Reading the Wind (Silver Ship)

by Brenda Cooper

  We shouldered our wet packs and chose a faint animal path near the tree-lined river and followed that up, watching for a good ford. Liam and I stopped regularly and recorded information about the various tracks we saw, while Kayleen stuck close to Windy and kept watch.

  We rounded a long slow corner of the path by a bend in the river, coming upon a gush of white steam-clouds pouring up from a crevice between two rocks. The sour-egg sulphur smell became so strong as we neared the steam that I started breathing through my mouth, which was only slightly better. It left an aftertaste. As we neared the steam, heat turned our faces red, and Windy pranced and threw her head up and down. We stopped a few meters from the source, unwilling to get closer. “What is that?” I asked.

  Liam looked at it. “Akashi told me it probably means there’s magma—hot, liquid rock like the fire river, down there. And water. The molten rock and water fight—hence the steam.”

  I looked down at my feet, shifting uneasily. The rock I stood on felt firm, but how far down was the hot rock? I’d seen the Fire River, at least from the air. Could I slip and fall into a fire stream?

  Liam caught my look and elaborated. “This whole continent was made from active volcanoes. I guess they both were, but Islandia is geologically younger. We’ve found hot springs—warm water pools—and steam vents like this all along one of Rage’s flanks.” He eyed the hole in the rocks, his lower lip twitching. “Akashi worries about them and doesn’t let us camp near them, although I’ve never seen any noticeable changes, and we haven’t recorded any as far as I know.”

  Kayleen asked, “What does Akashi mean by ‘near?’”

  We’d noticed a few of these from the top of the ridge, so the valley must be pockmarked with them. “We won’t be able to stay far away if we decide to live here,” I said.

  “There might not be anyplace here that doesn’t have any,” Liam mused.

  The idea of standing on something like the Fire River made me nervous. “We don’t have to camp right by one.”

  Liam laughed. “We won’t.”

  We worked our way around the hole in the ground and kept going north.

  Near the head of the valley, the ground became rockier. The river narrowed and deepened, rushing through a shallow gorge. The trees clustering around the river towered over our heads. The brush grew longer thorns, so we had to pick our way more slowly.

  “Should we turn back yet?” I asked.

  Liam, just ahead of me, stopped and turned around. “No. Hear that?”

  I listened. A low rush of sound spilled from the trees above and in front of us. “Waterfall,” I said.

  Liam grinned. “I bet that’s worth seeing.”

  The sound called me, too, and I picked up speed. We clambered up a slender trail between several large boulders, Liam ahead, then Kayleen and Windy, then me. The waterfall filled the air with sound, so I lost track of the tap of Windy’s feet and even my own breathing. The air felt damp, and tiny sun-sparkled water droplets gathered on the ends of my hair. At the top of the biggest boulder, Liam turned and grinned. We scrambled up, all four of us standing on a slightly damp, slightly slippery, but thankfully flattish gray rock. Ahead and above us, the river thundered off the top of a cliff and fell a hundred meters in a long, slightly curved arc to land in a pool of water at our feet. Across from us, the same herd of tall herbivores I’d seen the day before grazed in a clearing.

  I breathed out slowly, soaking in the beauty of the waterfall and the beasts. Vines covered with red flowers plunged down the cliff opposite us, like a second fall of flowers rather than water. The lush green of early spring growth screamed from every corner. It was a pocket valley of its own, a few hundred meters long and almost as wide.

  Liam looked at Kayleen, his eyes sparkling. He pointed at the wide clearing the herd grazed in. “They think it’s relatively safe.”

  Kayleen’s face shone. “Then perhaps we’ve found a home.”

  Liam looked down at her, his lips pursed. “A temporary home. You’re taking us back. In time for the roamers’ fall visit to town.”

  She blinked up at him. “If we get the skimmer free.”

  “When we get the skimmer free.” He looked back at the waterfall and the secret little valley, his eyes, too, alight. “It sure is beautiful.”

