Keel moved painfully to the table where Gallow had sat and dropped into the chair. It was still warm.

What a strange pair, he thought.

Nakano brought him a beaker of water. Keel sipped slowly, savoring the coolness.

It was almost as though these two exchanged personalities. Keel realized then that Nakano and Gallow were playing the old Security game with him - one guard always browbeat a prisoner while the other came on as a friend, sometimes pretending to protect the prisoner from the attacker.

"Tell me about the weapon," Nakano said.

"The ropes are thicker than full-grown kelp," Keel said. And he recalled underwater views of the kelp - strands thicker than a human torso swaying in the currents.

"A burner would still cut them," Nakano said.

"Ah, but the fibers have some way of reattaching to each other when they touch. Cut it apart and put the cut ends together, it's as though there were not cut."

Nakano grimaced. "How? How is it done?"

"I don't know. They talk about fibrous hooks."

"Now you understand," Nakano said, "why Mutes must go."

"What have we done except protect ourselves?" Keel demanded. "If that sub hadn't been out to sink the Island, it wouldn't have been harmed." Even as he spoke he wondered again about the damaged sub, wishing he could see and examine it. What had really done it? Crushed? Truly crushed or damaged by the bottom?

"Tell me how you commune with kelp," Nakano said.

"We ... just touch it."

"And?"

Keel swallowed. He remembered the old stories, the remnant history, especially the accounts by Shadow Panille's ancestor.

"It's like daydreaming ... almost," Keel said. "You hear voices."

That much the old accounts had said.

"Specific voices?" Nakano demanded.

"Sometimes," Keel lied.

"How do you contact the specific dead and gain access to what they knew when alive?"

Keel shrugged, thinking hard. His mind had never worked this fast, absorbing, correlating. Ship! What a discovery! He thought about the countless Islander dead consigned to the sea by mourning relatives. How many of those had been absorbed by the kelp?

"So the kelp doesn't respond to you any better than it does to us," Nakano said.

"I fear not," Keel agreed.

"Kelp has a mind of its own," Nakano said. "I've said that all along."

Keel thought then about the enormous undersea gardens of kelp, forests of gigantic, ropy strands reaching upward toward the suns. He had seen holos of Mermen swimming through those green forests, flashing silvery figures among the fish and fronds. But no Merman had ever before reported kelp responding in the way it had done for the first humans on Pandora. This must mean full sentience was returning. It must be an avalanche of consciousness sweeping through the sea! Mermen thought they controlled the kelp and, through this, controlled the currents.

What if ...

Keel felt his heartbeat stutter.

A Merman sub had been crushed. He imagined those gigantic strands of kelp wrapped around the sub's hard surface. Cutters and burners flashed in his imagination. And the kelp writhed, sending out its messages of self-protection. What if the kelp had learned to kill?

"Where are we right now?" Keel asked.

"Near the Launch Base. There's no harm in your knowing; you can't escape."

Keel let his body feel the lift and fall of the craft around him. The light through the louvered vents had begun to dim. Nightfall? The foil rode on extremely calm seas, for which he was thankful. Vashon needed calm seas just now.

Near the Launch Base, Nakano says. How near? But even a short swim was impossible for this old body with its head supported on a prosthetic brace. He was a cripple in this environment. A Mute. No wonder these monsters sneered at him.

The foil's motion became even steadier and the light dimmer. Nakano flipped a switch, bringing soft yellow illumination into the room from lamps near the ceiling.

"We are going down to commune with the kelp," Nakano said. "We are in old kelp here, the kind that's most apt to respond to us."

Keel thought about this craft sinking into a forest of kelp. Whatever had happened to Tso the kelp now knew. How would the kelp use that knowledge?

I know what I would do with such people in my power, Keel thought. I'd squash them. They are lethal deviants.

Twisp considered abandoning the tow coracle with its supplies. A second foil had passed nearby without slowing down and he was worried.

We could pick up a few more knots that way, he thought. It galled him that the foils, already lost below the horizon, would be at Vashon by nightfall. The first one probably was arriving right now. He had to plod along in this damned creeping coracle!

He laughed at his own frustration. It relaxed him to laugh, even if it was just his usual short bark. Vashon might be aground, but the Island had touched bottom before, and in perilously more dangerous weather. Pandora had subsided into a calmer phase; his fisherman's instincts felt this. It had to do with the looping interrelationship of the two suns, distance from primaries and, just possibly, the kelp. Perhaps the kelp had finally reached an influential population density. Certainly, kelp fronds were more evident on the surface and the kelp's nursery effect showed itself in the recent fish population boom.

Winters on the open sea were easier every year. The familiar drone of the little engine, the balmy warmth under scattered clouds and the coracle's rhythmic wallow toward Vashon reminded Twisp that he would get there in his own good time.

And when I do, I'll straighten out this Bushka's story.

Vashon was not a community to take lightly. There was influence there, power and money.

And Vata, he thought. Yes, we have Vata. Twisp began to see the presence of Vata on his home Island in a new light. She was more than a link with humanity's Pandoran past. Living evidence that a myth had substance - that was what Vata and her satellite Duque represented.

"That last foil must've seen us," Bushka said. "Our position is known."

"You really think they'll alert your Green Dashers?" Twisp asked.

"Gallow has friends in high places," Bushka growled. He glanced significantly at Scudi, who was sitting back against a thwart, looking at Brett with a quizzical expression. Brett lay curled up, asleep.

"We don't know what they're saying on the radio," Bushka said. He looked at the device near Twisp's knee. When Twisp didn't respond, Bushka closed his eyes.

Scudi, shifting her attention from one Islander to the other during this exchange, watched a deep listlessness come over Bushka. The man gave up so easily! What a contrast with Brett.

Scudi thought hard about the escape from Gallow, paddling and sailing, homing on the locator beam from the coracle's transmitter. They had inflated only one of the small rafts from the survival kits, holding the other in reserve. Even this they had delayed until they were more than a kilometer from the foil.

It had been heavy going at first in the thick glut of kelp. The two of them, linked by a single belt line, tended to tangle in the surface fronds. Scudi had led the first stage of their flight, holding them hydrostatically balanced with their dive suit controls just under the surface. When they came up for air it was always beneath a cover of kelp and each time they expected to hear sounds of search and pursuit.

Once, they heard the foil start up, but it shut down immediately. Under the protective cover of a kelp frond, Brett whispered to Scudi: "They don't dare chase after us right now. Capturing that other foil is too important to them."