Gallow set his spoon down carefully and dabbed at his lips with his cloth. He knit his smooth brow in an expression of concern.
“If you choose not to eat, you will be fed,” Gallow warned. “Spare yourself that unpleasantry. You won’t starve yourself out of my care.”
“Choice has nothing to do with it,” Keel said. “You snatched inferior merchandise. Eating causes pain, and the food merely passes undigested.”
Gallow pushed himself back from the squat table.
“It’s not catching, Mr. Gallow.”
“What is it?”
“A defect,” Keel said. “Our bioengineers helped me up to this point, but now the Greater Committee takes matters out of our hands.”
“The Greater Committee?” Gallow asked. “You mean that there is a group topside more powerful than yours? A secret clan?”
Keel laughed, and the laugh added frustration and confusion to Gallow’s otherwise perfect face.
“The Greater Committee goes by many names,” Keel said. “They are a subversive bunch, indeed. Some call them Ship, some call them Jesus—not the Jesus Lewis of your school-day histories. This is a difficult committee to confront, as you can see. It makes the threat of death at your hands not much of a threat at all.”
“You’re … dying?”
Keel nodded. “No matter what you do,” he said, smiling, “the world will believe that you killed me.”
Gallow stared at Keel for a long blink, then blotted his lips with the napkin. He extricated himself from the table.
“In that case,” Gallow announced, “if you want to save those kids, you’ll do exactly as I say.”
Chapter 38
… it comes to pass that the same evils and inconveniences take place in all ages of history.
—Niccolo Machiavelli, Discourses, Shiprecords
From his position at the foil’s controls, Brett watched the late afternoon sun kindle a glow in the cloud bank ahead of him. The foil drove easily across deep storm swells, picking up speed on each downslope, losing a bit on each advancing wave. It was a rhythm that Brett had come to understand without conscious attention. His body and senses adjusted.
A gray wall of rain skulked a couple of hundred meters above the wavetops to the right. A line storm, it appeared to be rolling away from them.
Brett, his attention divided between the course monitor above him and the seas ahead, abruptly throttled back. The foil dropped off its step and moved with minimal headway beside a kelp bed that stretched away into the storm track.
The change in motion aroused the others, who, except for Bushka and the captive Merman, whom Bushka had locked in the cargo bay with the survivors of the LTA, were sprawled around the cabin catching what rest they could. Bushka sat in regal isolation on the couch at the rear of the cabin, his eyes oddly indrawn, his face a mask of concentration as he stroked a fragment of kelp that lay across his lap. The bit of kelp had come up from the sea on Twisp’s rescue line and had attracted little attention until Bushka plucked it off and kept it.
Panille spoke from the copilot’s seat as he came abruptly alert. “Something wrong?”
Brett indicated the green glow of their position on the course monitor. “We’re only a couple of klicks out.” He pointed at the line squall. “The outpost is in there.”
Twisp spoke from behind them: “Bushka, you still going through with this?”
“I have no choice.” Bushka’s voice carried a distant tone. He stroked the fragment of kelp, which had begun to dry and crisp. It rasped under his hand.
Twisp nodded at the net of weapons Bushka had taken from the LTA survivors. “Then maybe we all better be armed.”
“I’m thinking on it,” Bushka said. Again, his hand rasped across the drying kelp.
“Panille,” Twisp said, “how are outposts defended?”
Scudi, seated on the deck across from Twisp, answered for him. “Outposts aren’t expected to need defenses.”
“They have the usual sonar, perimeter alarms against dashers, that sort of thing,” Panille said. “Each outpost has at least one LTA for weather observation.”
“But what weapons?” Twisp asked.
“Tools, mostly,” Scudi said.
Bushka nudged the netful of captured weapons at his feet. “They will have lasguns. Gallow arms his people.”
“But they’d be effective only inside the outpost compound,” Panille said. “We’re safe in the water.”
“Which is why I stopped here,” Brett said. “Do you think they know we’re here?”
“They know,” Bushka said. “They just don’t know who we are.” He peeled the dried kelp from his dive suit and dropped it to the deck.
