The Lazarus Effect by Frank Herbert
“Get back on course.” It was Twisp’s voice behind Brett, but Brett dared not turn. “I have her and she’s all right.”
Brett swung the foil’s bow back into the seas, quartering into a high comber that rolled over them at the crest. Water sloshed through the cabin as the foil pitched down into the next trough. The sound of pumps chuffing below decks came clearly to Brett’s ears. He risked a glance back and saw Twisp backing into the cabin, Scudi’s limp form over his shoulder. He dogged the hatch behind him and dumped Scudi on the couch where Bushka had been.
“She’s breathing,” Twisp said. He bent over Scudi, a hand on her neck. “Pulse is strong. She hit her head on the hull as we tipped.”
“Did you clear the struts?” Bushka demanded.
“Eelshit!” Twisp spat.
“Did you?”
“Yes, we cleared the damn struts!”
Brett looked at the overhead screen and brought the foil around ten degrees, putting down a surge of rage against Bushka. But Bushka was suddenly busy with the keyboard at his position.
“Finding how to retract these foils. That was the whole idea, wasn’t it?” Bushka’s fingers flurried over the keys and a schematic appeared on the screen in front of him. He studied it a moment and manipulated controls at his side of the board. Within blinks, Brett heard the hiss and clunk of struts retracting.
“You’re not on course,” Bushka said.
“As close as I can be,” Brett said. “We have to quarter these seas or we’ll pound ourselves to pieces.”
“If you’re lying, you’re dead,” Bushka said.
“You take it if you know better than I do,” Brett said. He lifted his hands from the wheel.
Bushka brought the lasgun up and pointed it at Brett’s head. “Steer us the way you have to but don’t give me any shit!”
Brett dropped his hands onto the wheel in time to catch the next crest. They were riding easier now. A green light showed at the “Foils Retracted” marker.
Bushka swiveled his seat and hunched down, positioning himself to watch both Brett and Twisp. The captive Merman lay beside Bushka, his face pale but he was breathing.
“We’re still going after Gallow,” Bushka said. There was a note of hysteria in his voice.
Twisp strapped Scudi into the couch and sat beside her. He held a grab near her head for balance. Twisp looked forward past Bushka, then up at the overhead display. “What’s that?” he asked, nodding at the screen.
Bushka did not turn.
Brett glanced up at the screen. A green diamond-shaped marker flashed near the course line and off to the right.
“What is it?” Twisp repeated.
Brett leaned forward and punched the identity key under the screen.
“Outpost 22” flashed on the screen beside the diamond.
“That’s the pickup station for the hyb tanks,” Brett said. “That’s where Gallow’s supposed to be. Scudi’s brought us out right on target.”
“Get us in there!” Bushka ordered.
Brett turned onto the new heading while he tried to recall everything Scudi had told him about the hyb-tank recovery project. There wasn’t much.
“Why’s it flashing?” Twisp asked.
“I think it does that when you get within range,” Brett said. “I think it’s a warning that we’re getting close to the shallows around the outpost.”
“You think?” Bushka snarled.
“I don’t know this equipment any better than you do,” Brett countered. “Take over any time you want.”
“Throw some water on that woman, get her awake,” Bushka ordered. Again, that note of hysteria in his voice. He brought the lasgun around until it pointed at Brett. “You stay put back there, Twisp!” Bushka ordered. “Or the kid gets burned.”
With his free hand, Bushka began working the keyboard in front of him. “Incompetents,” he muttered. “Everything’s right here if you just ask for it.” Chart-reading instructions scrolled upward on his screen. Bushka bent to read them.
“Ship’s balls!” Twisp shouted. “What’s that?”
Through the spray-drenched plaz ahead and to his left, Brett saw a great splash of bright orange, something floating a wave out there. He bent forward to peer through the salted plaz. It was a long orange something that stretched into the anonymous gray of the storm. Kelp lay tangled all around it.
The foil was coming up on the orange thing fast, bringing it close to their port side.
