"Shadow, don't make trouble for yourself," Ale said. "I'm speaking as a friend. Keep your suspicions to yourself ... no rumor-spreading outside this room."

"This is going to be very bad for business," he said. "I understand your concern."

She stiffened and her voice took on a coldly clipped quality. "I must go and get ready to receive the survivors. I will discuss this with you later." She turned on one heel and left.

The hatch sealed with a soft hiss behind him and Panille was left with the memory-image of her angry back and the sweet scent of her body.

Of course she had to go, he thought. Ale was a medic and every available medic would be called up in this emergency. But she was more than a medic. Politics! Why did every political crisis have the stink of merchants hovering around it?

***

Consciousness is the Species-God's gift to the individual. Conscience is the Individual-God's gift to the species. In conscience you find the structure, the form of consciousness, the beauty.
- Kerro Panille, "Translations from the Avata," the Histories

"She dreams me," Duque said. His voice came strongly from the shadows at the edge of the great organic tub that he shared with Vata.

A watcher ran to summon the C/P.

Indeed, Vata had begun to dream. They were specific dreams, part her own memories, part other memories she inherited from the kelp. Avata memories. These latter included human memories acquired through the kelp's hylighter vector, and other human memories gained he knew not how ... but there was death and pain involved. There were even Ship memories, and these were strangest of all. None of this had entered a human awareness in quite this way for generations.

Ship! Duque thought.

Ship moved through the void like a needle through wrinkled fabric - in at one place, out far away, and all in a blink. Ship once had created a paradise planet and planted humans on its surface, demanding:

"You must decide how you will WorShip me!"

Ship had brought humans to Pandora, which was not a paradise, but a planet almost entirely seas, and those waters moved by the unruly cycles of two suns. A physical impossibility, had Ship not done it. All this Duque saw in the flashing jerks of Vata's dreams.

"Why did Ship bring its humans to me?" Avata had asked.

Neither humans nor Ship answered. And now Ship was gone but humans remained. And the new kelp, that was Avata, now had nothing but a toehold in the sea and its dreams filled Duque's awareness.

Vata dreamed endlessly.

Duque experienced her dreams as vision-plays reproduced upon his senses. He knew their source. What Vata did to him had its own peculiar flavor, always identifiable, never to be denied.

She dreamed a woman called Waela and another called Hali Ekel. The Hali dream disturbed Duque. He felt the reality of it as though his own flesh walked those paths and felt those pains. It was Ship moving him through time and other dimensions to watch a naked man nailed to a crosspiece. Duque knew it was Hali Ekel who saw this thing but he could not separate himself from her experience. Why did some of the spectators spit on him and some weep?

The naked man raised his head and called out: "Father forgive them."

Duque felt it as a curse. To forgive such a thing was worse than demanding revenge. To be forgiven such an act - that could only be more terrible than a curse.

The C/P arrived in the Vata room. Even her bulky robes and long strides couldn't disguise the fine curves of her slim hips and ample breasts. Her body was doubly distracting because she was C/P, and because she was imprisoned inside that Guemian face. She knelt above Duque and the room immediately went silent except for the gurgle of the life-support systems.

"Duque," the C/P said, "what occurs?"

"It is real," Duque said. His voice came out strained and troubled. "It happened."

"What happened, Duque?" she asked.

Duque sensed a voice far away, much farther away than the Hali Ekel dream. He felt Hali's distress, he felt the ancient flesh she wore for Ship's excursion to that hill of terrible crosses; he felt Hali's puzzlement.

Why were they doing this thing? Why did Ship want me to see this?

Duque felt both questions as his own. He had no answers.

The C/P repeated her demand: "What happened, Duque?"

The faraway voice was an insect buzzing in his ear. He wanted to slap it.

"Ship," he said.

A gasp arose from the watchers, but the C/P did not move.

"Is Ship returning?" the C/P asked.

The question enraged Duque. He wanted to concentrate on the Hali Ekel dream. If only they would leave him alone, he felt he might find answers to his questions.

The C/P raised her voice: "Is Ship returning, Duque? You must answer!"

"Ship is everywhere!" Duque shouted.

His shout extinguished the Hali Ekel dream completely.

Duque felt anguish. He had been so close! Just a few more seconds ... the answers might have come.

Now, Vata dreamed a poet named Kerro Panille and the young Waela woman of that earlier dream. Her face merged with drifting kelp, but her flesh was hot against Panille's flesh and their orgasm shuddered through Duque, driving away all other sensations.

The C/P turned her protuberant red eyes toward the watchers. Her expression was stern.

"You must say nothing of this to anyone," she ordered.

They nodded agreement, but already some among them were speculating on who might share this revelation - just one trusted friend or lover. It was too great a thing to contain.

Ship was everywhere!

