Have a little faith, friend Orion, the voice in my mind said. It felt almost amused.
I lost track of time as we sank deeper and deeper into the sea. There was no light to see by, no sensation at all except the rush of water swirling by me.
Listen to the music of our world, said the voice. Open your mind to it.
I could hear more than gurgling, I realized. There were crackling sounds all around me. Hoots and whistles and soft thrumming noises. And off in the distance a faint melodic crooning that rose and fell. None of the clicks and whistles of dolphins, though.
Now open your eyes, Orion.
I hadn’t realized I’d been keeping them shut. Involuntarily I gasped. I was surrounded by hundreds of soft glowing points of light, like being in the middle of a meadow full of fireflies or in the heart of a cluster of gleaming stars.
And when I gasped I had air to breathe.
“Can you hear me?” the voice asked. And I could. It was using sound rather than telepathy or whatever form of mind contact it had used before.
“Good,” it said, without my answering. “The air globe is stabilized and you should feel more comfortable. We will see what can be done about your wounds.” The voice was silky soft, warm and calm.
“Who are you?” I asked. “Where are we?”
The lights danced and twinkled around me, blue and red and green and yellow, but I could not make out any shapes.
“We are nearing the bottom of the sea, roughly a hundred kilometers from the shore where the Skorpis have made their base.”
“You know about them?”
I sensed a tolerant chuckle. “Yes, we know about them. And about you.” The voice grew darker, more severe. “And about the way you casually slaughter one another.”
“I wouldn’t call it casual,” I replied.
No response. The lights flickered around me, as if they were dancing in a sphere all around me, binding me in a web of blinking colorful flashes of energy.
“You haven’t told me who you are,” I said.
“You may call us the Old Ones.”
“What does that mean?”
Again that tolerant sense of amusement, like a grandfather watching a baby’s hesitant first steps.
“You will find out in due course,” the voice said. “For now, we must travel deeper into the sea.”
I got a sense of motion, acceleration, a tremendous rushing through the dark waters. The lights remained all around me. I could breathe. I seemed to be floating weightlessly, almost like an astronaut in orbit. In the dim flickering light I could see that my wounds were scabbing over. The bleeding had stopped completely and I felt a little stronger. All the while I was moving through the inky depths, speeding deeper and deeper, farther and farther from the shore.
At last I saw more lights approaching. They glowed and pulsated as if they were living, breathing creatures. Whole avenues of light opened up before my eyes, as if I were flying toward a vast city, swooping along a highway of lights that led to its magnificent heart.
“How do you feel?” the voice asked.
“Bewildered.”
“I mean physically. Your wounds.”
I flexed my arms, looked down at my legs. They were healing rapidly.
“Everything seems to be going along fine.”
“Good. We are pleased.”
“Tell me more about yourselves. What is this city of lights that we are approaching?”
“This is our home, Orion. The home of the Old Ones.”
“May I see you?” I asked, sensing that these lights were merely sparks of energy.
“You may be unpleasantly surprised,” the voice replied. “You may be repelled by our appearance.”
“Then tell me what to expect.”
“A reasonable approach to the problem.” The voice hesitated, as if checking with others before answering my request. Then:
“Orion, your Creators have told you that space-time is an ocean, have they not?”
“The one called Aten has taunted me more than once about my linear perception of space-time,” I answered.
“Yes, we can see that. Yet your linear perception is not entirely in error, Orion.”
“There are currents in the ocean of space-time,” I said.
“And there is a flow, a very definite flow. Time’s arrow exists. Entropy exists. Even though we may move back and forth across the ocean of space-time, we still cannot hold back entropy. The continuum unravels a little whenever we move through space-time. The greater our move, the more disorder arises.”
“But what has this to do with the way you look?” I asked.
“Time’s arrow,” the voice replied. “There are earlier times and later times. There is a point in space-time when your planet Earth is barren and lifeless. There is a point where the human race begins-”
“Built by the Creators and sent to destroy the Neanderthals so that Earth can be inhabited by the Creators’ creatures.”
“Who in turn, over the millennia, evolve into the Creators themselves.”
“Yes. They created us and we created them.”
“There is a point in the evolution of our kind,” the voice said, “when we had not yet developed intelligence, when we were far simpler beings living in the seas of our original world.”
“Lunga is not your original world?”
“Oh, no. Not at all.”
“Then where did you originate?”
I sensed a hesitation. “Does it matter? Suffice to say that once we were far simpler beings than we are now.”
“Simpler beings,” I said, beginning to understand what he was hinting at, “with tentacles?”
