“It’s nephrite—jade,” Adrienne said, as they brought the loop of cable around the boulder and secured it. “So’s this big hunk of rock here.”
“Yikes,” he said, looking at it. Nine thousand pounds of jade; call it half a million. Oh, well, a glut of caviar is a glut of caviar. “You know, I’ve been to this spot before—looked at it, FirstSide, never got down on the beach, of course—but I don’t remember the jade boulder.”
“Mom had it moved here from a little south along the coast,” Adrienne said. “One of her better moves; she loved—loves—this spot too. Hell, you can’t quarrel with everything your parents like.”
Making camp was a work of moments; they set up two collapsible bell tents with titanium frames at a discreet distance apart, unrolled their sleeping bags, and dug a slit-trench behind a boulder near the inland edge of the beach. A circle of fire-blackened stones showed where others had made a hearth, and there was plenty of driftwood and deadfall; he shaved the kindling they needed, using dry branches, a hatchet, and a fallen log half-buried in sand as a cutting block.
The gear they’d brought included masks, snorkels and flippers—they were supposed to be on a vacation, without a care in the world, after all.
And, he thought, grinning, why not act like it right now?
Adrienne caught his mood. “Decided to put the Lutheran guilt-and-anxiety thing on hold for a while?”
“It’s your corrupting influence,” he said. “Episcopalians don’t do guilt, I suppose?”
“Of course not. It’s grubby, tacky and thoroughly lower-class,” she said with that irresistible smile. “Let’s swim—and get dinner.”
They changed; he noticed with some amusement that the bikinis the women wore were distinctly conservative by FirstSide standards, and that they both undressed in a tent—the body-modesty taboo had stayed stronger here than it had back in the parent society. As for the swimsuits…
Tully said it for him: “Hey, it’s Beach Blanket Bingo!”
“Oh, you liked that one too?” Sandra said artlessly, clapping her hands. The results were spectacular, even with Adrienne standing beside her, long and sleekly curved.
“God, a woman who likes old movies and looks like that,” Roy replied, eyes bulging. “I’m lost!”
“Well, the FirstSiders stopped making good movies—the new ones are too likely to be just disgusting, or not make any sense—so the Theatre Guild has to reissue the old ones a lot here,” Sandra said, handing them nets and short, heavy prying irons with sharpened, flattened ends. “Except for the Mummy movies, and the Harry Potter and the Rings series—those were fine, but that was years ago now! We should make more of our own.”
“Small population, limited talent pool,” Adrienne said. “We can’t do everything. Let’s go!”
They ran—as much as you could run with flippers on—and threw themselves into the shallow water, stroking out. He exulted in the sudden cold shock of the water, a good twenty degrees lower than the air, and the pull and surge of the ocean like some great beast tugging at him. It was crystal-clear as they sculled out past the little rock reef in the mouth of the cove; the stone was covered in bright-colored coralline algae and sea anemones, and beyond it the sandy bottom held a thick growth of giant kelp. A couple of five-foot giant sea bass flicked by below him, muscular, scaly brutes, then a school of bright orange garibaldi fish, and the bottom held lingcod and kelp bass and others by the dozens. He flipped upright and trod water; not far away a young sea otter floated on its back, wrapped in a strand of giant kelp by its mother to keep it in place while she foraged, staring at him round-eyed with its small paws raised as if in surrender.
It made a sound at him, something between meeep! and keeeek!
“Sorry, kid, it’s not your mother,” he said in reply. “On the other hand, I’m not after your fur, either.”
Just about then its mother did arrive from below, a handsome silvery-brown creature four feet long, with large eyes and a round, blunt-muzzled face framed by long whiskers on either side of a black button nose. She had a foot-long abalone clutched to her chest with one paw, a rock under the other, and looked suspiciously in his direction before she went to check her cub. It greeted her with happy high-pitched squeaks, grunts and coos as it climbed onto her belly and began to nurse, while she juggled rock and shellfish—evidently the problems of working mothers were a transspecies, transdimensional universal.
“Don’t worry, lady, the kid’s OK,” he said, grinning around the mouthpiece of the snorkel.
There were more of the otters scattered through the kelp forest; he could hear the whackety-whack-whack! as one of them held a shellfish between her paws and hammered it against the rock on her chest, going at it like a pneumatic pavement breaker.
“Time to dive,” Sandra said. “This water’s cold.”
It was, particularly without a wet suit; you were courting hypothermia if you stayed in too long. He took a couple of deep breaths and dove; the bottom was about twenty-five feet down, not very far for an experienced swimmer. The abalone was more abundant than any he’d ever seen, despite all the otters topside—and those critters could gobble down a third of their own considerable weights in seafood every day. Plus you couldn’t fault their taste: They’d eat abalone in preference to most other stuff, even sea urchins or crabs. Evidently the absence of millions of humans equally determined to get their hands on the big mollusks was enough to make the difference.
Back FirstSide you had to carry a special measuring stick to make sure none of the ones you took were less than seven inches long, and the meat cost eighty dollars a pound. Here he didn’t see many that weren’t seven inches, and plenty were monsters that would have broken records back FirstSide, a foot long and more.
It wasn’t the first time he’d pried abalone off rocks, either—although most of his efforts had gone into stopping poachers from doing it. He thrust the flattened end of the iron under the muscular “foot” of one and levered sharply; it came free after a long moment of effort, and he stuffed the twelve-inch shell into the net at his waist. His lungs were burning by the time he’d gotten three; they all stroked for the shore when he came up, and waded out with their lips blue and teeth on the verge of chattering, or over it in some cases—being big meant you lost heat more slowly. The kindling was ready in the stone circle, neatly piled in a little tepee; Tom blew on his fingers so that he could work the Zippo and get it going. Flames crackled up through the bone-dry shavings, and then through the larger sticks of driftwood as the four of them stood close around it, each couple pressed together for warmth and wrapped in a blanket.
He could feel Adrienne’s chilled flesh gradually thawing against him, and a big blanket could hide a fair degree of movement. Interesting. Definitely interesting, he thought, and she whispered through a shiver, “I seem to affect you more than the Pacific Ocean itself.”
“I’m not complaining, and neither is he,” he murmured into her ear.
After a while they were warm enough to go wash the salt off under the fringes of the waterfall—like God’s cold shower, as Roy put it—dry off around the fire some more, and dress. He felt relaxed and supple and strong again after fighting the chilly waters, but it wasn’t something you’d choose to do every day—or every week.