The Silver Ship and the Sea

by Brenda Cooper

  Tom stood and pointed toward the edge of the park, a slight, wry smile touching his lips. Jenna stood next to a twintree, the dead cat hanging limply down her back. Its body, nose to rump, streamed from her head to her calves, and its tail hung over her shoulder, draping down the front of her. It must have weighed seventy kilos, yet she seemed only lightly burdened. She came up to the group of us and dropped the body on the grass.

  Jenna stood at least a head taller than anyone else in the circle. Her gray hair was tied in a long rough braid behind her back, and her green hemp work clothes dripped with the cat’s blood. She was magnificent.

  It felt good to see her strong, to know she and I were of the same people, that I was more like her than the colonists. Oh, I didn’t envy her loneliness, but her sense of power and grace, of competence; those called to me. Even with her mangled face and single pale eye, she radiated pride, accomplishment, and control. She pointed at the cat. “I found this by the hebra barns. It came in gate five. It was alone.”

  She turned abruptly and left, jogging away in long ground-eating strides, and Tom alone had the presence of mind to call out, “Thank you.”

  The next morning Paloma and Kayleen and I painstakingly tested gate five’s digital reflexes, checking the mesh of the signals by moving through it and recording when it responded and when it didn’t.

  Just past noon, Paloma stood up, sweat dripping down her face. “I’m thirsty. Will you two be okay here while I go get us water and a snack?”

  We nodded. We had protected ourselves by setting up a secondary data fence in a half circle outside the gate, but we looked around often, remembering the cat.

  I nearly screamed when Jenna appeared in front of me. This was twice in two weeks she had sought me out. We often went months without seeing her except at a distance.

  She held her one hand up for silence. “Your brother is not riding the data networks.”

  I blinked at her, confused. “No. He is afraid.”

  She cocked her head, looking at me appraisingly. “He saw death. So? Fear will stop him, and stop us all, from our destiny. You need him, all of you. Tell him.”

  Too many people were telling me to fix Joseph. Nava and Jenna both wanting us to perform, wanting Joseph for their own ends, acting as if I didn’t want him to heal more than anything. “He is not listening to me about returning to his old duties. Perhaps he will listen if you talk to him.”

  Kayleen stepped nearer, cautiously, as if she were afraid Jenna would spook.

  Jenna shook her head. “He has not been where I can tell him. I cannot walk safely through town. You are his sister. He is a key, and he must heal. And you are the vehicle that can help him, only you.”

  Jenna wasn’t given to long conversation, but this was more cryptic than usual. “A key? To what?” Kayleen asked.

  Jenna put her finger to her lips and nodded toward the gate. Of course. Data pods could send conversation to another node in our defenses, even record it. Probably everyone was busy, but you never knew who listened to what. Then Jenna said, “Artistos needs Joseph to make the data network strong.” She nodded vigorously as she said this, as if I should be getting more from her words than I was.

  I glanced at Kayleen, but she looked as puzzled as I felt.

  “Paloma comes. Heal Joseph.” Jenna faded quietly into the sharp thick underbrush.

  “Thanks for killing the paw-cat,” I said to her retreating back. I knew she heard. Her hearing was as altered as ours.

  “What did she mean?” Kayleen asked. “A key?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  Paloma rounded the corner toward us, bringing Kayleen and I welcome bottles of cold water. Her presence stilled our conversation for the moment.

  4

  The Silver Ship and the Sea

  Tom and Nava were already at the breakfast table when Joseph and I got up on the first free morning after eighteen days of straight dawn-to-dusk hard labor. Sunlight streamed in the kitchen window, promising a bright fall day. I sat down, reaching for a plate of toast and goat cheese. Tom’s eyes sparkled, as if he had some great secret. He smiled at me. “I thought we’d go out and spread your parents’ ashes. Get out of town for the day, take a ride. Interested?”

  Nava’s lips turned down in a fine hard line. “I need you here. We haven’t ridden the whole perimeter since the quake.”

  “Paloma has.” Tom frowned. “We declared today a personal day. This is something personal that needs to be done.”

  Nava stood abruptly and started taking plates to the kitchen.