Scudi stood and moved to Brett’s side, resting an arm on the back of his seat. “They will have welders, plasteel cutters, some stunshields, knives, pry-bars. Tools are very effective weapons.” She looked at Bushka. “As Guemes should have taught us.”
Panille swiveled and looked at the passage that led back to the cargo compartment. “Some of those people back there might know some details about what we can expect down there—”
“This is stupid!” Brett said. “What can we do against Gallow and all his men?”
“We will wait for nightfall,” Bushka said. “Darkness is a great equalizer.” He looked at Scudi. “You say you’ve worked at this outpost. You can draw up a plan of the access hatches, the power station, tool storage, vehicle bays … that sort of thing.”
Scudi looked at Brett, who shrugged.
Twisp glanced once at the lasgun in Bushka’s hand, then at his face. “You really mean for us to attack them, don’t you?”
“Of course.”
“Unarmed?”
“We will have the inestimable arm of surprise.”
Twisp let out a barking laugh.
“Let me talk to Kareen,” Panille said. “She can’t be one of them. She may have learned—”
“She’s not to be trusted,” Bushka said. “She belonged to Ryan Wang when he was alive, and now she belongs to Gallow.”
“No, she doesn’t!”
“Men are so easily manipulated by sex,” Bushka sneered.
Panille’s dark face darkened further with anger, but he held his silence for a blink. Then: “The kelp! The kelp can tell us what we need to know!”
“Do not trust the kelp, either,” Bushka said. “Every sentient thing in this universe thinks of itself first. We don’t know what the kelp fears or desires.”
Panille glanced at the bit of dried kelp on the deck. “Scudi, what do you say about the kelp? You’ve worked in and around it more than any of us.”
“She is Ryan Wang’s daughter!” Bushka blared. “You ask the enemy for advice?”
“I ask where I might get an answer,” Panille said. “And if you’re not going to use that lasgun, quit waving it around.”
He turned from a flabbergasted Bushka to Scudi. “What’s the kelp’s range, from your experience?”
“Worldwide,” she said, “and almost instantaneous.”
“That fast?”
Scudi shrugged. “And what it learns, it never forgets.” She noted the look of surprise on Panille’s face and went on. “We’ve made reports. Most supervisors don’t go out there, so they write this off to narcosis and keep us out of deep water for a week.”
“What else might help us?”
“There are weak spots,” Scudi said. “Immature kelp is strictly a conductor. Mature kelp carries a presence all its own.”
“What do you mean?” Twisp asked.
“If I touch a young patch of kelp and you touch a mature one, we sense each other. But now … it is doing something more. Bushka’s right that it may do things on its own.”
“It has learned to kill,” Bushka said. Scudi said, “I always thought it could transmit, but not translate.”
Bushka asked, “How many people can the outpost support?”
Scudi juggled the question a moment. “They have accommodations
, food and other supplies for about three hundred. But they have open land at the center. They could shelter a lot more people.”
Brett turned to Bushka. “Does Gallow have three hundred people?”
Bushka nodded. “More.”
“Then we can’t confront them,” Twisp said. “This is crazy.”
“I’m going to kill Gallow,” Bushka said.
“That’s it?” Twisp demanded. “That’s all? Then they’ll quit and go home?”
Bushka would not meet Twisp’s gaze. “All right,” he said with a flick of the weapon, “let’s see what Kareen Ale has to say. Put the foil on autopilot, Brett.”
“Autopilot?” Brett asked. “Why?”
“We’re all going back to see Kareen,” Bushka said. “Everybody move easily, no sudden surprises.”
No one argued with those jumpy, glittering eyes. Brett and Scudi led the way through the hatch and down the passageway. At the cargo hatch Bushka motioned Twisp to the lock.
“Open the exterior hatch first,” he ordered. “We might want to throw something overboard.”
Slowly, reluctantly, Twisp obeyed. A fresh breeze tasting of iodine and salt ricocheted through the hatchway. Wave-slaps against the hull were loud in the passage.
