Across the Sea of Suns

One

The wind had backed into the northeast and was coming up strong again. Warren watched the sullen clouds moving in. He shook his head. It was still hard for him to leave his sleep.

It was three days now since he had passed the island. He had thought much about the thing with Rosa. When his head was clear he was certain that he had made no mistake. He had let her do what she wanted and if she had not understood it was because he could not find a way to tell her, it was the sea itself which taught and the Skimmers too and you had to listen. Rosa had listened only to herself and her belly.

On the second day past the island, the air had become thick and a storm came down from the north. He had thought it was a squall until the deck began to pitch at steep angles and a piece broke away with a groan. Then he had lashed himself to the log and tried to pull the plywood sheet down. He could reach it, but the collar he had made out of his belt was slippery with rain. He pulled at the cracked leather. He thought of using the knife to cut the sheet free but then the belt would be no good. He twisted at the stiff knot and then the first big wave broke into foam over the deck and he lost it. The waves came fast then and he could not get to his feet. When he looked up it was dark overhead and the plywood was wrenched away from the mast. The wind battered against the mast and the collar at the top hung free. A big wave slapped him and when he next saw the sheet it had splintered. A piece fell to the deck and Warren groped for it and slipped on the worn planking. A wave carried the piece over the side. The boards of the deck worked against each other and there was more splintering among them. Warren held on to the log. The second collar on the mast broke and the sheet slammed into the deck near him. He reached for it with one hand and felt something cut into his arm. The deck pitched. The plywood sheet fell backward and then slid and was over the side before he could try to get to it.

The storm lasted through the night. It washed away the shelter and the supplies. He clung to the log, and the lashing around his waist cut into him in the night. Warren let the water wash freely over the cuts, the salt stinging across his back and over his belly, because it would heal faster that way. He tried to sleep. Toward dawn he dozed and woke only when he sensed a shift in the currents. The wind had backed into the northeast. Chop still washed across the deck and a third of the raft had broken away, but the sea was lessening as dawn came on. Warren woke slowly, not wanting to let go of the dreams.

There was nothing left but the mast, some poles he had lashed to the center log and his knife and arrow. From a pole and a meter of twine he made a gaff with the knife. The twine had frayed. It was slow work and the twine slipped in his raw fingers. The bark of the log had cut them in the night and they were soft from the water and the rubbing. The sun rose quickly and a heat came into the air that worked at the cuts in him and made them sweat. He could feel that the night had tired him and he knew he would have to get food to keep his head clear. The Skimmers would come to him again he knew, and if there was a message he would have to understand it.

He made the knife fast to the pole with the twine but it was not strong and he did not want to risk using it unless he had to. A green patch of seaweed came nearby and he hooked it. He meant to use it for bait if he could, but as he shook it out small shrimp fell to the planking. They jumped and kicked like sand fleas, and without thinking Warren pinched off their heads with his finger-nails and ate them. The shells and tails crunched in his teeth and filled his mouth with a salty moist tang.

He kept a few for bait even though they were small. The twine was too heavy for a good line but he used it as he had before, in the first days after the Manamix went down, when he had tried with some of their food as bait and had never caught anything. He was a sailor but he did not know how to fish. He set three trailing lines and sat to wait, wishing he had the shelter to stop the sun. The current moved well now and the chop was down. Warren hefted the gaff and hoped for a Swarmer to come. He thought of them as moving appetites, senseless alone, but dangerous if enough came at once and butted the raft.

He bent over and looked steadily at a ripple of water about twenty meters from the raft. Something moved. Shifting prisms of green light descended into the dark waters. He thought about a lure. With Rosa it had been simple, a movement to draw them in and a quick shot. Warren turned, looking for something to rig to coax with, and he saw the trailing line on the left straightened and then the line hissed and water jumped from it. He reached to take some of the weight off and play in the line. It snapped. To the right something leaped from the water. The slim blue form whacked its tail noisily three times. Another sailed aloft on the other side of the raft as the first crashed back in a loud white splash. A third leaped and shone silver-blue in the sun and another and another and they were jumping to all sides at once, breaking free of the flat sea, their heads tilted sideways to see the raft. Warren had never seen Skimmers in schools and the way they rippled the water with their quick rushes. They were not like the Swarmers in their grace and the way they glided in the air for longer than seemed right, until you looked closely at the two aft tails that beat the water and gave the look of almost walking.

Warren stood and stared. The acrobatic swivel of the Skimmers at the peak of their arc was swift and deft, a dash of zest. Their markings ran downward toward the tail. There were purplings and then three fine white stripes that fanned into the aft tails. There was no hole in the gut like the place where the Swarmers spun out their strands. Warren guessed the smallest of them was three meters long. Bigger than most marlin or sharks. Their thin mouths parted at the top of the arc and sharp narrow teeth showed white against the slick blue skin.

It was easy to see why his clumsy fishing had never hooked any big fish. These creatures and the Swarmers had teeth for a reason. There were many of them in the oceans now and they had to feed on something.

They leaped and leaped and leaped again. Their fore-fins wriggled in flight. The fins separated into bony ridges at their edge and rippled quickly. Each ridge made a stubby projection. The rear fins were the same. They smacked the water powerfully and filled the air with so much spray that he could see a rainbow in one of the fine white clouds.

