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?”
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.”
Chapter 31
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, st
ep-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.
Chapter 32
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.