We had an exhausting flight from Palau to Pohnpei, it left at 2 AM, and the trip took about twelve hours. Slept twelve hours that night. The flight from Pohnpei to LA is going to be worse. But now we're here for a week.

Pohnpei is the capital of the FSM (Federated States of Micronesia) which includes Yap, Chuuk (pronounced Chook, and formerly known by Westerners as Truk), Kosrae, and numerous tiny “out islands” as well. Not that the main town looks much like a capital, so far as I've seen it's only a small step up from Yap. The main town on Yap and Pohnpei have almost the same name: Colonia and Kolonia.

Geographically speaking, Palau and its many islands are part of Micronesia as well, but Palau is a separate country of its own. Both Palau and the Federated States of Micronesia have fairly close affiliations with the US, and both use the US dollar as currency, but the FSM's association with the US is a bit closer.

Before World War Two, the Japanese had taken over the islands of Micronesia and were emigrating here in a big way, and rather brutally disenfranchising the native population. After the US won WW II, the Japanese settlers in Micronesia were “repatriated,” that is, sent back to Japan, the Micronesian natives took over again, and the US has been in their good graces ever since.

We've fetched up at a hotel called The Village, it's a collection of palm-thatched cottages built of mangrove wood, and with palm mats for some of the walls. No air conditioning, but its on a ridge with a stead breeze, and three sides of each cottage are permanently open to the breeze. They're screened, although the walls don't quite reach the ceiling, so bugs could in principle come in, but this hasn't been much of a problem. The beds have mosquito nets in any case. For some reason they're water beds, good in a way as they help keep you cool in the night. I'd thought the rocking might be uncomfortable, but I'm sleeping very well. After sharing a room for the five nights in Palau, Embry and I decided to go ahead and get separate rooms again for this last stay.

We're both very forgetful, and when we were rooming together, we had a terrible time with locking the safe and keeping track of our keys — this got to be a running joke: our room as the hotel Alzheimer's ward.

It's definitely good to have Embry along, I really wouldn't want to be doing the whole trip alone. And, even though we sometimes get annoyed with each other — breakfasting together is risky — we're brothers, and I often feel quite tender towards him. That deep organic flesh bond. There's something so mythical and legendary about pairs of brothers, and, come to think of it, they're usually somewhat in conflict with each other. That's just the way it is.

I'm writing this entry on the porch of my jungle cottage, its up on stilts in the midst of an honest-to-god jungle: coconut, breadfruit and ivory nut trees, ferns and orchids growing out of many tree crotches, the warm water of the lagoon visible through the trees, the steady breeze of the trade winds wafting through, the cute water bed with its mosquito net like a canopy. How my wife would love being here, how I'd love to see her delight. I miss her.

But, as I keep telling myself, this is the big trip I get, and I've got less than a week to go, and the only reasonable thing to do is to enjoy every bit of it while it's happening. And some day I'll get her back to South Pacific islands in person. There's plenty more of them to explore!

I'm guest of honor at an academic science fiction conference in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, ICFA, or, International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts.

Today I'm giving a talk called “Seek the Gnarl”.

And tomorrow I'm giving a little science talk on gnarl called, naturally, The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul.

Yesterday I went on a kayak tour in the rock islands, it was called “Jake’s Tarzan Tour.” It was one of the best days of my life.

Our guides were three Palauans: Jake, Ding and Rayna. They were great: wild black natives, talking rapid-fire Palauan to each other all day, Jake was the very image of the old-style Polynesian chief, though later I found out he’d gone to college, started a career as an accountant, and thrown that over to be a tour guide.

There were five of us tourists. They loaded up five single-seat hard kayaks on a boat and motored out to our starting point. For the rest of the day, we kayaked in stages: we’d get to a location and the motor boat would be waiting there, we’d tie our kayaks to the boat, go snorkeling, climb up the ladder to the motor boat, replenish our supplies, and then remount our kayaks. Jake had six waypoints for us: a hidden underwater tunnel leading to a tree-lined lagoon filled with giant clams, and a sunken ship from the 1930s.

And then a little point where Jake speared a fish, a large lagoon with a beach where we had lunch, an underwater tunnel leading to a cave filled with blue light coming up from the water, and an arch connecting two bays with soft corals growing on the sandy bottom of the arch.

We must have skirted the edges of two dozen islands, none of them were all that large. Their edges are eaten away by the ocean so they stick out of the sea like muffins. In kayaks we could get far under the ledges of the islands. Little stalactites hung down, the turquoise waves lapped at the rocks, tree leaves drifted about. The islands themselves are less lush than I’d realized. From a distance they’re solid green, so one thinks of a jungle. But the greenery is more like a thin layer of icing on a base of stark and toothy gray rock, porous limestone that’s been eaten away into thousands of little blades and spikes. As humus collects in the pockets of rock, seeds take root and grow trees, some of them quite large.

Coming into the lagoon for lunch I felt quite weightless; the water was so clear and unrippled, and the sand below it so white. It was as if my kayak were gliding through empty space. And quiet, quiet, quiet all around. Not a whisper of wind in the trees, only the gentle lapping of the waves, the occasional calls of birds and, of course, the sporadic whooping of the Palauans. I had such a wave of joy, wading around that lagoon, and a profound sense of gratefulness, both to the world for being so beautiful and to God for letting me reach this spot. I had another wave of these feelings a bit later when we were kayaking through a maze of small islands in shallow water, bays that no motor boat could reach. Peaceful, peaceful. Eden. The world as it truly is meant to be. Thank you, God. I’m glad I lived long enough to get here.

High in the air above one of these sunny backwaters, I see a large dark — bird? It’s the size of an eagle, and, no, it’s a fruit bat, the sun shining through the membranes of its wings. The islands look like green clouds come to earth; mirroring their fluffy white brethren above.

