Home from the Shore Page 5

"No," said Johnny. "There's no ringleaders with us."

  "News said so.”

  "No."

  "Well, they did."

  "They don’t know.”

  The pilot shrugged. He sat still fora second.

  "All right," he said. "They still got a reward out for you bigger than on any the rest of the Cadets."

  They held still for another little moment,watching each other. The flyer bored on through the air, automatically holding its course. Johnny stood balanced. He was thinking that he had picked this pilot because the man was like him.

  It might be they were too much alike. It might be that the pilot had too much pride to let himself be forced, in spite of the squint lines and broken knuckles and knowing now what his chances would be with someone like Johnny. If it was that, the pilot would need some excuse, or reason.

  Easily, not taking his eyes off the pilot, Johnny reached down and picked up his slacks. From one pocket he searched out something small, circular and hard. Holding it outstretched in his lingers, he took two steps forward and offered it to the pilot.

  "Souvenir," he said.

  The pilot looked down at it. It was a steel ring with a crest on it showing what looked like a mailed fist grasping at a star.

  Two words—ad astra—were cut in under the crest.

  "Souvenir," said Johnny again.

  The pilot looked it over for a long second, then slowly reached out two of the fingers with the broken knuckles and tweezered it between the ends of them, out of Johnny's grasp. He turned it slowly over, first one way and then the other, looking at it.

  He said, "Once I would've wanted one like that." He lifted his eyes to Johnny. "I don’t understand. Nobody does.”

  "It looks that way to us, too," he answered, not moving. "We don't understand landers."

  "Yeah," said the pilot. He turned the ring again. "Well, you was the one that was there. You all go home, you sea kids?"

  "It's not our job," he said. "Fill your Space Academy with your own people.”

  "Yeah," said the pilot, almost to himself.

  Slowly he folded in the fingers holding the ring, until it was covered and hidden in the grasp of his fist. He put the fist in his pocket and when it came out again he no longer held the ring.

  “All right. Souvenir." He turned back to the controls. "How much on out?"

  "About a mile now."

  The pilot took hold of the control bar. The flyer dropped. The surface of the sea came up to meet them, becoming more blue and less gray as it approached. From high up it had looked fixed and unmoving, but now they could see there was motion to it. When they got close indeed, they could see how it was furrowed and all in action, so that no

  part of it was the same as any other, or stayed the same.

  Johnny put one palm to the ceiling and pressed upward. He stood braced against the angle of their descent, looking past the bunched-up muscles of his forearms at the jacketed back of the pilot and the approaching sea.

  “How can you tell?" asked the pilot, suddenly. "You know where we are now?”

  "About eight-one, fifty west," said Johnny, "by about thirty-one, forty north."

  The pilot glanced at his instruments.

  “Right on," the pilot said. "Or almost. How?

  "Come to sea," he answered. “Your grandchildren'll have it.” His eyes blurred suddenly again for a second. "Why do you think they wanted us for their Space Program?"

  "No," said the pilot, not turning his head, "leave me out of it." A moment later he leaned toward the windscreen. "Something in the top of, the water, there."

  "That’s it," said Johnny. The flyer dropped.

  It came down on the surface and began to rock and move with the ceaseless motion of the waves. The ducted fans were unexpectedly still. Their thrumming had given way to a strange silence broken by the slapping of the waves against the flyer's underbody and small creakings of metal.

  "Well, look there!" said the pilot.

  He leaned forward, staring out through the windscreen. The flyer had become surrounded by a gang of stunting dolphin and seal. A great, swollen balloon of a fish—a guasa—floated almost to the surface alongside the flyer and gaped at it with a mouth that opened like a lifting manhole cover. Johnny slipped full-eye contact lenses into place and stripped off the shorts. In only the lenses and an athletic supporter, he picked up the small sealed suitcase he had brought aboard and opened the side door of the flyer, just back of the partition on the right. The pilot turned his seat to watch.

