That was unexpected.
“Just now,” he explained, “when your head was under.”
“You mean, in the water?”
“Yes.”
“Like what?”
“You haven’t been listening, have you?”
“Are you kidding? I’ve been listening so hard it’s driving me out of my mind.”
“To the conversation, I mean.”
“No. Everyone talks too loud.”
He considered it. Then he turned a little to one side and stretched out one arm, drawing her attention to a rocky headland that interrupted the beach a few hundred meters away. “There,” he said.
The thermal spike in her body had finally subsided, so she pulled her clothes back on and they walked along the beach toward the headland: an abrupt, almost artificial-looking rampart of shattered rock, held together by the roots of trees and scrub. It divided the beach like the blade of a shovel.
She did not even know why they had been going to the sea. Was someone going to pick them up there? Was there even a plan? Or had they simply run away until they could run no farther?
“The Diggers believe,” Beled said, “in the existence of people who live beneath the sea. The Pingers. Supposedly there have been contacts. At specific places along the coast of Beringia.” He nodded in the direction they were going.
“As in face-to-face contacts?”
Beled shrugged: a movement that, given the size of his shoulders, could almost be picked up on a seismograph. “I fancied you might have heard something while your head was under the water,” he said. “They use a tech called sonar.”
Her disordered brain was a little while putting this all together. She knew a little about sonar. Survey used it to map the bottoms of lakes and to count fish. “No coincidence that we are traveling with someone of that name?”
Beled nodded. “She has been telling us about them, but much of it sounds more legend than fact.”
“Where do they live? Submarines?”
He shrugged again. “No one seems to know. Apparently they are good at holding their breath.”
The headland could not be skirted without a boat. They ended up cutting back inland so that they could get past it. This required gaining a couple of hundred meters in altitude and bushwhacking through vegetation that had grown thick on the south-facing slope.
When they reached a place from which they could look down toward the sea, it became obvious that they were on the edge of an impact crater a kilometer or so in diameter. The headland that had blocked their passage down the beach was part of its rim; this curved out into the Pacific, forming one side of a bay. A mirror image of it, as they could now see, formed the opposite side. The bolide that had formed the crater had struck very close to the shore. The central impact peak was a sharp rocky islet just a stone’s toss from the beach, precisely centered between the twin headlands. It was easy enough for the eye to fill in the missing shape of the rim. Out in the water between the headlands, it must be slung in a submerged arc. And indeed it was possible to see waves breaking as they tripped over it. On the landward side, the rim blended into the natural slope. The impact had hollowed out a bowl whose steepness now forced Beled and Kathree to make an awkward, skidding descent into the cove below. The beach there was more rocky than sandy, and many of the rocks had the translucency of wave-worn beach glass.
They could hear the remainder of the party on the slope high above, catching up with them.
The middle of the beach—just opposite the sharp little island—seemed like the natural place to make camp. A little heap of glassy stones had been made there—just big enough to make it clear that this was no natural deposit, but an intentional act. “Their signal,” Beled explained. “We should build a fire now.” He began ranging along the beach picking up driftwood. Kathree, drawn somehow by the cairn, squatted there to wait for the others. She could hear Sonar Taxlaw chattering as she negotiated the slope above, running circles around the others, whose footfalls and breathing were audible.
“Their history is divided into three Deluges. The First Deluge was of rock and fire. It chased them into the deepest trenches of the sea, where it never fully dried out, even after the rest of the oceans had boiled off. They bred a race capable of living in confined spaces. The Second Deluge was of ice and water.”
“The Cloudy Century!” Einstein said.
“Yes, when you dropped comets on them for hundreds of years. They noticed that seas were expanding, growing away from the trenches where they had been holed up, expanding their range. They transformed themselves into a race that could swim in the sea.”
“When you say they transformed themselves,” asked Arjun, “do you mean genetic engineering or—”
“Selective breeding,” Sonar insisted. “If wolves could become poodles in a few thousand years, think what humans could turn into, if there was a need! They began to explore the seafloor. They found a lot of industrial junk that had been washed into the oceans during the Hard Rain and sunk to the bottom. There is nothing of metallurgy that is a mystery to them.”
“Which is why you trade with them?” Ty ventured. “Because you are short on metal?”
“And they are short on things we have,” Sonar affirmed.
“You said there were three Deluges,” Einstein reminded her. “The Third Deluge?”
“Is now,” said the Cyc. “A Deluge of life, beginning with microorganisms and culminating with you.”
“Meaning, the Spacers,” Ty guessed.
“Yes. And the only Spacers they know about are the ones who dropped a lot of rocks into the Torres Strait and built the thing at Makassar.”
“How is all of this being imparted to you?” asked Arjun.
“Imparted?”
“Have you, Sonar, actually had face-to-face conversations with Pingers?”
“Me personally?!” she asked, sounding amazed and horrified by the very idea. “Oh no, just looked down on them from up here.”
“So you lurk up above while more senior members of your clan go down to the beach and talk to the Pingers.”
“Talking is difficult. Communication is mostly through the written word. They didn’t have paper until we gave them some of ours. We use slates and chalk.”
Kathree’s eye went to a detail she had noticed a minute ago: an unnatural-looking deposit of flat black rocks half buried in wave-driven sand. As the remainder of the party made their final descent to the water’s edge, she used a piece of driftwood to scrape sand and gravel away from these until she could worry one loose. Though it was rough around the edges, it had clearly been shaped by humans: a slab of black rock about as thick as her finger, big enough to hold in the crook of an arm, smooth enough to write on. Scattered in the muck around it she’d seen lumps of calcium carbonate: chalk. Traces of it were still visible on the slates. Not writing but a fragment of a diagram, a map perhaps, and a few numbers.
PROJECTING FROM ONE SIDE OF THE ISLET, JUST BELOW THE TOP OF it, was a snarl of driftwood: the stump of a tree that a storm had torn from the edge of a cliff somewhere along the coast and later hurled up here. As soon as he arrived, Ty dropped his pack, emptied his pockets, and picked up the boxy equipment case that Roskos Yur had delivered in his glider. Holding this up above his head to keep it dry, he waded out to the islet, cursing at the intensity of the cold. At its deepest, the water came up to his waist, with occasional waves clipping him under the chin. He tossed the case up onto the flank of the islet and then clambered up after it.
After gazing curiously at the stump for some moments, he squatted down, gripped it by a couple of protruding roots, and overturned it, causing it to tumble into the surf. He then edged back out of the others’ sight line to reveal what had been hidden beneath it: a vertical section of stout steel pipe, about a hand’s breadth in diameter, rising to the height of a person’s knee, topped with a flat disk of battered steel the size of a dinner plate. The pipe wasn’t rooted to the boulder itself. It was part of a longer object that extended out into the sea. The part above the waterline was lashed to spikes that had been driven into crevices in the rock, in a style that they had already learned to recognize as typical Digger improvisation.