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“Demon patrol,” he muttered.
Vashon security sent regular patrols through refugee areas. Their stated purpose was to protect the people against hooded dashers and, lately, the terrifying boils of nerve runners that raced up from the south. Boggs shuddered. He had seen a boil of runners attack a family last season, entering through their eyes to clutch their slimy eggs inside their skulls. He had thought the family too weak to scream, but he was wrong. It was not a pretty sight, and the patrol took their sweet time burning them out.
Everyone knew that security’s real reason for patrolling the beach was to keep the people from feeding themselves. The Director passed rumors of black market fishing harvests that he said threatened the economy of Pandora. Boggs hadn’t seen sign of these harvests yet, nor had he seen any sign of an economy. His mother’s tiny radio taught him the word, but to him it would always be just a word.
A pyre smoldered to his left. Three small lumps of char lay atop a ring of rock, slightly higher than high tide. The poor couldn’t even muster enough fuel to burn their dead. When enough of them accumulated, the security patrols amused themselves by flaming them with gushguns. They called it nerve runner practice.
Someone guarded the pyre on the other side of the rocks, and when Boggs edged closer he could see that it was Silva. He stopped and caught his breath. Silva was a girl his own age, and the rumors said that she had killed her younger sisters and brother while they slept. No one raised a hand against her now as she tended their pitiful fire. Boggs hoped she wouldn’t see him. He needed bait, but he knew he couldn’t fight for it.
He got down on all fours and crawled to the edge of the heap. He reached a hand up, felt around the hot rocks until he touched something that didn’t feel like rock. He jerked, jerked harder and something came off in his hand. It was hot and peeling on one side, cold on the other. He couldn’t bring himself to look, he just grabbed his cane and scuttled away. Silva hadn’t seen him.
“I’ll bring her a fish,” he promised himself. “I’ll catch fish for mother and the boys, and one for Silva.”
The quartertide patrol was nowhere to be seen.
They’ve gone through already, he thought. They’ve gone through and checked the licenses and now they’re up the beach checking for caches in the rocks.
Boggs stood apart from the other fishermen. They might turn him in because he was catching fish that were rightfully theirs. They might steal his fish and line, and beat him as they had beaten his father once …
… But they’ll wait until I have the fish, he thought. That’s what I’d do.
He hunkered down against the jetty so that he was barely visible from the shore, tied a rock onto his line and baited the hooks from the charred mess he clasped in his fist.
“It’s bait,” he reminded himself, “it’s just bait.”
He didn’t have enough energy to plunk his bait out very far, so he left it on the bottom about a half dozen meters from the rocks. It was deep there, deep enough to take most of his line. He gave a tug now and then to make sure it was free. There was enough bait for two, possibly three more tries.
“You got a license, boy?” The gruff voice behind him startled him, but he was too weak to move. He didn’t say anything.
“You’re late getting out here if you got a license. You only get one day, can’t afford to waste it.”
Some rocks clacked together as the man stepped down to where Boggs sat wedged into a cleft. He was skinny and sallow, with a wisp of a beard on his chin and no hair on his head. The skin on the top of his head was peeling and sores dotted his face.
“I’m an illegal, too,” the old man said. “Figured it was my last chance. You?” “Same.”
He reached across Boggs, fingered the bait and put it down with a grunt.
“Same’s me.” The voice was lower than illegal, it was ashamed.
Suddenly Boggs’s line went tight, then tighter, then it nearly jerked his arms out of their sockets.
“You got one, boy,” the old man said. In his excitement, his voice rose and his cracked lips got wet. “You sure got one, boy. I’ll help …”
“No!” Boggs wrapped the line around his wrist and levered it in about a meter. “No, it’s mine!”
Whatever it was, it was big and strong enough that it didn’t have to surface to fight. But Boggs kept making slow progress, levering the stubs of his feet against a boulder and putting his skinny back into the pull. He figured he had about two meters to go but he couldn’t see anything for the black spots swimming across his eyes. He heard the old man grunt in surprise and scramble up the rocks behind him and when he had nothing left to pull with Boggs just lay there, wedged in the rock, his precious line tangled around both arms.
The water broke with a rush in front of him, and whatever he had hooked lunged for him and caught him by the ankles. The grip was firm, and human. It laughed.
“You caught a big one, boy!” it bellowed. “Can you show me your license?” Another laugh.
“Are you … are you … ?”
“Security?” the voice asked, pulling him closer to the water, cutting his skinny buttocks on the rock. “You bet your ass, boy. Let’s see that license.”