Just as suddenly they were gone.

Warren waited for them to return. After a while he licked his lips and sat down. He began to think of water without wanting to. He had caught some rain in his mouth the night before but it was little. When the waves were washing the deck he had been forced to stop because the salt water would set him back even though it would have felt good to drink it along with the rain.

He had to catch a Swarmer. He wondered if the Skimmers drove them away. To catch an ordinary fish would be a little help, but the ones out here did not give much liquid even when you squeezed the flesh and anyway he had only two lines now and the small shrimp for bait. He needed a Swarmer.

In the afternoon he saw a rippling to the east but it passed going north. The high, hard glare of the sun weighed on him. Nothing tugged at his lines. The mast traced an ellipse in the sky as the waves came. The current ran strong.

A white dab of light caught his eye. It was a blotch on the flat plane of the sea. It came steadily closer. He squinted.

Canvas. Under it was a blue form tugging at a corner. Warren hauled it aboard and the alien leaped high, showering him, the bony head slanted to bring one of the big elliptical white eyes toward the figure on the deck. The Skimmer plunged, leaped again, and swam away fast, taking short leaps.

Warren studied the soggy, bleached canvas. It looked like a tarp used to cover the gun emplacements on the Manamix but he could not be sure. There were copper-rimmed holes along one edge. He used them to hoist it up the mast, lashing it with wire and punching new holes to fasten the boom. He did not have enough lines to get it right but the canvas filled with the quickening breeze of late afternoon.

He watched the bulging canvas and patiently did not think about his thirst. A splash of spray startled him. A Skimmer—the same one?—was leaping next to the raft.

He licked his swollen lips and thought for a moment of fetching the gaff and then put the idea away. He watched the Skimmer arc and plunge and then speed away. It went a few tens of meters and then leaped high and turned and came back. It splashed him and then left and did the same thing again.

Warren frowned. The Skimmer was heading southwest. It cut a straight line in the shifting waters.

To keep that heading he would need a tiller. He tore up a plank at the raft edge and lashed a pole to it. Fashioning a collar that would seat in the deck was harder. He finally wrapped strips of bark firmly into a hole he had punched with the gaff. They held for a while and he had to keep replacing them. The tiller was weak and he could not turn it quickly for fear of breaking the lashing. It was impossible to perform any serious maneuver like coming about if the wind shifted, but the sunset breeze usually held steady, and anyway he could haul down the canvas if the wind changed too much. He nodded. It would be enough.

He brought the bow around on the path the Skimmer was marking. The current tugged him sideways and he could feel it through the tiller, but the raft steadied and began to make a gurgle where it swept against the drift. The canvas filled.

The clouds were fattening again and he hoped there would not be another storm. The raft was weaker and the boards creaked with the rise and fall of each wave. He would not last an hour if he had to cling to a log in the water.

A heavy fatigue settled in him.

The sea was calming, going flat. He scratched his skin where the salt had caked and stung. He slitted his eyes and looked toward the sunset. Banks of clouds were reflected in the ocean that now at sunset was like a lake. Waves made the image of the clouds into stacked bars of light. Pale cloud, then three washes of blue, then rods of cloud again. The reflection made light seem bony, broken into beams and angles. Square custard wedges floated on the glassy skin. He looked up the empty sky, above the orange ball of sun, and saw a thin streak of white. At first he tried to figure out how this illusion was made, but there was nothing in optics that would give a line of light that jutted upward, rather than lying horizontal. It was no jet or rocket trail. It thickened slightly as it rose up into the dark bowl of the sky.

After describing it to himself this way Warren then knew what it had to be. The Skyhook. He had forgotten the project, had not heard it mentioned in years. He supposed they were still building it. The strand started far out in orbit and lowered toward the Earth as men added to it. It would be more years before the tip touched the air and began the worst part of the job. If they could lower it through the miles of air and pin it to the ground, the thing would make a kind of elevator. People and machines would ride up it and into orbit and the rockets would not streak the sky anymore. Warren had thought years ago about trying to get a job working on the Skyhook, but he knew only how engines worked and they did not use any of that up there, nothing that needed air to burn. It was a fine thing where it caught the sun like a spider thread. He watched it until it turned red against the black and then faded as the night came on.

Two

He woke in the morning with the first glow of light. His left arm was crooked around the tiller to hold it even though he had moored it with a wire. The first thing he checked was the heading. It had drifted some and he sat up to correct it and then found that his left arm was cramped. He shook it. It would not loosen so he gave it a few minutes to come right while he unlashed the tiller and brought them around to the right bearing. He was pretty sure he knew the setting even though he could feel that the current had changed. The raft cut across the shallow waves more at this new angle. Foam broke over the deck and the swell was deeper and the planking groaned but he held to it.

The left arm would not uncramp. The cold of the night and sleeping on it had done this. He hoped the warmth later would loosen the muscles though he knew it was probably because his body was not getting enough food or the right food. The arm would just have to come loose on its own. He massaged it. The muscles jumped under his right hand and after a while he could feel a tingling all down the arm although that was probably from rubbing the salt in, he knew.

