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All through the night people had come with gear, sonar, a spare coracle, a new motor, eelcell batteries, every gift saying: “We know. We sympathize. I’d be doing the same thing if I were you.”
At the end, ready to set off, Twisp had waited impatiently for Gerard to appear. Gerard had said for him to wait. The big man had come down in his motorized chair, his single fused leg sticking out like a blunted lance to clear the way. His twin daughters ran skipping behind him, and behind them came five Ace of Cups regulars wheeling carts with the food stores.
“Got you enough for about twenty-five or thirty days,” Gerard had said, humming to a stop beside the waiting boats. “I know you, Twisp. You won’t give up.”
An embarrassed silence had fallen over the fishermen waiting on the docks to see Twisp off. Gerard had spoken what was in all of their minds. How long could the kid survive out there?
While friends loaded the tow-coracle, Gerard said: “Word’s out to the Mermen. They’ll contact us if they learn anything. Hard telling what it’ll cost you.”
Twisp had stared at his coracles, at the friends who gave him precious gear and even more precious physical help. The debt was great. And if he came back … well, he was going to come back—and with the kid. The debt would be a bitch, though. And only a few hours ago he had been considering abandonment of the independent fisherman’s life, going back to the subs. Well … that was the way it went.
Gerard’s twin girls had come up to Twisp then, begging for him to swing them. The coracles were almost ready and a strange reluctance had come over everyone … including Twisp. He extended his arms to let each of the girls grip a forearm tight, then he turned, fast, faster, swinging the children wide while the spectators stood back from his long-armed circle. The girls shrieked when their toes pointed at the horizon. He stumbled to a stop, dizzy and sweating. Both girls sat hard on the pier, their eyes not quite caught up with the end of the whirl.
“You come back, you hear?” Gerard had said. “My girls won’t forgive any of us if you don’t.”
Twisp thought about that oddly silent departure as he held his course with the wind on his cheek and an eye to the light and the swift hiss of the current under his craft. The old axiom of the fishing fleets nurtured him in his loneliness: Your best friend is hope.
He could feel the tow coracle tug his boat at the crests. The carrier hum of his radio provided a faint background to the slap-slap of cross-chop against the hull. He glanced back at the tow. Only the static-charge antenna protruded from the lashed cover. The tow rode low in the water. The new motor hummed reassuringly near his feet. Its eelcell batteries had not started to change color, but he kept an eye on them. Unless the antenna picked up a lightning strike, they’d need feeding before nightfall.
Gray convolutions of clouds folded downward ahead of him. Sometime soon it was going to rain. He unrolled the clear membrane another fisherman had given him and stretched it over the open cockpit of his coracle, leaving a sag-pocket to collect drinking water. The course beeper went off as he finished the final lashings. He corrected for slightly more than five degrees deviation, then hunkered under the shelter, sensing the imminent rain, cursing the way this would limit visibility. But he had to keep dry.
I never really get miserable if I’m dry.
He felt miserable, though. Was there even the faintest hope he could find the kid? Or was this one of those futile gestures that had to be made for one’s own mental well-being?
Or is it that I have nothing else to live for … ?
He put that one out of his mind as beyond debate. To give himself physical activity, something to drive out his doubts, he rigged a handline with a warning bell from the starboard thwart, baited it with a bit of bright streamer that glittered in the water. He payed it out carefully and tested the warning bell with a short tug on the line. The tinkling reassured him.
All I’d need, he thought. Drag a dead fish along and call in the dashers. Even though dashers preferred warm-blooded meat, they’d go for anything that moved when they were hungry.
A lot like humans.
Settling back with the tiller under his right armpit, Twisp tried to relax. Still nothing on the radio’s emergency band. He reached down and switched to the regular broadcast, coming in on the middle of a music program.
Another gift, a nav-sounder, with its bottom-finding sonar and its store of position memories, rested between his legs. He flipped it on for a position check, worked out the doppler distance figure from the radio and nodded to himself.
Close enough.
Vashon was drifting at a fairly steady seven klicks per hour back there. His coracle was doing a reliable twelve. Pretty fast for trolling with a handline.
The radio interrupted its music program for a commentary on Chief Justice Keel. No word yet from the Committee, but observers were saying that his unprecedented fact-finding trip down under could have “deep significance to Vashon and all other Islands.”
