Jeffrey A. Carver - Seas of Ernathe

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Seas of Ernathe by Jeffrey

Carver

INTRODUCTION

There are probably more good new writers in the science fiction field

today than at any time in the history of the genre. I'm not completely sure

why this should be, though obviously such factors as the burgeoning

quality and popularity of science fiction have a lot to do with it: not only

are there more people reading sf today (and hence becoming interested in

writing it), but the stories they're reading must be providing higher

standards at which to aim than did such stories of earlier eras as, say,

Captain Future and the Space Emperor.

Whatever the reason, I find that I get a lot of manuscripts from new

writers that would make the established professionals of science fiction's

pulp era flush green with envy. And whenever I get a manuscript that

shows so much talent, whether or not I feel I can buy it for one of my

anthologies, I try to let the writer know I appreciate what he or she has

done, and I ask for more stories.

Jeffrey Carver was one of these writers: a couple of years ago I received

two stories from him that raised my eyebrows. Neither struck me as

completely successful, but as I read them I became intensely aware that I

was meeting a writer of real talent; and when I regretfully returned the

manuscripts I said, "What I like in these stories are your descriptive

powers, which are considerable; I can see and feel these scenes." I asked

where he'd sold stories so far, and was surprised to get a letter in return

saying that he was just beginning and hadn't sold anything yet.

Since then Jeff Carver has sold articles and stories to such markets as

Fiction Magazine and Galaxy; and now he's written a full-length novel

that fulfills all the promise of his early stories, and then some.

Seas of Ernathe shows Carver's descriptive powers at their best: he

brings the people and places of an alien world to life on the page and

presents us with a well-thought-out alien society in conflict with visitors

from Earth. He has an engrossing story to tell, too.

Science fiction is a strangely hybrid field of writing, as its very name

suggests. Science: rationality, logic, the belief that all of reality can be

understood in these terms. Fiction: imagination, wonder, the realization

that strange things will happen in an infinite universe.

If we want to, we can polarize sf writers according to which end of the

description their works usually fit. Heinlein, Asimov, Clement and Clarke

are at home in the rationalists' camp; at the other end are people like

Vance, Brackett, Zelazny and Norton. Talented writers all—and popular

ones, too.

I think Jeffrey Carver's name will soon take its place among the latter

group of writers: he imagines wonders, and allows us to share his vision.

Seas of Ernathe is one such vision, and I think you'll enjoy it

Terry Carr

CHAPTER ONE

The starship labored in the uncertain currents of flux-space. Its course

took it through unknown realms, bypassing the emptiness between the

stars, until, in nearing the end of its journey, Warmstorm had effectively

dodged seventy-four light-years of normal-space distance from the Cluster

Central Worlds. But the journey, if quick by the standards of interstellar

distances, was perilously draining. Warmstorm had strained to the limits

of its endurance by the time, finally, that it wrenched free of the queer

existence of flux-space and leaped, like a terrified fish bursting over a

dam, into normal space.

A sculpted drop of quicksilver, Warmstorm hurtled on through the

dark of space toward the golden sun Lambern and its second planet,

Ernathe, where a troubled colony awaited assistance. From the darkened

control pit, communication channels grumbled forthrightly between

starship and colony as the ship decelerated toward orbit. With due

concern for identification, the colony demanded and received clearance

codes; then Warmstorm's master was advised that planetary defenses had

been neutralized and that the ship was free, to approach. Warmstorm

slowed and orbited.

Ernathe turned slowly on the control pit viewscreens: a misty planet, a

world of spiderweb land masses, glistening clouds and green and blue

seas. Ernathe the sea-planet. Somewhere in the clouds and the maze,

tracked by signal but lost to the eye, were the tiny twin settlements,

Lambrose and Lernick. They were the only human claim to this world but

an important claim, indeed, to warrant a planetary mission from the busy

Central Worlds.

