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GeLaar Gallow is attempting to take over Merman Mercantile and the recovery of the hyb tanks. Merman rockets are being sent into space for the tanks. Mermen are changing our planet in ways Islands cannot survive. If Gallow succeeds, Islanders are doomed.
How would the C/P react? Keel wondered. He might never know.
Keel held out little hope for himself. His gut had begun to burn again, precisely as it had four years ago. He knew that all traces of the remora were gone. Without it, the food he ate would pass undigested and his intestines would gnaw at themselves until he either bled to death or starved. There was no reason to doubt the word of his personal physician, and the evidence was too painfully immediate to disguise, even to himself.
It used to make me tired all the time, he thought. Why won’t it let me sleep now? Because last time he’d almost bled to death in his sleep, and now sleep was impossible.
It wasn’t the constant burning that kept him awake. Pain he had learned to bear over the years of ill-fitting support devices for his long neck. This was the crisp wakefulness of the condemned.
Wakefulness had brought Keel’s attention to the kelp. Sometime in midmorning the kelp stalks began defying the currents and reaching toward the outpost. The perimeter of growth began about two hundred meters from the outpost walls. The outpost itself lay in the center of this massive kelp project like a jewel in a fat ring. The fish were gone, too. Keel’s few earlier glimpses of the outer compound had shown a richness of fishes that rivaled the gardens at Core—fanlike butterfly fish with iridescent tails, the ever-present scrubberfish grazing leaves and plaz, mud-devils raising and lowering the tall sails of their dorsal fins with every disturbance. None was visible now and the gray filter of evening quickly washed itself black. Just the kelp remained, sole proprietor of the world beyond the outpost’s perimeter. This day Keel felt that he had watched the kelp go from graceful to stately to full alert.
That’s my translation, he reminded himself. Don’t attribute humanity to other creatures. It limits study. A quick shudder iced his spine when he realized that this kelp had been grown from cells carried by mutant humans.
The kelp had an infinite memory. The histories said that, but so did GeLaar Gallow. Conclusion? he asked himself.
It’s waking up, he answered. And it absorbs the memories of the living and the newly dead. Therein lay great temptation for Ward Keel.
I could leave more than scratchings in these journals, he thought. I could leave everything. Everything! Think of that! He entered these thoughts into his journal, and wished that he had his journals and his life’s collection of notes around him now. It was possible, he knew for fact, that no Islander had given more direct thought to life and life forms than Justice Keel. Some of these observations he knew to be unique—sometimes illogical, but vital every one. These data he hated to see lost when a struggling humanity needed them so very much.
Someone else will think those thoughts, in time. If there is more time.
His attention was caught by the arrival of another sub overhead. The sub gave the kelp a wide berth. Gallow’s orders. As the sub disappeared on its way to the interior docking bay, Keel marveled at the movement of the kelp. Huge stalks tracked the sub’s path even though it came in against the current. Like a blossom following the slow arc of sunlight across the sky, the kelp followed all of the incoming Mermen. An occasional blur of gray moved amongst the tendrils as one snapped out suddenly toward an intruder, but all Mermen kept well out of reach.
If the kelp is waking, he thought, the future of all the humans left may be at stake.
Perhaps after contacting enough humans the kelp would find some way of saying, “Like me. If you’re human, you’re like me.” There was a biological kinship, after all. Keel swallowed, and hoped silently that it was true that Vata was the key to the kelp. He hoped, too, that mercy was a part of Vata’s personality.
Keel thought he detected a change in the perimeter. It was hard to tell, with night coming on and visibility so poor anyway, but he was sure that the two-hundred-meter perimeter had closed. Not much, but enough to notice.
Keel cast about in his memory for all the information that he’d ever stored on the kelp. Sentient, capable of nonverbal communication by touch, firmly anchored to ballast-rocks and mobile in its bloom state—except the bloom state had been extinct for hundreds of years. That was the kelp the first humans on Pandora destroyed. What surprises lay in store with this new kelp? This creature had been regrown from gene-prints present in human carriers. Could it be that the kelp has learned how to move? It didn’t feel like a trick of the imagination. The dark outside was now nearly total, only a thin barrier of light escaped from the outpost itself.
Morning will tell, he thought. If there is a morning. He chuckled to himself. With most of his world dark, Keel was left staring at himself in the port, haloed by the glare of the one bare light. He moved away from the plaz after a passing glance at his nose. It spread over his face like a mashed fruit, the tip touched his upper lip whenever he pursed his mouth in thought.
The hatch door behind him slammed into the wall and startled him. His stomach took a bad turn, then turned again when he saw Gallow, alone, carrying two liters of Islander wine.
“Mr. Justice,” Gallow said, “I thought I’d liberate these from the men. I present them to you as a gesture of hospitality.”
