Chapter Text
The crew and scientists working on board the Pandora Clipper were aware that something was going on back at Hell’s Gate. They’d been told that avatar drivers had been disappearing and there was some kind of problem with an aggressively growing plant, but it didn’t seem to concern them. Nobody on the ship had an avatar or had even been considered for the program, and as one of the sailors, Bob Burke, had joked, there weren’t a lot of plants in the middle of the ocean. On the morning everything changed, nobody had even been thinking about it.
Dr. Stephanie Atwell certainly wasn’t, as she sat in the main lab listening to Nick’s classic rock playlist and watching sonograms come up on a holoscreen. She’d been listening to the songs of tulkun, the giant whale-like creatures that roamed the Pandoran oceans, for months now. When she heard a new one, she could almost intuitively predict what the next phrase would be. There was a breakthrough here, but it was hovering just out of reach, like a word on the tip of her tongue.
“I’ve seen this phrase appear in thirteen separate songs by nine different individuals,” she noted, poking one of the shapes with a pen. “Always accompanied by one of four others.”
“What does that mean to you?” asked Bev Grey, watching as she stirred a cup of coffee. Bev was the ship’s medic, a small, overweight woman with short ash-brown curls. She wasn’t a scientist, but Stephanie found her a good person to talk to. She would ask questions that helped Stephanie think things through.
“I’m wondering if it might be an equivalent of... have you ever read the Odyssey?” asked Stephanie. Bev shook her head. “There’s a number of formulae that occur over and over throughout the poem. Fresh Dawn came to light with rosy fingers and things like that. They’re stock lines of poetry that can be slotted in to complete a stanza. I wonder if this isn’t something like that.”
“Like the whales are all drawing on a sort of oral tradition?” Bev asked, interested.
“Yeah.” Stephanie sipped her own coffee – it had gone cold hours ago – and tapped her pen on the table as she thought about it. “I feel like any moment now something’s going to click... but it’s just not clicking.”
At the next seat, Nick Tolliver was not working. He was sitting and scowling at a screen that was showing only a connecting icon, which was spinning and spinning and not getting anywhere. He grunted impatiently, and Stephanie and Bev both looked over their shoulders at him.
“Ionosphere?” asked Stephanie.
“No!” said Nick, frustrated. “The signal’s getting through just fine, she just isn’t answering!” He pushed his hands through his hair. Nick was tall and wiry, with a slightly crooked nose and hair that had gone steel-grey even though he wasn’t yet forty. He leaned back in his chair, then nearly overbalanced and had to grab the edge of the lab table to pull himself back upright.
“Sorry, Nick,” said Bev, sounding like she meant it. Nick’s wife Audrey had broken her ankle a few days earlier, and Bev had called somebody to take her back to Hell’s Gate for treatment. Nick had been going stir-crazy without her, and all evidence from their prior conversations had suggested Audrey was doing the same. It was strange that she wouldn’t be answering.
“Trouble in paradise?” asked Sal, who was cataloguing corals in a corner of the room. Salvatore Pappalardo was the eldest of the scientists on the Clipper. He was a balding man in his seventies with the name, accent, and hooked nose of a cartoon mobster, but much more interested in reef ecosystems than in crime.
“No!” said Nick. “We didn’t fight or anything. She’s just not picking up.”
“Don’t panic,” said Bev. “Maybe they’re having technical difficulties.”
“We talked to them an hour ago,” Nick complained.
“A lot can happen in an hour,” Bev told him. “Just leave it for now and try again later.”
Stephanie gathered her own long, loose dark hair up in both hands and twisted it to pull in front of her shoulder, then turned back to her sonograms. She was trying to put together something that followed the rules of tulkun song as she understood it, which could be broadcast into the water to see how – or whether – the animals responded to it. Doing so, she mused, would be about equivalent to taking random lines from the Iliad and Odyssey and just reciting them as if they belonged together. It would be nonsense, but somebody who knew their Homer would hopefully recognize it as an attempt...
The door banged open, revealing Dr. Rattanak Oum, the head of Marine Biology on Pandora. “Guys!” he shouted.
