The Sea is Full of Stars

Mahakor, Kalinda

It wasn’t supposed to hurt, but it had, and a lot. Neither of them understood that it was because of their own telepathic links, suddenly severed when all of their beings were broken down into nothing more than impossibly complex and detailed code, analyzed, rearranged, and reformed on the surface by the great machine that operated and maintained the Well. The Well of Souls was not so much a creator as a processor, although only those long dead and gone could understand its logic.

Angel/Alpha, Ming/Beta, and Ari had all tried to enter at once, although they were assured it wouldn’t matter in terms of final placement. Alpha had winked out first, and Beta hesitated, feeling lost, and then the pain and jamming of the mental signals and implanted receptors kicked in and, for very different reasons, Beta and Ari clung to one another as their transformations began.

Beta clung to Ari because she had been using an unused part of his brain for hot swappable storage, and because she had made him subject to her. Ari clung to her out of fear, out of remorse, and because more than being controlled, he feared being alone.

He awoke, still with the echo of that searing pain, when somebody threw a huge bucket of water at him with enormous force, knocking him backward and almost out cold again.

He was disoriented and panicked, then saw that what had thrown the water at him was in fact a very angry looking ocean, and that he was on a rocky outcrop being pounded by tall waves and churning surf. He tried to get up and run inland to escape the next big one, but couldn’t get to his feet before it smacked him again. Then, without thinking, his survival instincts took over and he crawled, hand over hand, to the edge of the rocks and slid down into the ocean head first.

Instantly he was in a different world. A shiver went through him from head to—tail?—and he opened his mouth and took in water, starting a rhythmic motion. He felt it pass through the mouth, down through the neck, and then kind of ooze back into the surrounding water again. It was an interesting feeling, one he’d not had before, nor was it something he’d have tried on his own, but thankfully, the instincts worked.

Okay, he was breathing water. It still seemed odd, but only because, topside, he was certain he’d been breathing air. What kind of creature could breathe both so effortlessly?

He brought what proved to be a webbed hand with very long, sharp, curved nails to his face and felt it. Two eyes, a nose, a mouth, chin, even two ears, although they felt like soft seashells. But the nose wasn’t a nose; no water was going in and out, and he didn’t think air had before, on the rocks. It seemed to be a nice little nose, but in fact the two indentations in the nostrils weren’t cavities at all, but ended just inside, at a pulsing fleshy tissue.

There was hair, too, thick and long, but it didn’t quite feel like hair, and when he reached up and took a little of it and brought it in front of his eyes, it looked colorless, not quite transparent but certainly translucent, and felt warm to the touch.

Continuing his self-examination, he noted gill-like organs in the neck, which accepted water as he swam and extracted the oxygen and expelled the rest in a simple series of automatic motions. His color was light brown on the underside; from what he could tell about his back, it appeared a much darker brown, and there seemed to be a fin, like the dorsal of a shark, just below the shoulder blades. If that was what he’d fallen against the second time, it was a wonder he hadn’t impaled himself. Reaching around and touching it, which was all he could manage, he could feel it was very hard, and with sharp edges that probably led to a knifelike point.

Now it was clear that he hadn’t been able to run because he had no legs. Instead, the humanoid torso blended into one more reminiscent of a sea lion or a porpoise; the large steering fins were parallel to his body, much like a mammal, rather than like great fish.

A hybrid of some kind, he thought with some sense of wonder, one so much of the sea that it probably lived there most of the time and breathed the water easily, yet able to breathe air if need be and operate on the surface, or even, to the limited extent his body permitted, on land. Part fish, part mammal? There were small, very tight, very firm breasts with nipples, but they looked and felt more like pectorals and he felt comfortably male, except…

If there s no crotch, how do I…? He brought his tail around and angled his neck down until he could see a small area where something bony barely protruded. That was it? Jeez, maybe they just laid eggs and then the guys swam over them and got off or something. Wouldn’t that be a disappointment!

There was a sense of warmer and cooler currents; he could actually see them as well as feel them. But though he was now in what was certainly a cold current, it was a matter of fact rather than a matter of concern. Fatty tissue, or something even better, was insulating him as needed.

Underwater, the colors he saw were vanishing with depth. Still, when he examined his hands or other parts of his body, the image looked crisp and sharp. He wondered about that. It seemed that his eyes were flattening, compensating for the distortion of light in the water.

