Cary Neeper--Writings
© 2002 Carolyn A. Neeper

PREFACE

A formal report of the events reported in this narrative is on file in the Archives of Ellasonian History at the Concentrate for External Studies, 3632 ir, Varok. No doubt it states nothing false. It simply avoids the Entire Truth by dodging the thrust of Truth's well-hewn sword with carefully-chosen verbiage. For that reason I have not read it.

I know what it should say. I know what happened when the varoks first tried to force "communication" sideways down the ellls' velvet throats, because 1) I was there, 2) Ellean, the heroine of this story, let me include in the narrative personal information from Lokan's diary, 3) the rest I have filled in, like some guess-and-by-golly historical novelist. I have gleaned insight from my great-fish friends. I have schooled with Ellean herself—which I continue to do, whenever she is in port, so to speak.

She doesn't travel light these days, but she travels well, and Lokan's legacy can already be seen in her fine work. Varoks may yet avoid cracking in two as a species, if all goes swimmingly, and Ellean can claim most of the credit, which she will not.
Aman Okrahlan (Amanok), 3634 ir Ellason (4962 BC Earth)
*In days gone by, where days do not exist,
Beneath the deeps where varoks dare not range
And human search still fails,
Within the seas of Ellason
There lived an elll born strange.


*From the poem "The Legend of the First Loner," found in the reconstructed Library of Ellason, circa 3633 ir. (Varokian calendar). The collected verses are an early Elllonian translation from a great-fish Epic Presentation. Hoping to give the reader some feel for the obtuse but useful workings of the great-fish mind, I have included a germane verse at the beginning of each chapter of the following historical narrative.

Aman Telariahn (Amantel) 4226 ir.


I. An End to Games

Lok Antalorian, the student known as Lokan, had an untamed face of rubber, a face that stretched with laughter and sagged with disappointment, exhibiting mobility rare among varoks. It was as if the pages of varokian emotion had not yet frozen his visage, as if words of honest feeling still spilled from his lips. Most of us varoks do better at stomping out such fires.

I wish I could have seen Lokan's face when the Varokian supply cruiser carried him into orbit around Ellason. It must have danced with eagerness as the planet’s thirty moons shut out the stars in turn. I’m sure he was dreaming of a destiny that would turn ellls and varoks on their heads. He couldn't have suspected the nasty turn his fate would take.

Though Ellason's beauty no doubt stunned him when its blue-green luminosity reached out to swallow the cruiser he rode, Lokan shuddered with eagerness. I shouldn't admit this, but varoks older and wiser than Lokan had nearly gone irrational with panic at the thought of sailing into that large ball of glowing water, with one and a half times Varok’s gravity.

Not Lokan. Kohrek told me later that he stared into Ellason's eerie lights with a smile on his face. He was probably imagining schools of jolly ellls cutting through warm shallow waters. In his mind, the waters glowed blue with friendly characters wearing cartoon colors in their plumes: velvet green bipeds laughing at the joke of filling their orphan planet with life.

It had been a joke all right, a joke on us varoks. We did not suspect there was an Earth-sized planet in eccentric, 12,000 year orbit in our solar system. For decades, all our attention had been turned toward Earth—when we became interested in rare spurts of hominid progress there.

Furthermore, we did not imagine Ellason’s perihelion to be so close, in the vicinity of Neptune’s orbit. Such an errant planet would not support life—certainly not intelligent life. Yet there it was. It moved out to the Kuiper Belt at aphelion, too far from the sun to be practical for us, hidden for ages from our technical vision. Yet Ellason teemed with life, her oceans heated with pockets of natural nuclear fission and unrelenting deep-sea volcanism, her lands lit with the glow from thirty volcanic moons and living beings evolved as specialists in lighting their own way. She simmered with primitive hemosynthesizing beasts, and their sulfur oxidation eventually powered the evolution of intelligence in great-fish and ellls.

So much for varokian uniqueness!

Even young Lokan could remember the discovery of Ellason's advanced life-forms. It had thrown Varok into turmoil. He laughed to himself, and, as his fine brown hands clutched an orientation manual, one lightly booted foot rocked nervously back and forth. "When will we see the observation laboratory?" He spoke to the older varokian woman beside him, and his eyes stayed fixed on the monitor.

The woman (who, incidentally, was the delight of my life) laughed with the hearty chuckle of a released varok who knows how to enjoy unfettered moods. "You may never see the laboratory, Lokan," she said, "or anything else on this planet from the air. The mists of Ellason are thick enough to hide her sins, yet thin enough to lure an unsuspecting alien into trouble. But you will soon meet Amanok, Aman Okrahlan, Director of the Elll-watch, and he will save you. His allotted time on Ellason has been extended to a full half-year, Varokian time. Your assignment will overlap his for several Callisto cycles. His love and knowledge of ellls is beautiful to see. It's as if he has penetrated their spirit. If the laboratory Directorate allows him to visit with ellls, he will soon establish communication with them."

