Across the Sea of Suns

One

The guard took Warren down the center of the island, along a path worn smooth in the last few days by the troops. They passed a dozen technicians working on acoustic equipment and playing back the high-pitched squeals of Skimmer song. The troops were making entries on computer screens and chattering to each other, breaking down the problem into bits that could be cross-referenced and reassembled to make patterns that people could understand. It would have to be good because they wanted to eavesdrop. But the way the Skimmers talked to the Swarmers might not be anything like the songs the Skimmers sung among themselves.

It made no sense that the Skimmers had much control over the Swarmers, Warren thought to himself as he marched down the dirt path. No sense at all. Something had brought them all to Earth and given the Swarmers some disease and the answer lay in thinking about that fact, not playing stupid games with machines in the water.

The troops were spread out more now, he saw. There were nests of high-caliber cannon strung out along the ridge and down near the beaches men were digging in where they could set up a cross fire over the natural clearings.

The men and women he passed were talking among themselves now, not silent and efficient the way they had been at first. They looked at him with suspicion. He guessed the missile attack in the night had made them nervous and even the hot work of clearing fields of fire in the heavy humidity did not take it out of them.

Coming down the rocky ridgeline Warren slipped on a stone and fell. The guard laughed in a kind of high, fast way and kicked him to get him to hurry. Warren went on and saw ahead one of the bushes with leaves he knew he could eat and when he went by it he pulled some off and started to stuff them into his pockets for later. The guard shouted and hit him in the back with the butt of his rifle and Warren went down suddenly, banging his knee on a big tree root. The guard kicked him in the ribs and Warren saw the man was jumpy and bored at the same time. That was dangerous. He carefully got up and moved along the path, limping from the dull pain spreading in his knee. The guard pushed him into his cell and kicked him again. Warren fell and laid there, not moving, waiting, and the guard finally grunted and slammed the door.

Noon came and went and he got no food. He ate the leaves. They were a poor trade for the stiffness in his knee. He listened to the shouted orders and sounds of work and it seemed to him the camp was restless, the sounds moving one way and then the other. He did not blame the Chinese for the way they treated him. The great powers all acted the same, independent of what they said their politics was, and it was easier to think of them as big machines that do what they were designed to do rather than as bunches of people.

Night came. Warren had gotten used to not thinking about food when he was on the raft and he was just as glad the guard did not bring any. Eventually the squat chinless soldier would come all the way into the cell and look behind the table which was overturned and would see the dirt mounds. Warren lay on the rocky ground that was the floor and listened to the snarling surf on the reef. He wondered if he would dream of his wife again. It was a good dream because it took away all the pain they both had caused and left only her smells and taste. But when he dozed off he was in the deep place where clanking came from above, a metallic sound that blended with the dull buzzing he had heard all that afternoon from the motorboat in the lagoon, the sounds washing together until he realized they were the same, but the loud clanking one was the way the Skimmers heard it. It was hard to think with the ringing hammering sound in his head and he tried to swim up and break water to get away from it. The clanking went on and then was a roar, louder, and he woke up suddenly and felt the sides of the cell tremble with the sound. Two quick crashes came down out of the sky and then sudden blue light.

Warren looked out through the mesh on the windows and saw men running. There was no moon but in the starlight he could see they were carrying rifles. A sudden rattling came from the north and west. More crashes and then answering fire from up on the ridge.

He listened as it got louder and then used the flickering light from the windows to find the map Tseng had given him. He pulled back the sleeping pad to expose the hole he had dug and without hesitation crawled in. He knew the feel of it well and in the complete dark found the stone at the end he used. He had estimated that there was only a foot of dirt left above. Using the pan to scrape away the last few feet of dirt had left him with a feel for how strong the earth was above, but when he hit it with the stone it did not give. There was not much room to swing and three more solid hits did not even shake loose clods of it. Warren was sweating in the closeness of the tunnel and the dirt stuck to his face as he chipped away at the hard soil over him. It was hard-packed and filled with rocks that struck him in the face and rolled onto his chest. His arm started to ache and then tire out but he did not stop. He switched the stone to his left hand and felt a softness give above and then was hitting nothing. The stone broke the crust and he could see stars.

