She nodded. "Don't worry. I love you, too."

He felt a hot flush of exuberance plunge out of his cheeks.

"And the kelp knows that, too," she said.

Later, as Brett squatted in the coracle watching the distance to another kelp bed grow shorter and shorter, he heard Scudi's words over and over in his memory: "The kelp knows ... the kelp knows ..." The memory was like the gentle rise and fall of the seas beneath the wallowing boat.

It called our names, he thought. Admitting this did not help. It could be calling us to be its dinner.

He turned his thoughts to something else Scudi had said in the raft: "I like it that our bodies find comfort with each other."

A very practical woman. No giving in to the demands of sex, because that could complicate their lives. She did not hesitate to admit that she wanted him, though, and anticipation counted for something. Brett sensed the strength in her as he looked across the coracle to where she rested with both elbows hooked over a thwart.

"We're in the kelp," she said. She dropped her left hand over the side. Brett wished they could explain what she was doing, but he felt sure the others would think the explanation proof of insanity.

"Would you look at that!" Twisp said. He nodded toward something ahead of them.

Brett stood up and looked. A wide lane had opened through the kelp, the fronds spreading wide, then completely aside, still spreading farther ahead. He felt the water boil under them and the two coracles surged forward.

"It's a current going our way," Twisp said, astonishment in his voice.

"Merman Current Control," Bushka said. "See! They know where we are. They're delivering us someplace."

"That's right," Twisp said. "Directly toward Vashon."

Scudi straightened and brought her dripping hand out of the water. She bent forward and moved across the coracle, tipping it.

"Trim ship!" Twisp snapped.

She hesitated. "The kelp," she said. "It's helping us. This isn't Current Control at all."

"How do you know?" Twisp asked.

"It ... the kelp talks to me."

Now she's done it, Brett thought.

Bushka let out a loud snort of laughter.

Twisp, however, stared at her silently for a moment, then: "Tell me more."

"I have shared images with the kelp for a long time," she said. "At least three years since I first noticed. Now it speaks words in my head. To Brett, too. The kelp called his name."

Twisp looked at Brett, who cleared his throat and said, "Well, that's how it seemed."

"Our ancestors claimed the kelp was sentient," Twisp said. "Even Jesus Lewis said it. 'The kelp is a community mind.' You're-a historian, Bushka, you should know all this."

"Our ancestors said a lot of crazy things!"

"There's always a reason," Twisp said. He nodded at the lane through the kelp. "Explain that."

"Current Control. The girl's wrong."

"Put your hand over the side," Scudi said. "Touch the kelp as we pass."

"Sure," Bushka said. "Use your hand for bait. Who knows what you might catch?"

Twisp merely leveled a cold stare at Bushka, then steered the coracle close to the right side of the open lane and dipped his long right arm over the side. Presently, a look of amazement came over his face. The expression hardened.

"Ship save us," he muttered, but he did not withdraw his hand.

"What is it?" Brett asked. He swallowed and thought about the sensation of kelp contact. Could he put his hand over the side and renew that connection? The idea both attracted and repelled him. He no longer doubted a central reality to the night's experience, but the intent of the kelp could not be accepted without question.

Scudi almost drowned. That is a fact.

"There's a sub coming behind us," Twisp said.

All of them peered back along their course but the surface gave no sign of what might be under it.

"They have us on their locator," Twisp said, "and they mean to sink us."

Scudi turned around and dipped both hands into the passing kelp.

"Help us," she whispered. "If you know what help is."

Bushka sat silent, pale-faced and shuddering at the entrance to the tiny cuddy in the bow. "It's Gallow," he said. "I told you."

With a slow stateliness the channel ahead of them began to close. A passage opened to the left. Current surged into it, swinging the coracles wide. The towed supply boat pulled far to the right. Twisp fought the tiller to center his craft in the new channel.

"The channel's closing behind us," Brett said.

"The kelp is helping us," Scudi said. "It is."

