World of Water Read online

“Don’t get me wrong, I’m not ungrateful. But even if the Tritonians in the cuttlefish sub weren’t going to listen to reason, the ones in the manta sub would have. They weren’t like the other lot. They were a different kettle of fish – wait, is that racist?”

  “Different? In what way?”

  Dev shrugged noncommittally. “Less radical, I suppose. Moderate. I don’t know for sure, but I’m wondering if not all Tritonians are the same. There are factions. Different degrees of resentment. They’re not all fanatical human-haters.”

  “You’re saying there are good Tritonians as well as bad ones?”

  “Seems so.”

  “Well, duh,” said Sigursdottir, rolling her eyes. “Of course. We’d be nuts if we thought every last one of them was a ruthless revolutionary. That would be racist. Trouble is, in the midst of a conflict situation you can’t necessarily tell the sheep from the goats and you don’t have time to make distinctions. You have to assume every indigene is an enemy combatant and act accordingly. Otherwise you might make a mistake – the sort of mistake you don’t get the chance to learn from.”

  “I don’t disagree with that,” Dev said. “But if you want to create more of those ruthless revolutionaries, lobbing torpedoes indiscriminately at friendlies and hostiles alike is a good way of doing it. Friendlies can turn into unfriendlies fairly quickly.”

  “Yes, well, thanks for the advice, Harmer, and fuck you. I could have left you down there. I could have told Reyes and Cully to stay put on the Winterbrook and not risk their necks to save yours. If I didn’t have my orders, I probably would have. For you to stand here and lecture me on how to deal with insurgents – that’s the icing on the turd. I’ve been stationed on Triton for three long years. I know how shit goes down on this planet. You don’t come waltzing in out of nowhere and tell me how to do my job. You don’t have that right.”

  There were witnesses to this exchange, which took place on the Admiral Winterbrook’s bridge. Corporal Milgrom was there, and so was Gunnery Sergeant Jiang, a woman so petite that next to the hulking Milgrom she looked like a schoolgirl. Even the diminutive Sigursdottir stood a head taller than her. Jiang’s size spoke of an upbringing on one of the ergonomically compact Sino-Nipponese asteroid collectives. No one was that short except by design.

  Milgrom, for her part, stood menacingly at Sigursdottir’s shoulder to let Dev know that everything her commanding officer said, she backed to the hilt – the hilt of the shimmerknife she was lovingly fondling. Jiang outranked Milgrom and was the second most senior Marine on board, but it was clear which of them regarded herself as Sigursdottir’s XO and adjutant.

  Dev was annoyed that the Admiral Winterbrook had attacked the manta sub, but he knew that antagonising Sigursdottir any further would be counterproductive. The Marines were tolerating him at best. It would be pointless to give them a reason to actively hate him.

  “Look, all right,” he said. “What’s done is done. I don’t want to get into politics or counterinsurgency tactics or any of that. Handling the Tritonians, that’s your concern. Mine is trying to establish how far Polis Plus is involved in their activities, if at all. So you do your thing, I’ll do my thing, and let’s somehow meet in the middle. Okay?”

  Sigursdottir was somewhat mollified, but evidently couldn’t let him off in front of her subordinates. She said, “Yeah, well, stop behaving like a prize chump and that should be possible. By the way, your nose is bleeding.”

  “Shit.” Dev put a hand to his face and came away with a glistening palmful of blood. Sigursdottir sent Milgrom to fetch a first aid kit, and shortly Dev had a coagulant-impregnated absorption pad pressed to his nose.

  “Got a sanitary napkin if you’d prefer,” Milgrom said with a grin.

  “This’ll do fine, thanks.”

  “Must’ve been the torpedo,” said Sigursdottir. “Shockwave burst your sinuses.”

  “Must have been. Hold on a second. Call coming in.”

  Harmer? Handler. What’s up? I got your message, and when I came out on deck, there was a massive ship sinking and the Admiral Winterbrook firing torpedoes left, right and centre. I leave you alone for a few hours...

  Yeah, you missed some big fun, Manhandler. I’ll fill you in when I come back over. I’m probably going to need more of your magic medicine, too. I’ve started getting nosebleeds.

