Picnic on Nearside (28 page)

Piri called him the Ghost. He had seen him many times in the open sea. He was eight meters of mouth, belly and tail: hunger personified. There were those who said the great white shark was the most ferocious carnivore that ever lived. Piri believed it.

It didn’t matter that the Ghost was completely harmless to him. The Pacifica management did not like having its guests eaten alive. An adult could elect to go into the water with no protection, providing the necessary waivers were on file. Children had to be implanted with an equalizer. Piri had one, somewhere just below the skin of his left wrist. It was a sonic generator, set to emit a sound that would mean terror to any predator in the water.

The Ghost, like all the sharks, barracudas, morays, and other predators in Pacifica, was not like his cousins who swam the seas of Earth. He had been cloned from cells stored in the Biological Library on Luna. The library had been created two hundred years before as an insurance policy against the extinction of a species. Originally, only endangered species were filed, but for years before the Invasion the directors had been trying to get a sample of everything. Then the Invaders had come, and Lunarians were too busy surviving without help from Occupied Earth to worry about the library. But when the time came to build the disneylands, the library had been ready.

By then, biological engineering had advanced to the point where many modifications could be made in genetic structure. Mostly, the disneyland biologists had left nature alone. But they had changed the predators. In the Ghost, the change was a mutated organ attached to the brain that responded with a flood of fear when a supersonic note was sounded.

So why was the Ghost still out there? Piri blinked his nictating membranes, trying to clear his vision. It helped a little. The shape looked a bit different.

Instead of moving back and forth, the tail seemed to be going up and down, perhaps in a scissoring motion. Only one animal swims like that. He gulped down his fear and pushed away from the reef.

But he had waited too long. His fear of the Ghost went beyond simple danger, of which there was none. It was something more
basic, an unreasoning reflex that prickled his neck when he saw that long white shape. He couldn’t fight it, and didn’t want to. But the fear had kept him against the reef, hidden, while the person swam out of reach. He thrashed to catch up, but soon lost track of the moving feet in the gloom.

He had seen gills trailing from the sides of the figure, muted down to a deep blue-black by the depths. He had the impression that it was a woman.

*   *   *

Tongatown was the only human habitation on the island. It housed a crew of maintenance people and their children, about fifty in all, in grass huts patterned after those of South Sea natives. A few of the buildings concealed elevators that went to the underground rooms that would house the tourists when the project was completed. The shacks would then go at a premium rate, and the beaches would be crowded.

Piri walked into the circle of firelight and greeted his friends. Nighttime was party time in Tongatown. With the day’s work over, everybody gathered around the fire and roasted a vat-grown goat or lamb. But the real culinary treats were the fresh vegetable dishes. The ecologists were still working out the kinks in the systems, controlling blooms, planting more of failing species. They often produced huge excesses of edibles that would have cost a fortune on the outside. The workers took some of the excess for themselves. It was understood to be a fringe benefit of the job. It was hard enough to find people who could stand to stay under the Pacifica sky.

“Hi, Piri,” said a girl. “You meet any pirates today?” It was Harra, who used to be one of Piri’s best friends but had seemed increasingly remote over the last year. She was wearing a handmade grass skirt and a lot of flowers, tied into strings that looped around her body. She was fifteen now, and Piri was . . . but who cared? There were no seasons here, only days. Why keep track of time?

Piri didn’t know what to say. The two of them had once played together out on the reef. It might be Lost Atlantis, or Submariner, or Reef Pirates; a new plot line and cast of heroes and villains every day. But her question had held such thinly veiled contempt.
Didn’t she care about the Pirates anymore? What was the matter with her?

She relented when she saw Piri’s helpless bewilderment.

“Here, come on and sit down. I saved you a rib.” She held out a large chunk of mutton.

Piri took it and sat beside her. He was famished, having had nothing all day since his large breakfast.

“I thought I saw the Ghost today,” he said, casually.

Harra shuddered. She wiped her hands on her thighs and looked at him closely.

“Thought? You thought you saw him?” Harra did not care for the Ghost. She had cowered with Piri more than once as they watched him prowl.

