Iro flipped her
observation bubble’s shutter open. Her
tiny craft’s instruments told her exactly where she was and where she was
headed, but that didn't matter. She
wanted to see.
The bright
yellow star was a welcome beacon. It was
too far away to activate her heat shields, but close enough to show a definite
disk before the speckled background of night.
Several of the pinpricks around it weren't stars but rocky planets. She had to consult her chart to identify the
one she wanted.
The star was
cataloged as 742/Grα91. The amphibious
tree-dwellers of Lesut, thirty light-years away, called it “The Moss
Heart.” The blue planet that sat
comfortably in the system's liquid-water zone was referred to by the charts as
Grα91/3A, by the interstellar biogenetics community as TGAC Prime, and by its
long-extinct inhabitants as “Earth.”
Iro loved that
name. She loved all indigenous names,
preferring them to the cold designations of the Galactography Institute at
which she apprenticed. It irritated her professors
to no end that she used native nomenclature whenever possible in her
research. “The word Earth,” an
instructor once pointed out, “translates as dirt.” She didn't
care.
Her pod
approached Earth in a high arc over the orbital plane. She coasted on momentum alone, her last
course correction made several days before.
Any further use of her fusion drive would alert the Ish Marak sentinels
in Earth's orbit and the game would be up.
Before she came within a thousand diameters of the planet, she would
have to shut down her life support and trust that the pod's insulation would
keep her heat from bleeding away. At
present, the liquid inside her ship was a comfortable 35°C. If it fell below zero, she'd die of
hypothermia long before impact.
*
Ck'Luō reached
Earth a month before Iro. Instead of arriving
in a working spacecraft, Ck'Luō had hidden in the hulk of a Chango supply
vessel found drifting in the system’s cometary cloud.
With Ck'Luō
inside, his pod-brothers launched the derelict sunward. The ship would eventually burn when it hit
the solar atmosphere, but Ck'Luō jumped overboard when it crossed the orbit of
the small, red fourth planet and fell the rest of the way in a
stasis-suit.
It wasn't the
longest interplanetary dive on record, but it was by far the trickiest Ck'Luō
had ever attempted. His stasis field
cycled off for one second every ten hours of his descent, making the seventy
million kilometer plummet pass in a matter of moments. The cycle grew shorter as he made final approach,
creating the illusion of slowing while the azure water-world filled the sky
beneath him.
“This goodly
frame the Earth,” he couldn’t help but notice, was hardly the “sterile
promontory” that the Bard’s fictional prince lamented. The “brave, o’erhanging firmament” had been
more justly described, but Ck'Luō didn’t have time to admire the view.
The trick was
in the proper timing of his antigravity thrust.
If he triggered it low enough in the atmosphere, the Earth’s magnetic
field would mask its signal; if he waited too long, he and a hundred square
kilometers of the surface would revert to elementary particles.
As it was, he
pulled the cord too early, while he was still within easy range of the Ish
Marak’s scanners. He realized his
mistake when the warning claxon went off in his mask. The sentries were fast, and he had scant
moments to avoid being pulled into a holding cell and charged with criminal
trespass.
Ck'Luō cut the
antigrav before it was fully expended and spun around by thrashing his
tail. He thanked the Bard that Earth had
a sister planet or this would never have worked. With his thruster pointed at Earth’s airless
companion (against which he already saw the outline of an Ish Marak cruiser) he
cut the antigrav back on and used the mass of the silver Moon to accelerate him
toward the gossamer clouds below.
He broke
atmosphere going way too fast, faster than his stasis suit could tolerate. The emergency heat shield kicked on at 75,000
meters and slowed his descent, but it wrapped him in a pillar of fire that
surely gave his position to anyone with eyes to see. It couldn’t be helped. All Ck'Luō could do was hope that the
planetary guardians weren’t crazy enough to intercept him before he hit the
surface.
In that, he was
in luck. Beneath him stretched an
endless plain of blue. There was enough
power left in the antigrav for him to survive a rocky landing, but he would
have been captured within moments.
Coming in over the ocean gave him a fighting chance.
He couldn’t see
the Ish Marak overhead, but he assumed they were there. The sentinels were nothing if not relentless,
and the flora and fauna of Earth were some of the most prized in the
galaxy. It had taken years for the Ish
Marak to curb the exploitation of Earth’s biosphere, but in doing so they had
forbidden access to the planet for almost any other purpose. That didn’t stop the odd pilgrim or
thrill-seeker from trying, and it was only that possibility that Ck'Luō wasn’t
a gene-pirate that had kept the sentries from shooting on sight.
