This morning Embry and I went for one last manta dive . We left early, were the first at the site, and glimpsed a manta in the water before we jumped in. Our guide was Stahmp, a native of Chuuk who moved to Pohnpei to live with his local wife, he was mellower than the Japanese dive master we had the first day out.

We dropped down to a sandy crushed-coral bottom at about fifty feet, crept up into a couple of coral heads, and there they were, two mantas, both dark on top, one light on the bottom, and the other dark on the bottom, which is unusual. They were hovering over these coral heads to be cleaned by wrasses, these wriggly little-finger-sized fish with three stripes along their length, the wrasses make their living by nibbling the parasites off other fish and off mantas as well. The other fish like this, they seek out the wrasses, the coral heads with wrasses in them are called cleaning stations.

The mantas were just as alien as I'd hoped. Incredibly streamlined, all about curvature and torsion, a body roughly the shape of a sea turtle, but with meaty triangular wings going out on either side, a rudder-type fin near the rear, a long spike at the very back. They were ten or twelve feet across. Their eyes are in protruding knobs at either side of their heads, not that they really have a separate head, “anterior end” might be more appropriate. They have a slit mouth they can open to be fairly big and round so as to suck in water; they're filter-feeders. They have a pair of little appendages sticking out of the sides of their heads, fleshy and oar-like rather than fin-like. Sometimes one of these would be rolled up, but usually they were sticking out, gently adjusting themselves to the current, playing a role, I suppose, analogous to an airplane's horizontal stabilizer fin at the rear. They had five gill slits down either side of their chests; they opened up the slits like lipless mouths, and the cleaner wrasses were in and out of the slits, worrying the skin, also busy along the rear edges of the mantas body. Occasionally a wrasse would nip too hard, and the manta would twitch it loose. They raised up and lowered down several times, once the white one was up overhead and released a nasty and alarmingly large cloud of poop; the nearby fish were all over that, of course. The black one was close enough to me that I could have touched it, had my arm been twice as long. A very, very satisfying experience.

Afterwards we did another long shallow dive along a reef of soft corals, loaded with fish, probably my last dive in Micronesia, I was nostalgic for it already, saying goodbye the corals and fish, the pale green and pale lavender disks with the fractally folded edges, the brilliant yellow guys, the little guys who are green or gray or blue depending on the light and all these shades so lovely and watery and gleaming, the school of twenty tiny damselfish each one a different size like a line of carved ivory elephants hovering over the chartreuse (yellow-green) single-trunked flat-topped forest of fire coral, the last nudibranch with black body and yellow edge and red chemical sensor antennae and red tree-like naked gill growing out of his back, the last parrot fish, goodbye, Micronesia diving, goodbye.

I did sixteen SCUBA dives in all.

The people diving with us were fascinating, Scott and Jeanette Johnson, regular contributors to the Sea Slug Forum, and biologists turned tech workers for the US missile range at Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands east of here, which also a part of the archipelago of Micronesia, although not part of the Federated States of Micronesia. They knew all about cone shells, in fact they’ve made several great videos of Micronesian sea life. (That cone picture above is by the Johnsons.) Yes, the cones do live here, but I haven't seen them because they spend most of the day buried under a shallow layer of sand and come out to hunt at night. There are three groups, one eats algae, one eats other shell-creatures such as cowries, snails and cone shells, and the baddest mofos of all eat fish. I think they said Wolfram's textile cones fall in the second category, but I'm not sure about the tent cones, who have simpler looking patterns. They said once they'd caught a tent cone and put it in a bucket and they irritated it so they could watch it lashing out and firing poison dart after poison dart. They said if you find an empty cowrie shell, that means a textile cone ate the poor cowrie. By the way, Scott found a nice empty “map cowrie” shell for me. They're also big fans of giant clams, Jeanette said she has hundreds and hundreds of photos of their mantles. They said the Solomon Islands are good place to see cuttlefish and cone shells. So now I want to go there too, although I think Sylvia's up for Tahiti next, which would be good, too.

