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Twisp heard the spat-spattering of rain on the tarp. He checked his eelcells with the handlight and found that they were turning a noticeable gray. Right on cue there was a tremendous deafening lightning thunder flash behind them. In the aftershock stillness, he heard Bushka holler, “What the fuck was that?”
Twisp flashed the handlight in that direction. Bushka had gone under the tarp head-first and somehow got himself turned around. He clutched the edges of the tarp, steadying himself, and in the glow from the handlight, his wide eyes punctuated his bleached face.
“We just charged our batteries,” Twisp said. “We might take one more of those if it comes around. Then I’ll bring in the antenna.”
“Holy shit,” Bushka snorted, “fishermen are crazier than I thought. It’s a wonder any of you come back.”
“We manage,” Twisp said. “Tell me, how did you become an expert on Mermen so fast?”
Bushka emerged from the tarp. “As a historian, I already knew a great deal about them before going down under. And then … you learn fast when it’s necessary for survival.” There was the sound of chest-puffing behind his words.
Survival, Twisp thought. He extinguished the handlight and wished that he could see Bushka’s face without having to flash the light on him. The man was not a total coward; that seemed evident. He had crewed in the subs, like many other Islanders putting in their service time. Obviously knew how to navigate. But then, most Islanders learned that in school. With all that, Bushka was driven to seek a life down under. According to him, it was because the Mermen had better historical records, some they had never even examined themselves.
Bushka was like some of the Guemes fanatics, Twisp realized. Driven. A seeker after hidden knowledge. Bushka wanted his facts from the source and he didn’t care how he got there. A dangerous man.
Twisp renewed his alertness, sensitive to any shift in Bushka’s position. The coracle would transmit such movement … should Bushka try to take him.
“You’d better believe it’s happening,” Bushka said. “There’ll be no place for Islands pretty soon.”
“Radio says Ward Keel’s gone down under on some fact-finding mission,” Twisp said. “You suppose he knew about it all along?”
A foot scraped the deck as Bushka shifted his weight. “According to Gallow, they did it without word topside.”
Silence settled between them for a time. Twisp kept his attention on the guiding arrow, a red glowing pointer. How could some of the things Bushka said be believed? The barrier above the sea was real, though. And there was no doubt Bushka had run-for-it fever—something truly big and ugly chased him.
For his part, Bushka lay prisoned in his own thoughts. I should’ve had the guts to kill them. But the thing Gallow represented was bigger than Gallow. No mistaking that. To a historian, it was a familiar pattern. Ship’s surviving records reported a plenitude of violence, leaders who tried to solve human problems by mass killing. Until the madness of Guemes, Bushka had thought such things distantly unreal. Now, he knew the madness, a thing with teeth and shadows.
Pale dawn lightened the wavetops and revealed Twisp working over a small cooking burner on the seat beside him. Bushka wondered whether, in the growing clarity of daylight, Twisp might not rather foreclose on the loan of the kid’s shirt and pants.
Seeing Bushka’s attention on him, Twisp asked, “Coffee?”
“Thanks.”
Then: “How could I have been that blind and ignorant?”
Twisp stared at Bushka silently for a while, then asked, simply, “Going along with them, or letting them go?”
Bushka coughed and cleared his throat. His mouth felt full of lint as soon as he swallowed the hot coffee.
I’m still afraid, he thought. He looked up at Twisp, cooling his coffee at the tiller. “I’ve never been that afraid,” he said.
Twisp nodded. The signs of fear on Bushka were easily read. Fear and ignorance drifted the same currents. There would be anger soon, when the fear receded. For now, though, Bushka’s mind was chewing on itself.
“Pride, that’s what made me do it,” Bushka said. “I wanted Gallow’s story, history in the making, political ferment—a powerful movement among the Mermen. One of their best took a liking to me. He knew I’d work hard. He knew how grateful I’d be …”
“What if this Gallow and his crew are dead?” Twisp asked. “You scuttled their sub and only you are left to say what happened at Guemes.”
