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Now that they’d lost their Navcom they couldn’t function undersea, and they’d be bobbing squawks on the surface. Rico would have his hands full enough without this … mess.
Elvira’s got a few tricks, he thought.
Ben felt the Tingle rush like a hot blush down his back, out his shoulders and thighs. He tried to control his muscles again but couldn’t. He was a helpless, quivering heap on the deck. He remembered feeling more betrayed than careless. Then he started traveling the convolutions of Crista’s mind. Rico, the galley around them, the rest of the real universe played through a dark curtain that backdropped Crista’s thoughts and memories. These images from her life unreeled in his brain.
“Ben!” Rico said, his small voice rising to Ben from a great depth. He said more but Ben heard only the snap of the antidote against his singlesuit. He felt nothing but the Tingle throughout his body, but he was fully aware of Rico stretching him out on the deck.
Time rippled like a dark fabric strung between himself and Rico. The white and stainless steel of the galley blended into a great glowing halo of yellowpanel that washed out everything behind the curtain of his mind.
Ben understood much, now. A near-infinity of human memories slept in Crista Galli’s head. Now many of them buzzed in his own, like solvent to solute, a wet solution filling up a dry. He felt the dry blossom of his mind unfold as it drank, petal by intricate petal, and behind it the shadow that was Rico LaPush rippled back and forth.
Though he could see and hear, Ben felt a detachment from his body that was more curiosity to him than fear. He remembered the special show he’d done with Beatriz about people who returned from near-death, what they’d reported about this same detached feeling, this same comforting warmth that replaced all sensation in his skin except that Tingle. They said they’d viewed their bodies from certain vantage points in the room, watched the medics resuscitate them, remembered whole conversations that took place even when they showed no heartbeat on the monitor. They described watching the vital signs monitor with the same detached feeling that Ben had when he slumped to the deck.
His view, however, was distinctly from someone else’s body, someone else’s mind. This was a wot’s mind, down under, looking upward toward the sun from the middle depths of a kelp lagoon. His range of vision was limited to straight ahead. It was slightly blurry and a light halo surrounded the rim above. Way up there, backlit by the glowing suns, he saw Rico’s busy shadow. The lagoon was full of Swimmers, those legendary gilled humans, undulating in and out of channels above her.
This was Crista as a child. This was Ben as Crista as a child.
He sensed that Rico was very worried and he wanted to tell him, “It’s OK, I’m here,” but nothing would come out.
One Swimmer in particular attended her, an older female. Ben had never seen a Swimmer. He’d imagined them as grotesque, slimy creatures with wide mouths and stupid eyes, and rudimentary, ratlike tails. The female who attended Crista now was about his own age. Her red fan of gill fluttered furiously at her shoulders as she fed the girl slices of raw fish. Crista dangled from the kelp, and the Swimmer female came up to her from the deeps. She did not, or would not, speak.
From somewhere behind the halo, very far above Ben’s upturned face, Rico’s voice echoed, “I’m going to settle you here and keep you warm.”
Ben felt the lagoon receding, and Rico’s voice with it.
“Crista is still breathing,” Rico said. “I don’t know whether you can hear me or not, Ben, but we’ll get you out of here. You’ll be OK. The goddamned girl is OK. We’re almost topside. We’ll get you someplace.” Rico’s voice was tinged with hysteria, and he sounded close to tears. “We’ll get you someplace, buddy, you just hang on.” Then Rico was gone.
Ben found he could leave the womblike kelp, and if he imagined walking a corridor toward himself he became more aware of the galley, the foil around him. He felt he could walk a gossamer bridge between Crista’s mind and his own.
A sudden dazzle of light in the galley and a change in the pitch of the foil told Ben that they had surfaced. Ben wondered whether he would die this way, fully conscious, feeling that last exhalation and unable to suck in air. He remembered the time that he and Rico almost drowned, when Guemes Island was sabotaged and sunk. He had nearly panicked then, but he felt no such panic now, simply a numb obedience to his fate.
He found himself wondering about things that should terrify him: would the neurotoxin, whatever it was, paralyze his breathing muscles? His heart muscle? He wished that Rico had propped him up a little to make it easier, though already the tingling had stopped.
The slapshot works, he thought.
