Reading the Wind (Silver Ship) (20 page)

He watched me, his eyebrows slowly climbing toward his hairline. “Slow down. Your body is starved, but you should never overfill it.” He sipped his drink, and I noticed he had taken only a bite of bread. Disciplined. My cheeks burned lightly.

Marcus sipped his own col, a satisfied expression on his face. He seemed both strong and completely at peace.

Would I ever have that sense of coiled calm? I ached for Alicia, for Bryan, for Jenna. For Chelo. I wanted freedom, but surely I was more trapped now than the birds in Marcus’s garden. “So where do we start?” I asked.

He held up a hand. “I know you have questions to ask me. First, I need to learn enough about you to design your first few days of training. Tell me about yourself and about Fremont. Start with your oldest memories.” He settled back in his chair, watching me closely.

So I told him about growing up a spoil of war, about losing Steven and Therese, about being taunted and threatened, and Bryan’s beating.

At that, Marcus fell silent. After a few moments, he prodded. “Tell me more about the other children like you.”

Should I tell him about all of us? I glanced at his face, his eyes. They didn’t hold anything mean. Secrets, surely. Secrets I wanted to learn. And Jenna trusted him. I chewed my lip, unsure how much to reveal.

He took one of the yellow fruits, biting into it slowly. Waiting.

“I already told you about Bryan. Alicia had it worst, though. She was adopted by a band who hated us, with a leader who had lost her family in the war. Her
parents
locked her up like an animal once.” My hand shook, showing my anger, spilling a little of the hot drink on the table.

I wiped it up, refocusing, then looked at Marcus. “Some people were fair to us, some our friends, but we scared most of them. Some
people hated us because of the war—because of family members they’d lost. But it wasn’t our fault. We were just babies then.”

Anger flashed in his eyes. He masked it, his cool stare returning. At least he cared. He took a deep breath. “Tell me more about the colony.”

“It’s small, a few thousand people. There’s only one city, Artistos. Most people live there. There are two roamer bands—scientists, really—that come and go. They’re each over a hundred strong. One had Alicia and hated her, and one had Liam and loved him.”

Marcus drew me out with questions, asking about the bands and how people lived day to day, little things like where we got our water from (the river) and what we built houses out of (wood and metal) and about what we wore (woven hemp, djuri and goat hide, goat’s wool).

“Where was Jenna?” he asked.

“People tried to kill her for years, but they weren’t strong enough or fast enough, even a lot of them together. She lived outside town, and she finally made a truce by killing the paw-cats and demon dogs and yellow snakes that got inside the boundaries. She dumped their bodies in the park. She was too strong and too smart for them to kill, and she taught people to need her.” I remembered how she’d looked the few times she came into town, her hair a long uneven braid from having to catch it back with one hand, clad in paw-cat hide, wild and damaged and free. “All that with one arm and one eye missing. When I was very little—around seven or eight—I wanted to live by her side in the wild more than I wanted anything except to fly the ship.”

He raised an eyebrow at that and almost laughed, pleasure touching his eyes. “So, Jenna learned to be innovative. That might be good for her—she used to stick to rules and tradition as if her life depended on it.”

“She’s not like that, now. People have to watch out for her.”

Marcus just laughed. “Why do you think Jenna stayed around town?”

“To help us. She taught us a lot, mostly by making us learn things. She saved a skimmer and a bunch of other technology, and eventually she gave me one of my father’s old headbands full of data threads and enough clues to figure out how to use it. She saved up a bunch of—our—technology.”

He pursed his lips, and turned his questions back to more general ones about Fremont and Artistos. After an hour or so, he suggested a short break and we cleaned up from breakfast. He led me to a bench in the garden.

A palm-sized butterfly with a rainbow pattern on its wings flitted over and landed on my arm. Marcus glanced at it. “That’s one of my first creations that bred true—I call them light link butterflies. I was about your age when I designed those.” The butterfly took off, hovering for a moment in the air. Together, we watched it fly to a bush twice my height and disappear into bright blue and green flowers. Marcus turned back to me.

