"Can you see the gondola?" Twisp asked. "Brett! Stay downwind from it. The bag will act like a sea anchor. Don't get fouled in it."
Brett swung the foil to the left and it wallowed in a trough, rocking dangerously at the crest, then into the next trough. At the following crest, he saw the gondola, a dark shape awash in the long seas. The orange bag trailed out behind it with kelp laced across it. The gondola was coming up on their right. The seas were smoother there, flattened by the great spread of the bag. Another crest and Brett saw faces pressed against the gondola's plaz.
"There are people in there!" Twisp shouted. "I saw faces!"
"Damn!" Bushka said. "Damn, damn, damn!"
"We have to take them off," Brett said. "We can't leave them there."
"I know that!" Bushka snarled.
Scudi took this moment to begin muttering ... words Brett couldn't understand.
"She's all right," Twisp said. "She's coming out of it. Bushka, you come back here and look after her while I get a line aboard that gondola."
"How're you going to do that?" Bushka asked.
"I'm going to swim it over! What else? Brett, hold us steady as you can right here."
"They're Mermen," Bushka said. "Why can't they bring a line to us?"
"The minute they open their hatch, that gondola is going down," Twisp said. "It'll fill like a punctured float."
Scudi's voice came clearly then: "What's ... what's happening?"
Bushka released his safety harness and made his way back to her. Brett heard the hatch open and close. Bushka's voice, quite low, gave Scudi her answer.
"An LTA?" she asked. "Where are we?"
"Near Outpost Twenty-two." There was a scuffling sound and Bushka's voice: "Stay down there!"
"I have to get to the controls! It's shallow here. Very shallow! In these seas -"
"All right!" Bushka said. "Do what you have to do."
Scuffing footsteps on the deck, then water sloshing from a wet dive suit. Scudi's hand gripped Brett's shoulder. "Dammit, but my head hurts," she said. Her hand touched his neck and he felt a flash of pain on the side of his temple. It was a throbbing pain, as though something had struck him there.
Scudi leaned across him, her hand over his shoulder to steady herself. Their cheeks touched.
Brett felt something flow between them, creating a moment of panic followed by a sudden inrush of awareness. His neck hair prickled as he realized what had happened. He felt that he was two people become one but aware of the separation - one person standing beside the other.
I'm seeing with Scudi's eyes!
Brett's hands moved automatically on the wheel, a new expertise he had not known he possessed. The foil gentled its way close to the gondola and hung there with just enough headway to counteract the wind.
What's happening to us?
The words formed silently in their minds, a simultaneous question, shared in an instant and answered in an instant.
The kelp has changed us! We share our senses when we touch!
With this odd double vision, Brett saw Twisp swimming now, moving through a channel in the kelp and very close to the gondola. Faces peered out through the plaz. Brett thought he recognized one of those faces and, with that recognition, came a bursting daydream, instantaneous - a sense of people talking inside the gondola. The sensation vanished and he was left staring at white-whipped waves breaking across the LTA, Twisp clinging there while he fastened his line to a handgrab beside the plaz lock.
Scudi whispered to Brett: "Did you hear them talking?"
"I couldn't make out the words."
"I could. Gallow's people are in there and they have prisoners. The prisoners are being taken to Gallow."
"Where is Gallow? Here?"
"I think so, but I recognized a prisoner - it's Dark Panille, Shadow. I've worked with him."
"The man who treated me in the passageway!"
"Yes, and one of the captors is that Gulf Nakano. I'm going to warn Bushka. He has the weapon. We will have to lock them into one of the cargo bays."
Scudi turned away and worked her way back to Bushka, steadying herself along the overhead grabs. Brett heard her explain the situation to Bushka, saying she had recognized Nakano through the gondola's plaz.
"They've opened their hatch," Brett said. "People are coming out. I see Shadow ... there's Nakano. Waves are slopping into the hatch. Everybody's coming out."
Scudi slipped into the command seat beside Brett. "I'll take it. You help Bushka at the entry hatch."
"No tricks!" Bushka yelled as he followed Brett down the passageway.
"We've got to get Twisp out of there!" Brett said.
