CHAPTER 2

Life is just one damned thing after another.

To Birdie Kelly, squelching through the juicy dark mud of the Sling with a food tray balanced in front of him and a message flimsy stuck between the grimy fingers of his right hand, that thought came with the force and freshness of revelation.

One damned thing after another! he repeated to himself. No sooner was his boss, Max Perry, shipped off to the hospital for a couple of weeks of rehab surgery than Birdie found himself nursemaiding an Alliance councilor, no less, from far-off Miranda. Perry had been hard to take, with his obsessive need to work and his fixation about visits to Quake, but Julius Graves was no easier. Worse, in some ways, sitting there talking to himself when he should have been on his way back to Miranda weeks before. There he remained, day after day, loafing about indoors and not lifting a finger to help with the reconstruction work, and all the while ignoring recall messages from his own superiors. He seemed ready to stay forever.

Even so…

Birdie paused at the entrance to the building and took a deep breath of damp sea air.

Even so, it was impossible to feel anything other than elated these days. Birdie stared up at the dappled blue sky with Mandel’s golden disk showing through broken cloud, then around him at the torn vegetation pushing out new shoots from broken stems. A light breeze roamed in from the west, signaling a perfect day for sailing. He loved it all, and it all seemed too good to be true. Summertide was over, the surface of Opal was returning to its usual tranquility, and Birdie had survived. That was more than could be said for half the unfortunate population of the waterworld.

It was more than he had expected for himself. One week earlier, as Summertide reached its climax and the gravity fields of Mandel and Amaranth tore at Opal, Birdie had huddled alone in the prow of a small boat and watched the turbulent surface ahead of him veer from horizontal to near-vertical.

He was a goner and he knew it. Radio signals had warned that the monster was on the way. Tidal forces had created a great soliton, a solitary wave over a kilometer high that was sweeping around the whole girth of Opal. Sling after Sling had sent their last messages, reporting on wave speed and height before the huge but fragile rafts of mud and tangled vegetation were torn apart and fell silent.

There was no way to avoid it. Birdie had crouched in the bottom of the boat, clutching the bottom boards with white-knuckled hands.

The boat’s prow tilted up. Thirty degrees, forty-five, sixty. Horizontal and vertical switched roles. Birdie found himself with his feet braced on the boat’s stern, his hands holding tight to the centerboard and the little mast. He was lifted, with a two- or three-gee force on his body that went on and on, like a launch from Starside Port to orbit. Rushing water flew past, spray two feet from his nose. For half a minute he was carried up and up, a flyspeck on a wall of ocean, up into Opal’s dark clouds. He poised there, forever, unable to see anything as the boat leveled off. At last came the fall, leaving his stomach behind on the downward plunge.

He had been permitted one breathtaking view as they dropped out of the clouds: Opal’s seabed lay ahead, exposed by millennial tides, dotted with long-sunken ships and the vast green bodies of stranded Dowsers, unbuoyed by water and crushed by their own multimillion-ton weight. Then he was swooping down a long, foam-flecked slope, toward that muddy wasteland. He knew, even more certainly than before, that he was about to die.

A second, smaller wave, running crosswise to the first, saved him. Before he could be smashed onto the unforgiving seabed, there was a scream of wind and a harsh slap on the boat’s rugged stern. He found himself being lifted again in a boiling torrent of warm spray, holding harder than ever, almost unable to breathe. But breathe he did, and held on, too, an hour longer than he would have believed humanly possible, until Summertide was past and the tough little boat had been tossed to calmer waters.

It was something to tell his grandchildren about — if he ever got around to having any.

He had not intended to, but now he might. Only weeks after Summertide, and the social pressure was already on. Every fertile woman would be pregnant within the next month, pushing Opal’s population back toward survival level.

Birdie looked up at the calm blue sky and drew in another long, reassuring breath. Perhaps the real miracle was not that he had lived to tell the tale, but that his story seemed to have been repeated again and again across the entire surface of Opal. Some of the Slings, caught in contrary crosscurrents, had been held together by watery whirlpools when all logic suggested they should have been torn apart. Survivors told of flotsam that had come within reach just as their own strength was failing.

Or maybe they had it backward. Birdie had a new insight. Maybe they had hung on, like him, for exactly as long as was necessary until a means of self-preservation came to hand. People who lived in the Dobelle system did not give in easily. They could not afford to.

Birdie pushed the wicker door of the one-story building open with his knee, wiped his muddy shoes on the rush mat in the entrance, and walked through to the inside room.

“Same thing again, I’m afraid: boiled Dowser, grilled Dowser, and fried Dowser, with a bit of Dowser on the side.” He placed the tray on a table of plaited reeds. “We’ll be eating this stuff for a while, until we can get the fishing boats back into service.” He removed the lid of the big dish, leaned forward, and sniffed. His nose wrinkled. “Unless it gets too rotten to eat. Not far to go, if you ask me. Come on, though, dig in. It tastes even worse cold.”

The man sitting in the chair beyond the table was tall and bony, with a bald and bulging head burned purple-red by hard radiation. His eyes, a faded and misty blue beneath bushy eyebrows, gazed thoughtfully up at Birdie and right through him.

Birdie wriggled. He had not really expected his cheerful comments to elicit a matching reaction from Julius Graves — they never had in the past — but there was no reason for the other man to look so mournful. After all, only a week earlier Graves had survived an experience over on Opal’s sister planet, Quake, that by the sound of it had been as harrowing as anything that Birdie had been through. The councilor ought to be filled with the same zest for life, the same satisfaction at being alive.

“Steven and I have been talking again,” Graves said. “He has me almost persuaded.”

Birdie laid down the message flimsy and helped himself to food. “Oh, yes? What’s he been saying, then?”

Steven Graves was another thing that Birdie found hard to take. An interior mnemonic twin was no big deal; it was something employed by a number of other Council members, an added pair of cerebral hemispheres grown and housed within the human skull and coupled to the original brain hemispheres via a new corpus callosum. All it did was provide an extended and convenient organic memory, slower but less bulky than an inorganic mnemonic unit. What it was not supposed to do — what it had never done before, to Birdie Kelly’s knowledge — was to develop self-awareness. But Julius Graves’s mnemonic twin, Steven Graves, not only possessed independent consciousness; on occasion he seemed to take over. Birdie preferred him in many ways. Steven’s personality was far more cheerful and jokey. But it was disconcerting not to know who you were talking to at any given time, and although Julius seemed to be in charge at the moment, in another second it might be Steven.

“For almost a week I have been summoning my energy to return to Miranda,” Graves said, “to report on my experiences here.”