The Jesus Incident

Chapter Twenty

Nostalgia represents an interesting illusion. Through nostalgia, humans wish for things that never were. The positive memory is the one that sticks. Over several generations, the positive memory tends to weed out more and more of what really existed, refining down to a distillation of haunted desires.
- Shipquotes
FOR THE first time, Waela considered refusing an assignment. Not out of fear - she had survived in the research subs where no one else had, and still she accepted the fact that this project must continue at all costs. Beyond instinct, she knew that the 'lectrokelp was the most important factor in Colony life. Survival.
I've been down there and I survived. I should lead the new team.
This thought dominated her awareness as she and Thomas approached the bustle of early dayside activity around the new sub he was having rushed to completion.
Thomas worried her. One blink he seemed like a nice-enough fellow; the nex.... what? His mind appeared to wander.
He hasn't been out of hyb long enough to handle himself here.
They stopped a few meters from the work perimeter and she stared at what was taking shape under the brilliant lights. All this energy - all those workers. They were like insects intent on a giant egg. She tried to fathom the sense of this thing. It did make a certain sens.... but a transparent core of plaz? They had always used plasma glass in the subs, but this detachable core constructed entirely of plaz was a new concept. She could see that it was going to be crowded in there and didn't know if she would like that.
Why Thomas? Why did they put him in charge?
She recalled their walk across the compound and into the LTA hangar. He had been too busy giving orders to her for him to see the telltale shadow-flicker of a Hooded Dasher breaking past the sentries. She had cooked it in mid-leap with a hipshot from her lasgun - and immediately began to shiver when she realized that she had almost left the weapon in her cubby. This perimeter was supposed to be secure, the sentries the best.
Thomas had barely noticed.
"Quick little devils," he said, calmly. "By the way, there's a poet coming onto our team from Ship."
"A poet? But we need...."
"We will get a poet because Ship is sending us a poet."
"But we asked fo...."
"I know what we asked for!"
He sounded like a man suppressing his own misgivings.
She said: "Well, we still need a systems engineer fo...."
"I want you to seduce this poet."
She had trouble believing what she had heard.
Thomas said: "Your skin's a regular rainbow when you get upset. Just consider this a team assignment. I've seen a holo of the poet. He's not unattractive i...."
"My body is my own!" She glared at him. "And nobody - not you, not Oakes, not Ship, tells me who I will or will not let into my body."
They were stopped in the compound by then and she was surprised to see his hands up and a grin on his face. She realized that she had instinctively raised her lasgun to focus between his eyes. Without reducing her furious glare, she lowered the gun and holstered it.
"Sorry," he said. And they resumed their walk toward the hangar. Presently, he asked: "How important is the kelp team to you?"
He should know that! Everyone knew, and since Thomas had been groundside he had shown amazing ability to seek out critical information.
"It's everything to me."
Words began to pour from him. He wanted to know if Panille was a free agent. Was Panille really sent by Ship? Could Panille be working for Oakes or this Lewis people mentioned in such fearful tones? Who? Who? Doubt...cascade of doubts.
But why the hell should she have to seduce Panille to find out? There was no satisfaction in the answer Thomas gave.
"You have to get through all of Panille's barriers, all of his masks."
Damn!
"Just how important is this project to you?" Thomas demanded.
"It's vita.... not just to me but to the entire Colony."
"Of course it is. That's why you must seduce this poet. If he's to be a working member of this very bizarre team, there are things we must know about him."
"And a hold we must have on him!"
"There's no other way."
"Pull his records if you want to know whether he prefers women. I will no...."
"That's not my question and you know it! You will not refuse my orders and remain on this team!"
"I can't even question the wisdom of your decisions?"
"Ship sent me. There is no higher authority. And there are things I must know for this project to succeed."
She could not deny the intensity of his emotions, bu....
"Waela, you're right that the project's vital. We can't play with time as we play here with words."
"And I have nothing to say about the team?" She was close to tears and did not care that it showed.
"You hav.... ."
"After all I've been through? I watched them all die! All of them! That buys me some say in how this team goes, or it buys me th...R I can collect shipside. You name it."
Thomas, aware of the deepening flush in her skin, felt the intensity of her presence. Such a quick and perceptive person. He felt himself giving over to feelings he had not experienced in eons.
It's been Shipcenturies!
He spoke softly: "We consult, we share data. But all key decisions are mine and final. If that had been the case all along, this project would not have been botched."
Waela keyed the hangar door and they stepped inside to the brilliant focus of lights and activity, the noise and smell of torches. She put a hand on his arm to stop him. How thin and wiry he felt!
"How will seducing the poet make our mission succeed?"
"I've told you. Get to the heart of him."
She stared across at the activity around the new sub. "And replacing the plasteel with pla...."
"No single thing will make it for us. We're a team." He glanced down at her. "And we're going in by air."
"B...." Then she saw the stranded cables reaching up and out of the brilliant illumination into the upper shadows of the hanga...gigantic LTA partly inflated there. The sub was being fitted to a Lighter-Than-Air in place of the usual armored gondola.
"But wh...."
"Because the kelp has been strangling our subs."
