Across the Sea of Suns

One

Warren watched the Manamix going down. The ocean was in her and would smother the engines soon, swamping her into silence. Her lights still glowed in the mist and rain.

She lay on her port side, down by the head, and the swell took her solidly with a dull hammering. The strands that the Swarmers cast had laced across her decks and wrapped around the gun emplacements and over the men who had tended them.

The long green-and-yellow strands still licked up the sides and over the deck, seeking and sticking, spun out from the swollen belly pouches of the Swarmers. Their green bodies clustered in the dark water at the bows.

A long finger of tropical lightning cracked. It lit the wedge of space between the hovering black storm clouds and the rain-pocked, wrinkled skin of the sea. The big aliens glistened in the glare.

Warren treaded water and floated, trying to make no noise. A strand floated nearby and a wave brushed him against it but there was no sting. The Swarmer it came from was probably dead and drifting down now. But there were many more in the crashing surf near the ship and he could hear screams from the other crewmen who had gone over the side with him.

The port davits on the top deck dangled, trailing ropes, and the lifeboats hung from them unevenly, useless. Warren had tried to get one down, but the winch and cabling fouled and finally he had gone over the side like the rest.

Her running lights winked and then came on steady again. The strands made a tangled net over the decks now. Once they stunned a man the sticky yellow nerve sap stopped coming and they lost their sting. As he watched, bobbing in the waves, one of the big aliens amidships rolled and brought in its strand and pulled a body over the railing. The man was dead and when a body hit the water there was a frothing rush after it.

Wisps of steam curled from the engine room hatch. He thought he could hear the whine of the diesels. Her port screw was clear and spinning like a metal flower. In the hull plates he could see the ragged holes punched by the packs of Swarmers. She was filling fast now.

Warren knew the jets the Filipinos had promised the captain would never get out this far. It was a driving, splintering storm, and to drop the canisters of poison that would kill the Swarmers would take low and dangerous flying. The Filipinos would not risk it.

She went without warning. The swell came over her bows and the funnel slanted down fast. The black water poured into her and into the high hoods of her ventilators and the running lights started to go out. The dark gully of her forward promenade and bay filled and steam came gushing up from the hatches like a giant thing exhaling.

He braced himself for it, thinking the engine he had tended, and the sudden deep booming came as the sea reached in. She slid in fast. Lightning crackled and was reflected in a thousand shattered mirrors of the sea. The waters accepted her and the last he saw was a huge rush of steam as great chords boomed in her hull.

In the quiet afterward, calls and then screams came to him, carried on the gusts. There had been so many men going off the aft deck the Swarmers had missed him. Now they had coiled their strands back in and would find him soon. He began to kick, floating on his back, trying not to splash.

Something brushed his leg. He went limp.

It came again.

He pressed the fear back, far away from him. The thing was down there in the blackness; seeing only by its phosphorescent stripes along the jawline. If it caught some movement—

A wave rolled him over. He floated facedown and did nothing about it. A wave rocked him and then another and his face came out for an instant and he took a gasp of air. Slowly he let the current turn him to the left until a slit of his mouth broke clear and he could suck in small gulps of air.

The cool touch came at a foot. A hip. He waited. He let the air bubble out of him slowly when his chest started to burn so that he would have empty lungs when he broke surface. A slick skin rubbed against him. His throat began to go tight. His head went under again and he felt himself in the black without weight and saw a dim glimmering, a wash of silvery light like stars—and he realized he was staring at the Swarmer’s grinning phosphorescent jaw.

The fire in his throat and chest was steady and he struggled to keep them from going into spasm. The grin of gray light came close. Something cold touched his chest, nuzzled him, pushed—

A wave broke hard over him and he tumbled and was in the open, face up, gasping, ears ringing. The wave was deep and he took two quick breaths before the water closed over him again.

He opened his eyes in the dark water. Nothing. No light anywhere. He could not risk a kick to take him to the air. He waited to bob up again, and did, and this time saw something riding down the wave near him. A lifeboat.

He made a slow, easy stroke toward it. Nothing touched him. If the Swarmer had already eaten, it might have just been curious. Maybe it was not making its turn and coming back.

