Who could ever make sense of such diversity? The captain sometimes expressed his ideas of ecos organization, of hierarchies, but was reluctant to explain in detail. “All tentative,” Keyser-Bach said at the end of one lecture, answering questions from the researchers and crew. “We know some things ... but not nearly enough.” And behind it all, the unproven theory of central queens or seed-mothers, perhaps reflecting human needs for answers more than any reality.
After a few days, I relaxed completely and let the process of my absorption into the crew become complete. I quickly learned respect for nearly everybody on board, and for the ship itself, which I had underestimated. It gave us few problems at sea, or no more than any ship made of inadequate and primitive materials. Only Shatro, the researcher, continued to leave me unimpressed. Bulky, with large but soft muscles, shorter than me, with a boyish face on a wide head, he was prone to worries and enthusiasms, suspicions and confidences, in equal measure. He seldom spoke to me, but I could never tell whether he would treat me with suspicion or say something light and cheerful. He never said anything of much consequence, either way. He had a habit of stating the obvious and then being embarrassed about it.
I could not yet judge his scientific ability.
While at sea, the crew followed the first mate's rules about sex scrupulously, but flirting was rampant, and some couples were beginning to pair off in ways that might as well have involved sex. Men took on women's tasks, and women conferred grooming favors: cutting hair, tending to slight wounds. Some men actually hid their cuts and contusions from Shatro, who acted as ship's doctor, and revealed them to sympathetic female friends in privacy. I learned quickly that many of the women had brought aboard special bags or small trunks containing medicines and sweet or pickled treats, which they doled out to the men they favored.
Shirla Ap Nam, the round-faced A.B., reserved most of her attentions for me, and it would have been out of character, not to say rude, for me to decline. In time, I decided to relax about these matters as well. I was young, my body was in command of its own reactions and not buffered by implants. The flow of time complemented the flow of my hormones, and I realized, with some surprise, that socializing was a bodily function, regulated by deep instincts.
Aboard Thistledown, most of us—and nearly all in the Geshel communities—had acquired so many layers of conscious control and supplemental intervention that it seemed, from my new perspective, we might have lost sight of our true animal natures. And that, of course, had been the point. We had risen above our instincts and the rough grind of history; we had given human society a new and smoother character.
The immigrants had both the best and the worst of their own unenhanced natures.
At first I found Shirla attractive, but not deeply so. I would as soon have had the attentions of one or two of the other women, but did not encourage them. Shirla was pleasant, however, and her conversation interesting enough. She did not seem to take our flirtation with deep seriousness, so we avoided private admonishments from Talya Ry Diem, who regarded it as her duty to keep the younger women from being hurt, as apparently she had been years before, by shipboard trysts, even unconsummated ones. For the ship was small enough (and the mate rat-nosed enough) that sneaking off in privacy for anything more was almost impossible.
Randall and the first mate often deferred male-female disciplinary problems to Ry Diem. And partly through her vigilance, the mate did not have to follow through on his muttered threats to put various over-demonstrative couples into compartments in the bilge.
To my surprise, Ry Diem took Kissbegh and Ridjel directly in hand. Soterio was glad to leave the two problem children to her half-tender mercies. Ry Diem, Sonia Chung, Seima Ap Monash, and the other women A.B.s gave the crew its final social structure—that of an extended family, with Ry Diem as surrogate mother and finally, Shankara and Meissner as surrogate fathers. The captain became a tough taskmaster, combination peculiar god and professor, and more than once did I hear Ry Diem threaten Kissbegh with a tree hearing—being called up before Keyser-Bach for whatever infractions had most recently occurred. Kissbegh always relented.
We traveled for three days in the sea-chopping westerly, then turned south south-east, coming within a mile of the eastern Sumner Coast, though still sailing in deep water. So little of the coast had been explored or named, that a thousand miles of it, filled with shallow bays and backed by deserts and hills, carried only one designation: Sumner, after Lenk's second economist, Abba Sumner, who had also laid out Calcutta.
