Gallow wedged himself into the corner beside Zent, his gaze fixed on the display screens, which showed Island tissue melting away from the heliarcs.
"There is no Ship!" Gallow exulted. "You see! Would Ship allow a mere mortal to do such a thing?" He turned emotion-glazed eyes on Bushka at the controls. "I told you! Ship's an artifact, a thing made by people like us. God! There is no God!"
Bushka tried to speak but his throat was too dry.
"Take us back down, Iz," Gallow ordered.
"What're you doing?" Bushka managed.
"I challenge Ship," Gallow said. "Has Ship responded?" A wild laugh issued from his throat. Only Zent joined it.
"Take us down, I said!" Gallow repeated.
Driven by fear, Bushka's pilot-conditioned muscles responded, shifting trim ballast, adjusting planes. And he thought: If we get out fast, some of this Island may survive. Gently, he maneuvered the sub downward through the wreckage left by its terrible ascent. Plazports and screens showed the water around them dim with blood, a dull gray in the harsh illumination from the sub's exterior lights.
"Hold us here," Gallow ordered.
Bushka ignored the command, his gaze intent on the exterior carnage - inert bodies and pieces of bodies glimpsed in the murk. Raw horror everywhere around him. A little girl's dancing frock with white lace ruffles in an ancient pattern floated past a port. Behind it could be seen strung out the remnants of someone's pantry, half a lover's portrait pasted against a remnant stone box: outline of a smile without eyes. Beyond the sub's hot lights, blood rolled and streamed, a cold gray fog reaching down the currents.
"I said hold us here!" Gallow shouted.
Bushka continued to gentle the sub downward. A well of tears brimmed against his eyelids.
Don't let me cry! he prayed. Dammit! I can't break down in front of these ... these ... No word in his memory could label what his companions had become. This realization burned its change in him. These three Mermen were now lethal deviants. They would have to be brought before the Committee. Judgment must be made.
Nakano reached across Bushka and adjusted the ballast controls to bring the sub's descent to a stop. His eyes looked a warning.
Bushka looked at Nakano through a swim of tears, then shifted his gaze to Zent. Zent still held his left ear, but he watched Bushka steadily, smiling that cold-liver smile. His lips moved silently: "Wait till I get you topside."
Gallow reached across Zent's head to the heliarc controls.
"Take us straight ahead," he ordered. He snapped a polarized shield in place and sighted down the twin snouts of the bow heliarc.
Bushka reached to his shoulder and brought his chest harness into place, snapping it closed at his side. He moved with purpose, which brought a questioning stare from Zent. Before Zent could react, Bushka kicked loose the dive planes, skewed the control surfaces to starboard and blew the rear ballast tanks while he opened the bow valves. The sub surged over onto its nose and corkscrewed toward the bottom, spinning faster and faster. Nakano was thrown to the left by the force of the spin. Zent lost his needle burner while trying to grab for a support. His body was thrown against Gallow. Both men lay pinned between hull and control panels. Only Bushka, strapped in at the center of the spin, could move with relative ease.
"You damn fool!" Gallow shouted. "You'll kill us!"
His right hand moving across the switches methodically, Bushka snapped off the cabin lights and all but the exterior bow light. Outside the glow of that one beacon, darkness closed in, surrounding them with a gray murk in which only a few shreds of torn humanity drifted and sank.
"You're not Ship!" Gallow screamed. "You hear me, Bushka? It's just you doing this!"
Bushka ignored him.
"You can't get out of this, Bushka," Gallow shouted. "You'll have to come up sometime and we'll be there."
He's asking if I mean to kill us all, Bushka thought.
"You're crazy, Bushka!" Gallow shouted.
Bushka stared straight ahead, looking for the first glimpse of bottom. At this speed, the sub would dig in and make Gallow's warning come true. Not even plasteel and plaz could withstand a twisting dive into the rocky bottom, not at this depth and this speed.
"You going to do it, Bushka?" That was Nakano, voice loud but level and more than a little admiration in the question.
For answer, Bushka eased the angle of dive but kept the hard spin, knowing his Island-trained equilibrium could better withstand the violent motion.