A wave, a stroke, a wave—He stretched and caught the trailing aft line. He wrenched himself up and sprawled aboard, rattling the oars in the gunwale. Quietly he paddled toward the weakening shouts. Then the current took him to starboard. He did not use the oars in the locks because they would clank and the sound would carry. He pulled toward the sounds but they faded. A fog came behind the rain.

There was a foot of water in the boat and the planking was splintered where a Swarmer tried to stove it in. A case of supplies was still clamped in the gunwale.

Awhile later he sighted a smudge of yellow. It was the woman, Rosa, clinging to a life jacket she had got on wrong. He had been staying down in the boat to keep hidden from the Swarmers but without thinking about it he pulled her aboard.

She was a journalist he had seen before on the Manamix. She was covering the voyage for Brazilian TV and wanted to take this fast run down from Taiwan to Manila. She had said she wanted to see a Swarm beaten off and her camera crew was on deck all day bothering the ship’s crew.

She sat aft and huddled down and then after a time started to talk. He covered her mouth. Her eyes rolled from side to side, searching the water. Warren paddled slowly. He wore jeans and a long-sleeve shirt, and even soaked they kept off the night chill. The fog was thick. They heard some distant splashes and once a rifle shot. The fog blotted out the sounds.

They ate some of the provisions when it got light enough to see. Warren felt the planking for seepage and he could tell it was getting worse.

A warm dawn broke over them. Wreckage drifted nearby. There were uprooted trees, probably carried out to sea by the storm. The rain had started just as the first packs struck the bows. That had made it harder to hit them with the automatic rifles on deck and Warren was pretty sure the Swarmers knew that.

There was smashed planking from other boats near them, an empty box, some thin twine, life jackets, bottles. No one had ever seen Swarmers show interest in debris in the water, only prey. The things had no tools. Certainly they had not made the ships that dropped into the atmosphere and seeded the ocean. Those craft would have been worth looking at, but they had broken up on the seas and sunk before anyone could get to them.

The wreckage would not attract Swarmers but they might be following the current to find survivors. Warren knew no school of Swarmers was nearby because they always broke surface while in a Swarm and you could see the mass of them from a long way off. There were always the lone Swarmers that some people thought were scouts, though. Nobody really knew what they did but they were just as dangerous as the others.

He could not steer well enough to pick up wreckage. The boat was taking more water and he did not think they had much time. They needed the drifting wood and he had to swim for it. Five times he went into the water and each time he had to push the fear away from him and swim as smoothly and quietly as he could until finally the fear came strongly and he could not do it anymore.

He skinned the bark from two big logs, using the knife from the provisions case, and made lashings. The boat was shipping water now as it rolled in the swell. He and Rosa cut and lashed and built. When they had a frame of logs they broke up the boat and used some of the planks for decking. The boat sank before they could save most of it, but they got the case onto the raft.

He pried nails out of some of the driftwood. But now his vision was blurring in the bright sunlight and he was clumsy. They cleared a space in the frame to lie on and Rosa fell asleep while he was pounding in the last board. Each task he had now was at the end of a tunnel and he peered through it at his hands doing the job and they were numb and thick as though he were wearing gloves. He secured the case and other loose pieces and hooked his right arm over a limb to keep from falling overboard. He fell asleep facedown.

Two

The next day as he got more driftwood and lashed it into the raft there was a slow, burning, pointless kind of anger in him. He could have stayed on land and lived off the dole. He had known the risks when he signed on as engineer.

It had been six years since the first signs of the aliens. With each year more ships had gone down, hulled in deep water and beyond protection from the air. The small craft, fishermen and the like, had been first to go. That did not change things much. Then the Swarmers multiplied and cargo vessels started going down. Trade across open seas was impossible.

The oceanographers and biologists said they were starting to understand the Swarmer mating and attack modes by that time. It was slow work. Studying them on the open water was dangerous. When they were captured they hammered themselves against the walls of their containers until the jutting bone of their foreheads shattered and drove splinters into their brains.

Then the Swarmers began taking bigger ships. They found a way to mass together and hull even the big supertankers.