Once his initial mental qualms were out of the way and he had experimented with how much turn or twist did what, moving in this element was like flying without wings. While you were aware of the water, it was a friend, and you could hold yourself at a given depth, go up or down with minor gestures, and go forward with only slight expenditures of energy. It was better than flying; it was a fully three-dimensional environment, and the more he swam in it, the more of a rush he got. Damn if this wasn’t fun!

As he descended still farther, he became aware of other senses that he was using. Sound… Echoes back to his ears and then to his brain were painting pictures for him. Down about a hundred meters he pictured a school of average-sized fish, and a bit farther down there were more. But sonar couldn’t give the level of detail he was perceiving; no, he was picking out each individual living thing and categorizing it by size and attributes. He realized that this ability had something to do with whatever it was that he’d thought was his nose.

But where in this wet place was he headed?

As it turned out, at about fifty meters depth an entire network appeared to him out of the gloom at the bottom—not in sight, but in that sixth sense he didn’t quite understand. But what did they mean, these straight lines going in various directions like some grand highway as seen from very high up? Each, when probed by sonar, had a different and distinct single tone. Once he tried it, the tone persisted until he changed to a different line.

They were roads! Not actual, physical roads, but grids laid out on the floor and perhaps broadcasting as well. Anyone swimming along who had his powers would see it, and if they knew what each tone meant, they would know which road went where, and maybe more.

He wasted no time choosing a road. They were all the same to him, and they all had to lead somewhere, or else somebody had gone to a tremendous amount of bother just for art.

As he followed it, he tried to remember back. He had fragments of memories; in fact, he had memories from all sorts of sources, but none took precedence and many were confusing. He thought he was somebody named Aristotle Martinez, since that was the only male memories he had and he felt that he was a male. But it was an incomplete set of memories, with more gaps than whole parts, and he seemed very distant, like looking at a character in a play rather than at one’s own self.

And then there was Ming Dawn Palavri. He had at least as many memories of hers as of Ari’s, and in some cases it seemed that the Ming memories, while also distant, were more complete than much of Ari’s. Talk about your hybrids! He could tap either life, male or female, and think very much along those lines. Considering what a skunk Ari was, he suspected that he’d rather have been Ming, which explained the memory jostling. Split personalities, split nature, dual sexuality, part fish and part mammal, water breather and air breather—this was some mixed-up existence he was headed into!

But there were others in his head, too. Less so, less fully formed and detailed, but very much there. Some of Angel was there, oddly, and so were Alpha and Beta, although they were so synched that they seemed to have no separate identity. Alpha and Beta gave him the shivers; he could follow their single-minded logic and their view of the universe, but who would want to? Angel was a different story. He didn’t have her clearly at all, but those snippets he could make out were as bizarre a view of the universe as the Alpha-Beta concept, if different. Or were they? Alpha and Beta knew who their god was and joyfully lived to serve him and him alone. Angel believed in a different, more grandiose God of the cosmos that she could not see yet felt was with her seeing and hearing all and guiding her, and she joyfully lived to serve Him and Him alone. Hmmm… That didn’t sound like much of a choice.

The worst part was, none of them were him. They were all there, along with a lot of data, a lot of shared experiences, and some pretty nasty memories as well, but not a one of them fit like an old suit and comfortable chair. Ari didn’t really fit because he didn’t like him very much and didn’t want to be him. He had the fullest picture of Ming, yet he didn’t want to be Ming, either, because he wanted the real Ming back. He wanted to make it up to her, even make love to her. Hell, maybe mate with her.

The others he wanted to forget, although he knew they’d probably be a part of his nightmares. Still, he had the impression that it wasn’t supposed to work like this. They said he should be mentally intact; instead, he seemed a whole new person. Damn. Being yanked around was one thing, but at least he’d known who he was and had an intact ego and personality; now he felt like two very different people, with several others around as onlookers. He’d heard of people with multiple personalities, and perhaps that was what he was experiencing.

He was coming to a junction, but didn’t have to choose which branch to take. It was immediately obvious; if he’d been breathing air instead of water, it would have been breathtaking.

It was a city! And not just caves and kelp and coral, although it did look like a vast coral reef. The lifesigns to his sixth sense were so strong that he had to dampen it; there were a lot of beings over there, hopefully beings like him.

And if it wasn’t electrified and lighting up the sea bottom, then it was doing a pretty fair imitation.

In less than five minutes he encountered the first denizens of this new world, and had the mermaid vision reinforced, although the bodies were not like the classical mermaids of old, appearing more alien. Still, the ears, like clamshells set into each side of the head, the quite Terran-looking faces that seemed to be those of women, even though they might not all have been, and the long, translucent, and slightly glowing “hair,” were very much as he’d suspected.

