Vata watched the strange odyssey that worked its way back toward Outpost 22. She flexed her kelp when the gondola went down and acquainted herself with Bushka and Shadow Panille. This Panille, he was blood to her.
Brother, she thought, and marveled over the word. She trusted Bushka and Panille to Scudi's presence. The message she sent Scudi was simple and clear: Find Gallow, drive him out. Kelp will do the rest.
***
Life is not an option, it is a gift. Death is the option.
It was late evening, but Ward Keel had lost all inclination to sleep. He accepted the buzz of fatigue as a logical consequence of captivity. His eyes refused to stay closed. They blinked slowly and he glimpsed the brush of his long lashes in the plaz beside him. His brown eye faced itself in the plaz. It was a small dark blur. Beyond it lay the perimeter of kelp, almost gray at this depth. His prison cubby was warm, warmer even than his quarters on Vashon, but the gray of down under washed his psyche cold.
Keel had been watching the kelp for hours as Gallow's men streamed into the outpost. At first the kelp pulsed as usual with the current. Fronds waved at full extension downcurrent like a woman's long hair in an evening breeze. Now there was a different rhythm. And the larger kelp fronds downcurrent of the outpost stretched directly toward Keel. The currents were no longer consistent. The outpost was being battered by sudden changes of current that had the kelp outside flickering in a firelight dance.
Gallow's morning crew had never arrived. His medical team was lost. Keel could hear Gallow's rantings from the next room. The syrupy voice was cracking.
Something strange about that kelp, Keel thought. Stranger than moving against the current.
Keel never even considered that Brett and Scudi might be dead. In the reverie generated by the gentle undulations of the kelp, Keel thought often about his young friends.
Had they reached Vashon? He worried about that. But he heard no echoes of this in Gallow's angry words. Surely Gallow would be reacting if that message had reached Vashon.
GeLaar Gallow is attempting to take over Merman Mercantile and the recovery of the hyb tanks. Merman rockets are being sent into space for the tanks. Mermen are changing our planet in ways Islands cannot survive. If Gallow succeeds, Islanders are doomed.
How would the C/P react? Keel wondered. He might never know.
Keel held out little hope for himself. His gut had begun to burn again, precisely as it had four years ago. He knew that all traces of the remora were gone. Without it, the food he ate would pass undigested and his intestines would gnaw at themselves until he either bled to death or starved. There was no reason to doubt the word of his personal physician, and the evidence was too painfully immediate to disguise, even to himself.
It used to make me tired all the time, he thought. Why won't it let me sleep now? Because last time he'd almost bled to death in his sleep, and now sleep was impossible.
It wasn't the constant burning that kept him awake. Pain he had learned to bear over the years of ill-fitting support devices for his long neck. This was the crisp wakefulness of the condemned.
Wakefulness had brought Keel's attention to the kelp. Sometime in midmorning the kelp stalks began defying the currents and reaching toward the outpost. The perimeter of growth began about two hundred meters from the outpost walls. The outpost itself lay in the center of this massive kelp project like a jewel in a fat ring. The fish were gone, too. Keel's few earlier glimpses of the outer compound had shown a richness of fishes that rivaled the gardens at Core - fanlike butterfly fish with iridescent tails, the ever-present scrubberfish grazing leaves and plaz, mud-devils raising and lowering the tall sails of their dorsal fins with every disturbance. None was visible now and the gray filter of evening quickly washed itself black. Just the kelp remained, sole proprietor of the world beyond the outpost's perimeter. This day Keel felt that he had watched the kelp go from graceful to stately to full alert.
That's my translation, he reminded himself. Don't attribute humanity to other creatures. It limits study. A quick shudder iced his spine when he realized that this kelp had been grown from cells carried by mutant humans.
The kelp had an infinite memory. The histories said that, but so did GeLaar Gallow. Conclusion? he asked himself.
It's waking up, he answered. And it absorbs the memories of the living and the newly dead. Therein lay great temptation for Ward Keel.
I could leave more than scratchings in these journals, he thought. I could leave everything. Everything! Think of that! He entered these thoughts into his journal, and wished that he had his journals and his life's collection of notes around him now. It was possible, he knew for fact, that no Islander had given more direct thought to life and life forms than Justice Keel. Some of these observations he knew to be unique - sometimes illogical, but vital every one. These data he hated to see lost when a struggling humanity needed them so very much.
Someone else will think those thoughts, in time. If there is more time.
His attention was caught by the arrival of another sub overhead. The sub gave the kelp a wide berth. Gallow's orders. As the sub disappeared on its way to the interior docking bay, Keel marveled at the movement of the kelp. Huge stalks tracked the sub's path even though it came in against the current. Like a blossom following the slow arc of sunlight across the sky, the kelp followed all of the incoming Mermen. An occasional blur of gray moved amongst the tendrils as one snapped out suddenly toward an intruder, but all Mermen kept well out of reach.
If the kelp is waking, he thought, the future of all the humans left may be at stake.
Perhaps after contacting enough humans the kelp would find some way of saying, "Like me. If you're human, you're like me." There was a biological kinship, after all. Keel swallowed, and hoped silently that it was true that Vata was the key to the kelp. He hoped, too, that mercy was a part of Vata's personality.
Keel thought he detected a change in the perimeter. It was hard to tell, with night coming on and visibility so poor anyway, but he was sure that the two-hundred-meter perimeter had closed. Not much, but enough to notice.
Keel cast about in his memory for all the information that he'd ever stored on the kelp. Sentient, capable of nonverbal communication by touch, firmly anchored to ballast-rocks and mobile in its bloom state - except the bloom state had been extinct for hundreds of years. That was the kelp the first humans on Pandora destroyed. What surprises lay in store with this new kelp? This creature had been regrown from gene-prints present in human carriers. Could it be that the kelp has learned how to move? It didn't feel like a trick of the imagination. The dark outside was now nearly total, only a thin barrier of light escaped from the outpost itself.
Morning will tell, he thought. If there is a morning. He chuckled to himself. With most of his world dark, Keel was left staring at himself in the port, haloed by the glare of the one bare light. He moved away from the plaz after a passing glance at his nose. It spread over his face like a mashed fruit, the tip touched his upper lip whenever he pursed his mouth in thought.
The hatch door behind him slammed into the wall and startled him. His stomach took a bad turn, then turned again when he saw Gallow, alone, carrying two liters of Islander wine.