“It’s an LTA bag,” Bushka said. “Somebody’s gone down.”
“Can you see the gondola?” Twisp asked. “Brett! Stay downwind from it. The bag will act like a sea anchor. Don’t get fouled in it.”
Brett swung the foil to the left and it wallowed in a trough, rocking dangerously at the crest, then into the next trough. At the following crest, he saw the gondola, a dark shape awash in the long seas. The orange bag trailed out behind it with kelp laced across it. The gondola was coming up on their right. The seas were smoother there, flattened by the great spread of the bag. Another crest and Brett saw faces pressed against the gondola’s plaz.
“There are people in there!” Twisp shouted. “I saw faces!”
“Damn!” Bushka said. “Damn, damn, damn!”
“We have to take them off,” Brett said. “We can’t leave them there.”
“I know that!” Bushka snarled.
Scudi took this moment to begin muttering … words Brett couldn’t understand.
“She’s all right,” Twisp said. “She’s coming out of it. Bushka, you come back here and look after her while I get a line aboard that gondola.”
“How’re you going to do that?” Bushka asked.
“I’m going to swim it over! What else? Brett, hold us steady as you can right here.”
“They’re Mermen,” Bushka said. “Why can’t they bring a line to us?”
“The minute they open their hatch, that gondola is going down,” Twisp said. “It’ll fill like a punctured float.”
Scudi’s voice came clearly then: “What’s … what’s happening?”
Bushka released his safety harness and made his way back to her. Brett heard the hatch open and close. Bushka’s voice, quite low, gave Scudi her answer.
“An LTA?” she asked. “Where are we?”
“Near Outpost Twenty-two.” There was a scuffling sound and Bushka’s voice: “Stay down there!”
“I have to get to the controls! It’s shallow here. Very shallow! In these seas—”
“All right!” Bushka said. “Do what you have to do.”
Scuffing footsteps on the deck, then water sloshing from a wet dive suit. Scudi’s hand gripped Brett’s shoulder. “Dammit, but my head hurts,” she said. Her hand touched his neck and he felt a flash of pain on the side of his temple. It was a throbbing pain, as though something had struck him there.
Scudi leaned across him, her hand over his shoulder to steady herself. Their cheeks touched.
Brett felt something flow between them, creating a moment of panic followed by a sudden inrush of awareness. His neck hair prickled as he realized what had happened. He felt that he was two people become one but aware of the separation—one person standing beside the other.
I’m seeing with Scudi’s eyes!
Brett’s hands moved automatically on the wheel, a new expertise he had not known he possessed. The foil gentled its way close to the gondola and hung there with just enough headway to counteract the wind.
What’s happening to us?
The words formed silently in their minds, a simultaneous question, shared in an instant and answered in an instant.
The kelp has changed us! We share our senses when we touch!
With this odd double vision, Brett saw Twisp swimming now, moving through a channel in the kelp and very close to the gondola. Faces peered out through the plaz. Brett thought he recognized one of those faces and, with that recognition, came a bursting daydream, instantaneous—a sense of people talking inside the gondola
Scudi whispered to Brett: “Did you hear them talking?”
“I couldn’t make out the words.”
“I could. Gallow’s people are in there and they have prisoners. The prisoners
are being taken to Gallow.”
“Where is Gallow? Here?”
“I think so, but I recognized a prisoner— it’s Dark Panille, Shadow. I’ve worked with him.”
“The man who treated me in the passageway!”
“Yes, and one of the captors is that Gulf Nakano. I’m going to warn Bushka. He has the weapon. We will have to lock them into one of the cargo bays.”
Scudi turned away and worked her way back to Bushka, steadying herself along the overhead grabs. Brett heard her explain the situation to Bushka, saying she had recognized Nakano through the gondola’s plaz.
“They’ve opened their hatch,” Brett said. “People are coming out. I see Shadow … there’s Nakano. Waves are slopping into the hatch. Everybody’s coming out.”
Scudi slipped into the command seat beside Brett. “I’ll take it. You help Bushka at the entry hatch.”