  That’s a bad sign.

  No, really?

  “I should be getting back to the jetboat,” Dev said to Sigursdottir. “Handler’s giving me grief.”

  “Off you go, then,” said Sigursdottir. “Missing you already.”

  “Yeah,” said Milgrom, wiping away an imaginary tear. “Don’t be a stranger, you hear?”

  18

  THE TWO BOATS resumed their journey south. Next on their itinerary was a refuelling stop at the township of Llyr, some 300 kilometres away on the fringes of the Tropics of Lei Gong.

  After Dev had brought Handler up to speed on recent events, he asked him about the symbol the Tritonians had made out of the wreckage of the harpoon cannon.

  Rather than describe it verbally, he drew a simple picture using his commplant’s sketch function and beamed it to Handler:

  “Ring any bells?”

  Handler sucked his teeth. “Yes. I’ve seen this once or twice before.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “It’s religious. Iconography.”

  “Representing...?”

  “Ah, that’s just it. There isn’t much data to go on, I’m afraid. I’ve done a correspondence course in Tritonian anthropology. It’s one of the requirements for the job. But if I tell you that the course lasted just a couple of hours, it should give you an idea how much we know about these people’s behavioural patterns and belief systems.”

  “Not a lot.”

  “Next to nothing. They’re a hard race to study, for the obvious reasons. They live underwater and communicate using a visual language which is difficult to converse in for anyone who isn’t modified the way you and I are. There aren’t many xeno-anthropologists who are prepared to have their DNA rearranged so drastically. The quest for knowledge and academic advancement has its limits, it seems. In fact, only one guy has ever made it all the way out here to learn about Tritonian society, and he didn’t bother with altering himself.”

  “What did he do instead?”

  “Tried artificial solutions,” said Handler. “Professor Robert Adams, his name was. Arrived here in ’65, couple of years after the first wave of settlers. He used scuba gear, deep-dive suits, and a specially-made helmet fitted with an LED mesh to mimic photophores, run by a heuristic translation program.”

  “You say ‘tried.’”

  Handler gave a wry smile. “It was a noble effort. He lasted less than a month. Software, no matter how sophisticated, can’t hope to pick up a language that’s emotion-based.”

  “Way I see it, it’s as close to telepathy as anything.”

  “That’s it. Prof Adams’s program was applying algorithms to patterns that defy mathematical analysis. The software could copy the Tritonians’ light patterns but not comprehend them. It couldn’t correlate their meanings and build a dictionary. Essentially, Adams was a parrot, echoing what was said to him without knowing what he was saying. To the Tritonians it must have come across as a joke. Or worse.”

  “An insult.”

  “Which,” said Handler, nodding, “may be why one of them took umbrage and ran him through with a spear. Adams said the wrong thing by accident, or else the Tritonian just couldn’t bear the sight of this blank mechanical face shovelling out phrases at random. It offended his sensibilities.”

  “Like the Uncanny Valley.”

  “Right. Just as human forms inhabited by Plussers seem ‘off’ to us, Adams seemed ‘off’ to the Tritonians.”

  “And he got stabbed for it.”

  “Near fatally. He recovered, but since then no one else has been very keen to conduct research into this field, surprise, surprise. Whatever we know about
Tritonians has come from envoys like me engaging with them on a day-to-day basis, gleaning whatever we can as we go along – snippets here and there that build into a picture, like a mosaic.”

  “And speaking of pictures...”

  “Yes.” Handler reviewed the image Dev had sketched. “What you have there is something called either the Ice King or the God Beneath the Sea. Take your pick. The names are the closest approximations we can manage.”

  “And who or what is the Ice King?”

  “That’s the big question, isn’t it? Far as we can gather, it’s both a creation myth and some kind of apocalypse myth. The Ice King is an ancient, all-powerful god. Many millions of years ago he ruled the planet, his frozen domain. But it was just him and a few animals for company, and he was bored and lonely. So, he melted the ice, turning it to water and thus creating the world as we know it today. In that way he made a home for people – Tritonians – to live and flourish in.”

