I always thought it would be a dasher.
The first trickle of bubbles squeezed past his lips. Panic began to pulse through him. A gush of urine warmed his crotch. He twisted his head, seeing the glow of the urine against him holding back the cold press of the sea.
I don’t want to die!
His superb underwater vision followed the leak of bubbles upward, tracing them toward the distant surface, which was no longer a visible plane but only a hopeless memory.
In that instant, when he knew all hope was gone, a corner of his vision caught a dark flash, a flicker of shadow against shadow. He turned his head toward it and saw a woman swimming below him, her dive-suited flesh looking unclothed. She turned, something in her hand. Abruptly, the line of his ankle jerked once, then released.
Merman!
She rolled beneath him and he saw her eyes, open and white against a dark face. She slipped a knife into her leg sheath while she moved upward toward him.
The trickle of bubbles from his mouth became a stream, driving out of his mouth in a hot release. The woman grabbed him under an armpit and he saw clearly that she was young and supple, superbly muscled for swimming. She rolled over him. A white flash of oxygen despair began at the back of his head. Then she slammed her mouth against his and blew the sweet breath of life down his throat.
He savored it, exhaled, and again she blew a breath into him. He saw the airfish against her neck and knew she was giving him the half-used excess that her blood exuded into her lungs. It was a thing Islanders heard about, a Merman thing that he’d never expected to experience.
She backed off, dragging him by one arm. He exhaled slowly, and again she fed him air.
A Merman team had been working an undersea ridge, he saw, with kelp waving high beside it and lights glowing at the rocky top—small guide markers.
As panic receded, he saw that his rescuer wore a braided line around her waist with weights attached to it. The airfish trailing backward from her neck was pale and darkly veined, deep ridges along its length for the external gills. It was an ugly contrast to the young woman’s smooth dark skin.
His lungs ceased aching, but his ears hurt. He shook his head, pulling at an ear with his free hand. She saw the movement and squeezed his arm hard to get his attention. She plugged her nose with her fingers and mimicked blowing hard. She pointed at his nose and nodded. He copied her and his right ear popped with a snap. An unpleasant fullness replaced the pain. He did it again and the left ear went.
When she gave him his next breath, she clung to him a bit longer, then smiled broadly when she broke away. A flooding sensation of happiness washed through Brett.
I’m alive! I’m alive!
He glanced past the airfish at the way her feet kicked so steadily, the strong flow of her muscles under the skin-tight suit. The light markers on the rocky ridge swept past.
Abruptly, she pulled back on his arm and stopped him beside a shiny metal tube about three meters long. He saw handgrips on it, a small steering rudder and jets. He recognized it from holos—a Merman horse. She guided his hand to one of the rear grips and gave him another breath. He saw her release a line at the nose of the device, then swing astraddle of it. She glanced backward and waved for him to do the same. He did so, locking his legs around the cold metal, both hands on the grips. She nodded and did something at the nose. Brett became conscious of a faint hum against his legs. A light glowed ahead of the woman and something snaky extruded from the horse. She turned and brought a breather mouthpiece against his lips. He saw that she also was wearing one and realized she was easing the double load the airfish had been forced to carry. The fish trailing from her neck and over his own shoulder appeared smaller, the gill ridges deeper and not as fat.
Brett gripped the mouthpiece in his teeth and pushed the lip cover hard against the flesh.
In by the mouth, out by the nose.
Every Islander had some sub schooling and parallel training with Merman rescue equipment.
Blow, inhale.
His lungs filled with rich, cool air.
He felt a lurch then and something bumped his left ankle. She rapped his knee and pulled him closer to her back, lifting his handgrips until they formed a brace against her buttocks. He had never seen a naked woman before and her dive suit left nothing for him to imagine. Unromantic as the situation was, he liked her body very much.
The horse surged upward, then dived, and her hair streamed backward, covering the head of the airfish and flickering against his cheeks.