Nakano began to vomit, gagging and gasping as he tried to clear his throat in the heavy centrifugal pressure. The stench became a nauseating presence in the cabin.
Bushka keyed his console for display of the sub's gas displacement. Notations showed ballast was blown with CO2. His gaze traced out the linked lines. Yes ... exhausted cabin air was bled into the ballast system ... conservation of energy.
Gallow had subsided into a low growling protest while he struggled to crawl out against the force of the spin. "Not Ship! Just another damn shit-eater. Gonna kill him. Never trust Islander."
Following the diagram in front of him, Bushka tapped out the valving sequence on the emergency controls. Immediately, an oxygen mask dropped in front of him from an overhead compartment. All other emergency oxygen remained securely in place. Bushka pressed the mask to his face with one hand while his other hand bled CO2 from the ballast directly into the cabin.
Zent began gasping.
Gallow moaned: "Not Ship!"
Nakano's voice gurgled and rasped but the words were clear: "The air! He's ... going ... to ... smother us!"
Justice does not happen by chance; indeed, something that subjective may never have happened at all.
- Ward Keel, Journal
Maritime Court did not go at all as Queets Twisp had expected. Killing a Merman in the nets had never been an acceptable "accident" at sea, even when all the evidence said it was unavoidable. The emphasis was always on the deceased and the needs of the surviving Merman family. Mermen were always reminding you of all the Islanders they saved every year with their pickup crews and search teams.
Twisp walked the long mural-distorted hallway out of the Maritime offices scratching his head. Brett almost skipped along beside him, a wide grin on his face.
"See?" Brett said. "I knew we were worried for nothing. They said it wasn't a Merman in our net - no Mermen lost, nobody that wasn't accounted for. We didn't drown anybody at all!"
"Wipe that grin off your face!" Twisp said.
"But Queets ..."
"Don't interrupt me!" he snapped. "I had my face down there in the net - I saw the blood. Red. Dasher blood's green. Now, didn't it seem to you that they got us out of court too fast?"
"It's a busy place and we're small-time. You said that yourself." Brett paused, then asked, "Did you really see blood?"
"Too much for a few beat-up fish."
The hallway let them out into the wide third-level perimeter concourse with its occasional viewports opening out onto the surging sea and the spume flying past. Weather had said there was a fifty-klick wind today with chance of rain. The sky hung gray, hiding the one sun that had headed downward into the horizon, the other already gone.
Rain?
Twisp thought Weather had made one of its infrequent errors. His fisherman's sense said the wind would have to increase before any rain came today. He expected sunshine before sunset.
"Maritime has other things to do than worry about every small-time ..." Brett broke off as he saw the bitter expression on Twisp's face.
"I mean ..."
"I know what you mean! We're really small-time now. Losing that catch cost me everything: depth gear, nets, new stunshield charges, food, the scull ..."
Brett was almost breathless trying to keep up with the older man's longer, firmer strides. "But we can make another start if ..."
"How?" Twisp asked with a toss of one long arm. "I can't afford to outfit us. You know what they'll advise me in Fisherman's Hall? Sell my boat and go back to the subs as a common crewman!"
The concourse widened into a long ramp. They walked down without speaking and out onto the wide second-level terrace with its heavily cultivated truck gardens. Mazelike access lanes crooked their way to the high railing overlooking the wider first level. As they emerged, gaps began to appear in the overcast and one of Pandora's suns made liars out of the meteorologists at Weather. It bathed the terrace in a welcome yellow light.
Brett pulled at Twisp's sleeve. "Queets, you wouldn't have to sell the boat if you got a loan and -"
"I've got loans up to here!" Twisp said, touching his neck. "I'd just cleared my accounts when I brought you on. I won't go through that again! The boat goes. That means I have to sell your contract."
Twisp sat on a mound of bubbly at the rail and looked out over the sea. The wind-speed was dropping fast, just as he'd expected. The surge at the rim of the Island was still high but the spume shot straight up now.
"Best fishing weather we've had in a long time," Brett said.
Twisp had to admit this was true.
"Why did Maritime let us off so easy?" Twisp muttered. "We had a Merman in the net. Even you know that, kid. Something funny's going on."
