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“Well,” she said, “the sooner we get out of here the sooner life goes on.”
They uncurled themselves from each other. He liked the way the warm spots lingered and tingled on his skin. Ale stepped out of the hatch onto the docking bay and reached back a slender hand to pull him through.
“You’re beautiful,” he said, and her strong grip pulled him right up to her, then she hugged him close. Again, he put down his doubts about her.
“You have a way with words,” she said.
“Runs in my family.”
“You could’ve been a surgeon,” she said. “You have good hands. I’d like to spend more time studying your hands.”
“I’d like that,” he murmured against her hair. “I’ve always wanted to know you better. You know that.”
“I have to warn you, I snore.”
“I noticed,” he said. They held each other and swayed on the docking bay. “You drool, too,” he said.
“Don’t be crude.” She pinched him in the ribs. “Ladies don’t drool.”
“What’s this wet spot on my shoulder?”
“How embarrassing,” she said. Then she took his hand and guided him up the walkway toward her building. She glanced back at him and said, “Nobody lives long enough for dilly-dallying. Let’s get to it.”
Panille realized right then that the pace of his life had just turned itself up a full notch. Tired as he had been, he sparked with the measure of energy that she injected into the air around them. There was a new bounce to her step that he hadn’t noticed in surgery. Her body moved smoothly, quickly across the black-tiled foyer and he matched her step-for-step. When they walked into the ambassadorial quarters they were still holding hands.
Chapter 25
Pattern is his who can see beyond shape:
Life is his who can tell beyond words.
—Lao Tzu, Shiprecords
Both suns stood high in the dark sky, raising heat shimmers off the water. Brett’s sensitive eyes, shielded by dark glasses Scudi had found in the foil’s lockers, scanned the sea. The foil cut through the waves with an ease that thrilled him. He marveled at how quickly his senses had adapted to speed. A feeling of freedom, of escape soothed him. Pursuit could not move this fast. Danger could only lie ahead, where heat shimmers distorted the horizon. Or, as Twisp called it, “the Future.”
When Brett had been quite young, standing with his mother at Vashon’s edge for the first time, the heat-dazzled air had been inhabited by coils of long-whiskered dragons. Today’s sun felt new on his arms and face, glistening through the canopy onto the instruments. The suns ignited golden glints in Scudi’s black hair. There were no dragons.
Scudi bent intently over the controls, watching the sea, the dials, the guidance screen above her head. Her mouth was set in a grim line, which softened only when she looked at Brett.
A wide stretch of kelp drew a dark shadow on the water off to his right. Scudi steered them into the lee of the kelp, finding smoother water there. Brett stared out at an ovoid green mat within the kelp. At the very center of the oval, this particular green was a vivid reflector of the sunlight. The green darkened away from the center until the kelp patch became yellowed and brown at the edges.
Seeing where he was looking, Scudi said, “The outer edges die off, curl under and fortify the rest of the patch.”
They rode without speaking for a time.
Abruptly, Scudi shocked him by shutting down the foil’s engines. The big craft dropped off the step with a rocking lurch.
Brett looked wildly at Scudi, but she appeared calm.
“You start us,” Scudi said.
“What?”
“Start us up.” Her voice was calmly insistent. “What if I were injured?”
Brett sank into his seat and looked down at the control panel. Below the screen near the center of the cockpit lay four switches and a sticker labeled “Starting Procedure.”
He read the instructions and depressed the switch marked “Ignition.” The hot hiss of the hydrogen ram came from the rear of the foil.
Scudi smiled.
As the instructions told him, Brett glanced up at the guidance screen. A miniature line-drawing of a foil appeared around a green dot on the screen. A red line speared outward from the green dot. He touched the button marked forward and pushed the throttle gently ahead, gripping the wheel tightly with his free hand. He could feel sweat under his palms. The craft began to lift, tipping on the flank of a wave.
“Right down the trough,” Scudi reminded him.
He turned the wheel slightly and pushed the throttle farther ahead. The foil came out of the water with a gentle gliding motion and he gave it more throttle. They came up on the step and he saw the speed-distance counter flicker, then settle on “72.”
The green dot tracked on the red line.
“Very good,” Scudi said. “I’ll take it now. Just remember to follow the instructions.”
Scudi increased speed. Cabin air felt cooler as vents exchanged topside air from a clear and sunny day.
Brett scanned as much of the horizon as he could see from the cabin, a thing he had learned from Twisp, almost unconsciously. It was his landscape, the view he had known since infancy—open ocean with long rollers broken here and there by patches of kelp, silvery current intersections and wind-foamed crests. There was a rhythm to it that satisfied him. All the divergent variety became one thing inside him, as everything was one in the sea. The suns came up separately but met before they sank below the horizon. Waves crossed each other and told him of things beyond his view. It was all one. He tried to say something of this to Scudi.
“The suns do that because of their ellipses,” she said. “I know about the waves. Everything that touches them tells us something of itself.”
“Ellipses?” he asked.
“My mother said the suns met at midday when she was young.”
Brett found this interesting but he felt that Scudi had missed his point. Or she didn’t want to discuss it. “You must’ve learned a lot from your mother.”
“She was very smart except for men,” Scudi said. “At least, that’s what she used to say.”
“When she was mad at your father?”
“Yes. Or different men at the outposts.”
“What are these outposts?”
“Places where we are few, where we work hard and have our different ways. When I come into the city, or even the launch site, I’m aware that I am different. I speak different. I have been warned about it.”
“Warned?” Brett felt undertones of some dark savagery among the Mermen.
“My mother said if I took outpost-talk into the city I couldn’t blend. People would look at me as an outsider—a dangerous perspective.”
“Dangerous?” he asked. “To see things differently?”
“Sometimes.” Scudi glanced at him. “You must blend in. You could pass, but I know you for an Islander by the sound of your talk.”
Scudi was trying to warn him, he thought.
Or teach me.
He noted that her accent was different out here than it had been back in her quarters. It wasn’t her choice of words so much as the way she said them. There was a sparseness about her now. She was even more direct.
Brett looked out at the ocean speeding past. He thought about this Merman unity, this Merman society that measured danger in an accent. Like the waves, which met at odd angles, currents in Merman society were refracting off each other. “Interference,” the physicists called it; he knew that much.
The ease with which Scudi kept the big foil skipping the wavetops told Brett something of her past. She had only to glance at the guidance screen and out at the ocean to become one with all of it. She avoided the thick stretches of wild kelp and kept them securely on course toward this mysterious Launch Base.
“There’s more wild kelp lately,” he said. “No Mermen attending it.”
“Pandora belonged to the kelp once,” she said. “Now kelp grows and spreads at the top of an exponential curve. Do you know what that means?”