Keel noted that the label showed that the wine was from Vashon, not Guemes, and breathed easier. “Thank you, Mr. Gallow,” he said. He allowed his head to drop in a slight bow. “I seldom have the pleasure of a good wine anymore—sour stomach comes with age, they say.” Keel sat heavily and indicated the other chair next to his bunk. “Have a seat. Cups are on the sideboard.”
“Good!” Gallow flashed the wide, white smile that Keel was sure opened many a reluctant hatch.
And many a lady, he thought. He shook it off, suddenly embarrassed by himself. Gallow took two stoneware cups from a shelf and set them on the desk. The handles, Keel noted, were thick to accommodate the calloused fingers of outpost riders.
Gallow poured but did not sit.
“I have ordered supper for us,” Gallow said. “One of my men is a passable cook. The outpost is crowded, so I took the liberty of ordering the meal delivered here. I hope that meets your approval?”
How very polite, Keel thought. What does he want? He took a cup of the amber wine. Both lifted cups, but Keel only sipped.
“Pleasant,” Keel said. His stomach churned with bitter wine and the thought of lumps of hot food. It churned at the prospect of listening to more of Gallow’s egocentric prattle.
“Cheers,” Gallow said, “and to the health of your children.” It was a traditional Islander toast that Keel acknowledged with a raised eyebrow. Several acid replies teased the tip of his tongue, but he bit them back.
“You Islanders have mastered the grape,” Gallow said. “Everything we have down under tastes like formaldehyde.”
“The grape needs weather,” Keel said, “not racks of lamps. That’s why each season has its own distinct flavor—you taste the story of the grape. Formaldehyde is an accurate summation of conditions down under, from the grape’s point of view.”
Gallow’s expression darkened for a blink, the barest hint of a frown. Again, the wide, winning grin. “But your people are anxious to leave all this behind. They prepare to move down under en masse. It seems they have developed a taste for formaldehyde.”
So it would be that kind of a meeting. Keel had heard these conversations before—the justifications of men and women in power for their abuse of that power. He imagined that many a condemned man had to listen to the guilty prattle of his jailer.
“Right is self-evident,” Keel said. “It needs no defense, just good witness. What is it that you come here for?”
“I come here for conversation, Mr. Justice,” Gallow said. He brushed a stray shock of blonde hair back from his forehead. “Conversation, dialogue, whatever you might call it—it’s not r
eadily available among my men.”
“You must have leaders, officers of some sort. Why not them?”
“You find this curious? Perhaps a bit frightening that the one privacy of your imprisonment is breached here? At your ease, Mr. Justice, conversation is all I’m after. My men grunt, my officers plan, my enemies plot. My prisoner thinks, or he wouldn’t keep a journal, and I admire anyone who thinks. The rational mind is a rare creature, one to be respected and nurtured.”
Now Keel was positive that Gallow wanted something—something particular.
Watch yourself, Keel cautioned, he’s a charmer. The sip of wine found the hot spot deep in Keel’s belly and started its slow burn into his intestines. He was tempted to end this conversation. How much respect did you have for the minds on Guemes? But he couldn’t afford to end the conversation, not when there was a source of hard information that the Islanders might desperately need.
As long as I’m alive I’ll do what I can for them, Keel thought.
“I’ll tell you the truth,” Keel said.
“The truth is most welcome,” Gallow answered. A deferential nod graced the comment, and Gallow drained his wine. Keel poured him another.
“The truth is that I have no one to talk with, either,” Keel said. “I am old, I have no children and I don’t want to leave the world emptier when I go. My journals”—Keel gestured at the plaz-jacketed notebook on his bunk—“are my children. I want to leave them in the best possible shape.”
“I’ve read your notes,” Gallow said. “Most poetic. It would please me to hear you read from them aloud. You have more interesting musings than most men.”
“Because I dare to muse when your men dare not.”
“I am not a monster, Mr. Justice.”
“I am not a Justice, Mr. Gallow. You have the wrong person. Simone Rocksack is Justice now, as well as C/P. My influence is minimal.”
Gallow toasted him again with the wine. “Most perceptive,” he said. “Your information is correct—Simone is Chief Justice and C/P. A first. But because of the memory of one corrupt C/P, others have always been under scrutiny. You, as Justice, have satisfied the people that there is a balance of power. They wait to hear from you. It is you who can relieve their worries, not Simone. And for good reason.”
“What is the reason?”
Gallow’s easy smile uncurled and his eyes leveled their cold blue power at Keel.
“They have good reason to worry, because Simone works for me. She always has.”
“That doesn’t surprise me,” Keel said, though it did. He tried to keep his voice even, conversational.
Get everything out of him, he thought, that’s the only skill I have left.
“I think it did surprise you,” Gallow said. “Your body betrays you in subtle ways. You and the C/P aren’t the only ones trained in observation.”
