Orb (25 page)

“When.” I said the word so quickly it allowed me to jump out to a half-body length lead.

I had another slight advantage. Swimming to the left of Diana meant that when I turned my head out of the water to breathe I was able to catch a glimpse of her position relative to mine. She, on the other hand, had a panoramic view of the far horizon. I hadn’t been clever enough to plan it that way—maybe I’d feel guilty if I had. Then again, maybe not. I’m not fond of losing either. Halfway to Paul and Kelly I was holding onto a pretty good lead, but Diana was fast closing the gap.

That’s when the finish line became more fluid than the water we swam in. That’s when Kelly deliberately moved two strides forward to prevent me from being overtaken and Paul simultaneously stepped two strides backward to give Diana a few extra meters to catch me.

As a result, the outcome of the race was thrown in doubt.

In trying to explain this sad state of affairs, both Paul and Kelly emphatically swore they never moved. Then they took turns swearing the other had moved first. A friendly dispute ensued among the four of us. Naturally, Diana and I each claimed victory. When that debate predictably went unresolved, she and I proceeded to take turns criticizing Paul and Kelly for having moved. Even that squabble was a charade: After all, we had to appreciate our partners’ displays of devotion.

When the laughter and ensuing splash fight ended, Kelly came up behind me and draped her arms around my neck and clasped her legs around my waist. Clinging to my back, her sun-hot skin pressed tightly to mine, I carried her through the water onto shore, where I gently laid her down; and I drank in the sight of her—of her, of the sparkling water, of the sun and sky, until I felt a rush, a feeling of euphoria, pass clean through me. As I leaned over her, she stared up at me and said, “These are moments that stay with you a lifetime.”

“I could stay with you a lifetime.” The words, without my thinking, had come pouring out of me.

“Are you worried you said more than intended?” Kelly responded. She put a finger to my lips. “No, don’t answer … but don’t be.”

Paul and Diana joined us and, together with Angie, we lay side by side on a blanket-covered rock, basking in the blue-tinged light of the sun. We had precious little time before heading back.

“There is something intrusive about the summer sun,” I said. “The intense brightness seeps deep into you, then draws you out into the world.”

“The ever-contemplative Kyle,” Diana observed.

“A clumsy way to start a conversation,” I said, somewhat apologetically.

“No, I like it,” Diana remarked. “Appreciably, we
are
drawn out. Being sixty percent water, a part of each of us is evaporating up into the sky.”

I reclined and let Kelly lean back into my chest and the crook of my arm.

“Sixty percent?” I inquired. “That helps explain why I’ve always had an affinity for the water.”

“What about the other forty percent?” Paul said distractedly. He was lying on his stomach at the edge of the slab, one arm lazily moving back and forth in the water. He appeared fascinated by the subtle colors that occasionally appeared in the swirls he produced.

“The other forty percent,” I said, “is along for the ride.”

“Tell me, Paul,” Kelly said, wiping away the beads of sweat on her upper lip, “does the temperature get much hotter?” When Paul failed to respond, the question was repeated. When he still didn’t respond, Kelly simply said, “Paul?”

“His mind went elsewhere,” Diana noted. But curious as to why, she sat up to study him. Under the weight of our stares, he finally responded to Kelly’s inquiry.

“Sorry. I’m listening. More than you know, I am listening. For some reason the conversation reminded me of one Kyle and I had. In any event, a day like today is about as hot as it gets. The ocean moderates the temperature nicely.”

“And yet, fifteen months from now there’s several meters of ice,” Diana said, still watching Paul. “I wonder where the Orb go during the winter?”

“A warmer planet?” I said, receiving a good-natured elbowing from Kelly.

“No, really,” Diana persisted. “There are
millions
of them. Perhaps they stay submerged, keeping far below the ice. Another indication of how intimate their connection to the ocean must be…”

Diana was interrupted by the sudden motion of Paul standing upright, his eyes wide in astonishment, fixated on the ocean. Startled, expecting to see advancing Orbs, we followed his gaze outward.

What we saw, and for the last time, was only ocean.

“Can it be?” Paul whispered, nearly speechless, repeatedly shaking his head side to side to mean
no
, but really meaning
yes
.
But yes to what?