In less than ten minutes two such creatures wearing armbands with some kind of symbol and carrying what appeared to be ray guns had placed him under arrest.

He’d almost gotten used to a kind of local telepathy with the two women, so he wasn’t completely thrown by the way the authorities spoke to him, only their attitudes. It was telepathy, but very much on the surface. He could no more read their true thoughts than he could have read those butterfly things’ thoughts back in that entry place, yet the communication was clear. It was a combination—another hybrid!— involving the sending of a specific (or, if you wanted to address many, a broad) audio signal that acted as a carrier for the thoughts, which were perceived much like words and sentences. And it was clear from the start that this communication method left no room for weaseling or error. You understood exactly what the speaker meant.

Not that the two cops had been all that communicative. He’d just swam down on the main line for the city and they suddenly materialized on either side of him.

“Hold! What is your name?” one asked flat out, the “tone” conveying the kind of arrogant authority he expected of cops.

“I—” he began, and stopped. Hell, just which name did he use when he felt like neither? “I am Ari Martinez,” he finally responded, picking the one that was most correct in the basics, although he didn’t really exactly feel like Ari Martinez. “I was—” He hesitated, but his mind sent the requisite mental holograms showing him and his former companions being pushed into the void of the Gate. “I awoke on an island above in a terrible storm and my impulse was to come down here.”

“Smart impulse. That’s a hurricane up there. We just hope it doesn’t knock off the electricity plant,” the other cop said. “Well, you may have suddenly become like us, but that doesn’t make you one of us. Just ask the Crown Regent of Chalidang, for one.”

As he tried to make sense of that cryptic remark, the other cop snapped something tight around his neck, just below the gills. “Hey! What’s that?”

“It is an electric collar. You will come with us and do as we say, or either of us can press one stud on our wrist controllers and you will be shocked at whatever level we choose up to unconsciousness. Don’t make us do this. Sometimes you don’t move much after you get the big shock, and you just got here.”

He knew just the type of device, if not the thing itself, and he had no desire to test it out.

Their wrist controllers, not something he had paid much attention to before, were interesting little gadgets. There was a series of buttons, some small readouts in tiny windows, and they flanked a circular section that looked like a speaker. By locking down one of the buttons, they could beam their report in, presumably broadcast to headquarters; they also seemed to receive information back through it, but the signal was obviously so localized that it could only be heard or understood by the wearer.

Just as the water gave fully three-dimensional movements, so, too, had the city been designed for those who could simply float around and glide about and needed no surface roads, elevators, or much else. Buildings rose twenty stories yet had entrances on each floor, while vast tracts of apartments looked like great stylized obelisks and mounds with holes all over. All of the structures and even the layout of the city was clearly designed to keep water flowing, and there were large domed structures whose sole purpose was to either warm or cool the water passing through, and thus create the patterns. It kept the water fresh and oxygenated even when one of the denizens was not moving.

And yet, for all its alien strangeness, many aspects of the city were common to most communities of any size. There was municipal lighting, and inside lighting as well, with energy bands marking an incredible pattern of colorful routings. Ari suspected it was like the corridors back in the entry place; the streets had both a color and a frequency to identify them. Along them would be numbers. The colors from this illumination identified broad categories, like east or north, up and down, but the bands also carried frequency information that his mind accepted and differentiated from all the others. He was sure that if you knew the system, as he did not, you could easily navigate the whole thing.

That was one thing he missed from his brief union with the two women: knowing what it was like to be a genius, to quickly deduce and file away information as effortlessly as you’d scratch an itch. He knew that together they could have figured out this system just by looking at it, and that there was no way he could do it on his own. Still, he realized that certain bands, apparently all associated with yellow, were for commercial traffic only. This traffic involved some fairly large containers being “driven” by heavy duty motors and a driver with long rods for steering, while others were small rounded containers pushed by beefy tradesmen.

It was a sophisticated, modern culture, probably as much as some of the water breathing worlds of the Realm. There were electric water scooters lined up outside what could only have been the police building, ready to supply all the added power and speed a cop would need to answer an emergency. Since there didn’t seem to be any private vehicles allowed save for the commercial types, it would be easy to patrol the place.

Moving through the open archway that led inside the police building, he felt a tingling all over and decided that there were doors of a sort here. He assumed that this big one was a one-way door; anybody could get in to the station, but that big old fellow over there had to push things on a control board in front of him to let you back out again.

