Collected short fiction, p.781
Collected Short Fiction, page 781
His name had been Sea Searcher once, but he was only Watcher now. Good for nothing else. He had lain here too long, watching for the blackwings, starved and desperate since the long freeze closed their fishing grounds. He had dived again and again to warn his mate when they were diving at, the raft. She was Wave Rider; her name had come down from long ago, when waves still ran on liquid seas.
He watched too, and hopefully, for a skyler returning. Born in the sea, his people lived here through the first stage of life. The change gave them wings to reach the Shadowland. New skylers always promised to come back with lifestones for those they left behind, but nobody had ever returned with one for him. Now that his own time for change had passed, his desperate hopes were for Wave Rider and their son.
Desperate because their time was running out. She had gone down for fish, but the long freeze had killed most of the fish. The air-gaspers had vanished with the open water. The deep-swimming silverfins had grown rare and wary. Far Diver had always gone deeper to dig in the sea mud. He searched for the bones of some unlucky skyler who had drowned with a lifestone on him.
“Watcher! A gift from the Eternals!”
Wave Rider’s head had broken out of the water. Scrambling to help her up the ramp, he ached with pity for her. The beauty he had always loved still glowed in the fine bones of her face and the light, of her unshielded eyes. Her velvet fur was still dark and sleek, but he felt her bare ribs when she nestled against him. The best fisher of the three, she had shared too much of her catches with their son.
“Silverfins!” Elation lifted her voice. “I thought the last of them were gone, but I caught these inside the reef. One sonic shot got them all.” Anxiously, she peered around the raft. “Far Diver? Isn’t he back?”
“Not yet. He stays too deep and too long.”
He drew her closer, listening to the slow rush-and-sigh, rush-and-sigh of the air the dive had starved her for. Proudly, when she had recovered enough, she spilled three small fish from her pouch.
“The Eternals!” Her crest bent, in reverence. “They saw our need, and found a fish for each.”
She laid the largest fish under the perch to keep cold for Far Diver.
“Our splendid son.” She gave Watcher the middle fish, and kept the smallest for herself. “A gift of the Eternals, yet he has always hurt my heart. Too proud of his endurance when he was young, too daring in his ventures out under the ice, always probing for some forgotten wreck sunk too deep for salvage. So unhappy now, because he has never found a mate.”
“Yet always hopeful,” he tried to cheer her.
“He never will,” she muttered bitterly. “Because none is left for him to find.”
“Nobody, perhaps, here in the sea. What he wants is a lifestone, and his chance to reach the Shadowland.”
“I remember.” Her eye shields closed, she relaxed against him. “Remember when he saw the lifestone your father found. He was still a tadpole then, no longer than my flipper, but the stone fascinated him. He had to touch it, and he asked what it was.
“A second brain, your father told him, that would wake his body for life in the air. Your father told how he had found it in the wreck of a skyler ship that went down when skylers still sailed the seas. He wanted to know how the skylers made the stones. Grew them, your father said. Grew them out of their skulls in the third stage of their lives.
“He listened to all that with his eye shields wide. Wider when he watched your father struggle out of his own sea skin. He made me hold him high to let him watch your father fly away across the ice toward Skygate and the Shadowland.
“ ‘I’ll learn to dive the way he did,’ he told me. ‘I’ll swim out under the ice till I can find my own lifestone and follow him to the Shadowland.’ ”
“So long ago.” A wistful sadness edged her voice. “Just a tadpole then, but he never forgot. He was always diving deeper than anybody else. Digging up the sea mud as soon as he could reach it. Searching the rotten hulks of buried ships for lifestones he has never found—and never will.”
Lying huddled against him, shivering a little from the frigid air she had been gasping, she raised her shields again to sweep the sky from the blood-stained east to the stars over Skygate in the western dusk.
“Never will,” she murmured again. “Because our world is dying. I think we three are the last still in the sea. As for the skylers—” Her crest quivered with doubt. “I’ve watched friends change since I was a child, and listened to their promises. Nobody has ever come back. Not even your father.”
