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The fas - Intelligence is a poor cousin to understanding

- Kerro Panille, The Collected Poems

THE DULL criondola with red shadows and played firelight flickers off every movement of the three people strapped in their seats around the tight arc of controls

Tho pressure of water around thelanced up at the depth repeater This was not completely like a Voidship, after all Instead of e of the Pandoran sea All he had to do was look directly up through the transparent doondola where it protruded frolowing light which was the surface of the lagoon

As he ed in the sa it well No residual fugue from her bad experiences down here

He looked then at Kerro Panille This poet was not what he had expected - young, yes - barely past twenty according to the records - but there was so more mature in Panille’sthe descent, not even asking the expected questions, but his eyes missed very little The way he cocked his head at new sounds betrayed his alertness There had been no time really to train hi the an accepting the firefly patterns of the kelp She had reserved for herself the instrue to the anchor cable The anchor had been dropped in the center of a lagoon and now the cable guided their descent The LTA rode close to the sea surface overhead, tightly tethered to the cable

"He’s very sensitive to unconscious communication," she had told Thoar

Thomas did not ask how she knew this She already had confirmed the failure of her attempt to seduce Panille

"Was he too naive? Did he knohat yo ?"

"Oh, he knew But he has this thing about his body being his own Rather refreshing in a man"

"Is h do you think he’s really working for Oakes?"

"He’s not the type"

Thoree Panille displayed an almost childlike openness

Since the abortive and (she had to admit it) rather amateurish attempt at seduction, Waela had felt restrained with Panille But the poet showed no such inhibition He had shipside candor and, she suspected, would be rather more apt than not to walk openly into some deadly Pandoran peril out of curiosity

I like hiht I really like him

But he would have to be educated swiftly to the dangers here or he would not last long enough to write another poeht Is he supposed to keep watch on me?

Thomas had reserved for hih which they were descending It was a column of clear water about four hundred oon" They had not yet descended into the dark regions where the kelp played its light show

Panille had been fascinated by the naoon when he had heard it Ship had displayed an Earthside lagoon for hier hite sails Would Pandora ever see such play upon its seas?

He found himself acutely aware of every sensory impression about this experience It was the stuff of countless poe recycled, the s their unspoken fears He liked the way the red light played off the ladder which ran up to the hatch

When Thooon to describe their destination, Panille had said: "The persistence of atavislance frohty-five meters and called it out She leaned close to the screen which displayed the lagoon’s nearest wall of encaging kelp The long strands angled down into darkness with an occasional black tentacle reaching out toward the sub The external dive lights played green shadows on the pale kelp, revealing small dark extrusions, bubbles whose purpose remained undiscovered Farther down, such bubbles played their bright patterns of light

The water around the kelp strand and in the upper lagoon was asith darting and slow- shapes, some with many eyes and some with none So fleshy fins and toothless gaping jaws None had ever been known to attack Shipht they lived in sy them for specimens aroused the kelp to violence and when they were removed from the sea, they melted so rapidly that mobile labs appeared to be the only way to exa here

Farther down, Waela knew, there would be fewer and fewer of these creatures Then the sub would enter the zone of crawlers, things which e swiht out to the lagoon, Waela had kept herself busy, fearing that she ht break dohen the moment ca construction of this sub, but the actual led with a return to dark memories of terror Colony’s last dive had been a disaster The sub had been seventy , studded with knives and cutters It had cost Colony a terrible toll in lives to transport it across The Egg’s undulating plains to the one area on the south coast where they could skid the sub into a ashed bay of kelp She had been one of the nine on the crew, the only survivor

For a ti them success Water doors were opened remotely and stuffed with kelp specimens But the kelp’s cable-strands released the, swept over the sub There seemed no end to the attack More andthe cutters by weight of nu them deeper and deeper while tendrils probed for any weak point Leaves blinded their external sensors Static crackled in their communications system They were blind and dumb Then water had jetted into the hull near a hatch, a strea it cut the flesh in its path

Thinking about those momentsa cutter, her station a plaz bubble extruded fro strands of kelp trying to crush the sub Through the crashing static in her earphones, she had heard a crew one of their co of the hull and the explosive shift of pressure within the sub had blasted her bubble free It shot out and clear of the blinding leaves, then upward as the kelp spread aside to pere She had never been able to explain that phenomenon The kelp had opened a way to the surface for her!

Once into the glare of double-day side, she had forced open the hatch, dived clear to an undulant sea covered by broad fans of kelp leaves She re thereen cushion which dah her body Her es of deles She re Within seconds, the ies overwhelmed her and she rolled across a kelp leaf unconscious

An observation LTA had snatched her fro to acclaierous because of its physical abilities, but that its hallucinogenic capacity worked havoc when enough of it contacted enough of a Ship wrong, Waela?"

That was Panille staring at her, concerned by her introspection

"No We’re leaving the active surface waters We’ll begin to see the lights soon"

"You’ve been down here before, they tell me"

"Yes"

"We’ll be safe as long as we don’t threaten the kelp," Thomas said "You know that"

"Thanks"

"The records say that attempts to establish a shoreside harvester were defeated when the kelp actually came ashore to attack," Panille said

"People and machines were snatched from the shore, yes," she said "The people drowned and were thrown back Machines just disappeared"

"Then on’t it attack us here?"

"It never has e just co this helped her restore a measure of calm She returned to observation of sensors and telltales

Panille peered over his shoulder at her screen, saw the angled strands of kelp, the fluting leaves and the curious bubble extrusions which reflected starbursts frohts When he looked up past the ladder to the top hatch, he could see the lushapes of the creatures who shared the sea with the kelp

The lagoon was a place of ic and mystery with a beauty so profound he felt thankful to Ship just to have seen it The kelp strands were pale gray-green cables, thicker than a Shipman’s torso in places They reached up froht overhead

Light reaches for stars and, seeing the stars, fears to grasp them, floats in wonder Oh, stars, you burn a, the only sun in their sky at the a later Even under clouds, the kelp aligned itself perpendicular to the passage of a sun When two suns were present, this tropism adjusted to the radiation balance It was a precise adjust what he had learned from Ship These were observations which perilous ventures into the sea had gleaned Sparse infor here He knew sos he would see at the bottoe rocks Crawling creatures and burrowing ones Slow currents, drifting sedie between surface and bottoht for creatures other than kelp

The lagoons were cages

"These lagoons are where the kelp engages in aquaculture," he said

Thomas blinked That was so close to his own surmise about how kelp fitted into the sea syste on his thoughts

Is Ship talking to him even now?

Panille’s words fascinated Waela "You think the kelp follows a conscious pain?"

"Perhaps