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How ironic, Twisp thought, that those who can afford to wait don’t have to. I wonder if there’s anything left for him to hope for?
“Elder!”
Twisp cringed inwardly at the panting voice of the young Mose behind him. He felt impatience enough bursting in his breast without being nettled by Mose.
“What is it?”
The younger monk would not approach the precipitous edge of rock outcrop that Twisp occupied, this he knew. He admitted to himself that it was a little game he played with Mose.
“Why do you stand out there?” the younger asked, his voice tinged with a whine.
“Why do you stand back there?”
Still, Twisp did not turn, though he knew he would do so.
“Your presence is requested in chambers. It is urgent. There are many preparations afoot that I do not understand.”
Twisp did not answer.
“Elder, can you hear me?”
Still no answer.
“Elder, please do not make me come out there again. You know that it shakes my wattles in a fearsome way.”
Twisp chuckled to himself and turned to join Mose at the cavern entrance. The afternoon rains had begun, anyway, pattering like swiftgrazers in the scrub. He knew already what Operations must have decided. That it was time to stop hoping. That Flattery and his kind must go. That the people were rising up unorganized and undefended. That the Zavatans and the Shadows held the only means and position to guarantee his fall. That once again thousands would die in the greater name of Life and, of course, Liberty. When there was nothing else to boil down, it always boiled down to Bread.
“Come with me to Operations,” Twisp said, “and I’ll show you something to pink your wattles. You will then be witness to something fearsome, indeed.”
Twisp bowed once at the cavern entrance, in respect, and entered, the billow of his orange robe a beacon against the darkened afternoon.
The dim vestibule inside was guarded by two young novices with shaved heads and lasguns. The boy looked to be about fifteen and his glistening head revealed a high crest of bone atop his skull, which made him taller than Twisp, though their eyes met at the same height. Both he and the girl wore the black, armored jumpsuits of the Dasher Clan. Both were suitably alert, their quick brown eyes negating their relaxed posture. Together they swung the plasteel hatch outward on its gimbals and admitted the two monks to the cavern within the high reaches.
It was not dashers and flatwings that these doors walled out, but the Director and his Vashon Security Force. Through the years Twisp himself had become a master of security. Incursions by VSF had been few and unsuccessful. They viewed the Zavatans as harmless, spineless weaklings who were kelp-drugged or insane.
“Illusion is our strongest weapon,” Twisp had lectured the young novices. “Appear to be foolish, mad, poor and ugly—who would want to take you then? Note how the mold wins the fruit by its appearance alone.”
The first chamber was the one that was inspected periodically by Vashon Security Force. Rough-hewn out of rock, it housed three hundred Zavatans of the nine clans spread out along the walls, with common meeting and dining areas. Mazes of cubbies in three levels had bulkheads hung with hundreds of tapestries that muffled the din of three hundred voices echoing inside the cavern.
Lighting was the usual hot-glow type driven by four hydrogen generators housed in the rock beneath them. The appearance was of primitive squalor, and security inspectors sent here by the Director seldom stayed for more than a cursory look. This was where Mose lived. Twisp, too, had a cubby here—third level, to the right of the main entrance—but he seldom slept there. For more than a year Twisp had lived in the private chambers of the group known to the Shadows as “Operations.”
Twisp ascended to the second level with Mose in tow. He stepped behind an old Islander tapestry into an alcove that would not be noticed except perhaps by children at play. He approached an undamaged section of basalt bulkhead carved with elaborate histories of human and kelp interactions. The section that he faced, titled “The Lazarus Effect,” was simply a huge bas-relief figure of a human hand, index finger extended, touching a strand of kelp that rose from the sea.
Twisp pulled the finger out from the bulkhead and, with the snick of a dagger leaving its sheath, a section of rock sprang outward. When Operations met for Zavatan business, they met inside this labyrinth of rock. Its many repairs betrayed the instability of Pandora’s geology, and its routes were constantly changing. Few knew the passageways, and none as well as the Islander Twisp, Chief of Operations.
Mose swallowed hard and paled conspicuously. Tales abounded of thousands of villagers and common folk who sought safety among the Zavatans, never to be seen again. Mose himself had seen hundreds come into the great cavern behind them who had never come out. Operations referred to them as “Messengers from the Poor,” and hinted that they were relocated worldwide. Though Mose had heard this rumor, he had never seen evidence to back it up. Mose seldom admitted that he’d been born and lived out his meager years within five kilometers of where he now stood.
They never come back out this hatch!
Twisp smiled at the younger monk’s obvious fear.
Why do I like teasing him? he wondered. I remember Brett took it so well …
He shook his head. Dwelling on his dead partner was nonproductive. Cleaning up the nest of assassins who’d killed him would do everybody some good.
“Come,” Twisp said. “You will be safe with me. It is time the Zavatan muscle flexed itself.”
With a smile, Twisp stepped into the well-lighted passageway. Mose’s eyes couldn’t have widened further. When he hesitated, Twisp placed a large hand on his shoulder.
Mose, too, stepped inside and the panel snicked shut behind them. “I want you to remember everything you see here today.”
Mose swallowed hard again and nodded. “Yes … Elder.”
Mose did not look thrilled. His already pale face was drawn tight, the surgical scars along his hairline and neck glowed an angry pink. He alternately pulled at his robe and wrung his hands.
The raw silence of this stone passageway contrasted heavily with the steady din of the cavern they left behind them. The passageway was lighted by a cold source, neither bright nor dim, and it carried the pale green hues of Merman design. As in many Merman complexes, the walls met at right angles in a precision that annoyed many Islanders. These walls were carved by a plasteel welder, and except for fault damage they ran perfectly straight, perfectly smooth.
An electronic voice from overhead startled Mose: “Security code for companion?”
“One-three,” Twisp said. “Continue.”
They set out down the passageway and Mose asked, “Where are we?”
“You will see.”
“What do they mean, ‘security code’?”
“We have checks within checks,” Twisp explained. “Had you been an enemy holding me hostage, this passage would have been sealed off with both of us in it. Perhaps I would be rescued, perhaps not. You, at least, would have been killed.”
Twisp felt Mose walk closer to him yet. “Operations is far beneath us, even below the ocean floor.”
“Mermen did this?” Mose asked.
The passageway turned left abruptly and ended at a blank wall. Twisp pressed his palm to a depression on the wall and a panel slid back to reveal a tiny room, barely large enough for a half dozen people.
“Humans did this,” Twisp answered. “Islanders and Mermen alike.”
The panel slid shut behind them. Twisp spoke the single word “Operations,” and the room began to descend with the two of them inside.
“Oh, Elder …”
Mose held on to Twisp’s long arm.
“Don’t be afraid,” Twisp said. “There is no magic here. You will see many wonders, all human wonders. Our brothers and sisters will know of them, presently. Didn’t I say this would pink your wattles?”
At this, Mose laughed, but he continued to cl
utch Twisp’s arm throughout their rapid descent.
Chapter 42
I am afraid, too, like all my fellow-men, of the future too heavy with mystery and too wholly new, towards which time is driving me.
—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Hymn of the Universe, the Zavatan Collection
Doob muscled the controls of his track as it lurched across the rocky no man’s land between the periphery road and the settlement. The track’s ride was a kidney-buster, but it wasn’t confined to the few flat roads like Stella’s little Cushette. In spite of the beating, the track didn’t seem to break down as often, either. This was the third trip to the salvage yard for Doob and Gray this month—all three to fix Stella’s five-year-old Cushette.
“You should get a top on this thing,” Gray hollered.
Both men were soaked in the sudden afternoon rain, their short hair plastered like thick wet paint onto their heads.