“A hard time.” He tipped his head toward the heatless sun. “A cold time. A hungry time. But Far Diver has the heart we’ve lost. The long freeze may never end, but he’ll keep on pushing farther, staying longer, searching deep, till he finds his lifestone.”
“I hope.” She sighed. “I try to hope.” ramp. Rider moved to help, but he needed no help. Climbing the ramp before she could reach him, he held up his fin flexed around the bright black prism.
“Take it, Mot her. Keep it safe.”
He sank flat on the raft, drawing long gasps of air and shivering from its bitter chill.
“You distressed us,” she told him when he had revived enough to lift his head. “You were down so long.”
“The wreck I found.” He spoke between the gasps. “A long way out. Too far for me to get there again. Sunk very long ago. Our world different then. Nothing is left of the craft itself. All I found was cargo that couldn’t decay. Glass, porcelain, gold.”
He dropped flat again, and she waited to let him breathe.
“Tell us,” she urged when his shields came open. “About the stone.”
“Those other relics first.” With an affectionate bow of his crest he reached to touch them both. “Wonderful porcelains. Paintings on them showed people without wings. Living on land that had no ice. Scattered with queer green towers. Trees, I think, that grew in Shadowland before it was Shadowland. The sun was larger in the paintings, and brighter. Sometimes low, sometimes high. I think because the world was still turning.”
“The lifestone?” she asked again.
“I dug there in the mud. Searched and dug again till my light began to dim. Found no bones, no stone. Dug till I was dead for air. Had to give up. Swimming back, I came on something I never expected. Bones scattered over a high coral knob. Bones of a blackwing, the skull and the claws and a dagger-fanged jaw. And a skyler’s skeleton.”
“The stone?”
He reached his fin for it, and offered it to Watcher.
“Father, for you.”
Watcher’s shields quivered and closed with emotion. He blinked till vision came back, but a proud admiration dazzled him again when he looked at his son. Handsome as always, Far Diver was drawn lean from hard toil and long hunger, but still muscular and fit, strong enough to dive again.
Young and fit enough to change.
“A noble offering.” Crest bent deep, he waved the stone away. “A gift to earn you the light of the Eternals.” It would prove devotion, if that needed proof. It never did. “But I have lived long beyond the stage for change. Give the stone to your mother.”
Far Diver offered it, to her.
“For you, my loving mother, if my father wishes.”
With no move to take it, she wrapped them both in her swimming fins.
“My good . . . good son.” She was shaken with emotion, her voice a broken wheeze. “You offer more than I can take. The stone is your own life. Your chance for Shadowland. I love you for the offering, more than I ever did. But I can’t leave your father here to die alone. The stone is yours. You must use it while you have the strength to change.”
Shadowland will be your greatest gift to us. The will of the Eternals.”
“I will come back,” he said. “I promise that.”
He ate the fish they had saved for him. Still restoring himself, he lay a long time asleep in the sun’s dim red glow. Once his swim fins flapped, and he gasped as if after another dive. Relaxed again for a time, he cried out as if in sudden pain.
“He’s dreaming,” Rider said. “Waking.”
He lay quietly again, however, and dreamed again before he raised his head.
“Strange dreams,” he told them. “Dreams of my own transformation. I thought, the time was long ago, long before the ice closed the way to Skygate. My friends made a feast; for me when my change time had come. I left them at, sunset, to swim to Skygate and crawl up the ramp. The mosaics on the wall prepared me for the transformation. Free of my sea skin, I learned to use my wings and flew west toward Shadowland.
“The world still turned, though slowly. The sun was larger then, hotter. It, climbed as I flew, stood at noon before I reached the continent. The long night had buried it with snow, but, except in the high mountains most, of that, was gone. Green forests covered most, of the great central valley. Farmlands surrounded high-walled towns.
