Chapter 15: Embraced by Water

Pirya had awakened from suspended sleep many times before, but it had never been this blindingly, sickeningly awful. She collapsed to the deck, her legs too weak from the stasis to hold her, cold and wet with the remains of the preservation gel that still clung to her clothes and hair. Supporting herself on trembling arms, she struggled to cough up the slime that remained in her lungs.

As she did, she felt the touch of a hand on her shoulder, and a voice speaking to her, frightened, earnest and repetitive. The accents and intonations were so strange that she didn't realize for some time that it was speaking in her own language, and the words it spoke over and over were, "I'm sorry…I am so sorry…"

She turned her head for a look at the man, and suffered a jolt of fear. Through her blurry vision, she could see that his head reached little higher than where her knee would have been, had she been able to stand. He was one of the little Earth people. Still, he seemed nonviolent at the moment, and his presence was oddly comforting. If he had been one of the self-appointed giant-killers, he would have had more than enough opportunity by now to have plunged his spear into her throat.

Slowly recovering, Pirya sat, resting her back against one of the stasis tubes, rubbing the gel from her eyes. She could see better now. The Earth man stood before her. Only a boy. His youthful face showed concern, and in place of the usual skins and rough cloth, he wore a strange, close garment that glowed with lights like jewels. Pirya looked up, and saw that she was leaning on the resting place of Zaios, his thick beard and brows looking as fierce in sleep as they had in waking.

"Dhou aist on man av Eareth?" she asked. It was a stupid question, but she had to say something.

"No, I—Nao, y am av Greecia," the man said awkwardly, and added in his own strange dialect, "It's a long story." He spoke again, a long, rapid sentence of which Pirya understood only the word "Atalanta."

Of course. Greecia had noticed their long absence, found them, and sent a rescue party at last. This young man must have been disguised somehow to blend in with the natives, though he had a poor chance of that with the fool's costume he was wearing.

When she said so, he only looked at her with blank confusion. Pirya wondered what part of Greecia he had come from, that the people spoke so oddly.

But what he wanted to know, naturally, was what had happened to the Atalanta and why they had never returned home. Speaking as slowly and as clearly as she could, she told him.

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The Atalanta was a magnificent vessel, enormous, and the product of Greecia's most advanced technology. It collected all the power it required from the light of suns and stars. The power system technology had been perfected by the eminent inventor, Poromet, Pirya's uncle.

Pirya was a child when the Atalanta set out on its mission, bearing a crew of scientists and observers intent on investigating Greecia-like planets that had, so far, been out of range of physical exploration. Her mother, Panara had been aboard as the ship's chief medic, her father, Emeth, as a scholar of alien cultures. Her uncle headed the technical science division. Pirya loved nothing better than to help in her uncle's workshop and hand him his tools while he puttered. She thought going into space with her family as her uncle's little helper would be the most exciting adventure of her life.

Earth had not been their intended destination. While they were in stasis sleep for the long journey to Relbaer, an unexpected collision with a rogue comet damaged the ship's systems. When they were reawakened, they found themselves nowhere near the target planet, and with a communications system so devastated it was beyond repair. There was no way to contact Greecia.

Earth was barely even recognized by Greecia's astronomers at that time, but it was the nearest water planet, and had its own variety of humans, who seemed not so very different from themselves. Captain Zaios landed the Atalanta in its ocean beside a temperate coast.

What was meant to be a brief stop stretched into years. Atalanta's solar power system, damaged by the collision, almost completely failed. It barely provided enough power for them to go on living in the ship, with no hope of ever putting it back into orbit. While stranded, the scientists pursued their mission of planetary study. The people of Earth were savage and primitive and unpredictable. Her father found them fascinating, and that fascination was shared by her Uncle Poromet.

"The minds are there," he had said repeatedly. "With a little help, a little boost from us, Earth could be another Greecia."

Others didn't share Poromet's optimism or affection for the Earth dwellers. The little creatures were completely unpredictable: one day they would worship the Greecians as gods. The next, an Earth warrior might attack one of their number with stone weapons, just to display his bravery to his fellows. One day, they would be friendly and absurdly grateful for bits of shared knowledge about agriculture, astronomy and music. The next day you overheard them telling each other stories of giants who devoured people alive.

Captain Zaios grew angry at the long exile, and his anger was directed at Poromet. The inventor was meant to be fixing the solar collectors. Instead, when he wasn't puttering with some frivolous new invention or other, he was off among the Earth people. He and Emeth started trying to teach them about writing, architecture, mathematics.

The tiny bits of knowledge they were able to dole out to barely-comprehending primitives had a bad effect in the end. Knowing there was much more, the Earth people became hungry for alien knowledge. They spoke among themselves of the secrets and treasures of learning hidden in the Atalanta, and soon those stories began to claim the Greecians were hiding more than knowledge: that the ship was filled with rare metals and gems of Earth, unlimited supplies of fine food, and magical weapons that could give their bearer all the power of a giant, or of a god.