The currents flowed dark and rich beneath the Vigilant, and in what little time I had to spare, I stood by the rail peering into the clear water. Keyser-Bach had finally gotten the crew used to a nightly round of lectures, and most recently we had discussed zone five pelagic scions. I saw them swimming close to the surface: massive piscids called eggplant sharks, ten to fifteen meters long, deep purple-blue with white spots, thick-bodied and trilaterally symmetric, with blunt mouthless noses and lines of knife-shaped bony fins sweeping from nose to screw-like tails. They spun slowly in the water as they glided beneath the Vigilant. We also saw bowfish like gigantic tied ribbons floating on a gift-wrapped sea, long red streamers trailing from their winglike fins fifteen or twenty meters behind. Tangled masses of arm-thick vine seemed substantial as rope, yet parted like soapsuds as the ship passed through them, and regrouped in our wake.
A storm inland had broken loose balloon-trees, close relatives of lizboo, according to Randall; on the third day, the gas-bag of one floated off the starboard beam, twisting slowly, rumpled and half deflated, in the currents. As I watched, coiling ropes and splicing a broken line with a marlinspike, piscids the size and rough shape of harbor seals but black and silver in color tore at the balloon vigorously with external fangs, called thorn-teeth by the captain, then sucked the shredded fragments into orifices along their sides. Getting a closer look at one near the ship, I saw no head or mouth as such, only broad paddle-shaped fins with sharp white claws, and in a line on each side, the little mouthlike openings with sky-blue interior tissues revealed. They swam swiftly both backward and forward with rapid swishes, reversing their fins. Some, Shimchisko and Ibert among them, believed the cucumber sharks and other large piscids would eat anything tossed into the water. Shankara believed they acted more as clean-up crews, and did not actually digest the fragments they swallowed, but carried them to special stations where they were processed.
According to the captain, predation between ecoi was rare between Elizabeth's Land and Petain, or at least quite formalized. “They watch, they spy constantly, sending thieves or samplers, usually in the air but also underground, or skimming across the river or ocean. Between zones, the boundaries are clearly marked, but on rare occasion, parties of mobile scions will cross in a tight herd, grab what they can of arborids or phytids, and return ... We do not know why. Perhaps the zones need to challenge each other. Perhaps it is a kind of sport...”
Shirla equated it with love bites, but I could not tell if she was serious.
6
As evening approached and my watch ended, with the day's work done and the ship rigged to slice on a beam reach across the strengthening northerlies, I leaned on the starboard rail amidships and studied the shore from our distance of five nautical miles. The high cliffs of this part of the eastern Sumner coast were split with deep U-shaped grooves that spilled boulder-strewn floors into the sea, then thrust sinuously inland. I judged glaciers had once cut these grooves. A scattering of rangy short arborids covered the mesas and plains, and between them, a velvety, patchy carpet of blue and brown phytids spread in gentle mounds like fuzz on a rotting peach. The sun had reached its vernal zenith four hours before and now fled steadily westward, gently warming my face and hands, brightening the cloudless skies to a chalky enamel blue, almost white above Elizabeth's Land. The air smelled round and sweet, unlike any air I had ever breathed before, and the ocean sang its liquid rhythms against the hull, a metronomic slap of waves and hissing
trill of swirling waters. Our wake fell astern in steady white smeared curves with a shiny roiling smoothness between, vanishing when the ship had advanced a few miles.
Randall strolled beside me and leaned on the rail, in a mood to talk. “We've been at sea a week,” he said. “The mate and I have kept our eyes on you.”
I nodded, unsure what to say.
“You told me you'd catch on fast, and you have. I'd swear you've sailed before.”
“I've dreamed of sailing all my life,” I said.
“You're the best apprentice on board, better than Shimchisko, even, and he's a decent fellow, though he does have a sharp tongue. You could go for your A.B. rate in short order if you wanted. I also notice you attend the captain's lectures no matter how tired you are.”
“They're fascinating.”