“I was tired by then, famished. I came down in the middle of a town. The skylers welcomed me, begging for news of their seaside families and friends. I stayed there a long time, learning the ways of the green side, working on farms to pay for my keep.
“The skylers seemed prosperous and happy, but they had good reason for the walls. Their enemies are the flying monsters we call blackwings. The blackwings are form-changers, as we are, with two stages of life. The young are wingless wormlike things with savage jaws and voracious appetites. They are hatched in the night. When day comes, they swarm over the land, devouring everything.
“The skylers were already getting their crops inside the wall. They had need for haste, because the larval monsters, the killer-crawlers, came swarming in soon after I arrived. They ate the stubble in the fields to bare clay, ate the leaves off the trees, killed and at every animal they could surround, finally attacked one another.
“They terrified me, but the skylers have learned to survive. The towns are well defended, and the cold nights kill any crawlers that, fail to grow wings in time to reach the sea before darkness falls. I volunteered to join the soldiers on the walls. They told me I was needed more at. Skyhold.
“That’s their great fortress city. It stands on a high mountain ridge at the center of the continent. High mountains and higher walls defend it. Many of its levels are carved deep into the granite below, and its towers are so tall the ice can never cover them. The crawlers are no threat to it; they don’t, climb so high or get so far from the sea. Skyhold was planned to stand against greater dangers, designed to keep the race alive forever, even after the sun has cooled to extinction and death has claimed the planet.
“A hundred generations of workers have been toiling to complete it. Joining them, I ran a machine that nullified gravity, I never learned how. Using it, I could lift, enormous masses of stone from the quarries. But not to the wall. Common granite was too fragile for Skyhold. It. had to be powdered, mixed with other materials, molded finally into gigantic blocks of something harder than diamond and tougher than any metal.
“Working there all the rest of the day, I learned to be a skyler. I made good friends, and met Lifestar. We expected our love to last forever; we hoped in fact that, skyler science could give us actual immortality, perhaps elsewhere in the universe. Our dying sun has no other planets, but the skylers were hoping to reach some kinder world. They had built an interstellar ship, gravity-driven.
“We volunteered to go on its first, flight, Accepted for the crew, we went aboard together. The ship lifted. The planet fell away and vanished. We were safely out in space, with stars blazing all around us, when I woke. My heart, still aches from the pain of that bitter instant when I knew that my beloved Lifestar had been only a dream, now lost, forever.”
Far Diver stopped with a dismal sigh, his crest drooping.
“A PROPHETIC DREAM, I THINK,” WATCHER SAID. “THERE IS A TRADItion of very vivid dreams which seem to come from lifestones and foretell the future.”
“It was vivid enough.” Diver nodded forlornly, turning to his mother. “Lifestar was real and dear as you are.”
“We heard you cry out,” she told him. “A cry of pain.”
“Pain sharp enough, when I knew she was gone.” His eye shields closed for a moment, and his swim fins shivered. “But there was a second dream that hit me just as hard.”
He lay silent, remembering.
“It began right here, when I dived off the raft this last time. I thought I’d found that wreck again. The gold and glass and porcelain. Again, no bones. Out of breath and rising, I found the skeletons on that coral knob. The skyler’s and the blackwing’s—but this time I found an anklet, around the skyler’s shin bone. I knew the anklet. A guardian at Skygate had given it to me. I thought the skeleton had been my own.”
“A dreadful dream.” Rider’s fin caressed him. “We should have waked you.”
“I slept on through another dream. Prophetic?” His eye shields blinked at. Watcher. “I hope I never know. Again the time was far past. The planet still turned, but even more slowly. Those ragged black scabs had covered most of the sun. The seas were already freezing, and the few of us still left had to spend the endless nights breaking the ice from the holes where we came up to breathe.
“We were always hungry, with most of the fish already gone. I was diving with three friends, looking for lifestones, hoping for our chance to reach the green side of the old epics. We found a stone. I won the game we played for it. The losers lifted me on an ice floe for the transformation, and wished me the light of the Eternals.