He studied the area carefully. A soldier ran by carrying a tripod for an automatic rifle. The sharp crackling fire still came from north and west.

There was a spark of light high up and Warren snapped his head away to keep his night vision. Then the glare was gone and a hollow roar rolled over the camp. Mortars, not far away. He struggled up out of the tunnel and ran for the trees nearby. Halfway there his knee folded under him and he cursed it silently as he went down. It was worse than he had thought and lying on the hard cell floor had made it go stiff. He got up and limped to the trees, each moment feeling a spot between his shoulder blades where the slug would come if any of the running men in the camp behind him saw the shadow making its painful way. The slug did not come but a flare went up as he reached the clump of bushes. He threw himself into them and rolled over so he could see the clearing. The flare had taken away most of his night vision. He waited for it to come back and smelled the wind. There was something heavy and musky in it. It was the easterly trade, blowing steady, which meant the tide was getting ready to shift and it was past midnight. Coming from the east the wind should not have picked up the smell of the firefight, so the musky smell was something else. Warren knew the taste but could not remember what it was and what it might mean about the tide. He squinted, moving back into the bush, and saw a man in the camp coming straight toward him.

The figure stopped at the door of Warren’s cell. He fumbled at the door and a banging of automatic weapons fire came from the other side of camp. The man jumped back and yelled to someone and then went back to trying to unlock the door. Warren glanced into the distance where sudden flashes lit the camp in pale orange light. The firing got heavier and when he looked back at the cell there were two men there and the first one was opening the door. Warren crawled out of the dry bushes, moving when a burst of machine-gun fire covered any sound he might make. He got to a thin stand of trees and turned. A flare went up, burning yellow. It was the chinless soldier. He had the door open and Gijan was coming out, waving a hand, pointing north. They shouted at each other for a moment. Warren edged back farther into the trees. He was about fifty meters away now and could see each man unshoulder the slim rifles they carried. They held them at the ready. Gijan pointed again and the two men separated, moving apart about thirty meters. They were going to search. They turned and walked into the brush. Gijan came straight at Warren.

It would be easy to give himself up now. Wait for a flare and come forward with his hands held high. He had counted on getting farther away than this before anyone came after him. Now in the dark and with the fighting going there was a good chance they were jumpy and would shoot him if they saw some movement. But as he thought this Warren moved back, sinking into the shadows. He had faced worse than this on the raft. He limped away, going by feel in the shadows.

He reached a line of palms and moved along them toward the north. He was still about five hundred meters from the beach but there was a big clearing in the way so he angled in toward the ridge. Muffled thuds from the west told him that the Chinese were using mortars against whoever was coming in on the beaches. Five spaced screeches cut through the deep sounds of distant battle.

Warren guessed the Japanese or the Americans had decided to take the island and try to speak to the Skimmers themselves. Maybe they would try their own machines and codes. They might know about him though. The Chinese wanted to keep him or else Gijan would not have come with the soldier. Warren stumbled and slammed his knee into a tree. He paused, panting and trying to see if the men were within sight. With a moment to think he saw that Gijan might want to kill him to keep him out of the hands of the others. He could not be sure that giving himself up was safe anymore.

The five shrill notes came again and he recognized them as an emergency signal, blown on a whistle. They were from close by. Gijan was calling for help. With the Chinese fighting other troops on the other side of the island, Gijan might not get a quick answer. But help would come and then they would box him in.

Warren turned toward the beach. He moved as fast as he could without making a lot of noise. His knee went out from under him again, and as he got up he realized he was not going to give them much trouble. They had him bracketed already, they had good knees, and help was coming. He could not outrun them. The only chance he had was to circle around and ambush one of them, ambush an armed, well-trained man using his bare hands. Then get away before the other one found out.

