In Search Of... Part 3

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. Swimming through the electrical barrier that marks the Perimeter, she finds herself outside the community’s protective Enclosure. Suddenly, a net wraps around her. Terrified, she feels herself being hauled up to the Surface....

Franck, a planetary surveyor newly arrived from Earth on the starship Nova Scotia, is startled to find a silvery blue alien in his net. He hauls it on board his one-person landing craft. To his astonishment, the creature looks like “A mermaid?” he murmurs. The creature pants, “Don’t be stupid. I’m a human. What are you?” Although her accent is strange, he realizes they are speaking the same language and that Tay must be descended from the original Macmillan crew. “You survived!” exclaims Franck.

She smiles, revealing sharp little teeth. “Of course we did.”

PART III

“And no one came to the rescue,” said Franck quietly.

It was sometime later, and Tay had talked herself hoarse.

“No. No one came.” She stared out over the water. “It’s funny, really. I mean, we all know the story, but... the crew of the Macmillan never seemed very real. Even after we’d seen the picture and heard them on the Video, it was still just a story. It was OK to hear about what happened, and maybe shiver a little. And feel sorry for them. They must have been so sad.... But I never felt as if I had anything in common with them, really. They were just a bunch of ancient travelers with muddy skin and horrible, tiny little eyes —”

“Muddy skin and horrible, tiny little eyes.’ Thank you very much,” muttered Franck.

Tay put her hand to her mouth. “I didn’t mean... I mean, you’re not... Sorry!”

Franck grinned. “Don’t worry, I’m not all that vain,” he assured her. He laughed out loud at the look on her face.

She was dressed in some of his spare clothes. It was almost dark on deck now, except for the eerie glow that came from her face and hands and feet. Franck had been disappointed to discover she had legs and feet. Not a mermaid, after all. But just as fascinating…

“Why didn’t anyone try to rescue us?” She’d turned and was watching him intently now. “I mean, it must have been a huge effort to come all the way out here in the first place, with all that equipment and all those people, and then — how could you just forget about us?”

He held up his hands defensively. “It wasn’t me! I didn’t forget — and the people back then didn’t, either. Not really. It was just that the War started right around that time, and well, you know...” It didn’t sound very convincing, he realized.

She frowned. “What war is that?”

Now, there was a question! How do you go about explaining the single most important event in the history of the known universe, an event that lasted a century and affected everyone and everything within thousands of light-years, to someone who, bizarrely, completely missed it?

He didn’t know where to begin. The Planets War had come out of the usual murky soup of past greed and need, and had been the only reality for — how many generations was it? Franck frowned. There were so few habitable worlds to begin with, and they’d still managed to lose too many of them to fire, drought, and radiation. And in the end it was exhaustion, more than anything else, that saved the day. Humanity had worn itself out, kicking and screaming and breaking its toys like an upset toddler, until it ran out of breath.

All that destruction, all those lives lost — it wasn’t something you wanted to dwell on. You couldn’t — not and stay sane. Anyway, it was over now.

But what would somebody like Tay think of it all? What would she think of him, coming from a background like that? Suddenly he didn’t want to tell her about the War, or about anything bad. He wanted to impress her, more than he liked to admit.

He shrugged off her question and countered with one of his own.

“Why didn’t you refloat the escape pods when you realized you were going to have to stay? Wouldn’t it have been easier to live on the surface? There’s air up here, for one thing!”

Tay shook her head. “Not possible. You can’t tell much from this” — and she motioned the gentle roll of the water with a flick of her hand. “You’ve just been lucky, landing in the quiet season. Tsunami season is another thing altogether. You and your little boat wouldn’t have lasted a minute.”

Franck gaped. “What do you mean, ‘little boat’? I’ll have you know this craft is the result of years of better technology than you’d understand!”

Tay just looked at him. “Sixty seconds,” she said flatly.

“I bet it can stand up to any conditions you care to throw at it!”

Tay shrugged. “Maybe thirty seconds,” she murmured.

Just then the evening wind picked up, and the waves started to get choppier. The craft lurched a little.

Franck looked about. “So when does this tsunami season kick in?” he asked, trying to sound casual.

Tay frowned. “What day is today?” she asked.

Franck noticed she actually sounded worried, and his stomach went strange. “Uh, Tuesday,” he said.

