"Well... take this piece of burnt fabric here."
Mataroreva looked at it. "So?"
"Don't you see that?" She paused, eyed it herself, then looked over at the knee-high ridge of similar fragments. She saw no answers there, only additional frustration.
Then she picked up the bit of water-soiled material, wadded it into a ball, and threw it angrily over the side of the ship. "You can take it and do what you want with it! To hell with it-let's go!"
"That's the spirit!" He moved to don his gelsuit.
No, it isn't, she thought exhaustedly. She didn't have much spirit left.
The strains of the sobbing Trans-Carlson tune followed her over the side, and the neuronic projections tickled her for several meters more. Then they were out of the instrument's preset range. Once more she was cruising among the delicate hexalate formations.
Sam continued to point out unusual examples of Cachalot life as they encountered them. There hadn't been much time for such sightseeing in days past. He spotted one advanced variety of pseudoworm, far more spectacular than any of the Terran nudibranchs that were its closest visual relative, fluttering in and out among the reef formations. It was about half a meter in length and swam with an incredible suppleness. Hundreds of long, thin streamers trailed from its flanks. The feathery filaments were a rich azure blue, spotted with yellow and pink.
"Gorgeous," Cora muttered, overwhelmed as she had so often been already by the endless beauty of this world.
"That's not all. Watch." Sam kicked on ahead, ran a finger down the creature's slowly rippling ventral side. A thin, cloudy pink fluid filled the water around it.
She winced instinctively. "Protective mechanism?"
"No." He was grinning. "Slip off your mask and smell just a little. Inhale as much water as you can without choking."
"You're crazy." She was giggling.
"Just once," he begged. "Quick, before it dissipates."
"Well..." She raised the mask, breathed ha a tiny amount of water. It set her coughing as she hurriedly replaced the mask and cleared it
But she hardly noticed the cough. Her head was swimming. She drifted dazedly, feeling as if someone had just increased her olfactory sensitivity a thousandfold. She was no longer swimming in salt water but in perfume. Her body was smothering under the concentrated scent of a million wildflowers.
Unperturbed, the pseudoworm fluttered gracefully away, disappearing into a crevice in a turret of emeralds.
"Lord!" she gasped when she could finally breathe easily again. "That's the most incredible fragrance I've ever smelled in my life."
"That's a Ninamu Pheromonite. They aren't common, but they never have any trouble locating each other." He started downward. "Incidentally, that could have been the reason for the town's anchoring here." She followed him, still stunned by the overpowering aroma.
"As I said, there aren't too many of them, but even one like the individual we just encountered would release enough essence to make it worthwhile for an entire town to spend a few weeks hunting for him. I believe that a centiliter of the essence costs about half a million credits on the open market You just got dosed by five times that."
"Surely," she murmured, her thoughts dreamy, "it's not sold that way. No one could enjoy it"
"I wouldn't know," Sam said. "I expect it's diluted. But aromatics aren't my business."
They had descended some thirty meters. Sam leveled off, swam down a narrow natural canyon. The light at this depth was barely evident The normal spectrum-spanning colors of the hexalates were homogenized to a uniform dark blue.
"I guess there are some rich enough to afford to use it straight," Sam was saying. "Though they don't swim in half liters like we just did. No one smells that bad." He chuckled. "A very tiny amount would be sufficient."
"You couldn't measure it small enough to use it straight," she argued. "It has to be diluted. There can be such a thing as being too overpowering."
She looked below them. A bottom fish was crawling across the crystal sands. It walked on its lower fins and sported a trunk like a tiny elephant, which it used to probe at the sand for the small creatures dwelling therein.
"What's that one called, Sam?" There was no reply. She looked around. "Sam?"
He had vanished. Seconds ago he had been swimming parallel to her and just behind. She turned, kicked hard. Perhaps he had made a turn behind some hexalate protrusion. But the canyon was steep and relatively smooth-sided.