He picked up a rock and put it in his pocket. It banged against his leg with each step. A rustling came from behind him and he hurried and stumbled at the edge of a gully.

A shout. He jumped down into the gully. As he landed there was a sharp crack and something zipped by overhead. It chunked into a tree on the other bank. Warren knew there was no point in going back now.

He trotted down the deepening water-carved wash. It was too narrow for two men. He tried to think how Gijan would figure it. The smartest thing was to wait for the other troops and then comb the area.

But Warren might reach the beach by then. Better to send one man down the gully and another through the trees, to cut him off.

Warren went what felt like a hundred meters before he stopped to listen. A crack of a twig snapping came from far back in the blackness. To the left? He could not be sure. The gully was rocky and it slowed him down. There were some good places to hide in the shadows and then try to hit the following man as he came by. Better than in the scrub above, anyway. But by then the other man would have gotten between him and the beach.

A pebble rattled faintly behind him. He stopped. The hard clay of the gully was three meters high here and steep. He found some thick roots sticking out and carefully pulled himself up. He stuck his head above the edge and looked around. Nothing moving. He crawled over the lip and a rock came loose under his foot. He lunged and caught it. A stabbing pain came in his knee, and he bit his tongue to keep from making a noise.

The scrub was thicker here. He rolled into a stand of trees, keeping down and out of the starlight. Twigs snagged at his clothes.

There was an even chance the man would come on this side of the gully. If he didn’t Warren could slip off to the north. But Gijan had probably guessed where he was headed and he would not have much of a lead when he reached the beach. On the open sand he would be exposed, easy to pick off.

Warren crawled into the dark patches under the trees and waited, rubbing his leg. The wind smelled bad here, damp and heavy. He wondered if the tide had changed.

He leaned his head on his hands to rest and felt a muscle jump in his face. It startled him. He could not feel it unless he put his hand to it. So Tseng had been right and he did have a spasm without knowing it. Warren frowned. He did not know what to think about that. It was a fact he would have to understand. For now, though, he put the thought away from him and watched the darkness.

He pulled the rock out of his pocket and hefted it and a pale form moved in the trees forty meters inland. It was a short soldier, the chinless one. Warren crouched low to follow. The pain that shot through his knee reminded him of how the chinless man had kicked him but the memory did not make him feel anything about what he was going to do. He moved forward.

In the dry brush he kept as quiet as he could. The dull claps and crashes that came over the ridge were muffled now, just when he needed them to be loud. Under the trees it was quieter and he was surprised to hear the rasping of the soldier breathing. The man moved slowly, rifle at the ready, the weapon looking big in the starlight. The man kept in the starlight and watched the shadows. That was smart.

The breathing got louder. Warren moved, favoring his knee. He would have to jump up fast and take the soldier from behind.

The figure came closer. Suddenly Warren saw that the man wore a helmet. To use the rock now he would have to hit him in the face. That made the odds a lot worse. But he would have to try. The man stopped, turned, looked around. Warren froze and waited. The head turned away and Warren eased forward, closing, the pain shooting in his knee. The leg would try to give way when he came up for the rush. He would watch for that and force it to hold. The air was still and heavy under the trees and the smell was worse, something from the beach. The soldier was the only visible movement.

In the quilted pattern of shadows and light it was hard to follow the silhouette. Warren put his hand out and gathered his feet under him and felt something wet and slick ahead and suddenly knew that the slow rasping laboring breath did not come from the chinless soldier but from something between them.

He felt the ground, brought his hand up to his face and smelled the strong reek he had tasted on the wind. Ahead in the faint light that fell between two palms he saw the long form struggling, pulling itself forward on blunt legs. It sucked in the air with each step. It was thick and heavy and the skin was a gunmetal gray, pocked with inch-wide round holes. Warren felt a whirring in the air and something brushed against his face, lingered, and was gone. Another whirring followed, so quiet he could barely hear it.

