There followed a period of indeterminacy; of time outside of time; of fear beyond fear.
Myrah was distantly aware of spinning and tumbling as in a powerful current, of night wings curving around her and blotting out the entire universe, of a growing darkness which made it impossible for her to find air bubbles, of the bursting force within her ribs. Then there was the envelopment by Ka, the constriction of a cold and cavernous womb, the smothering pressure of its jelly-flesh on her face.
And, finally, there was her submission.
Myrah yielded with a guilty pleasure, grateful that the escape was being made so easy, and so desirable.
She drew the living tissue of Ka into her mouth and lungs.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The tide had not fully risen when Tarrant got back to his boat, and there was nobody in the vicinity whose help he could enlist in dragging the battery-laden craft down the beach.
He stared at it for a moment, undecided, then his gaze lit on the rectangle of discarded plastic skin he had promised to give to Will Somerville. Stepping on to the tilted deck of the boat, he put the rifle and box of ammunition out of sight beside the wheel and vaulted down on to the white sand. The skin panel was warm to his touch, and when he examined its inner surface he could see brownish stains near some of the bullet holes. He looked along the line of the jetty, satisfied himself that Somerville’s cruiser was at its berth, and set off walking with the panel under his arm.
A mid-morning quietness lay over the waterfront, most of the farmers being out tending their sectors, and the air itself seemed to be emitting sparkles of light. The scene affronted Tarrant with its unsympathetic cheeriness. He tried to console himself by drawing up grandiose plans for drinking sprees and—now that he was a free man again—a cold-blooded and calculating survey of the entire female population of Cawley Island which, he told himself, was bound to unearth at least one immoral and oversexed woman with whom he could form an alliance. And there was no longer anything to prevent him taking his own sea-going yacht out of mothballs and setting off to find a less restrictive society in which it would be possible to lead a normal life.
He reached the jetty and walked along the sun-dried, silver-grey planking. The lush green meadows of the algae beds spread before him to the horizon, scenting the inshore breeze. In a week or so he would be skimming off a crop for the production of high-quality protein cakes, and once that was done he would have enough gold in his pouch to support him for a year or more if he lived carefully.
But why, came an unsettling thought, bother to live carefully. Why not have a three-month burn-out? There’s nothing to stop you now….
The excitement of the idea put a bounce in his step, and he found himself thanking Beth and her parents aloud as he neared Somerville’s boat. They had done him a favour by making it so obvious that he could never be like them, and it was up to him to capitalise on his good fortune. Giving in to a boyish impulse, Tarrant began to whistle, hoping to impress Somerville with his jauntiness, but he found there was nobody on board the boat.
It was one of the larger craft—with a proper cabin below decks—of a type used by some of the inner sector farmers who were less concerned about transport costs. Tarrant went down into the cabin and propped his rectangle of plastic against the central table. The table was covered with glass and porcelain dishes, scraps of paper and stained cloth, pens and crayons, reference books and a cylindrical slide rule. One of the books was a good-quality atlas which lay open at oblique azimuthal projections of the northern and southern hemispheres.
Tarrant noted that somebody, presumably Somerville, had drawn a heavy blue line around the polar caps some distance out from their edges, and had cross-hatched the enclosed margin of sea. He shook his head and smiled at this fresh evidence of Will Somerville’s eccentricity—full-colour atlases were hard to come by, and anybody who defaced one had to have more money than sense. Even when Tarrant had been serving with the South Newzealand Air Force he had had to make do with monochrome photocopies of air navigation charts, and would never have considered writing directly on them. He took a crayon, scribbled a note to say he would be back in the evening and left it on the atlas.
By the time he got back to his own boat there was more activity on the waterfront and he had no difficulty in enlisting aid to get himself afloat. Now that his anger had been supplanted by bright-hued anticipations of a joyously profligate future, Tarrant felt less inclined to go hunting the big squid. He considered abandoning the idea and going home to drink wine, especially as squid were known to dislike bright light; then it occurred to him that were they to return after dark and spill more of his algae crop he would be quitting Cawley Island with less money stowed away. And for the plans he had in mind he was going to need all the money he could possibly raise.
He obtained some wire with which to secure his boom connectors, and set out for the northern rim of the farm.
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.