Waking was strange, in darkness and stench. Gavagol flung out his arms, to find that he was confined in a space not much bigger than a coffin. His knuckles rang against metal. The smell was so strong as to be unclassifiable, ancient and organic, like a food locker left uncleaned a thousand years. Gavagol gagged on a scream.
His arms felt different. In the blackness, he clutched at his own hands. His fingers were too long and seemed to be hung with bags of flapping membrane, and his skin. slick, moist, utterly alien.
He opened his mouth to try another scream, but then the regentank’s hatch opened. Pressure popped off, and light flooded his eyes. Strong hands took him by the shoulders and slid him out onto a gurney.
He looked up at the Flesh Tinker. The hot magenta eyes were filled with a fierce proprietary pride.
«Just lie still for a bit,» the Flesh Tinker said, smiling that predatory smile.
At the first try, Gavagol’s voice would not obey him. He swallowed a nasty taste, then tried again. «I feel like death,» he croaked.
The Flesh Tinker’s face pinched together. «I’ve, done exactly what you asked: given you the sea. And, I remind you, without charge.»
Gavagol propped himself on his elbows and looked down his body in fascination.
His skin glistened, a slippery gunmetal gray. The membranes that draped his arms were echoed by those on his legs. His feet were twenty centimeters longer, and the slender toes were tipped by sharp, hooked claws. When he saw that his crotch was too smooth, he whimpered, then he reached down, probing.
The Flesh Tinker laughed, good humor restored. «Not to worry. Internal genitals. You don’t want anything vital dangling out in the sea where the wildlife can snap at it, eh? You’ll soon get used to it.» The Flesh Tinker winked, all his wrinkles bunching up.
Gavagol looked about. The cabin was a jungle of eccentric equipment. Everywhere touchboards and readout screens hung, glowing with numbers and words in a dozen unfamiliar alphabets. There, a Genchee DNA-synthesizer covered a bulkhead with a shining tangle of plasmapipe. Over there, a phalanx of antique microsurgeons lifted a glittering thicket of manipulators, all blades and hooks and laser barrels. The other womb chambers that lined the bulkheads had crude steel lockwheels welded to them, so human hands could manipulate the alien hatch dogs.
He’d been reborn from an alien womb, saturated with centuries of alien juices. He shuddered.
«What now?» The Flesh Tinker seemed irritated again. «If you didn’t want my help, you shouldn’t have asked for it.» A dangerous glitter filled the Flesh Tinker’s eyes. «Are you dissatisfied?» The deep cold voice had dropped half an octave, to a grinding rumble.
The Flesh Tinker loomed over Gavagol, magenta eyes narrow, twitching. Gavagol fell back on the gurney, heart hammering. The moment stretched out interminably.
The Flesh Tinker turned away with a jerk.
Gavagol spoke to the Flesh Tinker’s back. «I’m just surprised. But, I forgot to mention. I can’t swim.»
The Flesh tinker turned back to him, still bristling. «What? Now you have the gall to question my workmanship? Naturally, I grew you a custom synaptic linkage; you’ll swim like an eel. Do you think me a beginner at this? Who sent the City’s people into the Indivisible Ocean?»
The Flesh Tinker seized the gurney’s push bar and maneuvered Gavagol out of the womb room. Gavagol clutched at the rails, hampered by the unfamiliar length of his fingers, as the gurney flew along the ancient corridors. «Where do we go now?» Gavagol asked, in plaintive tones.
«I can stand no more of your whining!» the Flesh Tinker said. The gurney slammed to a stop at the lip of the air lock, but Gavagol continued on, flailing out into the open air.
With a huge splash, he dropped into the lagoon.
He struggled in a cloud of bubbles for a moment. Then the new linkage took over, and he shot through the water, quick as a fish.
He gloried in his effortless strength, his new agility, the cool touch of the water on his naked skin. He raced the lagoon from end to end, building enough speed to leap completely from the water. He found that his nostrils closed underwater, like a seal’s, and that his lung capacity had increased enough to permit him fifteen-minute dives in comfort.
But then the sun, shining down through the thick clear monomol of the cyclone shell, began to bum his tender new skin, and he slid under the shady lip of the quay.
Floating there, he watched the Flesh Tinker’s boat. The lock was shut tight; no movement showed at the row of small ports that lined the hull just above the sponsons.
When dusk came, Gavagol swam slowly out through the personnel lock. Fear stewed with anticipation in the pit of his stomach.
The canal wound among the hull blocks, and then out into the sea along a curving breakwater. The City’s movement spun off an eddy of turbulence at the end of the breakwater, and Gavagol tumbled helplessly in it for a moment.
He was over the deep, staring down into the black water. He lifted his head above the water, to see the great flank of the City sliding past.
Panic seized him; the City would leave him behind, alone. He swam strongly in the direction of the City’s movement, and the panic dissolved in a burst of silvery-bubbled laughter. In his new body, he could outswim the City easily.
He knifed through the water, trailing phosphorescence, wild with his new abilities.
The cool glow showed only occasionally above the wave tops, and Gavagol thought of the predators that swam the Indivisible Ocean — the huge toothy squool, with its long hook-studded tentacles; the swift venomous saltweasel; the shoals of voracious butcherfish.
He swam for the safety of the City’s breakwaters, but they caught him. Enveloped in a cloud of blue sealight, he became confused. He felt them bumping against him, curious hands prodding his body, then a nip at his shoulder as one of the young ones attempted to taste him.
A chorus of laughter rose from the pod of merfolk as they circled him. «I was afraid you were a school of butcherfish,» Gavagol said, trying a smile.
«Oho, we feared that you were a victim of the shimmies,» said a big bull who bore the scars of long seasons in the breeding reefs. More laughter. The voice was high and clear; the Standard words carried a clicking, hissing accent.