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“Could we escape from here?” he asked, nodding toward the locked hatch.
“I can get us through the hatch,” she said. “Where would you go?”
“Topside.”
She looked at the hatch, her head shaking a slow “no” from side to side.
“When we open the hatch, they will know. An electronic signal.”
“What would those men do if we left here together?”
“Bring us back,” she said. “Or try. The odds favor them. Nothing moves down under without someone knowing. My father had an efficient organization. That’s why he hired men like those.” She nodded at the hatch. “My father directed a very large business—a food business. He had much trade with Islanders …”
Her eyes shifted away from his, then back. She indicated the walls and ceiling. “This was his building, the whole thing. As high as the docking tower, all of it.” She defined an area on the schematics with a finger. “This.”
Brett drew slightly away from her. She had defined an area as large as some of the smaller Islands. Her father had owned it. He knew that by Merman law she probably inherited it. She was no simple worker in the seas, an apprentice physicist who mathematicked the waves.
Scudi saw the look of withdrawal in his eyes and touched his arm. “I live my own life,” she said, “as my mother did. My father and I hardly knew each other.”
“Didn’t know each other?” Brett felt shocked. He knew himself to be estranged from his own parents, but he had certainly known them.
“Until shortly before he died, he lived at the Nest—a city about ten kilometers away,” Scudi said. “In all that time I never saw him.” She took a deep breath. “Before he died, my father came to our room one night and spoke to my mother. I don’t know what they said but she was furious after he left.”
Brett thought about what she had said. Her father had owned and controlled enormous wealth—much of Merman society. Topside, such matters as Ryan Wang controlled were the property of families or associations, never of one person. Community was law.
“He controlled much of your Islands’ food production,” she continued. A flush bloomed across her cheeks. “A lot of it he accomplished through bribery. I know because I listened, and sometimes when he was gone I used his comconsole.”
“What is this place, the Nest?” Brett asked.
“It is a city that has a high Islander population. It was the site of the first settlement after the Clone Wars. You know of this?”
“Yes,” he said. “One way or another, we all came from there.”
Ward Keel, standing in the shadows of the open passage from Ryan Wang’s den, had been listening to this exchange for several minutes. He shuddered, wondering whether he should interrupt and demand some answers of this young woman. The anguish in her voice held Keel in place.
“Did those Islanders in the Nest work for your father?” Keel asked.
She didn’t turn away from Brett to answer. “Some of them. But no Islander has any high position on anything. They are controlled by a government agency. I think Ambassador Ale is in charge of it.”
“It seems to me that an Islander should head an agency that deals with Islanders,” Brett said.
“She and my father were to be married,” Scudi said. “A political matter between the two families … a lot of Merman history that isn’t important now.”
“Your father and the ambassador—that would have linked the powers of the government and the food supply under one blanket,” Brett said. The insight came so quickly that it startled him.
“That’s all ancient history,” Scudi said. “She’ll probably marry GeLaar Gallow now.” Her words came out with an underlying misery that held Brett speechless. He could see the dark confusion in her eyes, the frustration of being a piece in some unruled game.
In the shadows of the passage, Ward Keel nodded to himself. He had shuffled back from Wang’s den with a feeling of helpless anger. It was all there for the discerning eye—the shifts of control, the quiet and remorseless accumulation of power in a few hands, an increase in local identity. A term from the Histories kept rattling in his memory: Nationalization. Why did it give him such a feeling of loss?
The land is being restored.
The good life is coming.
This is why Ship gave Pandora to us.
To us—to Mermen—not to Islanders.
Keel’s throat pained him when he tried to swallow. The kelp project lay at the base of it all, and that had gone too far to be lost or slowed. It was being taken over, instead. Justifications for the project could not be denied. The late Ryan Wang’s comconsole was full of those justifications: Without the kelp the suns would continue to fatigue the crust of Pandora, constant earthquakes and volcanics would ravage them as they had all those generations back.
Lava built up undersea plateaus along fault lines. Mermen were taking advantage of this for their project. The last wave-wall had been a consequence of a volcanic upheaval, not the gravitational swings that inflicted themselves on Pandora’s seas.
Brett was speaking: “I would like to see the Nest and the Islanders there. Maybe that’s where we should go.”
Out of the mouths of babes, Keel thought.
Scudi shook her head in negation. “They would find us there easily. Security there is not like here—there are badges, papers …”
“Then we should run topside,” Brett said. “The Justice is right. He wants us to tell the Islanders what’s happening down here.”
“And what is happening?” she asked.
Keel stepped out of the shadows, speaking as he moved: “Pandora is being changed—physically, politically, socially. That’s what’s happening. The old life will not be possible, topside or down under. I think Scudi’s father had a dream of great things, the transformation of Pandora, but someone else has taken it over and is making it a nightmare.”
Keel stopped, facing the two young people. They stared back at him, aghast.
Can they feel it? Keel wondered.
Runaway greed was working to seize control of this new Pandora.
Scudi jabbed a finger at the schematic, which Brett still held. “The Launch Base and Outpost Twenty-two,” she said. “Here! They are near Vashon’s current drift. The Island will be at least a full day past this point by now but …”
“What’re you suggesting?” Keel asked.
“I think I can get us to Outpost Twenty-two,” she said. “I’ve worked there. From the outpost, I could compute Vashon’s exact position.”
Keel looked at the chart in Brett’s hands. A surge of homesickness surged through the Justice. To be in his own quarters … Joy near at hand to care for him. He was going to die soon … how much better to die in familiar surroundings. As quickly as it came, the feeling was suppressed. Escape? He did not have the energy, the swiftness. He could only hold these young people back. But he saw the eagerness in Scudi and the way Brett picked up on it. They might just do it. The Islands had to be told what was happening.
“Here is what we will do,” Keel said. “And this is the message you will carry.”
Chapter 22
Perseverance furthers.
—I Ching, Shiprecords
A flock of wild squawks came flying past the coracles, their wings whistling in the dull gray light of morning. Twisp turned his head to follow the birds’ path. They landed about fifty meters ahead of him.
Bushka had sat up at the sudden sound, fear obvious in his face.
“Just squawks,” Twisp said.
“Oh.” Bushka subsided with his back against the cuddy.
“If we feed ’em, they’ll follow us,” Twisp said. “I’ve never seen ’em this far from an Island.”
“We’re near the base,” Bushka said.
As they approached the swimming flock, Twisp tipped some of his garbage over the side. The birds came scrambling for the handout. The smaller ones churned their legs so fast they skipped across the water.
It was the bird
s’ eyes that interested him, he decided. There was living presence in those eyes you never saw in the eyes of sea creatures. Squawk eyes looked back at you with something of the human world in them.
