The Deep Gods, Page 2

Why had no one ever suspected, Daniel thought, staring out into the red-lit mists? There had been expeditions to the South Pole itself; there had been bases built on the ice. The ice must have crushed everything, every trace, in time. But… how much time? How far in the past was he? He glanced up into the dark sky where a few stars were faintly visible in spite of the foggy air. He had a good knowledge of navigation, enough to guide himself by the star patterns, but not enough to guess how much they might have changed, if at all. And though he had been a well-read man, he now realized how little he really knew of the prehistory of the world.

  But what still troubled his thoughts most was a strange, clear certainty; that what had happened to him was not by chance. Somehow, he felt, he had been snatched out of his world by an act of will; he had been brought to this place for some reason.

  He had been an agnostic in his former life. The God of his fathers had been the fierce old tyrant deity of the Presbyterians; Daniel had rejected that God early in his life. He had been an engineer, a materialist, a believer in rational reality. He could not believe in occult forces or gods; whatever had done this had been neither a god nor a devil, he was sure.

  But then, he remembered, he had never believed in a soul, either. When you died, it was “Out, brief candle,” and an end to it.

  But he was alive, and he remembered dying too clearly. So, something survived after all, something that could be dragged across time and space and thrust into a new body.

  He stared down at his big hands, the black hair curling on their backs; not the hands he remembered having had all his life.

  He had been wrong, then. Maybe, he considered grimly, I may have been wrong about gods and devils, too. Then, somewhere, there was a somebody who had a reason for bringing a man back to life. Very well, how do I discover that person… or that creature, and ask him for his reason?

  Maybe I’ll never know, he thought. That’s the way it always seemed to be, with gods in my time. You weren’t supposed to ask questions. But I’ll ask, he thought. I’ll go on asking.

  Now the sun remained higher each day; though the mists were heavier, too. Among the people there was a stirring of activity; even more than usual in the warmer weather, at the approach of the sea dancing. Groups worked on the boats that were drawn up on the strand, caulking and repairing the largest of them. Smoke rose from fires where fish were drying, and people gathered food plants in the gardens outside the city.

  At least three groups were planning to sail away to the north as soon as possible. Their boats were small; the same kinds of craft were used to fish, out in the open sea, though, and would be safe enough, barring heavy storms. Once, Daniel was told, there had been much larger ships, but either they had sailed away long ago, or had rotted, unused.

  There were ancient maps, Daniel found, and copies, on wooden boards, were made for the use of those who would leave. He doubted their accuracy, but these were all that were available.

  The world, as these maps showed it, was strangely like his own, and yet unlike it too. The continents were there, just as they had been in the atlas as he remembered it; seeing them, he felt a new wonder at the extent of knowledge of the lost nations of Eloranar. They must have sailed long distances, to be able to map so much, he thought.

  South America was distorted; a vast curving bite gone from Brazil. There was no isthmus, either; and in North America there were seas through the center, where the Mississippi ran in his own time. Africa was even more strangely misshapen, and the Asian areas were almost unrecognizable. Farther north, it seemed as if the British Isles were joined to a queerly distorted Europe. Strangest of all to Daniel’s eyes, there was no Mediterranean; only a winding series of rivers and lakes from Gibraltar to the Bosporus. But the Black Sea was still there, larger than he recalled it, in fact.

  With fair winds and great good luck, it would take some weeks for a small sailing craft to reach the nearest land, Daniel thought. That seemed to be the tip of South America; he could find no trace of the Falkland islands. Tierra del Fuego, as Daniel remembered it, was no paradise, but it was a land on which people could live, at least.

  Some of the people came to him, shyly; there was still a fear in their minds, the vague idea of demonic possession. But they also believed that he knew more than they did of the world beyond their ice-locked corner. Egon, it seemed, had known something of other shores, possibly had even traveled to such places. It seemed that this new man might also know more than they did. And it was because of Daniel’s description of their future that they had given up hope of remaining here in Alvanir. So they came to him.

