Reefsong

by Carol Severance

  Pua pulled her hand back and separated out a single, long strand of her ebony hair. “Pukui's lucky,” she said. “There's an almost straight channel, an old lava tube, that leads right through the outer barrier reef. That's where the main deep-water pipe is laid. One end hangs down into the deep ocean where it's really cold, and the other leads into the lagoon. At other farms, they have to run the main pipe through natural passes, or sometimes even over the top of the barrier reefs. They're kind of ugly.” She squinted as she examined the single hair closely.

  “Why don't they cut underwater passages?” Angie asked. “The coral can't be that dense.”

  “They've tried that, but there's one kind of really sharp coral that grows fast in places where the reef's been damaged,” Pua said. “It grows around the pipe and punches holes in it. Besides, blasting on the reef can make the fish and stuff get cigarettes. Then you can't eat ’em ‘cause they'll make you sick.”

  “I believe the technical term for that is ciguatera,” Angie said with a smile.

  Pua shrugged. She lifted the hair very precisely with the thin, sharp tips of her fingernails.

  “Pua, what are you doing?”

  Pua glanced up at her. “Trying to decide whether you're ready to try picking this up without your nails snipping it off. You're still awful clumsy when it comes to precision movements.”

  Angie gave a quick demonstration of how precisely she could now mimic Pua's favorite rude hand signal, then turned back to the tape. Pua laughed, smoothed the hair back into place, and joined her. She leaned across Angie's shoulder to poke a long finger into the shimmering holo.

  “This isn't really what a harvest barge looks like,” she said. “They're a lot smaller and dirtier. They're flatter, too, and don't have that thing they call a drying cage on top. The drying is done inside. It's part of the processing.”

  “Crawley told me these tapes were up-to-date,” Angie said.

  “Well, he was wrong. See how they show the machine sucking the algae from the center of the net? It's never done that way unless the algae is already dead and is just going to be destroyed.”

  She motioned again with her thin finger. “The prime algae is along the inside edges of the net where it gets plenty of light and nutrients. The swimmers have to get inside the net and vacuum it onto the barge by hand, otherwise the net tears and the algae spills out. That's why standard Earthers can't work on Lesaat. Their fingers are too short and stubby to untangle the net and pick the little bits of algae out. Their nails aren't sharp enough either.” She clicked her own sharp nails together in a short, staccato beat. She did that often, as if testing her own dexterity.

  “When the middle part gets too old and rotten, they blow up the methane that's in it and let it burn. That kills all the algae so they can clean it out safely and start a fresh batch.”

  She motioned again toward the holo. “If they did it this way, too much of the live algae would escape. It's a lot harder to clean up a spill than to just contain it right in the first place.”

  Angie nodded. That part she understood. The first, and most impressive, of the holotapes had been a history of algae farming on Lesaat. It described how the first settlers had destroyed entire reefs in their eagerness to exploit the planet's potential.

  The 410 partial-conversion enzyme had been discovered decades before at the Company-run aquaculture labs in Hawaii, but had proved of little practical value. Not enough of the particular blue-green algae from which the enzyme was processed could be grown in Earth's polluted seas to make it profitable. No economical way to synthesize the enzyme was ever found, so neither the Company nor the world's poor benefited from the discovery.

  When the wormhole nexus was opened at mid-century and water-rich but land-poor Lesaat was discovered, the 410 PC suddenly become important news again. The disappointment over Lesaat's inability to provide a physical outlet for Earth's excess population was tempered by the discovery that its warm tropical seas provided an ideal growing environment for 410's Earth-algae base.

  The first settlers turned the Earth algae loose to grow wild across several prime lagoons. The aquatic environment proved so perfectly suited for its rapid growth, however, that it quickly spread and bloomed out of control over all submerged portions of the reefs. Because of the storm season and their own unpreparedness, the settlers were unable to harvest it fast enough to save the underlying coral.