She stood treading water, hands on hips in a most unhydrodynamic pose. "You're not being funny, Sam." She was still drowsy from the effects of the perfume. "I'm going back to the ship."
Something hard and unyielding wrapped around her ankle. She felt it keenly through the gelsuit, gave a little scream, and tried to pull free. She couldn't, but when she looked down, it was to see Sam grinning at her behind his face mask. He was leaning out of a modest hole in the reef wall.
"Don't go back just yet," he said easily, ignoring her furious expression. "I've something to show you. Why did you think I brought you down here?"
More curious than angry now, she followed him as he disappeared. She could touch both sides of the tunnel by extending her arms. Her suit light showed that the roof and the floor were equally close. Of course, if Sam could fit through...
They swam for several minutes. Then the tunnel angled upward slightly. It was completely unexpected when she broke the surface.
"What on earth?..." A soft hissing sound came from nearby.
"Air cylinder from our chemical stores," Sam said. "Switch off your light."
She did so, blinked as her eyes adjusted, and then sucked in her breath in surprise.
Lining the curving ceiling of the cave were a thousand creatures that resembled starfish, only they boasted nine dancing tentacles and a single greenish eye in the center of their bodies. At the tip of each tentacle was a glowing jewel, and the arms and central body sparkled with lambent dust.
Each animal was a different color from its neighbor: green, crimson, argent and gold, white and purple. Doubtlessly the larger lights on the end of each weaving tentacle were used to attract prey when the cave was filled with water, as it would normally be. She had the feeling they were outside on a clear night. Only now she could actually reach up and touch the stars. The ghostly firmament, constantly shifting to some instinctive choreography, hummed down to her as the massed creatures chatted at one another.
"Never... I've never seen anything so beautiful." First the perfume, now this, she thought. The stars were moving, crawling across each other as the animals hunted for better places on the ceiling.
"I don't understand... the air..." Hesitantly she lifted her mask. Not only was the air breathable, but it was fresh and sweet.
"There's enough pressure from the cylinder to hold the water back for roughly half an hour," he whispered to her. "The chromacules can survive much longer than that without it."
He was behind her now, treading water easily, his enormous arms enveloping her around her shoulders, hands locked in front of her. The fresh oxygen, the crawling, semaphoring stars on the ceiling, and the lingering aroma of the Pheromonite combined to overwhelm her. The tenseness that had been with her in varying amounts since she had first landed on Cachalot left her completely. What was more, some of that other, permanent tenseness faded away.
"You know," he was whispering in her ear, "the water's not that cold."
"That cold? How cold is 'that' cold?" Her gaze was fixed on the stars that weren't.
"That all depends, doesn't it?" he murmured. He nodded toward the large cylinder. It lay on a flat area several meters wide that was just above the waterline. A smooth glass beach.
Cora had never before made love under the stars. The fact that the stars were alive and that she and Sam were thirty meters beneath the surface of an alien sea did not matter. Nor did the fact that they were watched by a thousand dispassionate green eyes.
"Find anything?" Rachael extended a hand, helped h
er mother back onto the deck.
"Not really." The bright sunlight burned Cora's face.
Mataroreva was right behind her, slid up his mask. "We did a lot of looking. Found many beautiful things, but nothing that would help the investigation, I'm afraid."
"You looked long enough." Rachael studied Cora's back for a moment more, then added, "Pucara thinks he's found something significant."
"That's more than any of the rest of us have been able to do. Where is he?" Cora was grateful, no matter what the little researcher might have discovered.
"He's still down below, using the ship's duplicator to make a copy of what he's found. Just in case."
"It must be significant." They all moved below.
Merced was working in the one large, below-decks room, surrounded by familiar apparatus. He glanced up briefly as they entered. "Any luck?"
"Not a thing." Cora shook her head. "You've had some?"
"Maybe. I think it could be." He moved aside, switched on the duplicator's viewer. They crowded around the tiny screen. Cora felt Sam pressing close behind her, shifted her stance ever so slightly. Apparently he understood, because he moved back a step.