By then the oceanographers were dying, too, in their reinforced-hull research ships. The Swarmers could sink anything then and no one could explain how they had learned to modify their tactics. The things did not have particularly large brains.

There were reports of strange-looking Swarmers, of strays from the schools, of massed Swarmers who could take a ship down in minutes. Then came photographs of a totally new form, the Skimmers, who leaped and dived deep and were smaller than the Swarmers. The specimens had been killed by probots at depths below two hundred fathoms, where Swarmers had never been seen.

The automatic stations and hunters were the only way men could study the Swarmers by that time. Large cargo vessels could not sail safely. Oil did not move from the Antarctic or China or the Americas. Wheat stayed in the farm nations. The intricate world economy ground down.

Warren had been out of work and stranded in the chaos of Tokyo. His wife had left him years before so he had no particular place to go. When the Manamix advertised that it had special plates in her hull and deck defenses he signed into a berth. The pay was good and there was no other sea work anyway. He could have run on the skimships that raced across the Taiwan Straits or to Korea, but those craft did not need engineers. If their engines ever went out they were finished before any repair could get done because the loud motors always drew the Swarmers in their wake.

Warren was an engineer and he wanted to stick to what he knew. He had worked hard for the rating. The heavy plates in the fore- and aftholds had looked strong to him. But they had buckled inside of half an hour.

Rosa held up well at first. They never saw any other survivors of the Manamix. They snagged more wreckage and logs and lashed it together. Floating with the wood they found a coil of wire and an aluminum railing. He pounded the railing into nails and they made a lean-to for protection from the sun.

They were drifting northwest at first. Then the current shifted and took them east. He wondered if a search pattern could allow for that and find them.

One night he took Rosa with a power and confidence he had not felt since years before, with his wife. It surprised him.

They ate the cans of provisions. He used some scraps for bait and caught a few fish, but they were small. She knew a way to make the twine tight and springy. He used it to make a bow and arrow and it was accurate enough to shoot fish if they came close.

Their water began to run out. Rosa kept their stores under the lean-to and at seven days Warren found the water was almost gone. She had been drinking more than her share.

“I had to,” she said, backing away from him at a crouch. “I can’t stand it, I … I get so bad. And the sun, it’s too hot, I just …”

He wanted to stop but be could not and he hit her several times. There was no satisfaction in it.

Through the afternoon Rosa cringed at a corner of the raft and Warren lay under the lean-to, and thought. In the cool, orderly limits of the problem he found a kind of rest. He squatted on a plank and rocked with the swell, and inside, where he had come to live more and more these past years, the world was not just the gurgle and rush of waves and the bleaching raw edge of salt and sun. Inside there were the books and the diagrams and things he had known. He struggled to put them together:

Chemistry. He cut a small slit in the rubber stopper of a water can and lowered it into the sea on a long fishing line.

The deeper water was cold. He pulled the can up and put in inside a bigger can. It steamed like a champagne bucket. Water beaded on the outside of the small can. The big can held the drops. The drops were free of salt but there was not much.

Nine days out the water was gone. Rosa cried. Warren tried to find a way to make the condensing better but they did not have many cans. The yield was no more than a mouthful a day.

In the late afternoon of that day Rosa suddenly hit him and started shouting filthy names. She said he was a sailor and should get them water and get them to land and when they finally did get picked up she would tell everybody now bad a sailor he was and how they had nearly died because he did not know how to find the land.

He let her run down and stayed away from her. If she scratched him with her long fingernails the wound would heal badly and there was no point in taking a risk. They had not taken any fish on the lines for a long time now and they were getting weaker. The effort of hauling up the cans from below made his arms tremble.

The next day the sea ran high. The raft groaned, rising sluggishly and plunging hard. Waves washed them again and again so it was impossible to sleep or even rest. At dusk Warren discovered jelly sea horses as big as a thumbnail riding in the foam that lapped over the raft. He stared at them and tried to remember what he had learned of biology.

If they started drinking anything with a high salt content the end would come fast. But they had to have something. He put a few on his tongue, tentatively, and waited until they melted. They were salty and fishy but seemed less salty than seawater. The cool moisture seemed right and his throat welcomed it. He spoke to Rosa and showed her and they gathered handfuls of the sea horses until nightfall.

