The Silver Ship and the Sea

by Brenda Cooper

  Kayleen clapped her hands together. “I knew it was Joseph.”

  Tom looked puzzled, and gestured at the Fremont data reader he held in his right hand. “Well, he fixed more in one night than he would have been able to in three days before all this.” He narrowed his eyes. “Did Jenna teach him anything? Does it have something to do with that thing she gave him?”

  I shook my head. “I asked him the same question. He said no. Besides, remember? He was reading the nodes before we went with Jenna. She didn’t tell him anything about how to fix them except to suggest he stop being afraid—the same advice you’ve been giving him. She told me she can’t do it, that she’s as deaf to them as I am.”

  Tom frowned. “Yeah, we used to worry about her. Jenna seems to be able to slide through the perimeters as if they aren’t there—the altered all seemed to do that.” He paused. “Except you six. But we never found any evidence that she changed anything.”

  “We didn’t set off the alarms yesterday when we were with her.” Was Jenna honest with us about not reading data like Joseph and Kayleen? Or did she know some other trick?

  Tom just shook his head quietly. “I wish I knew how she did that. I better wake Joseph up and ask him about the nodes. Nava’s wanting some answers.”

  Kayleen stepped over near me and Paloma, and smiled up at Tom. “Isn’t this what she wanted? For him to fix things? Just tell her he did what she wanted and let him sleep. He’s exhausted.”

  Tom sighed and touched Kayleen’s shoulder lightly. “Maybe you’re right. It’s been a tough few days. Nava and Gianna are compiling a list of what’s fixed and what’s not. They’ll send it to me. I’ll call Nava back and confirm that Joseph did the fixing, and let her know he’s sleeping.” He started to turn away, then he glanced back at Paloma. “Here, I’ll help you back. Kayleen and Chelo can tend the hebras.”

  So I lost my chance to ask Paloma more questions, but gained a long-overdue opportunity to fill Kayleen in on our trip with Jenna. I took it, telling the story in order as we led the hebras out for food and water one at a time. Predictably, she asked a hundred questions I had no answer for. After we tied the last hebras back onto the line, she grinned at me, her eyes bright with excitement. “So, let me see the projector.”

  I glanced at the cabin. No movement. We stood behind the hebras, out of direct line-of-sight, and I slid the small box out of my pocket and handed it to her. She fingered it, and held it up. It appeared seamless. She immediately drew the same conclusion I had. “So, however this works, maybe the New Making works the same?”

  “It looks like it’s made out of the same stuff.” I showed her how to open it, how the data button nestled inside the box, fitting perfectly.

  She closed her eyes, holding the box in both hands close in to her belly, swaying gently. “I feel it. Like—but not like—our data. I felt it more when the box was open, as if the box itself hides some of the buttons…I don’t know what word to use. Attention? Signal?”

  “I still don’t feel anything from either.”

  She opened her eyes, an excited smile on her face. “Turn it on.”

  “Not here.” We would have to take some risks to use it at all. I’d been afraid to use it last night, even though the watch with Joseph would have been safe enough, in retrospect. “We need to come up with a reason to be away from Tom and Paloma.”

  “Well, let’s go pick berries.” She grinned, still excited, reminding me of Joseph the night before. “I’m hungry anyway. But we better ask. I’ll go.” She handed me back the projector and bounded toward the cabin. The uncomfortable feeling of widening deception felt only slightly weaker than the burning feeling of knowledge I’d wanted—no, needed—all my life, sitting in my pocket.

  Kayleen returned with two earsets and a backpack to carry the berries back in. “Tom sent these just in case we get into trouble.” She led. “Tom and I found three pongaberry trees yesterday. You can practice.”

  I groaned.

  She gave me a sly grin. “But you don’t have to take your shirt off.”

  “Good.” I followed her for almost ten minutes. We passed through the boundary, setting the exit bells ringing. It would be handy to have a way to pass barriers unheralded. Something else to ask Jenna about. We wound up a path lined with spiky green and gold trip-vine, stepping carefully to avoid being caught or scratched.

