They were close in, moving fast, their orbits repeating in less than an hour. Huge, irregular, their surfaces grainy and blotched. For Warren to be able to see the features on them they had to be far bigger than the ships that had brought the Swarmers and Skimmers. Asteroid-sized.
No defenses rose to meet the shapes. There were no military satellites left. No high-energy lasers. No particle-beam weapons. None of the apparatus that had kept the nuclear peace between humans for half a century.
The ships absorbed the sunlight and gave back a strange glowing gray. As Warren watched they began to split. Chunks broke away and fell, separating again and again as they streaked across the sky.
With dawn the light came back into the sky. The ocean was discolored around the raft. Nearby the water was pale, with a border, more than a hundred meters away, where the water got dark blue again.
There was something under him. It didn’t move.
Warren stayed silent, peering down.
A machine? From the gray ships?
But it did nothing.
He probed down with a stick. No resistance. The chop was low and after a while he could tell the raft was not moving any, not following the steady pressure of waves.
The thing below was holding him in place.
He had to risk it. He leaned quickly over the side and put his head under. A line ran from the middle of the raft, down to something white. Something solid. Amber phosphorescence rippled through it.
He watched it for an hour and it did not move, did not rise closer or drift off.
No fish ventured near. If he stayed here like this he would starve.
The rifle was useless but he took the knife. He dove in and swam down rapidly. He felt less vulnerable below the surface.
Refraction misled the eye. It was deeper than he thought, bigger, and he nearly failed to reach it.
His lungs already burned. Patterns raced across the faces of pearly walls. Twisting, he looked through them and saw floors and levels beyond. Nothing moved inside.
There was a hole lower down and he swam toward it, throat constricting. He had to get a look at the underside, some glimpse of the engine or driving screw or whatever moved it. As he turned under the sharp edge of the hole he flexed upward, peering toward a refracting edge of light, and his face broke through into air.
He gasped. It was a stale pocket, trapped between levels. He floated for a moment, trying to make structure out of the fuzzy images around him, confused by the liquid interplay of water and light. Translucent walls blended silvery wads of air with rippling shafts of green sunlight.
There was nothing mechanical. He swam past quilted; blurred boundaries, the surfaces were smooth, with a resisting softness when he pressed. Some were curved, others flat. He found a ledge and crawled up onto it.
He rested, surrounded by a play of filtered jade light. The white stuff that made the walls was, he saw, assembled nearly seamlessly from the kind of blocks that had washed up on the island, that Tseng had showed him. The ledge was narrow and bumpy. Crawling along it took him to a low wall he could climb. Beyond lay a flat floor, pitted by random holes nearly a meter wide. Beyond that, more.
He explored the labyrinth for a long time, cautiously, slipping in the slick, narrow corridors. There seemed no scheme to it, only twisting passageways and small rooms. About a third of the whole structure held trapped air. Water-filled tubes intersected irregular rooms in a kind of curvilinear logic.
He worked his way up, following the shafts of shadow that descended through milky walls, There—equipment, carelessly dumped into piles, soaked. Wreckage from ships—twisted superstructure, jumbles of electronics, valves and pipes and cables. An entire combustion assembly. There was a whole radio rig, compact, sealed against water, intact with emergency battery. A good ship’s set, with high-frequency bands.
The debris was unsorted, scattered around a long room which had more of the round openings in the floor. No sign of how it got here.
He worked on the radio for a while. Some hookup wire was missing but he scavenged some from nearby and got it up and running, it would be heavy, but maybe he could take it up to the raft. He peered at the thick cable lancing up to the raft.
Green fingers of sunlight came down obliquely now; dusk. He found a hole in the floor that weaved for ten meters and then gave onto the outer wall of the structure. He panted for two minutes, filling his blood with oxygen, and then slipped through, working his way down a wide tube and then out, into open water. Once he was free the tightness in his chest vanished and he opened his mouth and let the air rush out. As he rose, the ocean’s pressure eased and more air filled him, a seeming unending fountain of it, fat bubbles wobbling upward toward the raft.
The swell lapped at creaking boards. Fish jumped and the horizon was a clean line. The sea was gathering itself again after the long time of the Swarmers, blossoming, the schools returning. He could live here now.
He got his fishing lines and the rifle and then dove in, carrying them down, entering the structure again. As the light ebbed, schools of fish gathered in the sheltered openings and tube. He trailed his lines down to them and got three.
Darkness came swiftly. He lay on the floor. There was enough air in the labyrinth to last for the night, and plenty of time to think tomorrow. He dozed fitfully, and in the night his thoughts were ragged.
There had been no more flashes over the horizon. So one part of it was finished, he thought. To set one kind of life against another. To upset the precarious balance and give humans what they thought at first was a simple fight with something from the sea.
The men had done what they always did in groups and somehow the thing had gotten away from them. And they had killed the Skyhook, too.
All without knowing that somewhere something wanted life to cancel other life and for each form to pull the other down. Clearing the way for the gray ships that now hurled themselves into the sea, far from the futile battles raging on the continents.
Something was moving beyond the walls.
He woke instantly, muscles stiff, and searched the pearly shafts of light nearby. Air and water bled into each other, catching the cool gleam of dawn, fooling the eye—
There. Quick, darting movements. Skimmers.
They entered through the tubes of water, swimming close to his room. And somehow these Skimmers knew about the time before, knew the difficult slow progress, knew the patience it demanded.
It took hours to understand and more still to get the words right. They had brought something they probably thought would serve as writing implements. The crude pen barely made scratches on the oily, crinkled pages they gave him. He wrote and they replied and he tried to see through the packed strings of words.
THE GRAY THINGS FLOAT FAR DOWN. THEY MINE THE SEA THEIR FACTORIES CLANK WE CAN HEAR THEM. THEIR SOUNDS TRAPPED IN THE PLANES OF WATER COME LONG DISTANCES. THEY MAKE MORE COPIES OF THEMSELVES. THE SWARMERS ARE GONE TO LAND THE GRAY THINGS THINK THEY ARE SAFE.
Warren knew he was a hard man, uninterested in talk, never easy with fellow crew members, comfortable only with his wife, and that for a mere few years, before the gray shield had descended between them. There was an emptiness inside him he knew that too without feeling shame or loss, not a lack but a blank space—a vacancy that made him hear the wind whisper and the slosh of waves and, because of the vacancy, to truly listen, not thinking of them as background to man’s incessant mad talk, but as a separate song, the breathing of the planet. So he had an ear for the Skimmers and things meant and shown but not said. He made it into words because he was irreducibly human and the writing of it was a way of fixing it, a mere human impulse against the rub of time, to pin things with words. And the vacancy had saved him, years of interior silence had made a quietness that was solid now, stonelike.