“No tricks!” Bushka yelled as he followed Brett down the passageway. “We’ve got to get Twisp out of there!” Brett said. “He’s staying at the gondola to unfasten the line when it goes under.”
They were at the hatchway then, wind whipping around them and spray in their eyes. Brett was thankful for his dive suit. In spite of the chill, sweat poured from his body. The muscles of his arms and legs were tightly humming bands. A wave broke against the hull below them. Brett sighted along the line—a long row of bobbing heads worked their way toward the foil. He recognized Nakano in the lead, staying close to Panille. The line snaked up and down the waves.
“We’ll bring them aboard one at a time, right into the cargo bay behind me,” Bushka said.
“We’ll have to disarm them.”
Nakano was first through the hatch. His face had the single-minded aggressiveness of a bull dasher. Bushka leveled the lasgun from the far side of the hatchway, slipped a similar weapon from the thigh pocket of Nakano’s dive suit, grabbed a knife from Nakano’s waist sheath and motioned with his head for the Merman to enter the open hatch to the cargo bay.
For a blink, Brett thought Nakano would attack Bushka despite the lasgun, but the man shrugged and ducked through into the bay.
Panille stayed down below to help others and the next person through was a woman, red-haired, beautiful.
“Kareen Ale,” Bushka said. “Well, well.” He sent his gaze licking over her body, saw no weapon and nodded toward the cargo hatch. “In there, please.”
She stared at the lasgun in Bushka’s grip. “Do it!” A shout from below the hatch brought Brett whirling around to face the sea.
“What is it?” Bushka demanded. He was trying to divide his attention between the open cargo hatch and the outer hatch where survivors still waited to be brought aboard.
Brett peered out across Panille, who hung below the hatch with an arm wrapped through a loop in his safety line. The gondola beyond him had begun to sink, slowly dragging the orange LTA bag under the waves. The safety line lay across the waves with Twisp pulling himself along it. Something was happening about midway along the line, though, and Brett tried to make out what had caused the shout.
“What’s happening?” Bushka asked.
“I don’t know. There’s a length of kelp across the line. Twisp released the line from the gondola and it’s already under. But something’s …”
A human hand came out of the water near the kelp and one, two kelp strands whipped across the hand and the hand vanished. Twisp reached the kelp barrier and hesitated there. A questing strand of kelp touched his head, paused there and withdrew. Twisp continued his way along the line, stopping finally beside Panille, exhausted. Panille put an arm under Twisp’s shoulder and helped support him. Waves lifted both men and lowered them beside the foil.
“Shall I help bring him up?” Brett called.
Twisp waved a hand to stop him. “I’ll be all right.” One of his long arms snaked up the line and took a firm grip.
“Two people,” Twisp said. “The kelp took them. It just took them, wrapped around them and took them.”
He hauled himself up the line, quivering every muscle on the way. He slumped through the hatch, then turned to help Panille. Bushka waved Panille toward the cargo bay.
“No,” Brett said. He stepped between Bushka and Panille. “Shadow was a prisoner. He helped me. He’s not one of them.”
“Who says?”
“The kelp says,” Twisp said.
Chapter 36
Control the religion and the food and we own the world.
—GeLaar Gallow
Vata’s growing restlessness sloshed nutrient over the rim of her tank. At times she arched her back as if in pain, and the pink knobs of her nipples broke the surface like the bright peaks of two blue-green mountains. A relief attendant, an Islander high on boo, reached out to tweak one of the gnarled, vein-swollen things and was discovered catatonic, his blasphemous thumb and forefinger still held in position over the vat.
This event redoubled C/P Simone Rocksack’s efforts to effect the Islander move down under. Stories of “The Wrath of Vata” circulated freely and no one on the C/P’s staff made any effort to sort fact from fantasy. Rocksack silenced one underling who objected to the rumors by saying, “A lie is not a lie if it serves a higher moral purpose. Then it is a gift.”