Bushka opened his mouth and closed it without speaking. All of them turned to stare where he pointed. A black conning tower broke surface, tipped and sank from sight. Kelp curled over the scene. Giant bubbles began breaking the surface, thick rainbows of air and oil. Small waves surged under the boats, forcing the four people in the coracle to hold on to the rimlines.

As quickly as it had started, the turbulence subsided. The coracles continued their agitated rocking. Water splashed across the gunwales. This, too, quieted.

"It was the kelp," Scudi said. "The sub cut into the kelp trying to follow us."

Twisp nodded to where the kelp still curled among a few small bubbles. He gripped the tiller with both hands, guiding them through a channel that curved open ahead of them, once more aiming toward Vashon. "The kelp did that?"

"It clogged the sub's intakes," Scudi said. "When the crew tried to blow ballast and surface, the kelp jammed vines into the ballast ports. When the crew tried to get out, the kelp tore them apart and crushed the sub." She jerked her hands out of the water, breaking contact with the kelp.

"I warned you it was dangerous," Brett said.

A stricken look on her face, Scudi nodded. "It's finally learned to kill."

***

Hasn't the water of sleep dissolved our being?
- Gaston Bachelard, "The Poetics of Reverie," from The Handbook of the Chaplain/Psychiatrist

Duque woke to a nudge, a deliberate jostling intended to do the waking. He had been prodded, pricked, rubbed, shocked, bled and rocked in his liquid cradle with the great Vata, but this was the first time since childhood that he had been nudged. What surprised him was that it was Vata who did it.

You're awake! he thought, but there was no answer. He felt a focus, a channeling of her presence such as he had never felt before. For this he roused himself, twisted an arm up to his face and fisted his good eye open.

That brought the watchers to the Vata Pool on the double. What he saw with his one eye was worth calling those fools poolside. One of Vata's huge brown eyes, her left one, was pressed nearly to his own. It was open. Duque swallowed hard. He was sure she could see him.

Vata? He tried it aloud: "Vata?"

The growing crowd gasped, and Duque knew that the C/P would push her way to them soon.

He felt something breeze through his consciousness like a heavy sigh. It was a wind with hidden thoughts in it. But he felt them. Something big, waiting.

Duque was shocked. He had long been used to the mind-rocking power Vata could hurl between his eyes. This was the way she threw tantrums, by jamming whatever frustrated her right into his head. Now, she sent him a vision of the C/P, naked, dancing in front of a mirror. For some time now Vata had kept the naked female thoughts out of his head. Anger! Vata contained anger. He blocked out the anger and riveted his inner eye on the supple, firm-breasted Chaplain/Psychiatrist who thrust her pale hips again and again at the mirror. The tank was unbearably warm.

Simone Rocksack's favorite robe lay in a trampled blue heap at her feet. Everything in Duque strained to touch this vision, this body of raw beauty that the C/P locked away from the world.

That was when he saw the hands. A pair of large, pale hands snaked around her from behind and he watched in the mirror as they cupped her swaying breasts while she moved in a rhythmic step-slide, step-slide. It was a man, a large man, and he continued his intense caress of her body until she slowed her dance and stopped, quivering, while his lips brushed her shoulders and breasts, her abdomen, those glistening thighs. The man's shock of blonde hair was magnet to her fingers. Her hands pulled him close, closer, and they began to make love with him standing behind her, facing the mirror.

The vision ended with an angry white flash and the name Gallow blared across his consciousness. What he saw when he refocused on Vata's eye was danger.

"Danger," he muttered. "Gallow danger. Simone, Simone."

Vata's great brown eye closed and Duque felt relieved of a massive, clawlike grip that had held his guts tight. He lay back, breathing deeply, and listened as the knot of watchers grew and the babble of their speculations lulled him back to sleep.

When the C/P came to poolside there was nothing visible of the strange thing the watchers reported.

