Medusa's Children

CHAPTER NINE

Ka was the oldest inhabitant of his world; the first to survive the time of change.

He had begun his existence as a minute blob of protoplasm, a bud cast off into a warm ocean by a sedentary polyp. The polyp itself had been an asexual creature, little more than a vegetable in many respects, but the hydrozoan species to which it belonged could perform one of nature’s most audacious tricks—the alternation of generations. Its numerous offspring had male and female characteristics, were free-swimming, and had great responsiveness to their environment. They were, in fact, medusae.

Although devoid of any kind of brain, the transparent, bell-shaped creatures—Ka among them—promptly set out to perform a lengthy and incredibly difficult task, one which would have been beyond the capabilities of any higher life form. The instinctive ambition of each medusa was to increase his size and mass by a factor of many thousands, not simply through eating and growing as is the case with most creatures, but by assimilating other medusace—alive and complete—into his own body, reducing them to the status of organs serving a greater whole.

The dangers facing the tiny organisms were great, and the probability of an individual’s success very low. Many of the medusae were short-lived, a large proportion taking their unenviable place in the food chains of other creatures, some being carried by wind and current into regions where the conditions were wrong for their survival. But Ka was lucky.

In the early stages of his life he grew to a diameter of several centimetres by capturing and eating small marine organisms, but this type of activity was insufficient to satisfy his drive for survival. Unaided, or unhampered, by any degree of intelligence, he began absorbing others of his own general kind, establishing tenuous but effective neural links which made their motor systems into extensions of his own.

Ka remained as the central bell or float of the unified colony he was building. His individual size increased, but this growth was minute compared to the enlargement of his corporate body as more and more units were added. Some of these were in their own medusa stage and were used to form swimming bells, typical of siphonophores, which moved the colony through the water. Others were polyps which performed specialised tasks such as feeling, tasting and feeding. The polyp members of the community also contributed reproductive individuals, and stinging individuals equipped with powerful nematocysts which fired barbed and poisonous threads into prey or enemies on contact.

The composite being which was Ka was now large and powerful, with tentacles hanging many metres below his multi-hued body, but as yet his history had been no different from that of any of the untold billions of hydrozoans which for aeons had lived and died in the Earth’s oceans. It was not until he had survived the time of change that he entered the second and unique phase of his existence.

And the change came abruptly.

At one moment Ka was cruising—thoughtless, dreamless, mindless—on the surface of a calm, warm sea; and at the next he was at the centre of a maelstrom.

The currents which boiled and raged around him were so ferocious at this stage that sections of his body were torn away and dispersed into the surrounding water. Ka felt neither surprise nor fear. He was still without awareness of identity, merely an organic machine capable of a limited range of responses to his environment, and he reacted by contracting his body until he was carried into a zone of reduced turbulence.

As soon as the disruptive forces had abated he again began the search for food, and for other creatures to serve as replacements for the organs he had lost in the sudden turmoil. He was unperturbed by the fact that gravity no longer operated on him, that his tentacles now tended to spread uniformly in all directions instead of hanging in parallel clusters beneath the main portion of his body. He continued his primeval existence, oblivious to the more insidious and prolonged danger which now threatened him.

In the beginning the new world was small, containing only a few cubic kilometres of water, and solar and cosmic radiation sleeted through it with virtually no reduction of intensity. The bombardment of high-energy particles produced disease and death in many creatures, wrought freakish changes in the genes of others. Non-viable mutations were born and lived their truncated lives, and yet other mutations which might have been successful in a more favourable environment fell victim to the continuing assault of the universe. The hail of sub-atomic bullets found many targets in Ka’s body, but his colonial structure enabled him to survive by discarding units which were destroyed or irreparably damaged.

At this stage he was still without intelligence, reacting blindly and instinctively to his environment, but the composition of his body had begun to undergo a profound change. In the conditions of zero gravity and high radiation some of his units developed unnatural complexities, and began to create their own neural pathways which linked them to similar benign mutations. As the process accelerated the original purpose of the colony was forgotten, and instead of absorbing units for a narrow range of functions it learned the principle of random usage, cannibalising higher and higher life forms for their organic components.

