“When you say they transformed themselves,” asked Arjun, “do you mean genetic engineering or—”
“Selective breeding,” Sonar insisted. “If wolves could become poodles in a few thousand years, think what humans could turn into, if there was a need! They began to explore the seafloor. They found a lot of industrial junk that had been washed into the oceans during the Hard Rain and sunk to the bottom. There is nothing of metallurgy that is a mystery to them.”
“Which is why you trade with them?” Ty ventured. “Because you are short on metal?”
“And they are short on things we have,” Sonar affirmed.
“You said there were three Deluges,” Einstein reminded her. “The Third Deluge?”
“Is now,” said the Cyc. “A Deluge of life, beginning with microorganisms and culminating with you.”
“Meaning, the Spacers,” Ty guessed.
“Yes. And the only Spacers they know about are the ones who dropped a lot of rocks into the Torres Strait and built the thing at Makassar.”
“How is all of this being imparted to you?” asked Arjun.
“Imparted?”
“Have you, Sonar, actually had face-to-face conversations with Pingers?”
“Me personally?!” she asked, sounding amazed and horrified by the very idea. “Oh no, just looked down on them from up here.”
“So you lurk up above while more senior members of your clan go down to the beach and talk to the Pingers.”
“Talking is difficult. Communication is mostly through the written word. They didn’t have paper until we gave them some of ours. We use slates and chalk.”
Kathree’s eye went to a detail she had noticed a minute ago: an unnatural-looking deposit of flat black rocks half buried in wave-driven sand. As the remainder of the party made their final descent to the water’s edge, she used a piece of driftwood to scrape sand and gravel away from these until she could worry one loose. Though it was rough around the edges, it had clearly been shaped by humans: a slab of black rock about as thick as her finger, big enough to hold in the crook of an arm, smooth enough to write on. Scattered in the muck around it she’d seen lumps of calcium carbonate: chalk. Traces of it were still visible on the slates. Not writing but a fragment of a diagram, a map perhaps, and a few numbers.
PROJECTING FROM ONE SIDE OF THE ISLET, JUST BELOW THE TOP OF it, was a snarl of driftwood: the stump of a tree that a storm had torn from the edge of a cliff somewhere along the coast and later hurled up here. As soon as he arrived, Ty dropped his pack, emptied his pockets, and picked up the boxy equipment case that Roskos Yur had delivered in his glider. Holding this up above his head to keep it dry, he waded out to the islet, cursing at the intensity of the cold. At its deepest, the water came up to his waist, with occasional waves clipping him under the chin. He tossed the case up onto the flank of the islet and then clambered up after it.
After gazing curiously at the stump for some moments, he squatted down, gripped it by a couple of protruding roots, and overturned it, causing it to tumble into the surf. He then edged back out of the others’ sight line to reveal what had been hidden beneath it: a vertical section of stout steel pipe, about a hand’s breadth in diameter, rising to the height of a person’s knee, topped with a flat disk of battered steel the size of a dinner plate. The pipe wasn’t rooted to the boulder itself. It was part of a longer object that extended out into the sea. The part above the waterline was lashed to spikes that had been driven into crevices in the rock, in a style that they had already learned to recognize as typical Digger improvisation.
Ty’s attention strayed to something he had noticed at his feet. He bent down and heaved it up so that all on the beach could see it: a sledgehammer improvised from a length of pipe and a chunk of steel. Then he looked at the Cyc. Looking back at Ty she held her hands out, palms toward the gray sky, as if to say: See? Just like I said.
Ty turned away from them, gazing down into the sea before the boulder. After a few moments he turned back around. “How far does it extend?” he shouted.
“The pipe? A few score yards,” answered the Cyc. “The crater is as a horn, channeling the sound out into the deep.”