She thought back to her own survival from a doomed sub - the writhing kelp near the shore, the bubble escape, her frantic swim to the rocks and the near-miraculous dive of the observation LTA which had plucked her away from predators.
As though he read her thoughts, Thomas said: "You've seen it yourself. At our first briefing, you said you believed the kelp to be sentient."
"It is."
"Those subs did not just get tangled. They were snatched."
She considered this. On every lost mission where they had the data they knew that the sub had been destroyed shortly after collecting samples.
Could the kelp think we were attacking?
Her own reasoning made this possible. If the kelp is sentien.... Yes, it would have an external sensory matrix to respond to pain. Not blind writhing, but sentient response.
Thomas spoke in a flat voice: "The kelp is not an insensitive vegetable."
"I've said all along that we should be attempting to communicate with it."
"And so we shall."
"Then what difference does it make whether we drop in or dive in from shoreside? We're still there."
"We go by lagoon."
Thomas moved closer to the work, bending to inspect a line of welds along the plaz. "Good work; good work," he muttered. The welds were almost invisible. When the conversion was complete, the occupants would have close to three hundred and sixty degrees of visibility.
"Lagoons?" Waela asked as he stepped back.
"Yes. Isn't that what you call those vertical tunnels of open water?"
"Certainly, bu...."
"We will be surrounded by the kelp, actually helpless if it wants to attack. But we will not touch it. This sub is being fitted to play back the kelplights - to record the patterns and play them back."
Again, he was making sense.
Thomas continued to speak as he watched the work: "We can approach a perimeter of kelp without making physical contact. As you've seen, when we go in from shore, that's impossible. Not sufficient room between the kelp strands."
She nodded her head slowly. There were many unanswered questions about this plan, but she could see the pattern of it.
"Subs are too unwieldy," he said, "but they're all we've got. We must find a sufficiently large pocket of open water, drop into it and anchor. Then we dive and study the kelp."
It sounded perilous but possible. And that idea of playing back the kelplights to the kelp: She had seen those coherent patterns herself, sometimes repetitive. Was that the way the kelp communicated?
Maybe Thomas really was chosen by Ship. She heard him mutter something. Thomas was the only man she knew who talked to himself more or less constantly. He faded in and out of conversations. You could never be sure whether he had been thinking aloud or talking to you.
"What?"
"The plaz. Not as strong as plasteel. We had to do some buttressing inside. Makes things much more crowded than you might expect."
He moved through a group of workers to speak to their foreman, a low-voiced conversation which came through to her only in bits: "...then if you lattice th.... and I'll wan.... where w...."
Presently, he returned to her side. "My design isn't as good as it might be, but it'll suffice."
So he has his little mistakes but he doesn't hide them.
She had heard a few snatches of talk among the workers. They stood a bit in awe of Thomas. The man showed a surprising ability at their work, no matter what the work - plaz welding, control desig.... He was a jack of all trades.
Master of none?
She sensed that this was a difficult man to influence: a fearsome enemy, that one friend who does not mirror but mocks when mockery is needed.
This recognition increased her uneasiness. She knew she could like this man, but she felt bad vibrations about the tea.... and it wasn't even a team yet.
And the sub will be crowded even with three of us.
She closed her eyes.
Should I tell him?
She had never told anyone, not in the debriefings, nor in friendly conversation. The kelp had a special hold over her. It was a thing that began happening as soon as the sub started slipping through the gigantic stems and tentacles: a sexual excitement very nearly impossible to control at times. Absurdity, in fact. She had managed a form of balance by hyperventilating but it remained troublesome and sometimes reduced her efficiency. When that happened, though, the shock of it cleared the effect.
Her old teammates had thought the hyperventilating a response to fear, a way of overcoming the terrors all of them felt and suppressed. And now they were all dead - nobody left to hear her confession.
The closeness, the strange sexual air that had taken over the background of the project - the unknowns in Thomas - all frustrated her. She had thought of taking Anti-s to relieve the sexual tensions, but Anti-s made her drowsy and slowed her reflexes. Deadly.
Thomas stood beside her, silently observing the work. She could almost see him making mental notes for changes. There were gears turning in his head.
"Why me?" she muttered.
"What?" He turned toward her.
"Why me? Why do I have to take on this poet?"
"I've told you wha...."
"There are women paid well to do just what yo...."
"I won't pay for this. It's a project thing, vital. Your own word. You will do it."
She turned her back on him.
Thomas sighed. This Waela TaoLini was an extraordinary person. He hated what he had asked her to do, but she was the only one he could trust. The project was that vital to her, too. Panille posed too many unanswered questions. Ship's words were plain and simple: "There will be a poe...." Not: "I have named a poet," or, "I have assigned a poe...."
There will b....
Who was Panille working for? Doubt.... doubt.... doubt....
I have to know.
By the old rush in his veins, he already knew that Waela would follow his orders, and he would sink into a sadness the likes of which he had almost forgotten.
"Old fool," he muttered to himself.
"What?" She turned back toward him and he could see the acceptance and the resolve on her face.
"Nothing."
She stood facing Thomas a moment, then: "It all depends on how much I like the poet." With that, she turned on her heel and left the hangar with characteristic Pandoran speed.