No, Khorii!” Elviiz said, holding her back when she would have dived into the water. “You will not swim.” He dragged her back into the shuttle, Khiindi a jump ahead of them. “The wii-Balakiire has an amphibious mode. If there are monsters, the vessel will be much less vulnerable than you are.”
And though she seethed at her android brother’s assumption of command over her actions, she had to admit, as the wii-Balakiire sped into the sea and submerged, that he was correct.
“Aunt Neeva and the rest of our people, especially those on the rescue teams, would be displeased if you perished,” Elviiz said.
“What if the monster can attack vessels more easily than people and kills us all?” Khorii asked, still sulking a little.
“Then at least I will not have to bear their reproach,” Elviiz answered, quite seriously. Of course, he was seldom anything but serious.
Even so, the wii-Balakiire, with guidance from Khorii’s psychic sense of the location of Nanahomea and the others, brought them there quickly and with an unexpected benefit.
Mokilau, though covered with strange sores and bruises and clearly shaken, floated beside Nanahomea while the remaining elders supported him.
At Khorii’s insistence, Elviiz opened the underwater airlock and she swam out to join the LoiLoiKuans.
“Your ship made the monster release Mokilau,” Nanahomea said. Khorii swam to the old mer man and gently applied her horn to his wounds, which healed instantly.
All underwater healing did not deplete her—just the plague, so far. Unlike the last time she used her horn to heal while inside the ocean, the water was not disease-infested, nor were any of the other people, so her horn’s power localized to where it was most needed and restored Mokilau’s body to its uninjured state.
The old man’s white lashes raised, his chest heaved, and he grinned, then flipped in the water, took a brief swim, and returned clutching something. “A trophy,” he said, flourishing a long green object that looked half fin and half frond. “I took a piece of its tail.” With a bow that turned into a somersault, he proffered the object to Khorii. “I thought to keep this for my regalia, but the victory is truly yours, Korikori. Wear this proudly.”
She took it, though she couldn’t imagine accessorizing her shipsuit with it. “We cannot chase the monster and slay it,” she told them. “You understand, my people are not aggressive, and we do not kill.”
She thought it was rather too bad Khiindi couldn’t assume her size and command of the shuttle temporarily. She hated leaving these people unprotected and at the mercy of this mysterious monster after everything else they had endured. Khiindi would have had no reservations about dispatching the creature, as he had demonstrated on the beach.
Nanahomea brushed her cheek with webbed fingers. “Child, you have done enough for us already. You must not bear the weight of our world on your shoulders when you already have a universe to heal. We can take care of ourselves against tangible enemies.” She opened her other hand to reveal a blade. “We know how to hunt creatures larger than ourselves with the weapons our reef gives us.” Some of the others held blades in their hands or brandished long branches of coral with pointed ends as spears or harpoons.
Mokilau looked doubtful. “It is larger than the biggest whale, larger than a school of whales. And it has as many mouths and suckers like a squid or octopus—also it makes a cloud around it as they do so that you see nothing but cloudy water before it is upon you, stinging like a thousand jellyfish until one of its mouths can bite you in half.”
“So it will take more than one knife,” another male elder said. “Maybe a good harpoon.”
“Can you hide from it, stay away from it until we can find people with the technology and know-how to help you?” Khorii asked.
“Did I mention that the suckers are attached to tentacles, each like a giant fire eel, long enough to penetrate deep into crevasses?”
Exasperated by her inability to help and by Mokilau’s escalating description of the horrible features of the sea beast, Khorii resorted to one of Uncle Joh Becker’s expressions. “Mokilau, work with me, will you?” But when she touched his mind, she saw that the beast was much as he had described. She recalled her dream. “If you can evade this beast a short while longer, perhaps we can find you a new place to live, a safe place, with a healthy and friendly land species. Would such a solution be acceptable to you? I understand that you sent your children to Maganos because this world is dying.”
“Do what you can,” Nanahomea said. “We will try to evade the creature, as you say.”
“But it is very hungry,” Mokilau said. “The disease killed most of the sea’s creatures, and there is little left for it—or us—to eat. I do not think it will content itself with seaweed.”
When the shuttle returned to the Balakiire, the other crew members read her quickly and examined the piece of sea monster with scientific curiosity.