There was nothing on his lines. He drew in the bait but it had been nibbled away. He kept himself busy gathering seaweed with the gaff and resetting the lines with the weed but he knew it was not much use and he was trying to keep his mind off the thirst. It had been bad since he woke up and was getting worse as the sun rose. He searched for the Skyhook to take his mind off his throat and the raw puffed-up feel in his mouth but he could not see it.

He checked the bearing whenever he remembered it but there was a buzzing in his head that made it hard to tell how much time had passed. He thought about the Swarmers and how much he wanted one. The Skimmers were different but they had left him here now and he was not sure how much longer he could hold the bearing or even remember what the bearing was. The steady hollow slap of the waves against the underside of the raft soothed him and he closed his eyes against the sun.

He did not know how long he slept, but when he woke his face burned and his left arm had come free. He lay there feeling it and noticed a new kind of buzzing. He looked around for an insect—even though he had not seen any for many days—and then cocked his head up and felt the sound coming out of the sky. Miles away a dot drifted across a cloud. The airplane was small and running on props, not jets. Warren got to his feet with effort and waved his arms. He was sure they would see him because there was nothing else in the sea and he would stick out if he could just keep standing. He waved and the plane kept going straight and he thought he could see under it something jumping in the water after its shadow had passed. Then the plane was a speck and he lost the sound of it and he finally stopped waving his arms although it had not really come to him yet that they had not seen him. He sat down heavily. He was panting from the waving and then without noticing it for a while he began crying.

After a time he checked the bearing again, squinting at the sun and judging the current. He sat and watched and did not think.

The splash and thump startled him out of a fever dream.

The Skimmer darted away, plunging into a wave and out the other side with a turning twist of its aft fins.

A cylinder like the others rolled across the deck. He scrambled to catch it. The rolled sheet inside was ragged and uneven.

Now instead of NONGO there was OGO. Did they think this was the opposite? Again WSW and again CIRCLE. Another island? The misspelled SCHLECT, if that was what it was, and repeated. A warning? What point could there be in that when he had not seen a Swarmer in days? If UNS was the German we, then UNSSTOP might be we stop. The line might mean bad youth we stop not go. And it might not. But GEHEN WSW WSW meant go west south-west or else everything else made no sense at all, and he had been wrong ever since the island. There was Japanese in it too but he had never crewed on a ship where it was spoken and he didn’t know any. SHIMA. He remembered the city, Hiroshima and wondered if shima was “town” or “river” or something geographical. He shook his head. The last line made him smile. The Skimmers must have been in contact with something well enough to know a salute at the end was a human gesture. Or was that what they meant? The cold thought struck him that this might be goodbye. Or, looking at it another way, that they were telling him he needed lots of luck. He shook his head again.

That night he dreamed about the eyes and blood and fin fluid of the Swarmers, about swimming in it and dousing his head in it and about water that was clear and fresh. When he woke, the sun was already high and hot, the sail billowed west. He got the heading close to what he could remember and then crawled into the shadow of the sail, as he had done the days before.

He had kept his clothes on all the time on the raft and they were rags now. They kept off the sun still but were caked with salt and rubbed in the cuts and stung when he moved. At his neck and on his hands were black patches where the skin had peeled away and then burned again. He had worn a kind of hat he made before from Swarmer skin and bone and it was good shade but it had gone overboard in the storm.

Warren thought about the message but could make no more sense of it. He scratched his beard and found it had a crust of salt in it like hoarfrost. The salt was in his eyebrows too and he leaned over the side facedown in the water and scrubbed it away. He peered downward at the descending blades of green light and the dark shadow of the raft tapering away like a steep pyramid into the shifting murky darkness. He thought he saw something moving down there but he could not be sure.

He was getting weak now. He caught some more seaweed and used it as bait on the lines. The effort left him trembling. He set the heading and sat in the shade.

He woke with a jerk and there was splashing near the raft. Skimmers. They leaped into the noonday glare and beyond them was a brown haze. He blinked and it was an island. The wind had picked up and the canvas pulled full-bellied toward the land.

He sat numb and tired at the tiller and brought the raft in toward the island, running fast before the wind and cutting the waves and sending foam over the deck. There was a lagoon. Surf broke on the coral reefs hooking around the island. The land looked to be about a kilometer across, wooded hills and glaring white beaches. The Skimmers moved off to the left, and Warren saw a pale space in the lagoon that looked like a passage.

He slammed the tiller over full and the raft yawed and bucked against the waves that were coming harder now. The deck groaned and the canvas luffed, but the raft came into the pocket of the pale space and then the waves took it through powerfully and fast. Beyond the crashing of surf on the coral he sailed close to the wind to keep away from the dark blotches in the shallows, and then turned toward shore. The Skimmers were gone now, but he did not notice until the raft tugged on a sandbar and he looked around, judging the distance to the beach. He was weak and it would be stupid to risk anything this close. He stood up with a grunt and jumped heavily on the free side of the raft. It slewed and then broke free of the sandbar and the wind blew it fifty meters more. He got his tools and stood on the raft, hesitating as though leaving it after all this time was hard to imagine. Then he swore at himself and stepped off.