“Yep. But I don’t think it was really him.”

“Where was this?”

“On the sea-side, down about, oh, ten meters. I think it was a woman.”

“I don’t see how it could be. There’s just you and—and Midge and Darvin with—did this woman have an air tank?”

“Nope. Gills. I saw that.”

“But there’s only you and four others here with gills. And I know where they all were today.”

“You used to have gills,” he said, with a hint of accusation.

She sighed. “Are we going through that again? I
told
you, I got tired of the flippers. I wanted to move around the
land
some more.”

“I can move around the land,” he said, darkly.

“All right, all right. You think I deserted you. Did you ever think that you sort of deserted
me
?”

Piri was puzzled by that, but Harra had stood up and walked quickly away. He could follow her, or he could finish his meal. She was right about the flippers. He was no great shakes at chasing anybody.

Piri never worried about anything for too long. He ate, and ate some more, long past the time when everyone else had joined together for the dancing and singing. He usually hung back, anyway. He could sing, but dancing was out of his league.

Just as he was leaning back in the sand, wondering if there
were any more corners he could fill up—perhaps another bowl of that shrimp teriyaki?—Harra was back. She sat beside him.

“I talked to my mother about what you said. She said a tourist showed up today. It looks like you were right. It was a woman, and she was amphibious.”

Piri felt a vague unease. One tourist was certainly not an invasion, but she could be a harbinger. And amphibious. So far, no one had gone to that expense except for those who planned to live here for a long time. Was his tropical hideout in danger of being discovered?”

“What—what’s she doing here?” He absently ate another spoonful of crab cocktail.

“She’s looking for
you
,” Harra laughed, and elbowed him in the ribs. Then she pounced on him, tickling his ribs until he was howling in helpless glee. He fought back, almost to the point of having the upper hand, but she was bigger and a little more determined. She got him pinned, showering flower petals on him as they struggled. One of the red flowers from her hair was in her eye, and she brushed it away, breathing hard.

“You want to go for a walk on the beach?” she asked.

Harra was fun, but the last few times he’d gone with her she had tried to kiss him. He wasn’t ready for that. He was only a kid. He thought she probably had something like that in mind now.

“I’m too full,” he said, and it was almost the literal truth. He had stuffed himself disgracefully, and only wanted to curl up in his shack and go to sleep.

Harra said nothing, just sat there getting her breathing under control. At last she nodded, a little jerkily, and got to her feet. Piri wished he could see her face to face. He knew something was wrong. She turned from him and walked away.

*   *   *

Robinson Crusoe was feeling depressed when he got back to his hut. The walk down the beach away from the laughter and singing had been a lonely one. Why had he rejected Harra’s offer of companionship? Was it really so bad that she wanted to play new kinds of games?

But no, damn it. She wouldn’t play his games, why should he play hers?

After a few minutes of sitting on the beach under the crescent moon, he got into character. Oh, the agony of being a lone castaway, far from the company of fellow creatures, with nothing but faith in God to sustain oneself. Tomorrow he would read from the scriptures, do some more exploring along the rocky north coast, tan some goat hides, maybe get in a little fishing.

With his plans for the morrow laid before him, Piri could go to sleep, wiping away a last tear for distant England.

The ghost woman came to him during the night. She knelt beside him in the sand. She brushed his sandy hair from his eyes and he stirred in his sleep. His feet thrashed.

He was churning through the abyssal deeps, heart hammering, blind to everything but internal terror. Behind him, jaws yawned, almost touching his toes. They closed with a snap.

He sat up woozily. He saw rows of serrated teeth in the line of breakers in front of him. And a tall, white shape in the moonlight dived into a curling breaker and was gone.

*   *   *

“Hello.”

Piri sat up with a start. The worst thing about being a child living alone on an island—which, when he thought about it, was the sort of thing every child dreamed of—was not having a warm mother’s breast to cry on when you had nightmares. It hadn’t affected him much, but when it did, it was pretty bad.

He squinted up into the brightness. She was standing with her head blocking out the sun. He winced, and looked away, down to her feet. They were webbed, with long toes. He looked a little higher. She was nude, and quite beautiful.