  Kayleen stopped at the base of the biggest of three pongaberry trees and kicked her shoes off. She had a silly grin on her face. “Race you?”

  I shook my head ruefully, kicking off my own shoes. Watching Jenna was one thing, but getting up the tree myself was sure to be another. The dun and dark brown bark ridges ran vertically, making for bad toeholds, and the trunk of the smallest tree rose a full twelve meters before there was a branch to grab. Sighing, I stood at the bottom of the tree, feeling the rough deadfall leaves and small branches through the soles of my bare feet. I set one hand on the tree, trying to remember how Jenna had started up.

  Kayleen called to me, and I glanced over to find her halfway up, her long feet acting almost like extra hands.

  I tried a little leap up the tree trunk. One foot found barely acceptable purchase and the other slid off, pulling me down to my knees. I tried again, with nearly the same result, then stood still, eyeing the tree. It had to be about strength and balance. Jenna had been almost vertical. I started over, my belly near the rough bark, using both of my hands to grab halfway around the bole. That way, I managed a full two meters before I lost it and fell down, stinging the soles of my feet.

  Kayleen waved at me from the bottom of the branches of her tree, her face framed in the wide green and yellow leaves, laughing.

  I made it ten meters, and stopped, stuck, afraid to go back down, unsure how to go up. My arms twitched and shivered at the strength required to hold on. Kayleen called down, “Relax.”

  I closed my eyes. Surely this wasn’t as hard as it looked, as it felt. Jenna did it with one arm. I could do it with two. I started back up, slowly, carefully, one step, another, another, keeping my belly close to the tree. I didn’t look up or down, just at the bark in front of me, picking out the imperfections in color and the places wood-ants or summer moths nested.

  I counted breaths and slow unsure steps.

  My head bumped something hard. A branch. I reached up, found a firm grip, and climbing became easier, stepping in the cracks where the branches met the trunk, pulling up, finally enclosed in so many wide green leaves and broad branches they got in my way. The end of each leaf sported a nasty thorn, and one raked across my shoulder, drawing a thin bead of blood. I looked around. No pongaberries.

  Kayleen now stood at the bottom of my tree. “Up and to your left.”

  I followed her directions, finally locating a big bunch of berries. Looking past them, I saw the meadow, then picked out the hebras and the line of smoke from the cabin’s fire. The midday sun danced on the lake and reflected points of light all along the streams that cut through the valley. I glanced down, and wished I hadn’t. Kayleen looked very small.

  I reached for the stem, pulling, tugging harder than I expected to have to. The stem separated from the branch with a snap and I nearly lost my balance, nearly dropped the berries. I stuck the stem in my teeth, like Jenna had, and headed down-trunk. Down was easier, but even so, I earned two new scratches on my right forearm and slipped the last few meters. Kayleen had to catch me to keep me from landing on my butt. Lucky for her, she had the good grace to hold her face neutral, and say, “Good job.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief to see her holding two bunches of fat purple berries. We had enough.

  We sat near each other on the ground, the berries next to us, and I slipped the box out of my pocket and showed Kayleen how to turn it on. It still held the button Jenna had placed in it in the cave, and the first image to shimmer into being was of Silver’s Home. “That’s the place we saw in the cave, Kayleen, the planet Jenna called Silver’s Home.”

  Kayleen—eyes rou
nd with amazement—watched tiny silver ships like New Making fly through the air three feet in front of us, above the image of the strange planet; constructs of light with no substance. The projection drew my attention from Kayleen, from the world around me, so that, like Kayleen, I watched closely, entranced.

  We saw a planet full of energy and people and ships, a planet that was owned by our people, like Fremont was owned by its predators and its wildness.

  There was no sound until Kayleen found a way to stroke the box to produce a narrator’s voice that spoke softly into the mountain-fern and redberry that surrounded us. It took me a moment to be sure it was our language. The accent was a little off, the vowels more rounded, the words spoken faster than we spoke. Enough words were entirely unfamiliar that I couldn’t pull meaning from the monologue.

