"It's political," she said. "There's power in appealing to base responses. And there are problems over the kelp situation."
"What kelp situation?" His voice sounded toneless in his own ears, far away and ... yes, afraid. Wipe every Mute off the face of this planet.
"Do you feel up to a tour?" she asked. She glanced at the plaz beside them.
Ward looked out at the undersea view. "Out there?"
"No," she said, "not out there. There's been a wavewall topside and we've got all our crews reclaiming some ground we've lost."
His eyes strained to focus forward on her mouth. Somehow, he didn't believe anyone's mouth could be so casual about a wavewall.
"The Islands?" He swallowed. "How bad was the damage?"
"Minimal, Ward. To our knowledge, no fatalities. Wave-walls may very well be a thing of the past."
"I don't understand."
"This wavewall was smaller than many of the winter storms you survive every year. We've built a series of networks of exposed land. Land above the sea. Someday, they will be islands ... real islands fixed to the planet, not drifting willy-nilly. And some of them, I think, will be continents."
Land, he thought, and his stomach lurched. Land means shallows. An Island could bottom out in shallow water. An ultimate disaster, in the vernacular of historians, but she was talking about voluntarily increasing the risk of an Islander's worst fear.
"How much exposed land?" he asked, trying to maintain a level tone.
"Not very much, but it's a beginning."
"But it would take forever to ..."
"A long time, Ward, but not forever. We've been at it for generations. And lately we've had some help. It's getting done in our lifetime, doesn't that excite you?"
"What does this have to do with the kelp?" He felt the need to resist her obvious attempts to mesmerize him.
"The kelp is the key," she said, "just as people - Islanders and Mermen - have said all along. With the kelp and a few well-placed artificial barriers, we can control the sea currents. All of them."
Control, he thought. That's the Merman way of it. He doubted they could control the seas, but if they could manipulate currents, they could manipulate Island movement.
How much control? he wondered*
"We're in a two-sun system," he said. "The gravitational distortions guarantee wavewalls, earthquakes ..."
"Not when the kelp was in its prime, Ward. And now there's enough of it to make a difference. You'll see. And currents should begin an aggrading action now - dropping sediment - rather than degrading."
Degrading, he thought. He looked at Ale's beauty. Did she even know the meaning of the word? A technical understanding, an engineering approach was not enough.
Mistaking the reason of his silence, Ale plunged on.
"We have records of everything. From the first. We can play the whole reconstruction of this planet from the beginning - the death of the kelp, everything."
Not everything, he thought. He looked once more at the wondrous garden beyond the plaz. Growth there was so lush that the bottom could only be glimpsed in a few places. He could see no rock. As a child, he had given up watching drift because all he ever saw was rock ... and silt. When it was clear enough or shallow enough to see at all. Seeing the bottom from an Island had a way of running an icy hand down your back.
"How close are these 'artificial barriers' to the surface?" he asked.
She cleared her throat, avoiding his eyes.
"Along this section," she said, "surflines are beginning to show. I expect watchers on Vashon already have seen them. That wavewall drifted them pretty close to ..."
"Vashon draws a hundred meters at Center," he protested. "Two-thirds of the population live below the waterline - almost half a million lives! How can you speak so casually about endangering that many ... ?"
"Ward!" A chill edged her voice. "We are aware of the dangers to your Islands and we've taken that into account. We're not murderers. We are on the verge of complete restoration of the kelp and the development of land masses - two monumental projects that we've pursued for generations."
"Projects whose dangers you did not share with nor reveal to the Islanders. Are we to be sacrificed to your -"
"No one is to be sacrificed!"
"Except by your friends who want to wipe out every Mute on Pandora! Is this how they intend to do it? Wreck us on your barrier walls and your continents?"
"We knew you wouldn't understand," she said. "But you must realize that the Islands have reached their limits and people haven't. I agree that we should have brought Islanders into the planning picture much earlier, but" - she shrugged - "we didn't. And now we are. It's my job to tell you what we must do together to see that there is no disaster. It's my job to gain your cooperation in -"
"In the mass annihilation of Islanders!"
