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Brett felt guilty about his sudden embarrassment.
You shouldn’t be embarrassed by your friends.
The first long shaft of dawn washed across the coracle, a lazy pink.
Brett sat up.
Twisp, his voice low and muffled at the stern, said, “Take the watch, kid. I’ll need a few winks.”
“Right.”
Brett whispered to keep from waking Scudi. She lay curled up close, her back and hips fitting into the socket of his body as if they were built together. One hand lay flung backward around Brett’s waist. He gently disengaged her light grip.
Looking up at the clear sky, Brett thought, It’s going to be a hot one. He slid out from beneath the tarp and felt the damp bow spray wet his hair and face.
Brett brushed a thick lock of hair from his eyes and crept aft to take the tiller.
“Gonna be a hot one,” Twisp said. Brett smiled at the coincidence. They thought alike now, no question about it. He scanned the horizon. The boats still glided down a narrow avenue of current between the hedging kelp.
“Aren’t we going kinda slow?” Brett asked.
“Eelcells are getting low,” Twisp said. He gestured with a foot at the telltale pink of discharge on the cellpack set into the deck. “Gonna have to stop and charge them or raise sail.”
Brett wet a finger in his mouth and raised it to the air. There was only the coolness of their own passage—flat calm everywhere he looked, and gently undulating kelp fronds as far as the eye could see.
“We should be raising Vashon pretty soon,” Twisp said. “I caught the Seabird program while you were asleep. Everything’s going well, so they say.”
“I thought you wanted some shut-eye,” Brett said.
“Changed my mind. I wanta see Vashon first. ‘Sides, I miss all the times we’d just sit up and shoot the shit. I’ve just been dozing and thinking here since I relieved you at midnight.”
“And listening to the radio,” Brett said. He indicated the half-earphone jacked into the receiver.
“Real interesting, what they had to say,” Twisp said. He kept his voice low, his attention on the mound that was the sleeping figure of Bushka.
“Things are going well,” Brett prompted.
“Seabird says Vashon is in sight of land that is well out of the water. He describes black cliffs. High cliffs and waves foaming white at the base. People could live there, he says.”
Brett tried to visualize this.
Cliff was a word Brett had heard rarely. “How could we get people and supplies up the cliff?” Brett asked. “And what happens if the sea rises again?”
“Way I see it, you’d have to be part bird to live there,” Twisp agreed. “If you needed the sea. And fresh water might be scarce.”
“LTA’s might help.”
“Maybe catch basins for the rain,” Twisp mused. “But the big problem they’re worried about is nerve runners.”
In the bow, Bushka lifted himself out of his tarp and stared aft at Brett and Twisp.
Brett ignored the man. Nerve runners! He knew them only from the scant early holos and the histories from before the dark times of the rising sea and the death of the kelp.
“Once there’s open land, there’ll be nerve runners,” Twisp said. “That’s what the experts are saying.”
“You pay for everything,” Bushka said. He patted the back of his open hand against his mouth, yawning widely.
Something had changed in Bushka, Brett realized. When he accepted that his story about Guemes was believed, Bushka had become a tragicomic figure instead of a villain.
Did he change or is it just that we’re seeing him different? Brett wondered.
Scudi lifted herself from beneath her tarp and said, “Did I hear somebody say something about nerve runners?”
Brett explained.
“But Vashon can see land?” Scudi asked. “Real land?”
Twisp nodded. “So they say.” He reached down and tugged at a pair of lines trailing over the side of the coracle.
Immediately, their squawks set up a flapping commotion beside the boat, spattering cold water all around. Bushka caught most of the splashing.
“Ship’s teeth!” he gasped. “That’s cold!”
Twisp chuckled. “Wakes you up good,” he said. “Just imagine what—” He broke off and bent his head in a listening attitude.
The others heard it, too. All turned toward the horizon on their port where the distant pulse of a hydrogen ram could be heard. They saw it then—a white line far off across the kelp.
“Foil,” Bushka said. “They’re turning toward us.”
“Their instruments have locked onto us,” Twisp said.
“They’re not going to Vashon … they’re coming to us!” Bushka said.
“He may be right,” Brett said.
Twisp jerked his chin down and up. “Brett, you and Scudi take your dive suits and those kits. You hit the water. Hide in the kelp. Bushka, there’s an old green duffle bag under the deck forward. Haul it out.”
Brett, struggling into his suit, remembered what was in that bag. “What’re you going to do with your spare net?” he asked.
“We’ll lay it here.”
“I don’t have a dive suit,” Bushka moaned.
“You’ll hide under the tarp there in the cuddy,” Twisp said. “Over the side, you two. Hurry it up, Scudi! String that net along the kelp.”
Presently, after hurried preparations, Bushka burrowed his way beneath the tarp and crawled under the forward deck. Brett and Scudi rolled backward over the side of the boat, pulling the net with them. The sound of the approaching foil was growing louder.
Twisp stared toward the sound. The foil was still eight or ten kilometers to port but closing faster than he had thought possible. He hauled in his squawks and caged them, then found two handlines. He baited them with dried muree and slung them over the side.
The raft!
It bobbed against the side of the supply coracle like a beacon. Twisp shot out a long arm, grabbed the line and pulled it to him. He slit it open, rolled the air out of it as fast as he could and stowed it under his seat. Brett and Scudi, he saw, were getting something out of the supply coracle. Harpoon? Damn! They had better hurry.
He glanced around his coracle then. Bushka lay concealed under the bow cuddy. The net trailed aft. Scudi and Brett had gone under water into the kelp. Why did Brett want a harpoon? Twisp wondered. They were safely under the kelp, though, taking their surface air from beneath huge leaves.
Twisp cut his motor and slipped the lasgun out of its hiding place behind him. He put it under a towel beside him on the seat and kept his hand on it.
“Bushka,” he called. “Stay as quiet as a dead fish. If it’s them … well, we don’t know. I’ll give you the all-clear if it’s not.” He wiped the back of his free hand across his mouth. “Here they are.”
He raised a hand in greeting as the foil circled in over the kelp, scattering torn green fronds in its wake. It avoided the net and the side of the channel where Brett and Scudi had taken to the water.
No response came to his greeting, just intense stares from two dark figures in the high cockpit. Twisp saw streaks of green on the figures up there. He breathed deeply to slow his heartbeat and steady the trembling in his legs.
Be ready, he warned himself, but don’t be jumpy.
The foil swung wide astern and sank into the channel through the kelp. The jet subsided to a faint hiss. A heavy wave rolled out from the foil’s bow and rocked the coracles. The squawks set up a loud complaint.
Once more, Twisp raised a hand in greeting and waved the approaching foil to the left, indicating the long line of his net with its bobbing floats. When no more than twenty meters separated the craft, Twisp shouted, “Good weather and a good catch!”
He tightened his grip on the lasgun. The choppy cross-waves set up by the foil broke over the coracle’s thwarts and soaked him.
Still no response from the foil, which now loo
med high over him and no more than ten meters away. Its side hatch slid open and a Merman appeared there in a camouflaged dive suit—green blobs and stripes. The foil slid alongside and came to a stop.
The Merman standing above Twisp said, “I thought Mutes never fished alone.”
“You thought wrong.”
“I thought no Mute fished out of sight of his Island.”
“This one does.”
The Merman’s quick eyes flitted over both coracles, followed the line of floats astern, then fixed on Twisp.
“Your net’s strung along a kelp bed,” he said. “You could lose it that way.”