The stubby fin-legs of the Swarmer went mechanically forward and back, dragging its bloated body. In the starlight he could see the glistening where fluid seeped from the moist holes. THE YOUNG RUN WITH SORES. Another small whirring sound came and he saw from one of the dark openings a thing as big as a finger spring out, slick with moisture, and spread its wings. It beat against the thick and reeking air and then lifted its heavy body, coming free of its hole, wings fluttering. It lifted into the air and hovered, seeking. It darted away, missing Warren, passing on into the night. He did not move. The Swarmer pulled itself forward. Its dry, rattling gasps caught the attention of the soldier. The man turned, took a step. The Swarmer gathered itself and sprang.

It reached the man’s leg and the massive head turned to take the calf between its jaws. It seized and twisted and Warren heard the sharp intake of breath before the soldier went down. He screamed and the Swarmer turned itself and rolled over the man. The long blunt head came up and nuzzled down into the belly of the man and the sharp, shrill scream cut off suddenly.

Warren stood, the smell stronger now, and watched the two forms struggle on the open sand. The man pawed for his rifle where it had fallen and the thick leg of the Swarmer pinned his arm. They rolled to the side. The thing wallowed on him, covering him with a slick sheen, cutting off the low moans he made. Warren ran toward them and picked up the rifle. He backed away, thumbing off the safety. The man went limp and the air rushed out of him as the alien settled into place. Its head turned toward Warren and held there for a moment and then it turned back and dipped down to the belly of the man. It began feeding.

Gijan had heard the screams and would be here soon. There was no point in shooting the Swarmer and giving Gijan a sound to follow. Warren turned and limped away from the licking and chewing sounds.

He walked silently through brush, hobbling. The rifle had a bayonet on the muzzle. If a Swarmer came at him he would use that instead of firing. He stayed in the open, watching the shadows.

Abruptly from behind him came a loud hammering of automatic fire. Warren dodged to the side and then realized that no rounds were thumping into the trees near him. It was Gijan, killing the Swarmer a hundred meters or more away.

Warren was sure the Chinese did not know the Swarmers were crawling ashore or else they would have come after him in a group. Now Gijan would be shaken and uncertain. But in a few minutes he would recover and know what he had to do. Gijan would run to the beach, moving faster than Warren could, and try to cut him off.

Warren heard a light humming. He looked up between the trees where the sound came and could see nothing against the stars.

THE WORLD THAT WAS FALSE WORLD MADE THEM THIS WAY NOT AS THEY WERE WHEN WE KNEW THEM IN THE WORLD THAT WAS OURS THEY CANNOT SING BUT KNOW OF THE PLACES WHERE YOU SING TO EACH OTHER AND SOME NOW GO THERE WITH THEIR SORES THEY MAY BE CHEWED BY YOU BUT THERE ARE MANY MANY

Something smacked into his throat.

It was wet and it attached itself with a sudden clenching thrust like a ball of needles. Warren snatched at it. He stopped an inch short of grabbing at the thing when he caught the musty sea stench full in his nostrils. The moist lump dripped something down his neck.

He brought the rifle up quickly and pointed the bayonet at his throat and jabbed, aiming by instinct in the dark. He felt the tip go into the thing and he turned the blade so it scraped, pulling the wet centimeter-long larva out. It came away before the spines had sunk in. Blood seeped out and trickled down his neck.

He sopped it up with his sleeve and held the bayonet up in the starlight. The larva was white as a maggot and twisted feebly on the blade. One wing fluttered. The other was gone. The skin of it peeled back some more and the wing fell off. He stuck the blade into the sand to clean it and stepped on the thing that moved in spasms on the ground. Something still stuck on his neck. He scraped it off. The other wing was on the blade and some thin dark needles. He wiped them on the sand and with a sudden rushing roar slammed his heel down on them again and again.

He was breathing hard by the time he reached the beach. The fear had gone away when he had concentrated on staying away from the shadows, not thinking about what could be in them. The stabbing pain in his knee helped. He listened for the deep rasping and the humming and tasted the wind for their smell.