"No, Ward, dammit! In the mass rescue of Islanders ... and Mermen. We must walk on the surface once more, all of us."
He heard the sincerity in her tone but distrusted it. She was a diplomat, trained to lie convincingly. And the enormity of what she proposed ...
Ale waved a hand toward the exterior garden. "Kelp is flourishing, as you can see. But it's just a plant; it is not sentient, as it was before our ancestors wiped it out. The kelp you see there was, of course, reconstructed from the genes carried by certain humans in the -"
"Don't try to explain genetics to the Chief Justice," Ward growled, "we know about your 'dumbkelp.'"
She blushed, and he wondered at the emotional display. It was something he had never before seen in Ale. A liability in a diplomat, no doubt. How had she concealed it before ... or was this situation simply too much for normal repression? He decided to watch the emotional signal and read it for her true feelings.
"Calling it 'dumbkelp' like the schoolchildren is hardly accurate," she said.
"You're trying to divert me," he accused. "How close is Vashon to one of your surflines right now?"
"In a few minutes I will take you out and show you," she said. "But you must understand what we're -"
"No. I must not understand - by which you mean accept - such peril for so many of my people. So many people, period. You talk of control. Do you have any idea of the energy in an Island's movement? The long, slow job of maneuvering something that big? Your word, this control of which you seem so proud, does not take in the kinetic energy of -"
"But it does, Ward. I didn't bring you down here for a tea party. Or an argument." She stood. "I hope you have your legs under you because we've a lot of walking to do."
He stood at that, slowly, and tried to unkink his knees. His left foot tingled in the first stages of waking. Was it possible, all that she said? He could not escape the in-built fear all Islanders felt at the idea of a crashing death on solid bottom. A white horizon could only mean death - a wavewall or some tidal exposure of the planet's rocky surface. Nothing could change that.
***
How do Mermen make love? Same way every time.
- Islander joke
The two coracles, one towing the other, bobbed along on the open sea. Nothing shared the horizon with them except gray waves, long deep rollers with intermittent white lines of spume at the crests. Vashon was long gone below the horizon astern and Twisp, holding his course by the steady wind and the fisherman's instinct for shifts in light, had settled into a patient, watchful wait, giving only rare glances to his radio and RDF. He had been all night assembling the gear to hunt for Brett - raising the coracles, repairing the wavewall damage, loading supplies and gear.
Around him now was a Pandoran late morning. Only Little Sun was in the sky, a bright spot on a thin cloud cover - ideal navigation weather. Driftwatch had given him a fix on Vashon's position at the time of the wavewall and he knew that by midafternoon he should be near enough to start search-quartering the seas.
If you made it this far, kid, I'll find you.
The futility of his gesture did not escape Twisp. There was nearly a d
ay's delay, not to mention the ever-prowling hunts of dashers. And there was this odd current in the sea, sending a long silvery line down the sweep of waves. It flowed in his direction, for which Twisp was thankful. He could mark the swiftness of it by the doppler on his radio, which he kept tuned to Vashon's emergency band. He hoped to hear a report of Brett's recovery.
It was possible that Mermen had found Brett. Twisp kept looking for Merman signs - a flag float for a work party, one of their swift skimmers, the oily surge of a hardbelly sub surfacing from the depths.
Nothing intruded on his small circle of horizon.
Getting away from Vashon had been a marvel of secret scurrying, all the time expecting Security to stop him. But Islanders helped each other, even if one of them insisted on being a fool. Gerard had packed him a rich supply of food gifts from friends and from the pantry at the Ace of Cups. Security had been informed of Brett's loss overboard. Gerard's private grapevine said the kid's parents had set up a cry for "someone to do something." They had not come to Twisp, though. Strange, that. Official channels only. Twisp suspected Security knew all about his preparations for a search and deliberately kept hands off - partly out of resentment over the Norton family pressures, partly ... well, partly because Islanders helped each other. People knew he had to do this thing.