Lokan turned to face the proud veteran. I'm sure it took all his mental effort to keep his excitement under control so he could absorb everything Kohrek said.

Her eyes, bless their blue warmth, sparkled in response to Lokan's eager, struggling face. "You and I may see it, Lokan, on this assignment. After ages of failure, Amanok may do it. He is the greatest of all elllologists. He will solve the most elusive puzzle this solar system has ever presented to the varokian mind. Amanok will accomplish detailed communication with ellls. I am sure of it, if...." Kohrek sighed and shook her head. "If he is not overruled."


(Excerpt from Chapter IV. The Eefl)

She swam slowly now, hypothermic, unable to use her poisoned arm. She would try all four directions from the island. Surely one would take her to shallower water. There was some simple trick to measuring the depth of the sea, but Ellean had never learned the trick, and no one was willing to teach her.

Long ago some ellls of her school had tried to explain depth sounding, but too soon their talk stopped. She would be left with nothing but the painful buzzing in her ears and half a puzzle to solve. Since she could never solve the puzzles, she soon quit asking for lessons. It was more pleasant to drift alone with her thoughts. Now she wished she had made the school explain the puzzles, had made them stop the awful buzzing.

She failed to find shallow water in two directions, and the ocean bottom did not rise to meet her in the third direction, so she retraced her wake and tried the fourth. This had to be it, she told herself. She would swim straight as the tongues of great-fish until she came upon another shore, eefl or no eefl.

This she did, though she grew more and more exhausted, and her arm ballooned alarmingly. With dismay, she realized as she approached the shore of the fourth direction that it was as rocky and steep as the first. She swam toward the lifeless black rocks that rose straight out of the sea, carefully noting prominent landmarks that penetrated the mists. She hadn't gone more than a hundred leaps of an elll before she recognized the first landmark coming by again. Another island!

She came to a halt and looked around with frightened eyes as her back-fin and befinned feet undulated painfully, supporting her with increasing difficulty.

There was only one answer to the puzzle. She was lost in the Viortahk. This terrible place was dotted with hundreds of small islands. Its waters, teeming with untold numbers of eefl, was dark, devoid of bright, tasty plants and crawlers. It was also very cold—too cold for an elll.


(Excerpt from Chapter IX. In the City of Great-Fish)

When the great-fish turned sharply into a dark crevice, the clear light of the ocean moss went out, and a warmer glow appeared from beyond the bottomless dark of the entryway. They swam through a long corridor, a very narrow channel in the rocks. Ellean bumped her head twice trying to get a view of their destination.

The first time she bumped her head, the great-fish grinned, shook with an embarrassed laugh, and pulled her closer; but the second bump startled him. He didn't smile again, but clasped Ellean to him even more securely and moved more slowly through the last hundred meters of the gorge.

The walls of the sea suddenly opened into an enormous cavern lit by the most beautiful moss Ellean had ever seen. It hung in bright exploding bundles of iridescent blue and yellow. Floating from the ceiling and walls of the cave, it formed hidden corners and shelves and hammocks and private sleeping rooms on every rocky surface. On the far side of the cavern the moss had been woven into a dense net that enclosed the living stock of the great-fish's garden. Mud turtles, nightfish, and market shell dwellers—a plump fish Ellean had never seen before—and crawlers of every description moved about in their massive pens with the dull calm of domesticated beasts.



Beside the stockyard was a thick growth of cultivated sea plants. The familiar scent of moonlight tulip blossoms stirred Ellean's appetite, and the small stand of ahl trees growing along the cavern's rear wall made Ellean feel very much at home. Then she noticed the many openings in the rock.

The question in her mind was immediately answered in sonic code by the great-fish who carried her. "The City of Great-fish is made of many rooms like this, and smaller ones," he said. "They are connected by tunnels carved into the rock by the elllonian chemists from the Great Bay of Shallows."

"Explosives!" Ellean laughed, delighted that the great-fish had finally chosen to talk in sonic code. "I have learned of such things. Duregal told me."

"Your elllonian experimentalists stir up some dangerous chemicals," the great-fish said with a smile, "dangerous, but useful, at times. Come now, we had better join the others."


(Excerpt from Chapter XXII. A New Song)
Lokan loved best the time one might call evening—when the moonlight tulip spores changed the sea to muted rose, a spectacular sight under a black Ellasonian sky full of stars. He tried to enjoy it with the ellls, but he couldn't keep his mind off Ellean's hunting song.

"Why do you want to imitate the song?" she asked. "You are having such trouble with it. It doesn't have to be perfect. The lohn bird doesn't care. It was just a song to help me make the kill, nothing more."

But Lokan insisted. Slowly he learned some of the correct sounds, but Ellean grew bored before he finished.

She tried to explain that the sounds could be of no use to them. They were made with the tongue against gills, sounds made only for children's games or artist's fancies.

He persisted, and at last he had repeated Ellean's hunting song without distorting its meaning.