Everybody else looked up, but Rattanak was leaning in the doorway catching his breath. He was a dark-skinned Cambodian with a buzz cut, and he was muscular from lifting weights but had no stamina for running. It took a moment before he could speak again.
“Come on,” he panted. “You gotta see this!”
“What is it?” asked Bev, but Rattanak was already gone, charging back up the stairs to the bridge.
Stephanie looked around at the others in the room, but they were all just as mystified as she. Without saying anything, she got up from her seat, and she, Bev, Nick, and Sal all followed him.
They caught up with him on the bridge, where the rest of the crew was gathered, looking at a hologram projection just below the arc of the front windows. The captain, Gerwin Vogel, was standing back with his arms folded over his chest, but his first mate Li’o, a towering Hawai’ian with a shaved head and many complicated tattoos visible through the open front of his shirt, was leaning over to look at it. Stephanie squeezed in between Melissa Chastain and Cornelius Oliviera to take a look for herself.
The hologram was displaying satellite data – and the data represented a mass movement of marine life that had been detected both visually and with radar. Enormous shoals of fish were in motion, with their predators following – a huge circle of organisms all converging on a single point in the middle of nowhere.
“Look at this!” said Rattanak. “What do you make of that?”
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Melissa, chewing on a cuticle as she studied the image. “Even on Pandora.” Migration cycles were one of her specialties.
“Where are they going?” asked Cornelius as his wife, Dulce, came to join them. The two Dr.s Oliviera were both Brazilians with thick black curls, although Dulce was fair-skinned where Cornelius was dark, and spoke with a strong accent while her husband’s English could often pass for American.
The ship’s engineer, Ozzie Springer, stepped in to enlarge the image. He was surprisingly young for his position, not even thirty, with tousled blonde hair and a gap between his front teeth. He zoomed in on the centre, revealing a set of crescent-shaped islands surrounding a caldera perhaps eight kilometres across. The islands had sheer cliffs on almost all sides, with only a few black sand beaches on the inner curves, and their tops were crowned with thick jungle.
“What’s special about it?” asked Melissa, re-securing her ponytail with an elastic.
“Not a clue,” said Ozzie.
“Nobody lives there,” Ratannak added. “I checked. It’s nothing to do with the natives. I think we gotta go check this out. There must be a reason the animals are converging there, but I can’t imagine what it is.”
“How many species are involved?” asked Stephanie.
“If we can catch up with the shoals, we can find out,” Rattanak replied. “Captain, can we change course?”
Vogel stood quietly for a few moments. He was a difficult man to read, never showing much way of facial expression, and his posture tended to be stiff. Stephanie knew there was a good chance he might refuse, and she knew why – the Pandora Clipper was equipped for combat, but only barely. Spending most of its time far out at sea, it didn’t need the security troops and weaponry that the prospecting ships did, in case they countered unfriendly Na’vi. There were no soldiers on board, and only a minimal crew. If anything untoward happened, they had two machine guns and the ability to electrify the hull, and that was all.
“If nobody lives there, then yes,” he decided. “Li’o, call it in.”
“Aye, Sir,” said Li’o. He turned on a comm unit. “Hell’s Gate, Pandora Clipper, over.”
One of the sailors, Ward Loomis, gave the instructions to the computer, and the ship rumbled as the engines warmed up. The other, Bob Burke, came to look at the hologram. These two men looked about as different as possible: Loomis was a skinny fellow with his hair buzzed short, while Bob sported a beer gut, a voluminous beard, and long hair that he usually stuffed under a cowboy hat. He took the hat off now and put it on the table as he examined the projection.
“Does this place have a name?” he asked.
“If it does, it’s not on the map,” said Ozzie. “The blue dudes might have one for it, but I don’t think anyone’s asked them. Might be up to us.”
“What do you want to call it?” asked Dulce Oliviera.
“Gotta see what’s there first,” Bob replied.
Twenty minutes later, almost everybody was out on deck with their breathing masks on, watching as the ROV technician, Xiaoli Lu, lowered one of her robots over the side. She already had half a dozen drones in the air, and portable projectors were showing what was going on all around the ship – animals were moving just below the surface in a giant caravan, all heading for the nameless Caldera. A few seconds went by, and another screen popped up to show what was going on underneath the Clipper.