"He's staying at the gondola to unfasten the line when it goes under."
They were at the hatchway then, wind whipping around them and spray in their eyes. Brett was thankful for his dive suit. In spite of the chill, sweat poured from his body. The muscles of his arms and legs were tightly humming bands. A wave broke against the hull below them. Brett sighted along the line - a long row of bobbing heads worked their way toward the foil. He recognized Nakano in the lead, staying close to Panille. The line snaked up and down the waves.
"We'll bring them aboard one at a time, right into the cargo bay behind me," Bushka said.
"We'll have to disarm them."
Nakano was first through the hatch. His face had the single-minded aggressiveness of a bull dasher. Bushka leveled the lasgun from the far side of the hatchway, slipped a similar weapon from the thigh pocket of Nakano's dive suit, grabbed a knife from Nakano's waist sheath and motioned with his head for the Merman to enter the open hatch to the cargo bay.
For a blink, Brett thought Nakano would attack Bushka despite the lasgun, but the man shrugged and ducked through into the bay.
Panille stayed down below to help others and the next person through was a woman, red-haired, beautiful.
"Kareen Ale," Bushka said. "Well, well." He sent his gaze licking over her body, saw no weapon and nodded toward the cargo hatch. "In there, please."
She stared at the lasgun in Bushka's grip.
"Do it!"
A shout from below the hatch brought Brett whirling around to face the sea.
"What is it?" Bushka demanded. He was trying to divide his attention between the open cargo hatch and the outer hatch where survivors still waited to be brought aboard.
Brett peered out across Panille, who hung below the hatch with an arm wrapped through a loop in his safety line. The gondola beyond him had begun to sink, slowly dragging the orange LTA bag under the waves. The safety line lay across the waves with Twisp pulling himself along it. Something was happening about midway along the line, though, and Brett tried to make out what had caused the shout.
"What's happening?" Bushka asked.
"I don't know. There's a length of kelp across the line. Twisp released the line from the gondola and it's already under. But something's ..."
A human hand came out of the water near the kelp and one, two kelp strands whipped across the hand and the hand vanished. Twisp reached the kelp barrier and hesitated there. A questing strand of kelp touched his head, paused there and withdrew. Twisp continued his way along the line, stopping finally beside Panille, exhausted. Panille put an arm under Twisp's shoulder and helped support him. Waves lifted both men and lowered them beside the foil.
"Shall I help bring him up?" Brett called.
Twisp waved a hand to stop him. "I'll be all right." One of his long arms snaked up the line and took a firm grip.
"Two people," Twisp said. "The kelp took them. It just took them, wrapped around them and took them."
He hauled himself up the line, quivering every muscle on the way. He slumped through the hatch, then turned to help Panille. Bushka waved Panille toward the cargo bay.
"No," Brett said. He stepped between Bushka and Panille. "Shadow was a prisoner. He helped me. He's not one of them."
"Who says?"
"The kelp says," Twisp said.
Control the religion and the food and we own the world.
- GeLaar Gallow
Vata's growing restlessness sloshed nutrient over the rim of her tank. At times she arched her back as if in pain, and the pink knobs of her nipples broke the surface like the bright peaks of two blue-green mountains. A relief attendant, an Islander high on boo, reached out to tweak one of the gnarled, vein-swollen things and was discovered catatonic, his blasphemous thumb and forefinger still held in position over the vat.
This event redoubled C/P Simone Rocksack's efforts to effect the Islander move down under. Stories of "The Wrath of Vata" circulated freely and no one on the C/P's staff made any effort to sort fact from fantasy. Rocksack silenced one underling who objected to the rumors by saying, "A lie is not a lie if it serves a higher moral purpose. Then it is a gift."
Vata herself, locked inside her tank and her skull while generation after generation of her people evolved around her, explored her world with the tender new frond-tips of the kelp.
Kelp was fingertip and ear to her, nose and eye and tongue. Where massive stalks lazed on the sea's bright surface she witnessed pastel sunrises, the passage of boats and Islands, the occasional ravages of a hunt of dashers. Scrubberfish that cleaned the kelp's broadest leaves whiskered the deep crevasses of her opulent flesh.
