“They Walked Like Men.”

 

Gina turned her head towards me, the frown pulling her light blonde eyebrows down paired with a confused curl of lips at the side of her mouth. “What?”

 

Probably both sides, but I didn’t look right at her, keeping my own gaze forward as if I were completely absorbed by the spectacle on the beach. I shrugged. “It’s an old, really old, science fiction book by one of my favourite early writers. I know the Brhirri weren’t what he had in mind when he wrote about alien invaders shaped like bowling balls, but they’re kind of what I pictured when I first read the book.”

 

That ancient, tattered copy of the book — the paper book — my grandfather had given me as a kid was probably the one thing that had set me on the path ending with me standing on a beach sixty-plus light years from where I’d learned to surf and acting as lifeguard to a semi-annual alien festival that made no sense. Anywhere else, I’d be on standby for run-of-the-mill life-threatening emergencies. On Brhii, there wasn’t a lot to do for the twelve-person SAR team at the outpost the other hundred-eighty-six days of the local year. The scientists and cultural xenologists were a pretty tame group, and the Brhirri fished and swam and played in the water, but they almost never got into trouble.

 

Except every solstice for the Ritual of Garriin.

 

Shaking her head, she looked back towards the beach, the clusters of four-eyed, two-legged mottled grey bowling ball aliens humming in rhythm with the waves as they waited for the right moment. “It’s a good thing you’re good at your job, you know that? Because you’re pretty weird.”

 

“Right. I read old books. That makes me weird.”

 

Gina snorted and shook her head. “No, you read old books that no one else has ever heard of and you do it to avoid socializing with the limited number of humans stationed here. That’s what makes you weird.”

 

“So not so much the book reading as the introvert thing. Got it.”

 

“Shh. It’s starting.” I let it go because she was right on both counts. I was an introvert, and I was a little weird, although Off-Planet Search and Rescue didn’t tend to recruit completely normal people to begin with.

 

The mixed humming broke away from the wave rhythm as the various groups began to merge their sounds together into a single, unified note that we could hear over the surf, even standing more than a dozen metres from the back of the most timid members of the crowd. That hum grew in volume and rose to a pitch of, I’d read, E above high C. The gathered crowd sustained it for a solid thirty seconds, emptying their air bladders to prepare for the desperate inhales to come, before rushing en masse into the water, each intent on being the one to find the prize first and come back to take their new place in society.

 

Somewhere under the waves, lovingly carved from white sun-oak and wrapped in ancient, rusty chains, Garriin’s Box waited. Whoever found the box and brought back a detachable link of that chain to the waiting High Council first took the place of the outgoing senior councillor as the new junior member. Since the Council had nine members, that meant that there was a new member every four and a half local years. An odd way to choose your leaders, depending on endurance, speed, and luck, but I’d read about worse ways. In principle, it would come up with motivated individuals who actually wanted the job even knowing it was a limited-time gig, though there was no law or custom saying you couldn’t try again once you were off the Council.

 

Needing to be the first one back made it a race, though. Every link could be detached from the chain if necessary and the box was anchored on its own so there shouldn’t be any need to fight for one. Since the box might be just large enough to hold a pair of my shoes and had been stained black, it probably wouldn’t be found on the first round, and that made it an endurance race.

 

“The first ones are going under.”

 

I nodded, watching a ripple of the small round aliens contract and disappear under the waves, but decided Gina wasn’t looking for a response. She was just telling me she’d started the clock. We had about five minutes before we needed to be at the edge of the water, which was how long the average healthy adult Brhirri could go, starting with a full air bladder before oxygen deprivation kicked in and they needed to take a breath.

 

Wrapping one hand around my surfboard, I tried to let my body relax. Five minutes before the divers had to start breathing meant we had about five and a half minutes before the first half-drowned bowling ball bobbed to the surface. The first of dozens, we’d have to pick that bobbing ball out of a crowd of the ones who hadn’t waited too long to start back up, drag them back to shore, and start looking for the next one.

 

It was likely to be a long, long haul until someone presented a link, and we wouldn’t know our rescue success rate until sometime after that. They walked like men, but they swam like rubber bowling balls.