Was Ship in this very room in some mysterious way?

This thought had occurred to the C/P and she asked it of Duque, who lay half somnolent in postcoital relaxation.

"Everywhere is everywhere," Duque muttered.

The C/P could not question such logic. She peered fearfully around her into the shadows of the Vata room. The watchers copied her questioning examination of their surroundings. Remembering the utterance that had been repeated to her when she had been summoned, the C/P asked: "Who dreams you, Duque?"

"Vata!"

Vata stirred sluggishly and the murky nutrient rippled around her breasts.

The C/P bent close to one of Duque's bulbous ears and spoke so low that only the closest watchers heard and some of them did not hear it correctly.

"Does Vata waken?"

"Vata dreams me," Duque moaned.

"Does Vata dream of Ship?"

"Yesssss." He would tell them anything if only they would go away and leave him to these terrible and wonderful dreams.

"Does Ship send us a message?" the C/P asked.

"Go away!" Duque screamed.

The C/P rocked back on her heels. "Is that Ship's message?"

Duque remained silent.

"Where would we go?" the C/P asked.

But Duque was caught up in Vata's birth-dream and the moaning voice of Waela, Vata's mother: "My child will sleep in the sea."

Duque repeated it.

The C/P groaned. Duque had never before been this specific.

"Duque, does Ship order us to go down under?" she demanded.

Duque remained silent. He was watching the shadow of Ship darken a bloody plain, hearing Ship's inescapable voice: "I travel the Ox Gate!"

The C/P repeated her question, her voice almost a moan. But the signs were clear. Duque had spoken his piece and would not respond further. Slowly, stiffly the C/P lifted herself to her feet. She felt old and tired, far beyond her thirty-five years. Her thoughts flowed in confusion. What was the meaning of this message? It would have to be considered with great care. The words had seemed so clear ... yet, might there not be another explanation?

Are we Ship's child?

That was a weighty question.

Slowly, she cast her gaze across the awed watchers. "Remember my orders!"

They nodded, but within only a few hours, it was all over Vashon: Ship had returned. Vata was awakening. Ship had ordered them all to go down under.

By nightfall, sixteen other Islands had the message via radio, some in garbled form. The Mermen, having overheard some of the radio transmissions, had questioned their people among the Vata watchers and sent a sharp query to the C/P.

"Is it true that Ship has landed on Pandora near Vashon? What is this talk of Ship ordering the Islanders to migrate down under?"

There was more to the Merman query but C/P Rocksack, realizing that Vata security had been breached, invested herself in her most official dignity and answered just as sharply.

"All revelations concerning Vata require the most careful consideration and lengthy prayer by the Chaplain/Psychiatrist. When there is a need for you to know, you will be told."

It was quite the curtest response she had ever made to the Mermen, but the nature of Duque's words had upset her and the tone of the Merman message had been almost, but not quite, of a nature to bring down her official reprimand. The appended Merman observations she had found particularly insulting. Of course she knew there could be no swift and complete migration of Islanders down under! It was physically impossible, not to mention psychologically inadvisable. This, more than anything else, had told her that Duque's words required another interpretation. And once more she marveled at the wisdom of the ancestors in combining the functions of chaplain with those of psychiatrist.

***

They that go down to the sea in ships,

That do business in great waters;

These see the works of the Lord,

And his wonders in the deep.
- The Christian Book of the Dead

As he fell from the pier, the coracle's bowline whipping around his left ankle, Brett knew he was going under. He pumped in one quick breath before hitting the water. His hands clawed frantically for something to hold him up and he felt Twisp's hand rasp beneath his fingers but there was nothing to grip. The coracle, an anchor dragging him down, hit a submerged ledge of bubbly and upended, kicking him toward the center of the lagoon and, for a moment, he thought he was saved. He surfaced about ten meters from the pier and, over the howl of the hooters, he heard Twisp calling to him. The Island was receding fast and Brett realized the coracle's bowline had broken free of the dockside cable. He hauled in as much air as his lungs could grab and felt the line on his ankle pull him toward the Island. Doubling over underwater, he tried to free himself, but the line had tangled in a knot and his weight was enough to tug the coracle off the bubbly below the pier. He felt the line whip taut, dragging him down.

A warning rocket painted the water over him bloody orange. The surface appeared flat, the momentary calm ahead of a wavewall. Roiling water rolled him, the line on his ankle pulled steadily and he felt the pressure increase through his nose and across his chest.

I'm going to drown!

He opened his eyes wide, amazed suddenly at the clarity of his underwater vision - even better than his night vision. Dark blues and reds dominated his surroundings. The ache in his lungs increased. He held the breath tight, not wanting to let go of that last touch with life, not wanting that first gulp of water and the choking death behind it.

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 myself," 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.