He wanted to cross that gossamer bridge to Crista again, but he felt himself moving further away from the bridge and back into the foil, The deck under him was uncomfortable, and he found that he could squirm a little to change position. He was definitely improving. He’d been dimly aware of a voice coming in over the intercom, it was Rico’s voice, and it came in again, sounding worried.
“Speak to me, buddy. Anything.”
Ben tried his throat again. It was dry, and didn’t want to work quite right, but he managed to squeeze out: “Rico … OK.”
He heard Crista breathing, but she still hadn’t stirred.
I wonder what happens to her?
“Squall’s coming in,” Rico announced, “things might get rough again pretty soon.”
Ben wanted to laugh, tried to come back at Rico with, “Rough? What do you call this?” but it all came out a garble.
Chapter 40
The new ruler must inevitably distress those over whom he establishes his rule. So it happens that he makes enemies of all those whom he has injured in occupying the new principality, and yet he cannot keep the friendship of those who have set him up.
—Machiavelli, The Prince
Flattery spurned the safety of his quarters for a brazen tour in the sunshine topside. Nevi and Zentz were on their mission and out of his way, the ragtag rebellion was failing under his security force, and he knew that whoever had Crista Galli had a big handful of trouble. He smiled widely to himself and turned his face to the sky. He loved the sky, the weather—how different from the controlled susurrations of Moonbase air! It was nearly time for the afternoon rain. Like the few previous survivors of hybernation who had been reared in the sterility of Moonbase, Flattery had a feeling for weather.
He chose a parapet that looked downcoast, across the Preserve and into the wretched village that spilled from his gate. A boil of black smoke fanned inland with the upcoming wind. Flattery wore his brightest red lounging jacket so that the vermin could see he was very much alive, still very much the Director. So close to the borders of battle—now they would see the mettle they tested!
The presence of two suns unnerved him, even after these many years. Information from his kelp studies, from his geologists, proved that they were ripping the planet’s crust like so much flatbread. The worst was yet to come, and he didn’t intend to wait around for it.
Ventana, one of his messengers, approached the walkway below him. “Reports on the kelpway disruption, Sir.” She waved a messenger.
He signaled one of the guards, who inspected the device and then brought it to him. Flattery pulled his white hat farther down to shade his forehead. The wide-brimmed style was Islander, for political effect, and a white hat because Flattery believed that white placed him on the side of Truth and Justice at a glance. He did not retrieve the reports immediately. He knew what was inside: nothing. And by this time the afternoon cloud cover obscured an Orbiter view of the number eight sector.
His passion for weather did not include the suns’ ravages of his uncooperative skin. Two pink blotches peeled on his forehead and Flattery tried not to scratch them. His personal physici
an had removed two such spots only a month ago, and now this.
The people have to see me, he thought. There is no substitute for the proper exposure.
His three most trusted bodyguards accompanied him at a distance, their Pandoran instincts keeping them ever on the move. His vantage point was a bluff overlooking the compound, the village and the bay. To his back were the only higher points for many klicks—the high reaches, home of the worthless Zavatans. A lot of these Zavatans, like the peasantry, believed in Ship and the eventual return of this Ship as some sort of mechanical messiah. The thought made him laugh, and his guards looked at him curiously.
“Stand down, gentlemen,” he told them. “As you can see, there’s nothing down there that can reach us.”
“Begging the Director’s pardon,” one of the guards, Aumock, spoke up. “It’s my job to never stand down.”
Flattery nodded his approval. This one bears watching. “Very good,” he said. “I appreciate your dedication.”
Aumock, a Merman from good stock, didn’t swell with the praise. He was already back to scanning the area for movement.
“Nothing up here but Zavatans,” Flattery said.
“Are you sure they’re nothing, sir?” Aumock replied.
This was the first time his guard had offered a comment in his ten-month tour of service at Flattery’s side. Flattery merely grunted a response.
He had his suspicions about these Zavatans—always the same number of them appearing about, but seldom the same faces. Flattery was no fool. He was, after all, a Chaplain/Psychiatrist and had done impeccable study in the history of oppressed religions. He was uncomfortable with a nearby population that was potentially hostile, whose numbers seemed impossible to determine, and whose general fitness appeared far better than that of most of his security.
