In Search of... Part 2

Eighteen-year-old Tay lives on Rannoch, a distant planet covered with water, where undersea pods or living chambers provide life support for up to three people — usually two adults and one child. Tay learns that her parents are expecting another child and that she must marry and move into a pod of her own. Upset, she thrusts her portable breathing tube into her throat vent and slams out of the pod.

Swimming past the school, she remembers learning about the history of Planet Rannoch. One day the class viewed an ancient Video that showed the Survey Starship Macmillan arriving from Planet Earth. The starship smashed into a shock wave of radiation from the solar system’s sun and disintegrated. The lucky ones, whose escape pods landed on the planet, engineered underwater homes and genetically adapted their bodies for life in the sea.

Suddenly it all comes flooding back to Tay — what she is swimming away from, the future that she can’t escape — marriage to one of three available pod partners: Forth, Eden, or Esk. She powers off, kicking hard, her strokes fueled by anger and frustration.

PART II

Her mother’s words hammered in her head — another child... there won’t be room... you’ll have to leave... another child… She had to get away from that voice.

But where could she go? To the Kinglas’ pod? To the Linnhes’? To Esk’s mom’s? She’d be able to go inside, since the number of people breathing the air in any of their pods would most likely be down to one. Two at the most, depending on which of the adults were home. She shook her head. None of her friends were what she needed. Carr and Tummel would just giggle and probably be jealous underneath. Even though they were in her Grouping, they were both a year younger than she was — leaving home was still just a game to them. And Esk, her best friend — how could her mother have considered him as a possible partner? She didn’t even want to think about him that way.

It spoiled everything.

With her enhanced eyes, Tay had no difficulty seeing through the dark water. And even if she had been blindfolded, she knew every cubic meter of the great Enclosure, every current pattern and temperature range. She swam past the other living pods and the Medical Facility, past the Nursery where weighted-down babies and toddlers were allowed to explore the rocks and silt of the ocean floor. She passed the Quarry, the Mining Quarter, passed the Chemical Distillery and on through the Seaweed Fields.

The Enclosure was situated in the deepest part of Rannoch’s unbroken ocean, not far from the thermal vents that warmed and enriched its waters. Sunlight was hundreds of meters away; natural phosphorescence took its place. It was an environment that could so easily have defeated off-worlders, but the new people of Rannoch had refused to be overwhelmed. They’d fought back and won.

Right now, though, the achievement of her ancestors was the last thing on Tay’s mind. As she reached the Perimeter, her heart was pounding and her muscles ached, but she wouldn’t let up. She didn’t even stop to deactivate its electrical field. Passing through felt unpleasant — it made her teeth ache — but the electric charge wasn’t lethal to humans. Predators like the snark and the crampon avoided coming in contact with the Perimeter because it was tuned exactly to the frequency of their electro-sensors. It scrambled them. Schools of cerring, breen, and the small but delicious shards were unaffected and quickly learned that they could hide within the Enclosure as if in an invisible reef. They were safe from the big fish. Protected.

Tay didn’t want to feel protected. She pushed on, right away from the phosphorescent glow of the Enclosure and into the dangerous darkness beyond.

And then, gradually, she came to a stop. She hung in the water, swaying, automatically scanning above, below, 360 degrees around, using all her senses. She’d seen the damage a snark could do. She knew a flense could kill her.

So what was she doing here?

Was this what she was looking for? A quick dance with death before she sat out the rest of her life in a pod with Forth or Eden?

Pretty stupid.

All that surge of emotion was draining away now. She tried to go on feeling angry, and failed. She tried to feel all heated-up and ready for action, which she should be, considering where she was. She couldn’t even manage that. She had her knife strapped to one arm and an electric prod on the other. They were real against her skin. The danger around was real. Her mom having another child — that was real, too. The only thing that didn’t seem real was Tay, or the Tay she was bound to become....

She was moving upward now on a vertical current. As the pressure changed, Tay’s breather automatically adjusted itself to control the balance of nitrogen in her blood. She felt bleak and oddly boneless, knowing that she should be getting back to the Enclosure, yet putting it off. It was actually pretty peaceful, after all the fuss, to just let go, just let herself be moved by the sea. The sea wasn’t bothered. It went on forever, round and round the entire world. It didn’t get frantic about not being the sky. Not that she'd ever seen the sky…

She’d been to the Surface, of course, for picnics with her parents and then on a scientific outing with her Grouping, but it had always been cloud she’d seen those times. Mostly it was the cold she’d noticed about being up so high, and the weirdness of breathing air without walls around her…

It’s getting really cold now! she thought suddenly. This is way farther than I’d meant to come — I’d better be heading back.

And then... the net hit.

Sticky filaments glued themselves to her arms and legs. She tried to unsheathe her knife, but it was already too late. She was pinned within a rapidly forming cocoon, spun round and round.

