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As I would like to be gobbled up. But there’s not much hope of that!
Bushka suppressed feelings of jealousy. He could see his reflection in the plaz. The Committee on Vital Forms had faced no trouble in accepting him as human. He obviously fell somewhere near the Merman-tip of the spectrum. Still, his heavyset body, his small stature, the large head with its stringy dark brown hair, thick brows, wide nose, wide mouth, square chin—none of this came near the standard Gallow represented.
Comparisons hurt. Bushka wondered what the tall, disdainful Merman was thinking. Why that quizzical expression aimed at me?
Gallow returned his attention to Ale, touching her bare shoulder, laughing at something she said.
A new flurry of activity could be seen at the LTA launch base, more lights within the tube that would guide the sonde on the start of its journey toward the surface.
The launch director at the control console said: “It’ll be a few minutes yet.”
Bushka sighed. This experience was not turning out the way he had expected … the way he had dreamed.
He sneered at himself. Fantasy!
When he had been notified that he would be the Islander observer at this launch into the realm of Ship, elation had filled him. His first trip into the core of Merman civilization! At last! And the fantasy: Perhaps … just possibly, I will find the way to join Merman society, to abandon poverty and the grubby existence topside.
Learning that Gallow would be his escort had fanned his hopes. GeLaar Gallow, director of the Merman Screen, one who could vote to accept an Islander into their society. But Gallow appeared to be avoiding him now. And there had never been any doubt of the man’s disdain.
Only Ale had been warmly welcoming, but then she was a member of the Merman government, a diplomat and envoy to the Islanders. Bushka had been surprised to discover that she also was a medical doctor. Rumor had it that she had gone through the rigors of medical education as a gesture of rebellion against her family, with its long tradition of service in the diplomatic corps and elsewhere in the Merman government. The family obviously had won out. Ale was securely seated among the powerful—held, perhaps, greater power than any other member of her family. Both the Merman and Island worlds buzzed with the recent revelation that Ale was a major inheritor in the estates of the late Ryan and Elina Wang. And Ale had been named guardian of the Wangs’ only daughter, Scudi. Nobody had yet put a number on the size of the Wang estate, but the senior director of Merman Mercantile had probably been the wealthiest man on Pandora. Elina Wang, surviving her husband by less than a year, had not lived long enough to make serious changes in the Wang holdings. So there was Kareen Ale, beautiful and powerful and with the right words for any occasion.
“Delighted to have you with us, Islander Bushka.” How warm and inviting she had sounded.
She was just being polite … diplomatic.
Another burst of activity rippled through the workers at the console in Sonde Control. The screen showing the surface emitted a series of brilliant flickers and the view was replaced by the face of Simone Rocksack, the Chaplain/Psychiatrist. The background revealed that she spoke from her quarters at the center of Vashon far away on the surface.
“I greet you in the name of Ship.”
A barely suppressed snort came from Gallow.
Bushka noted a shudder pass through the man’s classic body at sight of the C/P. Bushka, accustomed to Islander variations, had never made note of Rocksack’s appearance. Now, however, he saw her through Gallow’s eyes. Rocksack’s silvery hair flared in a wild mane from the top of her almost perfectly round head. Her albino eyes projected at the tips of small protuberances on her brows. Her mouth, barely visible under a flap of gray skin, was a small red slit abandoned without a chin. A sharp angle of flesh went directly back from beneath her mouth to her thick neck.
“Let us pray,” the C/P said. “This prayer I offered just a few minutes ago in the presence of Vata. I repeat it now.” She cleared her throat. “Ship, by whose omnipotence we were cast upon Pandora’s endless waters, grant us forgiveness from Original Sin. Grant us …”
Bushka tuned her out. He had heard this prayer, in one version or another, many times. Doubtless his companions had heard it, too. The Mermen observers fidgeted at their stations and looked bored.
Original Sin!
Bushka’s historical studies had made him a questioner of tradition. Mermen, he had discovered, thought Original Sin referred to the killing of Pandora’s sentient kelp. It was their penance that they must rediscover the kelp in their own genes and fill the sea once more with submerged jungles of gigantic stems and fronds. Not sentient, this time, however. Merely kelp … and controlled by Mermen.
The fanatical WorShipers of Guemes Island, on the other hand, insisted that Original Sin came when humankind abandoned WorShip. Most Islanders, though, followed the C/P’s lead: Original Sin was that line of bioengineering chosen by Jesus Lewis, the long-dead mastermind behind today’s variations in the human norm. Lewis had created the Clones and “selected others re-formed to fit them for survival on Pandora.”
Bushka shook his head as the C/P’s voice droned on. Who is surviving best on Pandora? he asked himself. Mermen. Normal humans.
At least ten times as many Mermen as Islanders survived on Pandora. It was a simple function of available living space. Under the sea, cushioned from Pandora’s vagaries, there was a far greater volume of living space than on Pandora’s turbulent, dangerous surface.
“Into Ship’s realm I commend you,” the C/P said. “Let the blessing of Ship accompany this venture. Let Ship know that we mean no blasphemy by intruding ourselves into the heavens. Let this be a gesture that brings us closer to Ship.”
The C/P’s face vanished from the screen, replaced by a close-up of the launch tube’s base. Telltales on the tube tipped left to a slow current.
At the console to Bushka’s left, the launch director said: “Condition green.”
