"All I know is it's organic and it works by compression," Keel said.
"Organic? Our sub has cutters and burners!" Gallow clearly did not believe him.
"It's like a net," Keel said, warming to his fiction. "Each surviving part can behave like the whole. And once it's inside your defenses where your cutters and burners can't reach it ..." Keel shrugged.
"Why would you make such a thing?" Gallow asked.
"Our Security people determined that we were hopelessly vulnerable to attack from below. Something had to be done. And we were right. Look what happened to Guemes. What almost happened to Vashon."
"Yes, look what happened to Guemes," Gallow said, smiling.
Monsters, Keel thought.
"Tso must've done some damage," Nakano said. "That's why Vashon's grounded."
Keel tried to speak past a pain in his throat. "Grounded?" His voice was a croak.
"On the bottom and abandoning its downcenter," Gallow said, showing obvious relish in his words. He reached out and tapped Nakano's arm. "Keep our guest company. I will go out and prepare to commune with Tso's kelp-spirit. See if the Mute here can tell us any way to improve our contact with the kelp."
Keel took a deep breath. His improvisation about a Vashon defense weapon had been accepted. It would make these monsters more cautious. It would give Vashon a breathing space - if the Island survived grounding. He took heart from the fact that Vashon had survived groundings in the distant past. There would be damage, though, and economic losses. Ballast pumps would be working frantically to lift and compress the bottom sections of the Island. Heavy equipment would be detached in its own floaters. Mermen would be called in for assistance.
Mermen! Would friends of these vermin be among those summoned for help? It could take days for Vashon to lift its enormous bulk and refloat. If no storm or wavewall came ...
I have to escape, Keel thought. My people have to know what I've learned. They need me.
Gallow had moved to the hatch, looking back thoughtfully at Nakano and the captive. He opened the hatch and stood there a moment, then: "Nakano, he has not given us every detail of their weapon. He has not told us how he communes with the kelp. There are things of value in his head. If he does not reveal them willingly, we will have to feed him to the kelp and hope to recover the information that way."
Nakano nodded, not looking at Gallow.
Gallow let himself out and sealed the hatch behind him.
"I can't protect you from him if he gets angry, Mr. Justice," Nakano said. His voice was casual, even friendly. "You had better sit down and tell me what you know. Would you like some more water? Sorry we don't have any boo, that would make things easier - more civilized."
Keel moved painfully to the table where Gallow had sat and dropped into the chair. It was still warm.
What a strange pair, he thought.
Nakano brought him a beaker of water. Keel sipped slowly, savoring the coolness.
It was almost as though these two exchanged personalities. Keel realized then that Nakano and Gallow were playing the old Security game with him - one guard always browbeat a prisoner while the other came on as a friend, sometimes pretending to protect the prisoner from the attacker.
"Tell me about the weapon," Nakano said.
"The ropes are thicker than full-grown kelp," Keel said. And he recalled underwater views of the kelp - strands thicker than a human torso swaying in the currents.
"A burner would still cut them," Nakano said.
"Ah, but the fibers have some way of reattaching to each other when they touch. Cut it apart and put the cut ends together, it's as though there were not cut."
Nakano grimaced. "How? How is it done?"
"I don't know. They talk about fibrous hooks."
"Now you understand," Nakano said, "why Mutes must go."
"What have we done except protect ourselves?" Keel demanded. "If that sub hadn't been out to sink the Island, it wouldn't have been harmed." Even as he spoke he wondered again about the damaged sub, wishing he could see and examine it. What had really done it? Crushed? Truly crushed or damaged by the bottom?
"Tell me how you commune with kelp," Nakano said.
"We ... just touch it."
"And?"
Keel swallowed. He remembered the old stories, the remnant history, especially the accounts by Shadow Panille's ancestor.
"It's like daydreaming ... almost," Keel said. "You hear voices."
That much the old accounts had said.
"Specific voices?" Nakano demanded.