  Maybe this was what the three moons had promised us. But I still shivered inside, remembering the golden cat, the demon dogs, the sleepless night in the rain. The three of us were small and fragile compared to those, or even to the powerful waterfall in front of us.

  PART TWO

  JOSEPH GOES HOME

  11

  THE DEAD, WAKING

  Metallic air seared my nostrils. Pain, bringing me back from someplace very far away, someplace past memory. I tried to say my name—Joseph—but my mouth wouldn’t move. I couldn’t even feel it, much less control it. I felt my right little toe. Just my right little toe, tingling. I reached out with it, struggling to touch something. It moved, but found only empty space. My heel touched the hard bed below me. Dampness filled my toe, the top of my foot, my ankle, a slow pulsing wave of blessed water anointing me with life from inside. I gasped. My chest jerked involuntarily.

  I was … this was … the New Making. My reawakening.

  Water crept into my fingers and the pads of my palms, filling them. Dry eyes and nose and mouth told me how much freezing had parched my cells. Grit glued my eyelids shut. I struggled to open them and failed.

  Memories returned. I’d tricked Jenna before I slept, dipping into the ship’s systems, changing when the New Making’s med-bots would wake me. I should have three days alone.

  There were things I needed to know. My parents had been on this ship; traces of them lived in its databanks. But Jenna had refused all my questions, driving us through getting the ship in order after we took off, and then insisting on cold sleep. I couldn’t risk having no time before we landed.

  I gave up on my eyelids after one more struggle and settled for moving both of my index fingers.

  Had I been caught? Was Jenna awake? If so, was she angry?

  I sensed the deep thrum of ship’s data just outside my skin, hovering separate from my consciousness. I felt so dry. If I had enough water, would data surge inside my skin and fill me?

  Chelo would disapprove of me tricking Jenna. I could see Chelo’s face now, her dark hair pulled back tightly so her dark eyes looked bigger than normal, glaring at me, her stare a combination of anger and big-sister concern. Chelo’s lips would be tight against each other, and she’d have one hand on her hip. And yet there’d be a smile trying to get out. Knowing how Chelo would hate it, tricking Jenna didn’t feel good.

  But Chelo wasn’t here. I closed away the missing part of me she represented. She’d made her choice. I understood, but understanding and accepting weren’t the same.

  I wiped my eyes, clearing away junk, ripping eyelashes, blinking at the small, spare room. A groan escaped me as I reached my right arm out, grabbing my pilot’s coat from the chair nearby, draping it across my chest. What I needed, direct contact. My fingers found a strip of threaded conductor. Finally, data filled my blood, as good as water. Better. Data raced through my being, spoke to my heart.

  Something scraped on the floor near me; adrenaline surged. I turned my head. Leo. My pet maintenance bot, adopted at Jenna’s insistence to keep me safe on the ship. Waiting where I’d told it to, ripping a small smile from my cracked lips.

  My eyes slid closed again. I descended into the shipsong, riding it, building it back into my body. Bots reporting. Mostly well: enough well. A miracle, given we had no human roboticist. Food enough in the tiny garden, freezers still working, air breathable everywhere. Engines clean and silent, still running fast: three weeks from landing on Silver’s Home.

  Where was Jenna?

  Asleep in her frozen bed. Maybe far away, like I had been.

  I experimented with a long stretch. My toes touched cool metal, my back arched into the stretch, my torso ro
se. Everything slow, a half-beat behind the time I thought the commands to move.

  Alicia. Sweet, dark, dangerous Alicia. I licked my lips. Her frozen signature showed proper, complete stasis. I imagined Alicia’s dark eyelashes framing her violet eyes. Maybe I should wake her? I wanted her with me, but it was doubtful that I could control her. Best not wake her yet; Jenna would already be mad.

  The vast emptiness of the ship surrounded me, and I sent my senses into the lullaby of the shipsong, the test:report, test:report, test:report of sliding successfully through space.

  Some time later I blinked easily and felt normal, except for a driving urge to stretch every muscle in my body at once. I did my best to manage the feat, ending up seated cross-legged with my coat across my lap.