“Yes.”
“And claws that can crack armor?”
“Do you think you are prepared to see us?”
I thought of those things in the swamp, with their clutching tentacles and snapping claws and dozens of beady eyes.
I took a breath and said shakily, “Yes, I’m ready.”
“Very well.”
The sea around me brightened and I saw that I was surrounded by dozens of writhing tentacled creatures. They were huge, immense, like gigantic pulsating jellyfish with long wriggling tentacles and lipless round mouths that opened and closed, opened and closed, coming nearer and nearer to me. My skin crawled and I felt panic rising inside me, surrounded by these enormous engulfing undulating horrors pressing closer and closer, tentacles reaching out for me, mouths pulsating….
“Can you rise above your fears, Orion?”
I wanted to scream. Those enormous gaping mouths, like suckers big enough to swallow me whole, they seemed to be bearing down upon me, coming to devour me, coming to grasp me in those powerful tentacles and stuff me into one of those gaping maws. I could feel their digestive fluids burning into my flesh. I felt smothered, suffocating.
“Can you see beyond your terror, Orion? Can you look upon us as we truly are?”
I realized my eyes were squeezed shut, my fists pressed so hard against my temples I thought my skull would burst. They saved you! I raged at myself. They’re healing your wounds. They are intelligent beings. Go beyond their appearance; look at them as they see themselves.
Shaking with dread, I opened my eyes and forced myself to look at them again. They hovered all around me, huge, engulfing. I took a deep, shuddering breath. They came no closer, floating silently in the deep waters. Yet they were so enormous that they filled my vision wherever I looked. There was no escaping them. I fought against the panic that surged through me, deliberately forced my heart to slow its terrified beat, calmed my breathing to something close to normal.
I stared at them for long, long minutes. They hovered all around me, pulsating slowly, lights flickering within their undulating bodies, patterns of color glowing and shifting rhythmically across their translucent skins. There was a certain dignity to them, I slowly recognized. Even a certain kind of beauty as they floated throbbing in the deep waters. They moved gracefully, I forced myself to admit, trying to avoid looking at those dilating mouths.
And they were watching me intently. Each of them possessed two giant, solemn eyes that seemed focused on me.
“You are… beautiful,” I managed to croak.
“We are glad you think so. After your experience in the swamp we were afraid that you would be biased against us. Xenophobia is one of the deepest traits of your species.”
“We were created to be warriors,” I replied. “It makes it easier to kill your foes if you are frightened of them.”
“And yet the dolphins vouched for you.”
“The dolphins?” I blurted. “Are they here?”
“Not in this era,” the voice answered.
I realized that these Old Ones could travel through time the way the Creators could. The way I had myself.
“When we first made contact with you, Orion,” the voice continued, “we sensed nothing but a warrior intent on slaying his enemies. But the dolphins told us you were a good friend to them, so we probed deeper.”
It was the Old Ones whom I had sensed earlier, then. Yet I had no memory of how I got to be a good friend to the dolphins. Was I sent on a mission into the ocean, in another era?
“We find that although your basic instincts are those of a warrior, there are other desires struggling within you.”
“I have a will of my own,” I told them, “even though my Creator looks upon me as nothing more than a tool for his use.”
“That is a part of the problem you present to us.” The voice sounded slightly perturbed despite its silky smoothness. “We have been observing your kind since you first arrived. You humans are bloodthirsty as well as xenophobic.”
“We were made that way,” I admitted. “Although some of us have tried to rise above it.”
“Have you?”
“Some of us have. There are humans at the Skorpis base who are scientists. They are not warriors, not killers.”
“Why do you not regard the Skorpis as humans?” Although I heard only one voice, I got the impression that more than one of these sea creatures was speaking to me, or perhaps they were all speaking, and what I heard was a blend of their individual thoughts and questions.
“The Skorpis come from another world,” I answered. “They are descended from felines.”
“While your kind are patterned after primate apes.”
“That’s right,” I said.
“What makes you think that the Skorpis come from a different origin than your own?”
“They couldn’t…” I hesitated. “Do you mean that they were also-”
“Produced by your Creators? Why do you find that difficult to believe?”
“Not difficult. Just-a new idea. I hadn’t considered it before.”
“The universe is old, Orion. And your Creators have been very busy.”
“But if the Skorpis were also made by the Creators, why are they fighting against us?” I asked.
“Whatever your Creators touch degenerates into violence,” the Old Ones said. “They are a plague among the stars.”
