"My father had a comconsole in his den," Scudi said. "I'm sure I could get some of this through it ... but I'm not sure I understand how you ... mathematic it."
"Judges are sensitized to the assimilation of data," Keel said. "I pride myself on being a good judge. Get me this material, if you can."
Brett suggested, "Maybe we should see other Islanders living down under."
Keel smiled. "Don't trust the paperwork already, huh? We'll save that for later. It could be dangerous right now." Good instincts, he noted.
Scudi pressed her palms to her temples and closed her eyes. "My people don't kill," she said. "We aren't like that."
Keel stared down at the girl, thinking suddenly how similar at the core were Mermen and Islanders.
The sea.
He had never before thought of the sea in quite this way. How must their ancestors have adapted to it? The sea was always there - interminable. It was a thing unending, a source of life and a threat of death. To Scudi and her people, the sea was a silent pressure, whose sounds were always muted by the depths, whose currents moved in great sweeps along the bottom and through the shadows up to light. For the Merman, the world was muted and remote, yet pressing. To an Islander, the sea was noisy and immediate in its demands. It required adjustments in balance and consciousness.
The result was a quickness about Islanders which Mermen found charming. Colorful! Mermen, in contrast, were often studied and careful, measuring out their decisions as though they shaped precious jewels.
Keel glanced from Scudi to Brett and back to Scudi. Brett was taken by her, that much was clear. Was it the infatuation of differences? Was he some exotic mammal to her, or a man? Keel hoped something deeper than adolescent sexual attraction had been ignited there. He did not think himself so crass as to believe that Islander-Merman differences would be solved in the sexual thrashings of the bedroom. But the human race was still alive in these two and he could feel it moving them. The thought was reassuring.
"My father cared for both Islanders and Mermen," Scudi said. "His money made the Search and Rescue system a system."
"Show me his den," Keel said. "I would like to use his comconsole."
She stood and crossed to a passage hatch on the far side of the atrium. "This way."
Keel motioned for Brett to stay behind while he followed Scudi. Perhaps if the young woman were away from the distractions of Brett's presence she might think more clearly - less defensive, more objective.
When Keel and Scudi had gone, Brett turned to the locked hatch. He and Keel and Scudi had been sealed away from whatever the exterior Merman world might reveal. Ale had wanted them to see that world, but others objected. Brett felt this the complete answer to his present isolation.
What would Queets do? he wondered.
Brett felt it unlikely that Queets would stand vacant-eyed in the middle of a strange room and stare stupidly at a locked hatch. Brett crossed to the hatch and ran a finger around the heavy metal molding that framed the exit.
Should've asked Scudi about communications systems and the ways they move freight, he thought. He could remember nothing of the passageways except their sparse population - sparse by crowded Islander standards.
"What are you thinking?"
Scudi's voice from close behind him startled him. Brett hadn't heard her approach over the soft carpet.
"Do you have a map of this place?" he asked.
"Somewhere," she said. "I'll have to look."
"Thanks."
Brett continued to stare at the locked hatch. How had they locked it? He thought of Island quarters, where the simplest slash of a knife would let you through the soft organics separating most rooms. Only the laboratories, Security's quarters and Vata's chamber could be said to have substantial resistance to entry - but that was as much a function of the guards as of the thickness of the walls.
Scudi returned with a thin stack of overlays, on which thick and thin lines with coded symbols indicated the layout of this Merman complex. She put it into Brett's hands as though giving away something of herself. For no reason he could explain, Brett found her gesture poignant.
"Here we are," she said, pointing to a cluster of squares and rectangles marked "RW."
He studied the overlays. This was not the free-flowing, action-dictated environment of an Island, where the idiosyncrasies of organic growth directed the kind of changes that flaunted individuality. Islands were personalized, customized, carved, painted and dyed - shaped to the synergistic needs of support systems and those the systems supported. The schematic in Brett's hands reeked of uniformity - identical rows of cubicles, long straight passages, tubing and channels and access tunnels that ran as straight as a sun's rays through dust. He found it difficult to follow such uniformity, but forced his mind to it.
Scudi said: "I asked the Justice if a volcano might have destroyed Guemes."
Brett raised his attention from the schematic. "What did he say?"
"There were too many people shredded and not burned." She pressed the palms of her hands against her eyelids. "Who could do ... that?"
"Keel's right about one thing," Brett said, "we need to find out who as soon as possible."
He returned his attention to the stack of colloids and its mysterious mazes. All at once he was awash with the simplicity of it. It was clear to him that Mermen must find it impossible to travel any Island, where sheer memory guided most people. He set about memorizing the schematics, with their lift shafts and transport tubes. He closed his eyes and confidently read the map that displayed itself behind his eyelids. Scudi paced the room behind him. Brett opened his eyes.
"Could we escape from here?" he asked, nodding toward the locked hatch.
"I can get us through the hatch," she said. "Where would you go?"
"Topside."
She looked at the hatch, her head shaking a slow "no" from side to side. "When we open the hatch, they will know. An electronic signal."
"What would those men do if we left here together?"
"Bring us back," she said. "Or try. The odds favor them. Nothing moves down under without someone knowing. My father had an efficient organization. That's why he hired men like those." She nodded at the hatch. "My father directed a very large business - a food business. He had much trade with Islanders ..."
Her eyes shifted away from his, then back. She indicated the walls and ceiling. "This was his building, the whole thing. As high as the docking tower, all of it." She defined an area on the schematics with a finger. "This."
Brett drew slightly away from her. She had defined an area as large as some of the smaller Islands. Her father had owned it. He knew that by Merman law she probably inherited it. She was no simple worker in the seas, an apprentice physicist who mathematicked the waves.
Scudi saw the look of withdrawal in his eyes and touched his arm. "I live my own life," she said, "as my mother did. My father and I hardly knew each other."
"Didn't know each other?" Brett felt shocked. He knew himself to be estranged from his own parents, but he had certainly known them.
"Until shortly before he died, he lived at the Nest - a city about ten kilometers away," Scudi said. "In all that time I never saw him." She took a deep breath. "Before he died, my father came to our room one night and spoke to my mother. I don't know what they said but she was furious after he left."
Brett thought about what she had said. Her father had owned and controlled enormous wealth - much of Merman society. Topside, such matters as Ryan Wang controlled were the property of families or associations, never of one person. Community was law.
"He controlled much of your Islands' food production," she continued. A flush bloomed across her cheeks. "A lot of it he accomplished through bribery. I know because I listened, and sometimes when he was gone I used his comconsole."
"What is this place, the Nest?" Brett asked.
"It is a city that has a high Islander population. It was the site of the first settlement after the Clone Wars. You know of this?"
"Yes," he said. "One way or another, we all came from there."
Ward Keel, standing in the shadows of the open passage from Ryan Wang's den, had been listening to this exchange for several minutes. He shuddered, wondering whether he should interrupt and demand some answers of this young woman. The anguish in her voice held Keel in place.