***

To survive Pandora's time of madness, we were forced to go mad.
- Iz Bushka, The Physics of Political Expression

Brett woke at dawn, feeling the coracle riding gently under him. Scudi lay curled against his side. Twisp sat at his usual place by the tiller but the boat chugged along on autopilot. Brett could see the little red traveler lights blinking across the face of the receiver, keeping them on course to Vashon.

Scudi sniffed in her sleep. A light tarp kept the damp night air from both of them. Brett inhaled a deep breath through his nose and faced the fact that he would never again accept the stench that surrounded every place Islanders lived. He had experienced the Mermen's filtered air. Now, the fish odors, the thick miasma from Twisp's body, all of it forced Brett to think even more deeply about how his life had been changed.

I smelled like that, he thought. It's a good thing Scudi met me in the water.

Mermen joked about Islander stink, he knew. And Islanders returning topside spoke longingly of the sweet air down under.

Scudi had said nothing on meeting Twisp, nor on boarding the coracle. But the distaste on her face had been evident. She had tried to hide it for his sake, he knew, but the reaction was unmistakable.

Brett felt guilty about his sudden embarrassment.

You shouldn't be embarrassed by your friends.

The first long shaft of dawn washed across the coracle, a lazy pink.

Brett sat up.

Twisp, his voice low and muffled at the stern, said, "Take the watch, kid. I'll need a few winks."

"Right."

Brett whispered to keep from waking Scudi. She lay curled up close, her back and hips fitting into the socket of his body as if they were built together. One hand lay flung backward around Brett's waist. He gently disengaged her light grip.

Looking up at the clear sky, Brett thought, It's going to be a hot one. He slid out from beneath the tarp and felt the damp bow spray wet his hair and face.

Brett brushed a thick lock of hair from his eyes and crept aft to take the tiller.

"Gonna be a hot one," Twisp said. Brett smiled at the coincidence. They thought alike now, no question about it. He scanned the horizon. The boats still glided down a narrow avenue of current between the hedging kelp.

"Aren't we going kinda slow?" Brett asked.

"Eelcells are getting low," Twisp said. He gestured with a foot at the telltale pink of discharge on the cellpack set into the deck. "Gonna have to stop and charge them or raise sail."

Brett wet a finger in his mouth and raised it to the air. There was only the coolness of their own passage - flat calm everywhere he looked, and gently undulating kelp fronds as far as the eye could see.

"We should be raising Vashon pretty soon," Twisp said. "I caught the Seabird program while you were asleep. Everything's going well, so they say."

"I thought you wanted some shut-eye," Brett said.

"Changed my mind. I wanta see Vashon first. 'Sides, I miss all the times we'd just sit up and shoot the shit. I've just been dozing and thinking here since I relieved you at midnight."

"And listening to the radio," Brett said. He indicated the half-earphone jacked into the receiver.

"Real interesting, what they had to say," Twisp said. He kept his voice low, his attention on the mound that was the sleeping figure of Bushka.

"Things are going well," Brett prompted.

"Seabird says Vashon is in sight of land that is well out of the water. He describes black cliffs. High cliffs and waves foaming white at the base. People could live there, he says."

Brett tried to visualize this.

Cliff was a word Brett had heard rarely. "How could we get people and supplies up the cliff?" Brett asked. "And what happens if the sea rises again?"

"Way I see it, you'd have to be part bird to live there," Twisp agreed. "If you needed the sea. And fresh water might be scarce."

"LTA's might help."

"Maybe catch basins for the rain," Twisp mused. "But the big problem they're worried about is nerve runners."

In the bow, Bushka lifted himself out of his tarp and stared aft at Brett and Twisp.

Brett ignored the man. Nerve runners! He knew them only from the scant early holos and the histories from before the dark times of the rising sea and the death of the kelp.

"Once there's open land, there'll be nerve runners," Twisp said. "That's what the experts are saying."

"You pay for everything," Bushka said. He patted the back of his open hand against his mouth, yawning widely.