She struggled, trying to kick, even bite; the mesh tightened with every movement she made. Even breathing became difficult — and then she was really scared. Scared stiff. Scared still.

A motionless, wide-eyed package, Tay felt herself being hauled up, up through the increasingly cold darkness, away from the warmth of her life....

* * *

Franck liked his job. He was good at it, too — top of his year at the New Academy of Planetary Surveying and Exploration. His teachers might not have liked him much — too cocky by half, they all thought — but they couldn’t bring down his grades!

He had been born on Earth just as the Planets War was finally grinding to a close. His parents, and theirs, stretching back for generations, had always lived in wartime, with all its weight of restriction and fear. Even when they weren’t at a battlefront themselves, they had only to reach for a news-vid or broadsheet to be faced with horrors, near and far. Life was something to be survived, and hope was a fantasy, a private longing.

Gloomy, careful folk — that’s how they seemed to Franck and his friends. Worthy, of course, and you’d never want to be unkind to them, but, well, things were different now.

The universe was up for grabs.

And to prove it, here he was, on his first solo mission in a solar system that hadn’t been visited since before the War. The Macintosh — no, that wasn’t it — the Macmillan had started a survey, had sent back some interesting corrections to the long-range predictions, and then disappeared. Nobody had done anything about sending out a rescue crew. People had been too busy trying to rescue themselves. The start of the Planets War, all those years ago, had put that poor Macmillan lot completely off the list.

Oh well. All just history now.

And this time, history was not going to repeat itself — not with people like Franck on the job, in search of brave new worlds! Because, really, at its simplest, that was what the Planets War had been about — too many souls, too few square meters of land for them to call their own.

Not that there was a lot of land here, but that wouldn’t trouble some people....

It certainly didn’t trouble his craft. It was an All-Mode Shuttle, one of the new breeds to come out of the War. It had launched from the starship Nova Scotia, dropped through the cloud cover, and was now doing an excellent imitation of a boat. It could operate equally well on rock, sand, or mud, though it didn’t look as if he’d be getting a chance to test it on anything but sea this time. That simplified navigation, anyway.

Nothing to bump into! he’d thought after splashdown and then got on with finding mineral, chemical, plant, and animal specimens to analyze.

Franck hummed to himself as he checked the gauges one more time, altered the navigator half a point, and strolled out on deck to await the evening haul.

He watched eagerly as the net broke the surface, was lifted overhead by the crane, and deposited carefully onto the deck. Another selection of seaweed. A large, crablike crustacean that waved claws at him irritably.

And a... thing.

He didn’t need his degree in Comparative Biology to suspect it wasn’t a fish. Even encased in the netting, it looked more like a mammal: huge, forward-facing eyes, a nose instead of gills, and... a weird almost mechanical-looking bulge at the front of its throat. And it had skin, not scales.

Silver-blue skin that glowed in the evening light.

“Oh, my,” breathed Franck as he reached for the shears.

“What are you going to do to me?” the thing shrilled.

“It talks!” squeaked Franck, leaping back. His knees felt weak.

The thing flopped about helplessly, calling out to him in an increasingly strangled voice. “Please, don’t go — free my hands — I can’t get my breather out — I can’t breathe —”

Its words were strangely pronounced but understandable, even though Franck had no idea what it was talking about. It was clear, though, that the creature was in distress. The eyes were beginning to roll back in its head, and the color was leaching out of its skin....

Franck lunged forward and started slashing with the shears. Normally he would have approached a job like this calmly and with great care, so as not to damage the specimen before it could be recorded. But normally the specimen didn't speak to him first.

As soon as its — her — hands were free, she dragged the bulge away from her throat and began to gulp at the air. Franck drew back and studied this most unusual catch from what he hoped was a safe distance.

He saw a long, slender, upper body. It was impossible to know for sure what the lower half looked like, since it was still encased in netting, but it almost seemed as if she had a... tail!

“A mermaid!” he murmured in wonder. But the creature shook her head.

“Don’t be stupid,” she panted. “I’m... a human. What are you?”

Franck could only stare. The strange accent made it sound as if she’d said she was human! His catch frowned at him and tried again.

“I am a human,” she repeated very slowly and very carefully. “I will not hurt you. I only want to know what you are. Do you understand me?”

Franck realized his mouth was hanging open.

“Do I understand you?” he croaked. “Of course I do. You’re speaking Universal, though that’s a bit of a weird accent you’ve got there. But I don’t understand what you mean when you say you're a human. I mean, I’m human. That’s the word we use to describe people like me. I mean, I’m from Earth — humans don’t actually look like —”

And then it hit him.

“You are human! You’re from the Macmillan.... You didn’t...” This time, Franck’s knees did give out, and he sat down, hard. “You survived!”

She flicked her wet hair back from her face and smiled, revealing sharp little teeth.

“Of course we did,” she said.

Continued in Part III