All the while the new world was growing in size. As the radiation levels within the globe of water dropped to an acceptable level, Ka’s body slowed its rate of growth and began consolidating its gains. The nerve networks became even more complex and multi-connected, and gradually—over a period of centuries—there came awareness of identity, self-knowledge and … intelligence.

A human being who becomes part of Ka can react in only one way, Myrah discovered. She began to scream.

Her cries did not manifest themselves physically, because there was no air to be forced from her lungs and, in any case, the relevant muscle groups were no longer under her control. She hung in the blackness, her body limp and apparently without life, but a part of her being was screaming nonetheless. Even when she began to think and take notice of her incredible new circumstances, the screaming continued—as regular as the breathing which was no longer necessary—in the lower levels of her consciousness, pulsing out its message of fear and revulsion.

From earliest infancy, like all members of the Clan. Myrah had lived in constant pursuit of air, never daring to exhale in open water without first having located a fresh bubble and made certain it was within reach. Now, taking refuge from the overall enormity of the situation, her mind began to dwell on its separate aspects, and she found herself marvelling at her ability to go on living without air. She had been told there was enough oxygen in the bloodstream to sustain life for quite a long time provided one did not panic, but this was a different phenomenon altogether. It was as if she was being nourished by a cool placenta which could take care of her bodily requirements for an indefinite period, perhaps for ever. The sensation was both loathsome and luxurious, and did not bear thinking about.

Myrah’s next discovery was that, in spite of the darkness, she could see. It was not the normal clear vision she was accustomed to as a native of the euphotic zone, nor even the awareness of black upon black she had been developing near the end of the journey. Fragmentary images appeared and faded behind her eyes, like memories of dreams, sometimes superimposed on each other, sometimes reduced in size so that many could be presented at the same time. In some of them were the unmistakable shapes of the Horra. Others revealed meaningless slow movement of dark surfaces, and occasionally there were glimpses of human outlines, one of which appeared to be female.

Am I looking at myself? Myrah wondered, and the picture grew clearer momentarily. It was of a dead woman, with wasted limbs, and skeins of black, gelatinous threads issuing from her mouth, eyes and ears. The strands fanned away into a darkness which seemed to hide a multitude of similar horrors. No, Myrah pleaded, my mother can’t be here. She fought to move her arms and legs, but nothing happened. There was only a great passivity, a sense of primeval contentment.

She suddenly found she had a perspective of centuries, a timescale against which a human lifespan was very short, and in a dim way she realised that—as a part of Ka—she was thinking Ka’s thoughts, Ka’s blurred, protean, multi-faceted, wordless, alien thoughts….

First there was the Sun.

Then there was the Earth.

Then there was the sea.

Then there was life in the sea.

Then there was life outside the sea.

The sea is not one. In some places it is warm. In some places it is cold. At the cold cold places it ceases to be sea. It becomes white rock.

The Earth is not one. In some times it is warm. In some times it is cold.

In the cold times the white rock is more. In the warm times the white rock is less.

When the white rock is less the sea is more, and what is outside the sea is less. The life outside the sea did not want the sea to be more.

They put great shells in the sea. They were shells which make one place another place.

And the sea flowed into them, and then it was in another place.

When the Earth grew cold again the white rock began to be more and the sea began to be less. The shells turned, and the sea flowed from the second place to the first place.

This happened many times.

Then there was Ka.

The Earth grew warm again. The white rock began to grow less, and the sea began to grow more.

But the shells moved the sea from the first place to the second place.

Ka moved with the sea from the first place to the second place. And in the second place Ka was not one. Ka became more.

The Earth grows cold again, and the white rock is more. The shells in the sea have turned, and the sea flows from the second place to the first place.

Ka is more, but Ka cannot grow less. Ka will be nothing.

Ka will send the Ka-Men into the shell, to the first place. The Ka-Men will break the shells, and the first place will no longer be the second place.