His heat shield
overloaded two clicks above the ocean’s surface. Ck'Luō waited another thousand meters before
turning his antigrav back on. “Most
provident in peril” he imagined himself in the Bard’s words, “courage and hope
both teaching him the practice.”
The antigrav
kicked like a wild kushat, but he clamped his jaw and rolled with the blow. He flipped over in time to see that yes,
there were three Ish Marak flyers homing in on him.
He stripped in
mid-air. His limb-sheaths came off
first, freeing his arms and legs. His
torso plate ejected and his tail-cover slid off when he unbuckled his
harness. His helmet was the last to go,
the wind almost blinding him as it ripped past his head. The shadows of the sentinels grew near, as
did the chop of the surf. Ck'Luō smiled
and waved at his pursuers, then he deactivated the antigrav, slung the last of
his harness away, and dove head-first, naked, into the sea.
*
Iro’s craft
blazed through the sky over the continent that had once been Eurasia. Her trajectory took her toward the largest of
the inland seas that separated the northern and southern landmasses. She hoped to make it all the way; if she
didn’t, she would have a long walk ahead.
As it was, she
had to eject before her flyer slammed into the top of a mountain. The force of the parasail snapping taut
almost broke her shoulders, but she kept her wits long enough to steer toward a
valley beyond the glacier below her. Not
for the first time she wished that the ancient Human geneticists who’d gifted
her race with arms and legs had had the foresight to grant them wings as well.
She glided for
miles as the mountains became green foothills.
Tiny motors in her parasail kept her aloft, but in the end gravity won
and she touched down (rather hard) by the banks of a rippling stream.
Iro sloughed
out of her flight suit and crawled, aching, on knees and elbows to the
water. It was cold – colder than any of
the currents on iceless Siren, her home.
She clamped her teeth and slithered in, letting her lungs empty and the
chill of snow-melt pass through her gills.
The harness had left creases in her flesh; she rubbed her shoulders and
thighs and hoped the marks would heal quickly.
Her tail shivered violently in the chill water, but she held to the
rocky bottom and forced her body to adjust to the temperature.
She wondered
what the ancient Humans would have thought if they could have seen her. Doubtless they would have imagined her some
fantastic mythological creature, yet thanks to their star-faring descendants
there was as much terrestrial DNA in Iro’s blood as there was native
Sirene. Would the Humans have been proud
that one of their long-lost children had finally returned home?
Iro strode back
to the bank, dorsal fins quivering in the air, and checked her position with
her navicomp. It could have been much
worse. She had made it as far as the
northern end of the peninsula that had been her destination. Now she only had to traverse three hundred
kilometers of hilly terrain to reach the settlement of the Roänn caretakers.
It was a long
way to go on foot. It would be better,
she decided, to follow the stream to the sea and swim down the coast. She hoped Ck'Luō was having a better time of
it. With luck, he was waiting for her
already.
*
After
diving in the icy waters of the open ocean, it became clear to Ck'Luō why
Humans had evolved on land. Earth’s seas
were too damned salty, for one thing, and the cold made him wish for a layer of
blubber like his portly pod-brother Vh’Las.
For the first
few days, Ck'Luō kept below the surface and focused on evading capture. Once he felt sure (or at least hopeful) that
the Ish Marak had abandoned pursuit, he poked his head into the air and attempted
to get his bearings. The navicomp
strapped to his waist had thankfully survived the fall, and it placed him some
five hundred kilometers west of the inland sea where he and Iro had arranged to
meet.
Coming
to Earth had been Ck'Luō’s idea.
Splitting up had been hers. It
was easier for one, she pointed out, to slip around the sentinels than it was
for two. By staggering their arrivals,
they would be less likely to arouse the Ish Marak’s suspicion. By keeping a low profile, they would only
increase their chances of reaching the Roänn colony.
Iro
was always the practical one. Ck'Luō was
the poet. “Parting is such sweet
sorrow,” said the Bard, and Ck'Luō believed it.
It was the same every time Iro left on one of her expeditions for the
Institute. Ck'Luō always welcomed her
home with verses culled from the finest Human and Sirene wordsmiths, or fresh
songs of his own devising. They always
made her smile, even if she didn’t fully appreciate them the way he did.