The building was impressive; a kind of hollowed-out design with a vast but well-lit atrium, and on the main floor various signs leading to areas where there were officers and clerks and, to his surprise, flat screens that looked like computer screens, although he was surprised to see they mostly contained meaningless squiggles and that those working on them used massive input pads with an impossible number of buttons, rows and rows of them. Couldn’t they just talk to their computers and get replies?

The central area was a big horseshoe-shaped depression with a series of clerks at desks. He was brought up to one of them by his captors.

“What’s this one?” the clerk asked, sounding more bored than interested.

“New one,” the cop on the right replied. “Apparently just made through the Well from aliens processed through Zone. You want to run him through the system and confirm that such people did arrive? Can’t be too careful these days.”

“Don’t need to,” the clerk responded. “I’m surprised, though, to see this one. Looks just like the other one. Don’t usually get two in the same hex.”

“You have another like me here?” he asked, suddenly excited.

The clerk gave him a nasty look and responded, “You are not to be involved in this discussion. Just keep quiet.” She turned back to the booking cop. “I suppose he doesn’t remember his name?”

“Says he’s—okay, you can talk. What was that name again?”

While taking in all this and thinking of this new other, his mind had wandered from the immediate business of booking him.

“Ming—sorry, Ari Martinez.”

“Ming Ari Martinez. Well, that’s a lot.”

“Just Ari Martinez. Sorry. I was thinking about one of my companions.”

“Suit yourself.” She looked on the screen, punched something up, then swiveled it around so he could see it. “Which one are you?”

He was startled to see a still picture of them sitting in the small lecture hall, all together. Jeez, he looked awful! Not as bad as Kincaid looked, though—or his uncle, if the old bastard made it. His hand went out and toward Beta’s eerie gaze, but then he pointed to the one and only original Ari Martinez. “That one.”

He really did have a dual nature. He had just about all of Ari as well as all of Ming inside his head. They weren’t meshing— they were too clear and distinct for that—but keeping one up and the other in background required effort. He told himself that he had better find some way to manage them and deal with it. Otherwise he’d go to sleep and the next day wake up thinking he was Ming, and that wouldn’t do at all.

They took some sort of holographic photo of him by running a hooplike device over him. He only understood what it was because he saw the image form on a little disk next to the booking clerk’s screen. It was an interesting perspective in about one-fifth scale. A series of squiggles was written under it, it was rotated and checked, and then it vanished, presumably into the central police computer records.

“Take him to Interrogation 302,” the clerk told them. “Detective Shissik will want to question him, and a link with the Interior Police is already established there.”

He didn’t like the sound of “Interior Police.” Still, he wondered if he hadn’t been incredibly stupid. If he’d told them he was Ming and let that personality come up, it would have been cop to cop!

“Interrogation 302” meant that they swam up from booking to the fourth level, entry being “Ground,” and then to and through one of the doorways there. He assumed the squiggles gave the room number.

Inspector Shissik was already there, and there was a small oval object in front of him that looked like a speaker.

Nobody sat; the only furniture was the table on which the speaker rested, and only it was needed.

The Inspector looked up at the two cops who’d brought him in. “You may go,” he said officiously.

“But—” the first one protested, and stopped when the Inspector gave him a withering glare. They left, and Ari heard an ominous buzzing sound indicating that if he tried to leave, it would be a bit different.

“Please relax,” the Inspector said. “I am with the Interior Police. If that term is not familiar to you, it simply means the national police force that sees over the whole of Kalinda. You’re now a Kalindan whether you want to be or not, and there won’t be a third transformation, so you should get to know your new people and new home. You are here to answer some questions about yourself, your erstwhile companions, and a few other things. Then we’ll process you in as a citizen, find you quarters, and test you out for a job. Everyone in Kalinda works at something. If you cannot find a job you enjoy and are good at, we’ll find you a least common denominator one. I do not mean to suggest we’re a slave labor camp, but we do expect everyone to do their part. Is that understood?”

He nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“Now, I want to know all about you. What you did where you came from, how you wound up here, and, most particularly, I want you to tell me all that you can about those who came in with you. Just go ahead, and I will interrupt if I have a question.”

He did in fact understand, and he gave the Inspector a fairly whitewashed version of Ari Martinez’s life and times, jobs and relations, and something of an account of who the others were and how they all wound up here. He even admitted that his uncle was a master criminal and a sadist, but managed to give the impression that he wasn’t a part of that. He hoped he sounded convincing.

For a while the Inspector didn’t respond, then he said, “Why did you give the female Ming as an identity downstairs?”

He shrugged. “We—all three of us—were telepathically linked. It appears some of it came with me.”