Like herself, the kelp was single, incomplete, unable to reproduce. Mermen took cuttings, rooted them in rock and mud. Storms ripped whole vines loose from the mother plant and some of the wounded stragglers wedged safely into rock and grew there. For two and a half centuries, at least, the kelp had not bloomed. No hylighter broke the surface of the sea to rise on its hydrogen bag and scatter its fresh spores to the winds.
Sometimes in her sleep Vata's loins pulsed with an ancient rhythm and a sweet emptiness ached in her abdomen. These were the times she curled close to Duque, her massive body engulfing him in a frustrating approximation of an embrace.
Now her frustration focused on GeLaar Gallow. A jungle of kelp strained each strand to reach the walls and hatchways of Outpost 22, with no success. The perimeter was too wide, the stalks too short.
New pairs of eyes joined the kelp to reveal Gallow's treachery. The clearest of these eyes belonged to Scudi Wang. Vata enjoyed the company of Scudi Wang, and it became more difficult to let her go each time they met.
Vata met Scudi in the kelp. A few bright glimpses of a fresh young mind, and she searched for Scudi daily. When Vata dreamed the terrors of kelp, storm-ripped from its ballast-rock and dying, the touch of Scudi's skin on vine or frond smoothed those churning dreams to a warm calm. Those times Vata, in turn, dreamed back to Scudi. She dreamed small histories, images and visions, to keep the fear of kelp-madness out of Scudi's head. Vata had dreamed to others who had never come out of the dream. She knew now that Scudi's mother was one of those lost dreamers. Stunned by the hot dream sparking into her from the kelp, the woman had floated wide-eyed and helpless into a passing net. The tender airfish at her neck was crushed and she drowned. And the Merman crew supporting her had made no move to rescue her. Deliberate!
Vata watched the strange odyssey that worked its way back toward Outpost 22. She flexed her kelp when the gondola went down and acquainted herself with Bushka and Shadow Panille. This Panille, he was blood to her.
Brother, she thought, and marveled over the word. She trusted Bushka and Panille to Scudi's presence. The message she sent Scudi was simple and clear: Find Gallow, drive him out. Kelp will do the rest.
Life is not an option, it is a gift. Death is the option.
- Ward Keel, Journal
It was late evening, but Ward Keel had lost all inclination to sleep. He accepted the buzz of fatigue as a logical consequence of captivity. His eyes refused to stay closed. They blinked slowly and he glimpsed the brush of his long lashes in the plaz beside him. His brown eye faced itself in the plaz. It was a small dark blur. Beyond it lay the perimeter of kelp, almost gray at this depth. His prison cubby was warm, warmer even than his quarters on Vashon, but the gray of down under washed his psyche cold.
Keel had been watching the kelp for hours as Gallow's men streamed into the outpost. At first the kelp pulsed as usual with the current. Fronds waved at full extension downcurrent like a woman's long hair in an evening breeze. Now there was a different rhythm. And the larger kelp fronds downcurrent of the outpost stretched directly toward Keel. The currents were no longer consistent. The outpost was being battered by sudden changes of current that had the kelp outside flickering in a firelight dance.
Gallow's morning crew had never arrived. His medical team was lost. Keel could hear Gallow's rantings from the next room. The syrupy voice was cracking.
Something strange about that kelp, Keel thought. Stranger than moving against the current.
Keel never even considered that Brett and Scudi might be dead. In the reverie generated by the gentle undulations of the kelp, Keel thought often about his young friends.
Had they reached Vashon? He worried about that. But he heard no echoes of this in Gallow's angry words. Surely Gallow would be reacting if that message had reached Vashon.
GeLaar Gallow is attempting to take over Merman Mercantile and the recovery of the hyb tanks. Merman rockets are being sent into space for the tanks. Mermen are changing our planet in ways Islands cannot survive. If Gallow succeeds, Islanders are doomed.
How would the C/P react? Keel wondered. He might never know.
