"What do you need?" Scudi asked.
"Information," he said. "Recent news recordings for the Merman audience. A survey of Merman jobs would help - which categories still have openings, which are filled to overflowing. I need to know what's really happening down here. And we'll need comparable statistics on the Islander population that's living down under."
"I don't understand," Scudi said.
"I'm told you mathematic the waves," Keel said, looking at Brett. "I want to mathematic Merman society. I cannot assume that I'm dealing with traditional Merman politics. I suspect that even Mermen don't realize they're no longer in the grip of their traditional politics. News is a clue to fluctuations. Jobs, too. They might be a clue to permanent changes and the intent behind those changes."
"My father had a comconsole in his den," Scudi said. "I'm sure I could get some of this through it ... but I'm not sure I understand how you ... mathematic it."
"Judges are sensitized to the assimilation of data," Keel said. "I pride myself on being a good judge. Get me this material, if you can."
Brett suggested, "Maybe we should see other Islanders living down under."
Keel smiled. "Don't trust the paperwork already, huh? We'll save that for later. It could be dangerous right now." Good instincts, he noted.
Scudi pressed her palms to her temples and closed her eyes. "My people don't kill," she said. "We aren't like that."
Keel stared down at the girl, thinking suddenly how similar at the core were Mermen and Islanders.
The sea.
He had never before thought of the sea in quite this way. How must their ancestors have adapted to it? The sea was always there - interminable. It was a thing unending, a source of life and a threat of death. To Scudi and her people, the sea was a silent pressure, whose sounds were always muted by the depths, whose currents moved in great sweeps along the bottom and through the shadows up to light. For the Merman, the world was muted and remote, yet pressing. To an Islander, the sea was noisy and immediate in its demands. It required adjustments in balance and consciousness.
The result was a quickness about Islanders which Mermen found charming. Colorful! Mermen, in contrast, were often studied and careful, measuring out their decisions as though they shaped precious jewels.
Keel glanced from Scudi to Brett and back to Scudi. Brett was taken by her, that much was clear. Was it the infatuation of differences? Was he some exotic mammal to her, or a man? Keel hoped something deeper than adolescent sexual attraction had been ignited there. He did not think himself so crass as to believe that Islander-Merman differences would be solved in the sexual thrashings of the bedroom. But the human race was still alive in these two and he could feel it moving them. The thought was reassuring.
"My father cared for both Islanders and Mermen," Scudi said. "His money made the Search and Rescue system a system."
"Show me his den," Keel said. "I would like to use his comconsole."
She stood and crossed to a passage hatch on the far side of the atrium. "This way."
Keel motioned for Brett to stay behind while he followed Scudi. Perhaps if the young woman were away from the distractions of Brett's presence she might think more clearly - less defensive, more objective.
When Keel and Scudi had gone, Brett turned to the locked hatch. He and Keel and Scudi had been sealed away from whatever the exterior Merman world might reveal. Ale had wanted them to see that world, but others objected. Brett felt this the complete answer to his present isolation.
What would Queets do? he wondered.
Brett felt it unlikely that Queets would stand vacant-eyed in the middle of a strange room and stare stupidly at a locked hatch. Brett crossed to the hatch and ran a finger around the heavy metal molding that framed the exit.
Should've asked Scudi about communications systems and the ways they move freight, he thought. He could remember nothing of the passageways except their sparse population - sparse by crowded Islander standards.
"What are you thinking?"
Scudi's voice from close behind him startled him. Brett hadn't heard her approach over the soft carpet.
"Do you have a map of this place?" he asked.
"Somewhere," she said. "I'll have to look."
"Thanks."
Brett continued to stare at the locked hatch. How had they locked it? He thought of Island quarters, where the simplest slash of a knife would let you through the soft organics separating most rooms. Only the laboratories, Security's quarters and Vata's chamber could be said to have substantial resistance to entry - but that was as much a function of the guards as of the thickness of the walls.
Scudi returned with a thin stack of overlays, on which thick and thin lines with coded symbols indicated the layout of this Merman complex. She put it into Brett's hands as though giving away something of herself. For no reason he could explain, Brett found her gesture poignant.
"Here we are," she said, pointing to a cluster of squares and rectangles marked "RW."
He studied the overlays. This was not the free-flowing, action-dictated environment of an Island, where the idiosyncrasies of organic growth directed the kind of changes that flaunted individuality. Islands were personalized, customized, carved, painted and dyed - shaped to the synergistic needs of support systems and those the systems supported. The schematic in Brett's hands reeked of uniformity - identical rows of cubicles, long straight passages, tubing and channels and access tunnels that ran as straight as a sun's rays through dust. He found it difficult to follow such uniformity, but forced his mind to it.
Scudi said: "I asked the Justice if a volcano might have destroyed Guemes."
Brett raised his attention from the schematic. "What did he say?"
"There were too many people shredded and not burned." She pressed the palms of her hands against her eyelids. "Who could do ... that?"
"Keel's right about one thing," Brett said, "we need to find out who as soon as possible."