He settled himself comfortably, one long leg crossed over the other. “Now, tell me about your relationship with data. How did you first learn you could feel it differently than other people?”

Chelo had told me the story so many times I had no idea if I remembered the actual events or her side of them. “I was young, maybe five, and Chelo seven. We were in Commons Park, in the middle of town, playing catch. I remember knowing something was wrong, feeling off balance and suddenly scared. And then I knew what it was—and I said the word. ‘Demons.’ Chelo knew I was scared—she can always tell what I feel—and she knelt down next to me, and then the bells pealed for demon dog entry and people ran by us to find the pack and get it out of town.”

“What do you do to access data on purpose?”

“At first, I had to go almost into a trance. Chelo helped me by being near. She isn’t a Wind Reader herself, but she took care of me.” I closed my eyes, breathing in the smell of foreign dirt and different plants, momentarily homesick.

“Chelo is a full sister? Where is she now?”

I nodded. “She’s back on Fremont.” Years distant. If I left now, it would take three years to get back.

“It was easier for you with her nearby?”

I rose to stretch, turning away from him, not wanting Marcus to see how lost I felt without her.

Apparently he didn’t need to see. His voice, which had been all business, softened. “You must miss her. Sometimes family is designed
to support each other, and that must have been how your parents designed you and Chelo.”

Jenna had told us a little back at Fremont’s spaceport, and told me more on the ship. “We were designed to be a team. Liam and Chelo to lead and support, both capable of either, me and Kayleen as Wind Readers, Bryan to be physically strong and thoughtful, and Alicia to keep us on our toes, to take risks. There were more, but they died in the war.” I remembered a story Paloma and Tom told us once, in the tent. “One of them died in Jenna’s arms when she got blown up. I only know about the others because Jenna told us.” I sat back down next to him. “I do miss Chelo. I want to go back for her.” I shifted, looking at him. “Jenna could help some, but she never fit as well as Chelo. But I don’t really
need
either of them to access data anymore—just for other things. The data threads that Jenna gave me made me stronger. When I wore the headband, I could do things when I was awake that I couldn’t even do from a trance before that—I could feel the whole network—everything.” I had felt so powerful then. Lord of a tiny trickle of data, compared to the relentless flow here. “After a while, I didn’t even need the physical data threads anymore.”

He blinked at me, looking surprised, but didn’t say anything.

“I could manipulate their nets, turn them on and off, hear almost everything they said. And they couldn’t sense me doing it, couldn’t prove it was me.”

He rolled his eyes. “Is that why you had to leave?” he asked.

“No.” My cheeks grew hot again. “Well, maybe partly. But mostly we left because Alicia picked a fight with Town Council, and Jenna wanted to come home. But I wanted to go, too. I wanted to fly the ship. It had been sitting there all that time. And when Jenna told me I could fly it, I knew I had to.”

He laughed. “It’s probably in your blood. And I mean more than just the nanocytes. What did flying the ship feel like?”

I blushed. “It’s even better than sex.”

He threw his head back and laughed even harder. “Did you ever tell your girlfriend that?”

“Of course not!”

He was still laughing, not at me, but kindly. It felt like laughing
with a friend, like something man to man passing between us. The warmth stayed in his voice as he asked, “So, now I know it felt like the best thing ever, but what was it like to fly? What did the data feel like?”

I sat back down next to him. “It wasn’t as easy as the nets on Fremont. I had to stay close to trance on the ship, because there was so much more there—more data than in all of Artistos. The coat helped.”

He nodded. “You’re lucky that nothing unexpected happened when you landed. That’s why I waited until you came down in one piece.”

I bristled a little at that. “I wasn’t fully stretched. I could have done more.”

“Pride,” he said dryly, “might be your best friend or your worst enemy. You can’t handle our nets yet.”

That stopped me. I couldn’t bear the nets here. Yet. But I’d do something to be proud of here; I just knew it. All I said was, “I know. Your nets feel different.”

