MEDUSA’S CHILDREN
Bob Shaw
CHAPTER ONE
Myrah woke with a start, convinced she had heard a cry from one of the six babies in her care, but the nursery was quiet except for the steady breathing of the air pumps.
She remained quite still for a moment, while full consciousness returned, then decided to inspect each of the babies individually in case one of them had become ill or was caught in a freakish accretion of dead air. Unloosing the restraint cord from the fastening clip on her belt, she pushed herself away from the curved metal wall and floated low over the sleeping babies. They were in perfect repose, drifting comfortably at the ends of their short tethers, absurd little faces registering contentment or lordly boredom. The air currents induced by Myrah’s passage across the nursery caused the babies to rock and wallow slightly, like flowers nodding in a breeze, but they remained asleep. She checked her flight by grasping the bracket of a storage net and launched herself back to her original position close to the room’s circular window.
It took only a few seconds for Myrah to secure the restraint cord to the braided belt which was her sole item of apparel. She was wide awake now, the notion that her charges might have been in danger having driven out all desire for sleep, but there was no point in leaving the nursery until another watcher arrived for a duty spell. Close to Myrah’s face, on the moisture-beaded wall, was a sawn-off bracket which had once held a run of copper pipes. The pipes had long since been removed, probably for the fashioning of spears, but underneath the fixture there remained a rectangular brass plate. It was engraved with the words: TORPEDO HOIST—H.P. HYDRAULICS.
Myrah traced the letters with a fingertip, as she had done many times before, wondering about the meaning they must have had for the Clan’s founders. Tiring of the speculation, she closed her eyes and tried to go to sleep again, but at that moment there came a faint cry from one of the sentries outside. It contained a note of surprise or excitement, and she realised belatedly that it had been a similar sound which had wakened her.
She changed her position and pulled the circular window open, relying on the air pressure within the nursery to prevent water from billowing in. The world outside looked much as it always did—a pale blue universe of transparent water in which spherical air bubbles of all different sizes drifted like globes of silver foil. So plentiful were the bubbles this morning that they made it difficult to see much beyond the Home’s protective nets, but this was not a particularly rare occurrence and offered no explanation for the sentry’s call. Myrah held her breath and pushed her head into the gently undulating vertical surface of the water, hoping for a better view of what was going on. There was little to be seen on this side of the Home, except for nets and a column of root structure, and she withdrew her head from the water. As she was doing so, a strong hand gripped the inner surface of her thigh and pulled her further into the room.
“I could have had you like that,” a male voice said. “Very tempting indeed.”
Myrah twisted and saw Harld, a fair-haired youth from the Hunting family, who had entered the nursery with a professional lack of noise. He was a pleasant-natured boy, with a lithe body which bore very few of the Horra scars which so often made hunters look ugly. Myrah had swum with him many times.
She smiled at him. “So early in the morning! You must be eating well.”
“I am.” He caught hold of her restraint cord and, using it as an anchor line, drew his body closer to hers. “But I’m still hungry—I think I could eat you all up.”
Myrah allowed their bodies to touch for a moment, as a normal gesture of courtesy, then pushed him away. “Not here in the nursery,” she said. “I’ll swim with you later today if you want.”
He shook his head. “I’m not going for ice.”
“Why not? I thought you had been chosen.”
“We got no kingfish yesterday. Solman says we’ve to hunt again today, and I’ve also to take the early spell in here for five days—as a punishment.”
Myrah instantly detached herself from the wall and made ready to leave. “The nursery watch isn’t a punishment.”
Harld nodded without conviction and looked at the six babies, some of whom were beginning to stir at the sound of voices. The sponge bags tied between their legs, to prevent their excretions of the night drifting through the room, showed signs of staining. “I see you haven’t cleaned them.”
“First watch always does that.”
“And you say this isn’t a punishment duty!” Harld rolled his eyes in a good-humoured display of exasperation and unfastened the straps of his bubble cage from around his forehead. “I suppose I’d better get started.”
“Yes, and remember to be gentle with them.” Myrah took her own bubble cage from the nearest storage net and strapped it on. Its filigrees of chiselled bone curved around her head like the petals of a huge flower.
“I’ll take care,” Harld said. “For all I know, one of them could be mine.” While he was speaking one of the babies gave a thin, irritated squawk.
“Probably that one,” Myrah bantered.
“He isn’t handsome enough.” Harld wedged his feet into loops on the floor, to give himself working leverage, and untied the baby which had cried out. “Have any of them been coughing?”
“Of course not—I’d have heard.” Myrah tried to suppress a pang of unease. “You shouldn’t talk about coughing in here.”
Harld looked at her in amused surprise. “Talking about it doesn’t bring it on.”
“I know, but….” She decided to change the subject. “What’s happening outside? I heard somebody shouting.”
“I didn’t notice. I came here on the inner path.”
“Why weren’t you able to get any kingfish yesterday?”
“Solman says it’s because we didn’t try hard enough, but I think it’s something to do with the new current. Their feeding ground could have changed.”
Myrah nodded thoughtfully and kicked off towards the doorway of the nursery. Her accurately judged trajectory took her into the corridor beyond. There was less light here, but she was familiar with this part of the Home and two more impulsions brought her quickly to an outer doorway through which streamed the azure light of the morning. The surface of the water, held in check by air pressure, curved and flattened like a glassy blanket. She went into it head first and swam away to the right. On her third stroke she picked up a large bubble by putting her face into it and allowing its surface tension to glue it into the spherical framework of her cage. The action was performed automatically, almost as a reflex. Myrah could swim a long way before needing to breathe—and she was going to a section of the Home which was near at hand—but she had been conditioned since childhood to capture any air which became available.
Taking the free breath, she swam towards the central region of the Home, in the direction she thought of as up. She knew that when any solid object was released in an air space it eventually drifted down, but this movement was so gradual, and so easily reversed by air currents, that it played virtually no part in her spatial orientation. Up was the general direction from which light came during the day, and it was most easily identified by reference to the branching root structures which reached all the way to the surface of the world. Multiple columns of these roots stretched above her now, providing a shadowy background to the clustered buildings of the Home which hung motionless in the water like dead whales. At this level, near the bottom of the euphotic zone, reds and greens were very weak, and Myrah was swimming in a luminous blue universe shot through with galaxies of silver globes and darting fish.
She passed through an opening in the fine-mesh net which held the Home’s communal air supply, and penetrated the air-water interface at a speed which sent her arcing across the giant bubble amid a spray of droplets. In spite of the earliness of the hour, she could see a knot of people gathered about the figure of a man who was wearing the metal bubble cage of a sentry. She hooked one hand around a guide rope, using the momentary contact to effect a change of direction, and came to rest near the edge of the group.