On the eleventh day there were no sea horses and the sun pounded at them. Rosa had made hats for them, using cloth from the wreckage. That helped with the worst of the day, but to get through the hours Warren had to sit with closed eyes under the lean-to, carefully working through the clear hallways of his mind.

The temptation to drink seawater was festering in him, flooding the clean places inside him where he had withdrawn. He kept before him the chain of things to keep himself intact.

If he drank seawater he would take in a quantity of dissolved salt. The body did not need much salt, so it had to get rid of most of what he took in. The kidneys would sponge up the salt from his blood and secrete it. But doing that took pure water, at least a pint a day.

The waves churned before him and he felt the rocking of the deck and he made it into a chant.

Drink a pint of seawater a day. The body turns it into about twenty cubic centimeters of pure water.

But the kidneys need more than that to process the salt. They react. They take water from the body tissues.

The body dries out. The tongue turns black. Nausea. Fever. Death.

He sat there for hours, reciting it, polishing it down to a few key words, making it perfect. He told it to Rosa and she did not understand but that was all right.

In the long afternoon he squinted against the glare and the world became one of sounds. The rattling of their cans came to him against the murmur of the sea and the hollow slap of waves against the underside of the raft. Then there was a deep thump. He peered to starboard. A rippling in the water. Rosa sat up. He gestured for silence. The planks and logs creaked and worked against each other and the thump came again.

He had heard dolphins knocking under the raft before and this was not their playful string of taps. Warren crawled out from the lean-to and into the yellow sunlight and a big green form broke surface and rolled belly-over, goggling at them with a bulging eye, its mouth was like a slash in the blunt face. The teeth were narrow and sharp.

Rosa cried in terror and the Swarmer seemed to hear her. It circled the raft, following her awkward scuttling. She screamed and moved faster but the big thing flicked its tail and kept alongside her.

Warren’s concentration narrowed to an absolute problem that took in the Swarmer and its circling and the closed geometry of the raft. If they let it come in when it chose, it would lunge against the raft and catch them off-balance and have a good chance of tumbling them into the water or breaking up the raft.

The green form turned and dived deep under the raft.

“Rosa!” He tore off his shirt. “Here! Wave it in the water on the side.” He clipped the shirt, crouching at the edge. “Like this.”

She hung back. “I … but … no, I …”

“Damn it! I’ll stop it before it gets to you.”

She gaped at him and the Swarmer broke water on the far side of the raft. It rolled ponderously, as if it were having trouble understanding how to attack a thing so much smaller than a ship, and attacking it alone.

Rosa took the shirt hesitantly. He encouraged her and she bent over and swished a tip of it in the surf. “Good.”

Warren brought out the crude arrow he had made with a centimeter-thick slat from the Manamix lifeboat. He had tapered it down and driven a nail in the head. He tucked the arrow into the rubber strip of his bow and tested it. The arrow had a line on it and did not fly very straight. Not much good for fish.

He slitted his eyes against the glare and looked out at the shallow troughs. The sea warped and rippled where the thing had just disappeared. Warren sensed that it had judged them now and was gliding back in the blue shadows under the raft, coming around for its final pass. It would not see the shirt until it turned and that would bring it up and near the corner where Warren now stood, between its path and Rosa. He drew the arrow back in a smooth motion, sighting, straining, sighting—

Rosa saw the dim shape first. She flicked the rag out of the water with a jerk. Warren saw something dart up, seeming to come up out of the floor of the ocean itself, catching the refracted bands of light from the waves.

Rosa screamed and stepped back. The snout broke water and the mouth like a cut was leering at them and Warren let go the arrow thunk and followed it forward, scrabbling on all fours. The thing had the arrow in under the gills and the big flaps of green flesh bulged and flared open in spasms as it rolled to the side.