“Paul, what is it?!” Diana entreated, attempting to coax him out of his reverie. He had her full attention. Paul wasn’t prone to false alarms. He had all our attention.

“The ocean…” he stammered out, “…the ocean
is
the Orb!”

The three of us exchanged confused glances. Diana came to understand first,
her
eyes widening, her jaw dropping open. Temporarily at a loss for words she, too, began to shake her head.

“You understand?” Paul asked her.

“Yes,” she managed to reply, standing to look out over the water.

“Kyle,” Paul said, giddy with exhilaration, striving to make me comprehend, “try to phrase it correctly … the Ocean is the Orb, the Ocean are the Orb, the Orb is an Ocean…”

And the wave of comprehension that smacked into Paul, then Diana, washed over me. I grasped what Paul had accomplished. The complex made simple. Elegant and beautiful. But was it true? I looked to Kelly. Her eyes had welled with unrepressed emotion. As she blinked, one drop of water fell onto the softness of her cheek to tell me she, too, believed, saying to me in a gasp: “Kyle … your name for the planet …it’s almost as if you suspected all along.”

I could not claim this was so. No, this was Paul’s giant leap in reasoning, his vision, and we were enthralled by it, the three of us standing beside him, perched at the end of the slab, regarding the ocean as if for the very first time.

Ocean?
How crudely expressed, for this vast
body
was no more defined as water than you and I. No, an entity, a life-form, a collective organism were all more apt descriptions, even as I sought in vain for a better one, for a word yet to be devised.

And as I searched for mere words, the scientist in Diana excitedly sought proof, haphazardly retracing the steps Paul had most likely taken to arrive at his brilliant conclusion.

“So much seems to fit together … makes perfect sense … some type of intimate relationship where the individual Orbs—they’re not exactly individual, are they?—are bound to the main body, the ocean … I must somehow desist from calling them … it … an ocean. The intimacy of Orb-water contact we’ve never seen broken … the nearly identical chemical composition between the two … the confusing magnetic readings … and the colors, yes, the colors, swirls and ripples—you were fascinated with them, weren’t you my love?—the excitement Angie apparently felt after contact, and, lesser, the way
we
feel in the water.
Water?
Damn, I did it again—can we say the OceanOrb?—let’s, that’s good … for now. But how is the perfect roundness explained? And where does the phytoplankton fit in? Are we assuming too much? There remain loose ends…”

We let Diana’s stream of consciousness wander an irregular course to the sea, where it slowed enough for her to say, “We must immediately inform Thompson. And Larry!
He
couldn’t make the connection. I can’t wait to see his face, Paul, to see the reaction to your doing what he couldn’t! Kelly, he’ll surely have a stroke.”

“The credit—and it remains to be proved any is due—is by no means mine alone,” Paul said, gently admonishing her. “Consciously or not, you are all partly responsible; you prompted me to this conclusion.”

I wasn’t sure what he meant, but he was sincere. Almost anyone else I’d have accused of false modesty.

“The implications inherent in
your
insight,” Diana insisted, “are mind-boggling. Forget I once said
tens
of millions of years, the Orb and OceanOrb may be
hundreds
of millions of years old. Perhaps nearly as old as the planet itself. Try to wrap your mind around
that
concept.”

“I, for one,” Kelly said, “am still working on the fact that we swam in it! To it, we’re the size of a bacterium. Less; a virus. What does that mean?”

“What does it mean to us?” Diana queried. “Maybe nothing more than a slight feeling of euphoria.”

“And to the OceanOrb?”

“It’s too premature to say. Maybe it’s largely unaware of our presence. Or maybe we inadvertently established a rudimentary form of communication.”

“The Orb was pretty stimulated by contact with Angie,” I reminded.

“True,” Diana said. “Response may be intensified by contact with individual Orbs. Maybe the OceanOrb spins off the individuals for the very reason that they can become semi-autonomous, that they can, being several orders of magnitude less volume than the parent entity, sensate more intensely in that form. I didn’t express that well. Let me try again in reverse: When we are in the ocean, the Orb may experience us in a dilutional way.”

“Do you think all the individuals emerge from the OceanOrb?” Kelly asked.