“Who . . . ?”

“Are you awake now?” She squatted down beside him. Why had he expected sharp, triangular teeth? His dreams blurred and ran like watercolors in the rain, and he felt much better. She had a nice face. She was smiling at him.

He yawned, and sat up. He was groggy, stiff, and his eyes were coated with sand that didn’t come from the beach. It had been an awful night.

“I think so.”

“Good. How about some breakfast?” She stood, and went to a basket on the sand.

“I usually—” but his mouth watered when he saw the guavas, melons, kippered herring, and the long brown loaf of bread. She had butter, and some orange marmalade. “Well, maybe just a—” and he had bitten into a succulent slice of melon. But before he could finish it, he was seized by an even stronger urge. He got to his feet and scuttled around the palm tree with the waist-high dark stain and urinated against it.

“Don’t tell anybody, huh?” he said, anxiously.

She looked up. “About the tree? Don’t worry.”

He sat back down and resumed eating the melon. “I could get in a lot of trouble. They gave me a thing and told me to use it.”

“It’s all right with me,” she said, buttering a slice of bread and handing it to him. “Robinson Crusoe never had a portable EcoSan, right?”

“Right,” he said, not showing his surprise. How did she know
that
?

Piri didn’t know quite what to say. Here she was, sharing his morning, as much a fact of life as the beach or the water.

“What’s your name?” It was as good a place to start as any.

“Leandra. You can call me Lee.”

“I’m—”

“Piri. I heard about you from the people at the party last night. I hope you don’t mind me barging in on you like this.”

He shrugged, and tried to indicate all the food with the gesture. “Anytime,” he said, and laughed. He felt good. It was nice to have someone friendly around after last night. He looked at her again, from a mellower viewpoint.

She was large; quite a bit taller than he was. Her physical age was around thirty, unusually old for a woman. He thought she might be closer to sixty or seventy, but he had nothing to base it on. Piri himself was in his nineties, and who could have known that? She had the slanting eyes that were caused by the addition of transparent eyelids beneath the natural ones. Her hair grew in a narrow band, cropped short, starting between her eyebrows and going over her head to the nape of her neck. Her ears were pinned efficiently against her head, giving her a lean, streamlined look.

“What brings you to Pacifica?” Piri asked.

She reclined on the sand with her hands behind her head, looking very relaxed.

“Claustrophobia.” She winked at him. “Not really. I wouldn’t survive long in Pluto with
that
.” Piri wasn’t even sure what it was, but he smiled as if he knew. “Tired of the crowds. I heard that people couldn’t enjoy themselves here, what with the sky, but I didn’t have any trouble when I visited. So I bought flippers and gills and decided to spend a few weeks skin-diving by myself.”

Piri looked at the sky. It was a staggering sight. He’d grown used to it, but knew that it helped not to look up more than he had to.

It was an incomplete illusion, all the more appalling because the half of the sky that had been painted was so very convincing. It looked like it really was the sheer blue of infinity, so when the eye slid over to the unpainted overhanging canopy of rock, scarred from blasting, painted with gigantic numbers that were barely visible from twenty kilometers below—one could almost imagine God looking down through the blue opening. It loomed, suspended by nothing, gigatons of rock hanging up there.

Visitors to Pacifica often complained of headaches, usually right on the crown of the head. They were cringing, waiting to get conked.

“Sometimes I wonder how
I
live with it,” Piri said.

She laughed. “It’s nothing for me. I was a space pilot once.”

“Really?” This was catnip to Piri. There’s nothing more romantic than a space pilot. He had to hear stories.

The morning hours dwindled as she captured his imagination with a series of tall tales he was sure were mostly fabrication. But who cared? Had he come to the South Seas to hear of the mundane? He felt he had met a kindred spirit, and gradually, fearful of being laughed at, he began to tell her stories of the Reef Pirates, first as wishful wouldn’t-it-be-fun-if’s, then more and more seriously as she listened intently. He forgot her age as he began to spin the best of the yarns he and Harra had concocted.