He swam slowly until his feet hit sand and then took slow steps up to the beach, careful to keep his balance, so he did not see the man come out of the palms. Warren pitched forward onto the sand and tried to get up. The sand felt hard and hot against him. He stood again with pains in his legs and the man was standing nearby, Chinese or maybe Filipino. He said something to Warren and Warren asked him a question and they stared at each other. Warren waited for an answer, and when he saw there was not going to be one he held out his right hand, palm up. In the silence they shook hands.

Three

For a day he was weak and could not walk far. The Chinese brought him cold food in tin cans and coconut milk. They talked at each other but neither one knew a single word the other did and soon they stopped. The Chinese pointed to himself and said “Gijan” or something close to it, so Warren called him that.

It looked as though Gijan had drifted here in a small lifeboat. He wore clothes like gray pajamas and had two cases of canned food.

Warren slept deeply and woke to a distant booming. He stumbled down to the beach, looking around for Gijan. The Chinese was standing waist-deep in the lagoon. He pointed a pistol into the water and fired, making a loud bang but not kicking up much spray. Warren watched as slim white fish floated up, stunned. Gijan picked them from the water and put them in a palm frond he carried. He came ashore smiling and held out one of the fish to Warren. Its eyes bulged.

“Raw?” Warren shook his head. But Gijan had no matches.

Warren pointed to the pistol. Gijan took the medium caliber automatic and hefted it and looked at him. “No, I mean, give me a shell.” He saw it was pointless, talking. He made a gesture of things coming out of the muzzle and Gijan caught it and fished a cartridge out of his pocket. Gijan took the fish up on the sand as they started flopping in the palm frond, waking up from the stunning.

Warren gathered dry brush and twigs and mixed them and dug a pit for the mixture with his hands. He still had his knife and some wire. He forced open the cartridge with them. He mixed the gunpowder with the wood. He had been watching Gijan the night before and the man was not using fire, just eating out of cans. Warren found some hardwood and rubbed the wire along it quickly while Gijan watched, frowning at first. The fish were dead and gleamed in the sun.

Warren was damned if he was going to eat raw fish now that he was on land. He rubbed the wire harder, bracing the wood between his knees and drawing the wire quickly back and forth. He felt it warming in his hands. When he was sweating and the wire was both burning and biting into his hands, he knelt beside the wood and pressed the searing wire into it. The powder fizzled and sputtered for a moment and then with a rush it caught, the twigs snapped and the fire made its own pale yellow glow in the sun. Gijan smiled.

Warren had felt a dislike of using the gun to get the fish. He thought about it as he and Gijan roasted them on sticks, but the thought went away as he started eating them and the rich crisp flavor burst in his mouth. He ate four of them in a row without stopping to drink some of the coconut milk Gijan had in tin cans. The hunger came on him suddenly, as if he had just remembered food, and it did not go away until he finished six fish and ate half the coconut meat. Then he thought again about using the gun that way but it did not seem so bad.

Gijan tried to describe something, using his hands and drawing pictures in the sand. A ship, sinking. Gijan in a boat. The sun coming into the sky seven times. Then the island. Boat broken up on the coral, but Gijan swimming beside it and getting it to the shore, half sunken.

Warren nodded and drew his own story. He did not show the Swarmers or the Skimmers except at the shipwreck, because he did not know how to tell the man what it was like and also he was not sure how Gijan would like the idea of eating Swarmer. Warren was not sure why this hesitation came into his head but he decided to stick with it and not tell Gijan too much about how he survived.

In the afternoon Warren made a hat for himself and walked around the island. It was flat most of the way near the beach with a steep outcropping of brown rock where the ridgeline of the island ran down into the sea. There were palms and scrub brush and sea grass and dry stream beds. He found a big rocky flat space on the southern flank of the island and squinted at it awhile. Then he went back and brought Gijan to it and made gestures of picking out some of the pale rocks and carrying them.

The man caught the idea on the second try. Warren scratched out SOS in the sand and showed it to him. Gijan frowned, puzzled. He made his own sign with a stick and Warren could not understand it. There were four lines like the outline of a house and a crossbar. Warren thumped the sand next to the SOS and said “Yes!” and thumped it again.

He was pretty sure SOS was an international symbol but the other man simply stared at him. The silence got longer. There was tension in the air. Warren could not understand where it came from. He did not move. After a moment Gijan shrugged and went off to collect more of the light-colored rocks.

They laid them out across the stony clearing, letters fifty meters tall. Warren suspected the airplane he had seen was searching for survivors of Gijan’s ship, which had gone down nearby, and not the Manamix. It was funny Gijan had not thought of making a signal but then he did not think of making a fire either.

The next morning Warren drew pictures of fishing and found that Gijan had not tried it. Warren guessed the man was simply waiting to be picked up and was a little afraid of the big silent island and even more of the empty sea. Gijan’s hands were softer than Warren’s and he guessed maybe the man had been mainly a desk worker. When the canned food ran out Gijan would have tried fishing but not before. So far all he had done was climb a few palms and knock down coconuts. The palms were stunted here though, and there was not much milk in the coconuts. They would need water.

Warren worked the metal in the leftover cans and made fishhooks. Gijan saw what he was doing and went away into the north part of the island.

