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through the clouds faster than anything could possibly go to stop light as a feather with his feet brushing the wave-tops; maybe he would change his mind. He could smell the salt. He could feel the wind. He could see the lifted jelly sails of a kronkaeur fleet above the white-edged swell.
         "Aw not these jellyfish guys again," said Kyle.
         "No no no, this is different." Salim stood beside him above the waves. "Look, this is really cool." He folded his hands and leaned forwards and flew across the ocean, Kyle a heartbeat behind him. He always thought of those Hindu gods you saw on the prayer cards that blew into the compound from the street shrines. His dad didn't like those either. They arrived over the kronkaeur armada, beating through a rising ocean on a steady breeze, topsails inflated.
         When the huge, sail-powered jellyfish had appeared, Kyle had been so excited at his first experience of a newly evolved species that the vast, inflatable monsters had sailed like translucent galleons through his dreams. But all they did was raise their triangular sails and weave their tentacles together into huge raft-fleets and bud-off little jellies that looked like see-through paper boats. Once the initial thrill of being part of the global game-experiment to start life on Earth all over again and see how it evolved differently had worn off, Kyle found himself wishing that Salim had been given somewhere a bit more exciting than a huge square of ocean. An island would have been good. A bit of continent would have been better. Somewhere things could attack each other.
         "Every bit of water on Alterre was land, and every bit of land was water," Salim had said. "And they will be again. And anyway, everything eats everything out on the open ocean."
          But not in a cool way, Kyle thought.
         Apart from his tech and his skill at football, nothing about Salim was cool. At home he would never have been Kyle's friend. Kyle would probably have beaten him about a bit: he was geeky, had a big nose, couldn't get clothes right—all the wrong labels—and had no idea how to wear a beanie. He went to a weird religious school for an hour every afternoon and Fridays to the mosque down by the river steps where they burned the dead people. Really, they should not be friends at all. Ozzie Ryan, who'd been the team big one before Kyle, said it was unnatural and disloyal and you couldn't trust them; one moment they'd be giving you presents and the next they'd be setting you up for people out there to shoot you. Kyle knew Ozzie Ryan was just jealous.
         "Now, isn't this so cool?" Salim said, his toes brushing the wave tops. The sculpted upper surfaces of the great oceangoing jellies between the inflatable booms that held out the sails were bloated with bubbles, visibly swelling and bulging as Kyle floated around to a closer angle. Bigger, bigger, now the size of footballs, now the size of beach balls, stretching the skin until it split with a gush of acid-smelling liquid and a host of balloons dashed into the air. They rose in a mass, tethered to their parents by woven strands of tentacles, rubbing and bouncing and rebounding from each other in the wind; higher than the sail tops now and Kyle could make out detail: each balloon carried a cluster of stingers and translucent claspers beneath its domed canopy. Blue eyes were grouped in threes and fours. One by one their tethers parted and the balloon-jellies sprang up into the air and were whisked away on the sea breeze. All around him the flotilla was bubbling and bursting into spasms of balloons; they soared up around him, some still tangled together by the tentacles. Kyle found himself laughing as he watched them stream up into the sky until they vanished against the fast-moving clouds. It was definitely undeniably way way way cool.
         "It's a completely new way of reproducing," Salim said. "It's a new species!"
         Kyle knew what that