“In dialogue … it may be said that the two people are making
something in common … that is, creating something new together”
~ David Bohm~
The sea had erased most of the coastline along Kahala Avenue. The deserted mansion now occupied by Dr. Edmunds stood on the edge of what remained of the shore. Pink sandstone and coral, the structure stood perched just above the surf, surrounded by wind-sculpted palms, empty swimming pools and the dry koi ponds of long-vanished neighbors.
Every morning he’d walk the beach. He did so with a measured, purposeful stride; the stride of a physician conducting an examination, of a surgeon pacing thoughtfully before a delicate operation. The air bore the scent of iodine and brine as well as the sharp sting of sand. Two or three miles to the southeast, across Maunalua Bay, stood Koko Head. Daily, the ocean covered slightly more of the extinct volcano’s gentle, brooding slopes.
Ona visited sometimes. He’d peddle down from the valley just the other side of the Ko’olau bringing batteries, rice and occasionally mangos or apple bananas. Edmunds was grateful for the company. Those left on Oahu tended to keep to themselves. The radiation had done things to some of those who had remained and it was safest to limit one’s circle of acquaintances to those one knew and trusted.
“You really should think about coming inland,” Ona urged for the umpteenth time. “There’s precious little left here but salt and silence.”
“Precious, indeed,” Edmunds’ response was always the same. He repeated it as though it were a mantra. “I’ve grown extremely fond of both. They preserve things.”
Edmunds had been retired for years but, as he liked say, one is conditioned by one’s profession. Hence the habit of attention, of cataloging symptoms, remained. The relentless advance of the sea fascinated him. He was amazed at the way it so gradually swallowed the properties and landscape around him. To his eyes, the horizon itself seemed closer each day. It was as though his world were contracting or, more precisely, in-folding on itself.
It was one morning after a storm that he found the satellite. It lay half-buried in the sand, a dull metallic sphere with flanges, wings and broken antennae. Encrusted with barnacles and draped with kelp it had the look of something vaguely alien or insectoid; a new branch of the evolutionary tree. He reached out a tentative hand and touched it. It felt warm, perhaps from sitting in the sun. Dr. Edmunds could have sworn the object exhaled a low, mechanical sigh.
He brought back what he could to the mansion. All-in-all, he scavenged two sections of curved outer panel, a tangle of circuitry and switches as well as a number of what he assumed were recording or transcription devices of some sort. He arranged the pieces neatly, almost artistically, on an old table on his lanai. The result had a certain aesthetic quality, intricate and austere, like a piece of modern sculpture the exact purpose of which remained obscure.
The next time Ona visited, he frowned at what the doctor had created. “Are you sure you should be handling that? It could be dangerous.”
“Dangerous?” Edmunds laughed. “I doubt it, it’s inert, waterlogged, destroyed. Besides, what do I have to lose in any case!”
Ona tried another tact. “Be that as it may, you’re a surgeon, not an engineer or a physicist.”
The doctor stared at his friend. “And what’s the human body but a complex, interconnected circuit? I’ve been trained to see patterns and to assess and correct abnormalities. I’m not certain it makes a difference anymore if the subject is organic or … something else.”
Ona shrugged his shoulders. “Do you have any idea what its purpose was?”
Dr. Edmunds stared at the debris he had arranged. “For now, my working hypothesis is that it performed some communications or observational function. It’s difficult to say for certain. I do know the sea brought it here and that I was the one to find it. I don’t believe that was mere happenstance.”
This time it was Ona’s turn to laugh. “You sound like one of those preachers who went around before the tide started to rise and the radiation arrived. You know, shouting about signs and omens. ‘As above, so below’ and all that nonsense.”
“I don’t believe in omens,” Edmunds replied. “I believe in evolution, in correlations … in what might best be called, continuation.”
Over the course of the next few weeks, the doctor dismantled and re-arranged the pieces of the satellite in a myriad of different ways. He kept notes and drew elaborate diagrams in a battered old notebook. The notes bore cryptic mention of feedback loops and organic imitation in electrical system design.
Ona visited as usual. It seemed to him that Edmunds had been doing little else with his time other than tinkering with the satellite. The doctor seemed to have been neglecting his personal appearance. Ona found his friend’s talk to be increasingly fevered and, at times, almost incoherent. Nevertheless, Edmund’s manner was clam, clinical. The unintelligibility of what he was saying notwithstanding, it was delivered as though he were describing the condition of a particularly interesting patient.
“I think we’ve completely misunderstood evolution,” Edmunds commented during one such visit. “It’s not enough to speak of mere adaptation. Rather, it’s all about correspondence. I’m beginning to see that the whole process has a dialogic character; the environment speaks and, over time, organisms – individually or collectively – reply. Or they don’t.”
“Reply how,” Ona asked, bewildered.
“By altering themselves, of course.” Edmunds’ tone was that of an indulgent parent speaking to a well-meaning but dim child. “By listening, and by learning enough of the syntax to change in response to what it has been told.”
A week or so later, Ona returned to the mansion. Edmunds was gone. The lanai door stood open and sand had begun to accumulate at the threshold. The satellite was missing. All that remained on the doctor’s worktable were his notebook and his wristwatch.
Ona picked up the notebook and opened it. The doctor’s handwriting was neat and precise. Even so, Ona was disturbed by what he read. Observations and technical sketches were interspersed with what verged on meditation or mysticism: “Tidal pressure may equal pulse and respiration. Membranes permeable from the start or as learned behavior? Salinity may be key to the grammar.”
Ona searched the shoreline until dusk. He found the remnants of the satellite wallowing in the shallows about half a mile from Dr. Edmunds’ home. Its metallic carapace had been cleaned and glowed in the golden rays of the setting sun. Trailing wires drifted and danced like seaweed as the tide eddied around it. The sea beyond was calm and reflected the dying light of the day. As he stood there, Ona imagined Edmunds walking into the water, into the light. The doctor would have done so calmly, methodically, as he had once traversed the corridors at the hospital. He may have gone to test his theories, to complete his continuation.
In the days and weeks that followed, Ona would occasionally ride his bike back down to the coast. His friend wasn’t there, of course. Nevertheless, he’d sit on Doctor Edmunds’ lanai and gaze out to sea. Sometimes, in that sudden tropical darkness just after sunset, he thought he could see something move beneath the smooth surface of the ocean just offshore. It was the faintest hint of phosphorescence gently tracing the curve of a sandbar. It may have been nothing more than the shimmer of moonlight on the sea. Or perhaps, as Ona chose to believe, the sea had spoken and Edmunds had replied.
The End
About the Author
James C. Clar is a writer and retired teacher who divides his time between the wilds of Upstate New York and the more congenial climes of Honolulu, Hawaii. Most recently, his work has appeared in Bright Flash Literary Review, Antipodean SF, Metastellar Magazine, The Magazine of Literary Fantasy, Sudden Flash and Freedom Fiction Journal.