Warren was surveying the lagoon, looking for deep spots near the shore when he found the raft moored in a narrow cove. Gijan must have found it drifting and tied it there. The boards looked worn and weak and the whole thing—cracked tiller, bleached canvas, rusted wire lashings—carried the feel of an old useless wreck. Warren studied it for a while and then turned away.

Gijan found him at a rough shelf of rock that stuck out over the lagoon. Gijan was carrying a box Warren had not seen. He put the box down and gestured to it, smiling slightly, proud. Warren looked inside. There was a tangle of fishing line inside, some hooks, a rod, a diving mask, fins, a manual in Chinese or something like it, a screwdriver, and some odds and ends. Warren looked at the man and wished he knew how to ask a question. The box was the same kind that the canned food was in, so Warren guessed Gijan had brought all this in the boat.

They went down to the beach and Gijan drew some more pictures and that was the story that came out of it. He did not draw anything about hiding the box away but Warren could guess that he had. Gijan must have seen the raft coming and in a hurry, afraid, he would snatch up what he could and hide it. Then when he saw that Warren was no trouble he came out and brought the food. He left the rest behind just to be careful. He was still being careful when he used the pistol to fish. Maybe that was a way to show Warren he had it without making any threats.

Warren smiled broadly and shook his hand and insisted on carrying the box back to their camp. Land crabs skittered away from their feet as they walked, two men with a strange silence between them.

Warren fished in the afternoon. The canned goods would not last long with two of them eating and Warren was more hungry than he could ever remember. His body was waking up after being half dead and it wanted food and water, more water than they could get out of the coconuts. He would have to do something about that. He thought about it while he fished, using worms from the shady parts of the island, and then he saw moving shadows in the lagoon. They were big fish but they twisted on their turns in a way he remembered. He watched and they did not break water but he was sure.

He began to notice the thirst again after he had caught two fish. He left a line with bait and went inland and knocked down three coconuts but they did not yield much of the sweet milk. He took the fish back to camp where Gijan was keeping the fire going. Warren sat and watched him gut the fish, not making a good job of it. He felt the way he had in the first days on the raft. New facts, new problems. This island was just a bigger raft with more to take from but you had to learn the ways first.

Gijan’s odd box of equipment had some rubber hose that had sheared off some missing piece of equipment. Warren stared at the collection in the box for a while. He began idly making a cover for one of the large tin cans, fitting pieces of metal together. Crimping them over the lip of the can and around the edge of the hose, he found that they made a pretty fair seal. He made a holder for the can, working patiently. Gijan watched him with interest. Warren sent him to get seawater in a big can. He rigged the hose to pass through a series of smaller cans. With the seawater he filled the big can and sealed the tight cover and put it on the fire. The men watched the water boil and then steam came out of the hose. Gijan saw the idea and put seawater into the small cans. It cooled the hose so that at the end the thin steam faded into a dribble of fresh water.

They smiled at each other and watched the slow drip. By late afternoon they had their first drink. It was brackish but not bad.

Warren used gestures and sketches in the sand to ask Gijan about the assortment of equipment. Had he been on a research vessel? A fast skimship?

Gijan drew the profile of an ordinary freighter, even adding the loading booms. Gijan pointed at Warren, so he drew an outline of the Manamix. With pantomime and gestures and imitating sounds they got across their trades. Warren worked with machines and Gijan was some kind of trader. Gijan drew a lopsided map of the Pacific and pointed to a speck not big enough or in the right place to be any island Warren knew about. Gijan sketched in nets and motorboats and Warren guessed they had been using a freighter to try for tuna. It sounded stupid. Until now he had not thought about the islands isolated for years now and how they would get food. You could not support a population by fishing from the shore. Most crops were thin in the sandy soil. So he guessed Gijan’s island had armored a freighter and sent it out with nets, desperate. If it was a big enough island they might have an airplane and some fuel left and maybe that was the one he saw.

Gijan showed him the stuff in the box again. It was pretty banged up and salt-rusted, and Warren guessed it had been left years ago when the freighter was still working. In the years when the Swarmers were spreading Warren had a gun like everybody else in the crew, not in his own duffel where somebody might find it but in a locker of spare engine parts. Now that he thought about it, a lifeboat was a better place to stow a weapon, down in with some old gear nobody would want. When you needed a gun you would be on deck already and you could get to it easy.

He looked at Gijan’s pinched face and tried to read it, but the man’s eyes were blank, just watching with a puzzled frown. It was hard to tell what Gijan meant by some of his drawings and Warren got tired of the whole thing.

They ate coconuts at sundown. The green ones were like jelly inside. Gijan had a way of opening them using a stake wedged into the hard-packed ground. The stake was sharp and Gijan slammed the coconut down on it until the green husk split away. The hard-shelled ones had the tough white meat inside but not much milk. The palms were bent over in the trade winds and were short. Warren counted them up and down the beach and estimated how long the two men would take to strip the island. Less than a month.

Afterward Warren went down to the beach and waded out. A current tugged at his ankles and he followed with his eyes the crinkling of the pale water where a deep current ran. It swept around the island toward the passage in the coral, the basin of the lagoon pouring out into the ocean under the night tide. Combers snarled white against the dark wedge of the coral ring and beyond was the jagged black horizon.