“But you,” I asked again. “Who are you? What have you to do with the Creators?”
“We are a very old race, Orion. Older than your Creators by tens of millions of years. We have no desire to be dragged into the slaughters that your kind are perpetrating.”
“Why should you be?”
“Because your fellow humans have discovered us. They have tried to make contact with us. They want us to ally ourselves with them against their enemies.”
“I don’t even know who our enemies are,” I said.
“Other humans, of course. And species of similar levels of development, such as the Skorpis and the Tsihn.”
I felt confused, stunned almost, at all this new information they were throwing at me. They sensed my mental turmoil.
“Do not feel anxious, Orion. We will explain everything to you so that you can understand it fully.”
Why? I wondered. What do they want?
As if in answer, the silky voice told me, “You are going to be our ambassador, Orion. You will give our message to your Creators.”
Chapter 12
The city of the Old Ones, down at the abyssal depths of the ocean, was a vast wonderland of delights. Actually, the term city is a misnomer, for the Old Ones had no need for buildings or structures. Yet they clustered together in this sea-bottom aggregation of lights and patterns, exchanging thoughts like very old and very wise philosophers. Aristotle would have been happy here; Plato would have found his republic of intellect.
For countless days I wandered through the city, buoyed in an invisible sphere that somehow always was filled with fresh air. I neither ate nor drank, yet I was nourished and refreshed. My wounds healed completely as I learned of the Old Ones, their origins and history, their place in the continuum, their relationship to the Creators and the war that was spanning this region of the galaxy.
The Old Ones had evolved from octopus-like invertebrates living in the early seas of their home planet. We humans have a prejudice that a species cannot become fully intelligent until it masters energy sources beyond its own muscular power. For a land-dwelling species such as ourselves, that first energy source was fire. Since fire is impossible underwater, we tend to dismiss the possibilities of intelligent sea creatures. Even the dolphins would not have reached true intelligence if human scientists had not augmented their native brains.
The Old Ones had manipulating organs: ten tentacles that could grasp and maneuver as well as human hands or better. They had large, intelligent brains and exquisitely subtle sensory organs. Instead of fire, they developed the abundant electrical energies they found in many species of fish and eels. Where we humans built tools and learned engineering, the Old Ones learned biology and incorporated the living forms they needed into a symbiotic existence within their own bodies.
They learned about the world around them. Over the millennia, over the eons, they slowly built up a body of knowledge about the sea and, eventually, the land and even the sun and stars. Long before the dinosaurs ranged across Mesozoic Earth, the Old Ones discovered the energies of space-time and learned how to move through the continuum.
By the time the primate apes of Earth began to develop into the earliest hominids, the Old Ones had explored the galaxy. By the time Aten and the other Creators decided to build their human tools and send them to the Ice Age strongholds of the Neanderthals on a mission of genocide, the Old Ones had decided to keep to themselves, content to contemplate the universe without tampering with it.
Where we humans, driven by our Creators, are constantly meddling with the flow of space-time, constantly trying to alter the continuum to suit our needs and desires, the Old Ones have withdrawn to their oceans and their thoughts. They are to us as a giant sequoia tree is to a chittering squirrel.
All this I learned from them.
“Friend Orion,” said the silky-voiced one to me, “the moment has come for you to return to your own kind.”
The Old One who addressed me was swimming alongside my sphere as we gently glided through an avenue of blue-white lights that flickered like fireflies through the dark water. In all the time I had spent with them I had never heard any of the Old Ones refer to one another by a name. They had no need of names, it seemed. I could tell them from one another by differences in their coloration and in the sound of their voices, although I never did learn how they produced sounds that I could hear.
“You know now who we are and what we are,” said my companion and teacher. “Please tell your Creators that we refuse to be drawn into their slaughters. Our only desire is to live in peace.”
“But what if one of our warring groups tries to force you to join their side?”
Again that sense of gentle amusement. “We will not be forced, Orion. We will not listen to their words. If they try to use weapons against us, their weapons will not function. We threaten no one. We will harm no one. But we will not allow our knowledge or strength to be used in war.”
I recognized the hint.
“Will you meet us if we stop fighting? Would you be willing to exchange thoughts with us if we stop the war?”
A feeling of wry humor touched me. “Perhaps, Orion. In a million years or so, perhaps then you will be ready to share thoughts with us.”
I felt myself grinning. “That’s something to look forward to.”
“Farewell, ambassador Orion.”
I found myself sprawled on the beach near the ruins of the ancient city, where I had left the rest of my troopers. How long ago? I had no idea of how much time had passed. It was daylight, close to midday, I judged from the height of the blazing sun.
