"She lives me," he said once, and this became a token label inscribed on the Vatahair containers.

In these speaking times, the C/P would try prepared questions, sometimes booming them at Duque, sometimes asking in a low and reverential voice.

"Do you speak for Vata, Duque?"

"I speak."

That was all they ever got from him on this question. Since it was known that Duque was one of the hundred or so original mutants who had been conceived with kelp intervention and thus bore kelp genes, they would sometimes ask him about the kelp that had once ruled Pandora's now-endless sea.

"Do you have memory of the kelp, Duque?"

"Avata," Duque corrected. "I am the rock."

Interminable arguments came out of this answer. "Avata had been the kelp's name for itself. The reference to rock gave scholars and theologians room for speculation.

"He must mean that his consciousness exists at the bottom of the sea where the kelp lives."

"No! Remember how the kelp always clung to a rock, lifting its tendrils to the sunlight? And the hylighters used rock for ballast ..."

"You're all wrong. He's Vata's grip on life. He's Vata's rock."

And there was always someone who would harken back to WorShip and the stories of that distant planet where someone calling himself Peter had given the same answer Duque had given.

Nothing was ever solved by such arguments, but the questioning continued whenever Duque showed signs of wakefulness.

"How is it that you and Vata do not die, Duque?"

"We wait."

"For what do you wait?"

"No answer."

This recurrent response precipitated several crises until the C/P of that time issued an order that Duque's answers could only be broadcast by permission of the C/P. This didn't stop the quiet whispering and the rumors, of course, but it relegated everything except the C/P's official version to the role of mystical heresy. It was a question no C/P had asked for two generations now. Current interest centered much more on the kelp that Mermen spread far and wide in Pandora's planetary sea. The kelp was thick and healthy, but showed no signs of acquiring consciousness.

As the great Islands drifted they were seldom out of sight of a horizon touched by the oily green flatness of a kelp bed. Everyone said it was a good thing. Kelp formed nurseries for fish and everyone could see there were more fish these days, though they weren't always easy to catch. You couldn't use a net amongst the kelp. Baited lines tangled in the huge fronds and were lost. Even the dumb muree had learned to retreat into kelp sanctuary at the approach of fishermen.

There was also the recurrent question of Ship, Ship who was God and who had left humankind on Pandora.

"Why did Ship abandon us here, Duque?"

All Duque would ever say was: "Ask Ship."

Many a C/P had engaged in much silent prayer over that one. But Ship did not answer them. At least, not with any voice that they could hear.

It was a vexing question. Would Ship return? Ship had left the hyb tanks in orbit around Pandora. It was a strange orbit, seeming to defy the gravitational index for such things. There were those among Pandora's Mermen and Islanders who said Vata waited for the hyb tanks to be brought down, that she would awaken when this occurred.

No one doubted there was some link between Duque and Vata, so why not a link between Vata and the dormant life waiting up there in the tanks?

"How are you linked to Vata?" a C/P asked.

"How are you linked to me?" Duque responded.

This was duly recorded in the Book of Duque and more arguments ensued. It was noted, however, that whenever such questions were asked, Vata stirred. Sometimes grossly and sometimes with only the faintest movement over her vast flesh.

"It's like the safety line we use between divers down under," an astute Merman observed. "You can always find your partner."

Vata's tendril-awareness stirred to the linkage with genetic memories of mountain climbers. They were climbing, she and Duque. This she showed him many times. Her memories, shared with Duque, showed a spectacular world of the vertical that Islanders could barely imagine and holes did not do justice. Only, she did not think of herself as one of the climbers, or even think of herself at all. There was only the line, and the climbing.

Ward Keel looked down from the high bench and surveyed the two young petitioners in front of him. The male was a large Merman with the tattoo of a criminal on his brow, a wine-red "E" for "Expatriate." This Merman could never return to the rich land under the sea and he knew the Islanders accepted him only for his stabilizing genes. Those genes had not stabilized this time. The Merman probably knew what the judgment would be. He patted a damp cloth nervously over his exposed skin.

The woman petitioner, his mate, was small and slender with pale blonde hair and two slight indentations where she should have had eyes. She wore a long blue sari and when she walked Keel did not hear steps, only a rasping scrape. She swayed from side to side and hummed to herself.

Why does this one have to be the first case of the morning? Keel wondered. It was a perverse fate. This morning of all mornings!

"Our child deserves to live!" the Merman said. His voice boomed in the chambers. The Committee on Vital Forms often heard such loud protestation but this time Keel felt that the volume was directed at the woman, telling her that her mate fought for them both.

As Chief Justice of the Committee it was too often Keel's lot to perform that unsavory stroke of the pen, to speak directly the unutterable fears of the petitioners themselves. Many times it was otherwise and then this chamber echoed the laughter of life. But today, in this case, there would be no laughter. Keel sighed. The Merman, even though a criminal by Merman ruling, made this matter politically sensitive. Mermen were jealous of the births that they called "normal," and they monitored every topside birth involving Merman parentage.

"We have studied your petition with great care," Keel said. He glanced left and right at his fellow Committee members. They sat impassively, attention elsewhere - on the great curve of bubbly ceiling, on the soft living deck, on the records stacked in front of them - everywhere but on the petitioners. The dirty work was being left to Ward Keel.

If they only knew, Keel thought. A higher Committee on Vital Forms has today passed judgment on me ... as it will pass judgment on them, eventually. He felt a deep compassion for the petitioners in front of him but there was no denying the judgment.

"The Committee has determined that the subject" - not "the child," he thought -"is merely a modified gastrula ..."

"We want this child!" The man fisted the rail that separated him from the Committee's high bench. The security guardians at the rear of the chambers came to attention. The woman continued to hum and sway, not in time with the music that came from her lips.

Keel leafed through a stack of plaz records and pulled out a sheet thick with figures and graphs.

"The subject has been found to have a nuclear construction that harbors a reagent gene," he reported. "This construction insures that the cellular material will turn on itself, destroying its own cell walls ..."

"Then let us have our child until that death," the man blurted. He swiped at his face with the damp cloth. "For the love of humanity, give us that much."