Keel held out little hope for himself. His gut had begun to burn again, precisely as it had four years ago. He knew that all traces of the remora were gone. Without it, the food he ate would pass undigested and his intestines would gnaw at themselves until he either bled to death or starved. There was no reason to doubt the word of his personal physician, and the evidence was too painfully immediate to disguise, even to himself.
It used to make me tired all the time, he thought. Why won't it let me sleep now? Because last time he'd almost bled to death in his sleep, and now sleep was impossible.
It wasn't the constant burning that kept him awake. Pain he had learned to bear over the years of ill-fitting support devices for his long neck. This was the crisp wakefulness of the condemned.
Wakefulness had brought Keel's attention to the kelp. Sometime in midmorning the kelp stalks began defying the currents and reaching toward the outpost. The perimeter of growth began about two hundred meters from the outpost walls. The outpost itself lay in the center of this massive kelp project like a jewel in a fat ring. The fish were gone, too. Keel's few earlier glimpses of the outer compound had shown a richness of fishes that rivaled the gardens at Core - fanlike butterfly fish with iridescent tails, the ever-present scrubberfish grazing leaves and plaz, mud-devils raising and lowering the tall sails of their dorsal fins with every disturbance. None was visible now and the gray filter of evening quickly washed itself black. Just the kelp remained, sole proprietor of the world beyond the outpost's perimeter. This day Keel felt that he had watched the kelp go from graceful to stately to full alert.
That's my translation, he reminded himself. Don't attribute humanity to other creatures. It limits study. A quick shudder iced his spine when he realized that this kelp had been grown from cells carried by mutant humans.
The kelp had an infinite memory. The histories said that, but so did GeLaar Gallow. Conclusion? he asked himself.
It's waking up, he answered. And it absorbs the memories of the living and the newly dead. Therein lay great temptation for Ward Keel.
I could leave more than scratchings in these journals, he thought. I could leave everything. Everything! Think of that! He entered these thoughts into his journal, and wished that he had his journals and his life's collection of notes around him now. It was possible, he knew for fact, that no Islander had given more direct thought to life and life forms than Justice Keel. Some of these observations he knew to be unique - sometimes illogical, but vital every one. These data he hated to see lost when a struggling humanity needed them so very much.
Someone else will think those thoughts, in time. If there is more time.
His attention was caught by the arrival of another sub overhead. The sub gave the kelp a wide berth. Gallow's orders. As the sub disappeared on its way to the interior docking bay, Keel marveled at the movement of the kelp. Huge stalks tracked the sub's path even though it came in against the current. Like a blossom following the slow arc of sunlight across the sky, the kelp followed all of the incoming Mermen. An occasional blur of gray moved amongst the tendrils as one snapped out suddenly toward an intruder, but all Mermen kept well out of reach.
If the kelp is waking, he thought, the future of all the humans left may be at stake.
Perhaps after contacting enough humans the kelp would find some way of saying, "Like me. If you're human, you're like me." There was a biological kinship, after all. Keel swallowed, and hoped silently that it was true that Vata was the key to the kelp. He hoped, too, that mercy was a part of Vata's personality.
Keel thought he detected a change in the perimeter. It was hard to tell, with night coming on and visibility so poor anyway, but he was sure that the two-hundred-meter perimeter had closed. Not much, but enough to notice.
Keel cast about in his memory for all the information that he'd ever stored on the kelp. Sentient, capable of nonverbal communication by touch, firmly anchored to ballast-rocks and mobile in its bloom state - except the bloom state had been extinct for hundreds of years. That was the kelp the first humans on Pandora destroyed. What surprises lay in store with this new kelp? This creature had been regrown from gene-prints present in human carriers. Could it be that the kelp has learned how to move? It didn't feel like a trick of the imagination. The dark outside was now nearly total, only a thin barrier of light escaped from the outpost itself.
Morning will tell, he thought. If there is a morning. He chuckled to himself. With most of his world dark, Keel was left staring at himself in the port, haloed by the glare of the one bare light. He moved away from the plaz after a passing glance at his nose. It spread over his face like a mashed fruit, the tip touched his upper lip whenever he pursed his mouth in thought.
The hatch door behind him slammed into the wall and startled him. His stomach took a bad turn, then turned again when he saw Gallow, alone, carrying two liters of Islander wine.
