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“This Queets, he is your father?”
Brett thought suddenly about his father and his mother—the butterfly life between intense bouts of painting. He thought about their downcenter apartment, the many things they owned and cared for—furniture, art work, even some Merman appliances. Queets, though, owned only what he could store in his boat. He owned what he truly needed—a kind of survival selectivity.
“You are ashamed of your father?” Scudi asked.
“Queets isn’t my father. He’s the fisherman who owns my contract—Queets Twisp.”
“Oh, yes. You do not own many things, do you, Brett? I see you looking around my quarters and …” She shrugged.
“The clothes on my back were mine,” Brett said. “When I sold my contract to Queets, he took me on for training and gave me what I need. There isn’t room for useless stuff on a coracle.”
“This Queets, he is a frugal man? Is he cruel to you?”
“Queets is a good man! And he’s strong. He’s stronger than anyone I’ve ever known. Queets has the longest arms you’ve ever seen, perfect for working the nets. They’re almost as long as he is tall.”
A barely perceptible shudder crossed Scudi’s shoulders. “You like this Queets very much,” she said.
Brett looked away from her. That unguarded shudder told it all. Islanders made Mermen shudder. He felt the pain of betrayal deep in his guts. “You Mermen are all the same,” he said. “Mutants don’t ask to be that way.”
“I don’t think of you as a mutant, Brett,” she said. “Anyone can see that you’re normalized.”
“There!” Brett snapped, glaring at her. “What’s normal? Oh, I’ve heard the talk: Islanders are having more ‘normal’ births these days … and there’s always surgery. Twisp’s long arms offend you? Well, he’s no freak. He’s the best fisherman on Pandora because he fits what he does.”
“I see that I’ve learned many wrong things,” Scudi said, her voice low. “Queets Twisp must be a good man because Brett Norton admires him.” A wry smile touched her lips and was gone. “Have you learned no wrong things, Brett?”
“I’m … after what you did for me, I should not be talking to you this way.”
“Wouldn’t you save me if I were caught in your net? Wouldn’t you …”
“I’d go in after you and damn the dashers!”
She grinned, an infectious expression that Brett found himself answering in kind.
“I know you would, Brett. I like you. I learn things about Islanders from you that I didn’t know. You are different, but …”
His grin vanished. “My eyes are good eyes!” he snapped, thinking this was the difference she meant.
“Your eyes?” She stared at him. “They are beautiful eyes! In the water, I saw your eyes first. They are large eyes and … difficult to escape.” She lowered her gaze. “I like your eyes.”
“I … I thought …”
Again, she met his gaze. “I’ve never seen two Islanders exactly alike, but Mermen are never exactly alike, either.”
“Everyone down under won’t feel that way,” he accused. “Some will stare,” she agreed. “It is not normal to be curious?”
“They’ll call me Mute,” he said.
“Most will not.”
“Queets says words are just funny ripples in the air or printed squiggles.” Scudi laughed. “I would like to meet this Queets. He sounds like a wise man.”
“Nothing much ever bothered him except losing his boat.”
“Or losing you? Will that bother him?”
Brett sobered. “Can we get word to him?”
Scudi touched the transphone button and voiced his request over the grill in the wall. The response was too quiet for Brett to hear. She did it casually. He thought then that this marked the difference between them more firmly than his own overlarge eyes with their marvelous night vision.
Presently, Scudi said: “They will try to get word to Vashon.” She stretched and yawned.
Even yawning, she was beautiful, he thought. He glanced around the room, noting the closeness of the two cots. “You lived here with just your mother?” he asked. Immediately, he saw the sad expression return to Scudi’s face and he cursed himself. “I’m sorry, Scudi. I should not keep reminding you of her.”
“It’s all right, Brett. We are here and she is not. Life continues … and I do my mother’s work.” Again, that gamin grin twisted her mouth. “And you are my first roommate.”
He scratched his throat, embarrassed, not knowing the moral rules between the sexes down under. What did it mean to be a roommate? Stalling for time, he asked: “What is this work of your mother’s that you do?”