"Sometimes," Keel lied.
"How do you contact the specific dead and gain access to what they knew when alive?"
Keel shrugged, thinking hard. His mind had never worked this fast, absorbing, correlating. Ship! What a discovery! He thought about the countless Islander dead consigned to the sea by mourning relatives. How many of those had been absorbed by the kelp?
"So the kelp doesn't respond to you any better than it does to us," Nakano said.
"I fear not," Keel agreed.
"Kelp has a mind of its own," Nakano said. "I've said that all along."
Keel thought then about the enormous undersea gardens of kelp, forests of gigantic, ropy strands reaching upward toward the suns. He had seen holos of Mermen swimming through those green forests, flashing silvery figures among the fish and fronds. But no Merman had ever before reported kelp responding in the way it had done for the first humans on Pandora. This must mean full sentience was returning. It must be an avalanche of consciousness sweeping through the sea! Mermen thought they controlled the kelp and, through this, controlled the currents.
What if ...
Keel felt his heartbeat stutter.
A Merman sub had been crushed. He imagined those gigantic strands of kelp wrapped around the sub's hard surface. Cutters and burners flashed in his imagination. And the kelp writhed, sending out its messages of self-protection. What if the kelp had learned to kill?
"Where are we right now?" Keel asked.
"Near the Launch Base. There's no harm in your knowing; you can't escape."
Keel let his body feel the lift and fall of the craft around him. The light through the louvered vents had begun to dim. Nightfall? The foil rode on extremely calm seas, for which he was thankful. Vashon needed calm seas just now.
Near the Launch Base, Nakano says. How near? But even a short swim was impossible for this old body with its head supported on a prosthetic brace. He was a cripple in this environment. A Mute. No wonder these monsters sneered at him.
The foil's motion became even steadier and the light dimmer. Nakano flipped a switch, bringing soft yellow illumination into the room from lamps near the ceiling.
"We are going down to commune with the kelp," Nakano said. "We are in old kelp here, the kind that's most apt to respond to us."
Keel thought about this craft sinking into a forest of kelp. Whatever had happened to Tso the kelp now knew. How would the kelp use that knowledge?
I know what I would do with such people in my power, Keel thought. I'd squash them. They are lethal deviants.
If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.
- William Blake, Shiprecords
Twisp considered abandoning the tow coracle with its supplies. A second foil had passed nearby without slowing down and he was worried.
We could pick up a few more knots that way, he thought. It galled him that the foils, already lost below the horizon, would be at Vashon by nightfall. The first one probably was arriving right now. He had to plod along in this damned creeping coracle!
He laughed at his own frustration. It relaxed him to laugh, even if it was just his usual short bark. Vashon might be aground, but the Island had touched bottom before, and in perilously more dangerous weather. Pandora had subsided into a calmer phase; his fisherman's instincts felt this. It had to do with the looping interrelationship of the two suns, distance from primaries and, just possibly, the kelp. Perhaps the kelp had finally reached an influential population density. Certainly, kelp fronds were more evident on the surface and the kelp's nursery effect showed itself in the recent fish population boom.
Winters on the open sea were easier every year. The familiar drone of the little engine, the balmy warmth under scattered clouds and the coracle's rhythmic wallow toward Vashon reminded Twisp that he would get there in his own good time.
And when I do, I'll straighten out this Bushka's story.
Vashon was not a community to take lightly. There was influence there, power and money.
And Vata, he thought. Yes, we have Vata. Twisp began to see the presence of Vata on his home Island in a new light. She was more than a link with humanity's Pandoran past. Living evidence that a myth had substance - that was what Vata and her satellite Duque represented.
"That last foil must've seen us," Bushka said. "Our position is known."
"You really think they'll alert your Green Dashers?" Twisp asked.
"Gallow has friends in high places," Bushka growled. He glanced significantly at Scudi, who was sitting back against a thwart, looking at Brett with a quizzical expression. Brett lay curled up, asleep.