“Yes, well, he's a fine captain, but maybe the best scientist on La-marckia ... Or a close tie with Mansur Salap. We've traveled Tasman and Elizabeth and the Kupe Islands together for ten years now, at sea and ashore.” He let silence sit between us for several minutes, the sweet wind providing enough distraction. “It's your face that interests me, Ser Olmy. The apprentices, the A.B.s, they're familiar faces to me. I know their types. I have to judge people, and I think I'm good at it, but I cannot by face or Breath or Fate judge you.” He looked at me directly, elbows on the rail, hands clasped. “I swear you're older than you look and know more than you say.”
I raised my eyebrows to acknowledge these unwanted observations. First Larisa, then Thomas, now Randall. I seemed particularly transparent to these people.
“How do you feel you fit in with the crew?” he asked.
“Sir?”
“You don't scuffle, you don't argue, and you certainly don't aspire to a sailor's top bunk. You're calm and humble, Ser Olmy.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said. “I've made friends and taken advice. Listening makes me popular, I suppose.”
He laughed. “But you're hiding something.”
“Sir?”
“I suppose having your family proscribed does something to your spirit. Two years in the heart of Liz. Witness to atrocity.” He shook his head, then clucked his tongue in sympathy. “No easy way to return to the bosom of society. What I'm coming round to, Ser Olmy, is that when we put into Jakarta and Wallace Station and pick up Mansur Salap and our researchers, there will be a lot of work that requires more than a sailor's skills. We are short of trainable assistants, with sharp eyes and sharp minds. From the moment we picked up the children above Calcutta, you've impressed me. I'll watch you the next few days—don't let it make you nervous—and after we pass through Jakarta, I'll consider suggesting that you become an assistant to the researchers. I think we understand each other.” He nodded as if greeting the coast and said, “I love this stretch. So different from the silva around Calcutta.”
As the starboard watch ended, Shirla and Talya Ry Diem called together a circle of apprentices and A.B.s. Shirla took my elbow and pulled me into the circle, and Meissner brought out two long stringed instruments, each with two parallel rows of four strings suspended above two adjacent resonating hemispheres made from dried phytid fruit. These were kimbors, developed by the immigrants in the first few years after the Crossing. Meissner handed one to Ry Diem and began to tune one himself. Ry Diem hummed and sang a sequence of clear notes on a pentatonic scale, and all around the circle, others joined in, tuning themselves to the instruments and Ry Diem. Their voices seemed to cut through the wind.
Shirla put a xyla shoe on one bare foot, took Ry Diem's kimbor, set up a steady beat on the deck with the toe of the shoe, and thumbed the lower bole with her fingers. Immediately the crew in the circle began a high, singing chant. Meissner provided a booming bass line, sounding like a talented bullfrog. Shimchisko stood with hands outstretched and began a falsetto vocal. The hair on my neck stood up; I'd never heard anything like this. It sounded primeval, but very complex. I had no idea the Lamarckian immigrants had developed such a different style of music.
Shimchisko sang a list of names, starting with the people in the circle, then growing more and more exotic, until they became nonsense words. Others picked up with words that pleased them, and soon twelve voices wove in and out around each other, until the whole became far too complicated. The song collapsed in laughter, and Shirla thumped the deck rapidly five times with her shoe.
Next came a quiet ballad, sung by Shirla and Meissner, in clear words describing the sweet romance between a young lad and the personified Queen of Elizabeth's Zone. This was an old song, apparently, and its sentiment struck Shimchisko and several others deeply. Meissner's eyes filled with tears as Shirla described the inevitable end of the queen's love, and the suicide of the boy, who leaped from a cliff into the depths of an unknown silva.
The singing went on for two hours, punctuated by sips from a jug of mat fiber beer. Randall joined in toward the last, singing a song his mother had taught him, about children naming the scions they met in a newly settled silva. His voice was gravelly but well-modulated; they all sang well.
The evening ended with Leo Frey serving small sweet cakes. Keyser-Bach came down from the puppis, and Gusmao—the reclusive carpenter—joined us also, which brought a toast from Soterio to the craft rates. A.B.s toasted the captain and master, and Randall offered a toast to the apprentices, “Just growing in the ways of Lamarckia's seas.” Kissbegh in turned toasted Talya Ry Diem, “Who cracked my head early, and gives this ship spirit!”
Ry Diem actually blushed.