  Here—" he said suddenly. He reached into his pocket, brought out the Academy ring and held it out to Johnny. Johnny stared at him. "Go ahead, take it. What the hell, it don't mean anything to me!" Slowly, Johnny took it, hesitated, and slid it back on his right third finger to carry it.

  "Good luck."

  “All right," said Johnny. “Thanks.” He turned and tossed the suitcase out the door.

  Several dolphins raced for it, the lead one taking it in his almost beakless mouth. He was larger and somewhat different from the others.

  "You going very deep there?" asked the pilot as Johnny stepped down on to the top of the landing steps, whose base were in the waves.

  "Twenty..." Johnny glanced at the gamboling sea-creatures. "No, only about fifteen fathoms.”

  The pilot looked from him to the dolphins and back again.

  "Ninety feet," said the pilot.

  Johnny went down a couple of steps and felt the soft warmth of the sun-warmed surface waters roll over his feet. He looked back at the pilot.

  “Thanks again," he said. He hesitated and then held out his hand. The pilot got up from his seat, came to the flyer door and shook. In the grip of their hands, Johnny could feel the hard callouses of the man’s palm. "It's what you call Castle-Home, down there?” said the pilot as they let go.

  “No," said Johnny. "It’s Home." On the last word he felt his vocal cords tighten and he was suddenly in a hurry to be going.

  "Castle-Home's—something else."

  He let go of the doorpost of the flyer and stepped down and out into the ever-moving waves.

  Chapter 4

  The ones that had come up to meet him—the seals, the dolphins, the guasa—went down with him. He saw the color of the under-waters, green as light behind a leaf-shadowed window. And he spread his arms with the gesture of the first man who ever stood on a hilltop watching the easy soaring of the birds. He swam downward.

  The salt water was cool and simple and complete around him, after all the chills and sweatings of the land. In the stillness he could feel the slow, strong beating of his own heart driving the salt blood throughout his body. He felt cleaned at last from the dust and dirt of the past four and a half years. He felt free at last from the prison of his clothing.

  Down he swam, his heart surging slowly and strongly. Around him, a revolving circus act of underwater, free-flying aerialists leaped and danced—ponderous guasa, doe-eyed harp seals, bottle-nosed and common dolphins. And the one large Risso’s dolphin, with the suitcase in his mouth, circling closest.

  Johnny clicked fingernails and tongue at the Risso's dolphin. It was a message in the dolphin code that the Risso knew well. "Ba. ld. ur... Baldur the Beautiful. . ." The twelve-foot gray beast rolled almost against him in the water, offering the trailing reins of the harness.

  He caught first one rein, then the other, and let himself be towed down, no longer pivot man to the group but a moving part of it.

  Seconds later, there was light below them, brighter than the light from above. They were coming down into the open hub of a large number of apartments, mostly with transparent walls, sealed together into the shape of a wheel. People poured out of the apartments like birds from an aviary. They clustered around him, swept him down and pushed him through the magnetic iris of an entrance. His ears popped slightly and he came through, walking into a large, air-filled room surrounding a pool. The dolphins, the seals and the guasa broke water in the pool in the same second. People crow
ded in after him, swarmed around him, shouting and laughing.

  In a second the room was over-full. There was no spare space. A tall, lean young man, Johnny’s age, looking like Johnny, climbed up on a table holding a sort of curved, long-necked banjo. Sitting crosslegged, he flashed fingers over the strings, ringing out wild, shouting music. Voices caught up the tune. A song—one Johnny had never heard before—beat at the walls.

  Hey, Johnny! Hey-a, Johnny!

  Home, from the shore!

  Hey-o, Johnny! Hey, Johnny!

  To high land, go no more!

  Long away, away, my Johnny!

  Four long years and more!

  Hey-o, Johnny! Hey, Johnny!

  Go high land, no more!

  They were all singing. They sang, shouting it, swaying together, holding, together, laughing and crying at the same time. The tears ran down their clean faces.

