a brace against her buttocks. He had never seen a naked woman before and her dive suit left nothing for him to imagine. Unromantic as the situation was, he liked her body very much.
The horse surged upward, then dived, and her hair streamed backward, covering the head of the airfish and flickering against his cheeks.
He stared through a haze of her hair and over her right shoulder, feeling the water tumble around them. Far down the tunneling shadows of the sea past the smooth shoulder he saw a dazzling play of lights - uncounted lights - big ones, small ones, wide ones. Shapes began to grow visible: walls and towers, fine planes of platforms, dark passages and caves. The lights became plaz windows and he realized he was descending onto a Merman metropolis, one of the major centers. It had to be, with that much sprawl and that much light. The dance of illumination enthralled him, feeding through his mutated vision a rapture he had not known himself capable of feeling. A part of his awareness said this came from knowing he had survived overwhelming odds, but another part of him gloried in the new things his peculiar eyes could see.
Cross-currents began to turn and twist the horse. Brett had trouble holding his position; once he lost his leg grip. His rescuer felt this and reached back to guide one of his hands around her waist. Her feet came back and locked onto his. She crouched over her controls, guiding them toward a sprawling assemblage of blocks and domes.
His hands against her abdomen felt the smooth warmth there. His own clothing seemed suddenly ridiculous and he understood the Merman preference for dive suits and undersea nudity for the first time. They wore Islander-made dive suits for long, cold work, but their skin served them well for short spurts or warmer currents. Brett's pants chafed his thighs and cramped him, whipping in the currents of their passage.
They were much closer to the complex of buildings now and Brett began to have a new idea of the structures' sizes. The closest tower faded out of sight above them. He tried to trace it into the upper distances and realized that night had fallen topside.
We can't be very far down, he thought. That tower could break the surface!
But no one topside had reported such a structure.
Ship save us if an Island ever hit such a thing!
Lights from the buildings provided him with more than enough illumination, but he wondered how his rescuer was finding her way in what he knew to be deep darkness for ordinary human vision. He saw then that she was guided by fixed lights anchored to the bottom - lanes of red and green.
Even the darkest topside night had never kept him from moving around easily, but here the surface was just a faraway bruise. Brett drew a deep breath from the tube and settled himself closer to the young woman. She patted his hand on her stomach while jockeying the machine into a maze of steep-sided canyons. They rounded a corner and came onto a wide, well-lighted space between tall buildings. A dome structure loomed straight ahead with docking lips extruded from it. Many people swam in the bright illumination that glared all along the lips. Brett saw the on-off blink of a bank of hatchways opening and closing to pass the swimmers. His rescuer settled them onto a ramp with only a small sensation of grating. A Merman behind them took the horse by a rear handhold. The young woman motioned for Brett to take a deep breath. He obeyed. She gently pulled the breather from him, removed her airfish and caged it with others beside the hatch.
Through the hatch they went into a chamber where the water was quickly flushed out and replaced by air. Brett found himself standing in a dripping puddle facing the young woman, who shed water as though she and her translucent suit had been oiled.
"My name is Scudi Wang," she said. "What is yours?"
"Brett Norton," he said. He laughed self-consciously. "You ... you saved my life." The statement sounded so ridiculously inadequate that he laughed again.
"It was my watch for search and rescue," she said. "We're always extra alert during a wavewall if we're near an Island."
He had never heard of such a thing but it sounded reasonable. Life was precious and his view of the world said everyone felt the same, even Mermen.