Thomas blinked. That was so close to his own surmise about how kelp fitted into the sea system that he wondered if Panille had been eavesdropping on his thoughts.

Is Ship talking to him even now?

Panille’s words fascinated Waela. “You think the kelp follows a conscious plan?”

“Perhaps.”

To Thomas, the poet’s words pulled a veil from the kelp domain. He began to sense the sea in a different way. Here was rich living space free of Pandora’s other dangerous demons. Was it right then to rid the sea of kelp? He knew it could be done—disrupt the ecosystem, break the internal chain of the kelp’s own life. Was that the decision of Oakes and Lewis?

“The lights!” Panille said. “Ohhh, yes.”

They had reached the dark zone where the sub’s external sensors began to pick up the flickering lights. Jewels danced in the blackness beyond the range of the dive lights—tiny bursts of color . . . red, yellow, orange, green, purple . . . There appeared to be no pattern to them, just bursts of brilliance which dazzled the awareness.

“Bottom coming up,” Waela said.

Panille, every sense alert, shot a glance at her screen. Yes—the bottom appeared to be moving while they remained stationery. Coming up.

Thomas adjusted the rate of descent—slower, slower. The sub came to rest with a slight jar which stirred sediment into a gray fog around them. When the fog settled, the screens showed a plastering of ripples out to the limits of their illumination. Bottom grazers moved through the ripples—inverted bowls with gulping lips all around the rim. At the extreme forward edge of illumination, the flukes of the sub’s anchor dug into the sediment. The cable sagged back over them and out of light range. Off to the port side, they could glimpse black mounds of rock with kelp tendrils lacing over and through them. Dark shapes swam deep in the kelp jungle—more attendants of the sea’s rulers.

Tiny crawlers already were working their way along the anchor and the cable. Panille knew that the anchor tackle had been made of native iron and steel—substances which would be etched away to lace in a few diurns. Only plaz and plasteel resisted the erosive powers in Pandora’s seas.

This knowledge filled him with a sense of how fragile was their link to safety. He watched the jewel brilliants flickering in the gloom beyond the sub’s dive lights. They seemed to speak to him: “We are here. We are here. We are here . . .”

To Thomas, the lights were like the play of a computer board. Watching holorecords of them had formed this association in his mind. He had proposed it to Waela during one of the sessions when she had been teaching him the ways of Pandora’s deeps. “A computer could crunch far greater numbers, form so many more associations so much faster.”