скачать книгу бесплатно
“The-the octopus. Did you have to—kill it? With two arms off—”
“Course not. Tentacles grow back. They’re not like us, that way.”
“I guess not,” Don agreed, looking again at the morays. They might not be quite in his phase, but he would keep clear of them regardless. Certainly there were prettier sights. He spied zebra-striped fish, yellow and black (juvenile black angelfish, Gaspar said), red fish with blue fins and yellow tails (squirrelfish), purple ones with white speckles (jewelfish), greenish ones with length-wise yellow striping—or maybe vice versa (blue-striped grunt), and one with a dark head, green tail, with two heavy black stripes between (bluehead wrasse). Plus many others he didn’t call to Gaspar’s attention, because he tended to resent the man’s seemingly encyclopedic nomenclature. Melanie seemed similarly fascinated, now that they had gotten among the pretty fish instead of the ugly eels.
“Good thing you didn’t ask me any of the difficult ones,” Gaspar said. “There’s stuff in these reefs I never heard of, and probably fish no man has seen. New species are discovered every year. I think there are some real monsters hidden down inside.”
But the surface of the coral reef was impressive enough. They passed a section that looked like folded ribbon (stinging coral-stay clear), and marveled at its convolutions.
Then the reef rounded away, and they pedaled through. Melanie almost bumped into a large ugly green fish and shied away, still not completely used to the phaseout. But that reminded Don of something.
“We ride on the bottom because that’s inanimate,” he said. “The living things are phased out. But aren’t the coral reefs made by living creatures? How come they are solid to us, then?”
“They’re in the phase world,” Gaspar said. “They’re part of the terrain. They may not be the same reefs we see, but they’re just like them. So we have to take them seriously. Otherwise we could have ridden straight through them, and saved ourselves a lot of trouble.”
Of course that was true. Don was chagrined for not seeing the obvious.
They climbed into the shallows, passing mounds and ledges and even caves in the living coral. For here it was not rocklike so much as plantlike, with myriad flower-shapes blooming.
Gaspar halted as the ground became too uneven to ride over. “Isn’t that a grand sight?” he asked rhetorically. “They’re related to the jellyfish, you know. And to the sea anemones.”
“What are?” Don asked, perplexed.
“The coral polyps. Their stony skeletons accumulate to form the reef—in time. Temperature has to be around seventy degrees Fahrenheit or better, and they have to have something to build on near the surface, but within these limits they do well enough. They strain plankton from the water with their little tentacles—”
“Oh? I didn’t see that,” Melanie said, finally speaking. Apparently her revelation of her condition had set her back as much as it had Don, and she had withdrawn for a time. Now she was returning, and maybe it was just as well.
“They do it at night, mostly,” Gaspar explained. “We’re seeing only a fraction of the fish that live on the reef; night is the time for foraging.”
“You certainly seem to know a lot about sea life,” Melanie said. “Are you sure you’re a geologist?”
Gaspar laughed. “You have to know something about the flora and fauna, if you want to stay out of trouble. Sharks, electric eels, poisonous sponges, stinging jellyfish—this world is beautiful, but it’s dangerous too, unless you understand it.”
“I believe it,” she said.
“And there are practical connections to my specialty,” Gaspar continued, gazing on the coral with a kind of bliss. “I could mistake coral for a limestone rock formation, if I didn’t study both. Actually it is limestone—but you know what I mean. It tells me about historical geology, too. Because of the necessary conditions for the growth of coral. If I spy a coral reef in cold water, and it’s five hundred feet below the surface—”
“Say!” Don exclaimed, catching on. “Then you know that water was once seventy degrees warm, and that the land was higher.”
“Or the sea lower. Yes. There are hundreds of things like that. Fossils in sediments, for example. They account for an entire time scale extending through many hundreds of millions of years. Check the fossils and you know when that material was laid down and what the conditions were.”
“Like pottery shards!” Don said. “Each one typical of a particular culture. Only your shards are bones and shells.”
“You’re right,” Gaspar agreed, smiling. “Now I understand what you do. You’re a paleontologist of the recent past.”
“Recent past! I wouldn’t call several thousand years exactly—”
“Geologically, anything less than a million years—”
“Maybe we’d better make our rendezvous,” Melanie suggested.
They moved on, drawing nearer to the surface. The water inside the reef was barren in comparison: pellucid, with a flat sandy bottom. Don did spy a number of swift-moving little silvery fish scooting across the floor, and once something gray and flat flounced away as his front tire interacted with its bones.
Then they hit a field of tall grass—except that it wasn’t grass. Some was green and flat, some was green and round. The stalks offered little effective resistance to the bicycles, but Don still had the impression of forging through by sheer muscle. It was amazing to what extent sight, not knowledge, governed his reactions.
He glanced covertly at Melanie. She looked perfect: still slender and feminine. Had she not shown him her bald head …
Finally they came to the “patch” reefs that marked their rendezvous. Between these little reeflets and the shore he knew there was only more grass flat.
“Maybe if someone comes—a boat, I mean,” Melanie said, “we could lie down and be hidden by that grass.”
Gaspar nodded. “Smart girl. Keep your eye out for suitable cover.”
They drew up beside a great mound of coral, one of the patches. All around it the sand was bare. “So much for my smarts,” Melanie said ruefully.
This section was as bald as her head, Don thought, and wished he could get that matter out of his mind.
“Grass eaters,” Gaspar explained. “They graze, but don’t go far from their shelter. So they create this desert ring by overgrazing.”
“I would never have thought of that,” she said. “But it’s obvious now that you’ve pointed it out. Penned barnyard animals do the same.”
“Yes, the absence of life can be evidence of life,” Gaspar agreed.
