Flotsam

by R J Theodore

  Little Sophie, the most sheltered and colony-bred of their group, putting them all to shame with her hospitality.

  Was being courteous too much to ask of herself? Talis had, after all, swallowed her feelings for any number of clients before these. Actually accepting the aliens might follow, if she let it.

  Chapter 20

  Rain splattered on Wind Sabre’s deck. Softly at first, in droplets so occasional that Talis felt like she imagined them. Then gradually, as their ship approached the cumulonimbus giant that blocked the stars like a dark smear, the rain increased in frequency and intensity until she had to pull down her goggles and cinch the hood of her foul weather gear.

  The air grew turbulent and the lift balloon bounced against the lines, tiny bursts of slack rope that plunged the deck under her feet before wrenching it back up again. It was a good way to lose one’s last meal.

  Ahead, lightning flashes lit the cloud from within, providing strobed details of its size and shape. That information was already on her charts. It was the buoy she was watching for, marking safe entry into the storm.

  The water barges that came for the storm’s bounty could not easily maneuver around the active lightning zones. So the safest and most direct channels were indicated with buoy lights from the edges of the storm to the heart of it. The stormwater depot was installed on the islands amid the hardest driving rains, which collected on enormous harvester platforms anchored to the islands with heavy chains.

  “Do you think we’ll see any?”

  Talis wondered how long Sophie had been talking to her. She had been trapped in her own thoughts, focused on the view, and Sophie had appeared at her side without her realizing it. The engineer’s pale skin was rain-streaked, but rather than sharing in her captain’s misery, Sophie seemed to revel in the downpour. Fat drops of cold water bounced off her bare shoulders. Her tank top and overalls clung to her skin. She wore oilcloth gaiters to keep rain out of her boots and avoid the blisters that wet socks would bring, but the rest of her gear was still stowed in her locker to the fore of the ­engine house.

  The crew had reduced the regulator on the engines, hoisted their storm jib, and secured anything that might come loose in the wind or bounce out of its place below decks. Now they waited, with nothing to do for the moment but let Tisker guide them in. Once they spotted the buoy.

  “Any… ?” Talis didn’t take her eyes off the perimeter of the enormous cloud.

  “Mermaids, Captain!”

  Talis couldn’t suppress a sound of disgust. “Not if I can help it. This will be enough fun without them flopping onto our deck and trying to eat us. There!”

  She spotted the flashing yellow light of the buoy’s lensed signal flame, and waved at Tisker to indicate the course adjustment. Wind Sabre shifted under their feet as the triangular sails along the lift envelope caught the wind and the airship angled toward the solitary unmanned beacon.

  “I think they’re lovely. In a flesh-eating-monster sort of way.” Her voice was soft, trailing after thoughts that meandered ahead of them into the thick of that storm.

  Talis wondered if Sophie was trying to prove she’d put their argument out of her mind for now. Talis certainly hadn’t. The closer they got to Fall Island, the closer Sophie got to having the funds for that ship design.

  “I prefer them at a distance,” Talis said, and pushed back from the railing. With the clouds about to envelop and hide the ship, it was time.

  Yawning, Sophie trailed behind her to the hidden locker tucked behind a coiled mass of rope line. “Xe’s never seen one. The whole ship's instruments went dark when they tried to explore a cloud. And I don’t get many chances to see them.”

  Talis stiffened. Never mind the mention of their alien guest, that last phrase sounded to her like another complaint about Sophie not having her own ship. But the girl leaned forward with anticipation as Talis tabbed the latch release on the locker, and retrieved a bundle from a harness mounted within. A lumpy box, wrapped in oilcloth and bound with a leather strap.

  Even its buckle was an alchemical marvel. It could tell if there was line of sight to Nexus, and would refuse to release. As the cloud enveloped Wind Sabre, replacing aubergine sky with a soft gray that closed in around the railing, she thumbed the buckle and flipped a catch, and with a whir, the metal judged their cover. A ping indicated its approval, and its latch disengaged. The buckle smacked her hard on the thigh as it dropped away. She cursed, unwrapped the strap, and tossed it back into the locker.

  It was no handicap that the device required fully obscured skies to operate. She had no intention of being caught by Onaya Bone or any other of The Five, and punished for using alchemy. Parting with the presscoins for that buckle was punishment enough.

  Precisely how it worked, Talis had no idea. It required no fuel, minimal maintenance (just wipe the carbon off the metal connections before packing it away again), and if it were to ever break, even Sophie would be helpless to fix it. So she was mindful of her grip as she unwrapped the oilcloth with rain-wet hands.

  It had a name, something arcane like a tripolarizing kiparcoiled band-conducted electro-ionic… kajig. Talis couldn’t remember, exactly. Alchemists tended toward flamboyance when naming their devices, and it wasn’t as though she openly talked about owning one.

  It was comparable in size to a small jewelry box, except that it had sliding panels to open and close it instead of a hinged lid. Behind the panels, glass bulbs were filled with cloudy liquid as a sandglass might be filled with fine grains. The bulbs were mounted inside circular metal housings, on tracks filled with ball bearings. She used a fingernail to flick one arm open and rotate a glass bulb dextral until it was upside-down, and then flicked the arm back across that housing to lock it in place. She repeated the motion for the other glass bulbs, alternating dextral and sinistral for each and then slid their covers back into place until they latched with contented clicks.

