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Yes, Her Holiness was among the kelp again at last. Her presence suddenly freed the neighboring stand of prisoner kelp, a stand that had lost her to Flattery’s butchery five cycles back.
Who are these Others, now, come to my stand?
Few humans fished outside their gridwork. The few organic islands left to risk a float on Pandora’s seas likewise stayed to the more merciful currents of the grid. The Immensity had spared fishermen, scouts, humans fleeing humans, and it had spared entire island-cities more than once. The human in charge of humans had not shown the Immensity equal compassion.
Though humans often called them “willy-nillys,” the islands floated now in predictable patterns. Current Control, the enslaver of the kelp, ensured this. But the volcanics of the past twenty- five cycles had conjured storms the like of which the Immensity had never seen in its own time, and these storms brought islands into its reach. It thought of the organic islands as Immensities of Humans, and adjusted its own greatness to let them pass.
These humans came in their flying creature, dropping pieces of kelp into the Immensity’s lagoon. The Immensity unraveled a long vine from the wall of the lagoon and sniffed the human. The scents talked of fear and death, and to have the whole story the Immensity would have to read this human’s tissues bit by bit.
It waited until the human finished discharging the pieces of kelp, so that the Immensity would know as much of its neighbor as it could. It knew now, by scent and touch, that this was Oddie Zentz human. As it gripped Oddie Zentz human at the waist and pulled him into the walls of the lacuna, it knew that this human had killed many humans, as many as a storm and perhaps more.
The Immensity had spent most of its awakened time trying to communicate with other kelp, to merge with other, smaller stands. More kelp was better, it thought. Closer was better. It failed to understand creatures that killed their own kind. These were, indeed, diseased individuals. If they were merciless to their own, they would certainly show no mercy to others. The Immensity concluded that it should respond in kind.
Chapter 34
We Islanders understand current and flow. We understand that conditions and times change. To change, then, is normal.
—Ward Keel, The Notebooks
Beatriz knew that it would not be in the captain’s best interest to kill Mack, especially if there were links with other forces groundside. But she had also quit trying to guess what could be in Captain Brood’s best interest. From what she could gather, Captain Brood was a man trying to capitalize on a bad decision, making more bad decisions to cover his tracks. He wouldn’t last long at this rate, and he was the type who just might take everyone, and everything, with him.
She concentrated on the Pandora map she’d called up on the large studio display, rotatable, and at the touch of a key it highlighted populated areas, agriculture, fishing and mining. She could tell at a glance where the factories lay, both topside and undersea, and where the wretched communities lived that served them, for serve them they did.
Only today, with the murders of her crew and Ben’s warnings ringing in her memory, did she realize how the people of Pandora, including herself, had become one with their chains. They were enslaved by hunger, and by the manipulation of hunger, which was a particular skill of the Director. He concentrated on food, transportation and propaganda. Before her, on HoloVision’s giant screen, she saw the geography of hunger spread out for her at a touch.
The largest single factory complex above or below the sea was Kalaloch, feeding the bottomless maw of Flattery’s Project Voidship. It showed up on her display as a small, black bull’s-eye in the center of amoebalike ripples of blue and yellow. Those ripples represented the settlement—the blue was Kalaloch proper, where all paths led to the ferry terminal or to The Line. People inside the blue lived in barracks-like tenements or in remnants of Islander bubbly stuck to the shore.
The yellow, a weak stain of sorts widening out from the blue, represented the local refugee population. Starving, unsheltered, too weak for heavy work, they were also too weak to rebel. The Director’s staff rode among them daily, picking the lucky few who would be trucked to town to wash down the stone pavements, sort rock from dung in the Director’s gardens, or pick through refuse for reusable materials. For this each was given a space in The Line and a few crumbs at one of a hundred food dispensaries that Flattery operated in the area. Even private markets were offshoots of the dispensaries—true black market vendors disappeared with chilling regularity.
The sphere of Kalaloch included the bay and its launch base, the factory strip, the village, Flattery’s Preserve and the huddle of misshapen humanity that squeezed inside the perimeter for protection from Pandora’s demons.