  Tom nodded at Nava’s back, his mouth as thin a line as hers, then he turned to me and I watched the hard line of his jaw relax as he smiled. “Do you want to go?”

  I had other plans. I needed time with Bryan and Kayleen, time to assess choices, to figure out how to heal my brother. As soon as Nava declared it a free day, we’d planned to get together. But Tom clearly wanted us to go. A private but ceremonial mourning for Therese and Steven might be just what Joseph needed. I glanced at Nava’s stiff back as she stacked dishes in the sink. “Sure, I’d like to go.”

  Joseph twisted his hands in his lap, and then looked over at me. “I’m ready. I mean, I’m ready to scatter the ashes.”

  “Where would you like to take them?” Tom asked.

  Joseph answered, “To the sea. Therese liked it there.” It startled me that he didn’t choose the mountains, Steven’s favorite haunt. Perhaps he wasn’t ready to see the High Road yet.

  “All right,” I said. “They’d want to be together, and Steven would have been willing to go to the sea to be with her.” A hard lump rose in my throat.

  Tom brightened at our answers. “I thought you’d pick the water.” He spoke up, for Nava’s benefit. “We can check on the spaceport as we go. Make the trip useful. Let’s saddle up some hebras.”

  Nava turned toward him, her green eyes cool. “I think you should take more people. The plains aren’t safe.”

  He returned her look, cool for cool. “We’ll be okay.”

  She frowned at him, but didn’t say anything else.

  Joseph and I dressed carefully, wearing long, loose pants we could tie around our ankles through the Grass Plains, and light coats against the sea breeze over thin shirts designed for the hot plains. We tied the funeral urns to our belts using the white ribbons and packed water and food. I left a note for Kayleen and Bryan.

  Joseph and I jogged to keep up with Tom, passing fresh-cut hay fields. Tom carried a light pack and wore his stunner on his belt for easy access. The Grass Plains were full of both predators and prey, and we wanted to be neither today. The air felt cool. An early-morning nip signified summer’s true end.

  My spirits rose as we neared the hebra barn. I hadn’t been far outside the boundaries since before the earthquake. The roamers would be in soon. We would see Liam and Alicia. Maybe it would be okay.

  The barn, almost entirely rebuilt, smelled more like new wood than hebra sweat and hay. The hebras stamped restlessly in their stalls after the morning feeding, peering at us through the open top halves of the stall doors and making low whickering noises.

  Steven had once described hebras to me as a strange combination of horses and camels and giraffes with beards. He’d used pictures of the three animals. He started with a camel, and pasted half a giraffe’s neck onto it, then changed the ears to look like a floppy version of horse ears, removed the hump, made the hooves more like horse hooves, and drawn a long curly beard.

  The wooden barn held about twenty hebras, but I had a favorite. Jinks had the only white coat, with a dark tip on her tail and dark beard. I kissed her long soft nose, slid the face harness over her head, and pulled her out to a hitch while Tom and Joseph chose mounts. They both picked mottled brown animals that matched the dirt on the plains and the color of the late-fall grass. Joseph bridled his own favorite, Legs, who was taller than Jinks by almost a foot, and a faster runner. Tom chose a steady mount named Sugar Wheat, named for the way her tail
looked like the flower of the most common grass on the plains.

  Hebra saddles have high backs to provide support for the riders against the tall animal’s rolling gait. To climb up, I lowered a rope with loops tied into it from the saddle, took three steps up this loop ladder, then flung my right leg up and over Jinks’s neck, since the back of the saddle was too high to clear the other way. Once on Jinks, my feet hung as high as my head when I stood. She twisted her head all the way around to look on me, her eyes level with mine, nickering softly. Perhaps she wanted out as much as I did.

  Joseph brightened visibly as he climbed on Legs; it was the first genuine smile I’d seen on him since the earthquake. He led the way. We rode east, through the stubble of the cornfields, then turned south and passed under the huge wood and metal hoist used to lift heavy goods from the plains to Artistos. We crossed the boundary, the bell tinkling three times as it read our idents, and pulled up at the edge of the cliff.