“Wow,” Stephanie said.
Everybody gathered around as Xiaoli enlarged the display. The sea beneath them was a crowded place indeed. The ROV was speeding along just below the hull, and on all sides of it were hundreds of fish and cephalopods, heading in the same direction as if driven by some greater hive mind. As everyone watched, one of the black-and-white, plesiosaur-like predators the Na’vi called ilu darted by, snatching up a large fish in its toothy jaws.
Nick whooped in surprise and joy. “We’re recording this, right?”
“Of course we are,” said Xiaoli, shaking her head. She was small and slender, with a punk haircut and a large tattoo of a death’s head moth across her chest, visible peeking out from under her spaghetti-strap top. Her hands were, as usual, covered with band-aids from the small cuts and burns she got by assembling and disassembling robots.
Stephanie gathered up her hair again to keep the wind from whipping it in her face, and watched the display as several more ilu moved into positions where the camera could see them, their flippers undulating as if they were flying underwater. Further ahead she could make out a dark shape that might have been a larger predator, but... she looked around at the other images and frowned. Something was missing here.
There were no tulkun.
Tulkun were fish-eaters. They opened their huge mouths to take in entire shoals at once and swallowed them whole. A migration like this one ought to have been attracting them from kilometres around, like it had apparently done everything else... and yet they weren’t here. Their huge bodies would have been obvious on the aerial views, especially as they came up to breathe, but she couldn’t see a single one.
“Rattanak,” she said, “can I see that satellite data again?”
He handed her a holopad. Stephanie typed in some search parameters, telling the computer to find her anything over seventy metres.
It returned nothing.
She frowned. Where were they? It wasn’t the wrong time of year for them. When she widened the search area she found a couple of pods, but they were all far away, doing whatever it was tulkun did all day. They were not interested in this mass movement at all.
“I’ve seen at least six new species in the last five minutes?” said Melissa, giddily making screen captures. “Look at that – does that fish have a hole in it?”
Stephanie looked up again, and found her colleagues gathered around the big display, looking for things they had not seen before. There did indeed seem to be large flat fish with holes right through them... heaven only knew what evolutionary advantage those granted. Even Vogel was watching, although he normally took little interest in his charges’ research, and the cook, Guadalupe Flores, had come up to see what everybody was so excited about.
The airlock to the bridge clunked as it opened, and Li’o stuck his head out. He was holding a rebreather to his face, but hadn’t bothered to put the straps around his head.
“Captain,” he said, “I still can’t reach Hell’s Gate.”
Vogel nodded. “Keep trying,” he said. Li’o ducked back inside.
Bev patted Nick’s shoulder. “Told you,” she said. “It’s gotta be a technical problem.”
“Yeah,” Nick said, looking at the images of animals flashing by. “Audrey’s gonna be so mad she missed this. She was upset enough to think she wouldn’t get to see the ilu calving.”
“Mister Burke!” Melissa called, emphasizing the title. “Can you get the nets out? I want specimens!”
“I’m on it, Doctor Chastain!” Bob replied with a grin.
Ozzie shook his head. “Those two need to bone and get it over with,” he muttered. “It’d give me something to listen to at night besides the Olivieras going at it like rabbits.”
“Still jealous, I see,” said Cornelius tranquilly.
Vogel stepped up and cleared his throat. “Achtung, alle,” he said. “One thing: remember that this is all contingent on the islands being uninhabited. If we get there and see any signs of natives, we are leaving. I was on this ship before it was converted, when we got in a fight with the Na’vi at the String of Pearls. I’m not doing that again.”
“Aye, Captain,” said Burke.
The others nodded reluctantly. They’d all heard the story about what had happened to the Prospector 3 at the String of Pearls. It had ended in several people dead and their liaison losing his avatar, and the archipelago called Paysrok Telem on a no-go list. The Na’vi on this part of the planet were better off avoided.
By early evening, they were approaching the Caldera. Vogel reduced speed, and they circled the ring of islands, looking for a way in. There were several straits, but only two that were big enough for the Pandora Clipper to pass through. They sensibly chose the one with fewer tall spires of rock in it, and slowed down to make the passage safely.