  Johnny felt the arms of those closest to him, hugging him. Those who could not reach to hold him, held each other. The song rose, chanted, wept. It would be one of his lean cousin’s songs, made up for the occasion of his homecoming. He did not know the words. But as he was handed on, slowly from the arms of one relative or friend to the next, he was caught up, at last, in the music and sang with the rest of them.

  He felt the tears running down his own cheeks, the easy tears of his childhood. There was a great feeling in the room. It was thenous-novs of his people, of The People, the People of the Sea in all their three generations. He was caught up with them in the moment now and sar and wept with them. They were moved together in this moment of his returning, as the oceans themselves were moved by the great currents that gave life and movement to their waters. The roadways of the seal, the dolphin, and now the roadways of his people. The Liman, the Kuroshio, the Humbolt Current. The Canary, the Gulf Stream in which they were now this moment drifting north. The Labrador.

  For four years he had been without this feeling. But now he was Home.

  Gradually the great we-feeling of the People in the room relaxed and settled down into a spirit of celebration. The song of his homecoming shifted to a humorous ballad—about an old man/who had a harp seal/ which wouldn't get out of his bed. Laughter crackled among them. Long-necked green pressure bottles and a variety of marinated tidbits of seafood were passed from hand to hand.

  The mood of all of them settled into cheerfulness,swung at last to attention on Johnny. Quiet welled up and spread around the pool, quenching other talk.

  Sitting now on the table that his cousin Patrick with the banjo had vacated, he noticed their waiting suddenly. He had his arm around the shoulders of a round-breasted, brown-haired, slight young woman who sat leaning against him on the table, her head in the hollow of his shoulder. Her name was Sara Light and he had been looking down at her without talking, trying to see what difference four years had made in her. He saw something, but he could not put his finger on just what it was. Like all the sea-people, she was free; although he wondered if the landers had appreciated the difference between that, and their own legal ways, when they had set all the Cadets from the sea down as unmarried.

  But still, she was free; and he had not even been certain that he would find her still here with his family and friends’ Group when he came back.

  She sat up and moved aside now, to let him sit up. Her eyes glanced against his for a moment and once more he thought he saw a new difference between her now and the girl she had been when he saw her last—the person he remembered. But what it was, still stayed hidden to him. He turned and looked out at the people. They were all quiet now, sitting on chairs or hassocks or cross-legged on the floor and looking at him.

  “I suppose you've all heard it on the news," he said.

  "Only that it was something about the space bats, said the voice of Patrick beneath him. Johnny leaned forward and peered over the edge of the table. Patrick sat cross-legged there, the banjo upright between his knees with the long neck sloping over his shoulder, his head leaning against it with the edge pressing into his cheek. He winked up at Johnny. The wink was the same wink Johnny remembered, but it put creases in Patrick's lean face he had never seen there before. Without warning, Patrick’s face looked as it had been on the jacket of a tape of Patrick's Moho Symphony, in a music department ashore. At the time Johnny had thought the picture was a bad likeness.

  He winked back and straightened up.

  "The space bats were the final straw,” he said. "That's all, actually."

  "Were they big, Johnny?"

  It was a child’s voice. Johnny looked and saw a boy seated cross-legged almost at the foot of the table, his eyes full open, his lips a little parted, all his upper body leaning forward.

  He was one who had evidently been born into the Joya Group since Johnny left. Johnny did not know his name.

  The one I saw would have weighed very little down here on Earth." He spoke to the boy as he would have spoken to any of the rest, regardless of age. "But—it was four to five kilometers across."

  The boy drew in so deep a breath his shoulders lifted. When he let it out again his whole body shuddered.

  “Five kilometers!" he whispered.

  "Yes," said Johnny, remembering. "It was like a silver curtain waving in the current of an off-shore tide. That's how it looked to me."

  "You helped catch it?" said Emil Joya, who was an uncle both to Johnny and his cousin Patrick with the banjo.

  Johnny looked up.