"Figures," Mataroreva muttered as he examined the screen. "Another list. So what?"
"The figures line up economically with some manifests I found. Here." Merced adjusted the instrument. Words and quantities were superimposed alongside the lists of numbers. "I found out what the town was working, here on this reef." He looked up at their guide. "Do you know something called Teallin?"
"Sure," Mataroreva said. "It's a mollusk, looks like a perverted abalone. That's what the town was harvesting?" He nodded thoughtfully. "It would explain why we've come across so few of them in our search. The mature ones were all harvested, then?"
"That's what the records indicate."
"What's the significance?"
"I've been through the lists of what the first search teams found when they arrived here to hunt for evidence. There are fragments of everything you can imagine, but no Teallin. Yet the town was just getting ready to move, according to its fisher survivors. After three months of anchoring here."
"It's a luxury item," Mataroreva said interestedly. "Like most of the foodstuffs that are exported from Cachalot. You can extract about a kilo of meat from one mollusk. That may not sound like much, but the stuff has a strong, smoky flavor. It's combined with other foods, mixed to give them spice. And they'd been gathering it for three months?"
Merced tapped the viewer screen. "Two shiploads packed for transfer at Mou'anui. Several thousand kilos. Just a footnote in the regular records, mixed in with all their other work and their own food imports, medicines, power packs, and other general inventory. Just another statistic."
"So that's it," Mataroreva muttered.
"So what's it?" Rachael wondered. "Somebody put it together for me, please." She looked apologetic. I'm afraid I wasn't listening too closely." She tried to hide her neurophon behind her.
"Teallin is perishable. It's packed in polymultiene containers, vacuum-sealed until it can be transported to its eventual processing destination."
"Oh-oh! Vacuum-packed?"
"Not only that," Mataroreva continued, "but polymultiene is a chemical relative of the polymeric material that the towns themselves were built upon. When the search skimmers out from Mou'anui arrived here, they found thousands of fragments of the stuff, from finger-sized all the way up to square meters of town-raft. And a lot of other related, unsinkable material."
"I see," Rachael said.
"I've got to check this." He turned, hurried upward. Moments later they could hear him mumbling into the ship's communicator. The signal would go out instantly via satellite relay to the Administration Center on Mou'anui.
"If this proves out," Cora said, "is it sufficient basis for us to declare that a human agency was responsible for all the destruction? Any local life thorough enough to devour every human inhabitant would only naturally consume all the available food it could get its teeth into."
"But we found packaged foodstuffs ourselves," Rachael countered. "Some were exposed to the water and decomposing."
"I know. And the Teallin was vacuum-sealed, too. I don't see any attacking creature or creatures being able to detect the food inside such containers. Yet it's all gone. You'd expect that the previous searchers would have found some of it."
"We're forgetting one thing," Rachael reminded her. "All the attacks took place during a storm. Even a mild storm could have dispersed any floating debris quite rapidly."
"Yes, but every single container?"
Mataroreva rejoined them, glanced at each in turn.
"They didn't find anything?" Cora asked.
"On the contrary, they did. Polymultiene vacuum containers, each about a meter square."
Merced looked disgusted. "That kills it. We're back at square one again."
"Not necessarily," Mataroreva told him. "They found some. Twelve, to be exact. They didn't show on your list of recovered materials," and he indicated the still glowing screen of the viewer that Merced had been studying, "because all the edibles, for example, were grouped together. What's more," and his eyes gleamed, "all twelve were damaged. Now, friends, what does that suggest to you?"
"Twelve!" Amazing how everything is falling into place, Cora thought. "All broken. If animals had been responsible, they would have emptied the twelve and left the others. Instead, it seems we've exactly the opposite situation." She looked at Merced. "How many containers did the town manifest list as ready for shipment?"
"Eight hundred."