More cone shell info from the biologist divers another day. The cone has a proboscis that sticks out from inside its mouth, and the stinger is in the proboscis. When eating a fellow mollusk, the cone slimes its mouth tube inside the victim's shell, engulfing it in situ. The proboscis is red. When a cone eats a fish, what you find the next day is a little pack of bones wrapped in mucus. They're such nasty little beasts. Great article about them in the latest Scientific American, by the way, and you can find lots more the Cone Shell and Conotoxins web site. I happened on a book about cone shells at the beach in Sanibel just now. They’re closing in on me!

I’ll use cone shells for the bad guys in my novel, and maybe in a story as well. What a great horrific image. A cone shell is hiding under the sandy dirt of the pumpkin patch in the backyard of someone's house in Santa Cruz, with only its vigilant proboscis protruding, and it creeps out at night and eats this guy, and then all that can be found the next morning is his bones wrapped in mucus. Resting on his pillow. Gary Ziff: parrothead, stoner, termite inspector, R. I. P.

Today we went diving, Embry, me, a couple from Minnesota and a pair of guides in the same flat, open, seatless motorboat. We rode through a harbor with rusty Chinese fishing trawlers who come here for the tuna, on the way back the sea was getting rough, so we motored though an intricate maze of mangroves which grew so dense and low that we had to practically lie down in the boat. This part was very cool.

The dives were okay, though nothing can live up to the Blue Corner at Palau. The high point was a school of eighteen man-sized sharks. I also saw any number of enormous sea cucumbers, segmented like centipedes, leopard spotted in brown and white, with fan-shaped feeding tubules sticking from their fronts like legs.

Most of the dive sites in Pohnpei seem to be blown out by the trade winds, and I'm wishing I could have dived another couple of days in Palau. But Pohnpei is quite interesting above the water as well. Relax, Ru, and let the adventures keep happening. It's all good.

It was Sheryl, one of Embry's white acquaintances who moved to Pohnpei from Grand Turk, who talked him into coming here, she met us at our hotel for dinner. A chatty single lady nearly our age. Sheryl brought an interesting cast of characters with her, saying they were her local “family,” a white lawyer and the white editor of the island newspaper, and two Pohnpeian women, Elizabeth and Emmy.

I liked talking to Elizabeth and Emmy, getting local info from them. It was soothing. They were pleasant-looking, in their forties, with smooth brown faces and cute accents, with a languid island look, like brown Chers, not unlike a number of people I've known in multi-culti San Jose, come to think of it. But here it's their home turf, and in their power and situatedness, they also seem a bit like elegant sharks, finning along just outside the reef. After all this time with just my brother, I miss the leavening and civilizing influence of the fair sex.

It seems that only one of the twelve clans on Pohnpei thinks of eels as gods. Elizabeth's clan has a god which is an owl, other clans have the shark and the manta ray. They do eat dogs, sometimes casually, but more often for special occasions: if the chief of your clan asks for your dog for an important feast, say for a funeral, you gotta hand over the dog. I don't think they eat dogs on Yap, if they did, there wouldn't be so many of them.

The big local drug here is sakau, the same as the kava of the Tongans and Fijians, its made by squeezing the roots of a certain pepper plant in water. Betel nut isn't so big here as in Yap. Apparently they grow pot as well, and its best to have a guide if you go mountain hiking, lest you stumble on something you shouldn't see.

Saturday night we're invited to a party at Elizabeth's, which is pretty cool. They'll be serving sakau, though I don't expect to be drinking much of it. All these wonderful alien drugs out here in the islands. This young couple from Minnesota whom we dived with were getting loaded on sakau at the hotel bar, and effusively called Embry and me over to chat, and I say, “Is it like pot?” and the guy says, “No, it's more like a speedball; a combination of cocaine and heroin.”

