“How interesting,” Gallow said.
“I’m told,” Bushka said, “that when you recovered the Redoubt’s data base … I mean …” He coughed.
“Our historians work full-time,” Gallow said. “After the Disaster, everything, including the material from the Redoubt, was subjected to exhaustive analysis.”
“I would still like to see the material,” Bushka said. He cursed himself silently. His voice sounded so plaintive.
“Tell me, Bushka,” Gallow said, “what would be your response if this material revealed that Ship was an artifact made by human beings and not God at all?”
Bushka pursed his lips. “The Artifact Heresy? Hasn’t that been …” “You haven’t answered my question,” Gallow said.
“I would have to see the material and judge for myself,” Bushka said. He held himself quite still. No Islander had ever been granted access to Redoubt data. But what Gallow hinted … explosive!
“I should be most interested to hear what an Islander historian has to say about the Redoubt accounts,” Gallow said. He glanced at Ale. “Do you see any reason why we shouldn’t grant his request, Kareen?”
She shrugged and turned away, an expression on her face that Bushka could not interpret. Disgust?
Gallow directed that measuring smile toward Bushka. “I quite understand that the Redoubt has mystical implications for Islanders. I hesitate to feed superstitions.”
Mystical? Bushka thought. Land that once had protruded from the sea. A place built on a continent, a mass of exposed land that did not drift, the last inundated in the Disaster. Mystical? Was Gallow merely toying with him?
“I’m a qualified historian,” Bushka said.
“But you said hobby …” Gallow shook his head. “Was everything recovered intact from the Redoubt?” Bushka ventured.
“It was sealed off,” Ale said, turning once more to face Bushka. “Our ancestors put an air-bell on it before cutting through the plasteel.”
“Everything was found just as it was left when they abandoned the place,” Gallow said.
“Then it’s true,” Bushka breathed. “But would you reinforce Islander superstitions?” Gallow insisted.
Bushka drew himself up stiffly. “I am a scientist. I would reinforce nothing but the truth.”
“Why this sudden interest in the Redoubt?” Ale asked.
“Sudden?” Bushka stared at her in amazement. “We’ve always wanted to share in the Redoubt’s data base. The people who left it there were our ancestors, too.”
“In a manner of speaking,” Gallow said.
Bushka felt the hot flush of blood in his cheeks. Most Mermen believed that only Clones and mutants had populated the drifting Islands. Did Gallow really accept that nonsense?
“Perhaps I should’ve said why the renewed interest?” Ale corrected herself.
“We’ve heard stories, you see, about the Guemes Movement,” Gallow said.
Bushka nodded. WorShip was, indeed, on the increase among Islanders.
“There have been reports of unidentified things seen in the sky,” Bushka said. “Some believe that Ship already has returned and is concealed from us in space.”
“Do you believe this?” Gallow asked.
“It’s possible,” Bushka admitted. “All I really know for certain is that the C/P is kept busy examining people who claim to have seen visions.”
Gallow chuckled. “Oh, my!”
Bushka once more felt frustration. They were toying with him! This was all a cruel Merman game! “What is so amusing?” he demanded.
“GeLaar, stop this!” Ale said.
Gallow held up an admonitory hand. “Kareen, look with care upon Islander Bushka. Could he not pass as one of us?”
Ale swept a swift glance across Bushka’s face and returned her attention to Gallow. “What’re you doing, GeLaar?”
Bushka inhaled deeply and held his breath.
Gallow studied Bushka a moment, then: “What would be your response, Bushka, if I were to offer you a place in Merman society?”
Bushka exhaled slowly, inhaled. “I … I would accept. Gratefully, of course.”
“Of course,” Gallow echoed. He smiled at Ale. “Then, since Bushka will be one of us, there’s no harm in telling him what amuses me.”
“It’s on your head, GeLaar,” Ale said.