Ka will be more, and more, and more, and more….

The need to breathe again took Myrah by surprise.

There had been no possibility of escape from Ka, no refuge anywhere in the world, nor—and the knowledge was huge within her—had there been any real desire to break free. Ka and she had been one, wedded for ever, living in each other’s body, thinking each other’s thoughts, dreaming each other’s dreams … then she had been expelled.

Inky water pressed against Myrah’s face, invading her mouth and nostrils, and she instinctively closed it out as she strove to penetrate the darkness in search of air bubbles. For an instant her eyes seemed to pick out a rectangle of blackness beyond blackness, but there was no sign of life-giving bubbles, and her body told her why. She was in the grip of a current with a strength surpassing anything in her previous experience, so fast-moving that bubbles—if they existed in it at all—would have taken the form of slim needles, impossible to capture and useless as a source of oxygen. A roaring sound filled Myrah’s head and she was no longer certain whether it came from the water itself or was a sign that she was drowning. Her ribcage heaved convulsively as the involuntary muscles, locked in battle with her will, demanded that she breathe anything at all, even if it was the water which would bring lasting peace. Myrah spun this way and that, her arms and legs moving helplessly in the swirling violence, and the turbulent thundering of the water increased to an unbearable pitch.

Suddenly, impossibly, she was swimming in warm, sunlit water.

Myrah’s first disbelieving glance took in a universe of bright water which was green rather than blue, a fleeting vision of other human shapes, and quantities of silvery bubbles swarming upwards around her. She tried to capture a bubble, but it flew vertically away from her, glinting and shivering like a living creature which was rushing towards an urgent destiny.

At the same moment she became aware of a curious sensation in her ears, an internal movement which caused an odd wrenching of her perceptions, but everything was secondary to the crushing need for air. She struck out in pursuit of the bubbles and found herself travelling upwards with unexpected speed, as though impelled by an invisible hand. The bubbles kept eluding her, and her desperation increased as the pressure within her lungs grew irresistible. An undulating blanket of silver and blue appeared just above her and Myrah sobbed in panic as she saw she was, without being able to do anything to prevent it, on the point of bursting through the surface of the world….

Blinding brilliance. Warmth. Air!

Myrah threshed on the surface, anticipation of the silent death negating her normal responses; then came the realisation that she was breathing dry and pure air, and that all she had to do to go on breathing it, without effort, was to lie on her back. She forced herself to relax, capacity for surprise all spent, and concentrated on flooding her system with the bounteous oxygen. The air she was taking in had a freshness far beyond anything she had ever known. It was warm, dry, scented with unknown perfumes, and as she continued to draw it into her body there came a strange new idea, timid and tentative at first, but rapidly blossoming into conviction.

This, she thought in wonderment, is a place for living!

She partially opened her eyes, but immediately had to squeeze them shut again because of the pain caused by the sun. The after-image it left was a perfect circle, which meant the Clan elders had been right in one of their stories. The sun actually was a ball of light, but she had looked at it without coming to any harm—and according to Clan teaching she should have died the silent death on passing through the surface of the world.

But this isn’t the world. Half-memories began to stir. This is the place called Earth.

Myrah raised a hand to shield her eyes from the sun and made yet another discovery—a powerful, insistent force was trying to push her arm back down into the water. She used all her strength to keep it aloft, and in its shadow she managed to part her eyelids a short way and keep them open. Droplets of water were detaching themselves from her hand and forearm, and were falling back into the sea with bewildering speed. Intrigued by the phenomenon, Myrah wriggled her fingers and caused a few more drops to rain on her face, then her arm grew tired and she let it splash down on to the water. The sound reached her ears with peculiar clarity and was followed by a similar noise a short distance away.

She rolled over, marvelling at the way in which the surface of the water remained flat and intact all around her instead of breaking up into drifting globes. In her new position the sun’s rays were not spearing straight into her eyes, and she was able to see more of her surroundings. The sea was a vivid blue-green which spread away beneath a canopy of featureless blue immensities. Myrah had no previous experience with vision on such a scale, and she would have plunged her face down into the water to escape the mental pressures had she not seen Lennar close at hand.