"Well, good for you," Ellean laughed, "but it's no use. I love singing songs, but they are not taken seriously by most ellls. As a tad, I sang after Duregal fed me—and I sang for comfort when the school left me behind."

Later, we varoks learned that all ellls sang at such times, experimenting with conventional sound phrases or seeking new patterns, when they thought no one was paying much attention. Ellean did not know that.

She knew only that some ellls were recognized artists who sang for the beautiful tone or for the intricate patterns of rhythm and logic they could execute in new inventions.

"The songs have nothing to do with things varoks care about," she told Lokan. "There are no songs for water currents and life studies and stars and the ways of mist and machines."

All that knowledge was locked into elllonian memory. The songs never spoke of such detailed, dry information. They spoke of joy; or they were tone patterns for the sake of tone; or they were thoughts organized in sound for the pure joy of expressing emotion. It was the ellls' only means of expressing their individuality, if they weren't loners.

Much later, while writing these memoirs, Duregal told me that there were singers in ancient schools, ellls who felt so strongly that they burst into song, shocking their schools with their lovely sounds, but pleasing them too.

Recently, with Ellean, we have postulated that these first singers were the ancestors of loners. Such hindsight would have helped Lokan. It took all his stubborn persuasive powers to convince her she must teach him all the songs she remembered.

As he read Ellean's thoughts about the songs, Lokan grew more and more frustrated.

"No, no! Your singing is more than just beautiful sounds," he said. They joined their small school in the enlarged tidal pool, and he continued to speak Varokian. "How can I make you see, Ellean? The songs can be the basis for our common language. All we need to do is to make up a dictionary of your sounds and their meanings. Then varoks can tell you what is in their minds, by using your song words." He motioned for her to sing.

Reluctantly, she made up a tune about stubborn varoks.

He drew the sound of her voice in the damp mud with an al-shell, moving a line up and down as she sang. Then he cut the swerving line with many crossing lines and redrew each segment by itself. He gestured eagerly, imitated one part of the song, then stopped. Again and again, patiently, he repeated the exercise, and she began to understand.

The mists moved in and out along the shore, and the luminous moons did their slow-motion dance across the dark sky, while Ellean struggled with the concept.

"Ba-ohl, Melo, help Ellean to understand," Lokan shouted in frustration. "The songs must be split into fragments to make a language from them."

The ellls mimicked his choppy imitation of the song, until they were laughing too hard to continue.

"No, no!" Ellean finally understood, and she barked angrily at Lokan. "You are not a reductionist. You are not so crude. How can you think of chopping up a beautiful work of art?"

"We will chop it up for only a moment, only to re-form it again into other meaningful songs—into sentences," Lokan insisted.

Through another star-light change he worked with the entire school. They tried to connect specific meanings to linked song fragments—but the ellls rejected all combinations that were not poetic.


(Excerpt from Chapter XXIV. The Library)

Three ellls emerged from a side cave wielding long knives of al-shell. They rushed at Lokan, and he ran out of the library, plunging down the treacherous slope that faced the Great Bay of Shallows. He skidded, fell, then rolled to a stop. For a moment he lay bruised and disoriented near the shore, then he dared to look back. Ellean was nowhere in sight. He should have waited for her. He shouldn't have risked entering the cave. In misery, he realized he had no choice but to stay away from her. With him gone, the librarians' anger would quickly dissipate, and she would be safe.

"Aeyulll!!"

A cacophony of sonic cries erupted from the low eastern cliffs. They echoed over the rocks in chilling tones, as if the heart of Ellason were crying out in agony. "The varoks will take the library. Their machines are coming! The library is discovered!"

Then, like an ominous undertone to the cries, the quiet hum of a varokian rover spread over the sea. As it rounded the peninsula and approached the sand where he lay, Lokan saw the flurry of water and spray it left in its path. He did not see who was in the rover, however, for, in the moment it appeared, an enormous explosion ripped open the bowels of the mountain and sent a cascade of rock and ahl leaves flying to the beaches below.


(Excerpt from Chapter XXVIII. Attack and Release)
The tragedy of tragedies is this:
When good will, taken wrong, its good intent
Left broken on despair,
Turns full upon itself in flight,
Destroying all it meant. . . .

"The new school is warning us off," Sa-el said, looking to Duregal. "Why? What is that below?"

Suddenly a fleet of ten great-fish soared up from deep water. They sent a frantic message that traveled as an expanding ripple through the school: "Run! Follow us into North Bay!

Their great forked tails whipped around, and they led the ellls in a wild race against an unseen terror. Around the eastern peninsula, to the protected bay where their caves offered shelter, they ran.

"Dive!" The command came as an ultrasonic scream as well as a pressure signal, flashed crudely but effectively by the enormous waving span of fully extended great-fish fins.

Some ellls were leaving the shallows, swimming hard toward the deeps, when a loud crack pierced the water. A cascade of mind-numbing echoes exploded off the rocks like acoustic bombs, cutting the school apart and scattering the ellls in every direction.

Then all was quiet.