The Silver Ship and the Sea

by Brenda Cooper

  “No,” Paloma said, “I imagine not.”

  Joseph stared at his hands, at the leather band in them. “Do you know if our parents left with Journey or if they died here?”

  Paloma shook her head. “We don’t know who they were.”

  I expected that answer; Therese and Steven had answered the same way.

  We were all unusually quiet preparing for bed. Tom looked over at us. “You three look tired. I’ll take the first watch over the hebras tonight. Kayleen can keep me company. We’ll wake up Joseph and Chelo later on.”

  Joseph answered, his voice heavy with exhaustion. “Okay. Tom—let me work on the nodes tomorrow? I think I can do it now.”

  Tom nodded, smiled at Joseph, and he and Kayleen slipped quietly through the door.

  I crawled into my bedroll, grateful to be both still and horizontal, to have avoided first watch. My body relaxed long before my mind. Had Jenna chosen to live to protect us? What did she want from us and for us? Now that we were nearly grown, what could we offer her back?

  Always, I thought of helping the colony in terms of keeping ourselves safe, avoiding their prejudices, becoming useful in exchange for being allowed to live with a semblance of freedom. Sometimes in terms of sheer survival. Neither seemed like enough tonight. Safety was not a worthy goal all by itself and survival was simply instinct. We had no dreams, no direction.

  Jenna was right; we needed to know what we wanted.

  Where was Jenna anyway? Was she staying in the cave tonight, or perched nearby, watching the cabin, watching us?

  It seemed like I had only truly slept for moments when Kayleen shook my shoulder and whispered, “Wake up. Your watch.”

  “Hmmmm…did anything happen?”

  “Yeah. We got cold. Take blankets.”

  She was right. The chill air outside smelled like decaying fall leaves, like the night after a storm when all the water has not yet sunk into the ground or risen to the air. We settled on some wide low stones with a good view of the high-line and the cabin. At first, I sat sleepily next to my brother, welcoming the cold against my cheeks, watching Wishstone, Faith, Hope, and Summer hang above us. Four-moon nights were said to encourage contemplation, a fit to my mood. The hebras dozed standing, heads down, clearly too uneasy to lie down as they sometimes did back home. Night birds called calmly back and forth to each other. I imagined any of them might be Jenna, patiently watching, blending in.

  Joseph broke the silence first. “Come closer, Chelo. It’s too risky to use the projector here, so close, but I want to try the headband. I can tell you what I see.”

  I scooted over next to him, so we shared a single blanket between us and the wet grass, and I draped the blanket Kayleen had urged me to bring so it covered both of our shoulders. “Do you have one of the buttons with you?” I whispered.

  He nodded. “But first, I’m going to fix the node. The one on the ridge. I’ve heard the whole local net all day, and I can feel its imbalance inside me. It’s driving me nuts.” He held my hand, leaning into me, his head against my shoulder. I slipped my arm across his back. It had been one of his favorite positions to rest in when he was ten.

  “Go on, little brother, read the wind.”

  He nodded, mumbling, “Blood, bone, and brain.” I watched his eyes drift closed and then returned to scanning the sounds and shadows of the clearing and nearby forest, making sure we were safe. Joseph became steadily limper in my arms, heavier. His eyes fluttered and he thrashed softly, restless. It took longer than usual, even longer than the easy past, before he said, “Okay, Chelo, I have it. Node 89A sees two other nodes here, 90A and 91B, both up near the top. It should be able to talk to 102A across the lake. 89A is healthy enough. It’s reaching the far side, but all it gets is static. I can’t quite—twist it—no. We’ll need to replace the far side.”

  He sounded confident. Himself. As if the headband erased his fear.

  “Now…linking backward, into Kayleen’s work. Easy slide, follow…follow…data returning to Artistos: seismic, weather, temperature…” His voice trailed to nothing. His skin warmed slightly beneath my fingertips. The reddish moon, Summer, slid behind the crater rim, near the cave. I imagined it filling the cave with soft light, landing on Jenna’s face, softening her rough features, turning Jenna in her sleep to the beautiful woman that first came here.