They
had never traveled off-world together, and Ck'Luō had wanted to on this of all
occasions, but Iro’s logic won out. He
reminded himself that love “looks on tempests and is never shaken; it is the
star to every wandering bark.” It was
enough that they were both there, on the world of their genetic and spiritual
ancestors.
He
waited until night to plow eastward through the waves, and he used the stars to
guide him.
*
On
the third day of her trek down the coast, Iro needed a rest. She was cold, tired, and wrinkled as an old
woman. She wanted to be beautiful when
Ck'Luō saw her next, not frigid and withered like a water-logged
ckabba-fruit. There was a narrow beach
at the base of a cliff; she pulled herself ashore and lay in the sun to dry.
Birds
wheeled overhead, their brilliant white bodies a contrast to their dark faces. Iro’s biocomp implant identified them as ichthyaetus melanocephalus, the
Mediterranean Gull. She told it to
record the video stream from her optic nerve.
She meant to record every life form she came across. One didn’t visit Earth, even illegally,
without taking pictures.
Of
all the known biospheres in the galaxy, Earth’s was the most abundant by an
order of magnitude. Even her own world,
with its unbroken oceans full of life, couldn’t match the sheer variety and
unparalleled bounty of the species of Earth.
It was because of the peculiar nature of Earth DNA – more aggressive,
competitive, and adaptable than any other genetic blueprint known to exist.
Iro
sunned on the beach until she felt like herself again. The Institute’s records had warned about
strong tidal effects caused by Earth’s moon, but the inland sea was mostly
sheltered from them and Iro slept undisturbed by the rising water.
It
was only after she woke that she noticed the stairs. She hadn’t seen them before, but now that the
sun had dropped closer to the horizon, she could see the shadow they cut
against the face of the cliff. It would
soon be too dark to swim any further, so she decided to explore upward.
It
was a tricky climb. The steps were so
old they’d almost weathered down to the original rock. It was slow going and at times she had to
drop on all fours to keep her balance.
She didn’t want to think about getting down again. It was already too late to turn back.
There
was nothing at the top of the cliff but a jumbled collection of stones. She’d hoped for a forest with more animals to
record, but the woods didn’t begin for another kilometer. Instead, only grass and moss grew through the
piles of rock that it took her several minutes to recognize as the remains of a
Human village.
She
started recording. Out of reverence, she
almost stopped breathing. Her colleagues
at the Institute wouldn’t care about the ruins, but Ck'Luō would never forgive
her for not sharing. Iro was a
Naturalist, but Ck'Luō was a Humanist.
She knew he would trade the sight of a million new species for five
minutes on the hallowed ground of the Ancients he so adored.
In
the center of the village was a marker.
It was old, probably as old as the steps from the beach, but not as old
as the ruins themselves. On the black
obelisk were markings in a flowing Roänn script, faded by centuries of wind and
rain. The language was Galactic
Standard, but the words were those of one of the poets Ck'Luō idolized. Most of the passage was lost, but she could
still read the heart of it.
“The
cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe
itself, Ye all which it inherit…”
Humans
weren’t much for modesty, Iro thought.
“…shall
dissolve.”
Oh, she corrected herself.
“And,
like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind.”
By
all that lives, Iro wondered, did the Humans even then understand that they
would one day be no more? Is that what
drove them to such lengths to seed themselves across the cosmos?
“We
are such stuff as dreams are made on…”
The
rest was too worn to read. She would
have to remember to show it to Ck'Luō.
If they were lucky, she could even bring him back. She listened to the gulls for a while, then
climbed down the steps to the cool evening waves.
*
The
warm Mediterranean was a relief after the frigid and tempestuous Atlantic. Ck'Luō found a quiet cove almost immediately
after passing the boundary waters and camped for several days. His ration packs were nearly gone, and he
would have to start hunting his food if he wanted to survive. He’d seen many new species already, and he
wished he had an implant like Iro to record them. He would have to describe them to her in
verse instead. It would probably be
best, he thought, to leave out the parts about eating them.
Earth
fish were quick, he’d give them that.
Unfortunately for them, though, they’d gone too many millennia without
being hunted by anything except other fish.
Ck'Luō hadn’t brought any of his gear, but he was able to fashion a net
and a crude spear out of some local plant life.