  The algae masses grew denser and denser until, finally, sunlight could no longer pass through. Without oxygen, the underlying coral and its own symbiotic coralline algae died. Without the nutritive base the living reef provided, the Earth algae died as well. Within a single storm season, three entire atolls were turned into useless hulks. It would be a hundred years or more before a fully functioning coral ecology could re-form, if it ever could at all.

  “You know that ocean next to the Hawaii recon center?” Pua said. “It tasted kind of like the dead reefs on Lesaat. I don't know why that stupid Company doesn't do something to clean it up.”

  Angie shifted the tension bar to her fingertips and squeezed, carefully, smoothly, over and over again. “Because now that they have Lesaat, there's not enough easy profit in it,” she said.

  “Well, Earther's should stop making so many babies, then,” Pua said. “Then there could be enough food for everybody.”

  Unfortunately, that's not profitable, either, Angie thought. It was widely believed, but had never been proven, that World Life Company still surreptitiously supported the powerful anti-birth-control lobby. Early in the century, the group had gotten strict anti-abortion and anti-birth-control laws enacted in many third-world countries, a situation that had resulted in an immediate and dramatic population boom.

  In response, residents of other parts of the world had begun deliberately to increase their own numbers for fear of being overrun by people and cultures different from their own. World Life, with its growing control over the world's food distribution, had reaped enormous benefits.

  “Earthers are stupid,” Pua said. Angie squeezed the tension bar again.

  When she wasn't working with her hands or watching the tape, Angie exercised the rest of her body. The muscle tone and coordination that had been diminished by her lengthy stay in the EM field quickly returned.

  “You have strong arms,” Pua said once while they were arm wrestling. It was an exercise Angie had suggested to help increase her grip strength. “You'll make a good swimmer if we can ever get your head underwater.”

  Angie looked up at her sharply—

  —and Pua slammed their hands to the countertop.

  “Spit!” Angie muttered. The girl had done it again, broken her concentration with the simplest of tricks.

  “Pay attention, Mountainlady,” Pua said without smiling. “Pay attention to everything! All the time. It's the only way—” She paused, brows lifted.

  “—To survive on Lesaat,” Angie finished. “I remember.” She rubbed the sting from her fingers and set her elbow back on the counter. “Come on. Let's try it again.”

  It wasn't until the last day, while they were waiting to board the groundside shuttle, that Angie finally won an arm-wrestling match. Pua used no mental tricks in the contest, and when it was finished she looked to be almost as satisfied as Angie that they had reached relative parity in purely physical strength. She rubbed her shoulder and smiled at her own defeat while Angie winced over sore fingers.

  “Don't challenge anyone on the ride down,” Pua advised as the call came for them to board the shuttle. She laughed very softly. “There's no way you could do that twice in one day. Come on, let's go.”

  Angie kept her expression carefully neutral as she stepped into the shuttle's windowless passenger bay. At Pua's insistence, she had not worn the concealing gloves Crawley had given them. “This is Lesaat,” Pua had said. “Real waterworlders aren't ashamed of their hands.” Meeting the curious stares of the new recruits who would be descending with them, Angie saw that it had been strategically wi
se advice.

  The best seat, aside from those reserved for herself and Pua, was taken by a woman who openly displayed her new hands with their elongated, webbed fingers. She even wore a red ribbon around her bare neck, a clear statement that she was not embarrassed by her physical changes—that she was, in fact, proud of them. Like the others, the woman stared first at Angie's hands, then at her face. When Pua entered the bay, the woman frowned slightly, but did not join in the sudden, soft buzz of conversation. Her look, as it returned to Angie, was filled with both curiosity and challenge.

  So, Angie mused, you want to know the pecking order. She nodded to the woman as if she knew her, waited just long enough to recognize the woman's instant of confusion, then slid her hand across the back of the seat, in plain view, as she ushered Pua into the inside seat. Pua snapped on her safety harness, then stared straight ahead at the scarred metal bulkhead. She did not speak again until the shuttle was on the ground.