It would have been an impressive sight by daylight. With the suns setting and the planet’s legendary bioluminescence beginning to show, it was breathtaking. The cliffs on either side of the strait were some three hundred metres high, with jungle foliage trailing down from the tops all decked out in twinkling lights. Vines were strung across the gap like laundry lines, dangling leaves and flowers and providing perching places for several species of flying creature that took wing in a hurry as the ship passed by The ilu leaped out of the water on either side, as if guiding the Clipper in.
There were still no tulkun, but Stephanie had almost forgotten about them. She had certainly forgotten about her coffee, which she’d brought outside with her by mistake – she couldn’t drink it with her mask on. She clutched the mug in both hands as they passed under curtains of hanging vegetation.
“I wonder what kind of plants those are,” mused Melissa. “I’ve got that book Dr. Augustine wrote, on plants the Na’vi use. If they’re good for anything, they’ll be in there.”
“We could collect her a sample,” Stephanie suggested. She reached up to touch a dangling spiral vine as they passed under it. It seemed to twist in midair, wrapping around her wrist.
Then it suddenly tightened, and she was jerked off her feet. It happened so suddenly Stephanie couldn’t even scream – her brain simply froze, unable to react. The last things she remembered seeing were Nick’s and Melissa’s shocked faces, and her coffee cup spilling its contents as it bounced across the deck. Darkness fell.
The next thing Stephanie was properly conscious of was falling into the water. She landed hard, and kicked her way back to the surface to take a breath only to find that she couldn’t. Her mouth and nose were full of mucus. She thrashed and flailed for something to hold onto as she tried to cough it up, and her hands found a metal ring. Stephanie grabbed it and leaned against a sloping wall, gagging on snot and gasping for air.
It took a while for her throat to clear and her eyes to stop streaming, and then she could take stock of her situation. She was hanging on to the anchor chain, half-in and half-out of the water. Enormous dead leaves and stems were floating on the surface around her, and the hull of the Pandora Clipper was listing badly to starboard, turning it into a fifty-degree slope. The light was dim and low, like late evening or early morning, and the sky was overcast, with a cold wind blowing. Flying creatures called dorado verde, the Pandoran equivalent of gulls, were wheeling overhead and calling to each other, and she was hungry.
She wasn’t wearing a mask.
Stephanie’s heart leaped into her throat, and she automatically took a deep breath and held it. Then she reconsidered: taking a deep breath was the worst thing an unprotected human could do on Pandora... but she’d been gasping and sputtering for the last several minutes and she wasn’t dead yet, or even ill. Was she wearing a mask? With a frown, she rearranged her grip on the chain so she could reach up and touch her face.
She stopped before she got there, however, staring at the hand approaching her. Stephanie’s Irish ancestors had bequeathed her unmanageable dark hair and deathly pale skin that turned bright red after twenty minutes in the sunshine... but the hand she was looking at now was turquoise blue. It looked like the hands of the local Na’vi, the ones that had evolved for a semi-aquatic lifestyle – it was the right colour, and had the flange of cartilage down the forearm to help move water. It couldn’t be a Na’vi hand, though, because it had four fingers and a thumb. It would have looked like an avatar hand, but there were no aquatic avatars.
What was going on?
She heard a loud metallic thud from somewhere overhead, followed by coughing. There was somebody else here, which made sense... there’d been fourteen other people on the Pandora Clipper. Maybe one of them had some idea what had just happened. Stephanie grabbed the chain in both hands and began pulling herself up the sloping side of the ship, bracing her feet against the metal. Although it was cloudy now, the sun must have been shining on it not long ago, as it was still warm.
As she climbed, Stephanie realized that not only was she not wearing a mask, she wasn’t wearing anything else, either. That made her pause for a moment, but it wasn’t like she could do anything about it from where she was. So she kept climbing until she reached the railing, and pulled herself over.
The forecastle was home to the anchors, windlasses, and a few other bits of nautical equipment that Stephanie had never paid a lot of attention to. It was helpful now, though, because it, and the many woody roots and vines that had wound around it, gave her things to hang onto as she crossed the steeply sloping deck to take a look at the naked Na’vi man lying against the railing on the far side, among the gooey remains of some kind of large plant pod.