Something had changed in Bushka, Brett realized. When he accepted that his story about Guemes was believed, Bushka had become a tragicomic figure instead of a villain.

Did he change or is it just that we're seeing him different? Brett wondered.

Scudi lifted herself from beneath her tarp and said, "Did I hear somebody say something about nerve runners?"

Brett explained.

"But Vashon can see land?" Scudi asked. "Real land?"

Twisp nodded. "So they say." He reached down and tugged at a pair of lines trailing over the side of the coracle.

Immediately, their squawks set up a flapping commotion beside the boat, spattering cold water all around. Bushka caught most of the splashing.

"Ship's teeth!" he gasped. "That's cold!"

Twisp chuckled. "Wakes you up good," he said. "Just imagine what -" He broke off and bent his head in a listening attitude.

The others heard it, too. All turned toward the horizon on their port where the distant pulse of a hydrogen ram could be heard. They saw it then - a white line far off across the kelp.

"Foil," Bushka said. "They're turning toward us."

"Their instruments have locked onto us," Twisp said.

"They're not going to Vashon ... they're coming to us!" Bushka said.

"He may be right," Brett said.

Twisp jerked his chin down and up. "Brett, you and Scudi take your dive suits and those kits. You hit the water. Hide in the kelp. Bushka, there's an old green duffle bag under the deck forward. Haul it out."

Brett, struggling into his suit, remembered what was in that bag. "What're you going to do with your spare net?" he asked.

"We'll lay it here."

"I don't have a dive suit," Bushka moaned.

"You'll hide under the tarp there in the cuddy," Twisp said. "Over the side, you two. Hurry it up, Scudi! String that net along the kelp."

Presently, after hurried preparations, Bushka burrowed his way beneath the tarp and crawled under the forward deck. Brett and Scudi rolled backward over the side of the boat, pulling the net with them. The sound of the approaching foil was growing louder.

Twisp stared toward the sound. The foil was still eight or ten kilometers to port but closing faster than he had thought possible. He hauled in his squawks and caged them, then found two handlines. He baited them with dried muree and slung them over the side.

The raft!

It bobbed against the side of the supply coracle like a beacon. Twisp shot out a long arm, grabbed the line and pulled it to him. He slit it open, rolled the air out of it as fast as he could and stowed it under his seat. Brett and Scudi, he saw, were getting something out of the supply coracle. Harpoon? Damn! They had better hurry.

He glanced around his coracle then. Bushka lay concealed under the bow cuddy. The net trailed aft. Scudi and Brett had gone under water into the kelp. Why did Brett want a harpoon? Twisp wondered. They were safely under the kelp, though, taking their surface air from beneath huge leaves.

Twisp cut his motor and slipped the lasgun out of its hiding place behind him. He put it under a towel beside him on the seat and kept his hand on it.

"Bushka," he called. "Stay as quiet as a dead fish. If it's them ... well, we don't know. I'll give you the all-clear if it's not." He wiped the back of his free hand across his mouth. "Here they are."

He raised a hand in greeting as the foil circled in over the kelp, scattering torn green fronds in its wake. It avoided the net and the side of the channel where Brett and Scudi had taken to the water.

No response came to his greeting, just intense stares from two dark figures in the high cockpit. Twisp saw streaks of green on the figures up there. He breathed deeply to slow his heartbeat and steady the trembling in his legs.

Be ready, he warned himself, but don't be jumpy.

The foil swung wide astern and sank into the channel through the kelp. The jet subsided to a faint hiss. A heavy wave rolled out from the foil's bow and rocked the coracles. The squawks set up a loud complaint.

Once more, Twisp raised a hand in greeting and waved the approaching foil to the left, indicating the long line of his net with its bobbing floats. When no more than twenty meters separated the craft, Twisp shouted, "Good weather and a good catch!"

He tightened his grip on the lasgun. The choppy cross-waves set up by the foil broke over the coracle's thwarts and soaked him.

