Reefsong

by Carol Severance

  The bus's steady mechanical tremor was gradually replaced by the infinitely more varied and exciting touch of the sea. Light and sounds that she had not witnessed for months startled and delighted her. A school of flickerfish flashed into sight, then darted away to her left. She spun and followed, chasing them until, with a flick of her fingers, she shattered the seemingly solid mass into tiny silver shards. The taste of flicker offal made her want to sneeze. Enough excess oxygen had built up in her lungs to allow her to laugh aloud again.

  She stopped and held herself still, reveling in the sound and taste and movement.

  This is the way it's supposed to be! she thought. Wet and smooth—and fast! She dove again, through a cloud of drifting feather worms. The sucking tension of their tiny dual proboscises tickled as they attempted to attach to her bare skin. She scooped up a mouthful, used her tongue to mash them against the back of her teeth, and swallowed. Their sweet, sharp taste made her grin.

  Earth had been so dull and empty. So dark and dry. Not even the ocean had seemed truly alive. There had been a moon, but it had been all alone in the sky with only cold stars for company. No wonder Earthers are all so sour, she mused. No wonder they never smile with their eyes.

  She drifted with the current for a moment, thinking of the woman on the bus above. The mountainlady. The fire warden. The Earther who had taken her hands. Pua didn't understand her at all. In her sleep, the woman had talked of mountains and valleys and small creatures that bored holes in trees. She had spoken of a mother who died, and more than once about the man named Nori.

  Pua disliked the Nori man immensely. She had tasted his guilt the first time she had seen him; she didn't understand how the warden could ever have cared for him. Still, some of the things they had done together in that tower had sounded interesting.

  Once, the warden had told about a great fire and then a storm in some far-off place. She had spoken almost as if she had known someone was there listening and had even answered some of Pua's questions. Pua smiled. Sally Goberlan had been with the mountainlady during the storm, and they had done dangerous and exciting things together. They were obviously the best of friends.

  “Well, your Earther friends can't help you here,” Pua said into the sea. “The only one you've got to help you is me.”

  Pua couldn't understand why someone who seemed so smart about some things acted so dumb about others. The warden had challenged Toma right in front of everyone, with her back to the water! One push, and her career as a Lesaat farm boss would have ended before it had begun. No farm worker, new recruit or otherwise, would ever accept orders from someone he or she had seen panic in the water.

  Pua's grip on the warden's shirt might have helped, although she doubted it would have made a real difference if Toma had decided to fight physically. The first thing any waterworlder did in a fight was get his opponent wet. Pua hated being dependent on someone with such questionable sense.

  She blew a slow string of bubbles, a good-luck charm aimed at the sky, then kicked hard and raced the bubbles to the surface.

  The hydrobus was still circling. Pua lifted her head from the water about ten meters off the port bow. As she had expected, the mountainlady and the tankers, all but the sick one, stood at the starboard rail, looking toward the spot Zena was circling. Pua activated close focus and grunted in satisfaction when she saw that the mountainlady's long fingers were wrapped neatly around the rail. At least she was a fast learner.

  Fatu, also as expected, was looking directly her way when Pua surfaced. He looked older than she remembered. He looked tired. She acknowledged his slow smile with a grin and kicked closer. Fatu casually kicked a line over the side, and Pua grabbed it as the hydrobus passed. She pulled herself close.

  “You can't just leave her out here,” she heard one of the tankers say. “How will she find her way to land?”

  Zena answered, “Don't worry about that one. She couldn't get lost out here if she tried.” Not entirely true, Pua thought, but close enough.

  “What is she?” the tanker asked. “Some kind of mutant?”

  Pua grinned and signed to Fatu that she would meet the bus at the farm pass, inside Pukui's inner lagoon. Fatu's brows twitched in silent acknowledgment. She let the rope go and drifted a few meters back so she could watch as he crossed the deck to speak to Zena. Zena didn't even glance her way before revving the engines to full power and turning back toward the reef.