  The single paved road between the cliff and the spaceport cut the sea of greens and browns and reds like a wide river. Thick swaths of short grass on both sides of the road showed where we harvested hebra feed for winter. The Lace River bordered the plains to our left, and to our right, far away, the dark greens of forest marched uphill. Across the plains, the ocean glittered like a bright blue sparkling line between the ground and the light blue sky. Tom pointed below us, near the base of the cliff. “Look—wild hebras.”

  A medium-sized herd, maybe ten hebras. They grazed below us, visible as long thin backs and tails cutting their way slowly through the hebra-belly-height grass. Two scout hebras patrolled the edges of the herd, heads up.

  We wound single file down steep switchbacks, leaning back, our saddles creaking under us. Two huge plains eagles swirled lazily on warming air currents, spiraling up from below us to hang in the air above the cliff.

  When we reached the road, Joseph stayed ahead and Tom and I rode side by side. I glanced over at Tom. “He’s enjoying himself. It was a good idea to come out here.”

  Tom looked pleased. “He looks better than he has in days. Nava’s fit to be tied that he isn’t on the data nets. We need to get the outer perimeter working before winter sets in.”

  “I know,” I said simply. Everyone needed Joseph fixed. But not today. I wanted to be left alone today, to ride, to bury our parents in the sea.

  Tom sat easily in his saddle, his stocky body balancing nicely on Sugar Wheat. “I hoped getting away would help him let go of his anger and get back to work.”

  I gave him the same answer I gave Jenna. “I’m not sure he’s angry. I think he’s scared.”

  Ahead of us, Joseph pushed his hebra into a slow canter and we followed, our mounts’ split hooves tapping on the hard-packed dirt path. “Anger and fear are related, Chelo. He’s lost a lot. Maybe he’s angry with himself.”

  “He needs time. Can’t we give him more time?”

  “You’ve been working on the data nets. You know how long it takes us to fix them without him.”

  “What happens if Joseph just quits the data nets?” I didn’t tell Tom that Joseph had sworn never to go back. After all, I knew he had to. Somehow.

  “If it were up to me? Nothing. He could join the culture guild for all I care. But there are rules that bind us together, bind each of us to do our best.”

  There was an implicit threat there, as well as a truth. “I know.”

  We rode silently through grass tall enough to hide me standing if I weren’t astride. It felt like riding through parted water, making it difficult to see clearly or far. Only the wide road let us pass easily; the ride between the spaceport and the ocean would be harder. The feathered tips of the grass were bone dry, but the stalks were damp and still green. Later, as winter approached, lightning would catch the plains on fire, a bright flash feeding on the grass, preparing the seed to open in spring. Fire kept the plains monocultured; no trees grew here. Just yellow grass, tall grass, sharp grass, silver grass, whip grass, and insects, rodents, hebras, snakes, and paw-cats.

  It took an hour to reach the spaceport. Four square kilometers of concrete buffered the buildings from the annual fires, and in the center, two small houses, three hangars, and a well. Sugar Wheat bugled, and Legs stopped, waiting. We caught up to Joseph and rode three abreast to the water. I dismounted and brushed dust and dead moths from the metal trough, then pulled on the pump, hoping the station still worked. Clear water filled the long shallow half pipe. The hebras plunged their noses into it, drinking in soft little slurps, making satisfied low noises in their throats. We drank, too, clear water from near the spigot, and chewed dry salty djuri jerky and tore hunks of bread from a single shared loaf.

  We rode around the concrete pad, recording damage. Two long cracks had severed one corner. One crack was half a meter wide. If it wasn’t repaired before spring, grass would grow through next season, pushing up the concrete.

  Most importantly, the three remaining shuttles from Traveler nestled safely in one of the hangars. The colony still used them to check on Traveler at least once a year. Tom was one of the ten trained pilots. Even though they looked fine, he walked carefully around each shuttle, touching them, running his hands along the outsides.

  Next we checked the keeper’s cabin. No one lived there except for hunting trips, or support crew for shuttle launchings, the last of which had been almost a year ago. The cabin looked sound from the outside. Inside, we found a crack in the stovepipe, and broken cups and plates.

