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.