He was another of the aquatic type, with short dark curls and a tattoo on the back of his right shoulder. This wasn’t one of the geometric designs the natives used, though – instead, it was an outline of a cluster of trumpet-shaped flowers. Stephanie had asked about that once. She’d been told they were ipê-amarelo, the national flower of Brazil.
“Cornelius?” she asked, her voice a little hoarse from coughing.
“Ugh,” said the man. He grabbed the railing to drag himself into a sitting position, and looked up at her. His eyes went wide in surprise and fear.
“Is that you?” Stephanie ventured.
“Yeah,” he said. “Who are you?” He frowned, looking her over, until he suddenly realized she had no clothes on, and quickly turned his head. Stephanie, less inclined to be precious in an emergency, just looked back, studying the outlines of his face. Cornelius was a racial mutt, with strong cheekbones and thick eyebrows. The familiar features were still visible, but in a blue-skinned face with pale blue eyes in the place of brown ones.
Since she hadn’t answered, he guessed: “Stephanie?”
“Yeah,” she said.
Cornelius held up his own hands to look at them. He touched the flange on the outside of his arm, and bent it a little. It was stiff but flexible, like the helix of an ear. The same comparison must have occurred to him, because he next reached up to tug at his catlike Na’vi ears. They twitched under the touch.
“Que porra é essa?” he asked.
The question was directed less at Stephanie than at the universe in general, but she answered anyway. “I have no idea,” she said. “What’s the last thing you remember?”
Cornelius now realized that he, too, had no clothes on, and dragged a large dead leaf over to wrap around his waist. “Uh... you were lifted off the deck by a vine,” he said. “Nick and Melissa tried to grab you, but they weren’t fast enough, and Dulce... where’s Dulce?” He looked around in a panic, but he and Stephanie were the only people there. “Dulce!” he shouted, getting unsteadily to his feet. “Dulce! Me ouvir?”
As if in answer came the sound of glass shattering. Stephanie and Cornelius looked towards the bridge – the ceiling had been partially caved in under the weight of plant matter covering it and all the windows were broken, but a blue hand was gripping one of the frames as somebody inside tried to get out. Stephanie grabbed another vine to keep her balance on the sloping deck and went to see who was there. Cornelius followed her.
The plant growth had torn the bridge airlock open, and the room beyond was almost entirely filled with vines and the remains of another woody pod. Stephanie and Cornelius had to bend down to look inside. Since she didn’t interact with them, Stephanie often forgot that Na’vi were eight to ten feet tall. It was weird, like she was wandering around on a structure made for children.
Crawling out of the pod was another male Na’vi. This one not only had four human-like fingers, but a very un-Na’vi-like beak of a nose, which identified him as Captain Vogel. He shook his head as if to wake himself up, then looked up, saw the two scientists looking back at him, and froze. Stephanie could only imagine what must be going through his head.
“It’s us!” she said quickly, holding up her hands. “It’s Stephanie and Cornelius!”
Vogel blinked and opened his mouth to speak, but then something clanked behind him, further down the slope of the floor. Another hand pushed on the side of Vogel’s pod, but couldn’t move it.
Stephanie braced herself against the threshold of the airlock and offered Vogel a hand. “Come on,” she said. “It’s okay, it’s just me.”
“Dr. Atwell?” he asked, just to make sure.
Hearing his German accent come out of a Na’vi face almost made Stephanie laugh, but she contained herself. “Yes,” she said. “Just me.” She looked back for Cornelius, but he’d already moved on, still searching for his wife. It was up to Stephanie alone to pull Vogel out, and then the two of them had to try to shift the pod that was trapping another person inside.
It wouldn’t budge. The stems were very tough, and the pod itself felt like wet leather, heavy and inert. Vogel had to smash the glass panel to get the fire axe. He stared at the tool a moment, taking in how small it was, before he climbed back in to start cutting the pod up. He handed the pieces up to Stephanie and managed to free Li’o, who was easy to recognize by his tattoos.
“Stephanie!” Cornelius called. “Over here!”
Stephanie left Vogel to help Li’o and climbed back out of the airlock, where she found Cornelius looking at something over the side of the ship. “More people?” she asked.