  “How many days sailing, do you think?” one man asked, drawing a finger across the wood-carved map. He was a middle-aged man with a strong, leathery face, grey-bearded; his name was Gannat. He would have three women, two men and four children with him, he had told Daniel; his wife, his daughter and his son’s wife, his son and son-in-law, and their brood, the youngest a mere baby. And the boat, as Daniel knew, would be crowded with four aboard. He had seen it; to his eyes it looked frighteningly tiny and frail, a crudely planked boat with a single mast and a triangular sail. It was open to the weather, too.

  But Gannat and the others had gone out to the open sea for days at a time in just these boats, Daniel remembered. Then, he remembered that Egon too, whose body he inhabited, had gone out in such a boat, and died. He stared down at the map uncomfortably.

  “A long time, Gannat,” Daniel said, shaking his head. “Can you carry enough food and water for all your people?”

  Gannat grinned wryly. "I've no choice,” he said. “There’s none I could leave behind.”

  Daniel knew there would be no use in arguing the point. He had heard the same words from others, already; and the same calm, incredible conviction that “the sea folk will help.”

  “Damn it, man,” Daniel said, putting down the map. “Do you have to do this? Look, I told you and the others about the ice, of course. It’ll come, in time… but it may not come for centuries. You’ll be dead and gone. Why not stay here? Why risk everything?”

  “We were never sure,” Gannat said, a little sadly. He looked back toward the crumbling wall of Alvanir. “Some of us thought the ice would go, some day. But now you say it will not. And I would like my sons to have a new land of their own.” He was silent for a moment. “It will be strange to see the sun rise and set every day,” he said, after a while. He looked at Daniel. “Was it so, in your other Life?”

  “It didn’t seem strange to me,” Daniel said. “You’ll grow used to it.” If you get that far, he thought.

  “There will be few left after this year,” Gannat said quietly. “This may be the last dancing. There will be none but the oldest, who do not want to go, and too old to dance under the sea any longer.” He sighed. “But the sea is there, too, and we will dance again.”

  That again, Daniel thought. It seemed so important to these people, and yet, no matter how he tried, he could not get them to describe it in any detail. Apparently he would be expected to take part, too; the idea gave him a slight chill of fear.

  All that he could learn about it was that the people swam, en masse, out into the fjord, and that there they dived, to meet the… others. Dolphins, apparently; he had seen them from a distance, leaping and playing in the dark water. Daniel could still not believe the story of “speaking.” Dolphins did make sounds, he knew, and they were playful. It was a superstition, the kind of primitive belief he had read about in books. The Eloran only imagined that the dolphins replied.

  Gannat went away, back to the shore where he and his sons were caulking their boat; and Daniel wandered, thinking hard, through the emptiness of Alvanir.

  Most of the people lived close to the shore; in the ancient city itself there were columned halls and broad, empty ways where no one came anymore. Daniel did not want to return to the house where he usually slept and ate, Egon’s, and now his. Egon’s woman, though, Daniel thought with a touch of anger; still Egon’s, though the man was d
ead and gone. He was strongly drawn to Ammi, but he concealed it, knowing how she felt.

  He had come here often; explored the endless ruins with deepening wonder, day after day. If he could only return to his own world, with even a little of what he had found, he thought. There would be something left, under the ice; it could be dug out. The oldest of man’s civilizations, greater and more ancient than Sumer or the Indus Valley… and then, Daniel remembered, he would never return. And if I did, he asked himself, who would believe such a story?

  Walking, he had come into a wide avenue with crumbling buildings on either side. Once this had been a tree-lined avenue with reflecting pools in its center. Now the trees were gone, except for a few black stumps, and the pools were dry.

  He remembered that he had found a few crumbling books in one of these houses; in a chest, where there were scraps of rotting cloth and a few curious oddments. Something forgotten, or cast aside, when the owners had gone away forever; books, in a flowing script no one could read. Pictures, nearly invisible, painted on the walls; Daniel remembered puzzling over them for days.

  In a few years the ice would cover it all.

