Another cultural thing, he realized. He marveled that a simple difference in table manners could need translation to avoid international disaster. Unanswered questions still buzzed in his head. Perhaps a more devious approach was indicated—a mixture of Merman directness with Islander obliqueness.
“It’s pleasantly dry in these quarters,” he said, “but you don’t need a sponge. You don’t oil your skin. I’ve often wondered how you get by in a topside environment?”
She dropped her gaze from his face and held her teacup to her lips with both hands.
Hiding, he thought.
“Ward, you are a very strange person,” she said as she lowered the cup. “That is not the question I expected.”
“What question did you expect?”
“I prefer to discuss my immunity from the need for a sponge. You see, we have quarters down under that are kept with a topside environment. I was raised in such quarters. I’m acclimated to Islander conditions. And I adapt very quickly to the humidity down under—when I have to.”
“You were chosen as an infant for topside duty?” There was hesitation and shock in his voice.
“I was chosen then for my present position,” she said. “A number of us were … set aside in the possibility that some of us would meet the mental and physical requirements.”
Keel stared at her, astonished. He had never heard of such a cold dismissal of someone’s entire life. Ale had not chosen her own life! And, unlike most Islanders, she had a body that in no way restricted her from any trade she chose. He remembered suddenly how she planned everything—a planned person who planned. Ale had been … distorted. She probably saw it as training, but training was just an acceptable distortion.
“But you do live a … a Merman life?” he asked. “You follow their customs, you swim and …”
“Look.” She unfastened her tunic at the neck and dropped the top of it, turning her breasts away from him to expose the shoulders. Her back was as clear-skinned and pale as weathered bone. At the top of her shoulder blades the skin had been pinched into a short strip of ridge adjacent to the spine. There she carried the clear pucker-mark of an airfish, but in a peculiar place. He caught the meaning immediately.
“If that mark were on your neck, Islanders might be distracted when they met you, right?” It occurred to him that she would have undergone major arterial reshifting to carry this off—a complicated surgery.
“You have beautiful skin,” he added, “it’s a shame they marked it up that way at all.”
“It was done when I was very young,” she said. “I hardly think about it anymore. It’s just a … convenience.”
He resisted the urge to stroke her shoulder, her smooth strong back.
Careful, you old fool! he told himself.
She restored the top of her garment and when her gaze met his, he realized that he had been staring.
“You’re very beautiful, Kareen,” he said. “In the old holos, all humans look … something like you, but you’re …” He shrugged, feeling the exceptional presence of his appliance against his neck and shoulders. “Forgive an old Mute,” he added, “but I’ve always thought of you as the ideal.”
She turned a puzzled frown on him. “I’ve never before heard an Islander call himself a … a Mute. Is that how you think of yourself?”
“Not really. But a lot of Islanders use the term. Joking, mostly, but sometimes a mother will use it to get a youngster’s attention. Like: ‘Mute, get your grubby little paws outa that frosting.’ Or: ‘You go for that deal, my man, and you’re one dumb Mute.’ Somehow, when it comes from one of us it’s all right. When it comes from a Merman—it strikes deeper than I can describe. Isn’t that what you call us among yourselves, ‘Mutes’?”
“Boorish Mermen might, and … well, it’s a rather common bit of slang in some company. Personally, I don’t like the word. If a distinction has to be made, I prefer ‘Clone,’ or ‘Lon,’ as our ancestors did. Perhaps my quarters give me a penchant for antiquated words.”
“So you’ve never referred to us as ‘Mutes’ yourself.”
A rosy blush crept up her neck and over her face. He found it most attractive, but the response told him her answer.
She put a smooth, tanned hand over his wrinkled and liver-spotted fingers. “Ward, you must understand that one trained as a diplomat … I mean, in some company …”
“When on the Islands, do as the Islanders do.”
She removed her hand. The back of his own cooled in disappointment. “Something like that,” she said. She picked up her teacup and swirled the dregs. Keel saw the defensiveness in the gesture. Ale was somehow off-balance. He’d never seen her that way before, and he wasn’t vain enough to attribute it to this exchange with her. Keel believed that the only thing that could bother Ale was something totally unplanned, something with no body of knowledge behind it, no diplomatic precedent. Something out of her control.
“Ward,” she said, “I think there is one point that you and I have always agreed on.” She kept her attention on the teacup.
“We have?” He held his tone neutral, not giving her any help.
“Human has less to do with anatomy than with a state of mind,” she said. “Intelligence, compassion … humor, the need to share …”
“And build hierarchies?” he asked.
“I guess that, too.” She met his gaze. “Mermen are very vain about their bodies. We’re proud that we’ve stayed close to the original norm.”
“Is that why you showed me the scar on your back?”
“I wanted you to see that I’m not perfect.”
“That you’re deformed, like me?”
“You’re not making this very easy for me, Ward.”
“You, or yours, have the luxury of choice in their mutations. Genetics, of course, adds a particularly bitter edge to the whole thing. Your scar is not … ‘like me,’ but one of your freckles is. Your freckles have a much more pleasant quality to them than this.” He tapped the neck support. “But I’m not complaining,” he assured her, “just being pedantic. Now what is it that I’m not making easy for you?” Keel sat back, pleased for once about those tedious years behind the bench and some of the lessons those years had taught him.