  Pua dove under the bus's frothing wake.

  Fatu would admit to the warden that he had seen her, of course—no one lied to a farm boss unless it was absolutely necessary. But, there was nothing the warden could do except be mad at herself. She hadn't told Pua to stay aboard, and she obviously hadn't thought to order Fatu and Zena to report sighting her if she surfaced.

  Pua lifted her head above the water again.

  “Pay attention to everything, Auntie,” she called, knowing her voice wouldn't carry over the distance and the bus's humming engines. “Pay attention all the time!” She doubted she would ever get away with that trick again. The mountainlady wasn't that dumb.

  Pua dove again, leveled at about five meters, and turned toward Pukui. She began to swim—a little fast at first. Then she settled into a steady, strong rhythm that would allow her to reach the reef quickly but with the least possible energy loss. It felt wonderful to stretch again, to cup her hands in the water and pull them back hard and fast. Her hands worked fine. With each double-armed stroke she surged ahead.

  She swam with her knees close together, a technique she had learned as a youngster while swimming with the reef rays and false dolphins. Her arms and hands provided power, while her webbed feet and streamlined form allowed for maximum, long-distance speed.

  As she swam, her skin began to exude a thin layer of clear mucus, a protective coating against extended immersion. Its slick feel and the slight increase in speed it provided made her smile. Dr. Waight had never allowed her to stay in the water long enough for the coating response to be activated, so she had never discovered its existence. She had never let Pua swim naked either. Earthers were so strange.

  “You never learned a lot of things, Dr. Waight,” she murmured, hoping that was true. She worried sometimes about what the Earthers might have asked her while she was still sick.

  But it didn't matter now what the old woman had learned. Not at this moment, not in this sea. Here, Pua was free, and fast and strong. A distant pigfish squealed, high and shrill—a mating call. Pua tightened her throat and squealed back.

  She could feel the stretch of long-unused muscles; she was out of shape after so long away. I should have waited till the bus was closer, she thought, but she knew she couldn't have. She had stayed out of the water as long as she had been able.

  She needed this swim. She needed the ocean's silken touch, the echoing songs of Le Fe'e. She needed the sweet taste of the reef and her family. “I'm sorry,” she whispered, and the rhythm of her strokes faltered. “I'm sorry I couldn't bring them back.”

  “We'll cremate your parents’ bodies when our research is finished,” Dr. Waight had said when Pua asked for them to be returned to Lesaat, or at least to be taken to her mother's family at South Point. “Then the ashes will be scattered at sea.”

  “But my mother is a land person,” Pua had replied. “Her bones should be blessed and hidden in the burial cave, not left to sink in some strange sea.”

  “Your mother was no stranger to this sea,” Waight said. “She grew up here, remember?”

  “But—”

  “They're dead, Pua. It doesn't matter where their remains end up.”

  It does! Pua's tears salted the sea. It does matter! She was acutely conscious of her mother's hair, braided around her ankle. It was the only piece of her parents she had been able to bring home.

  She pushed away the memory of the hated doctor's face and swam hard again for the reef. She thought about making a short detour to visit the old man and the others. She wanted more than anything to tell
Le Fe'e all that had happened and to hug Pili and Kiki and Keha tight. But Sa le Fe'e was on the other side of the reef. It would take too long. She didn't want to give the mountainlady any excuse to ask dangerous questions.

  She crossed the deep-water drop-off and then followed the gradual upward slope of coral toward the surface. Above her, the breaking waves churned the water to phosphorescent foam.

  The face of the reef teemed with life. It was not as rich as some other parts of Pukui, those better protected from the pounding eastern swell, but it was alive and growing, and the sealife it supported created constant movement among the colorful corals.

