“If you’re smart you won’t use a motor in the lagoon.”

“The men will not go out without some way of returning quickly. I understand their fear. I have seen—”

An aide approached, lugging a case. He spoke quickly in Chinese. As Tseng answered, Warren watched the motorboat cross near the sandbar. Beneath it shadows darted, swift black shapes in the watery green light.

“The boats found something unusual,” Tseng said, gesturing to the aide to open the case. “They washed up on the reef.”

Inside, still wet, were three white, rhombohedral blocks. Warren crouched and touched one. It was lightweight and pearly, the corners unevenly turned.

Packing material, I suppose,” Tseng said.

“Funny manufacture,” Warren said. “Irregular. No forming creases on them.”

“From your own shipwreck, perhaps? No matter. I have no more time for you today, Mr. Warren. Or would you prefer being addressed by your military rank?”

“I don’t have any.”

“So you say.” Tseng nodded to the nearby guard. “Goodbye.”

That night he felt a dark hammering thing above him that wove and wove, its shadow a rippling of sunlight. The thing swam badly, moving in straight lines without flexing itself, firm and unnatural, and it dropped metal that settled on him, heavy and foul. The steady dead rasp from above cut and burned. A harsh buzzing jarred him, coming into his teeth with a slicing pain, and he turned on his side. Then he rose out and away, somewhere up high above what he now saw was a motor. He sensed the fuel line backfilled and felt the sluggish rumble as they blew the lines out and heard the plugs not running right either.

Sudden thoughts came—That was it: nothing ran right. Humans were great talkers but down here, lofting in the salty murk, he could see them above, at the shoreline and in the ratcheting boats, working their mouths and yet without effect, stiff and distant, their jaws pointlessly working, humans in uniform—but uniform meant to be the same, and how could anyone want that?—the words falling dead in the void between them. In Tokyo he had never learned a word of Japanese, and here Gijan had played a mute without Warren’s minding, and now the Chinese were trying to talk to Skimmers—who wanted something they couldn’t say, either—and each life-form had its own private language.

He turned over again and felt his wife sleeping against him, warm and moist, and then on top of him the way she liked. She pressed down too like the falling, spreading metal that the hammering machine laid in the lagoon, leaden, dark and descending. She rolled easily on him, heavy and yet soft, and her hair lay on his face silky and in his eyes. Moving in shadows, her face was intersecting planes, lean and white, and he took her hair in his mouth and tasted it. The salt and musk were like her sex below. He touched the canted planes of her and remembered that she had fallen away from him when more than anything he had wanted her weight. And her hair swinging across his face and the taste of it. Years ago now, she had done away with all that and was now a man. The softness now was slabs of muscle and the organs—squinting at her on the beach in the distance, he had not been able to tell, it was just a dark patch, the organs were in the end a detail, but the act of changing had made the final huge difference. He had wanted her weight. And her hair swinging across him and the taste of it.

When he woke the pad was damp with sweat. He felt in the blackness for the table turned over on its side to conceal the far wall, and this reassuring flat plane of wood gave him back the present so he did not have to think about the past. But he remembered the rasping from above and the falling cold metal and knew how much they hated what was happening to them out in the lagoon.

She came again and lay on him as he felt the towering weight of water above him, wondered what it was like to live in a layered element with a boundary above you, a place to go and stare out rose up leaping out of the bottom of the World with shapes moving in the thin stuff above the water, clouds, hovering facts that meant there were at least two elements in the world, the first recognition of material you could handle made the tools we knew that in time could be used the clouds open, we can see lights, all the time struggling to reach up onto the land, where things were dry always and more science was possible, made the fire-hardened sand and you looked still upward, saw and studied stars, as we cupped the light and so knew the distant origin of stones falling into the World. They had been scooped up into false World—a ship?—and carried away. To survive a many-year voyage inside an automatic machine required strong social organization, when the animals that are not alive but swallow—some kind of robot hunter?—took them far from their home seas and in the long years began to change them, upsetting their mating and birthing times, sour water, changing the newborn, their song goes away from us, killing many, until finally there were fresh streams and they swam weakly into a new ocean, alien like our World but not out World, their youth spreading out and behaving strangely, attacking ships, when they should be taking part in an ancient genetically ordained hunt of large surface animals. In their home oceans the hunt triggered the going-to-land, but on Earth a grotesque version of it ran on, driving ships from the sea, and the youth now were afflicted with sores, while their elders, the Skimmers, tried to make sense of their chaos and despair. They had cleared the area near this island we drive the youth away, the act chews us but does not finish us but now it was up to humans, not humans in ships we find you in the skins you love we cannot sing to you but on this island and perhaps the Skimmers would speak only with humans who were alone your kind cannot hear unless you are one but the Skimmers were fading, they could not protect the island forever they may be chewed by you but there are many many of them and Warren knew their despair at the motorboats in the lagoon, a sign to the Skimmers that the blind, dumb kind of humans had returned, men who would not know enough, who could not stop the Swarmers from attacking they ache now for the skins-that-sink any more than they had before they are madness they are coming and they chew you others last.

He rolled over and over, smacking against the wall, and woke up. He reached for his wife but she was gone. He had the new thoughts, he understood more, yes—but in the chill before dawn he drew himself up into a tight little ball, seeking sleep again, for in the dream he had been happier than he could remember ever being.

Before dawn his cell rattled and a booming rolled down from the sky. He woke and looked out the windows through the heavy wire mesh. High up in the black, luminous things tumbled and exploded into auras of blue and crimson and then gutted into nothing. Distant hollow boomings came long after the lights were gone and then the sounds faded into the crashing on the reef.

In the morning the chinless soldier came again and took the tin dish that Warren had rubbed clean. The soldier did not like his job and he cuffed Warren twice to show him where to walk. First they went to the beach with the waste bucket, which had more in it now because Warren’s body no longer absorbed almost everything he was fed. From the beach he watched the small motor ketches and cats that stayed near the shore while they laid something into the water, dropping boxes off the stern where they would lie on the bottom and, Warren was sure, report on the passing sounds and movements.

The guard took him north and inland, just out of view of the reef. Tseng was there with a crowd and they were all watching the green water from far back among the trees.

“See them?” Tseng said to Warren when he had worked his way through the group of men and women. Warren looked out past the brilliant white sand that stung the eyes and saw silver-blue forms leaping.