Outside this sphere Beatriz noted the similarities of other settlements along the coastline. These smaller dots also were ringed by the huddle of the poor, even agricultural settlements, fishing villages, the traditional sources of food. Security squads shot looters of fields, proprietors of illegal windowboxes and rooftop gardens. They shot the occasional fisherman bold enough to set an unlicensed line. All of this Ben had told her. She had seen evidence herself, and had chosen to disbelieve. Beatriz earned her food coupons fairly, ate well, felt guilty enough about the hunger around her to believe what Flattery had fed her about production meaning jobs and jobs feeding people.
For almost two years her assignments had covered jobs, the people who worked them and the people who gave them out. It had been a long time since she’d walked the muddy streets of hunger.
There aren’t any new jobs lately, she thought, but there sure are a lot fewer people. Now she was above it all, trapped and converted, with nothing to offer and everything to fear.
Chapter 35
Thou shalt give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.
—Christian Book of the Dead
Boggs had been hungry all his twenty years, but today his hunger was different and he knew it. He woke up without pain in his bones from the ground underneath, and when he scratched his head a handful of hair came with it. This, he knew, was not hunger but the end of hunger. He looked around him at the still, wizened forms of his family huddled together under their rock ledge. Today he would get them food or die trying, because he knew he would do the dying anyway.
Boggs was born with the split lip, gaping nose slit and stump feet characteristic of his father’s family. His six brothers shared these defects but only two still lived. His father, too, was dead. Like Boggs, they had known the enemy hunger from birth. His malformed mouth had made nursing a futile noise, so most of the sucking that he did as a newborn slobbered down his chin. His mother tried to salvage what she could with her fingers, slopping it back into the cleft of his mouth. He’d watched her do this countless times with his younger brothers.
A week ago he’d watched her try to nurse the starving ten-year-old when there wasn’t even a bug to catch. She had been dry for two years, and his brother died clutching a handful of fallen orange hair. Boggs looked again at the fistful of orange hair in his hand, then weakly cast it away.
“I will take the line, Mother,” he said, in the lilting Islander way. “I will bring us back a fine muree.”
“You will not go.” Her voice was dry, hoarse, and filled the tiny space they’d dug out under the ledge. “You are not licensed to fish. They will kill you, they will take the line.”
His father had begged the local security detachment for a license. Everyone knew that many temporaries were issued every day, and that some could even pay with a share of the catch. But the Director issued a fixed number each day. “Conservation,” he called it. “Otherwise the people will outfish the resource and no one will eat.”
“Conservation,” Boggs snorted to himself. He eyed the fish l
ine wrapped around his mother’s ankle. There were two bright hooks attached. There had been a fiber sack for bait but they’d eaten the sack weeks ago. There was just the ten meters of synthetic line, and the two metal hooks tucked inside the wrap.
Boggs crawled up beside his mother so that his face was even with hers. She had the wide-set eye-sockets of her mother, and the same bulging blue eyes. Now a faint film obscured the blue. Boggs pulled at his hair again, and thrust the scraggly clump where she could see it.
“You know what this means,” he said. The crawl, the effort at talk exhausted him but somehow he kept on. “I’m done for.” He tugged at her hair and it, too, came out in a clump. “You are, too. Look here.”
Her bleared eyes slowly tracked on the evidence that she didn’t need, and she nodded.
“Take it,” was all she said. She bent her knee up to her skinny chest and Boggs clumsily unwound the line from around her ankle.
He crawled out from under the ledge, and as far as he could see down to the shore others were crawling out of holes, out from under pieces of cloth and rubbish. Here and there a wisp of smoke dared to breach the air.
Boggs found his cane, propped himself upright and stumped his way slowly toward the water. He’d thought himself too skinny to sweat, but sweat poured out of him nonetheless. It was a cold sweat at first, but the effort of picking his way through the rubbish and the dying warmed him up.
A small jetty shouldered the oncoming tide. This amalgam of blasted rock, about twenty meters long and five or six meters wide, was dangerous even for the surefooted to navigate. The quartertide change tossed a few breakers over the black rock, soaking the dozen licensed fishermen who hunched against the spray.
It took Boggs over a half-hour to make it the hundred meters from the ledge to the base of the jetty. His vision was failing, but he scanned the tidelands for signs of the security patrol.