"We don't know what they're saying on the radio," Bushka said. He looked at the device near Twisp's knee. When Twisp didn't respond, Bushka closed his eyes.
Scudi, shifting her attention from one Islander to the other during this exchange, watched a deep listlessness come over Bushka. The man gave up so easily! What a contrast with Brett.
Scudi thought hard about the escape from Gallow, paddling and sailing, homing on the locator beam from the coracle's transmitter. They had inflated only one of the small rafts from the survival kits, holding the other in reserve. Even this they had delayed until they were more than a kilometer from the foil.
It had been heavy going at first in the thick glut of kelp. The two of them, linked by a single belt line, tended to tangle in the surface fronds. Scudi had led the first stage of their flight, holding them hydrostatically balanced with their dive suit controls just under the surface. When they came up for air it was always beneath a cover of kelp and each time they expected to hear sounds of search and pursuit.
Once, they heard the foil start up, but it shut down immediately. Under the protective cover of a kelp frond, Brett whispered to Scudi: "They don't dare chase after us right now. Capturing that other foil is too important to them."
"The doctor?"
"Something more important than that, I think."
"What?"
"I don't know," Brett whispered. "Let's keep going. We have to be out of sight of them by daybreak."
"I keep worrying that we'll run into dashers."
"I'm keeping a grenade handy. They like to sleep in the kelp. We'll have to dive for it if we surprise one."
"I wish I could see better."
Brett took her hand and they moved through the water as silently as possible.
As they brushed through the thick fronds in their maddeningly slow passage, an odd sense of calm came over both of them. They began to feel almost invulnerable to dashers - any variety, green or black. Under the water, touching the kelp, they moved to deep and stately music, something not quite heard but recognized. When they surfaced for air, the world became different, another reality. The air felt clean and satisfying.
Breaking through a profound shyness, they told each other about this feeling. They both imagined telling the other and the telling came out just as they had imagined. They thought they could go on forever this way, that nothing could harm them.
At one break for air, Brett could no longer contain the sense of an alien experience. He put his mouth close to Scudi's ear. "Something's happening down there."
Both of them had grown up on stories of the old kelp days, the mystical detritus of their history, and each suspected what the other was thinking now. Neither of them found it easy to put into words.
Scudi looked back at the foil, which lay in a low outline under its anchor lights. It still seemed much too close. The foil itself appeared so innocent, its hatch a wink against the night.
"You hear me, Scudi?" Brett whispered. "Something's happening to us when we're under water." When she remained silent he said, "They say when you're under water sometimes it's like a narcotic."
Scudi knew what he meant. Cold and the deeps could do things to your body that you did not notice until your mind started to come apart at the dreams. But this was no depth narcosis. And the dive suits kept them warm. This was something else and, here on the surface, knowing they should not delay long, she felt suddenly terrified.
"I'm scared," she whispered, staring at the foil.
"We'll get away from them," Brett said, seeing the direction of her gaze. "See? They're not chasing after us."
"They have a sub."
"The sub couldn't go fast in kelp. They'd have to cut their way through." He pulled himself closer to her along their belt line. "But that's not what's scaring you."
Scudi didn't say anything, she floated on her back under a swatch of kelp, conscious of a heavy iodine smell from the leaves. The weight of the kelp frond on her head was like an old, kindly hand. She knew they should be going. Daylight must not find them in sight of the foil. Her hand on the concealing kelp, she turned and a bit of the kelp came away in her grip. Immediately, she was thrust into the euphoria she had felt underwater. There was wind all around. A sea bird she had never seen shrieked somewhere in perfect time with the waves. The hypnotic effect unfocused her eyes, then centered them on a human being - prone and very old. An old woman. The old woman existed in a glowing space without any sense of world around her. The vision moved closer and Scudi tried to relax an intense pressure in her stomach. Monotony of waves and the shrieking bird helped, but the vision would not fade.
