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In a flurry at his keyboard Nevi set the foil up for seawater intake and hydrogen conversion The intakes clogged within blinks Even with Zentz out there to clear theer than Nevi felt they could afford He checked the fuel gauge
Fifteen ht, et the intakes," Nevi said "There&039;s a wild stand just northwest of here We&039;ll set up there to take on fuel, then I&039;ll see what I can learn fro you to the kelp would be a waste, and I&039;m not a wasteful man"
The convolutions of Zentz&039;s brorinkled somewhat He lifted his sullen bulk out of his couch and donned a dive suit
"Just in case," Zentz said, "I&039;m ready I&039;ve heard about wild kelp People disappear out here, and the kelp doesn&039;t have a reason"
Nevi throttled up and lifted theusted him, Nevi intended to keep him alive until the time came when it simply wasn&039;t handy to do that anymore
The run to the blue sector took only teninto the afternoon squall A black wall pushed across the sea toward theoon they were haloed in the nificent afternoon sun
Nevi deployed the intakes, but a warning light on his console told hi theet out there after all," Nevi said "And step on it That squall&039;s ed aft without co Nevi noted from the console display that Zentz left the aft hatch open He chuckled to hie, and blow out the flight controls if I take off
Nevi kneays around both of those situations, the sio aft and close the hatch He was teive Zentz a thrill, but decided against it They&039;d be refueled in fifteen or twenty minutes and with luck would lift off ahead of the storm
Nevi set out a call for Flattery on their private frequency, and received an i Do you have them yet?"
Nevi was surprised at the clarity of the reception Indeed, the clarity of reception was unlike any that he&039;d experienced over the years The activity of Pandora&039;s two suns interfered constantly with transe of transs even worse The kelp itself often garbled radio communication, but this time it seemed to embellish it
"No," he said, "we don&039;t have theht ere to et as et it," Flattery said "I want Crista Galli now She&039;s not to talk with anyone before she sees ht&039;s news is carrying notice of Ben Ozette&039;s death He&039;s not to be seen, but I want him for my own Do what you ith that LaPush bastard"
"Do you need support back there?"
"No," Flattery said He sounded distracted "No, I&039;ve taken care of it We&039;ve called so sites and from demon patrols These bastard there are so many of them They&039;ve looted the public market and its warehouse is dry We must&039;ve shot three hundred of theiven orders to blow up any warehouses that are in danger of being looted When they see their precious food blasted all over the landscape, they&039;ll think twice about this kind of thing You stick to your job, I&039;ll handle things here Don&039;t callto static and to the whine of the puen He reached to break the connection, but hesitated There was a pattern to the static, so he hadn&039;t noticed before It seeround, and voices from several conversations that he couldn&039;t quite pick out Over and over, faint in the distance, he could hear the rhyth, "Mr Nevi, Mr Nevi, Mr Nev"
He closed the circuit and stared out over the sea toward the black curtain of storm The surface chop had increased and a wind had cooon and closer to the inner edge of blue kelp He glanced at the fuel readout and was relieved that they were nearly full What worried him was the distinct repetition of his nah he&039;d shut off the radio
The fuel light indicated full, so he shut down the pu klaxon to Zentz before he retracted the intakes He felt then of Zentz
This was clear water, Nevi thought He should&039;ve been back aboard after clearing the intakes once
He sounded the klaxon again, twice, but heard nothing The aft hatch light remained on Nevi secured the console and started back toward the aft hatch The chant got louder, more distinct, and behind it a babble of voices rose on the air The hair on his ar the cabin
He felt a ue, a taste he&039;d heard others describe as fear He spat once on the deck, but the insidious taste remained
Consciousness li a cos aureoled by liations in space and time
- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Hymn of the Universe
The Ireat disturbance frole, the debris told that tale Currents had changed suddenly, bringing the strange scents of fear and, just as suddenly, bliss So far, the currents hadn&039;t changed back
The little whiff of death that the Iht on the current was human, not kelp
Perhaps the pruner has becoht
It stretched its outerhboring stand Only frages drifted in on bits of torn fronds These were shards, fras - not the Oneness that the Iht, not this "talk" that humans enjoyed and withheld from others
Then came the huhters reversing their lives, and with theht splinters of drea the kelp again at last Her presence suddenly freed the neighboring stand of prisoner kelp, a stand that had lost her to Flattery&039;s butchery five cycles back
Who are these others, now, coridwork The few organic islands left to risk a float on Pandora&039;s seas likewise stayed to the rid The I humans, and it had spared entire island-cities e of huh humans often called them "willy-nillys," the islands floated now in predictable patterns Current Control, the enslaver of the kelp, ensured this But the volcanics of the past twenty-five cycles had conjured storms the like of which the Imht islands into its reach It thought of the organic islands as Ireatness to let the pieces of kelp into the I vine frooon and sniffed the human The scents talked of fear and death, and to have the whole story the Immensity would have to read this human&039;s tissues bit by bit