He hobbled out from the last line of palms and onto the white glow of the beach beneath the stars. He could see maybe fifty meters and there were no dark forms struggling up from the water. To the north he could hear faint shouts. That did not bother him because he did not have far to go. He stumbled toward the shouts, ignoring the quick, rippling flashes of yellow light from a mortar barrage and the long crump that came after them. There were motorboats moored in the shallows with the big reels in the stern, but no one in them. He took an oar out of one.

He came around the last horn of a crescent beach and saw ahead the dark blotch of the raft far up on the sand. He threw his rifle aboard and began dragging the raft toward the water. Big combers boomed on the reef.

He got it into the shallows and rolled aboard without looking back. He pushed off with the oar and kept pushing until he felt the current catch him. Speed, now. Speed.

The tide had just turned. It was slow but it would pick up in a few minutes and take him toward the pass in the reef. When he was sure of that he sat down and felt for the rifle. Sitting, he would be harder to see and he could steady the rifle against his good knee. His throat had nearly stopped bleeding but his shirt was heavy with blood. He wondered if the flying things would smell it and find him. The Skimmers had never said anything about the things like maggots with wings and he was sure now it was because they did not know about them. There was no reason the Swarmers would have evolved a thing like that to help them live on the land. And with the Skimmers driven from the lagoon by the men there was nothing to keep the Swarmers from bringing the things ashore.

He saw something move on the land and he lay down on the raft and Gijan came out onto the sand, running. Gijan stopped and looked straight out at Warren and then turned and ran north.

Warren picked up his rifle. Gijan was carrying his weapon at the ready. Was the man trying to cut him off but keep him alive? Then he should have run south, toward the motorboats. But there might be boats to the north, too. Maybe Gijan had heard the shouts in that direction and was running for help.

Warren thumbed off the safety on his rifle and put it on automatic fire. He would know what to do if Gijan would tell him by some action what the man intended to do. If he could just shout to the man, ask him — But maybe Gijan had not seen him after all. And the man might lie even if he answered, Warren knew he could not trust words from Gijan or even silence from him; they were all the same.

Suddenly the running figure dropped his rifle and slapped at his neck and then fell heavily on the sand. He twisted and brought both hands to his neck and struggled for a moment. Then he brought something out from his neck and threw it into the water and made a sound of fear. Gijan lurched up and staggered. He still clutched his neck with one hand but turned and looked for his weapon. He seemed dazed. His head came up and his gaze swept past Warren and then came back again. Gijan had seen the raft for sure this time.

Warren wished he could read the man’s face. Gijan hesitated only a moment. Then he picked up his weapon and turned to the north. He took some steps and Warren relaxed and then there was something about the way Gijan moved his arm. Warren aimed quickly, with no pause for conscious thought, and Gijan was bringing the rifle around. It made a bright yellow flash, firing on automatic, as Gijan swept the muzzle, fanning, and Warren fired a burst. It took Gijan high in the shoulder and then in the chest, spinning him. The flashes stopped coming from Gijan’s rifle and Warren was startled by the loud chatter of his weapon but kept it on the toppling figure, rolling him over and over until he was a loose bunch of rags and blood.

Warren slowly put down the rifle, panting. He had not thought at all about killing Gijan but had just done it, not stopping for the instant of balancing the equation and seeing if it had to be that way, and that was what had saved him. If Gijan had gotten off another few rounds it would have been enough.

He peered shoreward again. Voices, near. There was some sea still running against the ebb but now the tide was taking hold and carrying him out. The pass was a dark patch in the snarling white of the combers.

He had to get away fast now because the men to the north would be coming toward the gunfire. Hoisting the sail would just give them a target. He had to wait for the slow steady draw to take him through.