In the last snorkel spot there are lovely pale blue and pink soft corals, branching alveolar broccolis on the sandy bottom of the archway connecting two bays. Fractals, in short. Swimming through the arch, I encounter a shoal of maybe ten thousand tiny tropical fish, like the fish you’d see in someone’s home aquarium, little zebras or tetras. With my snorkel on, I marvel at their schooling motions, their bodies moving in a unison like iron filings in a field, their ropes and scarves of density emerging from the parallel computation of their individual anxieties. The turbulent water currents compute, the clouds in the sky, the cellular automaton reaction-diffusion patterns on the mantles of the giant clams, the Zhabotinsky scrolls of the shelf corals, the gnarly roots of plants on the land.

And I’m thinking that maybe, yes, maybe after all everything is a computation. Universal automatism gives me a point of view from which I can make sense of all these diverse forms I’m seeing here. Maybe Wolfram is right to chide me for “taking it all back” at the end of Lifebox. But what about my thoughts, can I see those as computations too? Well, why can’t they just be fractal broccoli, flocking algorithms, class four turbulence, cellular automaton scrolls. I ascribe such higher significance to them, but why make so much of them. Are my thoughts really so vastly different from the life forms all around me in these lagoons? Why not relax and merge. All is One.

And if I find it useful to understand the One’s workings in terms of computation, don’t think that this reduces the lagoon to a buzzing beige box. The lagoon is not reduced, the lagoon is computing just as it is. “Computing” is simply a way to speak of the dance of natural law.

Speaking of dance, when we got back to the dive shop, Jake and Rayna were kidding around with this nice, cute American girl who’s just moved to Palau and is supporting herself by working at the shop — I met her the other day because she came along on the Blue Hole dive on her afternoon off. And Jake and Rayna start dancing and chanting, crouched, facing each other, their hands shaking in their air, slapping their thighs, vital and joyous as a pair of indestructible cartoon characters. Archetypes.

I mark this day with a white stone.

(Which is what Lewis Carroll used to write in his journal on his very best days.)

To cap off the Blue Corner dive day we visited Jellyfish Lake. I heard about this place about ten years ago, when I went to the “Planet of the Jellies” show at the Monterey Aquarium with Bruce Sterling — later we wrote a story “Big Jelly” together about giant flying jellyfish. These special Palau jellyfish barely sting, they don't eat anything, they get their nourishment from algae cultures that live inside their bodies. All they do all day is pulse their bells so as to move themselves into the sunniest part of the lake to make the algae in their tissues grow. Shades of my moldies in Freeware!

[Painting I later did.]

We swam out into this lake about a hundred yards, wearing masks, snorkels and most of us with fins. Keith, our guide, said the visiting ctenophorologists studying this population estimate it's now fifteen million strong, although in the bad El Nino year it had dropped to virtually nil, with nothing left but some estivating spores or polyps.

[Unrelated photo of swarming gnats in the air, the lines are the trails of their bodies, and the little tick-marks are their wingbeats.]

So how was it? It put me in mind of a certain kind of program I used to have my computer graphics students write. You define the geometry of some graphical object — we used to use polyhedra or tori — but in this case its a rounded bell with four dangling clappers, positioned like table legs, with lots of bumps along them. And you fill space with objects of this kind with randomly selected radii, or better than random, select the distribution according to a power law so you have, say, a certain number of large four inch diameter jellyfish, twice as many two inchers, four times as many one inchers, eight times as many half inchers, sixteen times as many quarter inchers. And maybe none smaller than that. You randomize their directions of motion, the jellyfish seem to have no inkling of up or down, although they are ever so slowly heading towards the light, this doesn't prevent them from pulsing down for twenty feet or so before getting turned around. You animate them by giving them a repetitive motion. In this case its pulsing.

Now I have a theory about jellyfish pulsation. There's a CA reaction taking place in the cells of the bell that leads to moving waves of excitation. The waves move radially out from the center. The waves travel at the same speed in the flesh of any jellyfish, large or small. When the wave hits the rim of the bell, you see the effect of the bell pulsing, or contracting, thus propelling the jellyfish in the direction of the bell's summit. My insight in the water today is that if a jellyfish is half as big as another, it will pulsate twice as fast. More precisely, if a jellyfish bell has radius R, then it will pulsate A/R times per second, where A is a constant having to do with the effective speed of the reaction wave fronts in jellyfish flesh.

So I'm looking down at them with a scientist's eyes. But also it's completely spacy, there's nothing in the visual field but the greenish yellow sunlight water and the endlessly many jellyfish. A couple of times I dove down to twenty feet, then floated up, with them all around me, no real standard of location or direction, just jellyfish everywhere endlessly.

How densely packed were they? At the thickest regions, there might have been twenty or fifty of them touching my body at any one time, four big guys, eight smaller, sixteen smaller, thirty-two tiny ones, like that. Maybe more. I'd feel something smooth touching me an think I was brushing against another person. Just a jelly.

They stung ever so slightly, and the longer I stayed in, the more I could feel the venom. Particularly when I was free diving down through them, I'd feel tingles on my lips when they touched them. Writing about this, my skin is crawling. Quick, rush to the emergency room. The closest one would be, um, Manila.

“Jellyfish like that very hot for two three week, then — wearing the Happy Cloak.”

After seeing jellyfish preserved behind glass in Monterey Bay Aquarium, what a romp to be able to wallow in them. Almost too good to be true. They have three other Jellyfish Lakes that people can't go in at all. They're a little worried that too many people are visiting this one, Palau seems to be a mass tourism destination for Taiwanese in particular, so maybe the days of swimming freely with the jellyfish are limited. Get 'em while you can.