As a child, he had given up watching drift because all he ever saw was rock ... and silt. When it was clear enough or shallow enough to see at all. Seeing the bottom from an Island had a way of running an icy hand down your back.
"How close are these 'artificial barriers' to the surface?" he asked.
She cleared her throat, avoiding his eyes.
"Along this section," she said, "surflines are beginning to show. I expect watchers on Vashon already have seen them. That wavewall drifted them pretty close to ..."
"Vashon draws a hundred meters at Center," he protested. "Two-thirds of the population live below the waterline - almost half a million lives! How can you speak so casually about endangering that many ... ?"
"Ward!" A chill edged her voice. "We are aware of the dangers to your Islands and we've taken that into account. We're not murderers. We are on the verge of complete restoration of the kelp and the development of land masses - two monumental projects that we've pursued for generations."
"Projects whose dangers you did not share with nor reveal to the Islanders. Are we to be sacrificed to your -"
"No one is to be sacrificed!"
Chapter 10
"Except by your friends who want to wipe out every Mute on Pandora! Is this how they intend to do it? Wreck us on your barrier walls and your continents?"
"We knew you wouldn't understand," she said. "But you must realize that the Islands have reached their limits and people haven't. I agree that we should have brought Islanders into the planning picture much earlier, but" - she shrugged - "we didn't. And now we are. It's my job to tell you what we must do together to see that there is no disaster. It's my job to gain your cooperation in -"
"In the mass annihilation of Islanders!"
"No, Ward, dammit! In the mass rescue of Islanders ... and Mermen. We must walk on the surface once more, all of us."
He heard the sincerity in her tone but distrusted it. She was a diplomat, trained to lie convincingly. And the enormity of what she proposed ...
Ale waved a hand toward the exterior garden. "Kelp is flourishing, as you can see. But it's just a plant; it is not sentient, as it was before our ancestors wiped it out. The kelp you see there was, of course, reconstructed from the genes carried by certain humans in the -"
"Don't try to explain genetics to the Chief Justice," Ward growled, "we know about your 'dumbkelp.'"
She blushed, and he wondered at the emotional display. It was something he had never before seen in Ale. A liability in a diplomat, no doubt. How had she concealed it before ... or was this situation simply too much for normal repression? He decided to watch the emotional signal and read it for her true feelings.
"Calling it 'dumbkelp' like the schoolchildren is hardly accurate," she said.
"You're trying to divert me," he accused. "How close is Vashon to one of your surflines right now?"
"In a few minutes I will take you out and show you," she said. "But you must understand what we're -"
"No. I must not understand - by which you mean accept - such peril for so many of my people. So many people, period. You talk of control. Do you have any idea of the energy in an Island's movement? The long, slow job of maneuvering something that big? Your word, this control of which you seem so proud, does not take in the kinetic energy of -"
"But it does, Ward. I didn't bring you down here for a tea party. Or an argument." She stood. "I hope you have your legs under you because we've a lot of walking to do."
He stood at that, slowly, and tried to unkink his knees. His left foot tingled in the first stages of waking. Was it possible, all that she said? He could not escape the in-built fear all Islanders felt at the idea of a crashing death on solid bottom. A white horizon could only mean death - a wavewall or some tidal exposure of the planet's rocky surface. Nothing could change that.
***
How do Mermen make love? Same way every time.
- Islander joke
The two coracles, one towing the other, bobbed along on the open sea. Nothing shared the horizon with them except gray waves, long deep rollers with intermittent white lines of spume at the crests. Vashon was long gone below the horizon astern and Twisp, holding his course by the