Warren snatched at the arrow line and missed. “Grab the end!” he called. The arrow was enough to stun the Swarmer but that was all. The thing was stunned with the nail driven deep in it, but Warren wanted more of it now, more than just the killing of it, and he splashed partway off the raft to reach the snout and drag it in. He got a slippery grip on a big blue ventral fin. The mouth snapped. It thrashed and Warren used the motion to haul it toward the raft. He swung himself, the wood cutting into his hip, and levered the body partway onto the deck. Rosa took a fin and pulled. He used the pitch of the deck and his weight to flip the thing over on its side. It arched its back, twisting to gain leverage to thrash back over the side. Warren had his knife out and as the thing slid away from him he drove the blade in, slipping it through soft tissue at the side and riding up against the spine. Warren slashed down the body, feeling the Swarmer convulse in agony. Then it straightened and seemed to get smaller.

The two stood back and looked at the scaly green body, three meters long. Its weight made the raft dip and turn in the swell.

Something sticky was beginning to drain from the long cut. Warren fetched a can and scooped up the stuff. It was a thin, pale yellow fluid. He did not hear Rosa’s whimpering, stumbling approach as he lifted the can to his lips.

He caught the cool, slightly acrid taste of it for an instant. He opened his mouth wider to take it in. She struck the can from his hands. It clattered on the deck.

His punch drove her to her knees. “Why?” he yelled. “What do you care—”

“Wrong,” she sputtered out. “Ugly. They’re not … not normal … to … to eat.”

“You want to drink? Want to live?”

She shook her head, blinking. “Na … ah, yeah, but … not that. Maybe …”

He looked at her coldly and she moved away. The carcass was dripping. He wedged it against a log and propped cans under it. He drank the first filled can, and the second.

The dorsal and ventral fins sagged in death. In the water he had seen them spread wide as wings. The bulging brain-case and the goggle eyes seemed out of place, even in the strange face with its squeezed look. The rest of the body was sleek like the large fish. He had heard somebody say that evolution forced the same slim contours on any fast thing that lived in an ocean, even on submarines.

The Swarmer had scaly patches around the forefins and at each ventral fin. The skin looked as though it were getting thick and hard. Warren did not remember seeing that in the photographs of dead ones, but then the articles and movies had not said anything about the Swarmer scouts either until a year ago. They kept changing.

Rosa crouched under the lean-to. Once, when he drank, she spat out some word he could not understand.

The third can he set down on the boards halfway between them. He cut into the body and found the soft pulpy places where it was vulnerable to an arrow. He learned the veins and arteries and ropes of muscle. There were big spaces in the head that had something to do with hearing. In the belly pouch the strand was shriveled and laced with a kind of blue muscle. Around the fins where the skin became scaly there were little bones and cartilage and gristle that did not seem to have any use.

Rosa edged closer as he worked. The heat weighed on her. She licked her lips until they were raw and finally she drank.

Three

He kept track of the days by making a cut each morning in a tree limb. The ritual sawing became crucial, part of the struggle. The itching salt spray and the hammering of the sun blurred distinctions. In the simple counting he found there was some order, the beauty of number that existed outside the steady rub of the sea’s green sameness.

Between the two of them they made the killing of the Swarmers a ritual as well. The scouts came at random intervals now, with never more than three days of waiting until the next thumping probes at the planking. Then Rosa would stoop and wave the shirt in the water. The thing would make a pass to look and then turn to strike, coming by the jutting corner, and Warren would drive the arrow into a soft place.

Rosa would crouch under the shelter then and mumble to herself and wait for him to gut it and bleed the watery pouches of fin fluid and finally take the sour syrup from behind the eyes.

With each flesh kill he learned more. They cut up some cloth and made small bags to hold the richer parts of the carcass and then chewed it for each drop. Sometimes it made them sick. After that he twisted chunks of the flesh in a cloth bag and let the drops air in the sun. That was not so bad. They ate the big slabs of flesh but it was the fluid they needed most.

With each kill Rosa became more distant. She sat dreamily swaying at the center of their plank island, humming and singing to herself, coiling inward. Warren worked and thought.

On the twenty-first day of drifting she woke him. He came up reluctantly from the vague, shifting sleep. She was shouting.

Darting away into the bleak dawn was something lean and blue. It leaped into the air and plunged with a shower of foam and then almost in the same instant was flying out of the steep wall of a wave, turning in the gleaming fresh sun. “A Skimmer,” he murmured. It was the first he had ever seen.

