Cataract. Part 3

She stared at him for a long moment. "No," she said slowly. She sat back, and her mind was chilled and locked in a circle of thought so old and worn that even the bitterness had faded to a faint taste on her tongue. She knew what he meant. She had traded her future for her biogate, then her freedom for her future. Now she had neither freedom nor future, and only the biogate was left. Only the voices of the cats in her skull to remind her of the life she once had. Ten years... Ten long and distant years. In her mind, the subtle snarling of the cougars overrode the growling of the feline tarns; the distant purr of the sandcats in the dunes was drowned out by the watercats in the sloughs. Only her memories of family were separate from the growling through her gate. It was the only part of her mind still untouched by the sound of the cats. The only part where she still had hope. Stupid hope, she told herself harshly. Hope that had no place in the crime of her existence.

"No," she said softly, but Wren heard all the same. "It makes no difference at all."

From the pilot's seat, Nitpicker steadied the skimmer into the storm. "Get soft," she called sharply. "We're starting the first pa.s.s."

"First?" queried Tucker.

"We're on manual," the pilot snapped back. "With the wind shear, there's no way I can drop us on the deck the first time across."

The skimmer b.u.mped up in a sickening rise, then dove like a stone in a well; it tilted, then surged forward hard. Tsia's fingers dug into the arm of her soft.

Wren glanced at the tightness of her jaw. He opened his mouth to speak, but Tucker leaned forward and asked, "Feather, can you feel the bloom from here? The jellies in the sea?"

Tsia made an irritated noise as the skimmer banked sharply left. "Daya, Tucker, I thought you were bugging Striker, not me."

Wren grinned coldly at her expression. "You've got nothing better to do."

She snorted.

"And you're on contract."

She gave him a dark look. "Give me a minute," she said shortly to Tucker. She stretched her thoughts through her biogate. Instantly, catspeak filled her mind. Soft clawed feet seemed to pad across her brain; the murmur of the mental growls was like an orchestra tuning itself in the background. She concentrated until she found, behind the din^-like a low swamp fog-the energies of the other beasts. Large shadows became distinct in her mind-those were the schools of fish that clouded the surge of the ocean below. A flicker of light was a nessie who writhed through the sea. But the weight of the pumping, surging hunger that hung like stirred-up silt in the sea-that was the bloom of jellies that rose to and dove from the storm-tossed surface. "I can feel them," she returned shortly.

Tucker watched her curiously, ignoring the lurch of the skimmer and gripping the back of her soft to keep his balance against the turbulence. "I once flew with a guide who couldn't feel anything that wasn't right under his fingers. We're a hun-dred meters above the sea. How can you"-his voice hiccupped as the skimmer rose again abruptly-"feel a bloom of jellies this far up?"

She shrugged. "They're strong. Just past peak, but heavy- very heavy-in the water."

Wren did not glance back. "A guide whose virus resonates to a tree species can feel an entire forest through the leaves and roots. Why shouldn't she feel the jellies from here?" The s.h.i.+p jerked to the side and swept in a hard turn up against the wind. The skin on Wren's sharp face almost sagged back from his chin with the acceleration.

Tucker fought the pressure to lean forward. His sweet-bitter breath over her shoulder made Tsia flinch. "I meant," he persisted, "how can you tell the jellies from anything else in the water?"

"Practice," she returned shortly. "I've been at it for a while."

"At your age, I would hope so," he retorted ungently. "What I'm asking is-"

"You know what they say about guides, Tucker?" she interrupted. She twisted in her seat until she could stretch her fingers out to his arm like a set of claws. "You can't trust a guide-we're too b.e.s.t.i.a.l- too caught up in our links with the world."

His skin seemed to crawl with the chill touch.

"When a guide is threatened-or irritated," she said softly, "she can strike like an animal. Tear the flesh from the bones like a cat gutting a mouse to get at its liver." She stroked her fingernails down the younger mere's forearm, and her eyes glinted at the goose b.u.mps that rose in their wake. Beside Tsia, Wren choked a sound into a cough as she kicked him under their softs. "I've been known to do that myself, Tucker," she said absently. "Tear the flesh from the bones..." When she abruptly clenched the mere's arm, the young man jumped. She hissed like a cat. He jerked his arm away. With her teeth bared, she gave him a caricature of a smile.