He
decided to start small. There were
schools of a particular silver fish that were especially plentiful. After a little exertion, he nabbed three,
slit them open, and let them bake in the sun for an hour before dining on their
succulent white flesh. It was filling,
but only whetted his appetite for more.
In the deeper sea he had seen larger creatures; he would have to make a
go at them as soon as he was a little more rested.
*
Iro
was beginning to wish her journey would never end. Earth was so very, very beautiful. She had to wonder what had pushed the Humans
into space to begin with. Why travel
outward into the void when they had paradise all around them?
Her
navicomp told her she was less than a day’s swim from the Roänn colony, but there
was so much to distract her and it was so hard to resist indulging herself.
The
creature she swam with that morning was a mobula
mobular, a giant devil ray. It
fluttered almost effortlessly like one of the great cloudwings of Cavor, only
beneath the waves instead of above them.
She trailed it for an hour, logging the entire experience into her
biocomp. She wished she could capture
one and bring it back to Siren, but knew that even speaking that thought aloud
could land her in an Ish Marak holding cell.
Her
stomach cramped. She was hungry, but she
couldn’t bear to eat any more rations.
The Roänn settlement waited only kilometers ahead; she turned from her
lovely watery companion and started toward shore.
When
she looked behind one last time to watch the ray vanish in the distance,
another creature caught her eye. She
stopped swimming and started recording again, waiting for her biocomp to
classify the animal and correlate the video stream. When the beast’s name inserted itself into
her field of vision, it was outlined in red.
Isurus oxyrinchus, Lamnidae family. Colloquial name: Mako shark. Warning: EXTREME HAZARD.
An
image from the computer file appeared underneath the warning. All she saw was the creature’s teeth. Iro twisted in the water and bolted. She hoped she was far enough away that the
monster wouldn’t follow.
She
was tired, but thanks to her journey she was also in the best physical shape
she’d ever been. Arms and legs tucked in
tight, she slithered eel-like toward the still-unseen shore. It couldn’t be too much farther, she
thought. She glanced behind her to see
if she’d lost the mako.
It
had closed half the distance. By all
that lives, it was fast! Iro redoubled
her efforts; she could feel all three of her hearts ready to burst from the
exertion. She glanced over her shoulder
again. The shark was closer still, and
it didn’t even seem to be trying.
She
thrashed her tail harder, but she couldn’t go any faster. She could see the bottom now; the shore had
to be close. The water around her was
warming up with the heat from the monster itself. Iro glanced behind one more time.
All
she saw was teeth.
*
Ck'Luō
was on his guard, his spear at the ready.
He’d grown to know Earth’s creatures well, and he knew to be
cautious. The Mediterranean current
carried him toward his destination, so he conserved his own strength. He didn’t know what it was that drove the
bigger fish to attack. Maybe it had to
do with pheremones or the high body temperature of Sirenes compared to the
local fauna. He’d have to ask Iro about
it when they met.
One
more day, he told himself. Less than a
day. Hours now. His gills practically quivered with
anticipation. It had all been worth it,
he thought. The hardship, the cold, the
loneliness… Ah, but the adventure! The
wonder! The sheer beauty! Even if he never did it justice in verse (and
he would sure as life try) to share such a breathtaking voyage with the woman
of his dreams was the experience of a lifetime.
There
was a bitterness in the water, at once familiar and out-of-place. Was it her?
The Roänn were close, and the sea only five meters deep. Had she recently passed through these
shallows ahead of him? Had he actually
picked up her scent?
He
couldn’t help but assume that the answer was ‘yes.’ He turned away from the current and followed
her trail. Of course, he knew, it could
turn out to be some other form of sea-life that he was tracking, but it suited
his own romantic notions to believe otherwise.
As
he neared the shore, anticipation turned to worry. The scent had become stronger and it was
definitely Sirene, but what he smelled couldn’t be right. His hearts went cold as he pushed toward the
bottom. What he tasted in the water was
a hint of blood.
He
found the strongest confluence in a small hollow on the sea floor not fifty
meters from the coast. Sirene blood
tended to sink in Earth’s over-salty water, and the hollow was coated in
it.
Ck'Luō
couldn’t believe it. There had to be
another explanation, but he couldn’t think of one. Could there be other Sirene on Earth besides
he and Iro? He knew there weren’t, but
he begged the fates and the Bard’s uncaring God otherwise. He swam back and forth along the seabed looking
for any sign or clue.