He returned his attention to the stack of colloids and its mysterious mazes. All at once he was awash with the simplicity of it. It was clear to him that Mermen must find it impossible to travel any Island, where sheer memory guided most people. He set about memorizing the schematics, with their lift shafts and transport tubes. He closed his eyes and confidently read the map that displayed itself behind his eyelids. Scudi paced the room behind him. Brett opened his eyes.
"Could we escape from here?" he asked, nodding toward the locked hatch.
"I can get us through the hatch," she said. "Where would you go?"
"Topside."
She looked at the hatch, her head shaking a slow "no" from side to side. "When we open the hatch, they will know. An electronic signal."
"What would those men do if we left here together?"
"Bring us back," she said. "Or try. The odds favor them. Nothing moves down under without someone knowing. My father had an efficient organization. That's why he hired men like those." She nodded at the hatch. "My father directed a very large business - a food business. He had much trade with Islanders ..."
Her eyes shifted away from his, then back. She indicated the walls and ceiling. "This was his building, the whole thing. As high as the docking tower, all of it." She defined an area on the schematics with a finger. "This."
Brett drew slightly away from her. She had defined an area as large as some of the smaller Islands. Her father had owned it. He knew that by Merman law she probably inherited it. She was no simple worker in the seas, an apprentice physicist who mathematicked the waves.
Scudi saw the look of withdrawal in his eyes and touched his arm. "I live my own life," she said, "as my mother did. My father and I hardly knew each other."
"Didn't know each other?" Brett felt shocked. He knew himself to be estranged from his own parents, but he had certainly known them.
"Until shortly before he died, he lived at the Nest - a city about ten kilometers away," Scudi said. "In all that time I never saw him." She took a deep breath. "B
efore he died, my father came to our room one night and spoke to my mother. I don't know what they said but she was furious after he left."
Brett thought about what she had said. Her father had owned and controlled enormous wealth - much of Merman society. Topside, such matters as Ryan Wang controlled were the property of families or associations, never of one person. Community was law.
"He controlled much of your Islands' food production," she continued. A flush bloomed across her cheeks. "A lot of it he accomplished through bribery. I know because I listened, and sometimes when he was gone I used his comconsole."
"What is this place, the Nest?" Brett asked.
"It is a city that has a high Islander population. It was the site of the first settlement after the Clone Wars. You know of this?"
"Yes," he said. "One way or another, we all came from there."
Ward Keel, standing in the shadows of the open passage from Ryan Wang's den, had been listening to this exchange for several minutes. He shuddered, wondering whether he should interrupt and demand some answers of this young woman. The anguish in her voice held Keel in place.
"Did those Islanders in the Nest work for your father?" Keel asked.
She didn't turn away from Brett to answer. "Some of them. But no Islander has any high position on anything. They are controlled by a government agency. I think Ambassador Ale is in charge of it."
"It seems to me that an Islander should head an agency that deals with Islanders," Brett said.
"She and my father were to be married," Scudi said. "A political matter between the two families ... a lot of Merman history that isn't important now."
"Your father and the ambassador - that would have linked the powers of the government and the food supply under one blanket," Brett said. The insight came so quickly that it startled him.
"That's all ancient history," Scudi said. "She'll probably marry GeLaar Gallow now." Her words came out with an underlying misery that held Brett speechless. He could see the dark confusion in her eyes, the frustration of being a piece in some unruled game.
In the shadows of the passage, Ward Keel nodded to himself. He had shuffled back from Wang's den with a feeling of helpless anger. It was all there for the discerning eye - the shifts of control, the quiet and remorseless accumulation of power in a few hands, an increase in local identity. A term from the Histories kept rattling in his memory: Nationalization. Why did it give him such a feeling of loss?
The land is being restored.
The good life is coming.
This is why Ship gave Pandora to us.
To us - to Mermen - not to Islanders.
Keel's throat pained him when he tried to swallow. The kelp project lay at the base of it all, and that had gone too far to be lost or slowed. It was being taken over, instead. Justifications for the project could not be denied. The late Ryan Wang's comconsole was full of those justifications: Without the kelp the suns would continue to fatigue the crust of Pandora, constant earthquakes and volcanics would ravage them as they had all those generations back.
Lava built up undersea plateaus along fault lines. Mermen were taking advantage of this for their project. The last wave-wall had been a consequence of a volcanic upheaval, not the gravitational swings that inflicted themselves on Pandora's seas.
Brett was speaking: "I would like to see the Nest and the Islanders there. Maybe that's where we should go."
Out of the mouths of babes, Keel thought.
Scudi shook her head in negation. "They would find us there easily. Security there is not like here - there are badges, papers ..."
"Then we should run topside," Brett said. "The Justice is right. He wants us to tell the Islanders what's happening down here."
"And what is happening?" she asked.
Keel stepped out of the shadows, speaking as he moved: "Pandora is being changed - physically, politically, socially. That's what's happening. The old life will not be possible, topside or down under. I think Scudi's father had a dream of great things, the transformation of Pandora, but someone else has taken it over and is making it a nightmare."
Keel stopped, facing the two young people. They stared back at him, aghast.
