The Lazarus Effect

Nakano looked up at the vent. Twisp, peering at the ceiling construction, saw the glittering oval of a Merman remote-eye.

"This man's my prisoner," Nakano said. "I presume there are guards topside."

"The Mute can't run away anywhere up there," Gallow's voice snapped. "But he had better wait near the lift exit. We don't want to hunt all over for him."

Twisp felt himself get heavier then and realized that the entire rectangular room was rising. Presently, it stopped, and a thin seam in the back wall opened to reveal a hatch and a well-lighted passage with many armed Mermen in it.

Gallow grasped Twisp's dive tanks by the harness. "I'll take them," he said. "Wouldn't want you using these as a weapon."

Twisp released his hold on the equipment.

Gallow went out and the hatch sealed.

Again, the room lifted. After what seemed to Twisp an interminable wait, the room again came to a stop. The hatch opening was haloed in dim light. Hesitantly, Twisp stepped out into hot, dry air. He looked up and around at high, black cliffs and open sky - dawn light, still some stars visible. Even as he looked, Big Sun lifted over the cliffs, illuminating a great rock-girdled bowl with much square-edged Merman construction in it and an LTA base in the middle distance.

Open land!

Twisp heard someone nearby using a saw. The sound was reassuring, a thing heard often in an Island's shop areas - metal and plastics being cut by carpenters for assemblage into necessary nonorganic utensils.

The rocks were sharp under Twisp's bare feet and Big Sun blinded him.

"Abimael, simple one! Come here out of the sun!"

It was a man's voice and it came from a building ahead of Twisp. He saw someone moving in the shadows. The sound of sawing continued.

The air in his lungs felt hot and dry, not the cool metallic dampness of the dive tanks nor the warm moisture that blew so often across Vashon. The surface underfoot did not move, either. Twisp felt this as a dangerous, alien thing. Decks should lift and move!

All the edges are hard, he thought.

He stepped gingerly forward into the building's shade. The sawing stopped and now Twisp discerned a figure in the deeper shadows - a dark-ski

As the man moved in the shadows, Twisp saw the evidence of great physical strength, particularly in the shoulders and upper body. This Merman would make a good net-puller, Twisp thought. The Merman's midsection displayed the preliminary settlings of middle age, however. Twisp guessed the man at a hard-driven forty or forty-five ... very dark-ski

"Abimael, come now," the man said. "Your feet will burn. Come have a cake till your mama finds you."

Why does he call me Abimael? Twisp glanced around at the basin enclosed by the high black cliffs. A squad of Mermen worked in the middle distance, sweeping the ground with flamethrowers.

It was a dreamlike scene in the hot light of swiftly rising Big Sun. Twisp feared suddenly that he had been narced. Panille had warned him about it: "Don't swim off into a deep area and you be sure to breathe slow and deep. Otherwise you could be narced."

Narc, Twisp knew, was the Merman term for nitrogen narcosis, intoxication they sometimes encountered in the depths when using pressurized air tanks. There were stories - narced divers releasing their tanks at depth and swimming away to drown, or offering their air to passing fish, or going off into a euphoric water-dance.

"I hear the flamethrowers," the old carpenter said.

The matter-of-fact confirmation of what Twisp saw eased his fears. No ... this is real land ... open to the sky. I am here and I am not narced.

"They think they'll sterilize this land and they'll never have nerve ru

The carpenter moved across his shadowed area toward a brown cloth folded on a bench. He sat on the end of the bench and opened the cloth, revealing a paper-wrapped package of cakes, dark brown and glossy. Twisp smelled the sweet stickiness rising from the cakes. The carpenter lifted a cake in thick knuckle-swollen fingers and held it toward Twisp.

In that instant, Twisp saw that the man was blind. The eyes were cloud-gray and empty of recognition. Hesitantly, Twisp accepted the cake and sampled it. Rich brown fruit in the cake sweetened his tongue.

Again, Twisp looked at the scene in the bowl of open land. He had seen pictures and holos from the histories but nothing had prepared him for this experience. He felt both attracted and repelled by what he saw. This land would not drift willy-nilly on an uncertain sea. There was a sense of absolute assurance in the firmness underfoot. But there was a loss of freedom in it, too. It was locked down and enclosed ... limited. Too much of this could narrow a man's vision.

"One more cake, Abimael, and then you go home," the carpenter said.

Twisp stepped back from the carpenter, hoping to escape silently, but his heel encountered a stone and he tumbled backward, sitting sharply on another stone. An involuntary cry of pain escaped him.

"Now, don't you cry, Abimael!" the carpenter said.

Twisp heaved himself to his feet. "I'm not Abimael," he said.

The carpenter aimed his sightless eyes toward Twisp and sat silent for a moment, then: "I hear that now. Hope you liked the cake. You see Abimael anywhere around?"

"No one in sight but the men with the flamethrowers."

"Damned fools!" The carpenter swallowed a cake whole and licked the syrupy coating off his fingers. "They're bringing Islanders onto the land already?"

"I ... I think I'm the first."

"They call me Noah," the carpenter said. "You can take it as a joke. Say I was the first out here. Are you badly deformed, Islander?"

Twisp swallowed a sudden rise of anger at the man's bluntness.

"My arms are rather long but they're perfect for pulling nets."

"Don't mind the useful variations," Noah said. "What's your name?"

"Twisp ... Queets Twisp."

"Twisp," Noah said. "I like that name. It has a good sound. Want another cake?"

"No, thank you. It was good, though. I just can't take too much sweetness. What're you making here?"

"I'm working with a bit of wood," Noah said. "Think of that! Wood grown on Pandora! I'm fashioning some pieces that will be made into furniture for the new director of this place. You met him yet? Name's Gallow."

"I haven't had that ... pleasure," Twisp said.

"You will. He sees everybody. Doesn't like Mutes, though, I'm afraid."

"How were you ... I mean, your eyes?"

"I wasn't born this way. It was caused by staring at a sun too long. Bet you didn't know that, did you? If you stand on solid ground so you don't move around, you can stare right at the sun ... but it can blind you."

"Oh." Twisp didn't know what else to say. Noah seemed resigned to his fate, though.

"Abimael!" Noah raised his voice into a loud call.

There was no answer.

"He'll come," Noah said. "Saved a cake for him. He knows it."

Twisp nodded, then felt the foolishness of the gesture. He stared across the enclosed basin. The land glared at him from all sides, everything highlighted by the brightness of Big Sun. The buildings were stark white, shot through with streaks of brown. Water or the illusion of water shimmered in a flat area near the far cliffs. The flamethrowers had been silenced and the Merman workers had gone into a building toward the center of the basin. Noah returned to his woodworking. There was no wind, no sound of seabirds, no sound of Abimael, who was supposed to be coming to his father's call. Nothing. Twisp had never before heard such silence ... not even underwater.