The Silver Ship and the Sea (22 page)

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 mumbled.

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.

I dragged my gaze from her, from her third cry in as many days, to watch Tom’s face, and Paloma’s.

Tom chewed at his lower lip, and looked like he was working hard to swallow words that begged to come out of him. I caught a glance between Paloma and Kayleen. Kayleen seemed to know how to interpret Paloma’s look, because she slid over close to Alicia and set an arm on Alicia’s shaking back.

Tom leaned over to Joseph, ignoring Alicia and her outburst. “Yes, we came here to fix the net. Good job.”

Joseph took one of Alicia’s hands, but answered Tom evenly. “Well, I see you’ve been working on the maps. Can we start this afternoon? I want to finish the ones that are broken, and then I think we’ll have time to pick up even more of the net than we planned. I’d like to see Akashi and Liam before we go home.”

Tom glanced at Paloma, who said, “I can ride. Can Sugar Wheat go yet?”

Tom hesitated briefly before answering. “Yes, but I don’t think we should ride her. Or run her. Maybe Chelo and Joseph can double up.”

Alicia turned back toward us and removed her hands from her face, exposing red cheeks wet from tears, and said, “We don’t all need to ride. We can keep up. Go ahead and ride Ink, and I’ll run. If I get tired, I’ll trade with one of the others.”

Once more, I saw Tom swallow his first reaction. He nodded curtly. “Well, then, pack up. There’s a rough spot on the trail about two kilometers ahead. We should be able to get past it tonight if we get packed in the next half hour.”

Packing took us forty-five minutes, but at least four hours of daylight remained when we rode on, passing through the narrow end of the valley to ride along the lake. We followed a beach trail, winding between forested cliffs and the water, dotted here and there with trickling waterfalls.

Sure enough, Alicia ran just ahead of us. The hebras moved just faster than our natural walk, and so Alicia loped along with plenty of time to make small side trips to pick up stones and throw them in the water or just run ahead and stand, watching and waiting for us, her hands on her hips.

After a while, Joseph dismounted and handed me Legs’s lead line, running alongside her. They ran easily, laughing and pointing out waterfalls to each other, looking like young healthy gods. I scratched Stripes’s ears. “Hey, girl, I’d love to run, too, but someone has to ride and manage you and the pack animals.” Stripes turned her head back toward me and lifted her lower lip in what I fancied was the hebra version of a smile.

We rounded a corner in the path to find a quake-slumped cliff. Gray and brown gravel and boulders, broken bushes, and shattered trees spilled across the path and into the lake. Tom rode along it, inland and down to the water, and back again, looking for a passable trail.

Joseph and Alicia clambered up on the fall. Finally, Alicia stood on the top of the unsteady berm, calling out, “There’s djuri tracks here. I bet if we lead the hebras they’ll make it.”

Joseph carried Paloma. Tom led two pack animals while I managed Stripes and Legs, Alicia took Sugar Wheat and Ink, and Kayleen led Sand and her own hebra, Longface. Even without our weight, the hebras sometimes sank almost to their knees in the loose material. Joseph’s idea to take them across without extra weight had been right. We sank in sand to our ankles, and once I fell in a soft sinkhole up to my waist and Kayleen had to pull me out with a rope. It took nearly an hour to get all of us across the berm.

We rode another hour, tired. I kept wondering when we’d stop, but Tom appeared to have a destination in mind. Finally, we came
up over a little hill. There, in the middle of a valley that had been purposely cleared, stood the biggest tent tree I had ever seen. A guild hall would fit under its canopy.

We camped inside, near the huge spreading trunk, tying the hebras on the other side of our camp but still under the canopy. We strung the barrier right at the edge of the tree and left two people at a time to tend a small fire all night. No animals bothered us, but it was no place for the projector.

Tom assigned Alicia and me the last watch that night, and we sat sleepily feeding small sticks into the fire, making sure it neither winked out, nor grew big enough to flood the canopy with smoke or threaten the tent tree.

“Have you ever seen a tent tree this big?” I asked Alicia.

“Yes…two others. One is even bigger. Sky said it must be over a thousand years old.”

I looked up at the thick canopy above us, the bottom leaves yellow from lack of direct sunlight. The tree creaked and groaned and made tiny snapping noises, and its leaves rubbed together almost like crickets. “It sounds like it’s singing to us, Alicia. Like it has its own song.”

She laughed, softly, almost a whisper. “Sky told me Akashi said everything has its own song.” She stared at the small fire, and fed it a dried brown tent tree leaf, which curled in on the edges and then burst into a small yellow flame as it lost its form. “Maybe we need our own song.”