Tarrant helped Treece into the bigger boat and turned back for Myrah. She was sitting nearly upright, with arms splayed behind her, but when he got close she sank back on the deck. Kneeling beside her, he faced the prospect of sliding his hands under her body to raise her up, knowing that if he did so his self-control was going to fail. He hesitated, his mind a dizzy pendulum.
“Hal,” she whispered, “please swim with me.”
“I…. The water isn’t safe,” he said, taking refuge in obtuseness, but unable to prevent his body sinking down closer to hers.
She wriggled her shoulders impatiently and the movement was transmitted to her breasts. “That isn’t what I mean.”
“I know.” Feeling that the seconds of privacy were going fast, that he had to seize the chance while he had it, Tarrant pressed his mouth to hers. She remained perfectly still for a moment, so rigid that he began to fear a Beth-type rejection, then her lips slowly parted, inviting that first symbolic act of penetration. He probed urgently and ecstatically with his tongue, and felt something cool and liver-smooth dart forward into his mouth. It vibrated in the back of his throat. He rolled away from Myrah, retching in a frantic effort to expel the invader, but his throat was clear again and he knew that the eel-like thing—predator or parasite—was deep inside him.
He lurched to his feet, unable to speak, pointing accusingly at Myrah—then a vast, cold sadness descended over him. He knew how dark it was at the centre of the world. He felt the new current intensify its grip on his body, threatening to end his life by wrenching his component organs apart and dispersing them into the night….
“We’d better hurry,” he said to Myrah. “We haven’t got much time.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
As a child of Ka, Tarrant was in exactly the same position as Myrah or Lennar—he had become one unit in a composite identity. Like a cell in the body of a human being, he retained all the autonomy that was necessary for him to continue functioning in an efficient manner, but his activities were subordinate to the needs of the gestalt being that was Ka.
At the same time, because the medusa principle is one of reciprocal benefit, his relationship with the overlord was special in that he had a unique contribution to make to the store of knowledge. Not only was his mind the best stocked of any that had ever become available to Ka, but it provided the longest baseline, the philosophical perspective and parallax without which a pool of data can never be effectively organised. Until then Ka had been limited to what he could harvest from the rare human who had strayed into the deep territory controlled by the Ka-Horra—Treece had been one such—but their world-view had been pitifully limited. He had usually returned them to the Home as free-swimming extensions of his own neural system, which had enabled him to monitor the activities of the humans from afar.
To Ka the human colony had represented an important reserve of mobility and intelligence, and he had nurtured it for centuries, sometimes sending armies of the Ka-Horra out to do battle with the Horra when it seemed that the latter were about to engulf the humans. On these occasions some of the Ka-controlled squid had perished, which meant that in a small way Ka himself had died for the sake of the humans, but his instincts had told him the sacrifices would be worth while. And, finally, he had been proved right….
Had there been time for him to be introspective, Tarrant might have found elements of his old personality cowering in an obscure, safe cranny of the mind-brain matrix. That helpless, reduced version of his former self would have been numb with dismay at the thought of a sliver of Ka’s mutated nervenet curling in his right lung, but to Ka-Tarrant its presence within his body was both natural and welcome. The only matter worthy of his attention, the only thing of importance in the entire universe, was the desperate need to find the Bergmann machines and destroy them before it was too late.
He raised Myrah to her feet and helped her to the side of the boat. Somerville had not yet emerged from the cabin so he left Myrah sitting on the deck and ran down the short companionway. The older man had put Geean in one of the bunks, and Lennar and Harld on the cabin floor. Treece was in the other bunk and Somerville was leaning over her while he adjusted the pillow. She was smiling up at him, but he appeared not to notice.
Tarrant moved quietly in behind him, brushed his supporting left arm out of the way and threw his weight on Somerville’s back. Somerville collapsed on to Treece with a startled curse which was stifled as she clamped her open mouth to his. He struggled for a moment, then his body relaxed. Tarrant stepped back and allowed him to regain his feet.
“There’s no point in aiming for the Bergmann transceivers themselves,” Somerville said at once. “There could be as many as a dozen of them all around the world, and even if we could get to them quickly—which we can’t—they’re bound to be fairly indestructible.”
“You’re saying it’s hopeless?”
Somerville shook his head. “I’m saying that particular approach is hopeless.”
“What do we do, then?”
“I think we should refer back to the old master himself.” Somerville took off his bandana and wiped perspiration from his neck with it as he stepped over Lennar’s and Harld’s outstretched legs to reach his book-shelf. “Would you like to bring Myrah down out of the heat? We don’t want to lose any units through sunstroke.”
“Okay.” Tarrant went up on deck, lifted Myrah bodily and carried her down into the crowded cabin. Neither of them spoke during the process, and when he set her on the floor between Lennar and Harld she lay back with complete passivity.
“I haven’t any Swedish,” Somerville said, spreading a book on his chart table, “but this is supposed to be a good translation of Bergmann’s original Balance of Life. It was written five years before he died, which was about the time the history books say dysteleonic radiation was discovered, but listen to this.”
Somerville cleared his throat and began to read. “The advantages of dysteleonic radiation for communications and power transmission would be that there would be virtually no transmission losses over global distances; the beams would be undetectable to all but the most advanced technological cultures; and, finally, they would be immune to interference. Barring the possibility that the hydrospheric balance valves are energised and controlled through a medium of such sophistication that we are unable even to guess at its nature, one must conclude that dysteleonics are employed for this purpose.
“I predict that in the near future, provided that our civilisation emerges intact from its present crisis, men will learn routinely to generate and detect dysteleonic radiation. And when they do they will discover they are not breaking new ground, but merely following in the footsteps of that ancient race to which I have given the name of Paleotechs. And the irrefutable evidence will be all about them in the form of beams of dysteleonic radiation linking the Earth’s hydrospheric balance valves to their central energising and control station.”
Somerville set the book down on the table. “What do you think of that?”
Tarrant shrugged. “Quite a lot of evangelistic fervour, but where does it get us?”
“Bergmann went on to postulate that his control station would be positioned on the equator and somewhere near the centre of the Earth’s largest ocean—which means it isn’t all that far from here. Anybody who could….”
“Wait a minute!” Tarrant snapped his fingers. “There was something about dysteleonics when I was in the Air Force! Seven or eight years ago, it was. One of the men in my squadron was put on escort duty and he did a couple of runs up to Baker Island with a Department of Science turbojet. He had no idea why the top brass thought the missions were so important, but he picked up the word dysteleonics.”