A movement at the Sonde Control console caught Bushka’s attention. Panille was no longer looking at him, but the set of his shoulders told Bushka the man was listening intently. Ship save them! Was the Artifact Heresy true, after all? Was that the great Merman secret?
“These visions causing so much trouble for our beloved C/P,” Gallow said. “They are Merman rockets, Bushka.”
Bushka opened his mouth and closed it without speaking. “Ship was not God, is not God,” Gallow said. “The Redoubt records …”
“Are open to several interpretations,” Ale said.
“Only to fools!” Gallow snapped. “We are sending up rockets. Bushka, because we are preparing to recover the hyb tanks from orbit. Ship was an artifact made by our ancestors. Other artifacts and things have been left in space for us to recover.”
The matter-of-fact way Gallow said this made Bushka catch his breath. Stories about the mysterious hyb tanks permeated Islander society. What might be stored in those containers that orbited Pandora? Recovering those tanks, and really seeing what they contained, was worth anything—even destruction of the Ship-God belief that sustained so many people.
“You are shocked,” Gallow said.
“I’m … I’m awed,” Bushka replied.
“We were all raised on the Transition Stories.” Gallow pointed upward. “Life awaits us up there.”
Bushka nodded. “The tanks are supposed to contain countless life forms from … from Earth.”
“Fish, animals, plants,” Gallow said. “And even some humans.” He grinned. “Normal humans.” He waved a hand to encompass the occupants of Sonde Control. “Like us.”
Bushka inhaled a trembling breath. Yes, the historical accounts said the hyb tanks held humans who had never been touched by the bioengineering machinations of Jesus Lewis. There would be people in those tanks who had gone to sleep in another star system, who had no idea of this nightmare world that awaited their awakening.
“And now you know,” Gallow said.
Bushka cleared his throat. “We never suspected. I mean … the C/P has never said a word about …”
“The C/P does not know of this,” Ale said. There was a warning note in her voice.
Bushka glanced at the plaz porthole with its view of the LTA tube. “She knows about that, of course,” Ale said.
“An innocuous thing,” Gallow said.
“There has been no blessing of our rockets,” Ale said.
Bushka continued to stare out the porthole. He had never counted himself a deeply religious person, but these Merman revelations left him profoundly disturbed. Ale obviously doubted Gallow’s interpretation of the Redoubt material, but still … a blessing would be only common sense … just in case …
“What is your response, Merman Bushka?” Gallow asked.
Merman Bushka!
Bushka turned a wide-eyed stare on Gallow, who obviously awaited an answer to a question. A question. What had he asked? Bushka was a moment recovering the man’s words.
“My response … yes. The Islanders … I mean, about these rockets. The Islanders … shouldn’t they be told?”
“They?” Gallow laughed, a deep amusement that shook his beautiful body. “You see, Kareen? Already his former compatriots are ‘they.’“
Chapter 5
The touch of the infant teaches birth, and our hands are witness to the lesson.
—Kerro Panille, the Histories
Vata did not experience true consciousness. She skirted the shadow-edges of awareness. Memories flitted through her neurons like tendrils from the kelp. Sometimes she dreamed kelp dreams. These dreams often included a wondrous hatch of h
ylighters—spore-filled gasbags that had died when the original kelp died. Tears mixed with her nutrient bath as she dreamed such things, tears for the fate of those huge sky-bound globes tacking across the evening breezes of a million years. Her dream hylighters clutched their ballast rocks in their two longest tentacles and Vata felt the comforting texture of rock hugged close.
Thoughts themselves were like hylighters to her, or silken threads blowing in the dark of her mind. Sometimes she followed awareness of Duque, who floated beside her, sensing events within his thoughts. Time and again, she re-experienced through him that terrible night when the gravitational wrenching of Pandora’s two suns destroyed the last human foothold on the planet’s fragile land. Duque repeatedly let his thoughts plunge into that experience. And Vata, linked to the fearful mutant like Mermen diving partners on the same safety line, was forced to recreate dreams that soothed and calmed Duque’s terrors.