  He stopped and kicked idly at a stone, staring into the mist. The secret had to be somewhere; the key to his own existence. But not here, in this graveyard. He swung around and walked back toward the shore; at least there were living people there.

  He came out of the ruins farther away from that part of the beach where most of the people lived and worked; looking toward their distant shapes, he could see Gannat and his son near their boat. Others, too—a tall woman, crossing the strand. That had to be Ammi, Daniel thought with a slight twist of anger. She had stopped to talk to a young man; now her head was tilted back in a characteristic gesture of laughter. She never laughed when she was with me, Daniel thought. He turned and walked farther along the beach.

  Here, black rocks rose out of the water; beyond, the cliffs came steeply into the bay. Daniel could see only deepening grey mist beyond, and glassy black water. He squatted down and put a hand into the sea. Cold, he thought, but bearable.

  Holding his hand there, he felt a sudden strange sensation-—a tingling, like a faint electrical shock. It came in pulses, rising and falling; puzzled, Daniel kept his hand in the water and stared downward, trying to see what was causing it. The pulse came again, more strongly; he pulled his hand out, remembering that there were jellyfish that could sting. But he could see nothing in the water, nothing at all.

  Then a huge shape appeared, sliding closer, like a great black torpedo, swiftly, yet without even a ripple, until its head came up, only a few yards away. It floated there, head up, the shining dark eyes fixed on Daniel’s; a broad head and a wide mouth that seemed to grin with amusement.

  “A dolphin,” Daniel said aloud, and grinned back at it. He chuckled to himself, at his own flash of panic. “Hello, there,” he said.

  “Hello, man,” the creature said.

  Its voice was a strange, piping sound, unearthly but clear. Daniel sat, staring at it, wondering if he had really heard the words. It may be something like a parrot, he thought, studying the broad head and the bright eyes; it repeated the words, of course.

  “I am sent,” the creature said. “You. Come. Near.”

  Daniel, listening incredulously, noticed that the words seemed to come with effort, as though the creature found it hard to speak. But speaking was what it was doing, beyond a doubt. With an effort, Daniel stood up; he stepped into the cold water, and waded toward the dolphin.

  As he did so, be felt the vibration again, now in his legs and lower body; he stopped. The dolphin’s head lowered till it lay half under the water, only the eyes visible.

  Then, amazingly, Daniel felt the sound, as though he could hear with his skin rather than his ears. The words came clearly now.

  “I was sent to find you, man,” the dolphin said. “Are you he who was reborn?”

  “Yes,” Daniel said, standing tensely, watching the creature.

  “I can hear you now,” it said. “I am called…” It uttered a whistling sound that sounded to Daniel something like “Pwee-yiss.” “I am to tell you of the Morra-ayar,” the dolphin went on. “They say that if you wish to learn what has happened to you, they will tell you. But you must come where they are.”

  “The what?” Daniel asked sharply. He stared, almost forgetting that the creature was not human. “What are the Morra-ayar? Where are they?”

  The dolphin uttered a strange sound; suddenly, with a sense of shock, Daniel realized that it was laughter. It was the only thing needed to convince him that this was real; the creature was able to laugh.

  “I had forgotten, you are not like the others,” the dolphin said. It chuckled again. “I was told you came from another world, man, where there are no sea people.”

  Where we make your people into dog food, Daniel thought grimly. It would not be wise to tell that to the dolphin.

  “The Morra-ayar are great ones,” the dolphin told him. “There are only a few of them, and they do not like to leave their own part of the sea. Some of us can lead you there, when you are ready.”

  The dolphin moved, sliding smoothly backward. Daniel saw he was going, and moved forward, almost falling as his feet went deeper.

  “Wait!” he called out. The creature stopped.

  “Is that all?” Daniel said angrily. Another deep laugh came through the cold water.

  “What else would you wish to know, man?” it asked. “If the Morra-ayar want to speak with you, is that not enough? Why, they seldom speak even with us, their own kind.”

  “Are they like you?” Daniel asked.