"Quit the horseplay," Nitpicker called sharply over her shoulder. "And get soft with the rest of us. We're hitting the deck in ten seconds."

Tsia barely had time to set her weight back in the seat before the faint image of the s.h.i.+p in the navtank struggled above the tiny platform. It shuddered violently, hung for an instant, then slammed down with a gust of wind. Nitpicker jerked the small craft back up before it crumpled against the decks. The wind sheared off, then beat back brutally. Tsia's jaws smacked together; her hands clenched the arm of her soft. The craft smashed down and skidded across the surface as the wind grabbed on to its hull. Crash pads snapped out from the seats. The scent of metaplas filled Tsia's nostrils. She gagged at the smell and flinched from the soft support that encircled her tegs and torso. Acceleration pressed her forward while the small s.h.i.+p shuddered and sc.r.a.ped across the deck. Someone was cursing-she could feel the anger echoing in her mind and almost hear the words through the foam that enclosed her head. The s.h.i.+p turned broadside to the wind, then spun in reverse. Landing gear shrieked. Then they slammed against the brake bars of the station like a brick.

Metaplas molecules clogged Tsia's breath as if she were suffocating in the porous foam. Stretched forward to the apex of its safety curve, the crash foam began to condense until it pressed her back into the soft. Seconds later, she jerked her limbs free almost before the pads released her, and the sound that escaped her throat was more snarl than curse.

"Cabin coupling," Estine reported from the front.

"Storm locks descending," Nitpicker said, her voice overlapping his.

"We've got some stability against the brake bars, but I can't get a linkup."

"You won't-platform power is off. We'll have to secure the s.h.i.+p manually."

"Manually?"

"You've got a better idea?" she retorted.

He didn't answer, but he set his screens and unstrapped himself from his soft while the shuddering of the skimmer subsided and the motor fields began to fade.

"Wait for Feather's scan," Nitpicker ordered sharply. Estine merely grunted in reply as he moved to the hatch.

While Wren pushed his own way through the suddenly crowded cabin, Tsia snagged her blunter jacket from its webbing, slid it on, grabbed her handscanner, and jammed it into her harness. Then she supped through the s.h.i.+fting bodies like a cat untouched by the gra.s.s through which it moved.

Estine had both hands on the skimmer walls, to feel for skimmer movement, when Tsia and Wren joined him. The copilot glanced at her uncovered head. She shrugged. She didn't need her hood to protect her from the storm-she sought the violence of that contact willingly. The bios.h.i.+eld she wore in her blunter and the stealth fabric from which the jacket was made would hide her heartbeat and body temperature from any standard scannet.

She glanced at Estine and received his go-ahead. She nodded shortly and expanded her biogate to feel for the energy that might be waiting outside. Humans had technology to fool the searching beams of a scannet, but they still couldn't keep their energies from the biogate of a guide.

Without hesitation, she swung back the door and let the wind in like a shout. With it came a thin blast of rain like needles. Wren staggered with the force of it and clutched the hood of his own blunter. Behind him, Striker cursed at the cold. Tsia grinned. She turned her face to the storm before jumping out and ricked the rain that stung her lips. When she struck the deck, her boots. .h.i.t and slid on the slick surface, but her body landed solidly in a half-crouch, while Wren skidded to one knee behind her.

"Show-off," he shouted in the din created by the crash of storm and ocean. His words were stripped away in the wind.

"You'd balance, too," she returned over the wind, leaning close to his ear, "if you had ten years' experience in this."

He glanced back. "Your 3D makes them think you've got thirty, so make this scan look good." He pointed toward the line of construction huts that lined one edge of the decks. "We've got five minutes for the initial sweep. As soon as we're done, you're on your own for the detail scan. And don't forget the generators. Nitpicker wants to get the skimmer's power charged off the station as soon as possible."

She nodded and judged the wind that stung her skin; it whipped her eyes till they burned with silent tears. The drab shades of her blunter were almost lost in the false dark that the storm gave grudgingly to the dawn, and the dark iridescent shades of her thin, earth-tone trousers flattened and rippled against her skin like silk. The blunt stick-shape of her flexor slapped against her thigh, and the tiny b.u.mps from the safety cubes showed like rocks in her pocket. She took her hand scanner from her harness and eyed the skimmer's position, but the s.h.i.+p was held securely against the brake bars by the wind that had only moments before forced it to the deck. Estine could wait: the s.h.i.+p would not slide farther before her scans were done.