"But they let us off, that's the important thing. I thought you'd be happy about it."
"Grow up, kid." Twisp closed his eyes and leaned back against the rail. He felt the cool water breeze against his neck. The sun was hot on his head. Too many problems, he thought.
Brett stood directly in front of Twisp. "You keep telling me to grow up. It looks to me like you could do some growing up yourself. If you'd only get a loan and -"
"If you won't grow up, kid, then shut up."
"It couldn't have been a tripod fish in the net?" Brett persisted.
"No way! There's a different feel. That was a Merman and the dashers got him." Twisp swallowed. "Or her. Up to something, too, from the look of things." Without changing his position against the rail, Twisp listened to the kid shift from foot to foot.
"Is that why you're selling the boat?" Brett asked. "Because we accidentally killed a Merman who was where he wasn't supposed to be? You think the Mermen will be out to get you now?"
"I don't know what to think."
Twisp opened his eyes and looked up at Brett. The kid had narrowed his overly large eyes into a tight squint, his gaze steady on Twisp.
"The Merman observers at Maritime didn't object to the court's decision," Brett said.
"You're right," Twisp said. He jerked a thumb upward toward the Maritime offices. "They're usually ruthless in cases like this. I wonder what we saw ... or almost saw."
Brett moved to one side and plopped himself onto the bubbly beside Twisp. They listened for a time to the thlup-thlup-thlup of waves against the Island's rim.
"I expected to be sent down under," Twisp said. "And you with me. That's what usually happens. You go to work for the dead Merman's family. And you don't always come back topside."
Brett grunted, then: "They'd have sent me, not you. Everybody knows about my eyes, how I can see when it's almost dark. The Mermen would want that."
"Don't give yourself airs, kid. Mermen are damned cautious about who they let into their gene pool. They call us Mutes, you know. And they don't mean something nice when they say it. We're mutants, kid, and when we go down under it's to fill a dead man's dive suit ... nothing else."
"Maybe they didn't want this job filled," Brett said.
Twisp tapped a fist on the resilient organics of the rail. "Or they didn't want anybody from topside to know what that Merman's job was."
"That's crazy!"
Twisp did not respond. They sat quietly for a while as the lone sun dipped lower. Glancing over his shoulder, Twisp stared at the horizon. It bent away in the distance to a bank of black sky and water. Water everywhere.
"I can get us outfitted," Brett said.
Twisp was startled but remained silent, looking at the kid. Brett, too, was staring off at the horizon. Twisp noticed that the boy's skin had become fisherman-dark, not the sickly pale he had displayed when he first boarded the coracle. The kid looked leaner, too ... and taller.
"Didn't you hear me?" Brett asked. "I said -"
"I heard you. For somebody who pissed and moaned most of the time he was out there fishing, you sound pretty anxious to get back on the water."
"I didn't moan about -"
"Just joking, kid." Twisp raised a hand to stop the objections. "Don't be so damned touchy."
His face flushed, Brett looked down at his boots.
Twisp asked, "How would you get this loan?"
"My parents would loan it to me and I'd loan it to you."
"Your parents have money?" Twisp studied the kid, aware that this revelation did not surprise him. In all the time they'd spent together, though, Brett had never talked about his parents and Twisp discreetly had never asked. Islander etiquette.
"They're close to Center," Brett said. "Next ring out from the lab and Committee."
Twisp whistled between his teeth. "What do your parents do that gets them quarters at Center?"
Brett's mouth turned up in a crooked grin. "Slurry. They made their fortune in shit."
Twisp laughed in sudden awareness. "Norton! Brett Norton! Your folks are the Nortons?"
"Norton," Brett corrected him. "They're a team and they bill themselves as one artist."
"Shitpainting," Twisp said. He chuckled.
"They were the first," Brett said. "And it's nutrient, not shit. It's processed slurry."
"So your folks dig shit," Twisp teased.
"Come on!" Brett objected. "I thought I got away from that when I left school. Grow up, Twisp!"
"All right, kid," he laughed, "I know what slurry is." He patted the bubbly beside him. "It's what we feed the Island."
