"You think they'll revolt, hurt humans?" Nate asked.
"No, they'll be fine. That was a first. It's not every day you find out that your messiah is plotting to kill you. Give 'em a day or two to get over the embarrassment — everything will be back to normal."
"I guess it's just as well that we're getting out of here. You don't want to face those two females you zapped."
"Bring it on," Amy said, patting the pockets of her shorts. "Besides, I'm sort of special here, Nate. I don't want to sound egotistical, but they really all do know me, know who I am, what I am. No one will bother me."
Just then Nate spotted a light coming from deep in the mirror-calm water.
"That's him," Amy said.
"Him?"
"Clay, coming to take you home."
"Me? You mean us."
"Em, can I get a minute?" Amy said.
" 'Kay," said Emily 7, skulking away from the shore toward town.
When Emily was out of hearing range, Amy put her arms around Nate and leaned back to look at him. "I can't go with you, Nate. I'm staying."
"What do you mean? Why?"
"I can't go. There's something about me you don't know. Something I should have told you before, but I thought you wouldn't… well, you know — I thought you wouldn't love me."
"Please, Amy, please don't tell me you're a lesbian. Because I've been through that once, and I don't think I could survive it again. Please."
"No, nothing like that. It's about my parents… well, my father really."
"The navigator?"
"Uh, no, not really. Actually, Nate, this is my father. She pulled a small specimen jar out of her pocket and held it up. There was a pink, jellylike substance in it.
"That looks like —»
"It is, Nate. It's the Goo. My mother was never intimate with her navigator, or with anyone in the first three years she was here, but one morning she woke up pregnant."
"And you're sure it was the Goo, not just that she had way too many mai-tais at the Gooville cabana club?"
"She knows it, and I know it, Nate. I'm sort of not normal."
"You feel normal." He pulled her closer.
"I'm not. For one thing, I don't just look a lot younger than I really am, but I'm also a lot stronger than I look, especially as a swimmer. Remember that day I found the humpback ship by sound? I really can hear directional sound underwater. And my muscle tissue is different. It stores oxygen the way a whale's tissue does, I can stay underwater without breathing for over an hour, longer if I don't exert myself. I'm the only one like me, Nate. I'm not really, you know… human."
Nate listened, trying to weigh what it really meant in the bigger picture, but he couldn't think of anything except that he wanted her to go with him, wanted her to be with him, no matter what she said she was. "I don't care, Amy. It doesn't matter. Look, I got over all this" — he gestured to all that — "and the fact that you're sixty-four years old and your mother is a famous dead aviatrix. As long as you don't start liking girls, I'll be fine."
"That's not the point, Nate. I can't leave here, not for long anyway. None of us can. Even the ones who weren't born here. The Goo becomes part of you. It takes care of you, but you become attached to it, almost literally. Like an addiction. It gets in your tissues by contact. That's how my mother had me. I've been gone a lot already this year. If I left now, or if I left for longer that a few months at a time, I'd get sick. I'd probably die."
At that moment a yellow research submersible bubbled up to the surface of the lagoon, a dozen headlights blazing into the grotto around a great Plexiglas bubble in the front.
"That's it, then. I'll stay. I don't mind, Amy. I'll stay here. We can live here. I could spend a lifetime learning about this place, the Goo."
"You can't do that either. It will become part of you, too. If you stay too long, you won't be able to leave either. You had to have noticed that first night we got drunk together, how fast you recovered from the hangover."
Nate thought about how quickly his wounds had healed, too — weeks, maybe months of healing overnight. There was no other explanation. He thought about spending his life with only fleeting glimpses of sunlight, and he said, "I don't care. I'll stay."
"No you won't. I won't let you. You have things to do." She shoved the specimen jar in his pocket, then kissed him hard. He kissed her back, for a long time.
The hatch at the top of the dry exit tower on the sub opened, and Clay popped up to see Nate and Amy for the first time since they'd both disappeared.
"Well, that's unprofessional," Clay said.
Amy broke the kiss and whispered, "You go. Take that with you." She patted his pocket. Then she turned to Clay as she checked her watch again. "You're late!"
"Hey, missy, I set a time when I'd be at the coordinates you sent — six hundred and twenty-three feet below sea level — and I was there. You didn't mention that I had another mile of submarine cave with some of the scariest-looking rock formations I've ever seen." He glanced at Nate. "They looked alive."
"They are alive," Amy said.
"Are we close to the surface? The pressure is —»
"I'll explain on the way," Nate said. "We'd better go." Nate stepped onto the sub as Clay slipped down inside the hatch to allow him to pass. Nate crawled into the hatch and looked back to Amy before he closed it.
"I'll stay, Amy. I don't care. For you I'll stay. I love you. You know that, right?"
She nodded and brushed tears out of her eyes. "Yeah," she said, Then she spun around quickly and started walking away. "You take care of yourself, Nathan Quinn," she shouted over her shoulder, and Nate heard her voice break when she said his name.
He climbed down into the sub and secured the hatch above him.
Clay had watched Amy walk away from the big, half-submerged Plexiglas bubble in the front of the sub.
"Where's Amy going?"
"She can't come home, Clay."
"She's okay, though?"
"She's okay."
"You okay?"
"I've been better."
They were quiet for the long ride through the pressure locks to the outside ocean, just the sound of the electric motors and the low hum of instruments all around them. The lights of the sub barely reached out to the walls of the cave, but every hundred yards or so they would come to a large, pink disk of living tissue, like a giant sea anemone, which would fold back to let them pass, then expand to fill the passageway once they had gone through. Nate watched the pressure gauge rise one atmosphere every time they passed through one of the gates, and it was then that he realized he wasn't escaping at all. The Goo knew exactly where and what they were, and it was letting him go.
"You're going to explain what all this is, right?" Clay said, not even looking away from the controls.
Nate was startled out of his reverie. "Clay, I can't believe — I mean, I believe it, but — Thanks for coming to get me."
"I never told you, you know — it's not really appropriate or anything — but I have pretty strong feelings about loyalty."
"Well, I respect that, Clay, and I appreciate it."
"Yeah, well, don't mention it."
Then they were both a bit embarrassed and both pretended that something was irritating their throats and they had to cough and pay attention to their breathing for a while, even though the air in the little submarine was filtered and humidified and perfectly clean.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Pirates
Nate was standing with Clay on the flying bridge of the Clair as she steamed into the Au'au Channel.
"You'd better put on some sunscreen, Nate."