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warmer currents. Brett's pants chafed his thighs and cramped him, whipping in
the currents of their passage.
They were much closer to the complex of buildings now and Brett began to have
a new idea of the structures' sizes. The closest tower faded out of sight
above them. He tried to trace it into the upper distances and realized that
night had fallen topside.
We can't be very far down, he thought. That tower could break the surface!
But no one topside had reported such a structure.
Ship save us if an Island ever hit such a thing!
Lights from the buildings provided him with more than enough illumination, but
he wondered how his rescuer was finding her way in what he knew to be deep
darkness for ordinary human vision. He saw then that she was guided by fixed
lights anchored to the bottom -- lanes of red and green.
Even the darkest topside night had never kept him from moving around easily,
but here the surface was just a faraway bruise. Brett drew a deep breath from
the tube and settled himself closer to the young woman. She patted his hand
on her stomach while jockeying the machine into a maze of steep-sided canyons.
They rounded a corner and came onto a wide, well-lighted space between tall
buildings. A dome structure loomed straight ahead with docking lips extruded
from it. Many people swam in the bright illumination that glared all along
the lips. Brett saw the on-off blink of a bank of hatchways opening and
closing to pass the swimmers. His rescuer settled them onto a ramp with only
a small sensation of grating. A Merman behind them took the horse by a rear
handhold.
The young woman motioned for Brett to take a deep breath. He obeyed. She
gently pulled the breather from him, removed her airfish and caged it with
others beside the hatch.
Through the hatch they went into a chamber where the water was quickly flushed
out and replaced by air. Brett found himself standing in a dripping puddle
facing the young woman, who shed water as though she and her translucent suit
had been oiled.
"My name is Scudi Wang," she said. "What is yours?"
"Brett Norton," he said. He laughed self-consciously. "You . . . you saved
my life." The statement sounded so ridiculously inadequate that he laughed
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again.
"It was my watch for search and rescue," she said. "We're always extra alert
during a wavewall if we're near an Island."
He had never heard of such a thing but it sounded reasonable. Life was
precious and his view of the world said everyone felt the same, even Mermen.
"You are wet," she said, looking him down and up. "Are there people who
should know you are alive?"
Alive! The thought made his breathing quicken. Alive!
"Yes," he said. "Is it possible to get word topside?"
"We'll see to it after you're settled. There are formalities."
Brett noticed that she'd been staring at him much the same way he'd been
intent on her. He guessed her age at close to his own -- fifteen or sixteen.
She was small, small-breasted, her skin as dark as a topside tan. She stared
at him calmly out of green eyes with golden flecks in them. Her pug nose gave
her a gamin look -- the look of wide-eyed corridor orphans back on Vashon.
Her shoulders were sloping and muscular, the muscles of someone who kept in
top shape. The airfish scar glowed at her neck, a livid pink against the dark
wash of her wet black hair.
"You are the first Islander I've ever rescued," she said.
"I'm . . ." He shook his head, finding that he did not know how to thank her
for such a thing. He finished lamely: "Where are we?"
"Home," she said with a shrug. "I live here." She dropped her ballast belt
at the jerk of a knot and slung it over a shoulder. "Come with me. I'll get
us both some dry clothes."
He slopped after her through a hatch, his pants dripping a trail of wetness.
It was cold in the long passage where the hatchway left them, but he was not
too cold to miss the pleasant bounce of Scudi Wang's body as she walked away
from him. He hurried to catch up. The passage was disturbingly strange to an
Islander -- solid underfoot, solid walls lighted by long tubes of
fluorescence.
The walls glowed a silvery gray broken by sealed hatches with colored symbols
on them -- some green, some yellow, some blue.
Scudi Wang stopped at a blue-coded hatch, undogged it and led him into a large
room with storage lockers lining the sides. Benches in four rows took up the
middle. Another hatch led out the opposite side. She opened a storage locker
and tossed him a blue towel, then bent to rummage through another locker where
she found a shirt and pants, holding them up while she looked at Brett.
"These'll probably fit. We can replace them later." She tossed the faded
green pants onto the bench in front of him along with a matching pullover
shirt. Both were a light material that Brett didn't recognize.
Brett dried his face and hair. He stood there indecisively, his clothes still
dripping. Mermen paid little attention to nudity, he had been told, but he
was not used to being unclothed . . . much less in the company of a beautiful
woman.
She removed her dive suit unselfconsciously, found a singlesuit of light blue
in another locker and sat down to pull it over her body, drying herself with a
towel. He stood up, looking down at her, unable to avoid staring.
How can I thank her? he wondered. She seems so casual about saving my life.
Actually, she seemed casual about everything. He continued to stare at her
and blushed when he felt the tightening erection beginning in his cold wet
pants.
Wasn't there a partition or something where he could get out of sight and
dress?
He glanced around the room. Nothing.
She saw him looking around and chewed her lower lip.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I forgot. They say Islanders are peculiarly modest.
Is that true?"
His blush deepened. "Yes."
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