  Pua dipped down to drag her hand across the pebbled surface of a candy coral. At her touch, the microscopic algae covering the coral shifted, sending a swirl of fluorescent pink and orange across the seemingly bare coral head. A school of kid fish darted from the cover of a nearby hole and fed madly until the colors faded. “Like kids in a candy store,” a visiting scientist had once called it, and that's how both the fish and the coral had gotten their names. Pua still wasn't certain what a store was, but the frenetic activity of the algae and the fish always made her laugh.

  She snagged a drifting coiler with a quick twist of one wrist. It wrapped itself neatly around her arm, contracting with smooth, even force, not strong enough at this hair-thin size to cause more than the pleasant sensation of friendly snugness. She admired her shimmering, crimson bracelet for a moment before moving on.

  As she swam upward, the current caused by the swells building up against the reef became stronger. She turned parallel to the reef, staying just below the turbulence of the breaking waves. She needed to find a surge channel large enough to take her past the lip of the algal ridge that covered the reef's outer edge. The tide was low, so she made her choice carefully. She didn't want to face the mountainlady missing a layer of skin.

  A giant reef grazer moved into view. The sunlight, refracting through the waves, turned the fish shimmering violet. It was only half Pua's length, but it matched her easily in girth. It nosed nearer to the reef, and she followed. She braced herself against the surge, strong now. It lifted her, pressing her closer to the coral, then dropped and tried to suck her away. With quick, fluttering movements of its tail and fins, the grazer held itself almost motionless in the strong ebb and flow.

  Suddenly, the grazer disappeared, sweeping inward with the surge and up through a narrow channel in the coral. Pua counted, marked the point at which she felt the wave break, then watched for the fish to return. It did not.

  “Ha!” she said, and giggled as a pair of fanning tuba worms turned toward the sound. She slipped into the surge channel, and when the next surge swelled, she relaxed into its grip. It lifted her and thrust her up and inward. The channel was narrower than she had hoped, but she managed to squeeze through without scraping her knees on the surrounding coral.

  She rode the surge to its foaming end.

  As soon as she felt the water begin to ebb, she grabbed the nearest coral outcrop with both hands. She braced her feet against rough coral edges and held tight. As soon as she was freed from the pull of the ebbing wave, she scrambled up the remaining incline of the surge channel onto the reef flat. Behind her, the following wave broke and sent foaming effervescence swirling past her knees. She had reached shallow enough water to brace herself against its force.

  The grazer was feeding placidly nearby. “I'll return the favor next time I find you in trouble,” she called. It was the kind of promise she always kept, because Fatu insisted the fish would remember, and she knew for herself that it was never wise to anger the reef's inhabitants without good cause.

  Many months of wearing shoes and walking on smooth, level floors had softened the calluses on the soles of Pua's feet. Even with her webs fully folded, she found it necessary to pick her way carefully across the treacherous reef flat. She leapt as best she could from one flat, sandy stretch to another, so as not to damage either her feet or the fragile coral.

  She stopped for a moment, staring out across the great Pukui Lagoon. The barrier reef on which she stood curved around the inner reef and the central islands of her home like a protective stone hand. Much of the barrier reef was underwater, even at low tide, but it still broke the force of the deep ocean swells. There were many open, sandy beaches along its great expanse, and a few islets large enough to support palm trees and thick, tough ground vines.

  At the center of the lagoon, Home Island rose in snow-clad splendor. It wasn't real snow. Pua understood that now. Her mother had just planted snow-white trees at the summit and named it Mauna Kea Iki to remind her of her ancestral home. Now that Pua had seen the real Mauna Kea, she understood why Earthers always smiled when they heard this one's name. Pukui's single mountain rose to only five hundred meters. Still, it had been her mother's pride.

  Pua's vision blurred. All that she saw and felt and tasted reminded her that she had come back alone. She blinked angrily and swiped away tears.

  A flicker of yellow caught her attention, the fluorescent floats that lined the edges of the algae holding nets on the inner reef. The deep orange of the enclosed algae showed that much of it was fully mature. She was surprised that there were no Company harvesters on-site. Perhaps they were out of sight behind Home or Second islands.

