"It's like a net," Keel said, warming to his fiction. "Each surviving part can behave like the whole. And once it's inside your defenses where your cutters and burners can't reach it ..." Keel shrugged.
"Why would you make such a thing?" Gallow asked.
"Our Security people determined that we were hopelessly vulnerable to attack from below. Something had to be done. And we were right. Look what happened to Guemes. What almost happened to Vashon."
"Yes, look what happened to Guemes," Gallow said, smiling.
Monsters, Keel thought.
"Tso must've done some damage," Nakano said. "That's why Vashon's grounded."
Keel tried to speak past a pain in his throat. "Grounded?" His voice was a croak.
"On the bottom and abandoning its downcenter," Gallow said, showing obvious relish in his words. He reached out and tapped Nakano's arm. "Keep our guest company. I will go out and prepare to commune with Tso's kelp-spirit. See if the Mute here can tell us any way to improve our contact with the kelp."
Keel took a deep breath. His improvisation about a Vashon defense weapon had been accepted. It would make these monsters more cautious. It would give Vashon a breathing space - if the Island survived grounding. He took heart from the fact that Vashon had survived groundings in the distant past. There would be damage, though, and economic losses. Ballast pumps would be working frantically to lift and compress the bottom sections of the Island. Heavy equipment would be detached in its own floaters. Mermen would be called in for assistance.
Mermen! Would friends of these vermin be among those summoned for help? It could take days for Vashon to lift its enormous bulk and refloat. If no storm or wavewall came ...
I have to escape, Keel thought. My people have to know what I've learned. They need me.
Gallow had moved to the hatch, looking back thoughtfully at Nakano and the captive. He opened the hatch and stood there a moment, then: "Nakano, he has not given us every detail of their weapon. He has not told us how he communes with the kelp. There are things of value in his head. If he does not reveal them willingly, we will have to feed him to the kelp and hope to recover the information that way."
Nakano nodded, not looking at Gallow.
Gallow let himself out and sealed the hatch behind him.
"I can't protect you from him if he gets angry, Mr. Justice," Nakano said. His voice was casual, even friendly. "You had better sit down and tell me what you know. Would you like some more water? Sorry we don't have any boo, that would make things easier - more civilized."
Keel moved painfully to the table where Gallow had sat and dropped into the chair. It was still warm.
What a strange pair, he thought.
Nakano brought him a beaker of water. Keel sipped slowly, savoring the coolness.
It was almost as though these two exchanged personalities. Keel realized then that Nakano and Gallow were playing the old Security game with him - one guard always browbeat a prisoner while the other came on as a friend, sometimes pretending to protect the prisoner from the attacker.
"Tell me about the weapon," Nakano said.
"The ropes are thicker than full-grown kelp," Keel said. And he recalled underwater views of the kelp - strands thicker than a human torso swaying in the currents.
"A burner would still cut them," Nakano said.
"Ah, but the fibers have some way of reattaching to each other when they touch. Cut it apart and put the cut ends together, it's as though there were not cut."
Nakano grimaced. "How? How is it done?"
"I don't know. They talk about fibrous hooks."
"Now you understand," Nakano said, "why Mutes must go."
"What have we done except protect ourselves?" Keel demanded. "If that sub hadn't been out to sink the Island, it wouldn't have been harmed." Even as he spoke he wondered again about the damaged sub, wishing he could see and examine it. What had really done it? Crushed? Truly crushed or damaged by the bottom?
"Tell me how you commune with kelp," Nakano said.
"We ... just touch it."
"And?"
Keel swallowed. He remembered the old stories, the remnant history, especially the accounts by Shadow Panille's ancestor.
"It's like daydreaming ... almost," Keel said. "You hear voices."
That much the old accounts had said.
"Specific voices?" Nakano demanded.
"Sometimes," Keel lied.
"How do you contact the specific dead and gain access to what they knew when alive?"
Keel shrugged, thinking hard. His mind had never worked this fast, absorbing, correlating. Ship! What a discovery! He thought about the countless Islander dead consigned to the sea by mourning relatives. How many of those had been absorbed by the kelp?
"So the kelp doesn't respond to you any better than it does to us," Nakano said.
"I fear not," Keel agreed.
"Kelp has a mind of its own," Nakano said. "I've said that all along."
Keel thought then about the enormous undersea gardens of kelp, forests of gigantic, ropy strands reaching upward toward the suns. He had seen holos of Mermen swimming through those green forests, flashing silvery figures among the fish and fronds. But no Merman had ever before reported kelp responding in the way it had done for the first humans on Pandora. This must mean full sentience was returning. It must be an avalanche of consciousness sweeping through the sea! Mermen thought they controlled the kelp and, through this, controlled the currents.
What if ...
Keel felt his heartbeat stutter.
A Merman sub had been crushed. He imagined those gigantic strands of kelp wrapped around the sub's hard surface. Cutters and burners flashed in his imagination. And the kelp writhed, sending out its messages of self-protection. What if the kelp had learned to kill?
"Where are we right now?" Keel asked.
"Near the Launch Base. There's no harm in your knowing; you can't escape."
Keel let his body feel the lift and fall of the craft around him. The light through the louvered vents had begun to dim. Nightfall? The foil rode on extremely calm seas, for which he was thankful. Vashon needed calm seas just now.
Near the Launch Base, Nakano says. How near? But even a short swim was impossible for this old body with its head supported on a prosthetic brace. He was a cripple in this environment. A Mute. No wonder these monsters sneered at him.
The foil's motion became even steadier and the light dimmer. Nakano flipped a switch, bringing soft yellow illumination into the room from lamps near the ceiling.
"We are going down to commune with the kelp," Nakano said. "We are in old kelp here, the kind that's most apt to respond to us."
Keel thought about this craft sinking into a forest of kelp. Whatever had happened to Tso the kelp now knew. How would the kelp use that knowledge?
I know what I would do with such people in my power, Keel thought. I'd squash them. They are lethal deviants.
***
If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.
Twisp considered abandoning the tow coracle with its supplies. A second foil had passed nearby without slowing down and he was worried.
We could pick up a few more knots that way, he thought. It galled him that the foils, already lost below the horizon, would be at Vashon by nightfall. The first one probably was arriving right now. He had to plod along in this damned creeping coracle!
He laughed at his own frustration. It relaxed him to laugh, even if it was just his usual short bark. Vashon might be aground, but the Island had touched bottom before, and in perilously more dangerous weather. Pandora had subsided into a calmer phase; his fisherman's instincts felt this. It had to do with the looping interrelationship of the two suns, distance from primaries and, just possibly, the kelp. Perhaps the kelp had finally reached an influential population density. Certainly, kelp fronds were more evident on the surface and the kelp's nursery effect showed itself in the recent fish population boom.