Something thumped against the bottom of the raft. It came again. Warren stood and cradled the rifle. The boards worked against each other as they came into the chop near the pass. A big dark thing broke water and rolled hugely. Eyes looked at him and legs that had grown from fins kicked against the current. The Swarmer turned and wallowed in the wash from the passage and then sank, the great head turning toward shore. The lagoon swallowed it.

Warren used the oar to turn the raft free of the rocks. The surf broke to each side and the deep bands of current sucked the raft through with a sudden rush. Behind him Warren heard a cry, lonely and harsh and full of surprise. The warring rumbled beyond the ridge and was lost in the crashing of the waves running hard before an east wind, and he went out into the dark ocean, the raft rising fast and plunging as it came into the full sea swell.

A sharp crack. A motorboat was coming fast behind. Warren lay flat on the raft and groped for his rifle. Another shot whispered overhead.

They would get him out here for sure. He aimed at the place where the pilot would be but in the fast chop he knew he would miss. There came a short, stuttering bark of automatic weapons fire. He heard the shots go by, not close. They did not have to be accurate though if they had enough ammunition.

The raft slewed port and the boat turned to follow. Warren crawled to the edge of the raft, ready to slip overboard when they got too close. It would be better than getting cut down, even with the Swarmers in the water.

The boat whined and bounced on the swell, bearing down. He lifted the rifle to take aim and knew the odds were damn long against him. He saw a muzzle flash and the deck spat splinters at him where the shots hit.

Warren squeezed carefully and narrowed his eyes to frame the target and saw something leap suddenly across the bow of the boat. It was big and another followed, landing in front of the pilot and wriggling back over the windshield in one motion. It crashed into the men there. Shouts. A blue-white shape flicked a man overboard and knocked another sprawling. The boat veered to starboard. From this angle Warren could see the pilot, holding to the wheel and crouched to avoid the flicking tail of the Skimmer. The boat bucked and slewed in the chop and its engine roared.

A hammering of the automatic weapon. The Skimmer jumped and slashed at the man with its tail. Warren leaped up and rocked against the swell to improve his aim. He got off two quick shots at the man. The figure staggered and the Skimmer struck him solidly and he pitched over the side. The pilot glanced back and saw he was alone. The Skimmer stopped thrashing and went still. Warren did not give the man time to think. He fired at the dark splotch at the wheel until it was gone. The boat throttled into silence. Nothing moved.

Distant shouts came from shore but no sounds of another boat. The boat drifted away. Warren thought of the Skimmer who lay dead in it. He tried to reach the boat, but the currents separated them farther. In moments it was gone in the darkness and the island itself faded into a mere looming shadow on the sea.

Two

At noon the next day three big fighter-bombers split the sky with their roaring and passed over to the south. After that craft streaked across the sky for hours, high and soundless.

He had rounded the island in the dark and put up his worn sail and then run before the wind to get distance. He had the map from Tseng. The fishing lines were still on the raft with their hooks. The rifle had no rounds left in its clip but with the bayonet it made a good gaff.

He had a strike at dawn from a small tuna. It got away as he hauled it in. He hoped there would be more now that the Swarmers were going to land and not taking them.

He got a small fish at noon and another near sunset. He slept most of the day, beneath a pale and heatless wafer disk of a sun. Welts and broken blisters made it hard to lie on his back.

In the night there was a sudden distant glare of orange reflected off clouds near the horizon. It eased into a glow as the color seeped out of it and then it was gone. Afterward a rolling hammer blow of sound came. There were more bursts of light, fainter.

High up, silvery specks coasted smoothly across the dark. One by one they vanished in bright firefly sparks—yellow, hard blue. Satellite warfare. Soon they were gone.

At dawn he woke and searched the sky to find the thin silver thread that reached up into the dark bowl overhead.

Now it curled about itself. Warren looked down the sky toward the dawn, shielding his eyes, and found another pale streak far below, where nothing should be.

The Skyhook was broken. Part of it was turning upward while the other fell. Somebody had blown it in two.