Hand over hand the security pulled Boggs closer. Face to face, Boggs could see the breathing device dangling from his dive suit and the black hair draining over his bulging forehead.
“You ain’t got one, do you?” He picked Boggs up and gave him a shake.
Every bone in his dried-up body rattled.
“Do you?”
“No, no … I …”
“Stealing food from people’s mouths? You think you have the right to decide who’ll live and who’ll die? Only the Director has that right. Well, fishbait, I’ll show you where the big ones are.”
With that the man stuck his mouthpiece between his lips, pinned the boy’s arms against his chest and fell backward with him into the sea.
Boggs coughed once at the tickle of water in his nose, then choked as it exploded into his frail lungs. He saw nothing but light overhead where it fanned out from the surface, and the bubbles from his mouth where they joined it like a blossom to its stem.
Chapter 36
Kill therefore with the sword of wisdom the doubt born of ignorance that lies in your heart. Be one in self-harmony and arise, great warrior, arise.
—from Zavatan Conversations with the Avata, Queets Twisp, elder
A silent Twisp and muttering Mose gathered the spore-dust of the two fulfilled hylighters into their bags and trudged their loads to the high reaches. Twisp had spent little time with the monks lately but they were generally an unsuspicious lot who seemed accustomed to his comings and goings. Few of them knew of his work with the Shadows, though if others knew he was certain they still would not interfere.
The carnage below would not reach them, experience had taught him this. Twisp tossed back his mantle, tucked up his sleeves and enjoyed his foray into the sun. For these few hours, at least, he could put aside the messages and codes and other accoutrements of his secret life. Today he might be called on to make a decision or give an order that might change Pandora forever. Until that hour, he wanted to feel Pandora’s sunlight and the feminine breezes of the high reaches.
He and Mose sweated in the spore-dust gathering, and sweat plastered the fine blue dust to their hot skins. The soul of Avata, bound up in the dust, leaked its way into his pores. Twisp’s body picked its way up the trail, oblivious to the way his mind raced the kelpways of the past.
He who controls the present controls the past, a voice in his mind told him, and he who controls the past controls the future.
It was something he’d read in the histories, but he’d also heard it before from the invisible mouth of the kelp.
Avata controls the past, he thought. It maps the voyage of our past, our genetic past, which helps us to plot a true course for our future.
He watched his feet fall, one in front of the other, without the expense of though
t. They stepped over sharp stones, sidestepped a flatwing, all without interference from what most people called the mind. It was as if he were a being watching another being, but from within.
Cheap entertainment, he thought, and smiled.
Mose hummed a tune behind him, one that Twisp did not recognize. He wondered where the young monk’s mind voyaged, to bring him such a tune. He had too much respect for another man’s reverie to ask him.
Each contact with the kelp or the spore-dust had taken Twisp deeper into the details of humanity and deeper into his own past. Yes, the loss of a love was painful and it seemed no less painful replayed. Most of these memories exhilarated him, like the one of nuzzling his mother’s breast for the first time, the taste of the sweet milk and the coo of her voice over him, in the background the swish-swoosh, swish-swoosh of her Islander heart.
Twice the kelp had taken him further than that, into the past of his ancestors, into the void from which humanity itself had sprung. Twisp acquired something more than a history lesson on these voyages. He acquired wisdom, the insight of sages, a separateness from the worldly machinations of people like Flattery. This was why the Director eventually discouraged, then finally forbade the kelp ritual.
“Do you want your children to know your most secret thoughts, your desires, all those dreams you couldn’t tell them?” he would ask.
This warned Twisp far more about Flattery’s depth of paranoia than it did of the dangers of the kelp.
Flattery successfully discouraged most Pandorans, at least the ones dependent on his settlements and his handouts. His isolation of a kelp neurotoxin made the people even more cautious. His development of an antidote became popular, since contact with the kelp was virtually unavoidable in many traditional professions.
It could’ve been a placebo, Twisp thought. What people expect the kelp to do to their minds is pretty much what occurs.
The brief Pandoran ritual of giving their dead up to the kelp had been all but abandoned. Now the dead were burned, their memories dissipated with smoke to the winds. This Flattery encouraged with his simple plea for hygiene.
“Decomposing bodies wash up on the beaches,” he said. “What little tideland we have stinks with the remains of our dead.”
Twisp shook his head to clear it of Flattery, of the man’s grating, nasal voice and supercilious manner. This was not the voyage he wished the dust to lead him down. He sought the deeper currents of history to address the problems of Flattery and hunger.