“Open the cargo hatch and stand aside,” Bushka said.
Twisp lifted the security bar, released the latch and slid the hatch to one side.
Without warning, Brett was knocked down by something wet and ropy coming from behind him. A large strand of kelp snaked past him, swerved left and slammed the LTA’s survivors against the bulkhead. It held them there. The thumpings of the kelp turned the passageway into a great drum. Brett snatched a grab, caught his balance and saw the rapt features of Iz Bushka, who was held in loops of kelp.
Bushka stood with both arms upraised, the lasgun still clutched in his right fist. Strands of kelp caressed his body, their leaves particularly drawn to his face and hands. More strands lay like ropes on the deck, fanned out on both sides. Scudi and the others were not in sight.
A branch of kelp detached itself from the captives and undulated toward Brett. The fronded tip lifted and enclosed Brett’s face.
Brett heard whistling—the wind against the foil, but enhanced, every tonal component identifiable. He felt his senses amplified—the touch of the deck, other people around him … many others … thousands. He sensed Scudi then, as though the kelp gave her to him with her thoughts clear. Bushka was there, an enraptured Bushka drinking from the kelp’s reservoir of memories. A historian’s paradise: firsthand history.
Scudi spoke in Brett’s head: “The rocket is up. They’re on their way to get the hyb tanks.”
Brett saw it then, a fiery ascent that flamed through the cloud cover and became an orange glow on the gray until it vanished and only the clouds remained. With the vision went a questioning thought, a profound wonder that was not human. The rocket was a wondrous thing of anticipation in this thought. It was a seeking after great surprises.
The thought and the vision vanished. Brett found himself sitting on the deck in the foil’s passage and looking into the cargo bay. Bushka sat there sobbing. The bay behind him was empty. The kelp was gone.
Brett heard others then and Scudi’s voice came overloud.
“Brett! Are you all right?”
He scrambled to his feet, turning. Scudi stood there with movements of others behind her, but Brett could focus only on Scudi.
“As long as you’re here, I’m all right,” he said.
Chapter 39
Symbols are worth a damn.
—Duque Kurz
19(?) Alki, 468. Outpost 22.
When they call me “Mr. Justice” I feel the scales of law and life freeze in my palm. I am not Ward Keel to them, the big-headed man with the long neck and stiff shuffle, but some god who will see the right thing and do it. And good will come. God and good, evil and devil—words are the symbols that flesh out our world. We expect that. We act on it.
Resentment, that’s expectation gone bad. I must admit, our crises are legion, but we live to confront our crises and that’s something no god ever promised.
Simone Rocksack thinks she knows what Ship has promised. That’s her job, she says. She tells the faithful what Ship meant and they believe her. The Histories are there for the reading. I come to my own conclusions: We are neither rewarded nor punished. We are. My job as Chief Justice has been to keep as many of us being as possible.
The Committee’s foundations were in science and fear. Original questions were quite simple: kill it or care for it. Terminate if dangerous. That power over life and death in a time of much death lent an aura to the Committee that it should never have accepted. In lieu of law, there is the Committee.
It is true that the C/P asserts the law of Ship and it is also true that her people enforce it. They give unto Ship that which is Ship’s … together we keep the human world flowing.
“Flow” is the right word. We Islanders understand current and flow. We understand that conditions and times change. To change, then, is normal. The Committee reflects that flexibility. Most law is simply a matter of personal contracts, agreements. Courts deal with squabbles.
The Committee deals with life and life alone. Somehow that has extended to politics, a matter of group survival. We are autonomous, elect our own replacements, and our word is as close to absolute law as Islanders get. They trust nothing fixed. Rigidity in law appalls them as much as cold statuary.
Part of our enjoyment of art derives from its transitory nature. It is made constantly new and if it is to survive over time it does so in the theater of memory. We Islanders have great respect for the mind. It is a most interesting place, a tool at the base of all tools, torture chamber, haven of rest and repository of symbols. All that we have relies on symbol. With symbols we create more world than we were given, we become more than the sum of our parts.
