Until people came along, only a few centuries before, with their rifles. He suddenly wondered if the Centauris were like this at all. They were amphibians, not reptiles. What would they make of gators?
A gator turned and looked up at him for a long moment. It held the gaze, as if figuring him out. It snuffed and waddled a little in the mud to get more comfortable and closed its big eyes. McKenna felt an odd chill. He paddled faster.
The other wing of the Pizotti family was on the long sand bar at the end of Weeks Bay, holding forth in full cry. He came ashore, dragged the skiff up to ground it, and tried to mix. The Pizottis’ perfunctory greetings faded and they got back to their social games.
He had loved Linda dearly but these were not truly his kind of people. She had been serene, savoring life while she had it. The rest of the Pizottis were on the move. Nowadays the Gulf’s Golden Coast abounded with Masters of the Universe. They sported excellently cut hair and kept themselves slim, casually elegant, and carefully muscled. Don’t want to look like a laborer, after all, never mind what their grandfathers did for a living. The women ran from platinum blond through strawberry, quite up to the minute. Their plastic surgery was tastefuclass="underline" eye-smoothings and maybe a discreet wattle tuck. They carried themselves with that look not so much of energetic youth but rather of expert maintenance, like a Rolls with the oil religiously changed every 1500 miles. Walking in their wake made most working stiffs feel just a touch shabby.
One of them eyed him and professed fascination with a real detective. He countered with enthusiasm for the fried flounder and perch a cousin had brought. Food was a good dodge, though these were fried in too much oil. He held out for a polite ten minutes and then went to get one of the crab just coming off the grill. And there, waiting for the next crab to come sizzling off, was Herb. Just in time. McKenna could have kissed him.
It didn’t take too long to work around to the point of coming here. Herb was an older second cousin of Linda, and had always seemed to McKenna like the only other Pizotti who didn’t fit in with the rest. He had become an automatic friend as soon as McKenna started courting her.
“It’s a water world,” Herb said, taking the bit immediately. He had been a general science teacher at Faulkner State in Fairhope, handling the chemistry and biology courses. “You’re dead on, I’ve been reading all I could get about them.”
“So they don’t have much land?” McKenna waved to the woman who loved detectives and shrugged comically to be diplomatic. He got Herb and himself a glass of red, a Chianti.
“I figure that’s why they’re amphibians. Best to use what there’s plenty of. Their planet’s a moon, right?—orbiting around a gas giant like Jupiter. It gets sunlight from both Centauri stars, plus infrared from the gas giant. So it’s always warm and they don’t seem to have plate tectonics, so their world is real, real different.”
McKenna knew enough from questioning witnesses to nod and look interested. Herb was already going beyond what he’d gotten from TV and newspapers and Scientific American. McKenna tried to keep up. As near as he could tell, plate tectonics was something like the grand unified theory of geology. Everything from the deep plains of the ocean to Mount Everest came from the waltz of continents, butting together and churning down into the deep mantle. Their dance rewrote climates and geographies, opening up new possibilities for life and at times closing down old ones. But that was here, on Earth.
The other small planets of our solar system didn’t work that way. Mars had been rigid for billions of years. Venus upchucked its mantle and buried its crust often enough to leave it barren.
So planets didn’t have to work like Earth, and the Centauri water world was another example. It rotated slowly, taking eight days to get around its giant neighbor. It had no continents, only strings of islands. And it was old—more than a billion years older than Earth. Life arose there from nothing more than chemicals meeting in a warm sea while sunlight boomed through a blanket of gas.
“So they got no idea about continents?” McKenna put in.
Herb said he sure seemed to miss lecturing, ever since he retired, and it made him a dinner companion not exactly sought after here among the Pizottis. McKenna had never thought he could be useful, like now. “They took one up in an airplane, with window blinds all closed, headphones on its ears. Turns out it liked Bach! Great, huh?”
McKenna nodded, kept quiet. None of the other Pizottis was paying any attention to Herb. They seemed to be moving away, even.
“The blindfold was so it wouldn’t get scared, I guess. They took off the blindfold and showed it mountains, river valleys, all that. Centauris got no real continents, just strings of islands. It could hardly believe its clamshell eyes.”
“But they must’ve seen those from space, coming in. Continents and all.”
“Not the same, close up.”
“So maybe they’re thinking to move inland, explore?”
“I doubt it. They got to stick close to warm, salty water.”
McKenna wondered if they had any global warming there and then said, “They got no oil, I guess. No place for all those ferns to grow, so long ago.”
Herb blinked. “Hadn’t figured that. S’pose so. But they say they got hurricanes alla time, just the way we do now.”
McKenna poked a finger up and got them another glass of the Chianti. Herb needed fueling.
“It’s cloudy alla time there, the astro boys say. They can never see through the clouds. Imagine, not knowing for thousands of years that there are stars.”
McKenna imagined never having a sunny day. “So how’d they ever get a space program going?”
“Slow and steady. Their civilization is way old, y’know, millions of years. They say their spaceships are electric, somehow.”
McKenna couldn’t imagine electric rockets. “And they’ve got our kind of DNA.”
Herb brightened. “Yeah, what a surprise. Spores brought it here, Scientific American figures.”
“Amazing. What sort of biology do amphibians have?”
Herb shrugged and pushed a hush puppy into his mouth, then chewed thoughtfully. The fish fry was a babble all around them and McKenna had to concentrate. “Dunno. There’s nothing in the science press about that. Y’know, Centauris are mighty private about that stuff.”
“They give away plenty of technology, the financial pages say.”
“You bet, whole new products. Funny electrical gadgets, easy to market.”
“So why are they here? Not to give us gifts.” Might as well come out and say it.
“Just like Carl Sagan said, right? Exchange cultures and all. A great adventure, and we get it without spending for starships or anything.”
“So they’re tourists? Who pay with gadgets?”
Herb knocked back the rest of his Chianti. “Way I see it, they’re lonely. They heard our radio a century back and started working on a ship to get here.”
“Just like us, you think about it. Why else do we make up ghosts and angels and the like? Somebody to talk to.”
“Only they can’t talk.”
“At least they write.”
“Translation’s hard, though. The Feds are releasing a little of it, but there’ll be more later. You see those Centauri poems?”
He vaguely recalled some on the front page of the paper. “I couldn’t make sense of it.”
Herb grinned brightly. “Me either, but it’s fascinating. All about the twin suns. Imagine!”
When he got home he showered, letting the steam envelop him and ease away the day. His mind had too much in it, tired from the day. Thinking about sleep, when he often got his best ideas, he toweled off.