  “Bigger, bigger,” the dolphin said. “One of them is twice as large as one of the wood boxes you float in on the water. And they are very wise, so wise that they think almost all of the time, and seldom speak, unlike you shore folk.” It chuckled again. “So, if the Morra-ayar will speak at all, you are sure to learn something, man.”

  And suddenly, with a splash, the dolphin spun around and shot out of sight, down into the dark water. Daniel stood, his questions unanswered, in the cold sea.

  Chapter II

  The house that had belonged to Egon was much like the others on the shore. It was stone, apparently very old, and with several rooms that were bare and Spartan. Hangings, made of something that looked to Daniel like wool, hung on some of the walls. Once there may have been sheep or something like them, he thought, though he had seen nothing that could bear wool in the valley. But everything made of that substance was very old. Most of the people wore rabbit skins, sewn together into a kilt and cloak affair, and rabbit skins covered the bed on which he slept, alone. There were still many rabbits—big, agile ones that raided the gardens and seemed to live well in the snows beyond the valley.

  Waking, Daniel saw the unaccustomed brightening at the tiny window. Apparently the mist was clearing as the sun rose higher now.

  He sat up and stretched, yawning. The girl, Ammi, was awake already; he could hear her moving about in the open court she used as a kitchen, and there was a smell of wood smoke. As always, she had slept in that small room on the other side of the court. And as always, she was silently preparing food for both of them.

  Daniel knotted his kilts about himself and drew on his boots; then he walked to the doorway and stood, looking at the girl. She was kneeling, head bent, over the cooking fire, watching the small fish cook on the flat stone.

  “Ammi,” he said, and she glanced at him, then returned to watching the fish.

  “The dance, in the sea,” Daniel said. “It’s today, isn’t it?”

  Ammi nodded without looking at him.

  After a moment he said, “Why do you do this, Ammi?”

  “What?” She glanced back, looking puzzled. With a swift movement she brought the food onto a clay dish and stood up. She came toward him, holding his share out as she ate her own with her fingers.

  He took the plate and held it absently, still looking at her.

&
nbsp; “Why?” he asked again.

  “I don’t understand,” she said. She glanced at the fish. “Eat,” she told him. “We must go soon.”

  “You cook for me,” he said, staring at her. “You live here with me as if you were my woman. Yet, you look at me… like that. Do you hate me, then?”

  “I was Egon’s woman,” she said.

  “He is dead,” Daniel told her.

  “That… is true,” she said, then turned away. After a moment she said, without turning back, “No. I do not hate you. Do you want me to go to another house?”

  “That young man, Banar,” Daniel said. “He has asked you to be his woman, hasn’t he?”

  She swung around, her eyes glittering oddly.

  “Yes,” she said. “So have others. I told them I am Egon’s.”

  “You were,” Daniel said. He moved toward her, a step. “If I asked, would you be my woman?”

  “Have you not been asking?” she said scornfully.

  “No,” he said. “You know I haven’t spoken of that.”

  “Did you need to?” But her voice was less edged now.

  He stood still, looking at her. There was nothing he could say, he thought angrily.

  “Have you forgotten your own woman, the one you called Sheila?” Ammi asked in a quiet voice.

  “No,” he said. And again, more harshly, “No. But… she is not alive. She… why, she’s not born yet!”

  “And Egon is dead, as you say,” Ammi told him. They stood, not moving, regarding each other.

  “I will not forget Egon,” she said after a moment. “Nor you your woman. But… if you want me to be your woman, ask, in a little while. But… not yet. Not for a little longer.” Her eyes glittered. “If you did not wear his face… it would be easier, Daniel. I could not leave here, because of that. Do you understand? Do you?”

  He nodded, not speaking.

  On the beach, the sunlight was warmer than Daniel had ever known it to be; the mist was thinning on the bay. More and more of the people were coming, sitting in quiet groups clumped along the shore, silent and watchful. Daniel, looking down toward the beach, guessed that there were six or seven hundred now, most of the population of the place. Ammi was beside him.