Vata herself, locked inside her tank and her skull while generation after generation of her people evolved around her, explored her world with the tender new frond-tips of the kelp.
Kelp was fingertip and ear to her, nose and eye and tongue. Where massive stalks lazed on the sea’s bright surface she witnessed pastel sunrises, the passage of boats and Islands, the occasional ravages of a hunt of dashers. Scrubberfish that cleaned the kelp’s broadest leaves whiskered the deep crevasses of her opulent flesh.
Like herself, the kelp was single, incomplete, unable to reproduce. Mermen took cuttings, rooted them in rock and mud. Storms ripped whole vines loose from the mother plant and some of the wounded stragglers wedged safely into rock and grew there. For two and a half centuries, at least, the kelp had not bloomed. No hylighter broke the surface of the sea to rise on its hydrogen bag and scatter its fresh spores to the winds.
Sometimes in her sleep Vata’s loins pulsed with an ancient rhythm and a sweet emptiness ached in her abdomen. These were the times she curled close to Duque, her massive body engulfing him in a frustrating approximation of an embrace.
Now her frustration focused on GeLaar Gallow. A jungle of kelp strained each strand to reach the walls and hatchways of Outpost 22, with no success. The perimeter was too wide, the stalks too short.
New pairs of eyes joined the kelp to reveal Gallow’s treachery. The clearest of these eyes belonged to Scudi Wang. Vata enjoyed the company of Scudi Wang, and it became more difficult to let her go each time they met.
Vata met Scudi in the kelp. A few bright glimpses of a fresh young mind, and she searched for Scudi daily. When Vata dreamed the terrors of kelp, storm-ripped from its ballast-rock and dying, the touch of Scudi’s skin on vine or frond smoothed those churning dreams to a warm calm. Those times Vata, in turn, dreamed back to Scudi. She dreamed small histories, images and visions, to keep the fear of kelp-madness out of Scudi’s head. Vata had dreamed to others who had never come out of the dream. She knew now that Scudi’s mother was one of those lost dreamers. Stunned by the hot dream sparking into her from the kelp, the woman had floated wide-eyed and helpless into a passing net. The tender airfish at her neck was crushed and she drowned. And the Merman crew supporting her had made no move to rescue her. Deliberate!
Vata watched the strange odyssey that worked its way back toward Outpost 22.
Brother, she thought, and marveled over the word. She trusted Bushka and Panille to Scudi’s presence. The message she sent Scudi was simple and clear: Find Gallow, drive him out. Kelp will do the rest.
Chapter 37
Life is not an option, it is a gift. Death is the option.
—Ward Keel, Journal
It was late evening, but Ward Keel had lost all inclination to sleep. He accepted the buzz of fatigue as a logical consequence of captivity. His eyes refused to stay closed. They blinked slowly and he glimpsed the brush of his long lashes in the plaz beside him. His brown eye faced itself in the plaz. It was a small dark blur. Beyond it lay the perimeter of kelp, almost gray at this depth. His prison cubby was warm, warmer even than his quarters on Vashon, but the gray of down under washed his psyche cold.
Keel had been watching the kelp for hours as Gallow’s men streamed into the outpost. At first the kelp pulsed as usual with the current. Fronds waved at full extension downcurrent like a woman’s long hair in an evening breeze. Now there was a different rhythm. And the larger kelp fronds downcurrent of the outpost stretched directly toward Keel. The currents were no longer consistent. The outpost was being battered by sudden changes of current that had the kelp outside flickering in a firelight dance.
Gallow’s morning crew had never arrived. His medical team was lost. Keel could hear Gallow’s rantings from the next room. The syrupy voice was cracking.
Something strange about that kelp, Keel thought. Stranger than moving against the current.
Keel never even considered that Brett and Scudi might be dead. In the reverie generated by the gentle undulations of the kelp, Keel thought often about his young friends.
Had they reached Vashon? He worried about that. But he heard no echoes of this in Gallow’s angry words. Surely Gallow would be reacting if that message had reached Vashon.