“They aren’t. Not much.” He leaned forward, his hands on his knees. “I know where to start now. The difference you feel is the size of the conversation. On Fremont, you had a single interconnected network—maybe a few if you count the satellite data, etc. But a handful, at most. The ship is a single network. A big one, and you did well. But here …” he waved his hand around in the air, taking in the garden and the house and maybe the whole planet “… here there are a million conversations all running at once. Even though a single blade of grass doesn’t send out data about itself, every single blade of grass has data collected about it.”

I looked around, counting up the blades of grass in my head. Millions.

He continued. “Data threads weave into many webs, some open to everybody, some secured.” He stood, too, and spread his arms wide. “The big webs include a finance web—the credit balances of everyone and every affinity group and every government here. An affinity web that tracks affiliations. A law web. Webs for each art form. A geo web that describes the places here in detail. Constructs really, so that people can understand related data through a single interface. Everywhere, local webs interact with bigger webs.”

He fell silent for a moment, and I tried to remember what I’d felt when I stepped off the ship, and then again when I tested his skimmer. It fit—a million million bits of data and even more connections between them. “How does anyone keep track of it all? How do you keep track?”

“No one can, or needs to. The trick is getting at what you want. You have to understand the linkages. For example, this garden has its own web that connects to the house web that connects to a web over the whole property that connects to the city, then the continent, then the planet, then to our space web. The geo web connects to other webs—for example, to the law web. If the rules are different for Li Spaceport than they are in the flyspace, the geo web can tell you that.”

I blinked at him, trying to understand so much complexity. A sudden thought crossed my mind. “Is everything here tamed?”

He laughed. “We have no wandering predators here. Like your—what did you call them? Demon dogs and paw-cats. But we have predators. Perhaps you would consider them tame, compared to wild Fremont. Here, there are designed predators, big game that suicidal idiots hunt over on Water Lily continent.” He snorted. “Some people die that way every year.” He fell silent for a moment, then said, “But we have people that are predators, too.”

“I’ve met people who are predators.”

“It sounds like you have also met governments that are predators. Some of ours are the same. But it would be risky to think you understand the dangers here for a very long time.”

He’d said people might be looking for me. “Am I safe here?”

He turned, a feral grin touching his face and satisfaction shining from his green eyes. “Not only are we standing inside a secure web, broadcasting only what we want, but some people here consider me a predator.”

I recoiled a bit; it was easy to forget there must be more to Marcus than the teasing teacher.

But there was more to me, too. I had hunted, brought down fast nearly man-sized djuri with my bare hands. “Are you a predator?” I asked.

His eyes widened, and he looked like he was about to choke on his
tongue. He took a deep breath, either trying to stop some outraged comment or trying not to laugh. After he calmed down, his voice grew serious. “Yes, but only to people who want too much power. See, Joseph, I believe in the balance and beauty of creation more than the beauty of power alone. I believe that people need to be able to choose what mods they want, to design themselves.” His green eyes almost glowed with energy, and he fixed them directly on me, demanding my attention. “There is a lot of beauty here.” He swept his arm in a wide arc, taking in the entire garden. “But we force some things on people before they’re born, things they can’t change. Like wings, or extra arms. We play god too hard, and too fast, and we may design our own doom if we aren’t careful. Other societies on other planets have done that, and we seem to have forgotten the lessons they left for us. There are powerful groups here willing to sacrifice long term good for immediate gain—some for power, some for attention, some for reasons I don’t understand.”

It sounded complex. On Fremont, they forced things to be the same, and hated us for being different. Here, they made people different on purpose. Either way, it was about control. I shivered, even though the temperature was perfect.

He watched me closely. “Sometimes I do things to disturb the status quo.” He paused, apparently realizing how intense he sounded. He shook himself, as if shaking off strong feelings. His voice lost some of its fire, turning into a calmer lecturer’s voice. “The most fun people to shake up are the government—they can do the most ill, or the most good. They need people to keep them on their toes.”

I remembered how I met him. “But sometimes you work for the government.”

“There are some things only I can do. And some of those things, I don’t mind doing.”