Rosa cried out.

Warren stared out into the hills and valleys of moving water, blinking, following her finger. A gray cylinder the size of his hand floated ten meters away.

He picked up the tree limb they used for marking the days. His hands were puffed up now from the constant damp, and the bark of the limb scraped them. No green shapes moved below. He rocked with the swell, waiting at the edge of the raft for a random current to bring the gray thing closer.

A long time passed. It bobbed sluggishly and came no closer. Warren leaned against the pitch of the deck and stretched for it. The limb was short at least a meter.

He swayed back, relaxing, letting the clenching in his muscles ease away. His arms trembled. He could swim to it in a few quick strokes, turn and get back in a few—

No. If he let go he would be sucked into the same endless caverns that Rosa was wandering. He had to hold on. And take no risks.

He stepped back. The thing to do was wait and see if—

White spray exploded in front of him. The lean form shot up into the air and Warren rolled back away from it. He came up with the knife held close to him.

But the Skimmer arced away from the raft. It cut back into a wave and was gone for an instant and then burst up and caught the cylinder in it slanting mouth. In the air it rolled and snapped its head. The cylinder clunked onto the raft. The Skimmer leaped again, blue-white, and was gone into the endlessly shifting faces of green marble.

Rosa was huddled in the shelter. Warren picked up the cylinder carefully. It was smooth and regular but something about it told him it had not been made with tools. There were small flaws in the soft, foamy gray, like the blotches on a tomato. At one end it puckered as though a tassel had fallen away.

He rubbed it, pulled at it, turned the ends—It split with a moist pop. Inside there curled a thick sheet of the same softly resistant gray stuff. He unrolled it.

He studied the combinations and tried to fit them together so there was some logic to it. It was no code, he guessed. Some of the words were German and there was some English and Japanese but most of it was either meaningless or no language he knew. VESSE L might be vessel. ANSAGEN—to say? He wished he remembered more of the German he had picked up in the merchant marine.

The words were in a clear typeface like a newspaper and were turned into the sheet.

He could make no more of it. Rosa did not want to look at the sheet. When he made her she shook her head, no, she could not pick out any new words.

A Swarmer came later that day. Rosa did not back away fast enough and the big shape shot up out of the water. It bit down hard on the shirt as Warren’s arrow took it and the impact made the blunt head snap back. Rosa was not ready for it and she stumbled forward and into the sea. The Swarmer tried to flip away. Warren caught her as she went into the water. The alien lunged at her but Warren heaved her back onto the deck. He had dropped the bow. The Swarmer rolled and the bow washed overboard and then the tail fins caught the edge of the raft and it twisted and came tumbling aboard. Warren hit it with the tree limb.

It kept thrashing but the blows stunned it. He waited for the right angle and then slipped the knife in deep, away from the snapping jaws, and the thing went still.

Rosa helped with the cutting up. She started talking suddenly while he looked for the bow. He was intent on seeing if it was floating nearby and at first did not notice that she was not just muttering. He spotted the bow and managed to fetch it in. Rosa was discussing the Swarmers, calmly and in a matter-of-fact voice he had not heard from her before.

“The important thing is to not let one get away,” she concluded.

“Guess so,” Warren said.

“They know about the raft, the Swarm comes.”

“If they can find us, yeah.”

“They send out these scouts. The pack, it will follow where the long ones tell it.”

“We’ll get ’em.”

“Forever? No. Only solution is land.”

“None I’ve seen. We’re drifting west, could be—”

“I thought you are sailor.”

“Was.”

“Then sail us to land.”

“Not that easy,” Warren said, and went on to tell her how hard it was to get any control of a raft, and anyway he didn’t know where they were, what the landfalls were out here. She sniffed contemptuously at this news. “Find an island,” she repeated several times. Warren argued, not because he had any clear reason, but because he knew how to survive here and a vague fear came when he thought about the land. Rosa was speaking freely and easily now and she thought fast, sure of herself. Finally he broke off and set to work storing away the slabs of Swarmer meat. The talk confused him.

