The Scar

Interlude IV

On keep on.

The water is like sweat and our whales do not like it.

Nonetheless.

South.

The trail is clear.

Into temperate and then into warm seas.

The submarine rockscape was dramatic here, jags and clefts in the world’s crust. Atolls and reefs rose from the deep water in a melee of vivid colors. The water was fertilized by rotting palm leaves and lotuses and the corpses of unique creatures: amphibious things that swam in mud, and fish that breathed air, and aquatic bats.

On every island there were scores of ecological niches, and for each unique opportunity there was a beast. Sometimes there were two or more, fighting for ascendancy.

The hunters made their way into shallows, into salt lagoons and caves, and ate what they found there.

The whales moaned and mewled and begged to return to the cold waters, and their masters ignored them or punished them, and told them again what it was they were looking for.

The hunters remarked upon the water temperature, and the new quality of light, and the crystalline colors of the fish that surrounded them, but they did not complain. It would have been unthinkable for them to care, with their quarry still loose.

South, they commanded, and even when their whales began to die, one by one, their colossal bodies falling prey to alien warmwater viruses and collapsing, their skins peeling off grey and rotten, their bodies bloating with gas and bobbing stinking and pustulant to the surface to be torn to pieces by carrion birds till their bones and the remnants of their flesh slid down into darkening water, their masters did not hesitate.

South, they said, and followed the trail into tropical seas.