The primary deck, like that on all platforms, was flat and fairly square, with one half set aside for a landing pad. Along the south side were cl.u.s.ters of construction huts and biochemical vats. Eight thick platform legs supported the outside edges of the structure. Four center legs supported the deck's middle. Beneath the deck, around those center legs, and growing out toward the edge of the marine station, ma.s.ses of sponge were being trained and shaped into rooms and halls and labs.

The construction huts squatted next to the chemical vats like a line of bloated toads. After a quick look, Tsia turned in to the wind to examine them. With each breath, her teeth tingled from the air that screamed across and scoured her mouth. Like an animal, she bared her canines to its force, then bent her body against the gusts that beat her down. This was what she loved best. Being the first one out. The first to feel the wild-ness of the atmosphere-to judge the strength of the storm. Blind meres, she thought with wild abandonment. Sightless as birds in a cave. Never feeling the strength of the world around them. Never seeing the energies that filled each creature on Risthmus. She tilted her face back to the rus.h.i.+ng, gray-black sky. This was the purpose of her gate, she thought-to give her the life she no longer had herself.

She ran in a staggering crouch to the middle of the deck. Slick, the platform's surface stole her footing. Violently, the wind tore at her clothes. The thin weathercloth of her trousers repelled the rain, but the thicker blunter did nothing to stop the chill moisture from sliding down her neck. She dropped to balance herself with her hands against the deck and squinted against the sheets of gray.

Wren huddled beside her, tucking his wiry body into her wind shadow. He waited without speaking, his eyes on his own handscanner while Tsia opened her biogate and sought life through her mind. Something about Tucker's last questions bothered her, and she stretched till she could feel the bloom in the sea. Had he really wanted to know about the jellies? Or had he wanted to know about her? He'd felt almost hungry to her biogate-like the bloom in the sea, she acknowledged. She glanced toward the rim where the energies of the jellies were strong compared to the sponges that colored the edges of her mind. Beside her, Wren was the only mere she could feel without stretching: a cold, steady tang, heavy with hidden power. His basic human resonance matched the others in the skimmer, but nothing else on the deck.

The rain subsided to a lighter, stinging wash until it became a series of sheets that slanted across the deck. Placing her lips next to Wren's ear, she said, "It's clear. Nothing but biologi-cals."

And the cats that clog your brain. She almost felt his thought ring in her head. She stared at him for a moment, while the wind rattled her body like tin. His cold gray eyes seemed to see right through her. Deep in her head, as if they were beside her, the distant tamcats rumbled. Along the storm-slapped beaches, sandcats crouched beneath the stones and waited to fish with the tides. But there were cougars closer, on the sea, and she shuddered with the surge of catspeak that dulled the back of her brain.

"You're reading something," Wren said flatly.

She nodded slowly. "There are cats on the kelp rafts-the floating islands-the brash close by in the currents. They're migrating to the mainland for winter."

"Cats?"

"Sargies-sea cougars."

He followed her gaze to the sea. "They close enough to cloud your gate?"

"There's nothing here but us, Wren."

He motioned sharply for her to go on, and she jerked a nod, closing herself off from the sharp mental snarling that came from the sargies. Ahead, she eyed the line of construction huts along one edge of the deck. There was no sense of movement within the huts-no sense of life-and she forced herself past them in a staggering run toward the edge of the purple-white platform.

The ma.s.s of marine sponges that formed the station's base were still soft with mucus and new growth at the edge. She could smell the turpentinic scent of the mucus as clearly as if she stood on its mushy flooring. She did not look behind her; she knew that Wren would follow.

The wind blasted, then gusted so suddenly that she was blown against a deck bar before she caught her balance. Wren shouted something, and she turned, but the wind stripped away his words.

She stared at him through the rain. He radiated power, yet no matter how close he came, his biofield remained dim compared to the sharpness of the cats'. The sargies, the sandcats on the sh.o.r.e-they engulfed her thoughts. They-not just the shame of her crime-were why she had not gone back to the guides. She had given away her past, she thought, and had taken Wren and the meres as her future. There was only one reality left in her existence: the biogate that seethed in her mind. The rink with the cats that pushed and pulled and filled her skull with paw-prints. She raised her fists to her head and clenched them at her temples. She could not squeeze the cats from her mind-no more than she could squeeze meaning from her past. To lose this... Her fingers tightened into a fist. Wren thought it was her biogate that ate at her brain like a hungry demon, but he was wrong. It was fear-the terror of losing this link.

