Now that Jess knew he could escape, the isolated water planet no longer seemed like a hopeless trap. All of his intrinsic powers and the reborn wentals would do him no good unless he could bring the water entities back to the Roamers . . . and Cesca.
He stood on his reef day after day, watching as the framework of his amazing vessel took shape in the water before him. The wentals carried his thoughts, helped guide aquatic creatures—from plankton and brine shrimp to lumbering leviathans—that became a nearly infinite workforce.
As the white surf foamed against the rocks, Jess sensed and directed the furious activity taking place in the deep ocean, even in the segregated tide pools. Microcellular animals and tiny coral creatures cemented millions of grains of sand in place, one at a time, to form a skeleton like an organic armillary sphere. Shellfish and slithering invertebrates secreted resins and pearly films that coated the rough bones of the ship’s skeleton, strengthening it with an enamel harder than human teeth, then plating on pure metals stolen from the seawater itself.
Arched ribs rose up out of the water, curving inward like fingers grasping an immense ball, the plaything of a giant child. Coral continued to build, crisscrossing the main supports. Growing out of the shallows, the incomplete ship looked like the fossil of an extinct dragon, its bones picked clean and half-submerged in the reef water. Jess watched it take shape and fill in, becoming more marvelous day after day. With his naked body flooded by wental energy, the possibilities seemed endless.
Roamers were experts at cobbling together functional vessels out of scrap components, their ships never pretty but always reliable. He’d seen a hodgepodge of designs that fit no standard catalogue, but this unique vessel—constructed by a limitless army of ocean creatures and guided by a water-based entity that had never taken human form—looked stranger than anything Jess had ever seen.
The plated coral bones formed curves and loops like the partial rings of latitude and longitude on an ancient globe. Incomprehensible engines were incorporated into the framework, operating on powers that even Jess did not understand.
Because of the raw life energy he drew from the alien ocean itself, time passed with a different sense for Jess. He could stand still as the tides cycled, bringing more creatures, more workers, more materials, and watch the ship grow before his eyes.
Finally, at high tide under two diamond moons in the unnamed world’s sky, the rigid outline of the spherical cage was complete.
From the deepest water came an enormous tentacled creature that emitted low thrums in a language more ancient than human civilization. It raised itself into the open air, letting water stream off its algae-covered hide. The monster’s tentacled embrace seemed to wield a muscular power sufficient to crack a hydrogue warglobe. With one enormous milky eye, the leviathan looked at Jess and then the motionless wental starship.
The creature lifted three tentacles as thick as tree trunks and seized the armillary-sphere framework. Jess watched anxiously, concerned that its brute force might damage the carefully constructed vessel. But the wentals guided it. With a strange delicacy, the beast carried the reinforced framework from where it had taken shape on the reef shelf into deeper water—where it sank.
Jess stared at the empty, rippling water. “Now what?”
Now your transportation bubble is complete.
Since his body was filled with the force of the wentals, Jess could breathe water . . . in fact, he didn’t need to breathe at all, yet another sign that he was more than human. Ripples of liquid electricity flowed like phosphorescent plankton just beneath his skin, like static sparks ready to jump to anything he touched.
The ocean’s surface roiled with bubbles as the last atmospheric inclusions were squeezed out of the rigid framework. Then, underwater, the wentals sealed the ship with their own binding force.
Jess stepped higher onto the dry rocks as the waves suddenly parted with a roar and the immense ball lifted itself from the water. The new ship hovered dripping over the restless seas, its framework filled with ocean water caught in an invisible bubble of wental force, like a gigantic raindrop held together by surface tension.
The planet’s twin moons shone down under cascades of stars, limning the water-based vessel with silvery radiance. The coral and pearl glowed with cold fire. The delicate bubble-ship moved smoothly, gently, until it hovered a hand’s width from the ground in front of Jess. The wall of flowing water beckoned him like a doorway, and Jess knew that he had to enter. He passed without a ripple through the membrane.
He found himself inside an aquarium globe filled with water and fishes, tiny sea animals, drifting plants, everything touched by the wentals’ essence. Inside, he stood enfolded by the water, feeling only warmth and comfort. It was amazing and wonderful.
Now you, and we, can command this ship.
His sense of awe gave way to impatient determination. Finally he could be off on his grand quest, and he knew exactly where he had to go. He would set out to find Cesca again—at least to let her know what had happened to him, and to ask all Roamers for their assistance in his grand new mission.
Not knowing how he did so, Jess guided the huge water ship. The enormous sphere of water rose into the misty clouds. Smoothly and silently, the wental starcraft rose away from the unnamed planet, leaving the throbbing, living seas behind.
Jess was going back to Rendezvous, where he belonged.