  She extended focus and searched the horizon for the hydrobus. After a moment, she spotted it nearing the leeward pass on the far side of the lagoon. Once inside, it would have to double back along the inner reef to reach the farm passage through the algae pens. She had plenty of time.

  She crossed a last stretch of smooth sand leading into the lagoon and returned once more to the water. The ocean sounded and tasted different here. Sharper, clearer, except that one had to be more careful of ricocheted sound. Pua clicked a rapid sequence with her fingernails to announce her presence. The sound pattern would identify her to the reef rays and other friendly denizens of the lagoon.

  It would also bring her to the attention of the suckersharks, but she doubted they would be hungry enough at this hour to come and investigate. She hoped they would stay away, because without a knife to scrape them off, she didn't care to bother with the stupid creatures.

  Unlike the hydrobus, Pua could cross the inner reef wherever she chose, as long as she remained far enough away from the perimeter alarms. She kept an eye on the yellow markers as she approached the nearest of the mature algae pens, and detoured carefully around them. She was even more careful near the seemingly empty stretches between the markers.

  Many an inexperienced poacher had been caught when they swam too close to one of the unmarked alarms that were scattered randomly around Pukui's perimeter. Pua had set off a few herself, until Fatu and her father finally showed her how to identify the small transparent cylinders that kept the sensor alarms dry.

  When she was sure the area was clear, she dove. The heavily laden net extended deeper than she had expected. Too deep, she thought. She followed it farther and farther down. Why hadn't this pen been cleared? The sludge-filled net reached almost to the coral shelf that formed the sunken inner reef. The net should never have been allowed to get so full. She could taste the rot clearly. It reminded her of Earth.

  She ducked beneath the net, then quickly retreated. It was as black as a burial cave under there. The algae had grown so thick that no light at all filtered through from above, and no light showed under from the opposite side. Could the net actually be touching the coral? Pua swam farther along the net. Finally, she reached a place where the darkness was not so intense. She slid under the net again. Yes. There. She could see an opening to the other side. A very shallow opening over razor-sharp coral. She swam carefully into the opening.

  The coral's usually riotous colors looked gray. The only light came from ahead of her, and from thin growths of barely luminescent coralline algae. The sea grew more and more silent as she moved forward under the net. The great mass of algae sludge hung like a living thing above her, sighing and bubbling, oozing its f
oul taste of decay into the darkness. She could see where the net had been stretched well beyond any normal or safe limits.

  When she reached the first of the uninsulated deep-water pipes, she stopped, puzzled because there was no discernible change in the surrounding temperature. If anything, the water seemed warmer. They should have been running the coldest water possible through the pen, to slow the growth until the net could be cleared.

  She eased herself over the pipe and swam on, a little faster now, because there was so little light, and the horror above her seemed to be sinking lower even as she watched. In her haste, she scraped the top of one knee across a jutting branch of fire coral. It stung, but her viscous skin coating sealed the cut quickly.

  It's dying! she thought as she crossed the central, fully insulated pipe. She could see no color at all in the coral she was passing over. My reef is dying! She was the only thing that moved in the gloomy darkness.

  After Pua had passed the larger, central pipe she began to feel the distant drumming throb of the hydrobus. It must have already reached the inner-reef farm pass. Well, there was no way she could meet it there now. She dared not swim any faster through this treacherous passage. The mountainlady would just have to wait.

  Zena would take the bus directly to the main dock, Pua knew. She supposed the pilot and Fatu would find some way to keep the new farm boss occupied until Pua caught up. She crossed a patch of sand and stopped. She brushed her hand lightly across the sand's smooth surface. Nothing moved. She relaxed her finger into a narrow crack and not even a reef mite shifted at the disturbance. She moved on. Why hadn't they harvested this pen? Why were they letting the reef die?

  Finally, she crossed the last of the deep-water pipes and swam from beneath the net into the bright, sunlit inner lagoon.