The old, old woman lay on her back in the blur of light. Alone ... breathing. Scudi noticed a clump of white hair jutting from a mole near the old woman's left ear. The eyes were closed. The old woman did not appear to be a mutant. Her skin was dark and heavily wrinkled. It gave off a greenish cast like the beginning patina on a piece of old brass.
Abruptly, the woman sat up. Her eyes remained closed but she opened her mouth to say something. The old lips moved slow as cold oil. Scudi watched the play of wrinkles released across the face by movement. The woman spoke, but there was no sound. Scudi strained to hear, pressing close to the wrinkled lips.
The vision dissolved and Scudi found herself coughing, retching, held across her floating survival kit by strong hands.
"Scudi!" It was Brett's voice in a loud whisper close to her ear. "Scudi! What's happening? You started to drown. You just sank under the water and ..."
She coughed up warm water and took in a choking breath.
"You just started sinking," Brett said. He was struggling to balance her on the kit. She pushed herself across its rasping surface and slipped back into the water, holding the kit by one hand. She saw immediately what Brett had done - set the kit's hydrostatic controls for surface and used it as a platform to support her.
"It was like you just went to sleep," Brett said. The worry in his voice seemed amusing to her, but she restrained a laugh. Didn't he know yet?
Brett glanced back at the foil about a kilometer away. Had they heard?
"Kelp," Scudi choked. Her throat hurt when she spoke.
"What about it? Did you get tangled?"
"The kelp ... in my mind," she said. And she remembered that old face, the open mouth like a black tunnel into a strange mind.
Slowly, hesitantly, she described her experience.
"We've got to get out of here," Brett said. "It can take over your mind."
"It wasn't trying to hurt me," she said. "It was trying to tell me something."
"What?"
"I don't know. Maybe it didn't have the right words."
"How do you know it wasn't trying to hurt you? You almost drowned."
"You panicked," she said.
"I was afraid you were drowning!"
"It let go of me when you panicked."
"How do you know?"
"I ... just ... know." Without waiting for more argument, she reset her survival kit's controls, pulled it under and began swimming away from the foil.
Brett, attached to Scudi by the belt line, was forced to follow, towing his own kit and sputtering.
Much later, on the coracle with Twisp and Bushka, Scudi debated recounting the kelp experience. It was late morning now. Still no sign of Vashon on the horizon. Brett and Bushka had fallen asleep. Before they had reached the coracle, Brett had warned her to say nothing of the kelp experience to Twisp, but she felt that this time Brett could be wrong.
"Twisp will think we're crazy as shit pumpers!" Brett had insisted. "Kelp trying to talk to you!"
It really happened, Scudi told herself. She looked from the sleeping figure of Brett to Twisp at the coracle's tiller. The kelp tried to talk to me ... and it did talk!
Brett came abruptly awake as Scudi shifted her position. She leaned back now with her elbows over the thwart. He looked up and met her eyes, realizing immediately what she had been thinking.
About the kelp!
He sat up and looked around at an empty horizon. The wind had picked up and there was spray in the air, scudding off the wavetops. Twisp swayed with a rhythm that marked both the pitch of the waves and the throb of the engine. The long-armed fisherman stared off across the water ahead of him the way he always did when they were chugging along in the fish runs. Bushka remained asleep near the bow cuddy.
Scudi met Brett's gaze.
"I wonder if they got their doctor," Brett said.
Scudi nodded. "I wonder why they needed one. Nearly everyone down under is trained as a med-tech."
"It was something pretty bad," Brett said. "Had to be."
Twisp shifted his position. He did not look at any of them and said, "You got doctors to spare down under."
Brett knew what the older man meant. Twisp had spoken of it bitterly many times, as had many Islanders. Topside technology, predominantly organic, meant that most topside biologists who might otherwise go into medicine were lured by higher-status maintenance positions in the cash business of the Islands' bioengineering labs. It was an ironic twist that had them keeping an Island itself fit while the Islanders made do with a handful of med-techs and a family shaman.