They would have to get fish from the lagoon and lines from shore would not be enough. But that was only one of the reasons to go out again.

In the dim moonlight he went back, past the fire where Gijan sat watching the hissing distiller and then into the scrub. Uphill Warren found a tree and stripped bark from it. He cut it into chips and mashed them on a rock. He was tired by the time he got a sour-smelling soup going on the fire. Gijan watched. Warren did not feel like trying to tell the man what he was doing.

Warren tended the simmering and fell asleep and woke when Gijan bent over him to taste the can’s thick mash. Gijan made a face. Warren roughly yanked the can away, burning his own fingers. He shook his head abruptly and set the can where it would come to a rolling boil. Gijan moved off. Warren ignored him and fell back into sleep.

This night mosquitoes found them. Warren woke and slapped his forehead, and each time in the fading orange firelight his hand was covered by a mass of squashed red-brown. Gijan grunted and complained. Toward morning they trudged back into the scrub and the mosquitoes left them and they curled up on the ground to sleep until the sun came through the canopy of fronds above.

The lines Warren had left overnight were empty. The fishing was bound to be bad when you had no chance to play the line. They had more coconuts for breakfast and Warren checked the cooling mash he had made. It was thick and it stained wood a deep black. He put it aside without thinking much about how he could use it.

In the cool of the morning he repaired the raft. The slow working of the tide had loosened the lashings and some of the boards were rotting. It would do for the lagoon, but as he worked he thought of the Swarmers crawling ashore at the last island. The big things had been slow and clumsy, and with Gijan’s pistol the men would have an advantage, but there were only two of them. They could never cover the whole island. If the Swarmers came the raft might be the only escape they had.

He brought the fishing gear aboard and cast off. Gijan saw him and came running down the hard white sand. Warren waved. Gijan was excited and jabbering and his eyes rolled back and forth from Warren to the break in the reef. He pulled out his pistol and waved it in the air. Warren ran up the worn canvas sail and swung the boom around so that the raft peeled away from the passage and made headway along the beach, around the island. When he looked back Gijan was aiming the pistol at him.

Warren frowned. He could not understand the man. After a moment when Gijan saw that he was running steady in the lagoon, the pistol came down. Warren saw the man put the thing back in his pocket and then set to work laying his lines. He kept enough wind in the sail to straighten the pull and move the bait so it would look as though it were swimming.

Maybe he should have drawn a sketch for Gijan. Warren thought about it a moment and then shrugged. An aft line jerked as something hit it, and Warren forgot Gijan and his pistol and played in the catch.

He took four big fish in the morning. One had the striped back and silvery belly of a bonito and the others he did not recognize. He and Gijan ate two and stripped and salted the others, and in the afternoon he went out again. Standing on the raft he could see the shadows of the big fish as they came into the lagoon. A Skimmer darted in the distance and he stayed away from it, afraid it would come for the trailing lines. After a while he remembered that they had never hit his lines in the ocean, so then he did not veer the raft when the Skimmer leaped high nearby, rolling over in that strange way. Gijan was standing on the glaring white beach, Warren noticed, watching. Another leap, splashing foam, and then a tube rattled on the boards of the raft.

Warren came ashore with it and Gijan reached for the slick sheet. The man moved suddenly and Warren stepped back, bracing himself. The two stood still for a moment, staring at each other. Gijan’s face compressed and intent. Then in a controlled way Gijan relaxed, making a careless gesture with his hands and helped moor the raft. Warren moved the tube and sheet from one hand to the other and finally, feeling awkward, handed them to Gijan. The man read the words slowly, lips pressed together. “Shima,” he said. “Shio. Nagare. Umi.” He shook his head and looked at Warren, his lips forming the words again silently.

They drew pictures in the sand. For SHIMA Gijan sketched the island and for UMI the sea around it. In the lagoon he drew wavy lines in the water and said several times, “Nagare.” Across the island he drew a line and then made swooping motions of bigness and said, “Hiro.”

Warren murmured, “Wide island? Hiro shima?” but aside from blinking Gijan gave no sign that he understood. Warren showed him a rock for STONE and drew the Earth for WORLD, but he was not sure if that was what the words on the sheet meant jammed in with the others. What did blackening in the w of WORLD mean?

The men spoke haltingly to each other over the booming on the reef. The clusters of words would not yield to a sensible plan and even if it had, Warren was not sure he could tell Gijan his part of it, the English smattering of words, or that Gijan could get across to him the foreign ones. He felt in Gijan a restless energy now, an impatience with the crabbed jumble of language. WAIT WAIT YOU and then LUCK. It seemed to Warren he had been waiting a long time now. Even though this message had more English and was clearer, there was no way for the Skimmers to know what language Warren understood, not unless he told them. Frowning over a diagram Gijan was drawing in the floury sand, he realized suddenly why he had made the bark mash last night.

It took hours to write a message on the back of the sheet. A bamboo quill stabbed the surface, but if you held it right it did not puncture. The sour black ink dripped and ran, but by pinning the sheet flat in the sun he got it to dry without a lot of blurring.