It waited until the hu the pieces of kelp, so that the Ihbor as it could It kne, by scent and touch, that this was Oddie Zentz huripped Oddie Zentz human at the waist and pulled him into the walls of the lacuna, it knew that this human had killed many humans, as many as a storm and perhaps more
The I to coe with other, sht Closer was better It failed to understand creatures that killed their own kind These were, indeed, diseased individuals If they were merciless to their own, they would certainly show no mercy to others The Immensity concluded that it should respond in kind
We Islanders understand current and flow We understand that conditions and tie, then, is normal
- Ward Keel, The Notebooks
Beatriz knew that it would not be in the captain&039;s best interest to kill Mack, especially if there were links with other forces groundside But she had also quit trying to guess what could be in Captain Brood&039;s best interest Fro to capitalize on a bad decision,more bad decisions to cover his tracks He wouldn&039;t last long at this rate, and he was the type who just , with him
She concentrated on the e studio display screen It was a hlighted populated areas, agriculture, fishing and lance where the factories lay, both topside and undersea, and where the wretched communities lived that served them, for serve them they did
Only today, with thein herherself, had becoer, and by the er, which was a particular skill of the Director He concentrated on food, transportation and propaganda Before her, on Holovision&039;s giant screen, she saw the geography of hunger spread out for her at a touch
The largest single factory co the bottomless maw of Flattery&039;s Project Voidship It showed up on her display as a small, black bull&039;s-eye in the center of amoebalike ripples of blue and yellow Those ripples represented the settlement - the blue was Kalaloch proper, where all paths led to the ferry terminal or to The Line People inside the blue lived in barrackslike tenements or in remnants of Islander bubbly stuck to the shore
The yelloeak stain of sorts widening out fro, unsheltered, too weak for heavy work, they were also too weak to rebel The Director&039;s staff rode a the lucky feould be trucked to town to wash down the stone paveardens, or pick through refuse for reusable iven a space in The Line and a few crumbs at one of a hundred food dispensaries that Flattery operated in the area Even private markets were offshoots of the dispensaries - true black ularity"
The sphere of Kalaloch included the bay and its launch base, the factory strip, the village, Flattery&039;s Preserve and the huddle of misshapen humanity that squeezed inside the perimeter for protection from Pandora&039;s demons
Outside this sphere Beatriz noted the si the coastline These sed by the huddle of the poor, even agricultural settlees, the traditional sources of food Security squads shot looters of fields, proprietors of illegal boxes and rooftop gardens They shot the occasional fisherh to set an unlicensed line All of this Ben had told her She had seen evidence herself, and had chosen to disbelieve Beatriz earned her food coupons fairly, ate well, felt guilty enough about the hunger around her to believe what Flattery had fed her about productionpeople
For alnments had covered jobs, the people orked the tier
There aren&039;t any new jobs lately, she thought, but there sure are a lot fewer people
Now she was above it all, trapped and converted, with nothing to offer and everything to fear
Thou shalt give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe
- Christian Book of the Dead
Boggs had been hungry all his twenty years, but today his hunger was different and he knew it He woke up without pain in his bones froround underneath, and when he scratched his head a handful of hair caer He looked around hiether under their rock ledge Today he would get the anyway
Boggs was born with the split lip, gaping nose slit and stump feet characteristic of his father&039;s family His six brothers shared these defects but only two still lived His father, too, was dead Like Boggs, they had known the ene a futile noise, sothat he did as a newborn slobbered down his chin His ers, slopping it back into the cleft of his mouth He&039;d watched her do this countless tio he&039;d watched her try to nurse the starving ten-year-old when there wasn&039;t even a bug to catch She had been dry for two years, and his brother died clutching a handful of fallen orange hair Boggs looked again at the fistful of orange hair in his hand, then weakly cast it away
"I will take the line, Mother," he said, in the lilting Islander way "I will bring us back a fine o" Her voice was dry, hoarse, and filled the tiny space they&039;d dug out under the ledge "You are not licensed to fish They will kill you, they will take the line"
His father had begged the local security detachment for a license Everyone knew that many temporaries were issued every day, and that some could even pay with a share of the catch But the Director issued a fixed number each day "Conservation," he called it "Otherwise the people will outfish the resource and no one will eat"
"Conservation," Boggs snorted to himself He eyed the fish line wrapped around his ht hooks attached There had been a fiber sack for bait but they&039;d eaten the sack weeks ago There was just the ten meters of synthetic line, and the two metal hooks tucked inside the wrap