  At first, it appeared to be an encyclopedia description, like we had seen in school about some of the original human worlds: Deerfly, Green Sands, and historical Earth. The voice described population (two and a half billion—a number higher than anything we had counted except stars), and then it talked about trade, like between us and the roamers. Silver’s Home apparently sold information and education relating to genetically modified people like us, including training and databases. They manufactured ships and weapons in low orbit and on one of their two moons; hence the vast multitude of ships moving around the planet like moths congregating to a candle flame.

  What they bought was less clear, but seemed to be related to information and visitors to the world who came to study there.

  I was keenly aware of time passing. How long before Tom and Paloma decided we’d been gone too long? I reached for the box to turn it off, but Kayleen blocked my hand and shook her head furiously. “No. Wait. You worry too much. We’ll say you were learning to climb pongaberry trees. Look—it’s showing individual people.”

  A series of images marched briefly across the air; the narrator talked about each one for only a few sentences each. I didn’t understand most of the words. “No. It’s not individuals. It’s types.” I pointed at an image of a tall woman with four arms. “Watch.” The next image was equally tall, with only two arms, and something that looked like the wings of a bird. A third image was shorter, with bunched powerful muscles in the shoulders and thighs. It could have been Bryan, only drawn with every difference between him and the original humans exaggerated.

  I stopped for a moment to look around, half hoping Jenna would show, afraid I’d see Tom’s round face peering out from behind a tree, watching us. I hadn’t even been listening for predators, and we were beyond the boundary.

  “I think you’re right,” Kayleen mused. “It’s a display of available genemods. Some of those pictures could match the altered we’ve heard about from the war.”

  When we saw a hairless woman with two eyes in the back of her head, I felt sure we were on the right track. They were all ugly, except maybe the woman with four arms, who had her own gentle grace. I looked down at my hands. We were not nearly so alien as the images in front of us. These were the monsters who had fought for Artistos. Or our brethren who had fought for Artistos. I remembered when we camped on the beach and I saw traces of a fight, and wanted both sides to have been safe. But we had not been made as different as these people. I was glad of that, but why? So we’d fit in here?

  Kayleen leaned forward, watching the play of light closely as image after image paraded in front of her eyes. I passed my hand between her eyes and a figure with elongated arms and legs. “We have to go.”

  She nodded, still focused on the projected image.

  I reached around and turned the reader off. “We’ll find some more time soon.”

  “This is going to be hard,” she said. “We don’t have time to just watch random images.” She stood up, brushing dirt from her pants, and bent to slip her shoes back on. “We’ll never get what we need moving this slowly. Not even if we have all day to watch.”

  “I know.” I slid my own shoes on and slipped the box back into the relative safety of my pocket. Maybe Joseph had made progress. “Do you think you could navigate the way you follow the data from the nodes?”

  “It didn’t work. I’m seeing this, not feeling it inside me. I didn’t see an interface, or a list of contents, or search boxes.” She picked up two bunches of berries. “But there has to be something else if Jenna can use the projectors. We’ll just have to figure it out.”

  We stuffed the berries in the pack and raced back, jumping over logs, chasing each other, tossing the pack back and forth as if it were a ball. Playing.

  As we walked into the cabin, we held up our pongaberry haul triumphantly, only to find Joseph and Alicia still sound asleep. Tom and Paloma sat quietly, talking. We passed around berries, saving some for the sleepers. The sweet berry smell permeated the cabin. After eating our fill, I jumped back up. “We’re going to brush the hebras. Come get us when they wake up.”

  Tom nodded, and Kayleen and I went outside. “Search terms…” she mused.

  Warmed by sunshine and slightly sleepy from night watches, we brushed mud from the hebras’ coats, boosting each other up on their backs to get at their long necks. I started with Legs, working in silence. Then I leaned against Ink’s side. “I want to know why the altered even came here in the first place. What did they want, except to live here?”

  Kayleen picked up my thoughts. “Fremont’s not prime real estate. The databases talk about hundreds of better planets, or at least planets that are easier to live on than this one. The original humans came here because they wanted someplace no one else wanted. But why did the altered come? And why were they willing to get in a war, to die, to stay here?”