"Mr. Justice," Gallow said, "I thought I'd liberate these from the men. I present them to you as a gesture of hospitality."
Keel noted that the label showed that the wine was from Vashon, not Guemes, and breathed easier. "Thank you, Mr. Gallow," he said. He allowed his head to drop in a slight bow. "I seldom have the pleasure of a good wine anymore - sour stomach comes with age, they say." Keel sat heavily and indicated the other chair next to his bunk. "Have a seat. Cups are on the sideboard."
"Good!" Gallow flashed the wide, white smile that Keel was sure opened many a reluctant hatch.
And many a lady, he thought. He shook it off, suddenly embarrassed by himself. Gallow took two stoneware cups from a shelf and set them on the desk. The handles, Keel noted, were thick to accommodate the calloused fingers of outpost riders.
Gallow poured but did not sit.
"I have ordered supper for us," Gallow said. "One of my men is a passable cook. The outpost is crowded, so I took the liberty of ordering the meal delivered here. I hope that meets your approval?"
How very polite, Keel thought. What does he want? He took a cup of the amber wine. Both lifted cups, but Keel only sipped.
"Pleasant," Keel said. His stomach churned with bitter wine and the thought of lumps of hot food. It churned at the prospect of listening to more of Gallow's egocentric prattle.
"Cheers," Gallow said, "and to the health of your children." It was a traditional Islander toast that Keel acknowledged with a raised eyebrow. Several acid replies teased the tip of his tongue, but he bit them back.
"You Islanders have mastered the grape," Gallow said. "Everything we have down under tastes like formaldehyde."
"The grape needs weather," Keel said, "not racks of lamps. That's why each season has its own distinct flavor - you taste the story of the grape. Formaldehyde is an accurate summation of conditions down under, from the grape's point of view."
Gallow's expression darkened for a blink, the barest hint of a frown. Again, the wide, winning grin. "But your people are anxious to leave all this behind. They prepare to move down under en masse. It seems they have developed a taste for formaldehyde."
So it would be that kind of a meeting. Keel had heard these conversations before - the justifications of men and women in power for their abuse of that power. He imagined that many a condemned man had to listen to the guilty prattle of his jailer.
"Right is self-evident," Keel said. "It needs no defense, just good witness. What is it that you come here for?"
"I come here for conversation, Mr. Justice," Gallow said. He brushed a stray shock of blonde hair back from his forehead. "Conversation, dialogue, whatever you might call it - it's not readily available among my men."
"You must have leaders, officers of some sort. Why not them?"
"You find this curious? Perhaps a bit frightening that the one privacy of your imprisonment is breached here? At your ease, Mr. Justice, conversation is all I'm after. My men grunt, my officers plan, my enemies plot. My prisoner thinks, or he wouldn't keep a journal, and I admire anyone who thinks. The rational mind is a rare creature, one to be respected and nurtured."
Now Keel was positive that Gallow wanted something - something particular.
Watch yourself, Keel cautioned, he's a charmer. The sip of wine found the hot spot deep in Keel's belly and started its slow burn into his intestines. He was tempted to end this conversation. How much respect did you have for the minds on Guemes? But he couldn't afford to end the conversation, not when there was a source of hard information that the Islanders might desperately need.
As long as I'm alive I'll do what I can for them, Keel thought.
"I'll tell you the truth," Keel said.
"The truth is most welcome," Gallow answered. A deferential nod graced the comment, and Gallow drained his wine. Keel poured him another.
"The truth is that I have no one to talk with, either," Keel said. "I am old, I have no children and I don't want to leave the world emptier when I go. My journals" - Keel gestured at the plaz-jacketed notebook on his bunk -"are my children. I want to leave them in the best possible shape."
"I've read your notes," Gallow said. "Most poetic. It would please me to hear you read from them aloud. You have more interesting musings than most men."
"Because I dare to muse when your men dare not."
"I am not a monster, Mr. Justice."
"I am not a Justice, Mr. Gallow. You have the wrong person. Simone Rocksack is Justice now, as well as C/P. My influence is minimal."