From the prelaunch briefing, Bushka knew this meant they were ready to release the sonde. He glanced at another of the screens, a view transmitted down a communications cable from a gyro-stabilized platform on the surface. White froth whipped the tops of long swells up there. Bushka’s practiced eye said it was a forty-klick wind, practically a calm on Pandora. The sonde would drift fast when it broached but it would climb fast, too, and the upper atmosphere, for a change, showed breaks in the clouds, with one of Pandora’s two suns tipping the cloud edges a glowing silver.
The launch director leaned forward to study an instrument.
“Forty seconds,” he said.
Bushka moved forward, giving himself a better view of the instruments and the launch director. The man had been introduced as Dark Panille—”’Shadow’ to my friends.” No overt rejection there; just a touch of the specialist’s resentment that observers could be brought into his working space without his permission. Bushka’s Mute-sensitive senses had detected immediately that Panille carried kelp genes, but was fortunate by Pandoran standards because he was not hairless. Panille wore his long black hair in a single braid—“a family style,” he had said in answer to Bushka’s question.
Panille displayed a countenance distinctly Merman-normal. The kelp telltale lay chiefly in his dark skin with its unmistakable undertone of green. He had a narrow, rather sharp-featured face with high planes on both his cheeks and his nose. Panille’s large brown eyes looked out with a deep sense of intelligence beneath straight brows. The mouth was set in a straight line to match the brows and his lower lip was fuller than the upper. A deep crease rolled from beneath his lips to the cleft of a narrow, well-defined chin. Panille’s body was compact, with the smooth muscles common to Mermen who lived much in the sea.
The name Panille had aroused a historian’s interest in Bushka. Panille’s ancestry had been instrumental in human survival during the Clone Wars and after the departure of Ship. It was a famous name in the Histories.
“Launch!” Panille said.
r /> Bushka glanced out the plaz beside him. The launch tube climbed beyond his vision through green water with a backdrop of sparsely planted kelp—thick red-brown trunks with glistening highlights at odd intervals. The highlights wavered and blinked as though in agitation. Bushka turned his attention to the screens, expecting something spectacular. The display on which the others focused showed only the slow upward drift of the LTA within the tube. Brilliant lights in the tube wall marked the ascent. The wrinkled bag of the LTA expanded as it lifted, smoothing finally in an orange expanse of the fabric that contained the hydrogen.
“There!” Ale spoke in a sighing voice as the sonde cleared the top of the tube. It drifted slantwise in a sea current, followed by a camera mounted on a Merman sub.
“Test key monitors,” Panille said.
A large screen at the center of the console shifted from a tracking view to a transmission from the sonde package trailing beneath the hydrogen bag. The screen showed a slanted green-tinged view of the sea bottom—thin plantations of kelp, a rocky outcrop. They dimmed away into murkiness as Bushka watched. A screen at the upper right of the console shifted to the surface platform’s camera, a gyro-stabilized float. The camera swept to the left in a dizzying arc, then settled on an expanse of wind-frothed swells.
A pain in his chest told Bushka that he was holding his breath, waiting for the LTA to break the surface. He exhaled and took a deep breath. There! A bubble lifted on the ocean surface and did not break. Wind flattened the near side of the bag. It lifted free of the water, receding fast as the sonde package cleared. The surface camera tracked it—showing an orange blossom floating in a blue bowl of sky. The view zoomed in to the dangling package, from which water still dripped in wind-driven spray.
Bushka looked to the center screen, the transmission from the sonde. It showed the sea beneath the LTA, an oddly flattened scene with little sense of the heaving waves from which the LTA had recently emerged.
Is this all? Bushka wondered.
He felt let down. He rubbed his thick neck, feeling the nervous perspiration there. A surreptitious glance at the two Merman observers showed them chatting quietly, with only an occasional glance at the screens and the plaz porthole that revealed Mermen already cleaning up after the launch.
Frustration and jealousy warred for dominance in Bushka. He stared at the console where Panille was giving low-voiced orders to his operators. How rich these Mermen were! Bushka thought of the crude organic computers with which Islanders contended, the stench of the Islands, the crowding and the life-protecting watch that had to be kept on every tiny bit of energy. Islanders paupered themselves for a few radios, satellite navigation receivers and sonar. And just look at this Sonde Control! So casually rich. If Islanders could afford such riches, Bushka knew the possessions would be kept secret. Display of wealth set people apart in a society that depended ultimately on singleness of all efforts. Islanders believed tools were to be used. Ownership was acknowledged, but a tool left idle could be picked up for use by anyone … anytime.
“There’s a willy-nilly,” Gallow said.
Bushka bridled. He knew Mermen called Islands “willy-nillys.” Islands drifted unguided, and this was the Merman way of sneering at such uncontrolled wandering.
“That’s Vashon,” Ale said.
Bushka nodded. There was no mistaking his home Island. The organic floating metropolis had a distinctive shape known to all of its inhabitants—Vashon, largest of all Pandora’s Islands.
“Willy-nilly,” Gallow repeated. “I should imagine they don’t know where they are half the time.”
“You’re not being very polite to our guest, GeLaar,” Ale said.
“The truth is often impolite,” Gallow said. He directed an empty smile at Bushka. “I’ve noticed that Islanders have few goals, that they’re not very concerned about ‘getting there.’”
