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Bushka snorted, rolled over and resumed his snoring. The dasher continued to purr, but the sound began to fade, moving farther to the right and behind the drifting coracles.
Asleep, Twisp hoped. Trust my squawks. The birds had not stirred again.
The dasher’s contentment faded away in the distance. Twisp listened for movement there, straining to hear over the sound of Bushka’s fatigue. Slowly, Twisp forced himself to relax, realizing that he had been holding his breath. He exhaled, then inhaled a deep breath of the sweet night air. A dry swallow rasped the back of his throat.
Although he could not hear the dasher, tension still rode him. Abruptly, the squawks came full awake and began living up to their name. Twisp flipped the stunshield switch. There came the unmistakable splash of something stiffening in the water close behind, then the frenzied whines and chuckles of dashers feeding.
Filthy cannibals, he thought.
“Whuzzat?” Bushka demanded.
The coracle shifted as Bushka sat up.
“Dashers,” Twisp said. He aimed the lasgun toward the feeding sounds and fired six quick bursts. The buzzing vibration of the weapon was hard against his sweaty hand. The thin purple beams lanced into the night. At the second shot, the dashers erupted in a frantic cacophony of yelps and screeches. The sounds receded rapidly. Dashers had learned to turn tail at the buzzing, purple shaft of a lasgun.
Twisp turned off the stunshield and reached for his handlight as another sound far off to his left caught his attention: the hiss-hiss-hiss of paddles cutting through wet kelp. He aimed the handlight toward the sound but the night sucked it dry without sending anything back but the sea’s pulse in dark strands of kelp.
A voice called from the distance: “Coracle! Do you have a load?”
Twisp felt his heart triple-time against his rib cage. That was Brett’s voice!
“Riding too high!” he shouted, waving the handlight as a locator. “Careful, there’s dashers about!”
“We saw your lasgun.”
Twisp could make them out then, an amoebalike blot undulating toward him on the low seas. Two paddles flashed bits of his light back at him.
Bushka leaned against the thwart, tipping it precariously near the water. “Trim the boat!” Twisp called. “You, Bushka!”
Bushka jerked back but kept his attention on the approaching shape. The paddles struck the water with splashes that burst like blossoms against the black hull of an inflatable raft.
“It’s them,” Bushka said. “They’ve blown it, just like I warned you.”
“Shut up,” Twisp growled. “At least they’re alive.” He took a deep breath of thanksgiving. The kid had become family and the family was whole again.
“Mother, I’m home!” the kid called, as though reading his thoughts.
So, Brett was sufficiently lighthearted that he could joke. Things could not be too bad, then. Twisp listened for dashers.
Bushka laughed at the quip, a laugh with a dry, cracked edge that set Twisp’s anger near the boiling point. The raft was in easy talking distance now. Twisp kept the handlight pointed toward the approaching figures and away from his own face, where tears of fatigue and relief wet his cheeks. At a low word from Brett, both he and Scudi stopped paddling. Brett threw a line to the coracle. Twisp caught it and hauled in the raft like a net of muree, snugging it against the coracle. One long arm snaked out and grabbed Brett. The kid’s dive suit was soaked and inflated.
The squawks took that moment to set up a warning commotion, but it subsided immediately. Dashers patrolled just out of sight, wary of the lasgun. A sizable hunt of them, Twisp thought. Hunger drove them in and fear kept them away.
Scudi said, “Should we come aboard?”
“Yes,” Twisp said, and heaved Brett aboard, then helped Scudi gently over the gunwale and onto the seat-slat in front of him. He secured the line to keep the raft tight against the boat, then stowed the handlight under his seat. Twisp put a hand on Brett’s arm, keeping it there, unwilling to break off the reassuring touch.
“They wouldn’t listen to you, would they?” Bushka demanded. “You had to run for it again. What happened to your foil?”
“Do we run for Vashon?” Twisp asked.
Brett held both hands up to slow them down. “I think we’d better discuss it,” he said. He recounted the story of Gallow and Nakano as briefly as he could. It was a bare-bones account, which Twisp heard with a growing admiration for Brett.
A good head there, he thought.
When Brett had finished, Bushka said, “Let’s get away from here! Those are devils, not men. They probably followed you and when they come—”
“Oh, shut up!” Twisp snapped. “If you don’t, I’ll shut you up.” He turned to Brett and asked, in a calmer voice, “What do you think? They have two foils now and could hunt us down with—”
“They’re not going to hunt for us, not yet,” Brett said. “They have other fish to fry.”