We mentioned that we'd been into town for dinner, and the woman looked at Embry and me and said, “You two really get around. That's great.” And as he and I are walking back to our rooms Embry is, like, “What did she mean we get around? We hardly do anything.” “It's because we're so old, Embry. She thinks it's amazing that we can do anything at all. 'Aren't those two old brothers cute?'” The next morning this couple were quite subdued, by the way. Sakau hangover.

[At the risk of boring you to death, I'm going to resume my Micronesia notes. The slide projector humming in the airless gloomy room…]

On our first full day in Pohnpei, we took a tour to these Micronesian ruins called Nan Midol. I'd never heard of them before, not surprising that I'd never heard of Pohnpei. It was a fun day; we went by boat, a smallish motor boat with about seven of us guests, a Pohnpeian man called Bidi at the dual outboard motors, and a Japanese man called Tomo doing the guiding.

First we stopped at a tiny sandbar with a couple of trees on it and went snorkeling. Ah, those fish of the Micronesia. There's one amazing largish fish called the diagonal-barred sweetlips, it's pale yellow with dark stripes on it which break into dots near its belly. This is precisely a reaction-diffusion pattern that I've created many times with my cellular automata using a rule devised by Alan Turing. Computation everywhere. Embry found a little pipefish, which looks like a seahorse without the wings. A bumpy long segmented body and a little horse head, the fish only a few inches long, nosing around in a little algae-grown bowl of coral. I'm particularly fond of some small bluish-green fish that are found schooling in the stag-horn coral, iridescent really, their exact color depends on the light, often they're a pale turquoise like shallow water above sand, other times they're like a tint of the sky, and sometimes they seem to glow as if they're electric. It truly is as if you're swimming around inside the most lavish possible imaginable pet-shop aquarium. But it goes on as far as you can see in every direction, and the currents are flowing through. The coral comes in a wonderful range of shades. There are some rounded heads that are truly that tacky orangish-pink “coral” color beloved by mail-order catalogs, but there's also delicious pale mauve tones. The staghorn corals have amazing lavender tips.

Second we pulled into a Stone Age wharf of, yes, stones, a few shacks of corrugated tin nearby. Debarked and walked up a trail along a stream to a tropical waterfall, white rivulets splashing down a bumpy fifty-foot slope of the smooth dense volcanic rock called basalt. I jumped into the pool, about ten feet deep, and swam around. At first I was the only one swimming. I looked over at our guide Tomo on the shore, and he was making swimming motions with one hand, and then holding his hands very far apart. Big fish? I opened my eyes underwater and saw some medium sized brown fish. Embry beckoned me towards the shore, Tomo had thrown in some bread crumbs, and there eating them was a fresh-water eel four feet long, a really fat guy, with alarming sharp dog-like teeth. I wondered whether it would be wise to touch his tail, I was standing in the water about a foot away from him. “Electric?” I asked Tomo. “I don't think so,” he said. And then the eel swam back into the deep water, not quite touching me. On the walk back down to the boat, Tomo told me that that for the Pohnpeians, an eel is, “Halfway between man and god. Or for some people maybe like a pet. They don't eat eel, but they eat dogs. Dogs not a pet on Pohnpei.” Later, Patti the inn-keeper told me that for kids in Pohnpei the dogs are like pets, and they're often heart-broken when the father of the family decides to butcher Fido for a feast, it's a common trauma. Speaking of dogs, there's two taciturn resident mutts at the Village. As I was moving into my room, they came and slept on my deck for an hour. “A sign of acceptance,” said Patti.

Third we stopped on a small island called Na for lunch. Small island, small name. It was covered with jungle, fairly open, so that you could walk the few hundred feet to the other side. The coconut trees had notches on them, and a lot of husks lay about, apparently the locals come here to harvest the nuts. In the Village restaurant you can get a fresh coconut to drink for a dollar, they chop off the top and stick in a straw, it's slightly sweet, slightly bubbly, fresh and wonderful-tasting. Embry and I had learned by now to usually order “bento” instead of “sandwich” for lunch. Our bentos were wads of rice with grilled tuna and some boiled vegetables, each lunch squeezed into a clever wrapping of banana leaf. This green, conical ice-cream-cone like leaf pack with a flap of leaf folded over; you unwrap it and eat it with chopsticks.

