Dom continued stroking until the creature was soothed and then stood up.

It didn't count unless you stood up. The best dagon fishers could ride a shell with their toes. How he had envied them - and how carefully he had watched from the family barge on feast days, when the fishermen came in two or three hundred abreast on their half-tame shells with See-Why setting, a bright purple star, into the sea. Some of the younger men danced on their shells, spinning and leaping and juggling torches and all the time keeping the shell under perfect control.

Kneeling in front of the nerve knot he guided the big semi-vegetable back through the twisting waterways of the marsh, through acres of sea lilies and past floating reed islands. On several of them blue flamingoes hissed at him and stalked imperiously away.

Occasionally he glanced up and northwards, searching for tell-tale specks in the air. Korodore would find him eventually, but Dom was pretty certain that he wouldn't pick him up straight away. He'd probably keep him under benevolent observation for a few hours because, after all, Korodore had been young once. Even Korodore. Whereas Grandmother gave the impression that she had been born aged eighty.

Besides, Korodore would bear in mind that tomorrow Dom would be Chairman and legally his boss. Dom doubted if that would influence him one jot. Old Korodore relished duty if it came sternly...

He smiled proudly as the shell cut smoothly through the quiet water. At least the fishermen would not be able to call him a blackhand, even if he wasn't quite a fully-fledged greenhand. That last initiation of the dagon fishermen could only be got out in the deeps, on a moonlit night, when the dagons rose out of the deep with their razor-sharp shells agape.

The shell bumped against the reed bed and Dom leapt lightly ashore, leaving it drifting in the little lagoon.