Neeva put it under the microscope while Khaari hailed one of the other rescue ships about relaying a message back to Vhiliinyar to ask if asylum for the LoiLoiKuans was possible, if the sii-Linyaari would accept another species and if not, if there was some other world with a suitable environment and no sea monsters where the LoiLoiKuans could find a new home.
Liriili had apparently been monitoring the transmission, because she was the next to appear on the com unit. “We are organizing some appropriate dried food to drop into the sea on LoiLoiKua,” she said. “It will rehydrate on contact and provide nourishment.”
“Probably it will mostly nourish the sea monster,” Khorii said ruefully.
“Sea monsters must eat as well as sea persons,” Liriili said in the more-Linyaari-than-thou tone for which she was widely known and disliked insofar as one Linyaari could dislike another. She signed off.
Melireenya gave Khorii a close-mouthed grin. “Perhaps if the monster has enough to supplement its current diet, it will be less interested in your friends. Snacking among nongrazing species is said to spoil the appetite.”
Khorii rolled her eyes. Elviiz said seriously, and with some enthusiasm, “That may well be true, Melireenya! Thus far we are uncertain of the monster’s dietary preferences. Perhaps Mokilau’s assumption was incorrect and the monster is a vegetarian like us.”
Khorii was not certain that periodic battery charges, which were Elviiz’s main source of nourishment, could be counted as vegetables, but it was true he was no meat eater, so she didn’t comment.
“Hmmm!” Neeva said. She had taken a thin slice of Mokilau’s trophy and was examining it under her portable electron microscope. “I have never seen a cellular structure quite like this before.”
She stepped aside as Khorii attempted to peer over her shoulder. “What do you think?”
Khorii put her eyes to the goggles and viewed the strange arrangement of particles—long threads, amorphous green shapes around aqua centers. It didn’t make any sense to her, though it made her feel uneasy. “I would rather die than say it aloud, Aunt, but my education has been interrupted by the plague. Elviiz is the one to ask.”
“Of course he is!” Neeva agreed. “I should have had him look at this to begin with. He’s been rather quiet, and I forgot he was there, I’m afraid.”
Khorii thought the truth was that, much as Elviiz looked like a Linyaari and wished to be considered one, he was not telepathic precisely because he was not organic. This had the odd effect of causing Linyaari who were not members of their immediate family to forget about him unless he kept reminding them, which he usually did.
It was so not his fault and so unfair that it made her feel protective of her brother, and she said more gently and humbly than she usually did when addressing him, “I can’t make anything of it, Elviiz. What do you think?”
With a nod he stepped past her and, after a noncommittal look in the microscope, asked, “May I examine the specimen with my own equipment?”
To Khorii’s annoyance he was asking Neeva’s permission. Mokilau had given the monster trophy to her, not Neeva. But she didn’t want to look petty in front of the Balakiire’s crew, and, besides, there was something about that trophy, other than the fact that it came from a horrible monster, that made her feel she didn’t exactly want to carry it around in her treasure pack with her beaded bracelet.
Retreating with the specimen to one of the Balakiire’s cabins, Elviiz “ahemed” and “ahahed” and made other professorial noises as he analyzed the specimen but then, suddenly, he let out a long hiss like an accidentally disconnected oxygen tube.
Khorii and Neeva crowded into the cabin’s open doorway. “What?” Khorii asked.
“I am amazed to tell you I cannot precisely say,” Elviiz said, “but I think we must take this back to Jalonzo at the laboratory on Corazon. These are unlike any normal cells of any creature I have ever examined.”
“A sea monster isn’t exactly a normal creature,” Khorii said. “And the one Mokilau described sounded like a whole zooful of horror.”
“Precisely,” Elviiz said. “And that may well be what it is. Some of the cells resemble those of ordinary sea creatures. But some of them look to me to be something nothing so large can possibly be.”
“I know you’re enjoying the suspense,” Khorii said. “But we would appreciate enlightenment as soon as you can force yourself to stop being mysterious.”
“But I’m not,” he said. “And though I don’t think it is possible, I could be wrong about this, but the cells appear to be not cells as we know them but similar in structure to those of a virus—but much, much larger.”