He stared through a haze of her hair and over her right shoulder, feeling the water tumble around them. Far down the tunneling shadows of the sea past the smooth shoulder he saw a dazzling play of lights—uncounted lights—big ones, small ones, wide ones. Shapes began to grow visible: walls and towers, fine planes of platforms, dark passages and caves. The lights became plaz windows and he realized he was descending onto a Merman metropolis, one of the major centers. It had to be, with that much sprawl and that much light. The dance of illumination enthralled him, feeding through his mutated vision a rapture he had not known himself capable of feeling. A part of his awareness said this came from knowing he had survived overwhelming odds, but another part of him gloried in the new things his peculiar eyes could see.
Cross-currents began to turn and twist the horse. Brett had trouble holding his position; once he lost his leg grip. His rescuer felt this and reached back to guide one of his hands around her waist. Her feet came back and locked onto his. She crouched over her controls, guiding them toward a sprawling assemblage of blocks and domes.
His hands against her abdomen felt the smooth warmth there. His own clothing seemed suddenly ridiculous and he understood the Merman preference for dive suits and undersea nudity for the first time. They wore Islander-made dive suits for long, cold work, but their skin served them well for short spurts or warmer currents. Brett’s pants chafed his thighs and cramped him, whipping in the currents of their passage.
They were much closer to the complex of buildings now and Brett began to have a new idea of the structures’ sizes. The closest tower faded out of sight above them. He tried to trace it into the upper distances and realized that night had fallen topside.
We can’t be very far down, he thought. That tower could break the surface!
But no one topside had reported such a structure.
Ship save us if an Island ever hit such a thing!
Lights from the buildings provided him with more than enough illumination, but he wondered how his rescuer was finding her way in what he knew to be deep darkness for ordinary human vision. He saw then that she was guided by fixed lights anchored to the bottom—lanes of red and green.
Even the darkest topside night had never kept him from moving around easily, but here the surface was just a faraway bruise. Brett drew a deep breath from the tube and settled himself closer to the young woman. She patted his hand on her stomach while jockeying the machine into a maze of steep-sided canyons. They rounded a corner and came onto a wide, well-lighted space between tall buildings. A dome structure loomed straight ahead with docking lips extruded from it. Many people swam in the bright illumination that glared all along the lips. Brett saw the on-off blink of a bank of hatchways opening and closing to pass the swimmers. His rescuer settled them onto a ramp with only a small sensation of grating. A Merman behind them took the horse by a rear handhold. The young woman motioned for Brett to take a deep breath. He obeyed. She gently pulled the breather from him, removed her airfish and caged it with others beside the hatch.
Through the hatch they went into a chamber where the water was quickly flushed out and replaced by air. Brett found himself standing in a dripping puddle facing the young woman, who shed water as though she and her translucent suit had been oiled.
“My name is Scudi Wang,” she said. “What is yours?”
“Brett Norton,” he said. He laughed self-consciously. “You … you saved my life.” The statement sounded so ridiculously
inadequate that he laughed again.
“It was my watch for search and rescue,” she said. “We’re always extra alert during a wavewall if we’re near an Island.”
He had never heard of such a thing but it sounded reasonable. Life was precious and his view of the world said everyone felt the same, even Mermen.
“You are wet,” she said, looking him down and up. “Are there people who should know you are alive?”
Alive! The thought made his breathing quicken. Alive!
“Yes,” he said. “Is it possible to get word topside?”
“We’ll see to it after you’re settled. There are formalities.”
Brett noticed that she’d been staring at him much the same way he’d been intent on her. He guessed her age at close to his own—fifteen or sixteen. She was small, small-breasted, her skin as dark as a topside tan. She stared at him calmly out of green eyes with golden flecks in them. Her pug nose gave her a gamin look—the look of wide-eyed corridor orphans back on Vashon. Her shoulders were sloping and muscular, the muscles of someone who kept in top shape. The airfish scar glowed at her neck, a livid pink against the dark wash of her wet black hair.