“Duque escaped,” she muttered in his mind, “Duque was taken away onto the sea where Hali Ekel tended his burns.”
Duque would snuffle and whimper. Had Vata been conscious, she would have heard with her own ears, because Vata and Duque shared the same life support at the center of Vashon. Vata lay mostly submerged in nutrient, a monstrous mound of pink and blue flesh with definite human female characteristics. Enormous breasts with gigantic pink nipples lifted from the dark nutrient like twin mountains from a brown sea. Duque drifted beside her, a satellite, her familiar dangling in the endless mental vacuum.
For generations now, the two of them had been nurtured and reverenced in Vashon’s central complex—home of the Chaplain/Psychiatrist and the Committee on Vital Forms, Merman and Islander guards kept watch on the pair under the command of the C/P. It was a ritualized observation, which, in time, eroded the awe that Pandorans learned early from the reactions of their parents.
“The two of them there like that. They’ll always be there. They’re our last link with Ship. As long as they live, Ship is with us. It’s WorShip keeps them alive so long.”
Although Duque occasionally knuckled an eye into glaring wakefulness and watched his guardians in the gloomy surroundings of the living pool that confined them, Vata’s responses never lifted to consciousness. She breathed. Her great body, responding to the kelp half of her genetic inheritance, absorbed energy from the nutrient solution that washed against her skin. Analysis of the nutrient betrayed traces of human waste products, which were removed by the sucker mouths of blind scrubberfish. Occasionally, Vata would snort and an arm would lift in the nutrient like a leviathan rising from its depths before settling once more into the murk. Her hair continued to grow until it spread like kelp across the nutrient surface, tangling over the hairless skin of Duque and impeding the scrubberfish. The C/P would come into the chamber then and, with a reverence touched by a certain amount of cupidity, would clip Vata’s locks. The strands were washed and separated to be blessed and sold in short lengths as indulgences. Even Mermen bought them. Sale of Vatahair had been the major source of C/P income for many generations.
Duque, more aware than any other human of his curious link with Vata, puzzled over the connection when Vata’s intrusions left him with thinking time of his own. Sometimes he would speak of this to his guardians, but when Duque spoke there was always a flurry of activity, the summoning of the C/P, and a different kind of watchfulness from the security.
“She lives me,” he said once, and this became a token label inscribed on the Vatahair containers.
In these speaking times, the C/P would try prepared questions, sometimes booming them at Duque, sometimes asking in a low and reverential voice.
“Do you speak for Vata, Duque?”
“I speak.”
That was all they ever got from him on this question. Since it was known that Duque was one of the hundred or so original mutants who had been conceived with kelp intervention and thus bore kelp genes, they would sometimes ask him about the kelp that had once ruled Pandora’s now-endless sea.
“Do you have memory of the kelp, Duque?”
“Avata,” Duque corrected. “I am the rock.”
Interminable arguments came out of this answer. “Avata had been the kelp’s name for itself. The reference to rock gave scholars and theologians room for speculation.
“He must mean that his consciousness exists at the bottom of the sea where the kelp lives.”
“No! Remember how the kelp always clung to a rock, lifting its tendrils to the sunlight? And the hylighters used rock for ballast …”
“You’re all wrong. He’s Vata’s grip on life. He’s Vata’s rock.”
And there was always someone who would harken back to WorShip and the stories of that distant planet where someone calling himself Peter had given the same answer Duque had given.
Nothing was ever solved by such arguments, but the questioning continued whenever Duque showed signs of wakefulness.
“How is it that you and Vata do not die, Duque?”
“We wait.”
“For what do you wait?”
“No answer.”
This recurrent response precipitated several crises until the C/P of that time issued an order that Duque’s answers could only be broadcast by permission of the C/P. This didn’t stop the quiet whispering and the rumors, of course, but it relegated everything except the C/P’s official version to the role of mystical heresy. It was a question no C/P had asked for two generations now. Current interest centered much more on the kelp that Mermen spread far and wide in Pandora’s planetary sea. The kelp was thick and healthy, but showed no signs of acquiring consciousness.