“I think so,” said Cornelius, but when Stephanie looked she found not people, but three more of the big, leathery pods, fixed to the side of the Pandora Clipper by tangles of vines. As they watched, one of the pods suddenly convulsed. A ripple moved along it, which reminded Stephanie of the time she’d watched a pet dog give birth, and then it split open and slime started bubbling out onto the surface of the water.
“Dulce!” Cornelius called out again. He climbed over the side and made his way down the vines to thump on the pod with his fist. Vogel and Li’o came up on either side of Stephanie to watch as he got his fingers into the split and pried it open. A huge quantity of mucus slid out, along with another Na’vi. Cornelius, unprepared for the suddeness of this, lost his grip and fell into the water.
Before anybody could react, the other two pods opened as well, dumping out more goo and two more naked blue bodies.
Cornelius came to the surface, covered in muck and with his arms around one of the three who’d just emerged – a woman who didn’t seem to be Dulce Oliviera, but unlike the others, Stephanie couldn’t tell who she was. Another person, a man, came up a few metres away, and the three still on deck realized they had to do something. Vogel pulled a life preserver off the wall.
“Dr. Oliviera!” he called out, and threw it over.
Cornelius grabbed it and did a rather comical double-take as he realized it was small enough he could have worn it as a hat. It was all they had, though, so he looped the unknown woman’s arm through it, and then went to help the other two fight their way free of the puddle of goop floating on the surface.
Stephanie, Vogel, and Li’o dragged the woman up and onto the deck, and left her sitting there coughing so they could pull up the man. This turned out to be Nick Tolliver, his grey hair having turned black as part of his overall transformation. The third person was another woman with short, tight curls. Cornelius helped her up and then knelt on the deck with her, holding her head against his chest. It was Dulce.
“O que aconteceu?” she asked, still coughing up mucus. “O que aconteceu conosco, Cornélius?”
“Não sei, meu amor,” he replied, pushing his fingers through her wet hair.
Vogel thumped Nick on the back, while Li’o made his way further aft, looking for more people – they still had less than half of those who’d been on board. Stephanie knelt down next to the anonymous woman and rubbed her back.
“How do you feel?” she asked.
“Terrible,” was the reply. “What’s going on?”
It was Bev, Stephanie realized... Na’vi were skinny creatures, and it was the loss of body fat that had rendered her unrecognizable. “You’re the doctor,” she said. “I think you’re gonna have to tell us.”
“More back here!” Li’o shouted from behind the superstructure.
The rest of the pods were draped over the back of the ship, where people had fled to try to escape what was going on at the front. One was actually hanging from the cliff a few metres away – this contained Ward Loomis, who’d jumped overboard in his panic. Within a quarter of an hour they had all finished hatching, or whatever it was they were doing, birthing Na’vi versions of the rest of the crew and science team.
Stephanie and Melissa crawled through another airlock and felt their way through the dark and bizarrely tiny sleeping quarters, pulling sheets and blankets off the beds so that everybody would have something to cover themselves with. As the climbed back out on deck, Melissa straightened up and then stopped there, looking out across the Caldera. It was getting dark now, and the jungle spilling over the tops of the cliffs was flickering with blue and purple light. The air was thick and the wind chilly, as if it were soon going to rain.
“It’s quiet,” said Melissa.
“Yeah, it is,” Stephanie asked, stepping up next to her. They were all used to hearing the constant low rumble of the ship’s systems, but those were silent now. It was just the wind, the water, and the foliage. Was something else missing?
“The ocean,” Melissa added. “They’re all gone.”
She was right – the last thing any of them remembered, the water had been absolutely boiling with living things, all heading into this crater for reasons unclear. Whatever had brought them here must have been over now, because there was not a ripple. Stephanie caught herself thinking she’d have to check the sonar, but then she remembered that wouldn’t be working, either. They had no power for them.
“We missed it,” said Melissa.
“I’m not so sure,” said Stephanie. What if they were ‘it’? Had all those animals been leading them here so that this could happen?
“What?” Melissa asked her.
“Never mind,” said Stephanie. That was ridiculous. And yet, as they headed back to the forecastle to distribute the sheets and blankets, she couldn’t quite get the idea out of her head. As if... as if this were all part of some much bigger plan.