Ocean: The Sea Warriors (7 page)

The recruits they had assembled aboard the high-speed pod—one hundred ninety-four of them—made for a good start, and that number should increase a little with additional stops in Ireland and Scotland, and then in Florida and Panama on the way back to the Pacific Ocean and Hawaii. Every one of the volunteers seemed enthusiastic, and determined to contribute. Most of the men and women were unafraid of being transformed physically by Moanna, while others expressed some trepidation—but at least all of them were brave enough to give it a try. One man who’d struggled with his fear said nonetheless that human beings needed to sacrifice themselves if necessary, to make up for the horrors and depredations mankind had inflicted upon the ocean.

Now Alicia slowed even more in the water and remained high on the wave as she floated prone toward shore, with the sun continuing to warm her. She could see the dock now, and was heading toward it because that was where her young recruit was supposed to be, presumably with the permission of her parents or guardians. Alicia wanted to pick her up early if possible, but saw only an old fisherman on the end of the structure, sitting on a bench. His head lolled to one side, and he appeared to be dozing, not noticing her.

Before leaving Hawaii on the jetfish craft, Alicia had practiced for days in the waters near Wanaao Town, and had successfully generated waves that were at least twenty yards in width. While she was doing that, in preparation for the trip Kimo did his own practicing, seeing what he could come up with to supplement her abilities. One morning he dove into deep water and brought back a school of skatefoils, large, flat whitefish that he taught to carry him and Alicia on their backs, skimming along the surface of the water. The pair had to sit on the creatures’ backs so as not to fall off, but the largest skatefoils appeared to be capable of carrying as many as seven passengers at a time, while even the smallest could accommodate two.

Considering the unique, sea-related talents that Kimo and Alicia had, she wondered what the new recruits might be able to do, beyond their pre-Sea Warrior professions and activities. They were oceanographers, professors, environmental activists, migration experts, fishermen, divers, and more. Among the people onboard that she liked the most personally, she had spoken briefly with two men—a dolphin trainer from San Diego and a Chilean author of a high-school textbook on ocean ecosystems who lived on Juan Fernandez island off the western coast of South America. She also liked the tall, blonde actress, Monique Gatsby. In recent years, the former model had generated worthwhile publicity about a number of ocean causes, using her star power to protest against overfishing and the dumping of toxins, plastics, and nuclear wastes into the ocean. She had a captivating smile and pleasant demeanor, and Alicia thought they might become friends.

Another volunteer was a Canary Islands artist who specialized in making illustrations of colorful fish for various publications, and knew a great deal about Mediterranean species. They had also plucked a scientist from a National Oceanographic ship at sea, and a Japanese environmentalist from an old, unseaworthy vessel operated by anti-whaling activists. Kimo and Alicia had even been to the Great Barrier Reef of Australia and the coastal bases of Antarctica, where a number of scientists worked.

One of the new recruits was an irritating, egotistical man named Vinson Chi’ang, in his mid to late thirties. An outspoken author and oceanographer who appeared regularly on cable news programs to encourage ocean-related ecological programs, Chi’ang wrote the “Think Blue” series of non-fiction books, popular with schoolchildren. When Alicia left the jetfish transporter moments ago, the mustachioed Chinese-American man had been speaking in a loud, authoritarian voice in the passenger compartment, saying how important it was for the public to “think blue” in addition to thinking green, that blue was even more important to the world from an ecological standpoint than green. A handful of the volunteers hung on his every word, while others made disdainful expressions in his direction, obviously finding him annoying.

A young woman seemed to worship him, an attractive French oceanography student named Pauline Deveaux. She had joined the voyage at the port of Cherbourg, when Chi’ang was already aboard. It wasn’t long before she was sitting next to him on the jetfish transporter as he spoke about the plight of the ocean, expressing his opinions about actions that needed to be taken. Napoli Mora, a well-known environmental activist from Italy, kept interrupting Chi’ang, trying to override whatever he said with something that Mora considered more significant. At times, Mora, a small olive-skinned man in his sixties, looked ready to throw punches at Chi’ang, so Alicia hoped they would find a way to get along—instead of trying to talk over each other.

A number of the volunteers said they had been strongly attracted to the sea from an early age, and felt a deep, calming sensation whenever they immersed themselves in saltwater. Some had been going out on boats in recent weeks without knowing why, or camping on beaches for the first time, or hiking for miles along the seashore—all before learning about the Sea Warriors and their own personal connections with the fledgling organization.

To Alicia, it all seemed predestined.