The stars came out from behind thin clouds. Head filled with the music, I rolled into my bunk.
The ship sailed around a barren, wind-whipped promontory called Cape Sadness. Five ships had been wrecked there, I heard from Shimchisko. The captain surveyed the cape with a telescope, looking for scion activity. The winds and sea were favorable this day, and we rounded the cape without incident.
Fifty miles south of Cape Sadness, with Jakarta only a hundred miles away, the captain came on deck, swearing and waving the ship's slate. “We're warned off!” he cried out to Randall and the mate. “I've just spoken to the disciplinary and the port rank. They say they've spotted raiding parties off the Magellan shore. They say the parties are looking to come in by night and fire the town, and they'll take any ship they find at sea. They're refusing all ships for the next few days ... just in case the town comes under siege. Damn them all ... that's just not pure!”
I listened from the mizzen top. The trio conferred, joined by the sailmaker, Meissner, and the senior A.B.s. I was distracted by a silver sparkle to starboard: pterids, glittering scions shaped like boomerangs and trailing long fringes, swooped and flapped over the blue foam-streaked waves, dipping their wings and fringes in the water, flipping, miraculously recovering their flight, zipping on to the next wave.
“We can sail on to Wallace Station,” Randall suggested, but the captain was not willing to settle for that.
“We have supplies and two more researchers waiting for us,” he said. “I'll be damned if I'll let a bunch of flip-chipping bureaucrats keep us out of port!” He clapped his hands together, face red and eyes reduced to angry slits. Then, as if with a passing storm, the captain's face cleared. He forcibly put his hands at his sides and said, “Even so, I'd hate to run into one of Beys's ships at this stage—or any stage.” His pacing grew more purposeful, energetic; he nodded, then grinned. “Yes, yesss,” he said. The men talked in lower voices, heads together, then retired to the puppis and below to the captain's quarters. The mate, Soterio, came on deck to take the master's place and stared at the apprentices and junior A.B.s with a dour eye.
I and three apprentices descended the ratlines and stood on deck, awaiting further orders.
“You know what that means, don't you?” Ibert cried out, slinging a rope end sharply at the deck.
Shirla slapped the young apprentice soundly on one arm and told him to keep his voice down. “We signed on for years at sea,” she said. “Don't ache for a last
day or two on land.”
“Not that at all,” Ibert grumbled, shouldering a coil of mat fiber rope.
“What, then?” Shirla asked.
“The best damned theater on Lamarckia,” Ibert said, stalking off. “And now I'll never see it.”
Shimchisko slung his leg over a spare yard. “Ibert loves the theater,” he said. “Live theater. Jakarta's famous for it.”
“I know that,” Shirla said, face screwed in irritation. “Such infants.”
The master emerged and conferred with the mate. “Close-haul!” Soterio shouted. “We'll anchor in the redwater at Sloveny Caldera.”
“Captain's going to wait them out,” Shimchisko said with some satisfaction. “Myself, I don't see why the towns are so aquiver.”
“You haven't been in a town that's been raided,” Kissbegh said.
“Have you?” Shimchisko asked, rushing for the shrouds at the master's second bellow.
“No,” Kissbegh said. “But I hear Ser Olmy has...”
I joined the apprentices aloft.
“Redwater,” moaned Shimchisko, hanging from the futtock shrouds upside down beneath the top. “Smells like a sewer in redwater.”
The ship sailed with the wind on the port quarter. We swiftly rounded a sea-jutting mountain covered with layered stripes of purple and red, as if painted with contours from an old topological map. The mountain, visible at sea for fifty miles, was cleft on its southwestern flank by an immense crater that seemed filled with thick, slowly waving hair; clouds streamed from the high, jagged rim of the crater. I did not have time to examine this sight in detail. The captain was on deck again, French the navigator by his side, steering the ship through narrow alleys between wave-smashed vine reefs. The sea swirled and sucked alarmingly just a few dozen meters from where the ship passed. Vines thrust above the waves and spread broad fans and bright red petals twenty or thirty meters wide, like enormous water lilies. The crew called them “castle flowers.”