She stared into his eyes, and he saw fear in her expression.
“There are Mermen fanatics who want to wipe every … Mute off the face of this planet.”
The flat abruptness of her statement, the matter-of-fact tone caught him off guard. Lives were precious to Islanders and Mermen, this he’d witnessed for himself innumerable times during his many years. The idea of deliberate killing nauseated him, as it did most Pandorans. His own judgments against lethal deviants had brought him much isolation in his lifetime, but the law required that someone pass judgment on people, blobs and … things … He could never decree termination without suffering acute personal agony.
But to wipe out hundreds of hundreds of thousands … He returned Ale’s stare, thinking about her recent behavior—the food cooked by her own hands, the sharing of these remarkable quarters. And, of course, the scar.
I’m on your side, she was trying to say. He felt the planning behind her actions, but there was more to it, he thought, than callous outlines and assignments. Otherwise, why had she been embarrassed? She was trying to win him over to some personal viewpoint. What viewpoint?
“Why?” he asked.
She drew in a deep breath. The simplicity of his response obviously surprised her.
“Ignorance,” she said.
“And how does this ignorance manifest itself?”
Her nervous fingers flip-flip-flipped the corner of her napkin. Her eyes sought out a stain on the tabletop and fixed themselves there.
“I am a child before you,” Keel said. “Explain this to me. ‘Wipe every Mute off the face of this planet.’ You know how I feel about the preservation of human life.”
“As I feel, Ward. Believe me, please.”
“Then explain it to this ch
ild and we can get started defeating it: Why would someone wish death to so many of us just because we’re … extranormal?” He had never been quite so conscious of his smear of a nose, the eyes set so wide on his temples that his ears picked up the fine liquid click-click of every blink.
“It’s political,” she said. “There’s power in appealing to base responses. And there are problems over the kelp situation.”
“What kelp situation?” His voice sounded toneless in his own ears, far away and … yes, afraid. Wipe every Mute off the face of this planet.
“Do you feel up to a tour?” she asked. She glanced at the plaz beside them.
Ward looked out at the undersea view. “Out there?”
“No,” she said, “not out there. There’s been a wavewall topside and we’ve got all our crews reclaiming some ground we’ve lost.”
His eyes strained to focus forward on her mouth. Somehow, he didn’t believe anyone’s mouth could be so casual about a wavewall.
“The Islands?” He swallowed. “How bad was the damage?”
“Minimal, Ward. To our knowledge, no fatalities. Wavewalls may very well be a thing of the past.”
“I don’t understand.”
“This wavewall was smaller than many of the winter storms you survive every year. We’ve built a series of networks of exposed land. Land above the sea. Someday, they will be islands … real islands fixed to the planet, not drifting willy-nilly. And some of them, I think, will be continents.”
Land, he thought, and his stomach lurched. Land means shallows. An Island could bottom out in shallow water. An ultimate disaster, in the vernacular of historians, but she was talking about voluntarily increasing the risk of an Islander’s worst fear.
“How much exposed land?” he asked, trying to maintain a level tone. “Not very much, but it’s a beginning.”
“But it would take forever to …”
“A long time, Ward, but not forever. We’ve been at it for generations. And lately we’ve had some help. It’s getting done in our lifetime, doesn’t that excite you?”
“What does this have to do with the kelp?” He felt the need to resist her obvious attempts to mesmerize him.
“The kelp is the key,” she said, “just as people—Islanders and Mermen—have said all along. With the kelp and a few well-placed artificial barriers, we can control the sea currents. All of them.”
Control, he thought. That’s the Merman way of it. He doubted they could control the seas, but if they could manipulate currents, they could manipulate Island movement.
How much control? he wondered.
“We’re in a two-sun system,” he said. “The gravitational distortions guarantee wavewalls, earthquakes …”
“Not when the kelp was in its prime, Ward. And now there’s enough of it to make a difference. You’ll see. And currents should begin an aggrading action now—dropping sediment—rather than degrading.”
Degrading, he thought. He looked at Ale’s beauty. Did she even know the meaning of the word? A technical understanding, an engineering approach was not enough.
Mistaking the reason of his silence, Ale plunged on.
“We have records of everything. From the first. We can play the whole reconstruction of this planet from the beginning—the death of the kelp, everything.”
Not everything, he thought. He looked once more at the wondrous garden beyond the plaz. Growth there was so lush that the bottom could only be glimpsed in a few places. He could see no rock. As a child, he had given up watching drift because all he ever saw was rock … and silt. When it was clear enough or shallow enough to see at all. Seeing the bottom from an Island had a way of running an icy hand down your back.
“How close are these ‘artificial barriers’ to the surface?” he asked.
She cleared her throat, avoiding his eyes.
“Along this section,” she said, “surflines are beginning to show. I expect watchers on Vashon already have seen them. That wavewall drifted them pretty close to …”
“Vashon draws a hundred meters at Center,” he protested. “Two-thirds of the population live below the waterline—almost half a million lives! How can you speak so casually about endangering that many … ?”