Wren moved closer beside her, and instinctively she moved away to let her senses stretch out to the sea. She could feel the seabirds huddled beneath the station in the unfinished chambers of sponge. She could feel the flaccid, blue-white jellies rising and diving below. The main deck was almost forty meters above the ocean's surface, but the sea, which moved with hidden hunger, stormed up along the outside legs and sprayed itself over the deck until the salt crystallized along the eaves of the huts and vats like winter icicles.

"Anything?" Wren shouted.

"Nothing," she returned.

"Sure?"

"Eight years ago, I wouldn't have been able to tell the jellies from the birds. Give me enough time now, and I can stand forty meters from the platform edge and feel the jellies bloom. You're even more distinct." She gestured with her arms. "There's nothing here but you and me, and the rest of them back in the s.h.i.+p."

" 'A guide's gate grows with every lick of flame,' " he quoted. "Or in this case-rain." He wiped the water from his brows in a futile gesture.

She grinned at him. "I can taste you like this ocean," she shouted. "Like seaweed on my lips."

"Then be thankful I don't sweat like Kurvan."

Tsia half turned to look back at the skimmer, and the wind twisted her violently. Wren fell back a step as she hit him, steadied her with his huge, clublike hands, then bent forward again to brace himself.

"Check the edge," he shouted, "just to make sure." He squinted toward the water, then stiffened. Tsia felt it, too. Her temple link went active. Not just the e-Iines, but the full set of node traces were up. Automatically, she sent a mental request for map overlay, and it flashed back in her head in an instant. The coastline, the platform, the color codes used by the guides for the waterways and sloughs... Instantly, she checked the node by locking into one of her standby webs-having been locked out of the node before, she was not about to limit herself to a single set of trace lines.

The false images of her extra trace held. Within seconds, she used those extra, unregistered lines to move farther out in the node. Like tracking a line of references, she followed the command images from one set to another. She called in other lines of ghosts she had created long ago. The false ID of a man on a city pedpath... An economist in a red-brown office... She checked the overlay for the marine station through the IDs of the ghosts, rather than her own licensed mere line, and it took her a moment to realize what was wrong with the web of images she saw. The deck was clearly shown in her mind, but the s.h.i.+p and the meres were not. In fact, when she looked for the meres through the false-eyes of the node ghosts, she couldn't find the skimmer anywhere near the platform. She started to touch Wren's arm for his attention, but the lines went blank, flickered back, and went down again like the dark.

Wren shrugged. "If this is anything like the problems we had on Chaos, it'll be hours before it's steady." He took the handscanner from her weapons harness. "I'll scan," he said over the wind. "You stay on your biogate."

She hesitated, then nodded. Ever since they started building the second docking hammer, the node had been unstable. The construction guilds had not yet melded the two systems together.

Wren pointed to the platform edge, and she acknowledged his gesture. As soon as the wind lapsed, she sprinted across the deck until the flooring beneath her feet became purple-white and spongy. To the right, a narrow catwalk-a thin layer of dark metaplas over the lighter airsponge growth-led out to the edge of the deck. The hardener that made up the deck's surface was still thin and resilient here. It bent and sprang back from her weight and the gusting of the wind like a sheet of thin wood. Rocking back and forth, she tested her weight on the sponge. The platform shuddered beneath her feet.

Wren glanced down. He could swear he saw the sea surge in the holes between the sponges. "Bet you won't go all the way to the edge," he shouted.

The glints in her eyes were sharp. "Is that a dare?"

His thin lips stretched in a ghostly grin. In the gloom, his beaked nose gave him the look of a buzzard. He didn't answer, and her own grin widened. She hadn't needed the challenge. She would have run like a cat on a branch just to see what was floating below.

She pushed out into the wind till she poised on the end of the catwalk, one hand gripping the narrow pipe that served as a guide for materials lifted to the deck. She stared down in fascination, aware only at an unconscious level that Wren was moving back to the s.h.i.+p. Below, the brutal surge slammed against the thin lift until it trembled in her hand. The intertidal sponges grew like violet shadows, crowding together and absorbing the light with their pigments, the same way they absorbed the hardeners they were fed. Like the trunk of a laceleaf maple, they grew thicker the more stress from the waves they received.

