cut you to pieces just going by. That doesn’t worry the predators; viswat are near the bottom of the food chain—but they do make it difficult to do ocean swimming.” He sighed. “I suppose the water ecology survived pretty well intact. It’s ironic, in a way. Almost like God was making a comment.”

“How’s that?”

“Well, consider. These Titans, whatever they are, are certainly land-based, and they like the sorts of places we like. So they scour and then remake the land to suit them, as we did, pretty well plowing under what humans built, so the only region that remains pretty much as God made it is the sea. These are the times when one almost questions whose side God is on.”

“How much longer, Harker?” Katarina Socolov called. She looked kind of green but hadn’t thrown up for a while, although perhaps that was because there wasn’t much left to heave.

Harker looked at the beach. “Twenty, thirty minutes, I’d say, unless we pick up speed with this incoming tide.

Don’t worry, Doc. You only wish you could die; you’ll be fine within minutes of our getting to dry land so long as you replace your fluids.”

Father Chicanis looked ahead at where they seemed to be going. “We’d best aim for Capri Point, there,” he said, pointing to a rocky outcrop. “There are some fairly nasty creatures that dwell under the sand and are particularly treacherous after it’s been wet down. That’s real rock there, a kind of shale, and there’s only a small stretch of beach to cover. When we get close, give me a rifle and you handle the boat and supplies.”

“A rifle?” Harker was intrigued. “Why?”

“Because they’ll come up from under the sand and pull you right down into it. I’ve seen them take limbs, even whole people. We never could wipe them out because they moved out under the sea and onto the shelf and through here and then came back when nobody was looking. No poison or other impediment seemed to do any good at all.”

Harker looked over at Mogutu and N’ Gana in their boat. “They know about this?”

“Of course. It only now occurred to me how few briefings you had on this world.”

Harker sighed and shook his head. “Sure must have made afternoons with the family at the beach a real adventure. Anything else like that I should know?”

“Nothing lethal. Actually, we used to have a kind of grid that gave a small electrical charge to the sand. You never even noticed it, but it drove all the no-see-ums away. My thinking is that it probably hasn’t been powered for almost a century.”

“Good point. And when we get off the sand, if we can?”

“Beyond the beach, I suspect that it’s going to be as new to me as it is to you. You’ve seen the three-dimensional maps, the scanning data, all that. I can recognize the land-forms and some of the old patterns, like I said, but the rest—it’s new. The scour took most everything out, and this is all new growth. It even appears that the roadways and farms had been scraped away, although you can still see the road paths and patterns in the pictures. How easily they’ll be to find on the ground is a different story.”

“I’ll settle for any kind of road,” Socolov moaned. “Nothing on land could be worse than this!”

They continued on in with the tide. In another half hour, they approached the beach near the rocky outcrop the priest had called Capri Point. “Going in fast,” Harker warned. “Father, you first. Get onto the rocks and cover us from as high as you can safely stand. Doc, I’m sorry about your sickness, but you’re gonna have to get off fast and pretty much under your own power. Get to the rocks and stay there! As soon as you’re clear, I’m gonna try and throw the line for the supplies. Doc, you’ll have to hold onto it because the padre’s gonna be shooting, I suspect. Then I’ll come up with the line for the boat and Father Chicanis and I will bring it up onto the rocks as fast as possible. Doc, your job is to hold onto that supply rope and don’t fall onto the sand. Got it?”

She looked nervous and still sick, but she nodded.

Harker went to the back of the boat, Chicanis took a rifle, inserted a clip, and stood near the front. Harker lowered a plastic tiller into the water and with all his strength battled the tide and waves to bring the boat as close to the rocks as possible without crashing onto them.

“Hold on!” he shouted above the sounds of crashing waves. “Everybody ready! Now!”

There was a tremendous lurch, and the boat ran up on the sand just a meter or so from the start of the rocky outcrop. Harker had proved himself a real expert sailor. Chicanis had been briefly knocked back by the force of the landing. He was unsteady as the waves continued to hit, but fired three loud shots into the sand just beyond and then immediately jumped out and raced for the rocks.

The bullets had done nothing, but as he hit the sand there was a sudden series of undulations of the yellow beach as if a horde of tiny rodents lived just beneath, and they all headed right for him. He made the rocks before they could catch him, though, and they stopped dead, as if waiting.

“Did you see ’em?” Harker called, pointing.

“I got ’em! Don’t worry!”

Harker turned to Socolov, who looked suddenly more terrified than green. “Doc, you can’t stay here and we have another boat coming in! This is what the job is. It’s a little late to lose your nerve now! Come forward!” He didn’t like to be so blunt and commanding to her, but time was not on their side.

She moved forward, but he could see her shaking. He took the long line of yellow rope and put it in her hand and then adjusted things, twisting this way and that, so she’d have a good grip. “Now, you don’t have to haul the stuff in,” he reminded her. “Just hold on!”