“High overhead when I left, the black-scabbed sun sank lower as I went west, till I was flying into freezing twilight. The long day had thawed much of the sea ice, but, the world seemed empty of life. No blackwings rose to at tack me; perhaps they were gone, with no prey left.
“No longer the green side, the great continent was buried with snow. No skylers rose to welcome me. The valley cities had vanished, with the killer-crawlers that once swarmed around them. The cold grew savage as I pushed on. At bust, flying under brilliant stars, I came to Skyhold.
“The mythic fortress of the skylers. It stands on high mountains. Its walls have no gates. They rise out of the glaciers, so tall the air was too thin for my wings before I got over them. The towel’s inside are dead black stone, higher than the wall, with steep-pitched roofs to shed the snows. Sealed against time and change, they have no doors, no windows. I saw no lights, no motion, not even a balcony where I could rest.
“I flew on and found no skylers anywhere. Nothing alive, till I was back above this half-thawed sea and saw a blackwing diving after me. Drawn with famine, it flew so clumsily that I might have escaped if I hadn’t been so cold. It caught me, with no strength to carry me. We went down together.”
FAR DIVER HAD LAIN FLAT ON THE RAFT AS HE SPOKE, EYE SHIELDS nearly closed. Moving now, he raised his head to stare silently out across the empty ice field under the dim crimson sun.
“Frightening dreams.” His mother’s crest quivered. “I don’t understand them.”
“Memories?” Watcher asked. “Memories of skylers who had worn the stone before you found it?”
“Perhaps. Perhaps that’s why they seemed so real.”
“Do they trouble you?” Rider asked him. “About your own change?” He turned to gaze at far-off Skygate and the faint stars above it. “No matter.” His lean shoulders lifted. “We’ve no future here. Nor anywhere, unless I find our people still surviving. It hurts to leave you, but I must go.”
He embraced them both. They drew aside to watch him burst free of his sea skin and climb to the perch. The gauze of his spreading wings dried swiftly in the bitter air, and Rider shuddered when the red sun touched them with the color of blood. Wavering a little at first, he circled close above them, calling another promise to return, and flew off to vanish among the faint stars in the dusk-dark wrest.
“A good son,” she murmured. “He will be back.”
“I hope,” Watcher said. “With a lifestone for you.”
With nothing else to live for, they waited for him. Although Watcher denied that he was hungry, Rider dived again for silverfins. She came back with none, so weak with long starvation that he had to help her back to the ramp.
“My last dive,” she whispered when she could. “No matter anyhow. The silverfins are gone.”
She saw him moving toward the ramp.
“Don’t go down!” she told him. “You’ve no more strength than I do.”
“Just for mudworms,” he told her. “They’re full of grit, and they taste like mud, but they can give us strength.”
He dived to search the mud banks toward the coast and found none of the tiny pits that marked mudworm siphons. Like the air gaspers and the silverfins, they were gone. He made it back to the raft, but his leap for the ramp fell short.
“Diver!” Rider called when she saw him, vibrant with joy. “He’s back! I see him over Skygate.”
She helped him on the ramp, and he saw their son returning, flying low above the far black block of Skygate, his wings a Heck of crimson in the sunlight.
“Our magnificent son!” Rider was radiant. “Perhaps with good news for us.”
Or perhaps himself in trouble, Watcher thought. Flying too low and too slow, laboring to stay aloft. He said nothing to dim her delight, but her sudden sobbing cry was cruder than the cold.
“No! No! Pray the Eternals to save him.”
The blackwing dived from high behind him, a thin black arrow in the somber dusk. Too late, too feebly, he swerved to evade it. Its talons caught his right wing. They struggled, tumbling in the air.
“A clumsy strike,” he whispered. “It must be weak with hunger. I think he has a chance.”
Their bodies separated, but his wing was mangled. Side by side, they fell to the ice.
“That dream.” He shivered. “His dream of the skeletons on the coral knob. It was prophetic. The stone was warning him.”