  Thirst drove me to the tiny sink in the corner. I downed three glasses of water, shaking fingers splashing it onto my shirt. Each glass made me feel freshly alive, more able to move. Water like oil for my joints.

  I let the data flows fall to a soft cadence, something I would hear only when trouble or change happened. Jenna had taught me that trick in the three months we spent awake, alone. She was as deaf to data as Chelo, but also like Chelo, she knew how to get me started, how to steady me. Jenna also knew what tools to provide. She encouraged me to learn the ship’s computer, which she called Starteller, even though she told me it wasn’t a true autonomous intelligence. But she talked to it all the time through her voice and her fingers, or with a far tinier and more elegant earset than the simple ones used by Fremont’s colonists.

  I spoke to it in gulps, in ideas, in floods of information.

  Starteller was smarter than anything on Fremont. Heck, the ship’s galley was smarter than anything on Fremont. I laughed, my lips cracking. Maybe smarter than anyone. What a strange waking thought.

  I rested, checking on the other three again: not breathing, maybe not being. Leo sat next to me as if it were a dog instead of a robot. In fact, Leo was the same size as some of the roamers’ smaller dogs, except round and silver with six spidery legs. From time to time I reached a hand out and ran it over Leo’s slick surface. It felt like oil more than metal, except hard. I told it, “Good Leo. I’m glad you’re here.” It had no visible ears, but it heard me.

  Leo read data much like me, pulling it from the air, and so it followed my silent commands and knew to step aside when a person or another robot moved in its path, as if it were omniscient. But really, Leo was fairly stupid, with a small set of a few thousand commands it could perform on its own in response to its original job as a simple maintenance and patrol bot.

  I was glad for its company, even if it was stupid.

  Even though a map of the New Making lived inside me, I asked Leo to lead the way to my parents’ quarters. With six appendages, it walked upright along the corridors on four, using two to balance on the handholds. When it got ahead of me, it stopped and waited for me. It never chided; like all robots it simply waited, emotionless. Nevertheless, I took each stop as encouragement to move faster.

  My body grew less clumsy the more I made it move. It felt different on the ship than at home—lighter—but Jenna maintained what she called “living gravity” everywhere except in the ship’s nose, so I climbed easily up or down levels, and walked through horizontal corridors.

  In my head, New Making lived like ten buildings stacked on top of each other. The bottom two were engines and workrooms, the next one a storage hold full both of things to colonize Fremont but never used, and of the scientific fruit of Fremont, gathered mostly before the war. Rocks, minerals, seeds, and some of the glass, weavings, and jewelry made on long winter nights in town. Things my people had brought, things my people had made; I had ties to both people, to both sides of the war I am too young to remember.

  Above the hold, the garden level also had room for labs and experiments and a ship’s hospital half as big as ours back in Artistos—three rooms and a storeroom. Just above, in the level of the frozen, Jenna and Alicia and Bryan waited.

  The first level of crew’s quarters sat above the frozen. After that, the common level, which included the Command Room, then another set of crew’s quarters, and everything above served as labs and storage, except the very nose of the ship, which was weightless and could become an escape pod.

  I commanded Leo to take me to the higher of the two crew quarter levels. It led me up to the doorway to the living quarters, then slid through, stopping just beyond so that I could still see one long arm trailing in the open door, as if it were saying, “I’m waiting for you.”

  Red and green and yellow pipes and dark blue handholds covered the walls, a chaos of physical plant designed to support the fifty people who could live here. New Making could support up to two hundred people, fifty on each living level, as long as half were always frozen.

  I pushed past Leo and went through a door on the right, following directions gleaned from Starteller’s records. Each set of rooms could serve twelve or thirteen people. Shared bathrooms and galley space clustered near the ship’s center. The outer walls were lined with rooms big enough for one or two, for sleeping and storing personal effects.

  The common seating between the galleys and the sleeping spaces stood empty. Chairs clustered as if waiting for conversations. I passed through them to the sleeping rooms. My parents had shared the one at the end.

  Their bed filled the wall opposite me. A gold coverlet embellished with a planet and seven moons had been laid neatly across it. A picture of Fremont. Had my mother made it to display her dreams of her new home?