  I hesitated a moment. “Maybe they wanted something they could only get here?” I turned back to Ink, quietly brushing her belly and down her legs, picking at matted mud.

  “The most useful thing to know,” Kayleen proclaimed while she sat backward on Sand, brushing her rump awkwardly, “would be how to get into the New Making. There must be tons of information there, maybe whole databases.”

  “I’d like to do more than get in it. I’d like to fly it.”

  Kayleen snorted. “And where would we go? Do you want to go to Silver’s Home? We’re not weird enough. To Deerfly? We’re too weird.”

  “I don’t know.”

  Kayleen boosted me up onto Stripes’s back. Stripes swiveled her head to watch me, bending close enough that her hot breath warmed my stomach. I scratched her ears with the bristles and used my fingers to comb out her beard.

  We knew Bryan’s parents were dead, but we knew nothing about the rest of them. Surely there were records. Surely Jenna knew, at least some of it. It wasn’t lost on me that she could answer most of our questions directly, but was making us hunt the answers on our own.

  We finished the hebras, hurrying back in to find Joseph and Alicia still asleep. My sleepy brother had slept long enough. I busied myself repacking and folding and finding small ways to make noise. Paloma laughed at me, catching on, then joined in, singing and stacking the wood next to her noisily. Even Tom seemed to be hiding a smile, though he was intent on his data reading device, taking notes.

  Alicia woke up first, sitting up and pushing her tangled dark hair into some sense of order behind her shoulders. “I’m starved,” she mumbled, glancing out the window. “How did it get so late?”

  “You were up until dawn,” Paloma said.

  “Oh, that’s right.” Alicia flopped back down, only to bounce up for a handful of pongaberries Kayleen offered her. Then she did the rest of my work for me, luring Joseph up with two berries she waved under his nose. He swiped at her with one hand, but took one of the berries with the other and joined her in pushing back the blankets.

  Tom watched Joseph speculatively as he and Alicia headed outside. As soon as they came back in, Tom asked, “So…what did you do last night?”

  Joseph peered at Tom through half-open sleepy eyes. “You sound as if I’ve done something bad,” he m
umbled.

  Tom’s eyes narrowed. “No. But everything seems to be working around here. Rather suddenly.”

  “Well?” Joseph cocked an eyebrow. “That’s what you wanted, right?”

  Tom stood up, poured himself a cup of tea, and palmed two more berries out of the pile we’d been saving for Alicia and Joseph. His voice didn’t have the anger he’d shown me on the path this morning, but he didn’t seem particularly pleased either. “I just don’t know how you did so much. I checked the local nodes yesterday while you were out rounding up hebras, and you were right—three of them did work, barely, but they weren’t talking to the Artistos net at all. This morning, Nava called me and said every single node that they don’t think is physically broken works better than it ever has before. She’s not getting any dropped data. None. I’m just…surprised, I guess.”

  Alicia clapped her hands together softly, drawing everyone’s attention. “Isn’t that what you wanted?” She looked exasperated, her dark hair a tangled mess, her lips a thin line in her narrow face. “It’s like hunting. You wanted Joseph to hunt if he could flush beasts for you, but when Chelo and Joseph, and surely the rest of us, can kill for ourselves, you don’t like it.” Her voice rose, almost scolding. “You don’t like it at all. You wanted Joseph to learn to fix nodes again, and you tried really hard to help him. I know, I saw you.”

  She paused, rubbing her hands together, holding Tom’s eyes with her own. Tom sat up straighter than a moment before, his arms crossed over his torso as if warding off Alicia’s words. His eyes looked like he wanted to laugh, while his crossed arms and stern expression told me he was frustrated with her.

  She continued, her voice now almost defiant, but shaky. “And now he can, and I can tell by how you’re sitting, how your voice is, everything, that you don’t like this either.” Her bottom lip trembled. “And you’re the two people Chelo tells me are the most sympathetic to us. If this is what I can expect in Artistos, I’d be better off by myself somewhere, where I can be as strong as I want to be, as fast as I can, as capable…” She put her hands up over her face and turned toward the wall, away from Joseph, away from the rest of us.