Gijan could not understand any of it or at least he gave no sign. Warren took the raft out again at dusk as the wind backed into the north and ebbed into fitful breezes. The sail luffed and he had trouble bringing the raft out of the running lagoon currents and toward the spot where flickering shadows played across the white expanse of a sandbar. A Skimmer leaped and turned as he came near. He held the boom to catch the last gusts of sunset wind, and when the shadows were under the raft he threw the tube into the water. It bobbed and began to drift out toward the passage to the sea as Warren waited, watching the shadows, wondering if they had seen it, knowing he could not now catch the tube with the raft before it reached the reef, and then a quick flurry of motion below churned the pale sand and a form came up ripping the smooth water as it leaped. The Skimmer flexed in air and hung for an instant, rolling, before it fell with a smack and was gone in an upwash of bright foam. The tube was gone.

That night the mosquitoes came again and drove them into the rocky ground near the center of the island in the morning their hands were blood-streaked where they had slapped their faces and legs in the night and caught the fat mosquitoes partway through their eating.

In the morning Warren went out again and laid his lines as early as possible. Near the sandbar there were many fish. One of them hit a line, and when Warren pulled it in the thing had deep-set eyes, a small mouth like a parrots beak, slimy gills, and hard blue scales. He pressed at the flesh and a dent stayed in it for a while, the way it did if you squeezed the legs of a man with leprosy or dropsy. The thing smelled bad as it warmed on the planks so he threw it back, pretty sure it was poisonous. It floated and a Skimmer leaped near it and then took the thing and was gone. Warren could see more Skimmers moving below. They were feeding on the poison fish.

He caught two skipjack tuna and brought them ashore for Gijan to clean. The man was watching him steadily from the beach and Warren did not like it. The thing between him and the Skimmers was his, and he did not want any more of the stupid drawing and hand waving of trying to explain it to Gijan.

He went into the palm grove where the fire crackled and got the diving mask he had seen in Gijan’s box. It was made for a smaller head, but with the rubber strap drawn tight he could ride it up against the bridge of his nose and make it fit. As he came back down to the beach Gijan said something but Warren went on to the raft and cast off, bearing in the southerly wind out toward the sandbar. He grounded the raft on the bar to hold it steady.

He lay on the raft and peered down at the moving shapes. They were at least five fathoms down and they had finished off the poison fish. Seven Skimmers hovered over a dark patch, rippling their forefins where the bony ridges stuck out like thick fingers. Sunlight caught a glint from the thing they were working on and suddenly a gout of gray mist came up from it and broke into bubbles. It was steam.

Warren lay halfway over the side of the raft and watched the regular puffs of steam billow up from the machine. Without thinking of the danger he slipped overboard and dove, swimming hard, pushing as deep as he could despite the tightness and burning in his chest. The Skimmers moved as they saw him and the machine became clearer. It was a pile of junk, pieces of a ship’s hull and deck collars and fittings of all sizes. Four batteries were mounted on one side and rust-caked cables led from them into the machine. There were other fragments and bits of worked metal and some of it he was sure was not made by men. Knobs of something yellow grew here and there, and in the wavering, rippling green light there was something about the form and shape of the thing that Warren recognized as right and yet he knew he had never seen anything like it before. There is a logic to a piece of equipment that comes out of the job it has to do and he felt that this machine was well shaped, as his lungs at last burned too much and he fought upward, all thought leaving him as he let the air burst from him and followed the silvery bubbles up toward the shifting, slanting blades of yellow-green sun.

Four

In the lagoon the water shaded from pale blue at the beach to emerald in the deep channel where the currents ran with the tides. Beyond the snarling reef the sea was a hard gray.

Warren worked for five days in the slow dark waters near the sandbar. He double-anchored the raft so the deck was steady. That way he could write well on it with the bark mash and then dry the sheets the Skimmers brought up to him.

Their first reply was not much better than the earlier messages, but he printed out in capital letters a simple answer and gradually they learned what he could not follow. Their next message had more English in it and less Japanese and German and fewer of the odd words made up out of parts of languages. There were longer stretches in it, too, more like sentences now than strings of nouns.

The Skimmers did not seem to think of things acting but instead of things just being, so they put down names of objects in long rows as though the things named would react on each other, each making the other clearer and more specific and what the things did would be in the relations between them. It was a hard way to learn to think and Warren was not sure he knew what the impacted knots of words meant most of the time. Sometimes the chains of words said nothing to him. The blue forms below would flick across the bone-white sand in elaborate looping arabesques, turning over and over with their ventral fins flared, in designs that escaped him. When the sun was low at morning or at dusk he could not tell the Skimmers from their shadows, and the gliding long forms merged with their dark echoes on the sand in a kind of slow elliptical dance.

He lay halfway off the raft and watched them, when he was tired from the messages; and peered through the mask, and something in their quick darting glide would come through to him. He would try then to ask a simple question. He wrote it out and dried it and threw it into the lagoon. Sometimes that was enough to cut through the jammed lines of endless nouns they had offered him and he would see a small thought that hung between the words in a space each word allowed but did not define. It was as if the words packed together still left a hole between them and the job was to see the hole instead of the blur around it. He watched the skimming grace they had down in the dusky emerald green but he could not sort it out.