  Joseph drifted, his eyes fluttering, his lips moving, but silent, as if he had no need to tell me exactly what he did, where he went. He felt far away and I curled myself closer around him, tucking the blanket in, watching carefully.

  A small shower of meteors spun through the sky, brilliant points of fire and light. The hebras shifted and stamped their feet. Joseph stayed a quiet heavy lump in my arms for so long I lost the feeling in my legs. I shifted a little to become more comfortable and hummed quietly to keep myself awake, wishing I’d brought the flute out here.

  Joseph’s far arm rose, stretching, and my hand slid down to his waist. He pushed himself up partway, and I shifted again, finding a comfortable spot. He tilted his head toward me. “It worked.” His dark eyes were bright and happy, as if the data of Fremont fed him. He whispered, “I want to go back to Artistos and sit in the middle of the web and see what I can do.”

  “We have work to do out here first.”

  He grinned, eyes alight as if a secret wanted to burst from them. “Only a little. Two nodes on the far side need physical replacement, and one is missing entirely. I know where they all are. Everything else is done.”

  I blinked at him. “The whole lake ring? Just like that?” Jenna had said the data threads would help him, but she hadn’t seemed to expect this much this soon. But then, she was like me. Deaf to whatever data flowed here. She might be guessing what to do for Joseph.

  He sat the rest of the way up, still grinning. “There’s more. I can sense the cave, and nodes way up by the Fish Mountains. From here. It’s as if I can feel everything on this part of the web, all the way back to Artistos. I can feel it now, while I’m talking to you. I can hold the threads.” His words tumbled out one on the other, loud in the quiet night.

  I put a hand over his mouth, shushing him gently. “Tom will be able to tell this is fixed as soon as he turns on his data reader. Artistos will see the new data. Do we want that?”

  “Isn’t that what we came here for?”

  “But so fast? I want time for you to learn to use the headband, for the rest of us to try the projector, maybe time to spend with Jenna.” I looked out over the clearing, watching the moonlight touch the grass tips and the streams. “I’m not ready to go back yet.”

  His eyes looked dreamy even in the wan moonlight, as if he were half in conversation with me while the rest of him rode the winds of data. His energy felt light and confident. “I…no, it’s okay. They can know these are fixed. We still have the physical work to do. That will take a few days. Then I want to go find Liam.”

  “Is that in Tom’s plans? I thought we were just going to fix the lake nodes and maybe a few more.”

  “We’ll make up a reason.” He stood, bouncing up and down on his feet, holding a hand out to me. He radiated confidence, and more. The boy from before the earthquake was back, clothed in an extra coat of success. I took his hand, letting him pull me up, his ebullient energy infecting me even through the soft haze of my exhaustion.

  “So, this is really easier now than before?”

  “It’s like jumping in the sea for the first time, when all you’ve ever known are streams.”

  I followed him to the hebra string, where he woke Legs from a drowsy sleep with a gentle slap on his neck. Legs snorted and turned a scathing look on Joseph, and I thought if the hebra could speak he would say, Why are you waking me, why now? Go to sleep, silly human. It’s just past the middle of the night.

  Joseph laughed and patted Legs, stroking his neck and the long nearly healed scar on his haunch. Legs whickered contentedly.

  “Is it because of the headband? Is that why you can see ou
r data, the Artistos data, so clearly again?”

  He slipped it off and handed it to me. It felt warm from his head, and the fine metal strands woven through the pattern were smooth and slick. I tied it around my own head. Wearing something my father had worn seemed to weave a connection to him through the years, a physical link I could no longer remember directly.

  Joseph came and circled me in his arms, a hard hug full of energy and excitement. “It’s not just the threads…I can still feel the network. Remember, even yesterday, I felt the nodes.” He released me and stood close, but not touching. “And now, I don’t need your touch to keep feeling them, although I think I did to get started. I feel like I’m being tuned.”

  “Tuned?”

  “Becoming more like myself.” He frowned, looking deeply, earnestly into my eyes. “I didn’t know before that this was something Dad could do—I don’t really remember him at all. Not like you do.”