“That’s one of two possibilities I can imagine,” Paul ventured. “The other is that they are the progeny of larger individual Orbs. We’ve no definitive observations, but if either, or both, is true it helps confirm our impression that there was excitement generated by the emergence of the smaller Orbs.”

“And are the individuals ever reabsorbed?”

“Also remains to be observed.”

“How do individuals die?” Kelly asked.

“Do
they die? Diana ventured. “If the individuals are reabsorbed, then death, at least as we define it, seems uncertain.”

“Incredible,” Kelly responded.

“Yeah.”

“We’ve repeatedly observed them banding together,” I commented, formulating an idea.

“Yes, there’s that,” Diana added. “And they appear to congregate in groups of twelve, and please don’t ask me why.”

“They are, in some capacity, behaving as a society?”

“In my estimation, yes,” Diana responded.

“Analogous,” I continued, “to humans procreating, establishing family and social groups?”

“The comparison is a bit of a stretch,” Diana responded. “But if you want to make one, Orb society is, like Thompson suggested,
far
more homogeneous than any human society.

“Homogeneous enough,” I proposed, “that the Orb, untold millions of them, can conceivably communicate instantaneously among themselves.”

“Logic would dictate so,” Diana agreed. “And I think I see the deeper meaning underlying your statement. The individual Orbs may, if they choose to, respond to us instantly and in unison. We should consider the likelihood, given their amazing interconnectivity, that individual Orbs have a heightened degree of intimacy, a type of shared understanding that we could only dream of.”

“Therefore we should exercise prudence in our dealing with them.”

“I agree,” Paul said. “This may provide our first hint into their mindset, one that we might somehow need to cultivate, even attempt to emulate, in any effort to get through to them … or it.”

“I have to ask,” Kelly began, “does any of this increase the chance
Ixodes
was destroyed by, or should I say within, the Orb?”

“Do you mean to suggest that Larry could have been right?” Diana asked, holding back her annoyance.

“No. Yes. Certainly a greater chance of that,” Kelly responded. “I’m not going to be his defender, but maybe, just maybe, the sub was considered a viral threat.”

“There’s something to that,” Paul said. “Before the arrival of humans, the Orb may have
never
come into contact with technology. It may be more alien to them than we are. On the other hand, given their perfect shape, metalloid composition, and the inexplicable aspect of their movement, I could just as easily surmise that the Orb have already incorporated a technology far superior to ours unto themselves. After all, they only had a few hundred million years to do so.”

“The holy grail of technology,” I said. “Another assumption we humans like to cultivate: That higher life forms unavoidably develop technology. Not necessarily so if, as seems to be the case here, there is no compelling reason to.”

“Or maybe they can’t,” Diana said, holding up one hand and flexing her fingers. “No opposable thumbs.”

“You keep a straight face,” I said, smiling. “Haven’t decided if you’re joking?”

“No.”

“Without technology, they forgo exploration of other worlds?” Kelly remarked.

“I guess so,” I replied, “but it is far easier, like we have, to let everybody come to you.”

“And we can be perceived either as visitors or as intruders,” Paul said. “Other than the mystery of what happened to
Ixodes
, we seem to have been well tolerated. The fact is, by carrying out Thompson’s idea, we were allowed contact, briefly, with two individual Orbs. And all of us—except Melhaus, that is—have physically entered the OceanOrb, apparently with no ill effects. Quite the contrary, in fact. Pretty considerate of them, no?”

“And, still,” Diana said, “Angie appears to have had the most significant contact of all. Why? Why? Why?”

“For every scientific discovery, one question resolved, two more—”

Interrupting Paul were three piercing notes from his communicator. The tonal pattern signaled high priority.

“Put me on speaker,” we heard Thompson say with uncharacteristic urgency.

“You are,” Paul responded.

“Return immediately. If for any reason I don’t meet you at the edge of Red Square, don’t approach any closer than one hundred meters of
Desio
.”

“What gives?” Paul asked with heightened concern.

“Melhaus has commandeered the ship.”

Thompson let the ramifications of his message sink in. Diana reacted first.

“What in hell does he possibly hope to accomplish?!” she shouted. “Has he gone
completely
insane?!”