The Lost Star's Sea

by C. Litka

  01

  It's a six hours' flight in a stub winged aircraft from Daeri to Daedora, a small cluster of islands far enough away from Daeri to be gravitationally independent, but close enough to serve as Daeri's wide-sky port. Since the wide-sky ships are designed for travel in the freefall conditions of the Pela, these small satellite island ports served as transfer points where passengers and cargoes for Daeri are transshipped to winged craft for the last leg of the journey down the gravitational well to Daeri. As we approached Daedora, it looked like a large, fat, green spider in the sky, surrounded by a swarm of mites. What it was, however, was a cluster of small, lush, rocky islands, linked by vines, spars and cables to form one intricate maze of an island, some ten kilometers in diameter that arches around a semi-enclosed inner harbor. This inner harbor shelters and serves the smaller trading ships, small boats and lighters. The main trading center of Daedora is built around this hollow harbor, under a maze of quays, docks, and warehouses.

  It proved to be a wonderfully strange, shadowed, city. Since the islands were too small for gravity to play a role in the design of the city, it rises like a haphazard collection of tree houses up towards the harbor between wharves and warehouses. All of the buildings are linked together by an intricate spider web of cables that serve as pathways through the city. The inhabitants fly about like birds through the dappled sunlight, swinging along and between the cables with casual deftness, shooting through the maze without more than the occasional halfhearted curse as they deftly dodge a less considerate, or skilled "pedestrian." The city's lowest level, the island surface, has twisting moss-carpeted streets lined with open markets selling most everything.

  The larger ships are served by long wharves extending, like spider legs, from the ragged outside fringe of Daedora. These wharves and godowns are scattered throughout the web of islands. Scores of large wood, iron and steel built ships float around the islands while awaiting their turn on a quay or simply off-loading their cargo to lighters - winged ones to take the cargo down to Daeri, non-winged ones to take it on from the warehouse on the islands. Small boats swarm all around the islands - bumboats, lighters, and quick-tongued merchants selling food and trinkets to sailors and passengers aboard the ships. And wheeling all about the islands are flocks of birds and lizards - calling, croaking and singing.

  Like all port towns, Daedora had its own version of "spaceer's row." This sailor's town, that lay under the wharves and warehouses of the inner harbor was the usual collection of brightly lit dives, whorehouses, and boarding houses. KaRaya and DeVere showed me its sights. Since then, I've mostly avoided it, and every other version of it on the port islands I've sailed to since then. I've seen enough spaceer's rows in my day not to have any curiosity about the Pela editions. Not only are they too familiar, but once you get beyond the city and the inner harbor of these free-fall ports, the islands become something of an actual paradise.

  Since these island ports are usually collections of small islands - assembled by towing little islands together ages ago - they're a wonderfully eclectic maze of spar and rope bridges, narrow, moss-paved trails that wind around and through the fragrant, flowering jungle of large, spreading trees, flowering vines, and rocky grottoes. These tame jungles are alive with birds, flying lizards, butterflies and beetles. Lining the lanes are cottages designed to fit seamlessly into the landscape, everything from caves in the rocks to tree houses, and stone cottages set in lush gardens. Many are little more than open air pavilions, with screens to keep the beetles, birds and lizards out. Leave the bustling of the harbor city behind, and you have only bird songs and the sighing of the leaves to keep you company while you follow the sun dappled lanes around and about, in and out, of these little islands. I've come to know them well, and never tire of exploring these quiet, twisting sun and shade dappled ways, to find a particularly pretty house with an R&M sign to spend a round or two when on leave from my ship.