Silent in the gloom of the control pit, Pilot Second Seth Perland

monitored his screens and made ready to assist the Pilot First as the latter

began the approach and descent sequence. Noting a red spark crossing his

mainscreen, the Pilot Second signaled the Captain to advise him of

imminent danger—and then allowed himself a breath of astonishment.

Warmstorm had been fired upon. A pulse-packet attack burst,

apparently from the colony, was streaking out of the atmosphere toward

the starship.

The Captain's voice murmured in his earset; and the Pilot Second

touched two parted fingers to two plates on the control panel.

The starship's weapons-fire streamed sparkling across the emptiness of

space and rained lazily into the closing pulse-packet pinwheel. Strange,

the Pilot Second thought, that if they're going to attack at all they should

launch only a single burst. He watched the deadly play on his screen and

remained ready to double his fire if necessary. …

The pinwheel brightened, absorbing the defensive fire. It overloaded

white… blue… pulsing indigo… then flared into a harmless nova and faded

silently into space.

The danger had passed, with scarcely a word spoken aboard ship.

While Warmstorm hovered, though, the communication channels came

alive. Pilot Second Perland keyed in and listened. "Ernathe, explain,

explain!" The Captain himself came on the circuit: "You will tell us,

Ernathe, what in hell is going on!"—and the only answers were more

confusion and consternation. The officers held the ship at battle

readiness—prepared, if necessary, for pinpoint bombardment. Did an

enemy hold the colony?

"Please hold, Warmstorm, please hold! We are trying to get you an

explanation, we do not know why you were fired upon!" The explanation,

when it came, was no explanation at all. It had been an accident, a

mortifying fluke—a prank, the Ernathene operator stammered, on the

part of a native life form. "We do, repeat do have full control over systems

again. All weaponry has, ah, been disconnected from power. You are

cleared, repeat cleared to land!"

The Pilot Second shook his head in disbelief—anger was impossible,

that would imply belief—and waited while the Captain presumably mulled

the situation over. He merely shrugged to himself when the order was

given to resume the landing approach, with all weapons at ready.

Its journey nearing an end, the starship flashed gleaming through the

planet's atmosphere, over seas glowing in the sun, and down finally to an

uneventful landing on the Lambrose-Lernick spacepad. If there was an

enemy waiting to greet the ship, he remained hidden. Only welcoming and

profusely apologetic Ernathenes came forward to greet the starship crew.

So began Warmstorm's planetary mission on Ernathe.

* * *

Seth Perland sat against the rocks of the seashore and stared

wonderingly out to sea, his thoughts torn between delight at the view laid

open before him and bewilderment over the words he had just heard. He

grunted unbelievingly. "The sea-people simply strolled into the defense

battery when no one was looking, set off an orbit-burst, and wandered

back out? No one watching, when there's a bloody starship landing?" He

looked dubiously at the speaker, and turned his gaze back to the water.

The sea was clear and empty and green, stretching from the ragged shore,

and flat beneath the airborne tufts of sea-mist that glittered in the sun

here and there across the expanse. A few kilometers out, another arm of

the coast jutted across the water to break up the open view.

The sea-people. The "Nale'nid." According to the Ernathenes, they

moved before one's eyes like shadows of fish beneath the water, like the

tricky play of golden Lambern over the sea.

"Well, nevertheless it seems to be true," answered Seth's Ernathene

guide of the last two days. "If we understood how and why the Nale'nid do

what they do, we wouldn't have had to ask the Cluster Council for help. We

were doing quite well without it, until recently."

Racart Bonhof was a small fellow—tan complexioned, with dark

straight hair and intelligent green eyes that flashed brightly at Seth, then

veered away with a far-off, dreamy intensity. He struck Seth as being a

capable man among a capable people; and yet their difficulties here were

so strange as to require help from the Central Worlds. Well, they deserved

it. For Seth himself, it was purely coincidence that he had drawn a

mission to a planet and colony whose activities were so close to his heart.