  “I can’t see his face anymore. I remember Chiaro more, and the day she brought us to town. It must have been the same day everyone left.” I thought about Tom and Paloma’s story. “The day we were almost murdered. She had all six of us, and everyone was old enough to walk, but Liam and Alicia could barely manage. Chiaro’s face and her side were bloody. She kept telling us to hurry. She took us to Commons Park, and we all had to hold hands the whole way. You could barely walk, and Liam and I pulled you between us.”

  The memory made me shiver. “A group of people came and Chiaro talked to them. There were a lot of them. She fell. Her blood stained the grass. She was asking the people to take care of us, and then Therese and Steven led us all away.”

  Joseph was quiet for a few moments before he spoke again. “I wish we remembered more about Dad. I’m glad I’m like him, that we have the same mods.”

  My sleepy thoughts about goals came back to me. “What do you want? For us? We will be adults. I want us to be free adults.” I pointed out a meteor flashing briefly above the dark silhouette of the crater rim. “What can Nava do? They won’t kill us, not now. They need us.

  “But do we want to just be part of the colony? Do we want to help lead it? We could become our own band of roamers.”

  He held his hand out, and I took the reader off my head and placed it in his palm. He closed his fist around the band, and held it up to his eye level, watching it closely, as if it were a bird or a flower. “It depends, Chelo. It depends on what we learn. Right now, I want to use this to learn what Jenna knows. We’ve learned more this week than in all of the years before. I want to understand who we are, and then maybe I can answer your question.”

  It would take time for me and Kayleen and Alicia to watch the projector, for any of us to communicate with Liam and Bryan, for Joseph to understand how to use the headband. It seemed important to come to a shared goal, to include all of us. Maybe even including Jenna. “Think about it, little brother. This trip won’t take forever, and we need a direction before we return to Artistos. We will need to know what we want to be when we grow up before we can bargain to get it.”

  He nodded, tying the headband back over his dark hair. It was surely a trick of the moonlight, but he looked older, as if even his shape had changed overnight and become nearly a man’s shape. Faith, the largest moon, hung over Joseph’s head and the smaller Hope reflected in his eyes as he looked up to meet mine. “And what do you want?”

  “I want to be happy. I want to prove to all of them that we are true humans, I want the freedom to make our own decisions. I want full access to their databases, and to ours. Now we know we have our own.” I chewed on my lip. “I want our own culture, side by side with theirs.”

  He laughed. “You may have to fight to get all that.”

  “I don’t want any wars.” I yawned. “I want to sleep.”

  Joseph bounced on the balls of his feet. He stretched, tall, as if he were reaching for the sky. “I’m not sleepy. Will you go in and wake Alicia up, then? She can help me watch until dawn.”

  “All right. But remember to be watchful. We’re not out here just to talk.” I gave him another hug. “Glad to have you back. I’ve missed my happy brother.”

  He kissed me on the cheek, his lips warm and dry. “Thanks for being there. You’ve always been there for me.”

  I returned his kiss. “Good night.”

  As I walked quietly back to the cabin I wondered again about Jenna. Was she nearby? What did she want?

  Three more meteors streaked the sky. Simultaneously, our small boundary bells rang the lowest possible earthquake tones and the ground shivered under my feet, once, and again.

  I didn’t go back and check on Joseph. A quake would not spook him tonight.

  16

  Monsters?

  The next morning I rubbed at crusted gritty eyes as the even light of midmorning poured in through the one window. It felt like I’d slept minutes, even though the light promised hours had passed. It hurt to sit up.

  The only movement in the room was Paloma’s right arm, where she sat propped in the single stream of sunlight. Her fingers spun over the paper, drawing a field of blue flowers over green grass, dipping rhythmically in and out of the jar of blue ink; a contrast to the stillness of the rest of her body. She smiled at me, then flicked her eyes toward Joseph and Alicia, her smile twisting to puzzled question.

  They slept close together, under a single green blanket. Alicia’s long hair covered her face. His face slack with sleep, Joseph looked both content and young. His right hand clutched the headband, and the other held the blanket up over both of them. It looked like Alicia had an arm thrown over his waist, although I couldn’t be sure because the blanket covered them.