For long moments he watched the faint band come down. Finally he lost it in the glare as the sun rose. There had been men and women working on the lower tip of the Skyhook, engineers, and he tried to imagine what it was to fall hopeless that far and that long and then burn quick and high in the air like a shooting star.

His knee had swollen up and be could not stand so he lay in the sail’s shadow. The wound in his neck throbbed and had a crusted blue scab. He didn’t touch it.

A fever came and he sweated, delirious. He saw his wife walking toward him across the sloping waves, called out to her with a caked tongue. Then he was in the lagoon, floating lazily, staring up at the cascading sunbeams that played on him while a motor’s rrrrrrr purred in his ear.

There was nothing to fear, he saw. A little time swimming like this in the bright water and then some rest and a cool drink, with ice cubes in it, and food, hot crisp toast, butter running on it, and steak well marbled with fat and then corned beef hash with the potatoes well browned, and iced tea, plenty of tea, pitchers of it, drinking it in the shade.

Then the sweating passed and he rested. A school of fish passed and he got one, gutted and skinned it and ate it whole inside a minute. A little while later he got another and could start to think.

He would ask the Skimmers about the larvae, he thought, but probably it would be no use. He was sure they were not natural to the Swarmers.

He remembered the sheets he had written on long ago, the tangled thoughts. The Skimmers hated the machines that had intruded into their home waters. They had learned about them in the long years of voyaging, moved and fed and poked at by things that hummed and jerked and yet had no true life. Not like life that arose from nothing at all, flowering wherever chemicals met and sunlight boomed through a blanket of gas.

Their hate had brought them through a long journey. So when they saw the simple, noisy ships of men they hated those, too.

The machines would have known that. Planned that. Easy. So easy.

He fished more but caught nothing.

That night there were more orange flashes to the west.

Then, in the hours before dawn, things moved in the sky. Shapes glided through the black, catching the sunlight as they came out of Earth’s shadow.

They were close in, moving fast, their orbits repeating in less than an hour. Huge, irregular, their surfaces grainy and blotched. For Warren to be able to see the features on them they had to be far bigger than the ships that had brought the Swarmers and Skimmers. Asteroid-sized.

No defenses rose to meet the shapes. There were no military satellites left. No high-energy lasers. No particle-beam weapons. None of the apparatus that had kept the nuclear peace between humans for half a century.

The ships absorbed the sunlight and gave back a strange glowing gray. As Warren watched they began to split. Chunks broke away and fell, separating again and again as they streaked across the sky.

With dawn the light came back into the sky. The ocean was discolored around the raft. Nearby the water was pale, with a border, more than a hundred meters away, where the water got dark blue again.

There was something under him. It didn’t move.

Warren stayed silent, peering down.

A machine? From the gray ships?

But it did nothing.

He probed down with a stick. No resistance. The chop was low and after a while he could tell the raft was not moving any, not following the steady pressure of waves.

The thing below was holding him in place.

He had to risk it. He leaned quickly over the side and put his head under. A line ran from the middle of the raft, down to something white. Something solid. Amber phosphorescence rippled through it.

He watched it for an hour and it did not move, did not rise closer or drift off.

No fish ventured near. If he stayed here like this he would starve.

The rifle was useless but he took the knife. He dove in and swam down rapidly. He felt less vulnerable below the surface.

Refraction misled the eye. It was deeper than he thought, bigger, and he nearly failed to reach it.

His lungs already burned. Patterns raced across the faces of pearly walls. Twisting, he looked through them and saw floors and levels beyond. Nothing moved inside.

There was a hole lower down and he swam toward it, throat constricting. He had to get a look at the underside, some glimpse of the engine or driving screw or whatever moved it. As he turned under the sharp edge of the hole he flexed upward, peering toward a refracting edge of light, and his face broke through into air.

He gasped. It was a stale pocket, trapped between levels. He floated for a moment, trying to make structure out of the fuzzy images around him, confused by the liquid interplay of water and light. Translucent walls blended silvery wads of air with rippling shafts of green sunlight.

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.