Anyone who threatens the mind or its symbolizing endangers the matrix of humanity itself. I have tried to explain as much to Gallow. He has the ears for it; he simply doesn’t care.
Chapter 40
When power shifts, men shift with it.
—George Orwell, Shiprecords
The argument was over whether to arm Nakano. Bushka favored it and Twisp did not. Ale and Panille remained aloof, listening but not watching. They stood, each with an arm around the other’s waist, looking out on the lowering gray sky visible through the open hatchway. The foil circled on autopilot in a wide pool of open water surrounded by kelp. The outpost lifted from the sea about ten klicks away—a foam-collared pillar of rock set in a ring of kelp. A kelp-free area surrounded the outpost. The rock appeared to be at least one klick away from this vantage.
Brett found himself alarmed by the change in Bushka. What had the kelp done to Bushka there in the cargo bay? And where were the other captive Mermen? Only Ale, Panille and Nakano remained of those rescued from the LTA.
Twisp voiced it for all of them: “What did the kelp do to you, Iz?”
Bushka looked down at the net of weapons by his right foot. His gaze passed over the lasguns he had already distributed to the others—to everyone except Nakano. A look of childlike bewilderment swept over Bushka’s face. “It told me … it told me …” He brightened. “It told me we must kill Gallow and it showed me how.” He turned and stared past Ale and Panille at the kelp drifting on the surging waves. A rapt expression came over his face.
“And you agreed, Nakano?” Twisp demanded.
“It makes little difference,” Nakano said, his voice gruff. “The kelp wants him dead but he will not be dead.”
Twisp shuddered and looked at Scudi and Brett. “That’s not what it said to me. How about you, kid?”
“It showed me the launching of the rocket.”
Brett closed his eyes. Scudi pressed herself against him, leaning her head into his shoulder. He knew the experience they had shared: thousands of people alive now only in the kelp’s memories. The last agony of the G
uemes Islanders was there and everything the dead had ever thought or dreamed. He had heard Scudi exclaiming in his mind: “Now, I know what it feels like to be a Mute!”
Scudi pushed herself a bit away from Brett’s embrace and looked at Twisp. “The kelp said it’s my friend because I’m one of its teachers.”
“What did it say to you, Twisp?” Brett asked. Brett opened his eyes wide and stared hard at the long-armed fisherman.
Twisp inhaled a deep, quick breath and spoke in a sharp voice: “It just told me about myself.”
“It told him he’s a man who thinks for himself and likes to keep his thoughts private,” Nakano said. “It told me we’re alike in this. Isn’t that it, Twisp?”
“More or less.” Twisp sounded embarrassed.
“It said our kind’s dangerous to leaders who demand blind obedience,” Nakano said. “The kelp respects this.”
“There! You see?” Bushka smiled at them, lifting a lasgun out of the pile of weapons he had taken from the people off the LTA. He balanced the lasgun on his open palm, staring at it.
Panille turned from the hatchway and looked at Bushka. “You all accept this?” His voice was flat. He glared at Nakano. “Only you and Kareen and I are left!” He jerked his chin toward the hatchway. “Where are the others?”
Silence settled over the group.
Panille turned toward the perimeter of kelp visible in the darkening light. He remembered hurdling the glut of kelp and reaching for Kareen as a giant vine released her. She had grabbed him close and they had clung to each other while cries of fear lifted all around them.
In that instant of kelp-awareness, he had been inundated by Kareen: Gallow’s captive—sent with Nakano to be used as bait in the capture of Dark Panille. She had her loyalty problems, too. Her family, with all its power, wanted a hold on Gallow in case he was victorious. But Kareen loathed Gallow.
Kareen’s fingers had held a painful grip on Panille’s water-frizzed hair while she cried against his neck. Then the kelp had returned … and touched them once more. They had both felt the kelp’s selective fury, sensed the leaves and vines writhing seaward … bottomward. Presently, the hatchway had framed a churning gray sea, not a sign there to betray the fact that humans had been removed from the foil … and drowned.