  “But if it used to be ice and he’s an Ice King...”

  “Exactly. It was an act of supreme self-sacrifice. He couldn’t live here himself anymore. So he disappeared into the oceans, and since that time he’s been asleep somewhere, lying dormant.”

  “Right, and don’t tell me, but when the time comes, when it’s the end of days, he’ll awaken from his slumber and rise again to destroy everything.”

  “Something along those lines,” said Handler. “There will come a time when the world is overrun with sinners and unbelievers, and that’s when the Ice King will return, to wreak chaos and devastation and eliminate all who do not follow his ways. The seas will run red with blood. Only the faithful, his loyal acolytes, will survive.”

  “Nice. So we have a religious sect on Triton who believe the Ice King, the God Beneath the Sea, is due a second coming any day now, and the righteous will be spared while the infidels will all die horribly.”

  “It seems some religious tropes are universal.”

  “And these fanatics are the ones spearheading the attacks on settlers. They count humans among the heathen.”

  “The symbol appears to confirm it. There was a rumour going round that it had been found at the scene of at least one other attack, daubed on a wall in the victim’s blood. But that was only hearsay, so I didn’t pay it much attention. No hard evidence, pictorial or otherwise.”

  “Well, we’ve got it now,” said Dev. “Sigursdottir and I both saw it, plain as day. What I can’t figure out is what the symbol’s meant to represent.”

  “Beats me too. Is that curve the sky? The firmament?”

  “Maybe the circles are Triton’s moons.”

  “What does that make the forked lines, though? Lightning?”

  “Or it might be some sort of pictogram. A hieroglyph?”

  “It might be, if the Tritonians had a written language, which they don’t. Communication is always done face-to-face with them. Everything is visual and personal. They couldn’t write anything down because it would become meaningless when detached from its emotional content. It would become verbal garbage, like Professor Adams’s LEDs.”

  “Yeah, I can see that. Also, how would you write in moving lights? What medium could you use?”

  “I’m sure the Tritonians could figure that out if they wanted to. A very simple symbol is probably the closest they get to representing an abstract concept in concrete form. Aside from that, they just light-speak to one another. In the same way, the story of the Ice King has never been formally enshrined. It’s a saga, a tale told by poets and parents, passed on from one generation to the next. Oral tradition.”

  “I’ve seen another symbol,” Dev said. “A cutaway of a nautilus shell.”

  “Where?”

  “On a Tritonian. Remember yesterday? When you nearly got me eaten by the thalassoraptor?”

  “That wasn’t my fault!” Handler protested hotly.

  “I know, I’m kidding. But one of the Tritonians there had the nautilus design on her chest. Ritually scarred into her skin.”

  Dev refrained from mentioning that he had seen the same design – the same Tritonian – again today, just now. If, as seemed to be the case, the two indigenes at Tangaroa had followed the Reckless Abandon all this way, why? What were they after? He could think of no answer that wasn’t worrisome, and he felt Handler needn’t know about it just yet. The straight-laced, high-strung ISS liaison had enough on his plate already.

  Besides, it might be nothing. Coincidence. A false alarm.

  “Ah, the nautilus,” Handler said. “It’s a reasonably commonplace motif. I’ve seen it a few times when I’ve been interfacing with the locals. I’ve seen other designs as well – fish skeletons, a redback, something that looks a bit like an octopus. They could just be decoration, but if you ask me, they may well signify familial or tribal affiliation.”

  “Like wearing clan tartan.”

  “Yes, or else denote social rank and status, like the Maoris’ moko tattoos.”

  “Or membership of a gang. They could even be prison tats, I suppose. What if an octopus represents an eight-year jail stretch for a Tritonian criminal?”

  “An intriguing proposition.”

  “I’m joking, Manhandler. Well, sort of. Half joking.”

  “It makes as much sense as any other theory. Perhaps Tritonian scarification is there to show that you’re a bad guy, a hard case, not to be messed with. Someone could put together an amazing doctoral thesis on this topic, couldn’t they?”

  “If only there was a xeno-anthropologist out there with the balls to become a fish-man and find out.”