“You are the first Islander I’ve ever rescued,” she said.
“I’m …” He shook his head, finding that he did not know how to thank her for such a thing. He finished lamely: “Where are we?”
“Home,” she said with a shrug. “I live here.” She dropped her ballast belt at the jerk of a knot and slung it over a shoulder. “Come with me. I’ll get us both some dry clothes.”
He slopped after her through a hatch, his pants dripping a trail of wetness. It was cold in the long passage where the hatchway left them, but he was not too cold to miss the pleasant bounce of Scudi Wang’s body as she walked away from him. He hurried to catch up. The passage was disturbingly strange to an Islander—solid underfoot, solid walls lighted by long tubes of fluorescence. The walls glowed a silvery gray broken by sealed hatches with colored symbols on them—some green, some yellow, some blue.
Scudi Wang stopped at a blue-coded hatch, undogged it and led him into a large room with storage lockers lining the sides. Benches in four rows took up the middle. Another hatch led out the opposite side. She opened a storage locker and tossed him a blue towel, then bent to rummage through another locker where she found a shirt and pants, holding them up while she looked at Brett. “These’ll probably fit. We can replace them later.” She tossed the faded green pants onto the bench in front of him along with a matching pullover shirt. Both were a light material that Brett didn’t recognize.
Brett dried his face and hair. He stood there indecisively, his clothes still dripping. Mermen paid little attention to nudity, he had been told, but he was not used to being unclothed … much less in the company of a beautiful woman.
She removed her dive suit unselfconsciously, found a singlesuit of light blue in another locker and sat down to pull it over her body, drying herself with a towel. He stood up, looking down at her, unable to avoid staring.
How can I thank her? he wondered. She seems so casual about saving my life. Actually, she seemed casual about everything. He continued to stare at her and blushed when he felt the tightening erection beginning in his cold wet pants. Wasn’t there a partition or something where he could get out of sight and dress? He glanced around the room. Nothing.
She saw him looking around and chewed her lower lip.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I forgot. They say Islanders are peculiarly modest. Is that true?”
His blush deepened. “Yes.”
She pulled her singlesuit up and zipped it closed quickly. “I will turn around,” she said. “When you have dressed, we will eat.”
Scudi Wang’s quarters were the same silvery gray as the passages, a space about four meters by five, everything squared corners and sharp edges alien to an Islander. Two cot-sized bed-settees extruded from the walls, both covered with blankets of bright red and yellow in swirling geometric patterns. A kitchen counter occupied one end of the room and a closet the other. A hatch beside the closet stood open to show a bath with a small immersion tub and shower. Everything was the same material as the walls, deck and ceiling. Brett ran a hand across one of the walls and felt the cold rigidity.
Scudi found a green cushion under one of the cots and tossed it onto the other cot. “Be comfortable,” she said. She threw a switch on the wall beside the kitchen counter and odd music filled the room.
Brett sat down on the cot expecting it to be hard, but it gave way beneath him, surprisingly resilient. He leaned against the cushion. “What is that music?”
She turned from an open cupboard. “Whales. You have heard of them?”
He looked toward the ceiling. “They’re on the hyb tank roster, I’ve heard. A giant earthside mammal that lives down under.”
She nodded toward the small speaker grill above the switch. “Their song is most pleasant. I’ll enjoy listening to them when we recover them from space.”
Brett, listening to the grunts and whistles and thrills, felt their calming influence like a long fetch of waves in a late afternoon. He failed to focus immediately on what she had said. In spite of the whalesong, or perhaps because of it, there was a sense of deep quiet in the room that he had never before experienced.
“What do you do topside?” Scudi asked. “I’m a fisherman.”
“That’s good,” she said, busying herself at the counter. “It puts you on the waves. Waves and currents, that’s how we generate our power.”
“So I’ve heard,” he said. “What do you do—besides rescues?”