The Earth humans became secretive and hostile. A few Greecians vanished, including Captan Zaios's son, one of the ship's officers.

Zaios's son was found. He had been trapped in a primitive snare and attacked, a number of small stone spears still embedded in his body. His death must have been slow and painful. The other missing crew members were never recovered.

After that, the captain ordered that all contact with the Earth people come to an end, and demanded that Poromet fix the solar collectors once and for all.

Quirky Uncle Poromet was a rebellious free spirit, though, and had no interest in recreating work he had already completed. He had an idea for a new sort of power generator, one that would not depend on any outer fuel such as sunlight or heat. His new machine, he promised, would tap into an alternate dimension, a world made up of pure energy. Zaios thought this sounded ridiculous, but he had little choice apart from letting Poromet pursue his new obsession. Zaios had not yet become a tyrant.

As Poromet worked, though, the Earth people grew increasingly aggressive. To whatever land the Atalanta moved, before long they would find themselves being attacked by Earth people greedy for imagined treasures. It baffled them all how those stories of giants' treasure spread over the globe with uncanny swiftness, in the absence of any technological system of communication.

The Greecians were bound by laws and oaths to take no harmful action against primitive natives, but in the interminable absence from their home world, their good intentions and civilized natures wore thin. Captain Zaios's command became more and more despotic, and his rage was directed at the Earth people more and more often. He encouraged his crew to open fire on them with Greecian weapons. When that failed to deter the primitives, Pirya's own mother, Panara, was ordered to pervert her medical skills to create deadly viruses with which to thin the local populations. Those among the Greecians who objected were punished, imprisoned, and sometimes even executed.

Poromet, meanwhile, worked on his new power system under guard, growing angrier by the day at Zaios's treatment of both the Earth primitives and his own people.

The new generator was completed at last, and it was all Poromet had promised. For the first time in years, Zaios was pleased. Power flooded the Atalanta once more. Again they had the energy they needed to shield the ship, to survive located in the middle of the sea where they were safe from encroachment, to return to a style of life that felt luxurious after the long privation, and to conduct repairs that might one day bring them home. Zaios even agreed to let Panara bring an end to the introduced plagues that were devastating the Earth tribes.

His only concern was that Poromet had vanished.

Nearly three months later, when Poromet returned, Zaios demanded an explanation for his absence.

"I have been out sharing our technology with Earth," Poromet said defiantly. "I have given them the design for the energy portal. I invented it, and it was mine to give."

Zaios had actually laughed. "What do you think these savages can do with your design? They can't even build a proper boat."

Poromet shrugged. "The generator is made up of many layered circuits. I've given each of the most powerful tribes the design for one layer. All they understand is that if they can learn to communicate and to cooperate with each other, those symbols will give them the power of the gods. Whether they make the generator or not, I hope that I have pushed them along the road to peace and civilization. Maybe by the next time Greecia visits Earth, we will meet on an equal footing."

Madness it might have been, naiveté it was certainly, but at any rate, Zaios had ordered no further contact with the people of Earth, and Poromet had disobeyed. Zaios made an example of him, having him bound and left on the hull of the ship to die slowly from exposure and thirst. When Emeth and Panara attempted to rescue him, they were caught and summarily executed.

Of all her family, only Pirya survived. Zaios permitted her to live, due to her youth, but she was imprisoned.

Then, one day, the lights went out in her cell and the walls grew cold. The door was eventually pried open by guards, and Pirya was taken before Zaios.

"You worked with your uncle on the dimensional portal," Zaios had said. "Something's gone wrong with it. The ship has no power. Fix it."

Pirya had been taken to the generator. It looked as it had always looked—a broad circular platform, with a wide beam of energy stretching from its surface to the collector above, from which power was distributed throughout the Atalanta.

It had been difficult to study the problem without energy to power any diagnostic equipment, but the conclusion she reached was inescapable.

"The flow of power has reversed," she reported. "For some reason, the generator is now sucking power from the ship instead of supplying it." Though she knew of no way to fix the problem, dismantling the generator at least brought an end to the outflow of power.

Or so she thought.

Released from prison, she was put to work repairing the solar collectors. In the wealth of energy Poromet's invention had supplied, the solar collectors had been neglected, even partly dismantled. Now they were once more the only hope of returning to Greecia.

But even as the crew worked with her to restore the system, disaster crept onward. The temperature sank every day, Earth becoming colder and colder. The energy flow, no longer sucking life from the ship, was sucking it from the planet. Their scanners showed the phenomenon was worldwide, and though the equatorial regions were still warm, the Atalanta no longer had enough energy to move there.

In the end, the cold began to kill them.

Finally Zaios made the only decision open to him. They would all return to stasis sleep. The partial remains of the solar collectors would provide enough energy to keep their bodies alive in a suspended state. The ship was programmed to reawaken them once the energy drain had ended and their surroundings returned to their normal temperature.

Finally, silently, the Atalanta slipped beneath the waves.