"It's not that simple," Brett said. "I grew up with it, so I know. It's scraps from the fish processors, compost from the agraria, table scraps and ... just about everything." He grinned. "Including shit. My mother was the first chemist to figure out how to color the nutrient like they do now without hurting the bubbly."
"Forgive an old fisherman," Twisp said. "We live with a lot of dead organics, like the membrane on the hull of my coracle. Islandside, we just pick up a bag of nutrient, mix it with a little water and spread it on our walls when they get a little gray."
"Don't you ever try the colored stuff and make a few of your own murals on your walls?" Brett asked.
"I leave that to the artists like your folks," Twisp said. "I didn't grow up with it the way you did. When I was a kid, we only had a bit of graffiti, no pictures. It was all pretty bland: brown on gray. We were told they couldn't introduce other colors because that interfered with absorption by the decks and walls and things. And you know, if our organics die ..." He shrugged. "How'd your folks stumble onto this?"
"They didn't stumble! My mother was a chemist and my father had a flair for design. They went out with a wall-feeding crew one day and did a nutrient mural on the radar dome near the slurryside rim. That was before I was born."
"Two big historical events," Twisp joked. "The first shit painting and the birth of Brett Norton." He shook his head in mock seriousness. "Permanent work, too, because no painting lasts more than about a week."
Brett spoke defensively. "They keep records. Holos and such. Some of their friends have worked up musical scores for the gallery and theater shows."
"How come you left all that?" Twisp asked. "Big money, important friends ... ?"
"You never had some bigshot pat you on the head and say, 'Here's our new little painter.'"
"And you didn't want that?"
Brett turned his back on Twisp so fast that Twisp knew the kid was hiding something. "Haven't I worked out well enough for you?" Brett asked.
"You're a pretty good worker, kid. A little green, but that's part of the bargain on a new contract."
Brett didn't respond and Twisp saw that the kid was staring at the Maritime mural on the inner wall of the second level. It was a big and gaudy mural aglow in the hard light of the setting sun - everything washed a fine crimson.
"Is that one of their murals?" Twisp asked.
Brett nodded without turning.
Twisp took another look at the painting, thinking of how easy it was these days to walk past the decorated hallways, decks and bulkheads without even noticing the color. Some of the murals were sharply geometric, denying the rounded softness of Islander life. Famous murals, ones that kept Norton in constant, high priced demand, were the great historical pieces barely applied before they began their steady absorption toward the flat gray of hungry walls. The Maritime mural was something new in a Norton wall - an abstraction, a study in crimson and the fluidity of motion. It glowed with an internal power in the low light of the sun, seeming to boil and seethe along its rim like an angry creature or a thunderstorm of blood.
The sun lay almost below the horizon, throwing the sea's surface into the little dusk. A fine line of double light skittered across the top of the painting, then the sun dipped below the horizon and they were left with the peculiar afterglow of sunset on Pandora.
"Brett, why didn't your parents buy your contract?" Twisp asked. "With your eyesight, it seems to me you'd have made a fine painter."
The dim silhouette in front of Twisp turned, a fuzzed outline against the lighter background of the mural.
"I never offered my contract for sale," Brett said.
Twisp looked away from Brett, oddly moved by the kid's response. It was as though they suddenly had become much closer friends. The unspoken revelations carried a kind of cement, which sealed all of their shared experiences out on the water ... out there where each depended on the other for survival.
He doesn't want me to sell his contract, Twisp thought. He kicked himself for being so dense. It wasn't just the fishing. Brett could get plenty of fishing after his apprenticeship with Queets Twisp. The contract had increased in value simply because of that apprenticeship. Twisp sighed. No ... the kid did not want to be separated from a friend.
"I still have credit at the Ace of Cups," Twisp said. "Let's go get some coffee and ... whatever ..."
Twisp waited, hearing the little shufflings of Brett's feet in the growing dark. The Island's rimlights began their nightly duty - homing beacons for the time between suns. The lights started with a blue-green phosphorescence of wave tops, bright because the night was warm, then grew even brighter as the organics ignited. Out of the corners of his eyes, Twisp saw Brett wipe his cheeks quickly as the lights came up.