“It appears that much of it came with you,” the Inspector responded. “The other one, which you weren’t supposed to be told about as yet but know anyway, is quite an amnesiac. It is genuine; we’ve gone through the usual verification steps— drugs, that sort of thing—to convince ourselves. She arrived here a few days ahead of you, although I must tell you that such a time spread for simultaneous processings isn’t all that unusual. It will be interesting to find out where the third is, and in what mental condition, but that will be days, even weeks, unless she, too, comes here. You say you have nearly complete memories?”

“Yes. I can’t say how complete, but if I reach back to common experiences, when we both were there, it is extremely easy to recall it from her point of view. It is almost like both of us were in here, somehow. I didn’t think that was possible with this Well of Souls thing.”

“Well, even the Ancient Ones could not be expected to think of everything. Apparently you and she were both physically and mentally connected when you entered?”

“Yes, she basically was operating me like a puppet.”

“Apparently the Well couldn’t tell the two of you apart, or perceived three consciousnesses in two bodies, and yet was running on the knowledge of your old species. This leads me to the rather interesting question it all raises. Are you certain that you are Ari and not Ming?”

It was a disconcerting question. “But—I’m male, aren’t I?”

“Doesn’t follow at all, for two reasons. Number one, the Well has never let that stand in its way before, nor even in all cases in the recent past. And second, we Kalindans are a bisexual race, it is true, but we’re designed primarily as survivors under almost any circumstances. When you woke up above, you could breathe, couldn’t you?”

“Yes. I wondered about that.”

“You have a blowhole in the back of your head and some rudimentary lungs that are sufficient up top. We’re quite a rarity in races—we can exist in two of the four elements, and we are well-insulated along a lot of temperature extremes. We’re also omnivores and can eat most anything, although there’s much we would not enjoy eating. And we’re born as neuters. Our children have no sexual differentiation at all. Upon puberty, we tend toward one sex or the other, but this can change. If the population falls below healthy levels, males will change over a period of weeks to females. When the population tends to get a bit too large, then a large number of females become males. Everyone’s not changing gender all the time, but if one hasn’t had it happen to them, one knows others that have. One’s gender is basically irrelevant here, you see, but whatever is needed to keep our population in balance, we do. This is why we all look rather feminine and have these breasts. The young are born live and carried in sacs—your sac is along here, as you might notice. They are nursed like mammals, although we are a rather unique species outside of here, and if you live with someone who has a nursing baby, even if male, you’ll discover that hormones will be triggered and you can hold and nurse as well. We prize personal honor and relationships over gender. It is another adaptation that helps us thrive.”

He thought it over, and decided it was a neat concept. It might be fun to be both. “I assume that the sex act itself is as fun as it used to be?”

“It is certainly not something we shy away from,” Shissik admitted.

And then it hit him, just what the Inspector meant. “So I really could be Ming. Or Ari.”

“Or both. That suggests a fascinating duality I’ve never had to face. You might be both a police officer and a criminal. Please relax—you are a criminal no more, nor, of course, are you an officer. Whatever you become starts now. We like to use the knowledge and experience you might have if it’s handy, but it is traditional that no newcomer to a race here is held at all accountable for past deeds. Inner natures do tend to emerge over time, and that might be interesting in your case. One might expect you to commit a criminal act and then arrest yourself.”

He realized that Shissik was being funny, but he didn’t share the joke.

“So what happens now?” he asked the Interior Policeman.

“Now? Nothing immediately. We will get you a good meal and then I want to propose an experiment to my superiors. They now have a recording of this conversation, so we’ll see if they are satisfied from their point of view. We are in the city of Mahakor, a medium-sized city in the northeast of our nation. The other is in the capital of Jinkinar. I’d like to take you up there eventually and get you together with this other one. We simply cannot be totally trusting of newcomers for a while, you see, and we do have this nagging question about the other far more than about you.”

“Which is?”

“Well, if she doesn’t know who she is or what she was, then aren’t we merely assuming that she’s your Ming? Perhaps she’s the other one you were linked to, the onetime cultist or whatever it was. Or perhaps she is neither of them but someone else. Ari’s uncle was near death. If he survived and was processed, who is to say what his mind might have been like by that point? Suppose it’s Ari’s uncle Jules that we have? And even if his memories were turned to mush, as I said, inner natures have a tendency to begin coming out over time. I think we need to know for certain.”

Jesus H. Christ! he thought in panic. What if it is Jules Wallinchky? That would be just what I needed here! A whole new body, a whole new race, a whole new life, and they would be putting me right back where I started…