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The clouds had lifted slightly and still there was no rain. He gauged his course by the bright spot on the clouds, the uncertain compass and the ripple of steady wind across the transparent cover above him. The wind drove spray runnels in parallel lines, giving him a good reading on relative direction.
His thoughts turned back to the dashers. He was convinced that Mermen had killed them from beneath, but how? A Merman sub crew, maybe. If this were an example of a Merman weapon, Islands were virtually defenseless.
Now, why would I think Mermen would attack us?
Mermen and Islanders might be polarized, but war was ancient history, known only through records saved from the Clone Wars. And Mermen were known to go to great trouble to save Islander lives.
But the whole planet was a hiding place if you lived down under. And Mermen did want Vata, that was true. Always coming up with petitions demanding that she be moved to “safer and more comfortable quarters down under.”
“Vata is the key to kelp consciousness,” the Mermen said. They said it so often it had become a cliche, but the C/P seemed to agree. Twisp had never believed everything the C/P said, but this was something he kept to himself.
In Twisp’s opinion, it was a power struggle. Vata, living on and on like that with her companion, Duque, beside her, was the nearest thing Pandora had to a living saint. You could start almost any story you wanted about why she lay there without responding.
“She is waiting for the return of Ship,” some said.
But Twisp had a tech friend who was called in occasionally by the C/P to examine and maintain the nutrient tank in which Vata and Duque lived. The tech laughed at this story.
“She’s not doing anything but living,” the tech said. “And I’ll bet she has no idea she’s even doing that!”
“But she does have kelp genes?” Twisp had asked.
“Sure. We’ve run tests when the religious mumbo-jumbos and the Mermen observers have their backs turned. A few cells is all it takes, you know. The C/P would be livid. Vata has kelp genes, I’ll swear to that.”
“So the Mermen could be right about her?”
“Who the fuck knows?” The tech grinned. “Lots of us have ’em. Everybody’s different, though. Maybe she did get the right batch. Or, for all we really know, Jesus Lewis was Satan, like the C/P says. And Pandora’s Satan’s pet project.”
The tech’s revelations did little to change Twisp’s basic opinions.
It’s all politics. And politics is all property.
Lately everything came down to license fees, forms and supporting the right political group. If you had someone on the inside helping you, things went well—your property didn’t cost you so much. Otherwise, forget it. Resentments, jealousy, envy … these were the things really running Pandora. And fear. He’d seen plenty of fear in the faces of Mermen confronted by the more severely changed Islanders. People even Twisp sometimes thought of as Mutes. Fear bordering on horror, disgust, loathing. It was all emotions and he knew politics was at the bottom of it, too—“Dear Ship,” the horrified Mermen were saying with their unmasked faces, “don’t let me or anybody I love own a body like that!”
The beeper interrupted Twisp’s black thoughts. Sonar said his depth here was a little under one hundred meters. He glanced around at the open sea. The silvery current-channel had been joined by tributaries on both sides. He could feel the current churn beneath his coracle. Bits of flotsam shared the water around him now—kelp tendrils mostly, some short lengths of floating bone. Those would have to be from squawks. Wouldn’t float otherwise.
A hundred meters, he thought. Pretty shallow. Vashon drew just about that much at Center. Mermen preferred building where it remained shallow most of the time, he recalled. Was this a Merman area? He looked around for signs: dive floats, the surface boiling with a sub’s backwash or a foil coming up from the depths. There was only the sea and the folding current that swept him along in its steady grip. Lots of kelp shreds in this current. Could be an area where Mermen were replanting the stuff. Twisp had found himself taking the Merman side on that project in many a bar argument. More kelp meant more cover and feed for fish. Nursery areas. More fish meant more food for the Islands and for Mermen. In more predictable locations.
His depth finder said the bottom was holding steady at ninety meters. Mermen had reason to prefer shallows. Better for the kelp. Easier to trade topside, as long as Islands had plenty of clearance. And there were all those stories that the Mermen were trying to reclaim land on the surface. There might be a Merman outpost or trading station nearby and they could give him word on whether they had rescued the kid. Besides, the little he knew about Mermen made him that much more fascinated by them, and the prospect of contact excited him for its own sake.
Twisp began to build a fantasy—a dream-truth that Mermen had saved Brett. He scooped a handful of the kelp and found himself daydreaming that Brett had been rescued by a beautiful young Merman girl and was falling in love somewhere down under.
Damn! I’ve got to stop that, he thought. The dream collapsed. Bits of it kept coming back to him, though, and he had to repress them sharply.
Hope was one thing, he thought. Fantasy was quite another thing … and dangerous.
Chapter 15
This may be the better age for the Faith, but this is certainly
not an age of Faith.
—Flannery O’Connor, from her letters, Shiprecords
Those who watched Vata that day said her hair was alive, that it clutched her head and shoulders. As Vata’s agitation grew her shudders became a steadily progressing convulsion. Her thick spread of hair snaked itself around her and curled her gently into a fetal ball.
The convulsions tapered off and ceased in two minutes, twelve seconds. Four minutes and twenty-four seconds after that, the tendrils of her hair became hair again. A thick spread of it fanned out behind her. She stayed in that position, tight and rigid, through three full shifts of watchers.
The C/P was not the first to equate the agitation in the tank with th
e sinking of Guemes, nor was she the last. She was, however, the only one who wasn’t surprised.
Not now! she thought, as though she could ever have found a convenient time for thousands of people to die. That was why she needed Gallow. This was something she could live with if it were done, but it was not something that she could do. None of that diminished the horrors she was forced to imagine as Vata lay writhing in her tank.
And scooped up like that by her hair! This thought raised every thin stalk on the back of the C/P’s shoulders and neck.
At Vata’s first abrupt stirrings, Duque had stiffened, flinched, then slipped quickly and deeply into shock. His only coherent utterance was a high-pitched, quickly blurted, “Ma!”
Those med-techs among the watchers, Islander and Merman alike, vaulted the rim of the pool.
“What’s wrong with him?” a young clerk asked. She was chinless and hook-nosed, but not at all unpretty. The C/P noticed her wide green eyes and the white eyelashes that flickered as she spoke.
Rocksack pointed at the telltales above the monitor center across the pool. “Fast, high heartbeat, agitation, shallow breathing, steadily dropping blood pressure—shock. Nothing touched him and they’ve ruled out stroke or internal bleeding.” The C/P cleared her throat. “Psychogenic shock,” she said. “Something scared him almost to death.”
Chapter 16
Forceful rejection of the past is the coward’s way of removing
inconvenient knowledge.
—the Histories
The weather around Twisp had shifted from scattered showers to a warm wind with clear skies directly overhead. Little Sun was wending its way toward the horizon. Twisp checked the rain water he had recovered—almost four liters. He removed the cockpit cover, rolled it forward and lashed it in place where it could be snatched back quickly if the weather changed once more.
He thought only briefly of the daydream he had entertained about Brett and a beautiful Merman woman. What nonsense! Mermen wanted normal children. Brett would only find disappointment down under. One look at his big eyes and parents would steer their daughters away from him. Islander births might be stabilizing, more births in the pattern of Gerard’s girls, more near-normals like Brett every season, but that changed nothing in basic attitudes. Mermen were Mermen and Islanders were Islanders. Islanders were catching up, though: fewer lethal deviants and longer life spans.