Seth rocked thoughtfully on the spray-smoothed stone, stretching. He

was a young man, perhaps a year or two older than Racart, but he did not

feel it at the moment; forty-some days in a starship had left him sadly in

need of outdoor exercise, and the several kilometers they had hiked from

the settlement had only begun to loosen his muscles. He rubbed his short

brown hair, smoothed his hands on the cool stone surface, and stared into

the sea. It was misty emerald. The rocky bank was visible beneath the

surface for some distance, sloping steeply, startlingly into the depths.

Nothing moved except a few bits of floating detritus and the translucent

fuzz of the plankton.

"I'm going to have to see these Nale'nid soon," Seth declared. He was

anxious to accomplish something; the Warmstorm mission crew under

Captain Gorges and Planetary Mission Officer Richel Mondreau was still

up in arms about the attack on the ship. But even just seeing the Nale'nid

might be a difficult problem; according to Racart, one saw the sea-people

solely at their own pleasure. Even the Ernathenes could say little about

them with certainty—except that until recently they had been a pleasant

but harmless enigma of this world, rarely appearing at all, and never

entering the human settlements. What had caused the change no one

knew; but whatever the reason it was disastrous to the functioning of the

colony.

Seth wanted, indeed, to see these curious marauders. It could be called

duty—now that he was under the orders, strictly speaking, of the Planetary

Mission rather than Captain Gorges—but it was really a matter of his

natural instinct for a mystery.

Racart slapped his arm. "Let's hike farther up the coast, then. The

chances will be better there." With that, he set off, Seth wincing and

trying to favor both legs at once as he followed. Hiking up the coast was no

simple matter. The terrain was torturous, a mazework of lagoons and

promontories and pools, bridged and framed by rock and weatherworn

krael growth. Everywhere they walked, sea-mist floated just above the

water or land, twinkling like fallen bits of cirrus cloud and making it

impossible to see the overall landscape at a glance. The sea-mist, Racart

had explained, was very common at these southern latitudes, disappearing

and reappearing at a whim or a wrong word. Where there was no mist,

Lambern glowed amber and red upon the rocky network and shone

glassily upon the water. A handful of the brightest stars was visible in the

sky.

Racart led the way with practised ease, but Seth lagged behind

frequently, nervous at treading the slippery rocks. At one point he skidded,

and yelped as one foot landed with a cold splash in a pool. He stepped

back onto dry surface, chagrined; but as he plodded after Racart—who

had grinned but not said a word—he congratulated himself for not having

fallen headlong. Not that he was so sure he wouldn't the next time.

They wound inland, and then back toward the sea, making a gradual

path northward from Lambrose. They stopped again near the end of a

raised promontory, which they reached by scrambling up the side of a

high, steep outcropping. The vantage point was excellent and the view

superb—which Seth appreciated once he had stopped wheezing from the

climb. The mist, for the moment, had disappeared.

"There's the Lambrose pier," Racart said, pointing back southward to

the left. A small hump was visible in the distance, but that was all that

could be seen of the unloading facility for the plankton-harvesters that

operated out of Lambrose. Hidden completely was the processing facility,

where the plankton was processed for food and synthetics, and for the

precious drugbase mynalar. The mynalars, the several derivatives of the

drugbase exported to Rethmere and from there to other worlds of the

Cluster, were the reason for the colony's very existence, and the crux of the

current difficulty. Seth looked, and nodded.

Southward, toward the mouth of the bay, was a large moving dot: a

harvester making its slow way east to the port of Lambrose.

And to the north: Racart said, pointing, "It becomes wilder and hotter

as you move toward the equator. That area was explored at one time, I

suppose, but no one's been far up that way since the early days of the

colony. No mynella. Somewhere in that direction, we think, is the

homeland of the Nale'nid—another reason for our not meddling." Most of

Ernathe, he explained, was unsuited for settlement—too hot and too little

land vegetation. Ernathe was an old world, not nearly as full of life as in

the past; but this was in part due to an unstable, variable sun, whose fits

and flares and fluctuations raked the planet from time to time with

fearsome radiations. The remainder of the planet, largely intertwined

ocean and barren land, belonged to whatever wildlife existed—and to the

Nale'nid.