Gallow toasted him again with the wine. "Most perceptive," he said. "Your information is correct - Simone is Chief Justice and C/P. A first. But because of the memory of one corrupt C/P, others have always been under scrutiny. You, as Justice, have satisfied the people that there is a balance of power. They wait to hear from you. It is you who can relieve their worries, not Simone. And for good reason."
"What is the reason?"
Gallow's easy smile uncurled and his eyes leveled their cold blue power at Keel.
"They have good reason to worry, because Simone works for me. She always has."
"That doesn't surprise me," Keel said, though it did. He tried to keep his voice even, conversational.
Get everything out of him, he thought, that's the only skill I have left.
"I think it did surprise you," Gallow said. "Your body betrays you in subtle ways. You and the C/P aren't the only ones trained in observation."
"Yes, well ... I find it hard to believe that she'd go along with the Guemes massacre."
"She didn't know," Gallow said, "but she'll adjust. She's a very depressing woman when you get to know her. Very bitter. Did you know that there's a mirror on every wall in her quarters?"
"I've never been to her quarters."
"I have." Gallow's chest swelled with the statement. "No other man has. She raves about her ugliness, tears at her skin, contorts her face in the mirror until she can bear its natural form. Only then will she leave her room. Such a sad creature." Gallow shook his head and freshened his cup of wine.
"Such a sad human, you mean?" Keel asked.
"She doesn't consider herself human."
"Has she told you this?"
"Yes."
"Then she needs help. Friends around her. Someone to -"
"They only remind her of her ugliness," Gallow interrupted. "That's been tried. Pity, she has a succulent body under all those wraps. I am her friend because she considers me attractive, a model of what humanity could be. She wants no child to grow up ugly in an ugly world."
"She told you this?"
"Yes," Gallow said, "and more. I listen to her, Mr. Justice. You and your Committee, you tolerate her. And you lost her."
"It sounds like she was lost before I ever knew her."
Gallow's white smile returned. "You're right, of course," he said. "But there was a time when she could have been won. And I did it. You did not. That may shape the whole course of history."
"It may."
"You think your people will continue to revel in their deformities forever? Oh, no. They send their good children to us. You take in our rejects, our criminals and cripples. What kind of life can they build that way? Misery. Despair ..." Gallow shrugged as though the matter were unarguable.
Keel didn't remember Islander life that way at all. It was crowded beyond Merman belief, true. Islands stank, also true. But there was incomparable color and music everywhere, always a good word. And who could explain to someone under the sea the incredible pleasure of sunrise, warm spring rain on face and hands, the constant small touchings of person to person that proved you were cared for merely by being alive.
"Mr. Justice," Gallow said, "you're not drinking your wine. Is the quality not to your liking?"
It's not the wine. Keel thought, but the company. Aloud, he said, "I have a stomach problem. I have to take my wine slow. I generally prefer boo."
"Boo?" Gallow's eyebrows lifted in genuine surprise. "That nerve-runner concoction? I thought it -"
"That only degenerates drank it? Perhaps. It's soothing, and to my taste even if it is dangerous to collect the eggs. I don't do the collecting." That's one he can relate to.
Gallow nodded, then his lips pressed into a firm, white line. "I heard that boo causes chromosome damage," he said. "Aren't you Islanders pushing your luck with that stuff?"
"Chromosome damage?" Keel snorted. He didn't even try to suppress a laugh. "Isn't that a little like roulette with a broken wheel?"
Keel sipped his wine and sat back to see Gallow fully. The look of disgust that shadowed the Merman's face told Keel that Gallow had been reached.
Anyone who can be reached can be probed. Keel thought. And anyone who can be probed can be had. His position on the Committee had taught him this.
"You can laugh at that?" Gallow's blue eyes blazed. "As long as you people breed, you endanger the whole species. What if ... ?"
Keel raised his hand and his voice. "The Committee concerns itself with matters of 'what if,' Mr. Gallow. Any infant that carries an endangering trait is terminated. For a people trained in life-support, this is a most painful event. But it guarantees life to all the others. Tell me, Mr. Gallow, how can you be so sure that there are only harmful, ugly or useless mutations?"