“I mathematic the waves,” she said. “That is my true work.”
Mathematic the waves? He had no idea what that meant. It forced him to reflect on how little he knew about Merman life. Brett glanced around the room. The walls were hard but he was mistaken about the cold. They were warm, unlike the locker-room walls. Scudi, too, did not seem cold. As she had led him here along the solid passages, they had passed many people. Most had nodded greeting as they chattered with friends or workmates. Everyone moved quickly and surely and the passageways weren’t full of people jostling shoulder-to-shoulder all the way. Except for workbelts, many had been naked. None of that outside bustle penetrated to this little room, though. He contrasted this to topside, where the organics tended to transmit even the smallest noises. Here, there was the luxury of noise and the luxury of quiet within a few meters of each other.
Scudi did something above her work area and the room’s walls suddenly were brightly colored in flowing sweeps of yellow and green. Long strands of something like kelp undulated in a current—an abstraction. Brett was fascinated at how the color-motion on the walls accompanied the whalesong.
What do I say to her? he wondered. Alone with a pretty girl in her room and I can’t think of anything. Brilliant, Norton! You’re a glittering conversationalist!
He wondered how long he’d been with her. Topside, he kept good track of time by the light of the suns and the dark patches between. Down here, all light was similar. It was disorienting.
He looked at Scudi’s back while she worked. She pressed a wall button and he heard her murmur something on a Merman transphone. Seeing the phone there impressed him with the technological gulf between Islanders and Mermen. Mermen had this device; Islanders were not offered it in the mercantile. He didn’t doubt that some Islanders got them through the black market, but he didn’t know how it would be of any use to them unless they dealt with Mermen all the time. Some Islanders did. Islander sub crews carried portable devices that picked up some transphone channels, but this was for the Mermen’s convenience as well as Islanders’. Mermen were so damned snobbish about their riches!
There was a faint hiss of pneumatics at the counter where Scudi worked. She turned presently, balancing a tray carrying covered bowls and utensils. She placed the tray on the deck between the two cots and pulled up a cushion for her own back.
“I don’t cook much mys
elf,” she said. “The central kitchen is faster, but I add my own spices. They are so bland at central!”
“Oh?” He watched her uncover the bowls, enjoying the smells.
“People already want to know of you,” she said. “I have had several calls. I told them to wait. I’m hungry and tired. You, too?”
“I’m hungry,” he agreed. He glanced around the room. Only these two cots. Did she expect him to sleep here … with her?
She pulled a bowl and spoon up to her lap. “My father taught me to cook,” she said.
He picked up the bowl nearest him and took a spoon. This was not like Islander feeding ritual, he noticed. Scudi already was spooning broth into her mouth. Islanders fed guests first, then ate whatever the guests left for them. Brett had heard that this didn’t always work well with Mermen—they often ate everything and left nothing for the host. Scudi licked a few drops of broth from the back of her hand.
Brett tasted a sip from his spoon.
Delicious!
“The air is dry enough for you?” Scudi asked.
He nodded, his mouth full of soup.
“My room is small but that makes it easier to keep the air the way I like it. And easier to keep clean. I work topside very often. Dry is comfort to me now and I don’t feel comfortable with the humidity in passages and public places.” She put the bowl to her lips and drained it.
Brett copied her, then asked, “What will happen to me? When will I go back topside?”
“We’ll talk of this after food,” she said. She brought up two more bowls and uncovered them, revealing bite-sized chunks of fish in a dark sauce. With the bowl she handed him a pair of carved bone chopsticks.
“After food,” he agreed and took a bite of the sauced fish. It was peppery hot and brought tears to his eyes but he found the aftertaste pleasant.
“It is our custom,” Scudi said. “Food sets the body at ease. I can say, ‘Brett Norton, you are safe here and well.’ But I know down under is alien to you. And you have been in danger. You must speak to your body in the language it understands before sense returns to you. Food, rest—these are what your body speaks.”