  Closed cupboards lined one wall, tempting me. But first, I lay across the bed. Inhaling deeply, I struggled to find some human smell, something left of their energies. But the room did not smell of people, just of the sterile ship’s air touched with garden smells, metals, and oils.

  I swung my feet from the bed and reached for the cupboard and pulled open the doors. There were four squared shelves. The bottom two held clothes. I left them for now, looking in the others. The top two were smaller. The left one must have belonged to my mother. A metal necklace of bright silver set with shimmering beads lay next to matching earrings, delicate and simple, pinned to a soft deep blue cloth. Beside them lay a tray with a mirror, a hairbrush, and a blue painted box strapped to it.

  I carefully loosed and lifted out the box and opened its lid to find it stuffed full of papers and pens. I took out the papers. Drawings. Drawings of people, and of plants. Some people in her drawings had obvious genemods—a woman with wings, an over-muscled strongman, a man with four arms. I found one drawing from Fremont, a picture of a hebra, quite well done, with the long neck and beard, the head swiveled as it looked behind itself.

  Half the drawings were delicately rendered pictures of a handsome man with long dark hair, blue eyes, and a broad smile. He looked as normal as I did, with no obvious mods. The hand that rendered the portraits had been tender, showing intimate moments such as the man looking up at the stars or sitting on a couch, relaxed, watching the artist.

  Surely this was my father. Who else would she have drawn so often? I spread the drawings out on the bed, looking from one to the other. His eyes were set wider than mine, but I had his chin, his easy smile. An ache spread in my throat. “Leo? What do you think? Am I like him?” I thought for a moment that my words had fallen on deaf ears, but Leo did leave its post at the door and come sit by the foot of the bed.

  The right-hand cubby wasn’t as neat. It held a brush, a headband full of data threads like the one of his Jenna had given me on Fremont. I took it out and ran it through my fingers. The threads woven into the band were bright purple and blue and gold, and the leather had become stiff from disuse. I worked it between my hands until it became slightly more pliable, then pocketed it.

  Near the back, I saw a little carved wooden box. I lifted the lid and found a data button nestled in soft velvety-red material. I took it out, palming it, and sat back down on the bed.

  The first data thread I followed proved to be se
ts of still pictures, clearly labeled with names and places and times. The years were high: 568, 571. We were on Fremont year 224 when we left. We counted ours from the settling of Fremont—perhaps they counted from the settling of Silver’s Home?

  I recognized some of the same people my mother had drawn. The seventh picture showed my mother and father when they were about twenty-five, around ten years older than I was now, or at least had been when we left Fremont. They stood against a railing, both smiling, my father’s arm around my mother’s shoulder. In the picture, he seemed sparer than in the drawings, maybe younger?

  My father stood tall and slight, with legs that looked built for running. His physical genemods might have simply been to build a perfect athlete’s body. My mother appeared to be a taller and just slightly older version of Chelo. Thin and strong, with a squared jaw, an intense look, and small breasts and hips. She, too, could be a runner, or maybe a climber. Her biceps and the muscles of her forearms made ridges under her dark brown skin. Her hair was long and straight, braided to fall on one side. Chelo sometimes braided her hair like that, and I wondered if it was from a memory of our mother. The photo was labeled David and Marissa Lee.

  Marissa.

  I hadn’t known her name. I said it three times to myself. “Marissa, Marissa, Marissa.” My voice was swallowed in the emptiness of the tiny room, the larger crew quarters, the great ship, itself tiny amongst the stars.

  A tear splashed onto my hand, startling me. I had cried before, at the foot of the New Making on the Grass Plains, and in the dark of the night, bawling because they abandoned us. Maybe it was being in their space, actually knowing what they looked like, that they’d had lives of their own, but these tears felt different, tears for them instead of tears for me. What had they experienced on Fremont, what had it cost them to leave us?

  In the picture, my mother looked up at my father’s face, as if admiring his nose or the turn of his jaw.

  There was more, but for now, this bittersweet picture left me full.