A pair of skrells squawked high in the air, circling and shouting at one

another as they roamed in search of prey. Shrieking, one following the

other, the winged creatures banked and plummeted like missiles into the

water. A moment later they erupted into the air, one with a mouthful of

wriggling fish and the other with a howl".

"I assume there will be a search for the Nale'nid's home," Racart said

abruptly. "What will happen then?"

Seth gestured ignorance. "I'm not in charge of the mission."

"But an attack on a starship is not apt to go unpunished. Not to

mention the sabotage in Lambrose and Lernick," Racart said, sounding

surprisingly bitter. "Isn't that true?"

Seth showed his surprise. "Probably—but I think you overestimate our

capabilities. The ship's weaponry, which is probably what you are thinking

of, is designed mainly to protect the ship. Besides, are you defending the

Nale'nid now, after they've ruined your entire production? And senselessly

endangered lives?" According to the settlement's reports, not a week had

gone by in the last year without the Nale'nid causing one or another kind

of disruption. However intrigued Seth might be by stories of the

sea-people, he hardly thought they were in need of sympathy. Why should

Racart, whose people had suffered far more, feel differently?

Racart did not face him. "I don't know. I don't know why they left us

alone for so many years, and then suddenly started all this trouble. I just

don't. Dammit, we don't know anything about them—except that this is

really their worlds not ours. We may have upset a natural balance of some

kind."

Seth acknowledged without answering. Racart normally worked aboard

a harvester at sea; whether his ideas were typical or not Seth did not

know, though he would certainly find out. Then, too, Seth had his own

personal interest in seeing the production of mynalar restored—but his

thoughts at the moment were more on the sea-people themselves, the

puzzle. "Perhaps," he said to Racart, for want of an answer. "If you have,

the ecologists haven't noticed, and everyone else is stumped. I guess we'll

have to ask the Nale'nid."

Racart grunted.

Seth knelt and peered cautiously over the edge of the rocks to the water

below. The sea welled beautifully downward to a deepening and finally

impenetrable green. Salt smell washed into the air, cool moist vapors

faintly tart with the odor, somewhere, of seaweed. He wondered if the

precious phytoplankton mynella were present in this water. Instead of

voicing that question, however, he asked, "How deeply has this part of the

sea been explored?" There were submersibles at Lambrose, he knew.

Receiving no answer, he looked up. Racart was standing very still,

gazing to the northwest over the water. "Look," he said softly, raising his

arm to point.

Seth followed his gaze. A front of dense sea-mist was gliding across the

water toward them. There was no apparent breeze, but it lapped silently

against the shore in eddies of silvery smoke. There was a scent of

rock-dampness and sea-moss in the air, as if driven by the fog. "Sit down

and keep your eyes open," Racart advised, and Seth obeyed without

hesitation. The fog swept quickly toward the promontory, its forward edge

curling under like a willowy, ghostly half-track.

The bank surrounded them, troops massing in the quiet afternoon.

Seth felt instinctively for the security of the rock beneath him, as mist

swirled ticklingly about his ears and nose. His sight was obscured

momentarily, and then it opened again as the front passed, leaving

patches of visibility over the flat gray water.

He squinted through the wafting scud and sat upright, stunned. Across

the water, several darkish shapes were moving within the silvery earthly

nebula like shadows of trees or persons. They were vague, roving figures,

which without being distinguishable made him think instantly of the

sea-people. His blood pounded with curiosity as he hunched forward,

staring intently until the bank coalesced again and blocked his view. "The

Nale'nid?" he asked Racart. His voice sounded wiry and strange against

the solitude of fog.