The next day a Skimmer came and leaped near the raft and there was another cylinder, it swam away, a blur of silvery motion. He read the sheet.

He could make no sense of it. Rosa worked on it, not much interested, and shrugged. He tried to scratch marks on the sheets, thinking that he could send them something, ask questions. The sheet would not take an impression.

A Swarmer surfaced to the west the next day. Rosa shrieked. It circled them twice and came in fast toward Rosa’s lure. Warren shot at it and hit too far back. The tip buried itself uselessly in a spot where he knew there was only fatty tissue. The Swarmer lunged at Rosa. She was ready, though, falling back from the edge, and it missed. Warren yanked on the line and freed the arrow. The Swarmer flinched as the arrow came out and rolled off the raft. The Swarmer sank and was gone.

“Don’t let it get away!” Rosa cried.

“It’s not coming up.”

“You hit it in the wrong place.”

“Went in pretty deep, though. Might die before it can get back to the pack.”

“You think so?”

Warren didn’t but he said, “Might.”

“You, you have got to find us an island. Now.”

“I still think we’re safe here.”

“Incredible! You are no kind of sailor at all and you are afraid to admit it. Afraid to say you don’t know how to find land.”

“Bullshit. I—” But she interrupted him with a flood of words he couldn’t keep up with. He heard her out, nodding finally, not knowing himself why he wanted to stay on the raft, on the sea. It just felt better, was all, and he did not know how to tell her that.

When the argument was finally over he went back to thinking about the second message. Some of it was German and he knew a little of that, but not those particular words. He had never learned any Japanese even though he had lived in Tokyo.

The next morning at dawn he woke suddenly and knew there was something near the raft. The swell was smooth and orange as the sun caught it. On the glassy horizon he saw nothing. He was very hungry and he remembered the Swarmer from yesterday. He had used the meat from the first kills to bait their lines but nothing bit. He wondered if that was because the fish would not take Swarmer meat or if there were no fish down there to have. The aliens had been changing the food chain in the oceans, he had read about that.

Then he saw the gray dot floating far away. The raft was drifting toward it and in a few minutes he snagged it. The message said

He peered at the words … and squatted on the deck and felt the long dragging minutes go by. If he could—

“Warren! Wa—Warren!” Rosa called. He followed her gesture.

A blur on the horizon. It dipped and rose among the ragged waves. Warren breathed deeply. “Land.”

Rosa’s eyes swelled and she barked out a sharp cackling laughter. Her lips went white with the laughing and she cried, “Yeah! Yeah! Land!” and shook her fists in the air.

Warren blinked and measured with his eyes the current and the angle the brown smudge ahead made with their course. They would not reach it by drifting.

He worked quickly.

He took the tree limb and knocked away the supports of the lean-to. In the center of the raft he knelt and measured out the distances with hands and fingers and worked a hole in between two planks. He could wedge the limb into it. He made a collar out of strips of bark. The limb was crooked but it made a vertical beam.

He took the plywood sheet of the lean-to and lashed it to the limb. With the knife he dug stays in the plywood. The wire that held the logs in place in the deck would have been good to use but he could not risk unlashing them. He used the last of their twine instead, passing it through the stays in the plywood and making them into trailing lines. The plywood was standing up now like a sail catching the wind, and by pulling the twine he could tack. The raft took the waves badly but by turning the plywood sheet he could take the strain off the weak places where the logs and boards met.

The wind backed into the east in late morning. They could not make much headway and the land was still a dark strip on the horizon. Warren broke off a big piece of wood at the raft corner. He hacked at it with the knife. A Swarmer surfaced nearby and Rosa started her screeching. He hit her and watched the Swarmer, but he never stopped whittling at the wood in his lap. The Swarmer circled once and then turned and swam away to the south.

He finished with the wood. He made a housing for it with the rest of the bark strips. It sat badly at the end of the raft but the broad part dug into the water and by leaning against the top of it he could hold the angle. He got Rosa to hold two blocks of wood against the shaft for leverage and that way the thing worked something like a rudder. The raft turned to the south, toward the land.