The two were getting along together, Don noted with mixed feelings. He had talked with Gaspar, and he had talked with Melanie, but so far there had not been a lot of interaction between Gaspar and Melanie. Yet why shouldn’t there be? It was evident that Gaspar, though surprised by her hairlessness, had not really been put off by it. He had broader horizons than Don did, and greater tolerance. Why should Don be bothered by that?
“Rendezvous is at dusk,” Gaspar said. “To let him slip into the water unobserved, probably. We’re early, so we can rest a while. Out of sight, if we can. Should be an overhang or maybe a cave.”
“Is it safe?” Melanie asked. “We aren’t entirely invulnerable.”
“Not much danger here, regardless,” Gaspar said confidently. “Why would the little fishes use it, otherwise?” He began pedaling slowly around the reeflet. The others, disgruntled, followed.
There were several projecting ledges harboring brightly colored fish who scattered as the bicycles encroached. Then a large crevice developed, and they rode between sheer coral walls. These overhung, and finally closed over the top, and it was a cavern.
The area was too confined for riding, and the floor was irregular. They dismounted and walked on inside, avoiding contact with the sharp fringes. Don was reminded of the cave paintings of Lascaux: the patchwork murals left by Upper Paleolithic man some fifteen thousand years ago, and one of the marvels of the archaeological world. Primitive man had not been as primitive as many today liked to suppose.
But this was a sea-cavern, and its murals were natural. Sponges bedecked its walls: black, brown, blue, green, red, and white, in dabs and bulges and relief-carvings.
There was life here, all right. The smaller fish streaked out as the men moved in, for their eyesight was keen enough to spot the intrusion even though its substance was vacant. One man-sized fish balked, however, hanging motionless in the passage.
“Jewfish,” Gaspar remarked—and with the sound of his voice the fish was gone. Sediment formed a cloud as the creature shot past, and Don felt the powerful breeze of its thrust. He appreciated another danger: just as a stiff wind could blow a man down on land, a stiff current could do the same here in the ocean. If his position happened to be precarious, he would have to watch out for big fish. Their bones could tug him if their breeze-current didn’t.
“Looks good,” Gaspar said. “I’m bushed.” He lay down beside his bicycle and seemed to drop instantly to sleep.
Don was tired, but he lacked this talent. He could not let go suddenly; he had to rest and watch, hoping that sleep would steal upon him conveniently. It probably wasn’t worth it, for just a couple of hours.
“I envy him his sleep, but it’s beyond me,” Melanie said, settling down to lean cautiously against a wall.
“Me too,” Don agreed, doing the same. The real wall might be jagged, but the phase wall wasn’t, fortunately.
“You’re not stuttering now.”
“Maybe I’m too tired.”
“Or maybe you know I’m no threat to you.”
“I didn’t say that.” But it might be true. Before, there had been the frightening prospect of social interaction leading into romance.
“You didn’t have to. Now you know why I read books. They don’t look at you.”
“But people don’t—I mean, they don’t know—”
“I know.”
“Well, I read too. Mostly texts, but—”
“I read fiction, mostly. Once I fell asleep during a book, and dreamed the author had come to autograph my copy, but we couldn’t find him a pen.”
“You like signatures?” he asked, not certain she was serious.
“Oh, yes, I have a whole collection of autographed books, back home.” She spoke with modest pride.
“Why? I think it’s more important to relate to what the author is trying to say, than to have his mark on a piece of paper.”
She was silent.
After a moment he asked, “You want to sleep? I didn’t mean to—”
“I heard you. I wasn’t answering.”
“Wasn’t what?”
“Maybe we’d better change the subject.”
“Why?”
“You couldn’t expect me to agree with you, could you? I mean, I collect autographs, don’t I? So what am I supposed to say when you say you don’t think they are very much?”
What was this? “You could have said you don’t agree.”
“I did.”
“When?”
“When I didn’t say anything. I think that should be obvious.”
“Obvious?”
“Well, you seem to use different conversational conventions than I do, and it’s unpleasant to talk to someone who doesn’t understand your silences.”
“Why not just say what you mean? I have no idea what’s bothering you.”
“No more than I did, when you kept cutting me off.”
Oh. “I’m sorry about that. I just had this notion it was all men on this circuit, and I thought something had gone wrong, the way my food did. I would have answered if I had realized.”
“Well, then, I’ll answer you now. I don’t want to be placed in the position of having to defend something I know you don’t like. I mean, if I answered you there would be all kinds of emotional overtones in my voice, and that would be embarrassing and painful.”
“About autographs?” he demanded incredulously.
“Obviously you didn’t mean to be offensive,” she said, sounding hurt.
“What do you mean, ‘mean to be’? I wasn’t offensive, was I?”
“Well, I shouldn’t have said anything about it.”
“Now don’t go clamming up on me again. One silence is enough.” He was feeling more confident, oddly.
“I was trying to hint that I didn’t agree with you.”
“About meaning being worth more than a signature?”
She was silent again.
“Oh come on!” he snapped. “What do you expect me to say to a silence?”
“I’ve already told you why I don’t want to talk about it any more. You could at least have apologized for mentioning it again.”
“Apologized?”
“What kind of unfeeling barbarian culture did you grow up in, anyway?”
“Primitive cultures are not unfeeling!”
There was no answer.
“You’re right,” he said with frustration. “We do have different conversational conventions.” Sane and insane, he was tempted to add.
And so they sat, leaning back against the spongy coral wall, watching the little fish sidle in again. Don wondered what had happened.
CHAPTER 4 (#ulink_a6e93931-504e-58e2-a85f-f4ad7da059cb)
ELEPH (#ulink_a6e93931-504e-58e2-a85f-f4ad7da059cb)
Proxy 5–12–5–16–8: Attention.
Acknowledging.
Status?