For days, since Beavan told her about the food delivery man leaving a door unsecured every morning, Gwyneth had been watching, and found it to be a potential escape route. Day after day the man followed the same, predictable routine, leaving the delivery door blocked open for a few minutes so that he could get in and out easier with his boxes.

That morning she went out into the exercise yard at her customary time, where she saw Beavan striding around the perimeter at a brisk pace. Two medical attendants in gray smocks were in the yard watching the patients who were out now. Gwyneth counted six other patients, plus herself. It was a bit warmer today than it had been recently, and the fog had cleared enough that the sun was shining through. It felt good on her face and hands.

She kicked a rubber ball around and chased it by herself, as she often did, but this time she remained as close as possible to the door that the delivery man used. At 10:20 she saw him enter, pushing a hand truck of boxes along an outside corridor. Glancing around as she leaned down to pick up the ball, she saw Beavan make eye contact with her and then fall suddenly to his knees, crying out in discomfort. Obviously he was feigning something in order to create a distraction for her. Somehow he knew she had a desperate need to escape this time. He’d told her he was observant, and maybe he’d heard something said about her, perhaps a couple of hospital officials discussing the Sea Warrior list and the letter she had received.

Her pulse jumped when she saw both attendants hurrying over to help him. The delivery man was out of sight, having gone into the adjacent cafeteria. Gwyneth darted into the corridor, opened the blocked door and ran outside onto the sidewalk. She ran to the right for a short distance, turned down an alleyway, and then kept changing streets and alleys as she continued rushing downhill, in the direction of the seashore and the public dock.

She kept expecting to hear someone behind her shouting a command to stop, but that didn’t happen. Wearing jeans and an Irish sweater, the petite young woman ran past startled villagers. She saw the dock now, and an old fisherman in a pea coat and cap standing at the end of it, looking out to sea.

Dripping wet, wearing a black, one-piece swimsuit, Alicia climbed a wooden ladder up to the deck of the weathered structure. As she reached the top, she didn’t see anyone except the old man.

“I’ve been watching you come in from way out there.” A smile creased his aged, ruddy face. “It almost looked like you were floating in from across the ocean.”

“I like to swim,” she said, glancing at her watch. If the volunteer didn’t show up in eighteen minutes, she would have to move on.

But at that moment she saw a small figure running toward her on the dock, looking back frantically, running as fast as she could. A policeman was running behind her, shouting for her to stop.

The girl’s eyes were desperate when she reached the end of the dock. She had trouble catching her breath.

“Are you Gwyneth McDevitt?” Alicia asked the tiny, elfin girl, who looked exactly as Kimo had described her from his dreams. Initially, they’d gotten her surname wrong.

The girl nodded, looked nervously over her shoulder at the oncoming, shouting officer. She had bright blue eyes.

Without another word, Alicia pushed her into the water and jumped in after her. The girl cried out, and coughed as she swallowed seawater. Then, holding the diminutive teenager around the waist, Alicia generated a wave, and stood up with her on top of it. They rode it out to sea, with the shouts of the cop fading behind them….

***

Chapter 10

After picking up the McDevitt girl, Alicia and Kimo had made a stop-off on the Irish coast for a recruit, followed by a detour to northern Scotland for two more, and then the two last stops—in Florida, and in Panama on the way through the canal. During the trip back, Gwyneth McDevitt had spoken very little, but she had provided her own explanation (albeit ungrammatical), which she wrote on a piece of paper and handed to Alicia: “I am autism.”

In response, Alicia had smiled and said it didn’t matter to her, but privately she found the girl peculiar, very much different from any of the other volunteers, and extremely unskilled at communication because of her ailment. She had an agitated, pained expression on her gamine face, which only added to her oddness.

Thinking about this now as the jetfish pod sped across the Pacific Ocean, just beneath the surface, Alicia wondered why Gwyneth was even on the list of names that had appeared to Kimo, and what the unusual teenager could possibly do to help the ocean. It must be something important, because Alicia had confirmed with Kimo what she’d thought when she first saw Gwyneth on the pier in England—he said the girl was the same person he’d seen in his dreams, the same one who seemed to have absorbed huge amounts of ocean-related data into her brain. At the first opportunity, Alicia wanted to talk more with Kimo about Gwyneth, but that would have to wait until after all the volunteers visited Moanna—and were either accepted or rejected as Sea Warriors.