The docks had been a madhouse of repair when Twisp went down to see whether he could recover his boat. Despite the hard work going on all around, fishermen made time to help him. Brett had been the only person lost with this wavewall and they all knew what Twisp had to attempt.
All through the night people had come with gear, sonar, a spare coracle, a new motor, eelcell batteries, every gift saying: "We know. We sympathize. I'd be doing the same thing if I were you."
At the end, ready to set off, Twisp had waited impatiently for Gerard to appear. Gerard had said for him to wait. The big man had come down in his motorized chair, his single fused leg sticking out like a blunted lance to clear the way. His twin daughters ran skipping behind him, and behind them came five Ace of Cups regulars wheeling carts with the food stores.
"Got you enough for about twenty-five or thirty days," Gerard had said, humming to a stop beside the waiting boats. "I know you, Twisp. You won't give up."
An embarrassed silence had fallen over the fishermen waiting on the docks to see Twisp off. Gerard had spoken what was in all of their minds. How long could the kid survive out there?
While friends loaded the tow-coracle, Gerard said: "Word's out to the Mermen. They'll contact us if they learn anything. Hard telling what it'll cost you."
Twisp had stared at his coracles, at the friends who gave him precious gear and even more precious physical help. The debt was great. And if he came back ... well, he was going to come back - and with the kid. The debt would be a bitch, though. And only a few hours ago he had been considering abandonment of the independent fisherman's life, going back to the subs. Well ... that was the way it went.
Gerard's twin girls had come up to Twisp then, begging for him to swing them. The coracles were almost ready and a strange reluctance had come over everyone ... including Twisp. He extended his arms to let each of the girls grip a forearm tight, then he turned, fast, faster, swinging the children wide while the spectators stood back from his long-armed circle. The girls shrieked when their toes pointed at the horizon. He stumbled to a stop, dizzy and sweating. Both girls sat hard on the pier, their eyes not quite caught up with the end of the whirl.
"You come back, you hear?" Gerard had said. "My girls won't forgive any of us if you don't."
Twisp thought about that oddly silent departure as he held his course with the wind on his cheek and an eye to the light and the swift hiss of the current under his craft. The old axiom of the fishing fleets nurtured him in his loneliness: Your best friend is hope.
He could feel the tow coracle tug his boat at the crests. The carrier hum of his radio provided a faint background to the slap-slap of cross-chop against the hull. He glanced back at the tow. Only the static-charge antenna protruded from the lashed cover. The tow rode low in the water. The new motor hummed reassuringly near his feet. Its eelcell batteries had not started to change color, but he kept an eye on them. Unless the antenna picked up a lightning strike, they'd need feeding before nightfall.
Gray convolutions of clouds folded downward ahead of him. Sometime soon it was going to rain. He unrolled the clear membrane another fisherman had given him and stretched it over the open cockpit of his coracle, leaving a sag-pocket to collect drinking water. The course beeper went off as he finished the final lashings. He corrected for slightly more than five degrees deviation, then hunkered under the shelter, sensing the imminent rain, cursing the way this would limit visibility. But he had to keep dry.
I never really get miserable if I'm dry.
He felt miserable, though. Was there even the faintest hope he could find the kid? Or was this one of those futile gestures that had to be made for one's own mental well-being?
Or is it that I have nothing else to live for ... ?
He put that one out of his mind as beyond debate. To give himself physical activity, something to drive out his doubts, he rigged a handline with a warning bell from the starboard thwart, baited it with a bit of bright streamer that glittered in the water. He payed it out carefully and tested the warning bell with a short tug on the line. The tinkling reassured him.
All I'd need, he thought. Drag a dead fish along and call in the dashers. Even though dashers preferred warm-blooded meat, they'd go for anything that moved when they were hungry.
A lot like humans.
Settling back with the tiller under his right armpit, Twisp tried to relax. Still nothing on the radio's emergency band. He reached down and switched to the regular broadcast, coming in on the middle of a music program.