Fourth we reached Nan Midol. This was the home base and capital of the Saudeleurs, a Micronesian group of warriors who ruled Pohnpei from about 500 AD to 1500 AD. Rather than being on land, Nan Midol is a collection of about twenty little artificial islands created by making walls of basalt and filling them in with coral. And sitting on the islands are more structures of basalt megaliths. It's a little Venice.

There's this odd feature of volcanic basalt, which is that if it cools slowly, as in the plug of a volcano, it forms long vertical crystals. Technically speaking, these are what chaoticians call Benard convection cells, akin to the networks you see sometimes in the mist on water in the morning, also akin to the depressions found in the sand on a beach. The famous Devil's Tower of South Dakota is a huge bundle of these basaltic frozen Benard convection cells. And Pohnpei has two natural towers like this: one is called Sokehs Rock, the other is called, believe it or not, Chickenshit Mountain (supposedly a mythic rooster dropped this one). If you quarry a big chunk of the basalt from these plugs and heat it over a fire, it quite naturally breaks into log-sized chunks, often hexagonal or pentagonal in cross-sections, but sometimes with triangular or square cross-sections as well. And the “rock logs” can be six or even twelve feet long.

So what the Saudeleurs did for their little city was to float the rock logs, the megaliths, down on bamboo rafts — there's a good current that makes this pretty easy — and then they piled up the rock logs to make structures a bit like log cabins — which must have been hard, maybe they used coral ramps to get the logs up high. Being South Pacific islanders, they didn't make solemn Lincoln-log squares of their walls, no, they bowed them in a bit, and ran them up to jutting pagoda-like points at the corners. Think Tiki Bar.

The boat pulled into one of the old canals, and we got out onto some stone steps, paid a minion of the unseen chief $3 a head, and looked around, nobody else there but our party of seven tourists and two guides.

Ah, the romance of stone ruins amidst jungle plants. Breadfruit trees with great oaky leaves were knotting their roots into the ruins, the great oval green breadfruits swaying in the trade winds. I thought of the Greeks, the Romans, the Mayans. Everything was pristine and natural, no trash in sight, no signs, nothing but the ruins, the jungle, the rising tide of the sea, and the single uncommunicative minion of the Micronesian king.

Back from FLA. “Candy came from Tampa, F-L-A. Thought she was James Dean for a day.”

I rented a cool car in the Emerald Isle of National, a PT Cruiser.

Was great when I picked up my better half when she came to meet me at the con, I had a black Cuban shirt with white stripes and my Robert-Williams wheels.

We went on an airboat ride with this real Olde Florida type and then did an eco-kayaking tour of the Everglades out of Everglades City, saw big-mamma gators and baby alligators the size of your finger. Cypresses, mangrove tunnels, Fakahatchee gnarl. Didn’t bring my camera, brought two mangrove seeds back the room, though. Cute things, like mice.

We spent three nights a nice place called the Island Inn on Sanibel Island. Sanibel isn't like it used to be when we where 27 years ago with the three kids, when it was still all those cute 1940s – 1950s kozy kabin motels, it's kind of condo-ed out now, though not like AIA north of Miami, which is like freakin’ computer graphics. The big deal about Sanibel is that great shells wash up on it, I think because the bottom slopes very gradually there.

When we did that Florida trip years ago in 1978 was when I got some of the basic material for my novel Software. And I remember one night in Sanibel sitting up with the wind blowing in off the Gulf, feeling like I was getting the weather inside my head. Tried that again this time, picked up a little more gnarl.

The beach is great for walking, though as it’s so sandy, the water’s pretty turbid. But very warm and swimmable.

I lost my glasses somewhere on this beach.