The answer was slow, in an awed and amused voice thinned as if by

distance. "Perhaps. Keep watching."

The mist paled, whitened, robbing the world of its last remaining

color—and then it broke, shifted, and with a swirl reopened. Three distant

but distinct figures moved across the water: two men and a young woman,

human-figures but slenderer, smoother, fairer, and clad in the simplest

fashion with dark glittering scales. They danced upon the water, stopped,

twirled, and winked at him—and then the men whirled while the girl

winked again. Seth was captured by astonishment and infatuation; they

were distant as stage players set in another world, but every movement

leapt to his eye as if fractured and magnified through a crystal. How could

he see so clearly? They glided like skaters over the water, their blades the

thinnest slips of mist. Laughter tinkled softly, distantly, as if spilled from

the lips of others beneath the waves. They moved maddeningly fast, with

the grace of deepwater fishes.

However lucid Seth had felt earlier, he now stared as if in a dream, rapt

by the vision of the sea-girl, of her men turning about her in nodding

circles. Before Seth could breathe and decide if he were entranced in a

hallucinatory vision, the mists closed again and moments later

reopened—revealing soft, driftglass green water, and moving beneath it,

closer now, three shadows like courtly humanfish. The silhouettes slowed

for a moment of still-life, two sea-men and one sea-woman, who then

danced in a lyrical flurry and fled, leaving only the green-glass memory of

their presence.

Too astonished to move or make a sound, Seth stared at the empty

water and tried to hold the fading image in his mind. Its vividness

vanished with the mist, and by the time he had sorted the impressions

from his expectations he was hardly sure that he had seen anything at all,

shadows or people. His hands pressed the rock, cold with airy dampness;

the mist tickled again as its tail drifted past, and then suddenly it too was

gone, receding across the water to the south. Seth slouched in the golden

sunshine, letting its warmth drench his skin before he finally sighed, and

turned to his friend. "They—"

His words stopped in his throat. He blinked. Racart was gone.

Now where? Seth twisted around to look, but his friend was nowhere on

the promontory summit. "Racart!" He scrambled to his feet, walked along

the edge of the summit, and looked down and around in all

directions—but there was no sign of the Ernathene. "Racart!"

Was this a prank? It would hardly befit Racart. Could he somehow have

fallen into the water? No; Seth would have heard a splash. "Where are

you?" he bellowed.

The answer was a sigh of air over the water, and the soft lap of the sea

against the rock face below. The outcropping tumbled to water on one end

and to rock and moss on the other; Seth could not see any likely place of

concealment. Kneeling at the seaward end, he gazed down carefully into

the water, probing it with his eyes.

There were no obstructions, so even if Racart had fallen he should have

been uninjured and able to swim clear. An uncertain fear nudged Seth's

mind, and sweat began to trickle down his neck as he swayed, standing.

"Racart!" The call rang across the water and died.

A lone skrell freewheeled into view, circled above the water at Seth's

height and cried mournfully. Why would he be hiding, testing him? No, it

was preposterous to consider that. Could the Nale'nid have done

something? Perhaps, but what?

He climbed down from the outcropping and scouted in a semicircle

around the base of the promontory, inspecting every crevice and break in

the rock. Something, he decided, must have happened to Racart—but

nothing so simple as falling from the rocks. Uncertainty tugged at him, a

feeling that there was something he was failing to consider, some danger

he was overlooking. He was kilometers from the settlement. He could

probably find 'his way back alone—but what would he do if he found

Racart seriously injured… or would he be able to return in time with a

proper search party?

Damn it, had the mist snatched him away?

Seth moved through the mazework around the pools and channels to

the landward of the promontory, looking into each pool one by one, into

each stream, as if he might find the grinning face of his friend, laid to rest

by some dreadful assassin. He saw only dark-bottomed and mossy-edged

pools, and cutting flows of water seeking the sea. He slipped; one knee

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