AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Brett glanced back at the foil about a kilometer away. Had they heard?
“Kelp,” Scudi choked. Her throat hurt when she spoke.
“What about it? Did you get tangled?”
“The kelp … in my mind,” she said. And she remembered that old face, the
open mouth like a black tunnel into a strange mind.
Slowly, hesitantly, she described her experience.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” Brett said. “It can take over your mind.”
“It wasn’t trying to hurt me,” she said. “It was trying to tell me something.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it didn’t have the right words.”
“How do you know it wasn’t trying to hurt you? You almost drowned.”
“You panicked,” she said.
“I was afraid you were drowning!”
“It let go of me when you panicked.”
“How do you know?”
“I … just … know.” Without waiting for more argument, she reset her survival kit’s controls, pulled it under and began swimming away from the foil.
Brett, attached to Scudi by the belt line, was forced to follow, towing his own kit and sputtering.
Much later, on the coracle with Twisp and Bushka, Scudi debated recounting the kelp experience. It was late morning now. Still no sign of Vashon on the horizon. Brett and Bushka had fallen asleep. Before they had reached the coracle, Brett had warned her to say nothing of the kelp experience to Twisp, but she felt that this time Brett could be wrong.
“Twisp will think we’re crazy as shit pumpers!” Brett had insisted. “Kelp trying to talk to you!”
It really happened, Scudi told herself. She looked from the sleeping figure of Brett to Twisp at the coracle’s tiller. The kelp tried to talk to me … and it did talk!
Brett came abruptly awake as Scudi shifted her position. She leaned back now with her elbows over the thwart. He looked up and met her eyes, realizing immediately what she had been thinking.
About the kelp!
He sat up and looked around at an empty horizon. The wind had picked up and there was spray in the air, scudding off the wavetops. Twisp swayed with a rhythm that marked both the pitch of the waves and the throb of the engine. The long-armed fisherman stared off across the water ahead of him the way he always did when they were chugging along in the fish runs. Bushka remained asleep near the bow cuddy.
Scudi met Brett’s gaze. “I wonder if they got their doctor,” Brett said.
Scudi nodded. “I wonder why they needed one. Nearly everyone down under is trained as a med-tech.”
“It was something pretty bad,” Brett said. “Had to be.”
Twisp shifted his position. He did not look at any of them and said, “You got doctors to spare down under.”
Brett knew what the older man meant. Twisp had spoken of it bitterly many times, as had many Islanders. Topside technology, predominantly organic, meant that most topside biologists who might otherwise go into medicine were lured by higher-status maintenance positions in the cash business of the Islands’ bioengineering labs. It was an ironic twist that had them keeping an Island itself fit while the Islanders made do with a handful of med-techs and a family shaman.
Bushka sat up, awakened by their voices, and immediately returned to his insistent fear. “Gallow will have that sub after us!”
“We’ll be at Vashon by tomorrow,” Twisp said.
“You think you can get away from Gallow?” Bushka snorted.
“You sound like you want him to catch us,” Twisp said. He pointed ahead. “We’ll be in kelp pretty soon. A sub would think twice about going in there.”
“They’re not Islander subs,” Bushka reminded him. “These have burners and cutters.” He sat back with a sullen expression.
Brett stood, one hand steadying him against a thwart. He stared ahead where Twisp had pointed. Still no sign of Vashon, but the water about a kilometer ahead gave off the dark, oily slackness of a heavy kelp bed. He sank back onto his haunches, still steadying himself against the top roll of the boat.
Kelp.
He and Scudi had inflated one of the rafts while still in the kelp bed and perilously close to the foil. Brett had been surprised how easily a raft glided over the big fronds. The kelp did not drag at the raft the way it did on a coracle’s hull. The raft slid across the fronds with only the barest whisper of a hiss. But the stubby paddles, fitted into sleeve pockets of their dive suits, splashed water into the raft. And the paddles tended to pick up torn pieces of kelp.
Remembering, Brett thought: It happened. No one will believe us but it happened.
Even in memory, the experience remained frightening. He had touched a piece torn from the kelp. Immediately, he had heard people talking. Voices in many pitches and dialects had blended into the hiss of the raft’s passage. He had known at once that this was not a dream or hallucination. He was hearing snatches of real conversation.
As he touched the torn bits of kelp in the night, Brett had felt it trying to reach up to him, seeking his hands on the paddles.
Scudi Scudi Scudi Brett Brett Brett
The names echoed in his mind with a feeling of music, a strange inflection but the clearest tones he had ever heard—undistorted by air or wind or the music-devouring dampers of an Island’s organic walls.
A wind had come up then and they had raised the raft’s crude sail. Scudding across the kelp’s surface, huddled close in the stern, they had held a paddle between them as a rudder. Scudi had watched the little receiver that aimed them toward Twisp’s transmitter.
Once, Scudi had looked up at a bright star low on the horizon. She pointed at it. “See?”
Brett looked up to a star that he had known from his first awareness, out onto a Vashon terrace with his parents on a clear warm night. He had thought of it as “the fat star.”
“Little Double,” Scudi said. “It’s very close to our sunrise point.”
“When it’s that low on the horizon, you can see the hyb tanks make a pass there.” He pointed to the horizon directly opposite the position of the fat star. “Twisp taught me that.”
Scudi chuckled, snuggling close to him for warmth. “My mother said Little Double was far off across the horizon to the north when she was young. It’s another binary system, you know. From Little Double we could see both of our suns clearly.”
“To them, we’re probably the fat star,” he said.
Scudi was quiet for a time, then: “Why won’t you talk about the kelp?”
“What’s to talk about?” Brett heard his own voice, brittle and unnatural.
“It called our names,” Scudi said. She gently pulled a bit of leaf from the back of her left hand.
Brett swallowed hard. His tongue felt dry and thick.
“It did,” she said. “I have trailed my hand through it many times. I get images—pictures like holos or dreams. They are symbols and if I think on them I learn something.”
“You mean you still wanted to touch it, even after it almost drowned you?”
“You’re wrong about the kelp,” Scudi said. “I’m speaking of the times before, when I worked at sea. I have learned from the kelp …”
“I thought you said you taught the kelp.”
“But the kelp helps me, too. That is why I have such good luck when I mathematic the waves. But now the kelp is learning words.”
“What does it say to you?”
“My name and your name.” She dipped a hand over the side and dragged it across a huge vine. “It says you love me, Brett.”
“That’s crazy.”
“That you love me?”
“No … that it knows. You know what I mean.”
“Then it’s true.”
“Scudi …” He swallowed. “It’s obvious, huh?”
She nodded. “Don’t worry. I love you, too.”
He felt a hot flush of exuberance plunge out of his cheeks. “And the kelp knows that, too,?
? she said.
Later, as Brett squatted in the coracle watching the distance to another kelp bed grow shorter and shorter, he heard Scudi’s words over and over in his memory: “The kelp knows … the kelp knows …” The memory was like the gentle rise and fall of the seas beneath the wallowing boat.
It called our names, he thought. Admitting this did not help. It could be calling us to be its dinner.