“You’re a fool!” Bushka blurted.
“Hear him out,” Scudi said. Her voice was as flat and solid as plasteel.
“They said they were waiting to capture a doctor,” Brett continued, “probably true, from the way they acted. It looked like they tried something and failed. They were shook up and trying to hide it from us. A lot of bragging.”
“That’s Gallow,” Bushka muttered.
“So what were they doing besides waiting to get a doctor?” Twisp asked.
“They were near the Launch Base,” Brett said. “With Gallow, I suspect nothing is coincidence. My guess is they want those hyb tanks.”
“Of course they do,” Bushka said. “I told you that.”
“He wants them real bad,” Brett said. He nodded to himself. The hyb tanks circling up there in space were the single most speculative subject on Pandora. Guessing the manifests of the hyb tanks ranked right up there with the weather as a conversational staple.
“But what about this threat that he’ll prevent the Mermen from reclaiming more open land?” Twisp asked. “Could he do that with one sub and a couple of foils?”
“I think Vashon’s in danger,” Brett said. “Guemes was much smaller, but still … sinking Islands is just too simple a diversion for somebody like Gallow to resist. About the time those tanks come down, he’ll try to sink Vashon. I’m sure of it.”
“Did he say anything specific?” Twisp asked. “Could he have found a real hyb tank manifest?”
Brett shook his head. “I don’t know. Something that big … he’d have to brag about it. Bushka, he ever say anything to you about what’s up there?”
“Gallow has … dreams of grandeur,” Bushka said. “Anything that’ll feed those dreams is real to him. He never claimed to know what was in the tanks; he just knew the political value of having them.”
“Brett’s right about Gallow,” Scudi said.
Twisp could make out the dark flash of her eyes in the growing light. “Gallow’s like a lot of Mermen—they believe the hyb tanks will save the world, destroy the world, make you rich or curse you forever.”
“Same with Islanders,” Brett said. “Speculation, but no facts,” Twisp said.
Scudi looked from Brett to Twisp and back to Brett. How like Twisp Brett sounded! Laconic, practical—all based on rocklike integrity. She studied Brett more carefully then, seeing the stringy strength in his young body. She sensed the power of the adult he would become. Brett was already a man. Young, but solid inside. It came over her like a quick-dive narcosis that she wanted him for a lifetime.
Twisp turned to the controls, started up the motor and set a course for Vashon. The coracle surged across the kelp into open water.
Scudi glanced around the brightening day. She scratched under the neck seal of her dive suit, and, with an impatient gesture, shucked out of the suit and spread it across the thwarts to dry. She did this after one smiling glance at Brett, who smiled back.
Twisp glanced once at her, noting the vestigial webs between her toes, but otherwise
an ideal, Merman-normal body. He hadn’t seen that many up close. He forced himself to look away, but noticed that Bushka, too, could not help staring at Scudi. She worked close beside Bushka, turning the dive suit and fluffing it as the wind blew it dry. Twisp watched Bushka’s eyes flick up from the water, over Twisp at the stern, up and down Scudi’s body, back to the water.
Twisp had long believed that Mermen didn’t have the same drives as Islanders, and he related it to the free display of their perfect bodies. Scudi’s display bore that out in his mind. Mermen lived so much of their lives either without clothes or in skin-clinging dive suits that they would have to develop different feelings about the body than the bulky-clothed Islanders.
Not much difference between nudity and a dive suit, Twisp thought. He could see that Bushka was bothered by Scudi’s proximity and her nudity. Brett was doing what any normal Islander might—giving Scudi the privacy of not looking at her. Scudi, however, was not able to keep her eyes off Brett.
Something going on there, Twisp decided. Something strong. He reminded himself that Mermen sometimes married Islanders, and sometimes it worked out.
Bushka shifted his attention from Scudi to Brett and the look on Bushka’s face was like a shouted statement to Twisp. It was the kid’s eyes.
Not as normal as I am! That was the look on Bushka’s face.
Twisp remembered seeing a long-armed Islander once holding hands with a long-armed woman—the first time he’d seen two of them in one place. It had taken
Twisp a long time to dig out his personal rejection of that scene and with his digging had come a valuable insight.
Like me. That’s how we define human.
He had traced that thought down its dark trail and come up with his own reason for judging that couple.
Jealousy.
He had only chosen women who were different from himself. Chances of passing along a specific trait to children got too high when similar mutants paired. Sometimes it was a genetic time-bomb that didn’t show for one or two generations.
Most of us aren’t willing to pass along anything except hope.
Something similar was going on in Bushka.