“I tell you, I made sure they could escape!”
Twisp suppressed a grim smile. The anger was beginning to surface.
Bushka studied Twisp’s face in the gray light. The fisherman was dark in the way of many Islanders who worked out in the weather. Vagrant breezes whipped Twisp’s shaggy brown hair across his eyes. A two days’ growth of beard shadowed his jaws and caught an occasional strand of hair. Everything in the man’s manner—the steady movement of his eyes, the set of his mouth—spoke to Bushka of strength and resolution. Bushka envied the untroubled clarity in Twisp’s gaze. Bushka was sure that no mirror would ever again return such clarity to his own eyes—not after the Guemes massacre. Bushka could see his own death in that butchery.
How could anybody believe I didn’t know what was happening until it happened? How can I believe it?
“They tricked me good,” Bushka said. “And oh, was I ready! I was all ready to trick myself.”
“Most people know what it’s like to be tricked,” Twisp agreed. His voice was flat and almost devoid of emotion. It kept Bushka talking.
“I won’t sleep for the rest of my life,” Bushka muttered.
Twisp looked away at the surging sea around them. He didn’t like the note of self-pity in Bushka’s tone.
“What about the survivors of Guemes?” He spoke flatly. “What about their dreams?”
Bushka stared at Twisp in the growing light. A good man trying to save a partner’s life. Bushka scrunched his eyes tightly closed but the images of Guemes imprinted themselves on his eyelids.
His eyes snapped open. Twisp was staring intently off to the right ahead of them. “Where’s this Launch Base we’re supposed to see at dawn?”
“It’ll show before long.”
Bushka stared at the lowering sky ahead of them. And when the Launch Base did show … what then? The question tightened a band around his chest. Would the Mermen believe? Even if they did believe, would they act on that belief in a way to protect Islanders?
Chapter 21
Never trust a great man’s love.
—Islander proverb
Keel looked down from the observation platform onto a nightmare scene of controlled pandemonium—rescue sleds wallowed into a small docking basin, coming through hatches lining the far wall of the courtyard below him. This was no nightmare, Keel reminded himself. Triage teams moved among the human shapes that littered the deck. Trauma teams conducted emergency surgery on the scene while other survivors were carried or carted off. The dead, and Keel had never imagined that much death, were stacked like the meat they were against the wall to his left. A long, oval port above the hatches gave a sea view of the arriving rescue sledges queued up and waiting their turns at the hatches. Trauma teams serviced these, too, as best they could.
Behind Keel, Brett uttered a sharp gasp as the shreds of someone’s lower jaw tumbled to the deck from a body
bag in transit to the mounting pile of similar bags against the wall. Scudi, standing beside Brett, shook with silent sobs.
Keel felt numb. He began to understand why Kareen Ale had sent Scudi to fetch him and Brett. Ale had not really grasped the enormity of this tragedy. Seeing it, she had wanted Islander witnesses to the fact that Mermen were doing everything physically possible for the survivors.
And she’ll bring up the dirty work of the dead, he thought.
Keel glimpsed Ale’s red hair among the medics working over the few survivors scattered across the courtyard. From the piles of dead, it was obvious that survivors were not even meeting the odds of pure chance. They were a tiny minority.
Scudi moved up beside him, her attention fixed on the deck below them. “So many,” she whispered.
“How did it happen?” Brett demanded, speaking from beside Keel’s left elbow.
Keel nodded. Yes, that was the real question. He did not want to conjecture on the matter, he wanted to be certain.
“So many,” Scudi repeated, louder this time.
“The last census put Guemes at ten thousand souls,” Keel said. This statement surprised him even as it escaped his mouth. Souls. The teachings of Ship did come to the surface in a crisis.
Keel knew he should assert himself, use the power of his position to demand answers. He owed it to the others if not to himself. The C/P would be after him the minute he returned, for one thing. Rocksack still had family on Guemes, of this Keel was certain. She would be angry, terribly angry in spite of her training, and she would be a force to reckon with.
