Gallow held up an admonitory hand. "Kareen, look with care upon Islander Bushka. Could he not pass as one of us?"

Ale swept a swift glance across Bushka's face and returned her attention to Gallow. "What're you doing, GeLaar?"

Bushka inhaled deeply and held his breath.

Gallow studied Bushka a moment, then: "What would be your response, Bushka, if I were to offer you a place in Merman society?"

Bushka exhaled slowly, inhaled. "I ... I would accept. Gratefully, of course."

"Of course," Gallow echoed. He smiled at Ale. "Then, since Bushka will be one of us, there's no harm in telling him what amuses me."

"It's on your head, GeLaar," Ale said.

A movement at the Sonde Control console caught Bushka's attention. Panille was no longer looking at him, but the set of his shoulders told Bushka the man was listening intently. Ship save them! Was the Artifact Heresy true, after all? Was that the great Merman secret?

"These visions causing so much trouble for our beloved C/P," Gallow said. "They are Merman rockets, Bushka."

Bushka opened his mouth and closed it without speaking.

"Ship was not God, is not God," Gallow said. "The Redoubt records ..."

"Are open to several interpretations," Ale said.

"Only to fools!" Gallow snapped. "We are sending up rockets. Bushka, because we are preparing to recover the hyb tanks from orbit. Ship was an artifact made by our ancestors. Other artifacts and things have been left in space for us to recover."

The matter-of-fact way Gallow said this made Bushka catch his breath. Stories about the mysterious hyb tanks permeated Islander society. What might be stored in those containers that orbited Pandora? Recovering those tanks, and really seeing what they contained, was worth anything - even destruction of the Ship-God belief that sustained so many people.

"You are shocked," Gallow said.

"I'm ... I'm awed," Bushka replied.

"We were all raised on the Transition Stories." Gallow pointed upward. "Life awaits us up there."

Bushka nodded. "The tanks are supposed to contain countless life forms from ... from Earth."

"Fish, animals, plants," Gallow said. "And even some humans." He grinned. "Normal humans." He waved a hand to encompass the occupants of Sonde Control. "Like us."

Bushka inhaled a trembling breath. Yes, the historical accounts said the hyb tanks held humans who had never been touched by the bioengineering machinations of Jesus Lewis. There would be people in those tanks who had gone to sleep in another star system, who had no idea of this nightmare world that awaited their awakening.

"And now you know," Gallow said.

Bushka cleared his throat. "We never suspected. I mean ... the C/P has never said a word about ..."

"The C/P does not know of this," Ale said. There was a warning note in her voice.

Bushka glanced at the plaz porthole with its view of the LTA tube.

"She knows about that, of course," Ale said.

"An innocuous thing," Gallow said.

"There has been no blessing of our rockets," Ale said.

Bushka continued to stare out the porthole. He had never counted himself a deeply religious person, but these Merman revelations left him profoundly disturbed. Ale obviously doubted Gallow's interpretation of the Redoubt material, but still ... a blessing would be only common sense ... just in case ...

"What is your response, Merman Bushka?" Gallow asked.

Merman Bushka!

Bushka turned a wide-eyed stare on Gallow, who obviously awaited an answer to a question. A question. What had he asked? Bushka was a moment recovering the man's words.

"My response ... yes. The Islanders ... I mean, about these rockets. The Islanders ... shouldn't they be told?"

"They?" Gallow laughed, a deep amusement that shook his beautiful body. "You see, Kareen? Already his former compatriots are 'they.'"

Vata did not experience true consciousness. She skirted the shadow-edges of awareness. Memories flitted through her neurons like tendrils from the kelp. Sometimes she dreamed kelp dreams. These dreams often included a wondrous hatch of hylighters - spore-filled gasbags that had died when the original kelp died. Tears mixed with her nutrient bath as she dreamed such things, tears for the fate of those huge sky-bound globes tacking across the evening breezes of a million years. Her dream hylighters clutched their ballast rocks in their two longest tentacles and Vata felt the comforting texture of rock hugged close.

Thoughts themselves were like hylighters to her, or silken threads blowing in the dark of her mind. Sometimes she followed awareness of Duque, who floated beside her, sensing events within his thoughts. Time and again, she re-experienced through him that terrible night when the gravitational wrenching of Pandora's two suns destroyed the last human foothold on the planet's fragile land. Duque repeatedly let his thoughts plunge into that experience. And Vata, linked to the fearful mutant like Mermen diving partners on the same safety line, was forced to recreate dreams that soothed and calmed Duque's terrors.

"Duque escaped," she muttered in his mind, "Duque was taken away onto the sea where Hali Ekel tended his burns."

Duque would snuffle and whimper. Had Vata been conscious, she would have heard with her own ears, because Vata and Duque shared the same life support at the center of Vashon. Vata lay mostly submerged in nutrient, a monstrous mound of pink and blue flesh with definite human female characteristics. Enormous breasts with gigantic pink nipples lifted from the dark nutrient like twin mountains from a brown sea. Duque drifted beside her, a satellite, her familiar dangling in the endless mental vacuum.

For generations now, the two of them had been nurtured and reverenced in Vashon's central complex - home of the Chaplain/Psychiatrist and the Committee on Vital Forms, Merman and Islander guards kept watch on the pair under the command of the C/P. It was a ritualized observation, which, in time, eroded the awe that Pandorans learned early from the reactions of their parents.

"The two of them there like that. They'll always be there. They're our last link with Ship. As long as they live, Ship is with us. It's WorShip keeps them alive so long."

Although Duque occasionally knuckled an eye into glaring wakefulness and watched his guardians in the gloomy surroundings of the living pool that confined them, Vata's responses never lifted to consciousness. She breathed. Her great body, responding to the kelp half of her genetic inheritance, absorbed energy from the nutrient solution that washed against her skin. Analysis of the nutrient betrayed traces of human waste products, which were removed by the sucker mouths of blind scrubberfish. Occasionally, Vata would snort and an arm would lift in the nutrient like a leviathan rising from its depths before settling once more into the murk. Her hair continued to grow until it spread like kelp across the nutrient surface, tangling over the hairless skin of Duque and impeding the scrubberfish. The C/P would come into the chamber then and, with a reverence touched by a certain amount of cupidity, would clip Vata's locks. The strands were washed and separated to be blessed and sold in short lengths as indulgences. Even Mermen bought them. Sale of Vatahair had been the major source of C/P income for many generations.

Duque, more aware than any other human of his curious link with Vata, puzzled over the connection when Vata's intrusions left him with thinking time of his own. Sometimes he would speak of this to his guardians, but when Duque spoke there was always a flurry of activity, the summoning of the C/P, and a different kind of watchfulness from the security.