Bushka sat up, awakened by their voices, and immediately returned to his insistent fear. "Gallow will have that sub after us!"
"We'll be at Vashon by tomorrow," Twisp said.
"You think you can get away from Gallow?" Bushka snorted.
"You sound like you want him to catch us," Twisp said. He pointed ahead. "We'll be in kelp pretty soon. A sub would think twice about going in there."
"They're not Islander subs," Bushka reminded him. "These have burners and cutters." He sat back with a sullen expression.
Brett stood, one hand steadying him against a thwart. He stared ahead where Twisp had pointed. Still no sign of Vashon, but the water about a kilometer ahead gave off the dark, oily slackness of a heavy kelp bed. He sank back onto his haunches, still steadying himself against the top roll of the boat.
Kelp.
He and Scudi had inflated one of the rafts while still in the kelp bed and perilously close to the foil. Brett had been surprised how easily a raft glided over the big fronds. The kelp did not drag at the raft the way it did on a coracle's hull. The raft slid across the fronds with only the barest whisper of a hiss. But the stubby paddles, fitted into sleeve pockets of their dive suits, splashed water into the raft. And the paddles tended to pick up torn pieces of kelp.
Remembering, Brett thought: It happened. No one will believe us but it happened.
Even in memory, the experience remained frightening. He had touched a piece torn from the kelp. Immediately, he had heard people talking. Voices in many pitches and dialects had blended into the hiss of the raft's passage. He had known at once that this was not a dream or hallucination. He was hearing snatches of real conversation.
As he touched the torn bits of kelp in the night, Brett had felt it trying to reach up to him, seeking his hands on the paddles.
Scudi Scudi Scudi Brett Brett Brett
The names echoed in his mind with a feeling of music, a strange inflection but the clearest tones he had ever heard - undistorted by air or wind or the music-devouring dampers of an Island's organic walls.
A wind had come up then and they had raised the raft's crude sail. Scudding across the kelp's surface, huddled close in the stern, they had held a paddle between them as a rudder. Scudi had watched the little receiver that aimed them toward Twisp's transmitter.
Once, Scudi had looked up at a bright star low on the horizon. She pointed at it. "See?"
Brett looked up to a star that he had known from his first awareness, out onto a Vashon terrace with his parents on a clear warm night. He had thought of it as "the fat star."
"Little Double," Scudi said. "It's very close to our sunrise point."
"When it's that low on the horizon, you can see the hyb tanks make a pass there." He pointed to the horizon directly opposite the position of the fat star. "Twisp taught me that."
Scudi chuckled, snuggling close to him for warmth. "My mother said Little Double was far off across the horizon to the north when she was young. It's another binary system, you know. From Little Double we could see both of our suns clearly."
"To them, we're probably the fat star," he said.
Scudi was quiet for a time, then: "Why won't you talk about the kelp?"
"What's to talk about?" Brett heard his own voice, brittle and unnatural.
"It called our names," Scudi said. She gently pulled a bit of leaf from the back of her left hand.
Brett swallowed hard. His tongue felt dry and thick.
"It did," she said. "I have trailed my hand through it many times. I get images - pictures like holos or dreams. They are symbols and if I think on them I learn something."
"You mean you still wanted to touch it, even after it almost drowned you?"
"You're wrong about the kelp," Scudi said. "I'm speaking of the times before, when I worked at sea. I have learned from the kelp ..."
"I thought you said you taught the kelp."
"But the kelp helps me, too. That is why I have such good luck when I mathematic the waves. But now the kelp is learning words."
"What does it say to you?"
"My name and your name." She dipped a hand over the side and dragged it across a huge vine. "It says you love me, Brett."
"That's crazy."
"That you love me?"
"No ... that it knows. You know what I mean."
"Then it's true."
"Scudi ..." He swallowed. "It's obvious, huh?"