  Which was just as well, Angie decided. Keeping herself from screaming in the claustrophobic bay was taking all the energy she had. It felt like a coffin, and she echoed Pua's sigh of relief when they finally touched the ground.

  As the shuttle taxied to a stop, a man's voice spoke over the comm system. Water transportation was waiting for the farm workers, he said. Their personal baggage would be transferred by the Lesaat ground crew. Without further greeting, he began calling a list of names and numbers, farm assignments for the new recruits. The names, Angie realized after the first several had been called, were the farms; the tankers were referred to only by number. She blew out a tight breath and glanced at Pua.

  The girl was still staring at the forward bulkhead, frowning deeply. Her long fingers were wrapped tightly around the safety harness mesh.

  “Warden Dinsman?”

  Angie looked up. A short, dark-haired woman—a waterworlder, Angie saw by her neck and hands—stood in the aisle beside her. Angie nodded.

  “My name is Tulina Sanchez. I'm the Company ground rep. If you'll follow me, I'll show you where you can stow your things before the committee meeting.”

  Angie frowned. “What committee?”

  The woman's brows lifted in surprise. “The World Life Farm Management Committee. They're here to advise you on how to proceed at Pukui. And Dr. Haili will want to examine...”

  Angie unhooked her harness and stood. She was a full head taller than the ground rep. Sanchez stepped back slightly.

  “I prefer going directly to Pukui,” Angie said.

  “I know you're eager to get to the farm, Ms. Dinsman, but—”

  “I don't work through committees, and I have no need to see a Company doctor. If your people have anything important to offer, tell them to bring it to the reef. Let's go, Pua.”

  Pua released her harness and stood.

  “According to the very personal greeting these workers just received,” Angie said, glancing back at the attentive tankers, “there is immediate transport to Pukui waiting.”

  “But that's just a hydrobus,” Sanchez said. “A flitter will be assigned to you right after—”

  “The bus will be just fine,” Angie said. The last thing she wanted to do right now was to get into a Company-maintained flitter. She stepped into the aisle, forcing Sanchez back farther, then waved Pua ahead of her to the exit. The ground rep immediately began murmuring into her wrist comm. The ribboned tanker laughed.

  The shuttle was parked inside a large, open hangar. Sunlight pouring through the translucent roof cast bright, golden light, eerily shadowless. The air was humid and smelled of machine oil and shuttle exhaust, and rotting tropical foliage. In the distance, the sea glinted gold, more vivid even than in the holos.

  Angie walked swiftly across the hangar, following the string of blue floor lights the announcer had said would lead to the Pukui-bound vessel. In the distance she could hear the sounds of heavy machinery.

  One side of the hangar led back to the runway where they had just landed. Two others opened onto docks and a dead-calm, golden-tinted harbor. As they neared the dock area, Angie activated her polarizers against the glare of the sun on the golden water. She drew deep breaths of the moist, warm air.

  Extended focus showed that the white line on the horizon was foaming waves, breaking against some barrier. Coral reef or a human-built breakwater—it was impossible to tell. A dark line of low islets far off to the left indicated at least a partial barrier reef. The hangar's fourth side was attached by covered walkways to a squat, ugly building—cement block and plastic, smeared here and there with what looked like rust but was probably just accumulations of tropical sludge. It looked little different from other isolated Company headquarters Angie had seen.

  Beyond the office building was Lesaat's single town of Landing, spread in typical, port-town squalor. Its appearance was as drab as its name, although Pua had assured her that at the end of each successful harvest, the Company squids brought the dismal place to life. Somehow, Angie had expected something better from a permanent planetary HQ.

  There was only the one shuttle in the oversized hangar, but a row of flitters and what looked like a full-sized hydrobus were parked on the side adjoining the building. The grounded bus was in obvious disrepair. A pair of workers in faded green overalls gestured in heated discussion at the bus's side. Others, similarly dressed, bustled between the shuttle and various parts of the hangar, transferring supplies.

  A Company security squad lounged at the far end of the main building. Their attitudes were casual, but Angie recognized their careful vigilance as she and Pua walked quickly across the open hangar.