Can they feel it? Keel wondered.
Runaway greed was working to seize control of this new Pandora.
Scudi jabbed a finger at the schematic, which Brett still held. "The Launch Base and Outpost Twenty-two," she said. "Here! They are near Vashon's current drift. The Island will be at least a full day past this point by now but ..."
"What're you suggesting?" Keel asked.
"I think I can get us to Outpost Twenty-two," she said. "I've worked there. From the outpost, I could compute Vashon's exact position."
Keel looked at the chart in Brett's hands. A surge of homesickness surged through the Justice. To be in his own quarters ... Joy near at hand to care for him. He was going to die soon ... how much better to die in familiar surroundings. As quickly as it came, the feeling was suppressed. Escape? He did not have the energy, the swiftness. He could only hold these young people back. But he saw the eagerness in Scudi and the way Brett picked up on it. They might just do it. The Islands had to be told what was happening.
"Here is what we will do," Keel said. "And this is the message you will carry."
***
Perseverance furthers.
- I Ching, Shiprecords
A flock of wild squawks came flying past the coracles, their wings whistling in the dull gray light of morning. Twisp turned his head to follow the birds' path. They landed about fifty meters ahead of him.
Bushka had sat up at the sudden sound, fear obvious in his face.
"Just squawks," Twisp said.
"Oh." Bushka subsided with his back against the cuddy.
"If we feed 'em, they'll follow us," Twisp said. "I've never seen 'em this far from an Island."
"We're near the base," Bushka said.
As they approached the swimming flock, Twisp tipped some of his garbage over the side. The birds came scrambling for the handout. The smaller ones churned their legs so fast they skipped across the water.
It was the birds' eyes that interested him, he decided. There was living presence in those eyes you never saw in the eyes of sea creatures. Squawk eyes looked back at you with something of the human world in them.
Bushka moved up and sat on the cuddy top to watch the birds and the horizon ahead of them. Where is that damned Launch Base? The motions of the birds kept attracting his attention. Twisp had said the squawks acted out of an ancient instinct. Probably true. Instinct! How long did it take to extinguish instinct? Or develop it? Which way were humans going? How strongly were they driven by such inner forces? Historian questions thronged his mind.
"That dull-looking squawk is a female," Bushka said, pointing to the wild flock. "I wonder why the males are so much more colorful?"
"Has to be some survival in it," Twisp said. He looked at the flock swimming beside the coracle, their eyes alert for another handout. "That's a female, all right." A scowl settled over his face. "One thing you can say for that hen squawk: she'll never ask a surgeon to make her normal!"
Bushka heard the bitterness and sensed the old familiar Islander story. It was getting to be ever more common these days: A lover had surgery to appear Merman-normal, then pressured the partner to do the same. A lot of angry fights resulted.
"Sounds like you got burned," Bushka said.
"I was crisped and charred," Twisp said. "Have to admit it was fun at first ..." He hesitated, then: "... but I hoped it would be more than fun, something more permanent." He shook his head.
Bushka yawned and stretched. The wild flock took his movement as a threat and scattered in a flurry of splashes and loud cries.
Twisp stared toward the wild birds, but his eyes were not focused on them. "Her name's Rebeccah," he said. "She really liked my arms around her. Never complained about how long they were until -" He broke off in sudden embarrassment.
"She chose sur
gical correction?" Bushka prompted.
"Yeah." Twisp swallowed. Now what set me talking about Rebeccah to this stranger? Am I that lonesome? She had liked to feed the squawks at rimside every evening. He had enjoyed those evenings more than he could tell, and remembered details in a flood that he shut off as soon as it started.
Bushka was staring at his own hands. "She dumped you after the surgery?"
"Dumped me? Naw." Twisp sighed. "That would've been easy. I know I'd always feel like some kind of freak around her afterwards. No Mute can afford to feel that way, ever. It's why a lot of us more obvious types shy away from the Mermen. It's the stares and the way we think of ourselves then - our own eyes looking back from the mirror."
"Where is she now?" Bushka asked.
"Vashon," Twisp said. "Someplace close to Center, I'd guess. That's one thing good looks can get you on Vashon. I'd bet big money she's down there where the rich and powerful live. Her job was preparing people psychologically for surgical correction - she was sort of a living model of how life would be if they went through everything right."
"She made the choice, and it worked for her."
"If you talk about something like that long enough it becomes an obsession. She used to say: 'Changing some bodies is easy. A good surgeon knows just where to work. Minds are a little tougher.' I think she didn't really listen to herself."
Bushka looked at Twisp's long arms, a sudden insight flooding his mind.
Twisp saw the direction of Bushka's gaze and nodded. "That's right," he said. "She wanted me to get my arms fixed. She didn't understand, not even with all of her psychological crap behind her. I wasn't afraid of the knife or any of that eelshit. It was that my body would be a lie, and I can't stand liars."
This is no ordinary fisherman, Bushka thought.
"I finally figured it out about her," Twisp said. "A little too much boo and she started with this pitch for all of us to be 'as normal as possible.' Like you, Bushka."
"I don't feel that way."
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