Free Ocean: The Awakening by Brian Herbert, Jan Herbert Page A

sea and her confinement here, all that was gone. She’d been living inside her mind for the most part, receiving the strange, incredible flow of data and processing it, drawing her important conclusions about the sickness of the world’s vast, interconnected ocean.
    And a mysterious word had been coming into her mind, across a soft, murmuring awareness, a word that repeated itself without explanation: moanna … moanna…. What did it mean?
    Venturing outside her internal realm was limited. She could listen to others and comprehend them, but much of the time she was unable to form coherent words with which to express herself. In this sense, she was almost like a mute, but not a deaf person, and not blind. Her senses were available to her, even heightened.
    It occurred to her now, as she sat in afternoon sunlight by the window, that she rather liked the fact that she was having so much trouble speaking, because if she ever formed words to tell others exactly what she was thinking, they would be taking a portion of her precious self, her most private thoughts—and she preferred to keep such things to herself. Outsiders had no right to plunder the treasures of her marvelous mind! The thoughts and images were hers to share, or not share, as she pleased. She hated having her actions and thoughts analyzed through a magnifying glass in this asylum , and she wanted to limit the intrusions as much as possible, until that glorious day when she finally found a way to get out of this place….
    Dr. Halberton entered the room, not bothering to knock this time, as he did on occasion. The heavyset black man had no prurient motive in this, she had decided. It was just that he was often focused on something he wanted to do for her as his patient. He tended to be absent-minded.
    “It’s time to continue your lessons,” the doctor said, setting a briefcase down on the central table. “Did you have a nice lunch?”
    She just stared at the magazine photograph of the humpback whale on the wall, without replying. She loved that picture, could stare at it for hours and imagine herself with the amazing animal, in the water. It would be the most wonderful experience she could imagine.
    “I know you understand me,” the doctor said. “I know you’re smart.”
    Slowly, the elfin girl turned to look at him, then struggled to produce words. This time she managed to succeed, though she had trouble with the letter “s”. “S-oup was bad.”
    “The chowder? What didn’t you like about it?”
    “Eat no clam, eat no fish.”
    “Why not?”
    “Eat no clam, eat no fish.” She’d never told him this much before about her dietary preferences. In the past, she had always refused to consume any form of seafood, and would continue to take that stance, though she did eat red meat and chicken—most anything that came from the land, but not from the sea.
    “All right, Gwyneth. I’ll see what I can do about that. No more clam chowder for you. The kitchen will give you different soups. Would you like that?”
    “Eat no fish.”
    “Right, no fish, either.”
    She nodded.
    “We’re going to do multiple choice today,” he said, flipping on a laptop computer. “These are complex mathematical problems, and I want you to select the correct answer to each question. All right?”
    Another nod, and she sat at the table in front of the screen, as she had done before.
    An advanced calculus question appeared, written in numbers and mathematical symbols, along with seven possible answers. With only a moment’s hesitation, she touched the screen with her answer, and a gold star appeared next to it, indicating the choice was correct. This took her to another question, which she again answered correctly, and to another, and another, and another, until she had completed fifty and answered every one of them perfectly.
    After this, another fifty questions appeared, similar to the standard fare she had seen before, multiplying or dividing large numbers. They