“Ward!” A chill edged her voice. “We are aware of the dangers to your Islands and we’ve taken that into account. We’re not murderers. We are on the verge of complete restoration of the kelp and the development of land masses—two monumental projects that we’ve pursued for generations.”
“Projects whose dangers you did not share with nor reveal to the Islanders. Are we to be sacrificed to your—”
“No one is to be sacrificed!”
“Except by your friends who want to wipe out every Mute on Pandora! Is this how they intend to do it? Wreck us on your barrier walls and your continents?”
“We knew you wouldn’t understand,” she said. “But you must realize that the Islands have reached their limits and people haven’t. I agree that we should have brought Islanders into the planning picture much earlier, but”—she shrugged—“we didn’t. And now we are. It’s my job to tell you what we must do together to see that there is no disaster. It’s my job to gain your cooperation in—”
“In the mass annihilation of Islanders!”
“No, Ward, dammit! In the mass rescue of Islanders … and Mermen. We must walk on the surface once more, all of us.”
He heard the sincerity in her tone but distrusted it. She was a diplomat, trained to lie convincingly. And the enormity of what she proposed …
Ale waved a hand toward the exterior garden. “Kelp is flourishing, as you can see. But it’s just a plant; it is not sentient, as it was before our ancestors wiped it out. The kelp you see there was, of course, reconstructed from the genes carried by certain humans in the –“
“Don’t try to explain genetics to the Chief Justice,” Ward growled, “we know about your ‘dumbkelp.’”
She blushed, and he wondered at the emotional display. It was something he had never before seen in Ale. A liability in a diplomat, no doubt. How had she concealed it before … or was this situation simply too much for normal repression? He decided to watch the emotional signal and read it for her true feelings.
“Calling it ‘dumbkelp’ like the schoolchildren is hardly accurate,” she said.
“You’re trying to divert me,” he accused. “How close is Vashon to one of your surflines right now?”
“In a few minutes I will take you out and show you,” she said. “But you must understand what we’re—”
“No. I must not understand—by which you mean accept—such peril for so many of my people. So many people, period. You talk of control. Do you have any idea of the energy in an Island’s movement? The long, slow job of maneuvering something that big? Your word, this control of which you seem so proud, does not take in the kinetic energy of—”
“But it does, Ward. I didn’t bring you down here for a tea party. Or an argument.” She stood. “I hope you have your legs under you because we’ve a lot of walking to do.”
He stood at that, slowly, and tried to unkink his knees. His left foot tingled in the first stages of waking. Was it possible, all that she said? He could not escape the in-built fear all Islanders felt at the idea of a crashing death on solid bottom. A white horizon could only mean death—a wavewall or some tidal exposure of the planet’s rocky surface. Nothing could change that.
Chapter 14
How do Mermen make love?
Same way every time.
—Islander joke
The two coracles, one towing the other, bobbed along on the open sea. Nothing shared the horizon with them except gray waves, long deep rollers with intermittent white lines of spume at the crests. Vashon was long gone below the horizon astern and Twisp, holding his course by the steady wind and the fisherman’s instinct for shifts in light, had settled into a patient, watchful wait, giving only rare glances to his radio and RDF. He had been all night assembling the gear
to hunt for Brett—raising the coracles, repairing the wavewall damage, loading supplies and gear.
Around him now was a Pandoran late morning. Only Little Sun was in the sky, a bright spot on a thin cloud cover—ideal navigation weather. Driftwatch had given him a fix on Vashon’s position at the time of the wavewall and he knew that by midafternoon he should be near enough to start search-quartering the seas.
If you made it this far, kid, I’ll find you.
The futility of his gesture did not escape Twisp. There was nearly a day’s delay, not to mention the ever-prowling hunts of dashers. And there was this odd current in the sea, sending a long silvery line down the sweep of waves. It flowed in his direction, for which Twisp was thankful. He could mark the swiftness of it by the doppler on his radio, which he kept tuned to Vashon’s emergency band. He hoped to hear a report of Brett’s recovery.
It was possible that Mermen had found Brett. Twisp kept looking for Merman signs—a flag float for a work party, one of their swift skimmers, the oily surge of a hardbelly sub surfacing from the depths.
Nothing intruded on his small circle of horizon.
Getting away from Vashon had been a marvel of secret scurrying, all the time expecting Security to stop him. But Islanders helped each other, even if one of them insisted on being a fool. Gerard had packed him a rich supply of food gifts from friends and from the pantry at the Ace of Cups. Security had been informed of Brett’s loss overboard. Gerard’s private grapevine said the kid’s parents had set up a cry for “someone to do something.” They had not come to Twisp, though. Strange, that. Official channels only. Twisp suspected Security knew all about his preparations for a search and deliberately kept hands off—partly out of resentment over the Norton family pressures, partly … well, partly because Islanders helped each other. People knew he had to do this thing.
The docks had been a madhouse of repair when Twisp went down to see whether he could recover his boat. Despite the hard work going on all around, fishermen made time to help him. Brett had been the only person lost with this wavewall and they all knew what Twisp had to attempt.
The Lazarus Effect Page 14
