Gregory Benford - Across the Sea of Suns

“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.

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.

“Hi.”

Carlotta kissed him. “Had another face smoothing, I see.”

“No, I decided to skip that and go straight to embalming. How’s it look?”

“It’s you, dahling. Are those laugh lines or an irrigation project?”

Bob shook hands in his good-ole-boy persona. “You figure there’s much on fer tonight?”

Nigel fetched drinks. “The free-form sex is down the hall, second left.”

“Don’t look for him there,” Carlotta said. “Nigel gets all tired out just struggling with temptation.”

Nigel handed her a drink. “Hot-blooded kid. I suppose you’ll be playing hopscotch tonight with real Scotch?”

“Si. You’re so much wittier after I’ve had a few drinks.”

“You two!” Nikka shook her head. “One could never guess you had spent the night together.”

“Mating rituals of the higher primates,” Carlotta said, taking a long pull. She stroked Nikka’s kimono. “ Madre! It’s so attractive on you.”

Nigel wondered why women spoke that way when presumably it was men who were best qualified to judge attraction, yet men seldom used the term. Curious. Though of course in this case his generalization fell on its face. In their first hand touch they reestablished a lazy, familiar sensuality.

He watched Carlotta approach Nikka, speaking rapidly and approvingly, and then move away, and then return, an unconscious push-pull to draw Nikka out. Carlotta’s heavy, springy hair flowed with these movements. In marked contrast, her large brown eyes did not share this social gavotte. He liked the rigor of those eyes and the unashamed way they locked on whatever interested her, holding it for rapt attention.