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Presently, a look of amazement came over his face. The expression hardened.
"Ship save us," he muttered, but he did not withdraw his hand.
"What is it?" Brett asked. He swallowed and thought about the sensation of
kelp contact. Could he put his hand over the side and renew that connection?
The idea both attracted and repelled him. He no longer doubted a central
reality to the night's experience, but the intent of the kelp could not be
accepted without question.
Scudi almost drowned. That is a fact.
"There's a sub coming behind us," Twisp said.
All of them peered back along their course but the surface gave no sign of
what might be under it.
"They have us on their locator," Twisp said, "and they mean to sink us."
Scudi turned around and dipped both hands into the passing kelp.
"Help us," she whispered. "If you know what help is."
Bushka sat silent, pale-faced and shuddering at the entrance to the tiny cuddy
in the bow. "It's Gallow," he said. "I told you."
With a slow stateliness the channel ahead of them began to close. A passage
opened to the left. Current surged into it, swinging the coracles wide. The
towed supply boat pulled far to the right. Twisp fought the tiller to center
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his craft in the new channel.
"The channel's closing behind us," Brett said.
"The kelp is helping us," Scudi said. "It is."
Bushka opened his mouth and closed it without speaking. All of them turned to
stare where he pointed. A black conning tower broke surface, tipped and sank
from sight. Kelp curled over the scene. Giant bubbles began breaking the
surface, thick rainbows of air and oil. Small waves surged under the boats,
forcing the four people in the coracle to hold on to the rimlines.
As quickly as it had started, the turbulence subsided. The coracles continued
their agitated rocking. Water splashed across the gunwales. This, too,
quieted.
"It was the kelp," Scudi said. "The sub cut into the kelp trying to follow
us."
Twisp nodded to where the kelp still curled among a few small bubbles. He
gripped the tiller with both hands, guiding them through a channel that curved
open ahead of them, once more aiming toward Vashon. "The kelp did that?"
"It clogged the sub's intakes," Scudi said. "When the crew tried to blow
ballast and surface, the kelp jammed vines into the ballast ports. When the
crew tried to get out, the kelp tore them apart and crushed the sub." She
jerked her hands out of the water, breaking contact with the kelp.
"I warned you it was dangerous," Brett said.
A stricken look on her face, Scudi nodded. "It's finally learned to kill."
Hasn't the water of sleep dissolved our being?
-- Gaston Bachelard, "The Poetics of Reverie," from The Handbook of the
Chaplain/Psychiatrist
Duque woke to a nudge, a deliberate jostling intended to do the waking. He
had been prodded, pricked, rubbed, shocked, bled and rocked in his liquid
cradle with the great Vata, but this was the first time since childhood that
he had been nudged. What surprised him was that it was Vata who did it.
You're awake! he thought, but there was no answer. He felt a focus, a
channeling of her presence such as he had never felt before. For this he
roused himself, twisted an arm up to his face and fisted his good eye open.
That brought the watchers to the Vata Pool on the double. What he saw with
his one eye was worth calling those fools poolside. One of Vata's huge brown
eyes, her left one, was pressed nearly to his own. It was open. Duque
swallowed hard. He was sure she could see him.
Vata? He tried it aloud: "Vata?"
The growing crowd gasped, and Duque knew that the C/P would push her way to
them soon.
He felt something breeze through his consciousness like a heavy sigh. It was
a wind with hidden thoughts in it. But he felt them. Something big, waiting.
Duque was shocked. He had long been used to the mind-rocking power Vata could
hurl between his eyes. This was the way she threw tantrums, by jamming
whatever frustrated her right into his head. Now, she sent him a vision of
the C/P, naked, dancing in front of a mirror. For some time now Vata had kept
the naked female thoughts out of his head. Anger! Vata contained anger. He
blocked out the anger and riveted his inner eye on the supple, firm-breasted
Chaplain/Psychiatrist who thrust her pale hips again and again at the mirror.
The tank was unbearably warm.
Simone Rocksack's favorite robe lay in a trampled blue heap at her feet.
Everything in Duque strained to touch this vision, this body of raw beauty
that the C/P locked away from the world.
That was when he saw the hands. A pair of large, pale hands snaked around her
from behind and he watched in the mirror as they cupped her swaying breasts
while she moved in a rhythmic step-slide, step-slide. It was a man, a large
man, and he continued his intense caress of her body until she slowed her
dance and stopped, quivering, while his lips brushed her shoulders and
breasts, her abdomen, those glistening thighs. The man's shock of blonde hair
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was magnet to her fingers. Her hands pulled him close, closer, and they began
to make love with him standing behind her, facing the mirror.
The vision ended with an angry white flash and the name Gallow blared across
his consciousness. What he saw when he refocused on Vata's eye was danger.
"Danger," he muttered. "Gallow danger. Simone, Simone."
Vata's great brown eye closed and Duque felt relieved of a massive, clawlike
grip that had held his guts tight. He lay back, breathing deeply, and
listened as the knot of watchers grew and the babble of their speculations
lulled him back to sleep.
When the C/P came to poolside there was nothing visible of the strange thing
the watchers reported.
To survive Pandora's time of madness, we were forced to go mad.
-- Iz Bushka, The Physics of Political Expression [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]