Getting to my feet, I started walking rapidly across the glaring sand toward the ruins. Within minutes a voice from one of the crumbling walls hailed me.
“Captain? Is that you?”
“Yes,” I said, stating the obvious.
The trooper climbed up atop the broken edge of the wall. I recognized him: Jerron, the smallest man in the unit, often teased as the runt of the litter. He glanced behind him, and made a slight pushing motion with both his hands. I realized that his hands were empty. He was unarmed, not even a pistol on him.
I was about to ask him why he had no gun when a quartet of Skorpis warriors rose beside him. They were all fully armed. They pointed their rifles at me.
“Surrender or be killed.”
The nearest bit of cover was the wall on which they stood. Otherwise I was totally unprotected, standing out on the bare beach in the noontime sun, wearing nothing but a ragged pair of shorts. Not even much of a shadow with me.
I surrendered.
“They came in the second night you were gone,” Jerron told me as the Skorpis warriors marched us across the beach toward their base. “Just popped up in the middle of the ruins, outta nowhere. We never had a chance.”
So the Skorpis had found that the underwater tunnels led into the heart of the ruined city, I realized. They knew we were there and they used the tunnels to take the troop by surprise.
“How bad were our casualties?” I asked.
“It all happened so fast we never had much of a chance to put up a fight. The guys on sentry duty caught it. Manfred, Klon, Wilma.”
Manfred. The sergeant I had forced to become a lieutenant. A real lieutenant would not have been on guard duty. Manfred’s old habits killed him. Then I remembered Frede’s warning me that it’s not smart for a soldier to make friends. Manfred was hardly a friend, but I felt his loss as if it were my own fault.
“How long have I been away?” I asked. “I’ve lost track of time.”
“Four days, sir. The Skorpis knocked us off the second night you were gone, and then they’ve been waiting for you to come back ever since.”
“So now they’ve got us all.”
“Sorry to be the judas goat, sir.” Jerron looked fairly miserable as we walked, struggling to keep pace with the giant Skorpis’s strides. They were quite willing to nudge us with their rifle butts if they felt we were lagging behind.
“You’ve done nothing to be ashamed of, soldier,” I said. “This whole mission was a disaster from the outset.”
They marched us through their perimeter emplacements and into an open compound in the middle of the base, sealed off by electric fences, guarded by a dozen heavily armed warriors, surrounded by all the Skorpis on the planet. They were intent on keeping us from escaping, I could see.
Lieutenant Frede hurried to me as soon as the warriors pushed little Jerron and me into the compound.
“Orion! Captain! Are you all right?” There was real concern in her eyes.
“I’m unhurt,” I said.
“From what we had heard, the Skorpis had fried you six ways from breakfast.”
“They exaggerated their marksmanship,” I said.
Lieutenant Quint pushed through the group that had gathered around us. “They claim you killed half a dozen of them,” he said, with something like admiration in his voice.
“I didn’t stop to count.”
Frede said, “I don’t know what they intend to do with us, but it won’t be pleasant.”
“How have they treated you so far?”
“Oh, okay, by their standards. We’re stuck in this compound. No shelter. When it rains we get wet. We sleep on the ground. They feed us once a day, toward sundown.”
“I haven’t missed today’s feeding, then.”
Her expression grew more serious. “It seemed to me they were waiting for something. I guess they wanted to get you. Now they’ve got all of us.”
Quint added, “Now they can do whatever it is they intend to do.”
“Did you know there are other humans in this camp?”
“Others? No!” Frede said.
“I haven’t seen any,” said Quint.
“They seem to be scientists. And they’re working with the Skorpis.”
“Willingly?”
“I don’t know.”
“You there!” a deep Skorpis voice bellowed. “The one called Orion. To the gate. Now!”
I went to the gate, my officers and most of the remaining troopers trailing after me. The one who had called me was the security officer. I recognized her face and the insignia on her cinnamon brown uniform.
“Take him out of there,” she commanded the guards. “I have a few questions I want him to answer.”
I shot a glance back to Frede and the others. “Guess I’ll miss today’s meal, after all.”
They marched me to the security officer’s office and sat me in a chair that was a size too big for me.
“At least your uniform is dry this time,” the security officer growled as she sat behind her desk. Two big guards stood behind me. My “uniform” was still nothing more than the shorts I had been wearing since she had last seen me.
“The other humans know nothing of you, even though some of them were willing to lie on your behalf.”