At the moment, Kimo was lying at the front of the passenger compartment, his hands and face pressed against the soft pod floor, massaging the amalgamated creatures and humming something melodic to them, calming them and somehow encouraging them to follow the course he wanted, urging them onward in the sea. She couldn’t hear Kimo now, but whenever she drew close she heard him making undulating sounds, and whenever he paused she heard the faint response tones of the creatures. She recalled an earlier conversation with Kimo in which he’d said that some aquatic animals made response tones to him, as if mimicking him—and she had observed him imitating the natural sounds made by turtles, dolphins, and whitetip sharks. It gave her a warm feeling, knowing that Kimo was so connected to the ocean. She loved both of them.

Kimo had also told her that he could send jetfish pods to wherever he wanted them to go, and not accompany them. But when he did ride in them, he liked to strengthen his bond with their species. They were a collective organism, he’d explained, and by getting close to them whenever he could, he was making a strong connection with all living members of the jetfish species, no matter where they were in the world.

The passenger compartment was noisy now, from numerous animated conversations that were going on simultaneously. She listened in on one of them for a moment, two men saying that humans needed to be completely evicted from the ocean if they were not going to treat it right. To Alicia, it was a startling thought, yet one that made some sense philosophically, though not from a practical standpoint. Anything like that would be a monumental undertaking, doomed to certain failure.

Two female scientists were discussing technical methods that might be used to heal ocean waters that were in the most trouble, including in the Pacific Ocean where coral reefs were dying on such a frightening scale, bleaching out and breaking into lifeless pieces. Other recruits discussed new laws that were needed, and strict enforcement all over the world.

Alicia stared at Kimo, transfixed by what he was doing….

Several days ago, during one of Kimo’s breaks, she had asked him how he guided the jetfish. The two of them had been sitting on one of the interior benches in the forward section of the passenger compartment, a few feet from Shauna McDill, the professional storyteller they had brought along. A short woman with soft features and eyeglasses, McDill had been standing with her back to Alicia, telling a humorous tale about an African fishing village that was populated by wise women and foolish men. The storyteller’s accents and sound effects were highly amusing.

In answer to Alicia’s question, Kimo had shrugged. “Can’t say I know how I do it, but it’s almost like I was born with the ability and only discovered it recently.”

“You hum something to the jetfish, and press your hands against their soft flesh, stroking it or massaging it. Somehow the creatures go exactly where you want them to go, and yet you can’t see outside the hull, so you can’t possibly see where we’re going. How do you set courses or make course corrections?”

“It’s the same answer as before. I just don’t know. Except that I feel a special connection with the creatures, something that locks into place between me and them, and they do what I want—it is as if they are an extension of me, as if I am them and they are me. It sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it?”

“Not at all. Not to me. I also feel something strange whenever I generate waves, but my strong connection is with seawater instead of sea creatures—as if the ocean is a life form itself, and I have a paranormal linkage with it.”

“But it
is
a life form,” Kimo had said. “I overheard a couple of the scientists talking, and they said that each drop of seawater on the surface is teeming with life, millions of organisms in a single drop of water—tiny plant and animal organisms called phytoplankton and zooplankton that drift with the currents. You might have an extraordinary connection with those life forms. Your waves are on the surface of the sea, just as they are.”

“Wow. That’s really interesting.”

“I’ve seen the tiny organisms in a microscope they brought aboard, and I’ve seen them in my dreams—greatly enlarged. Despite its problems the ocean is brimming with life, and both of us have a unique connection with it. Concerning your ability to generate waves, there is more plankton in colder waters than in the tropics, though the tiny life forms are spread all over the world. Another interesting thing—most of the zooplankton dive deeper in daylight hours and come back to the surface at night, to feed on phytoplankton. These facts make me wonder if you might generate even more powerful waves in colder climates., or at night.”

“Maybe, but I suspect not. I suspect that the entire ocean, every aspect of it, is essentially a single life form, a collective organism, and you and I have a special relationship with it—just as you have with all living members of the jetfish species. Some people say the entire planet is a life form called Gaia.”

He’d considered that for a moment, then had nodded and said, “I like that way of thinking. Yes, it sounds plausible.”

“And what if it’s even bigger than that?” she’d asked, hearing the excitement in her own voice. “What if we’ve tapped into the core power that drives the entire universe?”

“Hmmm, I don’t know. I mean, we can easily say that every human being is tapped into the core power of the universe, because all life forms are connected to it.”

“Sure, the basic physics of properties in motion, and how they interact on a micro and macro scale.”

“We’re tapped into something all right,” he’d said, nodding. “The question is,
what
is it?”