He went ashore at dusk each day. The catch from the trailing lines was good in the morning and went away in the afternoon. Maybe it had something to do with the Skimmers. The easy morning catch left him most of the day to study the many sheets they brought up to him and to work on his own halting answers.

Gijan stood on the beach most of the day and watched. He did not show the pistol again when Warren went out. He kept the fire and the distiller going and they ate well. Warren brought the finished sheets ashore and kept them in Gijan’s box, but he could not tell the man much of what was in them, at first because lines in the sand and gestures were not enough and later because Warren did not know himself how to tell it.

Gijan did not seem to mind not knowing. He tended the fire and knocked down coconuts and split them and gutted the catch and after a while asked nothing more. At times he would leave the beach for hours and Warren guessed he was collecting wood or some of the pungent edible leaves they had at supper.

To Warren the knowing was all there was, and he was glad Gijan would do the work and not bother him. At noon beneath the high hard dazzle of the sky he ate little because he wanted to keep his head clear. At night, though, he filled himself with the hot moist fish and tin-flavored water. He woke to a biting early sun. The mosquitoes still stung but he did not mind it so much now.

On the third day like this, he began to write down for himself a kind of patchwork of what he thought they meant. He knew as soon as he read it over that it was not right. He had never been any good with words. When he was married he did not write letters to his wife when he shipped out even if he was gone half a year. But this writing was a way of getting it down and he liked the act of scratching out the blunt lines on the backs of the Skimmer sheets.

Five

Each night after it got too dark for Warren to write in the yellow firelight, they would move inland. The mosquitoes stayed near the beach and there were a lot of other insects, too. Warren listened to fish in the lagoon leaping for the insects and the splashing as the Skimmers took the fish in turn. He could see their phosphorescent wakes in the water.

They smeared themselves with mud to keep off the mosquitoes, but it did not keep off the ticks that dropped from the trees. There was no iodine in Gijan’s box of random items.

Putting a drop of iodine on the tick’s tail was the best treatment and second best was burning them off. Each morning the men inspected each other and there were always a few black dots where the ticks burrowed in. An ember from the fire pressed against the tick’s hindquarters made it let go and then Warren could pull the tick out with his fingernails. He knew that if the head came off in the skin, it would rot and the whole area would become a boil. He noticed that Gijan got few ticks and he wondered if it had anything to do with the Asian skin.

The next morning Warren got a good catch, and when he brought it in he was sore from the days of work on the raft. After eating the fish he went for more coconuts. The softer fronds were good, too, for rubbing the skin to take away the sting of mosquito bites and to get the salt out. Finding good coconuts was harder now and he worked his way across the island, up the ridgeline and down to a swampy part on the southern side. There were edible leaves there and he chewed some slowly as he made his way back, thinking. He was nearly across a bare stretch of soil when he saw it was the place they had laid out the SOS. The light-colored rocks were there but they were scattered. The SOS was broken up.

Gijan was looking in the storage box when Warren came back into the camp. “Hey!” he called. Gijan looked at him, calm and steady, and then stood up, taking his time.

Warren pointed back to the south and glared at the man and then bent down and drew the SOS in the sand. He rubbed it out and pointed at Gijan.

Warren had expected the man to give him a blank look or a puzzled expression. Instead, Gijan put a hand in a pocket.

Then Gijan said quite clearly. “It does not matter.”

Warren stood absolutely still. Gijan pulled the pistol casually out of his pocket but he did not aim it at anything.

Warren said carefully, “Why?”

“Why deceive you? So that you would go on with your”—he paused—”your good work. You have made remarkable progress.”

“The Skimmers.”

“Yes.”

“And the SOS …”

“I did not want anyone to spot the island who should not.”

“Who would that be?”

“Several. The Japanese. The Americans. There are reports of Soviet interest.”

“So you are—”

“Chinese, of course.”

“Of course.”

“I would like to know how you wrote that summary. I read the direct messages you got from them, read them many times. I could not see in them very much.”

“There’s more to it than what they wrote.”

“You are sure that you brought all their messages ashore?”

“Sure. I kept them all.”

“How do you discover things that are not in the messages?”

“I don’t think I can tell you that.”

“Cannot? Or will not?”

“Can’t.”

Gijan became pensive, studying Warren. Finally he said, “I cannot pass judgment on that. Others will have to decide that, others who know more than I do.” He paused. “Were you truly in a shipwreck?”

“Yeah.”

“Remarkable that you survived. I thought you would die when I saw you first. You are a sailor?”

“Engine man. What’re you?”

“Soldier. A kind of soldier.”

“Funny kind, seems to me.”

“This is not the duty I would have chosen. I sit on this terrible place and try to talk to those things.”

“Uh-huh. Any luck?”

“Nothing. They do not answer me. The tools I was given do not work. Kinds of flashlights. Sound makers. Things floating in the water. I was told they are drawn to these things.”

“What would happen if they did not answer?”

“My job is over then.”

“Well, I guess I’ve put you out of work. We’re still going to need something to eat, though.” He gestured at the raft and turned toward it and Gijan leveled the pistol.

“You can rest,” the man said. “It will not be long.”