Tay reached over suddenly and grabbed his wrist. Her huge eyes became enormous, ringed right round with white. Her alien, silver-blue face was close to his.

“Are you sure?” she hissed. “Are you sure it’s Tuesday?”

Franck could only nod, his throat too tight for speech. He was horribly aware of the wind, much stronger now, and the way the boat was wobbling.

“Oh well, then if it’s Tuesday, I’d say we’ve got about three months,” said Tay, and she grinned.

Franck dragged his arm away from her and rubbed at where her grip had left marks. “I ought to throw you overboard!”

“Oooooh. Scary!”

He had to laugh.

They sat together in the bobbing silence for a while. Franck felt himself filling up with a new feeling. A feeling of contentment. He stole a look across at her, and then another. It was so strange. He could have sworn he’d been perfectly happy before she landed on his deck. He’d loved his work, his life. He hadn’t been lonely, not a bit. And now…

Now the thought that she might disappear back under the waves, that he might not see her again, was unbearable. Don’t be stupid, he told himself. She’s got an entire life down there. What on Earth makes you think you could have any place in it? “What on Earth” — listen to yourself she wouldn’t even say that. She’d say, “What on Rannoch,” or maybe something completely weird. You have nothing in common.

All the contentment was gone now. He felt tight inside and unreasonably angry. He jumped up and went over to the railing. “So what are you going to do?” he said, too loud, too rough.

She looked surprised. “What?”

Franck tried to make his voice lighter. “I mean, what were you in the middle of, when my net so rudely interrupted you? Were you at school, or what?”

“School? I’m too old for school! No. No, I wasn’t in the Enclosure at all. I’m not sure your net would even go that deep.”

“The Enclosure?”

“Where we live. It’s right down at the seafloor, near the thermal vent.” She grinned at him and shivered a little. “It’s a lot warmer there, I can tell you.”

He leaned on one elbow, still at the railing, still keeping a distance between them.

“So what were you doing, away from the warmth?” he asked.

Her eyes slid past him, and she stared out over the surface of the sea. “I’d had a fight with my parents,” she said quietly. “I’d left.”

“For good?”

Tay shrugged. “Of course not. Where could I go? I don’t know. I was...fed up. It was like everything was just too small.” She sounded bleak.

Franck took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Then he came back to sit close beside her on the deck.

“I don’t know,” he said after a while, “but it seems to me what you’ve got down there is anything but small. It’s amazing how you found a way to make it work so that all those people could be born and grow up and have babies and die in peace. Something to be proud of.” He shoved her with his shoulder. “Biggest thing the rest of us managed was the Planets War!”

Tay was still for a minute. Then she nodded.

“You’re right, in a way,” she said. “It is impressive. And I am proud, really, if I think about it like that. But...”

“But it wasn’t enough?” Franck prompted carefully. “You were looking for something? In search of...?”

“In search of...,” murmured Tay. Then she turned to him and grinned. “That just about covers it. In search of!”

They were quiet again. He watched her. Those enormous eyes — and the way her skin and hair glowed, a silvery blue luminescence in the night.

She’s cool, he thought. Clever. Funny. And completely, utterly alien. I joined Surveying to see what strange wonders the universe could come up with, and the strangest, most wonderful thing I’ve found is another human.

“So what are you going to do?” he asked again, gently this time. What were any of them going to do? This new world of human miracles — how would Tay’s people fit into the mess the rest of the universe had made of things? Would they even want to be rescued? He had to know. “Tay?”

Tay didn’t answer. She might not have heard. She just sat there, hugging her knees, smiling at a break in the clouds and its glimpse of stars.

He was leaning toward her when he sensed movement in the water, just out of the corner of his eye. He leaped to his feet and spun on his heel in a circle. All around the craft were round silvery heads, bobbing up and down in the dark water.

He gave a whoop of delight and cried, “Seals!”

Then one of them shot him.

As the fire in his chest spread, Franck slid gracelessly to the deck. He found he couldn’t move, couldn’t see. He could still hear, though, through the strange buzz in his ears.

“What do you think you’re doing?” he heard Tay scream. Her alien accent was stronger than before.

“We’re here to rescue you!” This from a voice he didn’t recognize.

“Don’t be stupid that’s what he’s here for!” That was Tay again.

“I don’t need...,” she was continuing, when the buzzing darkness flooded over him, and he knew no more.

To be concluded in Part IV