“Maybe it’s too big for us to ever understand, Kimo, like the concept of a universal god. Maybe we shouldn’t even try, and should just try to do the right thing with the abilities we have.”

He’d nodded. “The right thing, yes the right thing. That’s what this ocean project is all about, isn’t it?”

During the voyage, Alicia and Kimo had been receiving questions from the recruits about what they would experience when they reached the waters of Hawaii—but both of them deferred most of their responses for a general meeting that would be held when they were almost there. Alicia had told Kimo he should conduct the meeting, because he had so much more experience than she did.

When they were a couple of hours away from Loa’kai island, Kimo gathered everyone and began speaking to them. In his bare feet, he wore shorts and a faded green Hawaiian shirt, with the tails out. He said it would be early afternoon when they arrived, and the volunteers would enjoy a picnic on the beach before being taken deep into the vault of the ocean, to the realm of Moanna, the amorphous goddess of the water.

“It might be your last chance for food from the land,” he said, “at least for awhile.”

Kimo went on to describe the means by which they could dive deep inside a bubble tube, and what the experience would be like. He spoke of some of the spectacular colors and ocean creatures they might see as they descended into the deep, and what it would be like to be in the presence of Moanna herself.

He also said that, depending on the availability of the fish required to form a bubble tube, another deep-diving system might need to be used—something he called the “seavator,” which he described as a huge clam shell lowered by giant squids of the genus
Architeuthis
. If that mode became necessary, he said the underwater views for the passengers would not be as good, because the colossal clams only had small viewing ports on their tops and bottoms. The clam-squid system surprised Alicia, because she had not heard of it previously, but she remembered Kimo telling her how vast the seas were, and how even he only knew a small portion of what there was to know about them.

Now Kimo reminded his audience that the Sea Goddess might not accept all of them, in which case they would not become hybrids. “If that happens, you might still be able to contribute in some other way to the Sea Warriors, as associates, if you wish to do so. Or, we will transport you back to the same place we picked you up.”

“Like a money-back guarantee?” a mustachioed man asked, eliciting laughter from those around him.

“Sort of like that,” Kimo said, with a smile.

He answered more questions, then spoke of the gills behind his and Alicia’s ears, which they had already shown to most of the volunteers. This time he took a few moments to describe how the respiratory organs enabled him to obtain oxygen from seawater and breathe while immersed, and how it felt when he did that, and during transitional times when he was entering the water and leaving it. He also spoke of the amazing ability of his body (and Alicia’s) to withstand deep-sea pressures, without the necessity of diving equipment, and the way they could find food in the water.

“I am not a scientist,” he said, “so my comments are more personal than technical—my attempt to let you know what it might be like if you are successfully transformed—as Alicia and I have been.”

Alicia added a few observations of her own. Then Kimo grinned and asked, “For those of you who might be transformed into hybrids, are you ready to snatch small fish out of the water and eat them whole, or swallow fat lugworms, or suck plankton into your new body’s filter system? Do you want to know how I eat crustaceans in the wild? Or how I avoid eating animals such as moray eels, because they might be carrying toxins from poisonous fish they eat, and which did not harm them?” Without waiting for anyone to answer, he said, “If you are transformed I will teach you how to live on the bounty of the sea, and—very important!—how to avoid harming endangered species. We are in the ocean to live in harmony with it and contribute to its welfare, not to commit detrimental acts.”

The most outspoken oceanographer onboard, Vinson Chi’ang, said, “Many species of animal life—including crabs, lobsters, and fish—begin as microscopic larval organisms in zooplankton, and then grow larger, eventually leaving the plankton colonies and swimming freely in the sea, where they continue to grow until they are adults. How can we make certain that the plankton we consume does not contain anything that is endangered, and in an embryonic form?”

When Kimo hesitated, Alicia said, “That is why we need you, Mr. Chi’ang, to come up with a way for us to behave with complete propriety.”

Laughter spread through the passenger cabin, and Chi’ang reddened. “I asked a serious question, and it deserves a serious answer.”

“We are a new organization,” Alicia countered, “trying to figure out the proper ways of doing things.” She glared at him. “I gave you a serious answer, sir, and we shall look for your contribution.”

Now Kimo said, “One of your first duties, Chi’ang, if you are accepted as a Sea Warrior, will be to analyze the animal life that inhabits the plankton colonies, and give us your recommendations. No one here doubts the importance of the work we all have to do, and I promise you, we take the matter of endangered species quite seriously.”