She stared into his eyes, and he saw fear in her expression.

"There are Mermen fanatics who want to wipe every ... Mute off the face of this planet."

The flat abruptness of her statement, the matter-of-fact tone caught him off guard. Lives were precious to Islanders and Mermen, this he'd witnessed for himself innumerable times during his many years. The idea of deliberate killing nauseated him, as it did most Pandorans. His own judgments against lethal deviants had brought him much isolation in his lifetime, but the law required that someone pass judgment on people, blobs and ... things ... He could never decree termination without suffering acute personal agony.

But to wipe out hundreds of hundreds of thousands ... He returned Ale's stare, thinking about her recent behavior - the food cooked by her own hands, the sharing of these remarkable quarters. And, of course, the scar.

I'm on your side, she was trying to say. He felt the planning behind her actions, but there was more to it, he thought, than callous outlines and assignments. Otherwise, why had she been embarrassed? She was trying to win him over to some personal viewpoint. What viewpoint?

"Why?" he asked.

She drew in a deep breath. The simplicity of his response obviously surprised her.

"Ignorance," she said.

"And how does this ignorance manifest itself?"

Her nervous fingers flip-flip-flipped the corner of her napkin. Her eyes sought out a stain on the tabletop and fixed themselves there.

"I am a child before you," Keel said. "Explain this to me. 'Wipe every Mute off the face of this planet.' You know how I feel about the preservation of human life."

"As I feel, Ward. Believe me, please."

"Then explain it to this child and we can get started defeating it: Why would someone wish death to so many of us just because we're ... extranormal?" He had never been quite so conscious of his smear of a nose, the eyes set so wide on his temples that his ears picked up the fine liquid click-click of every blink.

"It's political," she said. "There's power in appealing to base responses. And there are problems over the kelp situation."

"What kelp situation?" His voice sounded toneless in his own ears, far away and ... yes, afraid. Wipe every Mute off the face of this planet.

"Do you feel up to a tour?" she asked. She glanced at the plaz beside them.

Ward looked out at the undersea view. "Out there?"

"No," she said, "not out there. There's been a wavewall topside and we've got all our crews reclaiming some ground we've lost."

His eyes strained to focus forward on her mouth. Somehow, he didn't believe anyone's mouth could be so casual about a wavewall.

"The Islands?" He swallowed. "How bad was the damage?"

"Minimal, Ward. To our knowledge, no fatalities. Wave-walls may very well be a thing of the past."

"I don't understand."

"This wavewall was smaller than many of the winter storms you survive every year. We've built a series of networks of exposed land. Land above the sea. Someday, they will be islands ... real islands fixed to the planet, not drifting willy-nilly. And some of them, I think, will be continents."

Land, he thought, and his stomach lurched. Land means shallows. An Island could bottom out in shallow water. An ultimate disaster, in the vernacular of historians, but she was talking about voluntarily increasing the risk of an Islander's worst fear.

"How much exposed land?" he asked, trying to maintain a level tone.

"Not very much, but it's a beginning."

"But it would take forever to ..."

"A long time, Ward, but not forever. We've been at it for generations. And lately we've had some help. It's getting done in our lifetime, doesn't that excite you?"

"What does this have to do with the kelp?" He felt the need to resist her obvious attempts to mesmerize him.

"The kelp is the key," she said, "just as people - Islanders and Mermen - have said all along. With the kelp and a few well-placed artificial barriers, we can control the sea currents. All of them."

Control, he thought. That's the Merman way of it. He doubted they could control the seas, but if they could manipulate currents, they could manipulate Island movement.

How much control? he wondered*

"We're in a two-sun system," he said. "The gravitational distortions guarantee wavewalls, earthquakes ..."

"Not when the kelp was in its prime, Ward. And now there's enough of it to make a difference. You'll see. And currents should begin an aggrading action now - dropping sediment - rather than degrading."

Degrading, he thought. He looked at Ale's beauty. Did she even know the meaning of the word? A technical understanding, an engineering approach was not enough.

Mistaking the reason of his silence, Ale plunged on.

"We have records of everything. From the first. We can play the whole reconstruction of this planet from the beginning - the death of the kelp, everything."

Not everything, he thought. He looked once more at the wondrous garden beyond the plaz. Growth there was so lush that the bottom could only be glimpsed in a few places. He could see no rock. As a child, he had given up watching drift because all he ever saw was rock ... and silt. When it was clear enough or shallow enough to see at all. Seeing the bottom from an Island had a way of running an icy hand down your back.

"How close are these 'artificial barriers' to the surface?" he asked.

She cleared her throat, avoiding his eyes.

"Along this section," she said, "surflines are beginning to show. I expect watchers on Vashon already have seen them. That wavewall drifted them pretty close to ..."

"Vashon draws a hundred meters at Center," he protested. "Two-thirds of the population live below the waterline - almost half a million lives! How can you speak so casually about endangering that many ... ?"

"Ward!" A chill edged her voice. "We are aware of the dangers to your Islands and we've taken that into account. We're not murderers. We are on the verge of complete restoration of the kelp and the development of land masses - two monumental projects that we've pursued for generations."

"Projects whose dangers you did not share with nor reveal to the Islanders. Are we to be sacrificed to your -"

"No one is to be sacrificed!"

"Except by your friends who want to wipe out every Mute on Pandora! Is this how they intend to do it? Wreck us on your barrier walls and your continents?"

"We knew you wouldn't understand," she said. "But you must realize that the Islands have reached their limits and people haven't. I agree that we should have brought Islanders into the planning picture much earlier, but" - she shrugged - "we didn't. And now we are. It's my job to tell you what we must do together to see that there is no disaster. It's my job to gain your cooperation in -"

"In the mass annihilation of Islanders!"

"No, Ward, dammit! In the mass rescue of Islanders ... and Mermen. We must walk on the surface once more, all of us."

He heard the sincerity in her tone but distrusted it. She was a diplomat, trained to lie convincingly. And the enormity of what she proposed ...

Ale waved a hand toward the exterior garden. "Kelp is flourishing, as you can see. But it's just a plant; it is not sentient, as it was before our ancestors wiped it out. The kelp you see there was, of course, reconstructed from the genes carried by certain humans in the -"

"Don't try to explain genetics to the Chief Justice," Ward growled, "we know about your 'dumbkelp.'"

She blushed, and he wondered at the emotional display. It was something he had never before seen in Ale. A liability in a diplomat, no doubt. How had she concealed it before ... or was this situation simply too much for normal repression? He decided to watch the emotional signal and read it for her true feelings.