"Hell, we're not breaking up a good team, yet," Twisp said. "Let's go get that coffee." He had never before invited the kid to share an evening at the Ace of Cups, although it was well-known as a fisherman's hangout. He stood and saw an encouraging lift to Brett's chin.
"I'd like that," Brett said.
They walked quietly down the gangway and along the passages with their bright blue phosphorescence to light the way. They entered the coffeehouse through the wool-lined arch and Twisp allowed Brett a moment to look around before pointing out the really fancy feature for which the Ace of Cups was known throughout the Islands - the rimside wall. From deck to ceiling, it was solid wool, a softly curling karakul of iridescent white.
"How do they feed it?" Brett whispered.
"There's a little passageway behind it that they use for storage. They roll the nutrient on from that side."
There were only a few other early drinkers and diners and these paid little attention to the newcomers. Brett ducked his head slightly into his shoulder blades, trying to see everything without appearing to look.
"Why did they choose wool?" Brett asked. He and Twisp threaded their way through the tables to the rimwall.
"Keeps out noise during storms," Twisp said. "We're pretty close to the rim."
They took chairs at a table against the wall - both table and chairs made of the same dried and stretched membrane as the coracles. Brett eased himself into a chair gingerly and Twisp remembered the kid's first time in the coracle.
"You don't like dead furniture," Twisp said.
Brett shrugged. "I'm just not used to it."
"Fishermen like it. It stays put and you don't have to feed it. What'll you have?"
Twisp waved a hand toward Gerard, the owner, who lifted head and shoulders from the raised well behind the bar, a questioning look on his enormous head. Tufts of black hair framed a smiling face.
"I hear they have real chocolate," Brett whispered.
"Gerard will slip a little boo in it if you ask."
"No ... no thanks."
Twisp lifted two fingers with the palm of his other hand over them - the house signal for chocolate - then he winked once for a dash of boo in his own. Presently, Gerard signaled back that the order was ready. All of the regulars knew Gerard's problem - his legs fused into a single column with two toeless feet. The proprietor of the Ace of Cups was confined to a Merman-made motorized chair, a sure sign of affluence. Twisp rose and went to the bar to collect their drinks.
"Who's the kid?" Gerard asked as he slid two cups across the bar. "Boo's in the blue." He tapped the blue cup for emphasis.
"My new contract," Twisp said. "Brett Norton."
"Oh, yeah? From downcenter?"
Twisp nodded.
"His folks are the shitpainters."
"How come everybody except me knew that?" Twisp asked.
"'Cause, you keep your head buried in a fish tote," Gerard said. His ridged forehead drew down and his green eyes twinkled in amusement.
"It's a mystery whatever brought him out to fish," Twisp said. "If I believed in luck, I'd say he was bad luck. But he's a damned nice kid."
"I heard about you losing your gear and your catch," Gerard said. "What're you going to do?" He nodded toward where Brett sat watching them. "His folks have money."
"So he says," Twisp said. He balanced the cups for his return to the table. "See you."
"Good fishing," Gerard said. It was an automatic response and he frowned when he realized he'd said it to a netless fisherman.
"We'll see," Twisp said and returned to the table. He noted that the action of the deck underfoot had picked up slightly. Could be a storm coming.
They sipped quietly at their chocolate and Twisp felt the boo settling his nerves. From somewhere in the quarters behind the counter someone played a flute and someone else tapped out a back-up on water drums.
"What were you two talking about?" Brett asked.
"You."
Brett's face flushed noticeably under the dim lights of the coffeehouse. "What ... what were you saying?"
"Seems everybody but me knew about you being from downcenter. That's why you don't like dead furniture."
"I got used to the coracle," Brett said.
"Not everybody can afford organics ... or wants them," Twisp said. "It costs a lot to feed good furniture. And organics don't make the best small boats because they can go wild when they get into a school of fish. The subs are specially designed to prevent that."
Brett's mouth began to twitch into a smile. "You know, when I first saw your boat and heard you call it a coracle, I thought 'coracle' meant 'carcass.'"
They both laughed, Twisp a little unsteadily from the boo.
Brett stared at him. "You're drunk."