Another gift, a nav-sounder, with its bottom-finding sonar and its store of position memories, rested between his legs. He flipped it on for a position check, worked out the doppler distance figure from the radio and nodded to himself.
Close enough.
Vashon was drifting at a fairly steady seven klicks per hour back there. His coracle was doing a reliable twelve. Pretty fast for trolling with a handline.
The radio interrupted its music program for a commentary on Chief Justice Keel. No word yet from the Committee, but observers were saying that his unprecedented fact-finding trip down under could have "deep significance to Vashon and all other Islands."
What significance? Twisp wondered.
Keel was an important man, but Twisp had trouble extending that importance beyond Vashon. Occasional grumbles over a decision swept through the Island communities, but there had been few real disturbances since Keel's elevation, and that was some time back. Sure sign that he was a wise man.
The C/P had been asked to comment on Keel's mission, however, and this aroused Twisp's curiosity. What did the old Shipside religion have to do with the Chief Justice's trip? Twisp had always paid only cursory attention to both politics and religion. They were good for an occasional jawing session at the Ace of Cups, but Twisp had always found himself unable to understand what drove people to passionate arguments over "Ship's real purpose."
Who the hell knew what Ship's real purpose had been? There might not have been a purpose!
It was possible, though, that the old religion was gaining new strength among Islanders. It was certainly an unspoken issue between Mermen and Islanders. There was enough polarization already between topside and down under - diplomats arguing about the "functional abilities" characteristic of Pandora's split population. Islanders claimed eminence in agriculture, textiles and meteorology. Mermen always bragged they had the bodies best adapted for going back to the land.
Stupid argument! Twisp always noticed that a group of people - Islander or Merman - got less intelligent with every member added. If humans can master that one, they've got it made, he thought.
Twisp sensed something big was afoot. He felt well
away from it out in the open sea. No Ship here. No C/P. No religious fanatics - just one seasoned agnostic.
Was Ship God? Who the hell cared now? Ship had abandoned them for sure and nothing else of Ship really mattered.
A long, sweeping roller lifted the coracle easily to almost twice the height of the prevailing seas. He glanced around from the brief vantage and saw something large bobbing on the water far ahead. Whatever it was, it lay in the silvery channel of the odd current, which was adding to his forward speed. He kept his attention ahead until he picked up the unknown thing much closer, realizing then that it was several things clumped together. A few minutes later he recognized the objects in the clump.
Dashers!
The squawks lay quiet, though. He glanced at them as he put a hand on the field switch, ready to repel the hunt when they attacked. None of the dashers moved.
That's strange, he thought. Never seen dashers sit still before.
He lifted his head, raising the catchment sag of his cockpit cover, and peered ahead. As the coracle neared the clump, Twisp counted seven adults and a tighter cluster of young dashers in the center of the group. They rode the waves together like a dark chunk of bubbly.
Dead, he realized. A whole hunt of dashers and all of them dead. What killed them?
Twisp eased back the throttle, but still kept a hand on the field switch ... just in case. They were dead, though, not pretending as a ruse to lure him close. The dashers had locked themselves into a protective circle. Each adult linked a rear leg to the adult on either side. They formed a circle with forepaws and fangs facing out, the young inside.
Twisp set a course around them, staring in at the dashers. How long had they been dead? He was tempted to stop and skin at least one. Dasher skins always brought a good price. But it would take precious time and the hides would rob him of space.
They'd stink, too.
He circled a bit closer. Up close now he could see how dashers had adapted so quickly to water. Hollow hairs - millions of trapped air cells that became an efficient flotation system when sea covered all of Pandora's land. Legend said dashers once had feared the water, that the hollow hairs insulated them then against cold nights and oven-hot days among the desert rocks. Because of those hollow hairs, dasher hides made beautiful blankets - light and warm. Again, he was tempted to skin some of them. They were all in pretty good shape. Have to jettison part of his survival cargo if he did, though. What could he spare?
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