“Myrah? Myrah!” He swam closer to her. “Are you all right?”

“I think so.” Myrah’s neck grew tired and she had to lower her head briefly before speaking again. “But I can’t hold my head up.”

“Take off your bubble cage.”

“What good will that do?” She looked at Lennar again and saw that he had removed his own cage. The marks left by the retaining straps glowed intensely pink against the whiteness of his skin. Myrah unstrapped the copper cage from her head and was amazed at the way in which it dragged her arm downwards, painfully twisting her fingers. She let go and the thick metal artifact plummeted into the depths. Myrah, who had intended the cage to float beside her, grabbed for it, but it had already vanished from sight.

“Let it go,” Lennar advised. “I don’t think you’ll ever need it again.”

“But….” Myrah began to feel afraid of the huge, bright, unfamiliar world all around her. “What happened to it?”

“It fell. Or it sank. The same thing happened in the Home when you let something go. It took a lot longer, that’s all.”

The explanation, far from reassuring Myrah, made her feel more threatened than ever. She sensed that Lennar had just told her something monstrous about their strange new environment. She had already seen how incomprehensibly large it was—but what if falling or sinking speeds were proportionate to size? What if …?

“Help me with Geean,” Lennar said firmly.

Myrah drew back from the conceptual abyss and looked around her. Without the drag of the bubble cage she was able to raise her head higher, and this time—in spite of the punishing brilliance—she saw other figures spread out on the surface. The two-dimensional arrangement of forms which was imposed by the conditions made identification difficult, but she recognised Harld and Treece who were treading water on either side of Geean. Their faces seemed longer, the muscles subtly altered. Geean’s hair was a striking coppery red in the direct sunlight, and it came to Myrah that they had entered a universe in which the perception of colour was a much richer experience than she could have imagined.

Harld was trying to unstrap Geean’s bubble cage and keep her head above water at the same time. The girl’s eyes were closed, but the controlled movements of her limbs showed that she was alive. Myrah swam to her and helped remove the heavy cage which, as with her own, sped into the depths as soon as she released it. Something about the finality of its descent triggered an alarm in her mind.

“Where is Dan?” she said.

“I think we’ve lost him.” Lennar’s face was strangely impassive. “There’s nothing we can do about it.”

“Shouldn’t we go down and look for him?”

“How? There’s no air down there?”

“I’d forgotten.” Dan’s death was a trivial matter, Myrah suddenly realised, only significant in that it reduced their number from six to five. “The shells are far from here,” she heard herself saying. “How will we reach them?”

“Earth is the home of the human race,” Lennar replied. “The humans here can travel through the water at great speed. They will help us.”

“Supposing they don’t want to help?”

“Ka will see that they do,” Treece put in, smiling. “Nobody can refuse Ka anything.”

“But Ka isn’t here.”

“Isn’t he?” Treece met Myrah’s gaze squarely, and her smile grew wider. Salt water splashed over her face and into her mouth, but she appeared not to notice.

Myrah was suddenly afraid of Treece and turned away from her, but there was no escaping the alien presence behind her own brow. She understood then that she was still wedded to Ka, and that he could claim her at any time. The knowledge should have been insupportable—and the fact that she could accept it showed that she was no longer her own self….

“We may not be able to find anybody,” she said, trying to avoid the downward spiral of her thoughts. “The Earth is so big.”

“But the humans here are many. Look!” Lennar raised himself higher in the water and pointed at something in the distance.

Myrah forced her head upwards against the unceasing pull of the planet and looked in the direction Lennar had indicated. The abundance of light reflecting from the sea created a painful shimmering across her vision, but she picked out a low shape which was moving silently through the brilliance. The object was about the size of a large shark, and—using knowledge which was not her own—Myrah identified it as a boat.

By narrowing her eyes to slits she was able to discern that the boat had a single occupant.

She sank down into the water again and—silently, with their arms moving in unison—the group swam towards the lone sailor.