  "Yes,” he said. "They took our senior class of the sea people out beyond Mars." He hesitated a second. "We were told it was something we’d be required to do as space officers some day. It’s part of a project to find out how the space bats travel between the stars, if they do. And how to duplicate the process."

  “I don’t quite understand," said Emil, his heavy gray brows frowning in his square rock of a face.

  "The Space Project people think the space bats can give us the secret of a practical way to drive our own ships between the stars at almost the speed of light.”

  "And you caught this one?” said Patrick, beneath the table.

  "We caught it," Johnny nodded. "It didn't try to escape until it was too late. We went out in special space suits and trapped it in a net of energy. Then, all of a sudden, it seemed to understand it was caught. And it died."

  “You killed it!" said the boy.

  “None of us killed it," said Johnny. "It killed itself. One minute it was there, waving like a colored curtain in space, and then the color started to go out of it. It fell in on itself. In just a moment it was nothing but a gray rag in the middle of the net."

  He stopped talking. There was a second or two of silence in the small-Home crowded with sea people.

  "And seeing that made you leave the Academy?" asked Patrick's voice.

  "No," said Johnny. He drew a breath as deep as the boy had drawn. "After we came back from the observation cruise, we had to write reports. We wrote them separately; but afterwards we found we'd all written the same thing, we sea-Cadets. We wrote that the space bats killed themselves when they were captured because they couldn’t bear being trapped." He breathed deeply again. "We wrote that it would never work this way. The bats would always die. The project was a blind alley.”

  "And then?" said Patrick.

  "We wrote our reports separately," Johnny said, "but the general in command of the Academy believed we must have gotten together on them, since we’d all said the same things. For that reason he refused to follow through properly when lander cadets beat up Mikros, away from the Academy. We saw they’d never understand us, or how we felt about things, so we came away.”

  No one spoke for a long moment.

  "It doesn't make sense,” said Patrick at last.

  "Not to us, it doesn't,” said Johnny. "To a Lander it makes very good sense. They never wanted us sea people as people in the first place. When they asked our third generation to enlist as Academy Cadets, they only wanted those parts of us they could use—our faster reaction times
, our more stable emotional structure, our gift of reckoning location and distance and all the other new instincts living in the sea has wakened in us..."

  Johnny's voice trailed off. He thumped softly on the table by his knee with one knotted fist, staring at the blank wall opposite, until Sara Light, beside him, took his fist gently in her hands and cushioned it to stillness.

  "We were like the space bats to them," said Johnny after a bit. "Time and again they’d proved it to us. I called a meeting of the other class representatives—I was Senior Class Rep. Will Jakin for the freshmen sea-Cadets, Per Holmquist for the second year group, Mikros Palamas for the juniors. We decided there was no use trying any longer. We went back and told the men in our own class. The next weekend, when we were allowed passes, we all took our rings off and headed as best we could for our own Homes."

  He stopped speaking and sat looking across the unvarying surface of the wall.

  They swarmed all over him for a second time. But they quieted down soon, the more so as Patrick's banjo did not join them. When it was still again Patrick spoke from under the table.

  "You were the one who called the meeting, Johnny?"

  "It was me," said Johnny. "I was Senior Representative."

  "True enough,” said Patrick. A faint E minor chord sounded from the strings of his banjo as if he had just happened to shift his grip lightly on the neck of it. "That's why the news services have been calling you the ringleader. But you didn’t have any choice, I suppose."

  "No," said Johnny.

  "It’ll be a hard thing for them to swallow.”

  "Perhaps," said Johnny. "I’ve lived with them four years, and they swallow differently than we do, Pat. We see and think differently than they do. We've already got instincts they don't have—and who knows what the next generations will be like? But they're not ready to admit the difference. And until they do, we can't live on dry land with them."

  For a second it seemed as if Patrick would not say anything more. Then they heard a faint chord from his banjo again.

  "Maybe," said Patrick, “maybe. But we all started by coming from high land in the beginning. A hundred thousand generations of men ashore, and only three or four in the sea. All the history, the art, the music... We can't cut ourselves off from that.”