As the great Islands drifted they were seldom out of sight of a horizon touched by the oily green flatness of a kelp bed. Everyone said it was a good thing. Kelp formed nurseries for fish and everyone could see there were more fish these days, though they weren’t always easy to catch. You couldn’t use a net amongst the kelp. Baited lines tangled in the huge fronds and were lost. Even the dumb muree had learned to retreat into kelp sanctuary at the approach of fishermen.
There was also the recurrent question of Ship, Ship who was God and who had left humankind on Pandora.
“Why did Ship abandon us here, Duque?”
All Duque would ever say was: “Ask Ship.”
Many a C/P had engaged in much silent prayer over that one. But Ship did not answer them. At least, not with any voice that they could hear.
It was a vexing question. Would Ship return? Ship had left the hyb tanks in orbit around Pandora. It was a strange orbit, seeming to defy the gravitational index for such things. There were those among Pandora’s Mermen and Islanders who said Vata waited for the hyb tanks to be brought down, that she would awaken when this occurred.
No one doubted there was some link between Duque and Vata, so why not a link between Vata and the dormant life waiting up there in the tanks?
“How are you linked to Vata?” a C/P asked.
“How are you linked to me?” Duque responded.
This was duly recorded in the Book of Duque and more arguments ensued. It was noted, however, that whenever such questions were asked, Vata stirred. Sometimes grossly and sometimes with only the faintest movement over her vast flesh.
“It’s like the safety line we use between divers down under,” an astute Merman observed. “You can always find your partner.”
Vata’s tendril-awareness stirred to the linkage with genetic memories of mountain climbers. They were climbing, she and Duque. This she showed him many times. Her memories, shared with Duque, showed a spectacular world of the vertical that Islanders could barely imagine and holes did not do justice. Only, she did not think of herself as one of the climbers, or even think of herself at all. There was only the line, and the climbing.
Chapter 6
First, we had to develop a landless life-style; second, we preserved what technology and hardware we could salvage. Lewis left us with a team of bioengineers—both our curse and our most powerful legacy. We do not d
are plunge our few precious children into a Stone Age.
—Hali Ekel, the Journals
Ward Keel looked down from the high bench and surveyed the two young petitioners in front of him. The male was a large Merman with the tattoo of a criminal on his brow, a wine-red “E” for “Expatriate.” This Merman could never return to the rich land under the sea and he knew the Islanders accepted him only for his stabilizing genes. Those genes had not stabilized this time. The Merman probably knew what the judgment would be. He patted a damp cloth nervously over his exposed skin.
The woman petitioner, his mate, was small and slender with pale blonde hair and two slight indentations where she should have had eyes. She wore a long blue sari and when she walked Keel did not hear steps, only a rasping scrape. She swayed from side to side and hummed to herself.
Why does this one have to be the first case of the morning? Keel wondered. It was a perverse fate. This morning of all mornings!
“Our child deserves to live!” the Merman said. His voice boomed in the chambers. The Committee on Vital Forms often heard such loud protestation but this time Keel felt that the volume was directed at the woman, telling her that her mate fought for them both.
As Chief Justice of the Committee it was too often Keel’s lot to perform that unsavory stroke of the pen, to speak directly the unutterable fears of the petitioners themselves. Many times it was otherwise and then this chamber echoed the laughter of life. But today, in this case, there would be no laughter. Keel sighed. The Merman, even though a criminal by Merman ruling, made this matter politically sensitive. Mermen were jealous of the births that they called “normal,” and they monitored every topside birth involving Merman parentage.
“We have studied your petition with great care,” Keel said. He glanced left and right at his fellow Committee members. They sat impassively, attention elsewhere—on the great curve of bubbly ceiling, on the soft living deck, on the records stacked in front of them—everywhere but on the petitioners. The dirty work was being left to Ward Keel.