  While Tom picked up plates, I took Jinks out to the New Making, which stood upright, like a perfectly round fat silver stick with a pointed top. It rested on its own small concrete pad, a hundred meters from the spaceport proper. Jinks’s hooves crunched across the dead zone, a circle around the pad the ship rested on that grew only short stubbled grass, even after twenty-two years.

  New Making loomed above me, twenty times my height. The metal skin of the ship gleamed, also a mystery after so much time, so much rain and storm and fire. There was no obvious break in the ship’s skin for a door. I put one hand on the urn of ashes at my belt, suddenly feeling twice bereft. Therese and Steven had conquered my first parents, yet I had cared for all of them. I didn’t understand the war, didn’t understand the Fremontian need to be “pure” human. Why not want to be stronger and faster like we were? New Making reminded me that Joseph and I were different, and made me ache sharply for my first parents, and for Chiaro, who cared for us while they fought for us.

  New Making’s past affected the way people treated us now, fed into the dark undercurrents of the colony’s fear, and made many people watch the sky regularly. The future was harder to read than the present. Would the altered ever return for us? Even if my parents lived, would I recognize them now, twelve years later? Was the New Making merely a reminder, or would we figure out how to open her someday? How to pry loose her secrets? I imagined clues about who we were, all captive inside the unassailable silver shell of the ship.

  Did Jenna know how to get in?

  Joseph brought Legs next to me, and said, “It makes me feel like we lost something before we were old enough to know it.” His soft voice trailed off for a moment, and then he looked over at me and said, “I guess we’re no good at keeping parents, huh?” Tears filled his eyes, but didn’t spill down his cheeks.

  “It wasn’t our fault. Either time,” I said firmly. I put my hand on the little urn at my side, and Joseph did the same. My heart hurt for him. For me, too. I missed Therese and Steven. It had been such an uphill battle to get them to accept us that it never really registered when it wasn’t a fight anymore.

  Now we had to do it all over again.

  The thought struck me silent as we left spaceport.

  Tom rode ahead of us, scanning the grass for signs of paw-cat or hebra herds. Perhaps he would be a good guardian, but Nava? Nava would never have taken time to bring us out here.

  I shook my head to clear worries and breathed in the grass and the heat and the sun and the dust. My
focus should be on Joseph. I started one of the songs Therese sang when she worked outside, one she’d written to celebrate the things she loved about Fremont; the huge blue flowers that adorned the twintrees every spring, the colorful birds with strong beaks and talons for clawing seeds free from near-elm, the pleasant shade of the bright green tent trees. By the time I reached the first chorus, Joseph joined with me, and as we neared the ocean we had worked through every song we knew, even some of the bawdy drinking songs we weren’t supposed to sing at our age. A fitting funeral procession.

  Tom turned in his saddle and smiled at us, although he didn’t join us singing. A sharp warm wind blew inland, carrying the scents and sounds of the sea. The rhythmic roll of waves accompanied the lyrics.

  Tom led us down the steep trail to the wide beaches. At the bottom, the hebras stamped their feet in the sand, uncomfortable with the change in footing. Joseph leaned forward and sent Legs galloping down the beach. I followed, Jinks falling farther behind with every step. The wind pulled my hair back and the waves filled my ears. Near the end of the crescent beach, Joseph pulled Legs to a stop and stared at the busy water, waiting for me to catch up.

  We urged the hebras into the edge of the surf together, close enough for Joseph and me to hold hands, until the water reached the hebras’ knees and they moved apart a little, uneasy as foamy breakers tickled their bellies. I loosened the urn from my belt and held it up to the sky, yelling into the white noise of the sea. “For you, Therese and Steven, for your care of us, your care of Artistos, of Fremont. We wish you good journey.”

  Joseph’s voice joined mine, strong and sure. “Thank you. We will miss you forever, and think of you always.”

  Both urns dangled over the water. The hebras danced under us, and the sun shone on the waves. As one, we uncorked the urns and turned them upside down, pouring the ashes into the water. A wave mingled them together. We stayed until the water absorbed the last trace of the ashes. We threw the urns as far out as we could.