Undertow by Elizabeth Bear Page B

that broad of a cordon around the fire. He wanted an excuse to stay and see what happened next.
    “I’ll call you,” Kroc said. “Please, go now.” He raised his voice. “Cricket, you, too.”
    She came out drying her hands. She sat down on the floor without a word and started pulling on her shoes.
    André offered her a lift, and she took it. Took him home with her, too, and what with one thing and another, it was an hour and a half before he remembered to power up and connex, and morning before he checked his messages.
             
    Gourami hunkered, wet, amid waterplant and reed in the brackish water where the delta ran into the bay. Se croaked low in frustration—an anonymous noise in the dark—and dipped under again so only bulging eyes and comma-shaped nostrils would show. Se mottles were not dyed into green anonymity, as the commandos’ had been, but even humen technology would not single se out so hidden.
    In the dark nearby, other persons moved, thrummed through swelled throats, quiet reassuring conversation. Gourami filtered water, swallowed plankton and waterweed. As it too often did in the bay now, the food had an acrid tang. Se ate farmed on the job and at home—
    Se could not go home. Se had no home. No position now. Reinvention or death.
    Because the body had been tangled in the cables, halfway down. And when Gourami had tugged it free, had brought it up, none of the humen had cared. Had honored the dead. Se knew its name; it had been a friend of some of the other persons. And the mate of this one they came to talk to now, because the humen mated like animals, with their pair-bonds and their closed little families.
    Se thought somebody should have sung for it. Even if it was an animal. And even if, though se had not yet worked out the logic behind it, it was the dead animal’s fault that Gourami could not go home.
    There were footsteps through the marsh. Some humen, booted, and a person’s, too. Ripples in the water stroked Gourami’s skin. The person at se left hand sang low, and a song answered. Tetra had returned. With the human Gourami had heard, and the rest said, could be trusted. The mate of the human who had become the body in the cables.
    The rest. The rest were revolutionaries. The persons who had come to rescue se were rebels. They had destroyed the humen ship. And Caetei was one of them.
    Gourami sank into calming mud and water, nostrils sealing as se submerged. The human needed a light to walk in the dark. It bobbed, reed-cut, reflecting splinters off the water. Gourami let a thin stream of silver slip from se nostrils. Handfingers brushed a still-sore shoulder; se leaned into Caetei’s touch, allowed Caetei to lead. The light clicked off as they came forward, as if the human knew it would hurt a person’s dark-adapted eyes.
    Se slipped up the bank beside Caetei. Tetra’s palms luminesced faintly, enough to guide them. The human stank in the dark, of poison—which the humen drank as if they breathed it—and of fire-charred humen food and chemicals. It—he, it was a he, by the flat chest and the bristles on its face—did not reach out for Gourami, who folded se hurt hand to chest and waited.
    Instead, he hunkered on his heels in the dark, a humen approximation of a person’s rest-pose, and extended the back of one arm. Something glimmered there. Gourami crouched, too, knees higher than the half-seated human’s head, and bent to see what he offered.
    A slate. There was a slate on his wrist, and it made words when he made those burbling humen noises.
    —I am Jean,
the machine wrote.
—Tetra says they call you Gourami. Can you tell me what you’ve seen?
    Gourami was not a very good storyteller. But a not-very-good storyteller by a person’s standards was an exceptional one, as humen went. And se was an experienced liaison.
    With a ripping sound, se tugged the gripping fabric loose and pulled the waterproof slate from the human’s arm. With the tips of se handfingers,