  Yesterday, I had promised myself I’d think about this today, and I shut my eyes briefly, sighing. I looked at Paloma and opened my hands in a gesture of futility.

  She grimaced, a sign she wasn’t much happier than I was about the situation, and whispered, “Good morning. They just came in at dawn. Would you help me to the outhouse?”

  I nodded and pushed myself up. My legs protested at the idea of movement and my hands still stung from yesterday’s adventures. Offering Paloma an arm, I helped her up. Joseph and Alicia didn’t even stir as we walked carefully past them and through the door, shutting it quietly. A warm fall day greeted us, the sky a cloudless soft blue, the hills dotted with little scraps of yellow and red signaling the near-elm and fall ladies turning with the season.

  Paloma leaned on me, letting me take much of her weight every other step. Her head came just past my shoulder, and this close, little gray wisps showed against her blond hair. Dry leaves crunched under our feet, even though small mud puddles still filled low spots.

  “Where are Kayleen and Tom?” I asked.

  “They went to the node.” She must have misinterpreted my startled look, because she said, “Yes, Tom remembered Joseph asking to work on it. He’s just having Kayleen tell him what she thinks is wrong.”

  I suspected they’d be back soon, but didn’t say it out loud. “Do you have any idea what I should do about Joseph and Alicia?”

  Paloma grimaced at a slight wrong step, but kept her balance. “Has Joseph talked to you about Alicia?”

  I shook my head. “I think Alicia started it.”

  “Well, she must feel very lost out here. Are you sure you want advice?”

  I grinned. “Can’t hurt.”

  “If you tell teenagers not to do something, they often think it’s a great idea. You may be his sister, but you’re older than both of them by a couple of years.” She smiled up at me. “Almost an adult yourself. If I were you, I’d encourage Joseph to talk, but I’d only offer advice if he asks. Tom and I can keep them from being alone together too much by making sure they are on different watches.”

  “He asked me to wake her up last night. I was so tired I didn’t even think about it, but they were alone for hours.”

  “Well, Tom’s caught up some on sleep. We could make sure either me or Tom is awake all the time.�
��

  That wouldn’t help us try out the projector. “Maybe I’ll just take a watch with Alicia tonight. You need to rest enough for your ankle to heal.”

  She laughed. “I don’t need that much babying. We’ll work it out.” She stopped for a moment to catch her breath. “It might be best to stay out of it until one of them approaches you, which they will if they don’t see you as an enemy.” She sighed. “Don’t, by the way, be sure that you can or should stop them. Regardless of what people in Artistos think, you all will pair up sometime.”

  I remembered Liam’s farewell kiss on the top of my head, and the feel of Bryan’s arms around me the last day before we left. “I know. It just seems we should wait until the discussion in Artistos is over. Until we have our freedom as adults.”

  Paloma laughed, a friendly laugh tinged with irony. “You’re delusional. Being an adult does not make you free, and emotions seldom honor reason.”

  I frowned and helped her step carefully down a steep spot.

  We arrived at our destination, took turns, and started our return trip. Tom and Kayleen met us on the way back, just outside the cabin. “All of them?” Tom’s tone told me he was talking into his earset, probably to Nava. “I’ll call you back.” He tapped the set to close the connection, and when he looked at me his jaw was still tight and the little muscles near his ears trembled. He looked angry, both with us and with Nava. “What did you do last night? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  He didn’t need to be mad at Joseph for doing what he’d asked him to do. I smiled up at him, trying to counter his anger. “Well, I haven’t seen you since I woke up. I’d be happy to tell you now.”

  His expression settled some, relaxing. “I’m sorry. We’re all tired.” He swiped at his eyes, as if underscoring the point. “Kayleen and I went to fix this node, and it had been done. Then Nava called and said the whole lake ring is working this morning. Did Joseph do all that?”

  I nodded. “Last night, while we were on watch. He was happy he figured out how to get back into it. You should have seen him—he was almost dancing. Remember, he’s been able to read the nodes since before we went hunting. He just couldn’t change them until last night. I don’t know what he figured out.”