Surfacing by Walter Jon Williams

SURFACING

    There was an alien on the surface of the planet. A Kyklops had teleported into Overlook Station, and then flown down on the shuttle. Since, unlike humans, it could teleport without apparatus, presumably it took the shuttle for the pleasure of the ride. The Kyklops wore a human body, controlled through an n -dimensional interface, and took its pleasures in the human fashion.
    The Kyklops expressed an interest in Anthony’s work, but Anthony avoided it: he stayed at sea and listened to aliens of another kind.
    Anthony wasn’t interested in meeting aliens who knew more than he did.
    The boat drifted in a cold current and listened to the cries of the sea. A tall grey swell was rolling in from the southwest, crossing with a wind-driven easterly chop. The boat tossed, caught in the confusion of wave patterns.
    It was a sloppy ocean, somehow unsatisfactory. Marking a sloppy day.
    Anthony felt a thing twist in his mind. Something that, in its own time, would lead to anger.
    The boat had been out here, both in the warm current and then in the cold, for three days. Each more unsatisfactory than the last.
    The growing swell was being driven toward land by a storm that was breaking up fifty miles out to sea: the remnants of the storm itself would arrive by midnight and make things even more unpleasant. Spray feathered across the tops of the waves. The day was growing cold.
    Spindrift pattered across Anthony’s shoulders. He ignored it, concentrated instead on the long, grating harmonic moan picked up by the microphones his boat dangled into the chill current. The moan ended on a series of clicks and trailed off. Anthony tapped his computer deck. A resolution appeared on the screen. Anthony shaded his eyes from the pale sun and looked at it.

    Anthony gazed stonily at the translation tree. “I am rising toward and thinking hungrily about the slippery-tasting coordinates” actually made the most objective sense, but the righthand branch of the tree was the most literal and most of what Anthony suspected was context had been lost. “I and the oily current are in a state of motion toward one another” was perhaps more literal, but “We (the oily deep and I) are in a cold state of mind” was perhaps equally valid.
    The boat gave a corkscrew lurch, dropped down the face of a swell, came to an abrupt halt at the end of its drogue. Water slapped against the stern. A mounting screw, come loose from a bracket on the bridge, fell and danced brightly across the deck.
    The screw and the deck are in a state of relative motion, Anthony thought. The screw and the deck are in a motion state of mind.
    Wrong, he thought, there is no Other in the Dwellers’ speech.
    We, I and the screw and the deck, are feeling cold.
    We, I and the Dweller below, are in a state of mutual incomprehension.
    A bad day, Anthony thought.
    Inchoate anger burned deep inside him.
    Anthony saved the translation and got up from his seat. He went to the bridge and told the boat to retrieve the drogue and head for Cabo Santa Pola at flank speed. He then went below and found a bottle of bourbon that had three good swallows left.
    The trailing microphones continued to record the sonorous moans from below, the sound now mingled with the thrash of the boat’s screws.
    The screw danced on the deck as the engines built up speed. Its state of mind was not recorded.
    *
    The video news, displayed above the bar, showed the Kyklops making his tour of the planet. The Kyklops’ human body, male, was tall and blue-eyed and elegant. He made witty conversation and showed off his naked chest as if he were proud of it. His name was Telamon.
    His real body, Anthony knew, was a tenuous incorporeal mass somewhere in n -dimensional space. The human body had been grown for it to wear, to move like a puppet. The n th dimension was interesting only to a mathematician: its inhabitants preferred wearing flesh.
    Anthony asked the bartender to turn off the vid. The yacht club bar was called