"Seven hundred and eighty-eight unaccounted for, hmmm? Allowing for dispersal by wind and wave," and she nodded to Rachael, "I'd say that left rather a large number which have unaccountably disappeared."
"Even allowing for extreme weather," Merced agreed. "It would normally be expected that somewhat more than twelve should have been recovered. If animals were involved, they would not break into sealed cases and leave a dozen that were already open." He glanced at their guide. "What about container fragments?"
Mataroreva shook his head. "Uh-uh. Only the twelve. No pieces."
"Couldn't they have been listed with other containers of approximately the same size and composition?"
"No," he said positively. "Each polymultiene crate is stamped with the name of its town, the day it's sealed with whatever it's holding, who provided the contents, and most importantly, the contents themselves. The searchers found other containers, but none holding Teallin."
"Well." Cora slapped both hands on her knees, stood up. "That's that, then. No more mystery. Somehow a group of belligerents-local, human, or off-world-are raiding the floating towns and destroying any evidence that could implicate them."
"Pirates," Rachael said.
"Oh, Rachael, I'm not sure such an archaic term-"
"Why not?" Mataroreva asked. "As many millions of credits, as many deaths, as we have? I can't think of a more appropriate term."
They split, Merced to recheck his lists, Rachael to strum her neurophon. She kept the range down, and Cora left the stimulating projections behind as she walked up on deck and moved to the stern of the ship. Mataroreva went with her.
"But why?" she muttered, staring down into the clear water. Purple and yellow fish drifted beneath her, vanished under the stern. "Whole towns, entire populations?..."
"If you kill ten people or a thousand, the penalties are the same," Sam told her softly. "Once the first step, the first multiple murder, is committed to cover one's tracks, subsequent actions become routine. You'll be wiped and personality reimprinted for the first as much as for the second and third. Why risk witnesses?"
"I suppose you're right." She tried to consider the situation coldly, as a question of statistics and not of individual lives. "At least we know what we're looking for now, if not who."
"I imagine they're from off-planet," he speculated. "I can't believe even part-time residents of Cachalot committed mass murder for
profit. For any reason. But you're wrong about one thing. We're not going to be looking for these people. At least, you're not. I'll communicate our information and our theory to Administration and they'll turn it over to my people. This is peaceforcer work, not biology."
"I'd like to keep working," she argued. "Maybe we have a good idea who to look for, but not how to locate them. They've covered their work thoroughly. How can your people find them?"
He considered. "If this was a more technologically developed world, I'd set up a scan for any shuttle-craft leaving or arriving and have it searched for contraband materials. But Cachalot's satellite system is nowhere near sophisticated enough to watch the whole planet. Though they have to be getting the stolen merchandise off-planet via shuttle.
"As to finding the local end of the business, that's going to be tougher still. We can't search every town and independent gathering vessel. Not only isn't it practical-illegal goods could easily be dumped or destroyed-but the Cachalotians wouldn't stand for it." He grinned slightly. "Our citizens are very independent, as you may have guessed."
"What does that leave you with?"
"Trying to catch them just before they act." He sounded grim. "I don't like the implications there."
"Were the other lost towns also getting ready to make full shipments?"
"Sorry. I had the same thought. That was one list I checked. Not only did they have varying stocks on hand, but in, the second town attacked, had just finishing sending off its quarterly production only a few days before it was wiped out."
"It could have been mistiming on the part of the attackers."
"It could have been." He shrugged. "It doesn't matter."
"Why not?"
"Because I think well find, when we check the records, that all produce, regardless of quantity, disappeared," and he went below.
He was gone quite a while. Cora did not move, continued to watch the subsurface denizens, to envy them their freedom from thought. Much better to be able to rely only on instinct, she mused.
"Well?"
"Everything crated for shipment," he told her. "No sign of it. And that's not all. Merced and I made a detailed study of the recovered-articles lists. Absent from them is just enough in the way of water-resistant valuables-power packs, generator units, converters, and personal effects like jewelry-to give credibility to our theory.