“I told you. I mathematic the waves.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Where new waves or wave patterns are seen, I go. As my mother did and both her parents before her. It is a thing for which our family has a natural talent.”
“But what do you do?”
“How the waves move, that tells us how the suns move and how Pandora responds to that movement.”
“Oh? Just from looking at the waves, you … I mean, waves are gone just like that!” He snapped his fingers.
“We simulate the waves in a lab,” she said. “You know about wavewalls, I’m sure,” she said. “Some go completely around Pandora several times.”
“And you can tell when they’ll come?”
“Sometimes.” He thought about this. The extent of Merman knowledge suddenly daunted him. “You know we warn the Islands when we can,” she said.
He nodded.
“To mathematic the waves, I must translate them,” she said. She patted her head absently, exaggerating her gamin appearance. “Translate is a better word than mathematic,” she said. “And I teach what I do, of course.”
Of course! he thought. An heiress! A rescuer! And now an expert on waves!
“Who do you teach?” he asked, wondering if he could learn this thing she did. How valuable that would be for the Islands!
“The kelp,” she said. “I translate waves for the kelp.”
He was shocked. Was she joking, making fun of Islander ignorance?
She saw the expression on his face because she went on, quickly: “The kelp learns. It can be taught to control currents and waves … when it returns to its former density, it will learn more. I teach it some of the things it must know to survive on Pandora.”
“This is a joke, isn’t it?” he asked.
“Joke?” She looked puzzled. “Don’t you know the stories of the kelp as it was? It fed itself, it moved gases in and out of the water. The hylighters! Oh, I would love to see them! The kelp knew so many things, and it controlled the currents, the sea itself. All of this the kelp did once.”
Brett gaped at her. He recalled schooltime stories about the sentient kelp, one creature alive as a single identity in all of its parts. But that was ancient history, from the time when men had lived on solid land above Pandora’s sea.
“And it will do this again?” he whispered.
“It learns. We teach it how to make currents and to neutralize waves.”
Brett thought about what this might mean to Island life—drifting on predictable currents in predictable depths. They could follow the weather, the fishing … An odd turn o
f thought put this out of his mind. He considered it almost unworthy, but who could know for certain what an alien intelligence might do?
Scudi, noting his expression, asked: “Are you well?”
He spoke almost mechanically. “If you can teach the kelp to control the waves, then it must know how to make waves. And currents. What’s to prevent it from wiping us out?”
She was scornful. “The kelp is rational. It would not further the kelp to destroy us or the Islands. So it will not.”
Again, she stilled a yawn and he recalled her comment that she had to go back to work soon.
The ideas she had put into his head whirled there, though, leaving him on edge, driving away all thought of sleep. Mermen did so many things! They knew so much!
“The kelp will think for itself.” He recalled hearing someone say that, a conversation at the quarters of his parents—important people talking about important matters.
“But that could not happen without Vata,” someone had said in response. “Vata is the key to the kelp.”
That had begun what he remembered as a sprightly and boo-inspired conversation, which, as usual, ran from speculative to paranoid and back.
“I’ll turn out the light for your modesty,” Scudi said. She giggled and touched the light down through dim to barely shadow. He watched her fumble her way to her bed.
It’s dark to her, he thought. For me she just turned down the glare. He shifted on the edge of his bed.
“You have a girlfriend topside?” Scudi asked.
“No … not really.”
“You have never shared a room with a girl?”
“On the Islands, you share everything with everyone. But to have a room, two people alone, that’s for couples who are new to each other. For mating. It is very expensive.”
“Oh, my,” she said.
In the shadow-play of his peculiar vision he watched her fingers dance nervously over the surface of her cot.
“Down under we share for mating, yes, but we also share rooms for other reasons. Work partners, schoolmates, good friends. I mean only for you to have one night of recovery. Tomorrow there will be others and questions and tours and much noise …” Still her hands moved in that nervous rhythm.
