The Lazarus Effect

"Right down the trough," Scudi reminded him.

He turned the wheel slightly and pushed the throttle farther ahead. The foil came out of the water with a gentle gliding motion and he gave it more throttle. They came up on the step and he saw the speed-distance counter flicker, then settle on "72." The green dot tracked on the red line.

"Very good," Scudi said. "I'll take it now. Just remember to follow the instructions."

Scudi increased speed. Cabin air felt cooler as vents exchanged topside air from a clear and su

Brett sca

"The suns do that because of their ellipses," she said. "I know about the waves. Everything that touches them tells us something of itself."

"Ellipses?" he asked.

"My mother said the suns met at midday when she was young."

Brett found this interesting but he felt that Scudi had missed his point. Or she didn't want to discuss it. "You must've learned a lot from your mother."

"She was very smart except for men," Scudi said. "At least, that's what she used to say."

"When she was mad at your father?"

"Yes. Or different men at the outposts."

"What are these outposts?"

"Places where we are few, where we work hard and have our different ways. When I come into the city, or even the launch site, I'm aware that I am different. I speak different. I have been warned about it."

"Warned?" Brett felt undertones of some dark savagery among the Mermen.

"My mother said if I took outpost-talk into the city I couldn't blend. People would look at me as an outsider - a dangerous perspective."

"Dangerous?" he asked. "To see things differently?"

"Sometimes." Scudi glanced at him. "You must blend in. You could pass, but I know you for an Islander by the sound of your talk."

Scudi was trying to warn him, he thought.

Or teach me.

He noted that her accent was different out here than it had been back in her quarters. It wasn't her choice of words so much as the way she said them. There was a sparseness about her now. She was even more direct.

Brett looked out at the ocean speeding past. He thought about this Merman unity, this Merman society that measured danger in an accent. Like the waves, which met at odd angles, currents in Merman society were refracting off each other. "Interference," the physicists called it; he knew that much.

The ease with which Scudi kept the big foil skipping the wavetops told Brett something of her past. She had only to glance at the guidance screen and out at the ocean to become one with all of it. She avoided the thick stretches of wild kelp and kept them securely on course toward this mysterious Launch Base.

"There's more wild kelp lately," he said. "No Mermen attending it."

"Pandora belonged to the kelp once," she said. "Now kelp grows and spreads at the top of an exponential curve. Do you know what that means?"

"The more kelp there is the faster it spreads and the faster it grows," he said.

"It is more like an explosion at this point," she said, "or like the moment of crystallization in a saturated solution. Add one tiny crystal and the whole thing precipitates out one massive crystal. That's what the kelp will do next. Right now it is learning to care for itself."

Brett shook his head. "I know what the history says. Still ... sentient plants?"

She shrugged off his incredulity like a shawl. "If the C/P is right - if they've all been right - Vata is the key to the kelp. She is the crystal that will precipitate its consciousness. Or its soul."

"Vata," he whispered, a childlike awe in his voice. He was not one for WorShip, but he respected any human being who had outlived so many generations. No Merman had ever done that. Did Scudi believe in that Chaplain/Psychiatrist stuff?

He asked her.

Scudi shrugged. "I only know what I can arrange in my mind. I have seen the kelp learn. It is sentient, but very low-grade. There is no magic in sentiency except life and time. Vata has kelp genes, that is a fact."

"Twisp says last time it took the kelp a quarter of a billion years to come awake. How will we ever know ..."

"We've helped. The rest is up to it."

"What does Vata have to do with it?"

"I don't really know. I suspect she's some kind of catalyst. The last natural link with the kelp's ancestor. Shadow says Vata's really in a coma. She went into the coma when the kelp died. Shock, maybe."

"What about Duque? Or any number of us - Mermen included - who have kelp genes? Why aren't we the catalysts you talk about?"

"No one human has all kelp genes - such a being would be kelp, not human," she said. "Each one may have wholly different combinations."

"Duque says Vata dreams him."

"Some of our more religious types say Vata dreams us all," Scudi said. She sniffed. "The fact that you and I were prisoners and escaped, that was no dream." She shot him a warm glance. "We are a good team."

Brett blushed and nodded.

"How close are we to Launch Base?" he asked.

"Before nightfall," she said.

Brett thought about the coming encounter. Launch Base would be an important place, many people. Among those people might be the ones who had deliberately destroyed Guemes. His Islander accent could mean danger. He turned to Scudi and tried to speak of this casually. He didn't want to argue with her or scare her. But it became immediately apparent that Scudi had been thinking along the same lines.

"In the red locker beside the main hatch," she said. "Dive suits and kitpacks. We'll be in colder water at the Launch Base."

"Hypothermia kills," he said. He had seen the two words in bright yellow on the red locker, reminding him of his earliest survival lessons. Island children were taught the dangers of the cold water as soon as they could talk. Apparently Mermen taught the same lesson, although Twisp claimed that Mermen had greater tolerance for cold.

"See if you can find suits to fit us," she said. "If we have to go over the side ..." She left the sentence unfinished, knowing it was u

The sight of the pile of gray dive suits inside the locker brought a smile to Brett's face. The organic suits, of Islander design and manufacture, represented one of the few advancements they held over the Mermen. He selected a "small" and a "medium" and tore open the packages to activate them. He picked up two of the orange kitpacks with the suits and stowed them under the command couch seats in the cabin.

"What are those kitpacks for?" he asked.

"They're survival kits," she said. "Inflatable raft, knife, lines, pain pills. There are even repellent grenades for dashers."

"Have you ever had to use grenades?"

"No. But my mother did once. One of her team did not get away."

Brett shuddered. Dashers seldom came near Islands anymore, but fishermen had been lost and there were stories of children taken by sneak attacks at an Island's rim. Suddenly, the wide ocean around their speeding foil lost some of its warm softness, its protective familiarity. Brett shook his head to clear it. He and Twisp had lived out here on a tiny coracle. For the love of Ship! A foil could not be as vulnerable as a flimsy coracle. But they had no squawks on the foil and if they had to take to the water in dive suits ... Could their own senses warn them in time? Dashers were blindingly fast.