Still no response from the foil, which now loomed high over him and no more than ten meters away. Its side hatch slid open and a Merman appeared there in a camouflaged dive suit - green blobs and stripes. The foil slid alongside and came to a stop.

The Merman standing above Twisp said, "I thought Mutes never fished alone."

"You thought wrong."

"I thought no Mute fished out of sight of his Island."

"This one does."

The Merman's quick eyes flitted over both coracles, followed the line of floats astern, then fixed on Twisp.

"Your net's strung along a kelp bed," he said. "You could lose it that way."

"Kelp means fish," Twisp said. He kept his voice level, calm. He even flashed a smile. "Fishermen go where the catch is."

Under the foil's bow, too low to be visible to the Merman, Twisp saw Scudi slip up for air, then drift down.

"Where's your catch?"

"What's it to you?"

The Merman squatted on the deck above Twisp and looked down at him. "Listen, shit-bug, you can disappear out here. Now I've got some questions and I want answers. If I like the answers, you keep your net, your boat, your catch and maybe you keep alive. Do you understand?"

Twisp remained silent. Out of the corner of one eye he caught a glimpse of Brett's head surfacing under the other side of the foil's bow. Brett's hand came up gripping the harpoon from the supply coracle.

What's he doing with that thing? Twisp wondered. And he's in too close for me to use the stunshield if the chance comes.

"Aye," Twisp said. "No catch yet. Just got set up." Brett and Scudi disappeared from his sight around the other side of the foil.

"Have you seen anyone else on the water?" the Merman asked.

"Not since the wavewall."

The Merman looked at Twisp's grizzled, weather-beaten face and said, "You've been out ever since the wavewall?" There was awe in his voice.

"Yeah."

He dropped the awe. "And no catch?" he snapped. "You're not much of a fisherman. Not much of a liar, either. You sit still, I'm coming aboard." He signaled his intentions to someone out of view in the foil, then flipped a stubby ladder over the side.

The Merman's movements were deft and controlled. He used no more than the minimal energy required for each action. Twisp noted this and felt a deep sense of caution.

This man knows his body, Twisp thought. And it's a weapon. It would be difficult to take this man by surprise. But Twisp knew his own strengths. He had leverage and a net-puller's power. He also had a lasgun under his towel.

The Merman began lowering himself into the coracle. One foot probed backward for the thwart and, as the Merman put his weight onto that foot, Twisp moved backward as though compensating for the weight shift. The Merman smiled and released both hands from the ladder. He turned to make the last step down into the coracle. Twisp reached his long left arm out to steady the man and, as he moved, shifted his weight. Twisp allowed the man to feel a firm grip in the clasp of the hand, steadying him against the roll of the boat until the last possible blink. Then, in one smooth move, Twisp shifted farther toward the Merman, shortened his long-armed grip and tipped that side of the boat completely under water. The Merman lurched forward. Twisp twisted his grip, jerking the man toward him. The long left arm released its grip and snaked around the Merman's neck while the other hand came up with the lasgun pressed against the back of his head.

"Don't move or you could disappear out here," Twisp said.

"Go ahead and kill me, Mute!" The Merman thrashed against Twisp.

Twisp tightened his grip. Muscles that single-handedly pulled loaded nets over a coracle's rim stood out in sinewy ropes.

"Tell your mates to step out on deck!" Twisp growled.

"He won't come out and he's going to kill you," the Merman choked. He twisted again in the powerful grip. One foot braced against a thwart and he tried to push Twisp backward.

Twisp lifted the lasgun and brought it down sharply against the man's head. The Merman grunted and went limp. Twisp lifted the lasgun's barrel toward the open hatch and started to rise. He didn't like the idea of going up that ladder fully exposed.

Brett appeared in the hatchway, saw the lasgun directed at him and ducked, shouting: "We've got the foil! Don't shoot!"

P/S: Copyright -->www_novelfreereadonline_Com

***