Noon passed. Warren fought the wind and the rudder and tried to estimate the distance and the time left. If dark came before they reached the land the current would take them past it and they would never be able to beat back against the wind to find it again. He had been so long away from firm ground that he felt a need for it that was worse than his hunger. The pitch of the deck took the energy out of you day and night, you could not sleep for holding onto the deck when the sea got high, and you would do anything for something solid under you, for just—

Solid.

The message had said solid. Did that mean land?

Gefahrlich gross something something solid.

Gefahrlich had some kind of feel to it, something about bad or dangerous, he thought. Gross was big. Dangerous big blank blank land? Then some Japanese and other things and then scatter portline zero. Scatter. Make to go away?

Warren sweated and thought. Rosa brought him an old piece of Swarmer but he could not eat it. He thought about the words and saw there was some key to them, some beauty in them.

The rudder creaked against the wooden chocks. The land was a speck of brown now and he was pretty sure it was an island. The wind picked up. It was coming on to late afternoon.

Rosa moved around the raft when he did not need her, humming to herself, the Swarmers forgotten, eating from the pieces of meat still left. He did not try to stop her. She was eating out of turn but he needed all his thought now for the problem.

They were coming in on the northern shore. He would bring them in at a graze, to have a look before beaching. The current fought against them, but the plywood was enough to sweep them to the south.

South? What was there about …

WSW. West southwest?

UNS B WSW.

Uns was we in German, he was pretty sure of that. We be WSW? On the WSW part of the land? The island? Or WSW of the island? We—the Skimmers.

He noticed Rosa squatting in the bow of the raft, eager, her weight dipping the boards with the blue-green swell and bringing hissing foam over the planks. It slowed them but she did not seem to see that. He opened his mouth to yell at her and then closed it. If they went slow, he would have more time.

The Skimmers were all he had out here and they had tried to tell him …

Portline. Port was left. A line to the left?

They were coming in from the northeast as near as he could judge. Veering left would take them around and to the southwest. Or WSW.

The island seemed to grow fast now as the sun set behind it. Warren squinted against the glare on the waves. There was something between them and the island. At the top of a wave he strained to see and could make out a darker line against pale sand. White rolls of surf broke on it.

A reef. The island was going to be harder to reach. He would have to bring the raft in easy and search for a passage. Either that or smash up on it and swim the lagoon, if there was no way through the circle of coral around—

Circle stein nongo. He did not know what stein was, something to drink out of or something, but the rest might say don’t go in the circle.

Warren slammed the tiller over full. It groaned and the collar nearly buckled but he held it, throwing his shoulder into it.

Rosa grunted and glared at him. The raft tacked to port. He pulled the twine and brought the plywood farther into the wind.

Small youth schlect uns. The Swarmers were bigger than the Skimmers, but they might mean smaller in some other way. Smaller development? Smaller brain? Schlect uns. Something about us and the Swarmers. If they were younger than the Skimmers, maybe their development was still to come. Something told him that schlect was a word like gefahrlich, but what the difference was he did not know. Swarmers dangerous us? There was nothing in the words to show action, to show who us was. Did us include Warren?

Rosa stumbled toward him. The swell was coming abaft now and she clutched at him for support. “Wha’? Land! Go!”

He rubbed his eyes and focused on her face but it looked different in the waning light. He saw that in all the days they had been together he had never known her. The face was just a face. There had never been enough words between them to make the face into something else. He …

The wind shifted and he shrugged away the distraction and worked the twine. He studied the dark green mass ahead. It was thickly wooded and there were bare patches and a beach. The white curves of breaking surf were clear now. The thick brown reef—

Things moved on the beach.

At first he thought they were driftwood, logs swept in by a storm. Then he saw one move and then another and they were green bodies in the sand. They crawled inland. A few had made it to the line of trees.

Small youth. Young ones who were still developing.

He numbly watched the island draw near. Dimly he felt Rosa pounding on his chest and shoulder. “Steer us in! You hear me? Make this thing—”

“Wha—what?”

“You afraid of the rocks, that it?” She spit out something in Spanish or Portuguese, something angry and full of scorn. Her eyes bulged unnaturally. “No man would—”

“Shut up.” His lips felt thick. They were rushing by the island now, drawn by the fast currents.

“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.