All I'd need, he thought. Drag a dead fish along and call in the dashers. Even though dashers preferred warm-blooded meat, they'd go for anything that moved when they were hungry.

A lot like humans.

Settling back with the tiller under his right armpit, Twisp tried to relax. Still nothing on the radio's emergency band. He reached down and switched to the regular broadcast, coming in on the middle of a music program.

Another gift, a nav-sounder, with its bottom-finding sonar and its store of position memories, rested between his legs. He flipped it on for a position check, worked out the doppler distance figure from the radio and nodded to himself.

Close enough.

Vashon was drifting at a fairly steady seven klicks per hour back there. His coracle was doing a reliable twelve. Pretty fast for trolling with a handline.

The radio interrupted its music program for a commentary on Chief Justice Keel. No word yet from the Committee, but observers were saying that his unprecedented fact-finding trip down under could have "deep significance to Vashon and all other Islands."

What significance? Twisp wondered.

Keel was an important man, but Twisp had trouble extending that importance beyond Vashon. Occasional grumbles over a decision swept through the Island communities, but there had been few real disturbances since Keel's elevation, and that was some time back. Sure sign that he was a wise man.

The C/P had been asked to comment on Keel's mission, however, and this aroused Twisp's curiosity. What did the old Shipside religion have to do with the Chief Justice's trip? Twisp had always paid only cursory attention to both politics and religion. They were good for an occasional jawing session at the Ace of Cups, but Twisp had always found himself unable to understand what drove people to passionate arguments over "Ship's real purpose."

Who the hell knew what Ship's real purpose had been? There might not have been a purpose!

It was possible, though, that the old religion was gaining new strength among Islanders. It was certainly an unspoken issue between Mermen and Islanders. There was enough polarization already between topside and down under - diplomats arguing about the "functional abilities" characteristic of Pandora's split population. Islanders claimed eminence in agriculture, textiles and meteorology. Mermen always bragged they had the bodies best adapted for going back to the land.

Stupid argument! Twisp always noticed that a group of people - Islander or Merman - got less intelligent with every member added. If humans can master that one, they've got it made, he thought.

Twisp sensed something big was afoot. He felt well away from it out in the open sea. No Ship here. No C/P. No religious fanatics - just one seasoned agnostic.

Was Ship God? Who the hell cared now? Ship had abandoned them for sure and nothing else of Ship really mattered.

A long, sweeping roller lifted the coracle easily to almost twice the height of the prevailing seas. He glanced around from the brief vantage and saw something large bobbing on the water far ahead. Whatever it was, it lay in the silvery channel of the odd current, which was adding to his forward speed. He kept his attention ahead until he picked up the unknown thing much closer, realizing then that it was several things clumped together. A few minutes later he recognized the objects in the clump.

Dashers!

The squawks lay quiet, though. He glanced at them as he put a hand on the field switch, ready to repel the hunt when they attacked. None of the dashers moved.

That's strange, he thought. Never seen dashers sit still before.

He lifted his head, raising the catchment sag of his cockpit cover, and peered ahead. As the coracle neared the clump, Twisp counted seven adults and a tighter cluster of young dashers in the center of the group. They rode the waves together like a dark chunk of bubbly.

Dead, he realized. A whole hunt of dashers and all of them dead. What killed them?

Twisp eased back the throttle, but still kept a hand on the field switch ... just in case. They were dead, though, not pretending as a ruse to lure him close. The dashers had locked themselves into a protective circle. Each adult linked a rear leg to the adult on either side. They formed a circle with forepaws and fangs facing out, the young inside.

Twisp set a course around them, staring in at the dashers. How long had they been dead? He was tempted to stop and skin at least one. Dasher skins always brought a good price. But it would take precious time and the hides would rob him of space.

They'd stink, too.

He circled a bit closer. Up close now he could see how dashers had adapted so quickly to water. Hollow hairs - millions of trapped air cells that became an efficient flotation system when sea covered all of Pandora's land. Legend said dashers once had feared the water, that the hollow hairs insulated them then against cold nights and oven-hot days among the desert rocks. Because of those hollow hairs, dasher hides made beautiful blankets - light and warm. Again, he was tempted to skin some of them. They were all in pretty good shape. Have to jettison part of his survival cargo if he did, though. What could he spare?

One of the dashers displayed a great hood that floated out from its ugly, leather-skinned head like a black mantle. Experts said this was a throwback characteristic. Most dashers had shed the hood in the sea, becoming sleek killing machines with saber fangs and those knife-sharp claws, almost fifteen centimeters long on the bigger animals.

Lifting a corner of his cockpit cover, he poked at the hooded dasher with a boathook, lifting it far enough to see that the underside had been burned. A deep, crisp line from brisket to belly. The limpness of the beast told him it couldn't have been dead more than a few hours. A half-day, at the most. He withdrew the boathook and refastened the cockpit cover.

Burned? he wondered. What had surprised and killed this entire hunt - from below?

Swinging the tiller, he resumed his course down the silvery channel of current, checking by compass and the relative signal from Vashon. The radio was still playing popular music. Soon, the mysterious clump of dashers lay below the horizon astern.

The clouds had lifted slightly and still there was no rain. He gauged his course by the bright spot on the clouds, the uncertain compass and the ripple of steady wind across the transparent cover above him. The wind drove spray runnels in parallel lines, giving him a good reading on relative direction.

His thoughts turned back to the dashers. He was convinced that Mermen had killed them from beneath, but how? A Merman sub crew, maybe. If this were an example of a Merman weapon, Islands were virtually defenseless.

Now, why would I think Mermen would attack us?

Mermen and Islanders might be polarized, but war was ancient history, known only through records saved from the Clone Wars. And Mermen were known to go to great trouble to save Islander lives.

But the whole planet was a hiding place if you lived down under. And Mermen did want Vata, that was true. Always coming up with petitions demanding that she be moved to "safer and more comfortable quarters down under."

"Vata is the key to kelp consciousness," the Mermen said. They said it so often it had become a cliche, but the C/P seemed to agree. Twisp had never believed everything the C/P said, but this was something he kept to himself.

In Twisp's opinion, it was a power struggle. Vata, living on and on like that with her companion, Duque, beside her, was the nearest thing Pandora had to a living saint. You could start almost any story you wanted about why she lay there without responding.

"She is waiting for the return of Ship," some said.

But Twisp had a tech friend who was called in occasionally by the C/P to examine and maintain the nutrient tank in which Vata and Duque lived. The tech laughed at this story.