  “Ms. Dinsman,” Sanchez called. She was having difficulty keeping up. “Ms. Dinsman, please...”

  Pua remained close at Angie's side. “That one,” she said as they neared the waterfront, and she began walking even faster. A hydrofoil, similar to the one inside, bobbed gently near the end of a short secondary loading dock. It was the smallest of four such craft berthed along the waterway.

  A crewman aboard the Pukui bus looked up at their approach.

  “It's Uncle Fatu!” Pua murmured, and a brief smile touched her lips.

  He was a huge man, at least half a head taller than Angie and more than twice her girth. He was dressed only in a waist-wrap of patterned blue cloth and—Angie blinked to extended focus again—tattoos! Large, intricately patterned semicircles darkened each side of his torso above his...

  ...lavalava. The memory of a long-past assignment in the South Pacific slid into place. Angie had seen such attire and similar tattoos on a very old man in Western Samoa. She wondered if this “Uncle Fatu's” tattoos extended all the way to his knees as the elderly high chief had assured her a proper Samoan man's should. Angie had thought the old man was the last of his kind.

  Uncle Fatu stood slowly. His dark eyes widened as Pua stepped onto the dock. He called something to the boat pilot, then started forward as if to greet them. As he was about to leave the hydrobus, he frowned and stopped.

  Angie caught movement in her peripheral vision. She stopped and turned back. Another man was striding toward them across the hangar. He, too, was tall, although not as tall as the Pukui crewman. His eyes had the same, slightly Asiatic tilt as Pua's, but as he drew close, Angie saw that they were the color of the Hawaiian sky, a visual indication of at least some Caucasian ancestry.

  Judging from the shape of his thighs and shoulders, Angie suspected he was a strong swimmer. His clothing was as nondescript as any of the hangar workers', but he walked with the sure step of authority. His expression was stern.

  Admin, Angie decided.

  “Shark,” Pua hissed softly. She stayed close at Angie's back.

  “Doctor Haili, she—”

  The man brushed past the ground rep. He stopped in front of Angie. Hands, not quite as alien as her own, rolled into fists at his hips.

  “What do you think you're doing?” he demanded. He looked beyond Angie, and his expression turned angry.

  Pua said nothing, bu
t Angie felt a strong hand grip the back of her shirt.

  “Is there something we can do for you, Inspector?” she said, hoping Pua's reference to sharks meant what she thought it did. He was staring at her hands.

  The man's start of surprise indicated that she was right, even if that was not his public title. His frown deepened. “You can get over to the committee hall and start doing your job,” he said.

  He pointed toward Pua. His long finger was remarkably steady. “And you, young lady, can get yourself directly to my office. You're not leaving Landing.” The grip on Angie's shirt grew tighter.

  “Pua is coming with me,” Angie said.

  He shook his head. “Children aren't allowed on the reefs unless they're with family,” he said. “That's the law. They're not even allowed on-planet unless they're born here.”

  “I'm her auntie,” Angie said.

  “And I'm her favorite uncle,” he returned. “Look, Warden, you weren't sent out here to babysit. You have a bigger job to do, and the atolls are dangerous. Pua could get in real trouble out there.”

  A small crowd had gathered around them. Three men and two women. Angie recognized them from the shuttle. She was relieved to see that the woman with the red ribbon was not among them. She wasn't sure how much more calm she could manufacture. She needed open air and a direct line of sight to the horizon, even if that horizon was the wrong color. She felt as if she had been transported directly from the fire on the mountain to this burning golden seaworld, with only a slice of hell in between.

  How the fireloving hell did this happen? she wondered. And more to the point, How am I going to get out of it? She wondered why this Company man was trying so hard to get his hands on Pua. She recognized from his name that he was the planetary superintendent, the official liaison between Lesaat and Earth, or, more practically, between World Life Admin and the U.N. He was paid by World Life. He'd probably been told to put Pua on the next ship back to earth.