The world seems to be changing, he had said. At that time, still fresh from her night’s sleep, Myrah had been scornful—now she was filled with a gloomy certainty that he had been right.
The Home was a scene of unusual activity when they descended on it out of the silent blue waters.
Everywhere that Myrah looked on the vast, amorphous structure she glimpsed the figures of men and women either carrying ropes from one point to another, or busy reinforcing the anchorages of the outer defensive mesh. In those places where the dark shapes of houses projected through the mesh they were criss-crossed with new lines, like whales which were being prevented from making ponderous escapes.
Myrah was disturbed by what she saw. With the almost complete lack of gravity it was easy to secure an edifice as large as the Home, its various attachments to the root columns being used principally to prevent the inner air net from deforming under the action of stray currents. Now, however, it seemed that the Home was being reinforced to withstand an abnormally powerful attack from outside. Myrah turned her head, taking a general view of her environment, and became aware of the fact that the endless shoals of air bubbles, upon which her people depended for their lives, were drifting downwards at a more noticeable rate than had been the case in the morning. Her sense of being threatened grew stronger.
They reached the smaller netted bubble which surrounded the Topeast entrance and went into it one by one. Old Shire, who was back on sentry duty, urged them through with excited gestures which made Myrah resolve not to betray her own fears. She manoeuvred her position so as to be the last of the group to go inside and paused by Shire. The skin bags she was transporting, their contents now melted down into water, surged against her legs as she stopped.
“Keep moving,” Shire commanded impatiently.
“What’s going on?”
“Solman has called a Clan meeting.”
“Why? What happened?”
“The Home has shifted and …” Shire paused, scowling, suddenly aware he was weakening his new-found authority. “It isn’t for the likes of you or me to question the Council, is it?”
Myrah shrugged, handed him her spear and went through to the protected inner waters of the Home. Four strokes took her to the nearest opening in the interior net and she passed through its clinging folds into the giant, artificially maintained bubble in which the people of the Clan spent most of their lives. She took off her bubble cage, closed up its leaves like a fan, and hooked it into her belt. Adapting easily to the change of environment, she propelled herself through the air in a series of gentle flights from guide rope to guide rope, eventually arriving at the dark oval mouth of the water store. The custodian, Jule—a fat woman whose eyes were featureless milky orbs—accepted the water bags from her with a fixed smile. She steered the bulging skins into a net which held others brought in by the group.
“Thank you, Myrah love,” she said. “Had a good trip?”
“No. Didn’t they tell you? We lost Caro.”
“A pity.” Jule’s smile faded, but was quickly renewed. “Razorfin? Shark?”
“Horra.”
“Up at the surface?”
“It might have been lost,” Myrah said sarcastically. She was as familiar with premature and violent death as any member of the Clan, but she disliked the blind woman’s casual acceptance of the news about Caro. Deciding to change the subject, she glanced around the interior of the water store. It had been chosen for its purpose because, unlike other houses in the Home, it was small and constructed of a whitish metal which seemed immune to serious corrosion. The metal was much thinner than in the bigger houses and its reinforcing ribs were pierced with large circular holes, presumably for decoration.
“I’d love to know where this house came from,” Myrah said, touching a sawn edge of metal which protruded from the mastic which held the net in place around the entrance.
“The Clan fathers built it.”
“Why?”
“To store water, of course.”
Myrah considered asking Jule why a water store should have three large fin-like extrusions at its closed end, then decided there was little point. Jule was quite capable of saying that a house which enabled humans to live in water like fish ought to be shaped like a fish. She had lost her sight many years earlier in an encounter with a cumberfish, an immobile species which defended itself by explosive evisceration of its own body when it felt menaced. Usually this resulted in no more than a scare for the swimmer concerned, but the cumberfish had been in a poisonous condition and Jule had contracted an eye disease. Since then she had survived by being optimistic about everything, and Myrah had no wish to infect her with her own mood of depression.
Looking outside the house she saw a fairly steady stream of people flying down into the central region and guessed the Clan meeting was about to start. She said goodbye to Jule and propelled herself from the lip of the water store entrance and slanted down through the webs of rope, suddenly aware that she had had no food since the previous day. There was still time to go to the Artisan family house and pick up a tablet of dried fish—large meetings were always difficult to organise—but her curiosity about what Solman was going to say was too strong. She continued her downward flight to where the Clan had assembled in the largest open space, ranged along guide ropes like complicated beads.
There were less than two hundred of them, and yet this was the total strength of the Clan, excluding infants and the few adults who were engaged on essential work such as guarding the entrances. Myrah had often heard that there had been many more Humans in the Home in the old days, but it saddened her to realise that, even were their numbers to be doubled or trebled, the people of the Clan would still be as nothing compared to the teeming life forms beyond the nets. It seemed to her that their status in the order of things was not merely insignificant, but that it was dangerously close to not existing at all. They were dependent on the fine balance of too many forces; their resources were dwindling to the point at which a single disaster could be sufficient to wipe them out altogether.
And, for all she knew, the final tragedy had already begun. The new current, the disappearance of the best edible fish from their usual feeding grounds, Horra spreading upwards from their dark domain to the surface of the world—all of these could be portents….
“I’d like to know what’s wrong with you today,” Lennar said, coming down from behind her and grasping the same rope. He caught her belt with his hand and drew their bodies into momentary contact with a courtesy which was at variance with the terseness of his voice.
“Perhaps I don’t like seeing people being eaten,” Myrah replied without looking at him.
“It started before that.”
“L …” Myrah turned reluctantly to face him. “I think I’m afraid, Lennar. I can’t see the Clan going on like this for much longer.”
“Is that all? I thought it was something serious.”
“I’m serious, Lennar.”