What significance? Twisp wondered.
Keel was an important man, but Twisp had trouble extending that importance beyond Vashon. Occasional grumbles over a decision swept through the Island communities, but there had been few real disturbances since Keel’s elevation, and that was some time back. Sure sign that he was a wise man.
The C/P had been asked to comment on Keel’s mission, however, and this aroused Twisp’s curiosity. What did the old Shipside religion have to do with the Chief Justice’s trip? Twisp had always paid only cursory attention to both politics and religion. They were good for an occasional jawing session at the Ace of Cups, but Twisp had always found himself unable to understand what drove people to passionate arguments over “Ship’s real purpose.”
Who the hell knew what Ship’s real purpose had been? There might not have been a purpose!
It was possible, though, that the old religion was gaining new strength among Islanders. It was certainly an unspoken issue between Mermen and Islanders. There was enough polarization already between topside and down under—diplomats arguing about the “functional abilities” characteristic of Pandora’s split population. Islanders claimed eminence in agriculture, textiles and meteorology. Mermen always bragged they had the bodies best adapted for going back to the land.
Stupid argument! Twisp always noticed that a group of people—Islander or Merman—got less intelligent with every member added. If humans can master that one, they’ve got it made, he thought.
Twisp sensed something big was afoot. He felt well away from it out in the open sea. No Ship here. No C/P. No religious fanatics—just one seasoned agnostic.
Was Ship God? Who the hell cared now? Ship had abandoned them for sure and nothing else of Ship really mattered.
A long, sweeping roller lifted the coracle easily to almost twice the height of the prevailing seas. He glanced around from the brief vantage and saw something large bobbing on the water far ahead. Whatever it was, it lay in the silvery channel of the odd current, which was adding to his forward speed. He kept his attention ahead until he picked up the unknown thing much closer, realizing then that it was several things clumped together. A few minutes later he recognized the objects in the clump.
Dashers!
The squawks lay quiet, though. He glanced at them as he put a hand on the field switch, ready to repel the hunt when they attacked. None of the dashers moved.
That’s strange, he thought. Never seen dashers sit still before.
He lifted his head, raising the catchment sag of his cockpit cover, and peered ahead. As the coracle neared the clump, Twisp counted seven adults and a tighter cluster of young dashers in the center of the group. They rode the waves together like a dark chunk of bubbly.
Dead, he realized. A whole hunt of dashers and all of them dead. What killed them?
Twisp eased back the throttle, but still kept a hand on the field switch … just in case. They were dead, though, not pretending as a ruse to lure him close. The dashers had locked themselves into a protective circ
le. Each adult linked a rear leg to the adult on either side. They formed a circle with forepaws and fangs facing out, the young inside.
Twisp set a course around them, staring in at the dashers. How long had they been dead? He was tempted to stop and skin at least one. Dasher skins always brought a good price. But it would take precious time and the hides would rob him of space.
They’d stink, too.
He circled a bit closer. Up close now he could see how dashers had adapted so quickly to water. Hollow hairs—millions of trapped air cells that became an efficient flotation system when sea covered all of Pandora’s land. Legend said dashers once had feared the water, that the hollow hairs insulated them then against cold nights and oven-hot days among the desert rocks. Because of those hollow hairs, dasher hides made beautiful blankets—light and warm. Again, he was tempted to skin some of them. They were all in pretty good shape. Have to jettison part of his survival cargo if he did, though. What could he spare?
One of the dashers displayed a great hood that floated out from its ugly, leather-skinned head like a black mantle. Experts said this was a throwback characteristic. Most dashers had shed the hood in the sea, becoming sleek killing machines with saber fangs and those knife-sharp claws, almost fifteen centimeters long on the bigger animals.
Lifting a corner of his cockpit cover, he poked at the hooded dasher with a boathook, lifting it far enough to see that the underside had been burned. A deep, crisp line from brisket to belly. The limpness of the beast told him it couldn’t have been dead more than a few hours. A half-day, at the most. He withdrew the boathook and refastened the cockpit cover.
Burned? he wondered. What had surprised and killed this entire hunt—from below?
Swinging the tiller, he resumed his course down the silvery channel of current, checking by compass and the relative signal from Vashon. The radio was still playing popular music. Soon, the mysterious clump of dashers lay below the horizon astern.