She tested the deck with the tip of her boot. The metaplas solution was not yet fully incorporated into the sponge and algae skeletons, and the marine animals had not yet anch.o.r.ed themselves together like solid rock instead of sticky pasta. Under the main platform and above the waterline, there would be chambers and shafts-rooms for labs and halls. Each would be sealed first with a layer of coralline algae, and then sputtered with thin metaplas.

In the intertidal growth, there would be st.u.r.dier shafts for the pipe lifts that carried workers and materials up and down. There would be flood chambers where the ocean would be allowed to filter through and create aquariums and drain rooms for research and aquafarming. There would be windows, where some gaps would be filled with filter fields, and others with clear, solid sheets of flexan. And the whole structure would be alive. A platform that breathed the sea and expelled it, that rinsed itself in the ocean's nutrients, gathering strength and growing out and up. Tsia wrinkled her nose. She could taste in the air the thick mucus that coated the sponge skins. Like black turpentine or oil, it did not wash off, but oozed down the sides of the structure. It muted the force of the wind and the sharp nutrient particles that were shot into the porous growth by the waves. Gingerly, Tsia knelt and ran her fingers across the tacky substance on the edge of the catwalk.

"What is that?"

It was not Wren's voice that struck her ears. Startled, she half spun, the wind carrying her the rest of the way around to a half-kneeling stance. Doetzier's tall, lean frame swayed like a reed as the gust hit him, and Tsia, hiding a surge of irritation, looked up at him and opened her gate to taste the strength of his biofield. The sense of him was subtle, with specks of energy at odds with the sense of his general field.

Doetzier pointed at the flooring where Tsia was still crouched, then motioned again at her splotch-stained hands. "What is that stuff?'

"Mucus," she returned shortly. Rain ran down her chin, and she gestured at the flooring before wiping her face. 'Touch it."

He stooped and slid one finger gingerly across the soft floor, then twisted his finger to examine the thick, oily splotch. "Natural or engineered?"

"Natural-or it was on old Earth," she corrected. "The sponge platforms here are Gea projects-genetic engineering and a.n.a.lysis. This mucus is enhanced through microbiology."

The lean man gestured back at the ma.s.sive, battened-down vats. "Those vats-are they for the hardeners?"

"One or two contain metaplas," she explained. 'The others are mixers and growth containers."

"Nutrients?"

She shook her head. "More like a three-in-one protection."

"Explain," he ordered.

His voice was curt and commanding, and Tsia hid her expression before Doetzier looked up again. When he did, only the glint in her eyes betrayed her flash of anger. If he wanted to take the time later, he could link up to the library and image down the data for himself. He had a high enough tech rating to access what he wanted. Why distract her with his questions instead? She fingered the mucus on her skin. Her sister had always done that-asked for information instead of getting it herself. Shjams had hated the manual links to the node. Once she was old enough to have her own temple link, Shjams had refused to use anything else, even when the node was down.

Tsia studied the hollows in the other mere's cheeks, made darker by his wet, black hair. The dark circles under his steady brown eyes were smudges in the predawn gloom. She could smell the tension in his body, even though he seemed relaxed to her gaze. He had not been this abrupt the last time they had worked together.

"Do you not know?" he queried sharply.

A slow smile crossed her face. "Tell me your full name," she challenged, "and I'll tell you about the mucus."

"What kind of deal is that?" he asked, startled.

"I heard someone call you 'Ghobhoza' once. I want to know more."

"Why?"

"What's the harm in a name?"

"Maybe none, maybe some. It's not your business to know." He eyed her with a glint in his eyes. "Besides, who are you to bargain? It's in your contract to explain about the mucus-or any other life-form."

"Coward," she teased.

He grinned slowly. "Give me your name, and I'll give you mine."

She eyed him for a moment, then shrugged deliberately and pointed to a lighter splotch on the deck. "The sponges exude a special type of diffusible molecule," she explained flatly. "The mucus doesn't bind -it doesn't form a skin, like the way molecules of pudding make starch on their surface. Instead, each of the diffusible molecules spreads out in solution-like salt dissolving in water. Enough chemicals spread across the surface of a sponge to allow it to recognize another of the same species when they touch."