He
found a piece of her waist-harness with a few remaining ration-wafers wedged between
two boulders. Later, he found the end of
her tail.
*
The
Roänn caretaker found the young Sirene sitting quietly at the edge of the
surf. The Roänn’s name was Beach-Comber,
after an old Human pastime. He doubted
that Human beachcombers had ever come across anything so strange.
He
held up his roots as he trudged into the water.
He wasn’t quiet, yet the Sirene didn’t stir. Beach-Comber leaned over and touched a branch
to his shoulder. Only then did the boy
jump.
“Forgive
me,” the Roänn rumbled in Galactic Standard, “but are you the Petitioner who
fell into the ocean six weeks ago?”
The
Sirene boy’s eyes were wells of sadness.
He nodded.
“Most
amazing,” the Roänn observed. His leaves
fluttered excitedly in the breeze. “We’d
thought you lost. We never imagined that
you could survive such a journey.
Incredible!”
The
boy wiped water off his cheek. It was a
very Human reflex, one that only a few of their descendants shared.
“Don’t
cry,” Beach-Comber told him gently. “You
mustn’t cry. You’re here! You’re alive!
This is a time for celebration.
Please, come with me to the colony.
We can be there before nightfall.
There’s still plenty of light.”
“What
light is light, if Iro be not seen?” the boy suddenly said. “What joy is joy if Iro be not by? Tarry I here, but I attend on death. Fly I hence, I fly away from life.”
“Pish,”
the Roänn scolded. “None of that. Besides, you’re saying it wrong and leaving
parts out. The Bard would never approve. Now pull yourself together and take my
branch.”
He
had to practically drag the youth out of the water. Once on land, the young man followed without
argument. He didn’t say anything, in
fact. Beach-Comber knew that of all the
races in the galaxy, the aquatic Sirene were the most like to Humans as the
Humans themselves. This one, he mused,
was displaying the Human quality of “dragging one’s feet.”
“This
‘Iro’ you speak of,” he said. “Tell me
about her.”
The
youth was silent at first. “She was
everything,” he eventually said. “She
was the light that shimmers on the face of the water, and the comforting
shadows beneath. She was a splash of
color on a barren seabed. She was a
flower in the coral. She was the music
of the tide, and the dance of the waves.”
He
went on like that for a while.
Beach-Comber let the words drift through his leaves and into the air,
where the wind carried them in the pollen to his brothers and sisters at the
colony. When at last the pair of
travelers arrived, everyone there had heard Ck'Luō’s song filtered through the
language of trees.
Beach-Comber
gestured to a low hilltop that overlooked the sea. “This way, Petitioner.” On the crest of the hill was a small stand of
Roänn who had already gathered.
Not
many made requests to visit the Roänn colony on Earth any more. Fewer still were granted permission to land,
but the two Sirenes’ request had been so unusual that it intrigued the Roänn
even after the Ish Marak guardians above denied them access. The young ones’ bravery in defying the
sentinels could not go unrewarded. The
Roänn would grant what they had asked.
Beach-Comber
guided the sorrowful young man to the top of the hill. At the summit, two of the trees stepped aside
and Ck'Luō gasped in wonder.
For
there stood Iro. Her tail was a bandaged
nub, her face and arms bore fresh cuts, there was a hole in her dorsal fin, and
she leaned on a crutch for support, but there she was. She smiled.
“The
light that shimmers on water, huh?”
Ck'Luō
blushed. Beach-Comber watched bemused as
disbelief and joy battled on the boy’s face.
At last, the youth ran to his companion on exhausted legs, took her in
his arms, and kissed her in the setting sunlight.
Beach-Comber
managed a chuckle. “That part comes at
the end, I think.” The two Sirene, both
embarrassed now, stepped away from each other while another Roänn, the eldest
of the colony, addressed them in quiet solemnity.
“Let
me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments,” he began.
It
was a ceremony as old as Humanity, as old as time. The words were fluid and had changed over the
eons with the shifting of oceans and the passing of stars. The intent was always the same: a binding of
hearts and a sharing of souls.
The
elder Roänn spoke of commitment and honesty, of suffering and joy, in sickness
and in health, until the two were parted and reunited in eternity. At the end, he asked a question.
They
each answered in turn, “I do.”
This story is copyright 2010 Jared Millet. It was originally published in
Shelter of Daylight Vol. 3 from Sam's Dot Publishing.