  “I wouldn’t recommend it,” said Handler. “I can’t remember much about the procedure except that it felt weird and really, really hurt. Especially when my gills broke through.”

  Dev gave a sharp intake of breath, not in sympathy but in actual pain.

  “Are you all right?” Handler asked.

  “No.”

  Tiny electric shocks had started shooting down into Dev’s jawbone from his lower teeth at the back. He touched the side of his face, probing. He was gentle as anything, hardly exerting any pressure with his hand, but all at once, a molar came free from its gum bed.

  He plucked it from his mouth with thumb and forefinger. The tooth had fallen out whole, roots and all. It sat in his palm, smeared in blood and looking larger than it had any right to be.

  Handler winced. “Ouch.”

  Dev inspected the gap in his gum with the tip of his tongue. It felt huge, a bottomless pit. Suddenly, spontaneously, the adjacent molar also fell out. He spat it onto the deck, along with more blood.

  “Oh, this fucking sucks,” he said. “First nosebleeds. Now I’m losing teeth. What next, my gonads?”

  “Ten minutes after I gave you a shot, too.”

  Dev consulted his countdown timer.

  52:14:39

  “Is there anything else we can do to slow down the whole falling-to-bits thing?” he said.

  “Not that I’m aware of. It’s not as if we can order you up another host form and transfer you across into that. Not in time, at any rate. We don’t have a growth vat of our own on Triton.”

  “Not considered important enough, huh?”

  “We’re a lesser ISS outpost,” Handler admitted. “Not fully equipped. The body you’re in was supplied by the central hub and delivered weeks ago. It’s been sitting in a stasis solution ever since. We’d have to wait several more weeks before we could get hold of a replacement.”

  “Then I’ll just have to muddle along with what I’ve got, won’t I?”

  “Afraid so.”

  19

  LLYR WAS MUCH larger than Tangaroa, a manmade archipelago covering some five square kilometres. This far south the air was noticeably warmer and moister, and large grey clouds boiled on the horizon. They had crossed the 23rd parallel and were officially in the tropics.

  The skin-prickling which Dev had felt earlier in the day returned with a vengeance. As Handler guided the Reckless Abandon into a berth b
eside the Admiral Winterbrook at Llyr’s main marina, Dev rubbed his bare forearms, and eventually started scratching. He stopped when he realised that his fingernails were raising red welts.

  “Looks like you’re developing a reaction to heat,” Handler said. “Hives. Another sign that your host form’s malfunctioning – your immune system’s going into overdrive.”

  “Any suggestions for remedies, Panhandler?”

  “I thought I was Manhandler.”

  “I’m trying names out for size.”

  “Well, for what it’s worth, I prefer Manhandler. And my suggestion is, try a dip in the water.”

  Needing no further invitation, Dev leapt off the jetboat. The water was lukewarm but cooler than the air, blissfully so. He luxuriated in its tepid embrace, performing slow somersaults and barrel rolls.

  A tiny fish popped up in front of his nose. It was as long and thin as a pencil, with a pair of pea-sized eyes perched at the front, quite out of proportion with the rest of it. The eyes made the fish look goofy and comical, and Dev couldn’t help but smile.

  The fish goggled at him inquisitively. Dev held up a finger, and the creature scooted backwards with wafts of fan-shaped gossamer fins. Then timidly, inch by inch, it crept forward again.

  Dev waggled his finger, and the fish mirrored the action, flexing its body. He wondered if it thought his finger was a prospective mate that could be seduced with a few neat dance moves.

  You’re barking up the wrong tree there, my friend, he wanted to tell it.

  Abruptly, a dozen identical fish appeared alongside the first as if answering some invisible summons. They all seemed fascinated by his finger, like professors investigating some new scientific phenomenon. They converged on its tip, eyeing it beadily.

  Then there was a whole shoal of them, more than Dev could count. They filled his field of vision, a thousand sinuous silver ingots.

  The frontmost of them – it may have been the original one, but with so many lookalikes to choose from Dev had lost track – nudged right up to his finger. Its soft lips opened and closed a few times. It looked like a reluctant Romeo, trying to pluck up the nerve to go in for the kiss.