  A panel on the bottom of the box released four trailing wires, each pronged at the end, equal in number to copper panels mounted in the back of the hidden locker. Each wire clipped into place, charges carefully aligned positive and negative. With that done, Talis secured the box back into its harness. She then wrapped the strap and buckle inside the oilcloth wrapping and tucked that into the bottom of the locker so it wouldn’t damage the box or interrupt the current if a sudden shift in the angle of their flight sent them sliding.

  “I’ll consider it a good day if I disappoint you again,” she said to Sophie, and thumbed a toggle switch on the top of the device.

  There was a thrumming pulse from the box, which Wind Sabre’s hull seemed to answer with a deeper tone of its own. Talis swore, as magenta light arced from the toggle’s metal fitting, catching her fingertips before she could pull them away. A sharp stabbing coursed up to her wrist. She tasted copper. She shook her hand to dispel the tingling sensations and held the offended limb against her chest.

  Sophie laughed. If she was hurt by Talis’s unwillingness to banter, she didn’t show it. She wandered off, checking the lines as she made her way forward, eager to be the first of them inside the storm.

  That was a pleasure Talis would gladly cede. She secured the locker, then retreated under the cover of the wheelhouse where Dug stood with Tisker at the helm. At her approach, Dug moved away, stiffly walking past to take up a watch on the port side, making it clear he preferred to stand in the rain than share a space with her.

  She had already explained herself to him. He’d already made up his mind about the soundness of her decisions. She could either wait out his anger or see him disembark with Sophie on the other end of it.

  That would leave Talis with a near-empty ship. The ship she bought to be home for her and Dug. Would she even want to keep it if he left?

  And if she didn’t care about the particular ship as much as the bodies aboard, why not talk to Sophie about joint ownership of the next?


  Her ego stepped in to elbow the sliding mess of such thoughts aside. Did she really want to have to fight with Sophie over priorities and not have the old fallback of ‘it’s my ship, you’ll do what I say’ as a last resort? Sharing a ship might be just the final tilt their friendship needed to go over the edge.

  Talis shook herself. She was letting the dreariness of the rain get to her.

  “Anyone check on our guest lately?”

  “Scrimshaw’s not exactly happy, Cap,” Tisker said, squinting into the rain as it drove sideways across the deck. “Curled up below complaining of a delicate stomach. Though I think my stomach would be delicate with that food, too.”

  The crew had taken to calling the alien Scrimshaw as a rough approximation of xist actual name, which they all found nearly impossible to pronounce. It was an apt moniker, given the shallow, intricate carvings across xist entire body. Their guest had not objected, though Talis had no idea what xe actually thought of being renamed.

  Scrimshaw had come aboard the ship with live food, a tall chrome-and-white barrel of something oily and slithering that smelled of soured milk. None of the crew had observed xin eating, as xe did not make use of the galley. In the absence of knowledge, their imaginations ran wild as to the preparation of xist meals. Talis intended to broach the subject eventually, when she learned to better gauge xist personality.

  The alien had been keen to begin language lessons with Talis and anyone else who would join them. Sophie volunteered with enthusiasm, but both men declined. Tisker proclaimed that he hadn’t spent a day in school in his entire life and he didn’t intend to start now. Dug stayed quiet and kept his reasons to himself. Their choice. Talis didn’t see the point of the lessons in the long term either, but it made for a good distraction while they sailed, and she admitted she was almost as curious about the aliens as Sophie was. The more cultural differences that emerged through conversation, the more intrigued Talis became.

  The first lesson covered a dizzying number of pronoun groupings the aliens used in Yu’keem, their language. What Talis had originally taken for a gender indicator, Scrimshaw explained was related to class, not anatomy. ‘Xe,’ and its fifty—dear gods, fifty—variations, were of the ‘respectful non-class’ pronoun category. Scrimshaw informed them, when Talis complained of the length of that list, it was only one of nine pronoun categories. There were honorary, noncommittal, and dismissive pronouns for Yu’Nyun premier, artisan, and drone classes, plus something Scrimshaw referred to as ‘transitional.’

  Talis had a knack for picking up languages, but she’d never learned one in a classroom setting. She was learning new words in her own language, as Scrimshaw threw terms around like ‘prepositional object possessive indefinite’ and made her head spin. She was relieved that Scrimshaw thought they could get by with just the respectful non-class category, despite xist concern that offering too much respect to the wrong subordinate would be seen as a weakness.

  Sophie absorbed it all, however. She was a fast study in any subject that piqued her curiosity, and to say that included the aliens was an understatement. She hungrily ate up any morsels of information the alien would offer. Talis was almost certain Sophie had already memorized at least the singular pronouns which would come up in their conversations with and about their guest. For Talis, however, Yu’keem was demanding more of her patience than any native Peridot language ever had. It was a small grace that Peridot had several equivalent pronouns, mostly plurals, which Scrimshaw said would suffice.

  While Scrimshaw did seem driven to teach them to speak Yu’keem, xe had not been as eager to discuss any topic that delved into the nature of Yu’Nyun society. Anything xe admitted seemed to be filtered through extreme trepidation and, when xe did answer a direct question, xist eyes darted side to side as though xe feared being overheard. Talis couldn’t figure it. Sophie’s questions were about simple things, cultural and physiological stuff. The answers to which, whatever they were, could hardly be sensitive enough to keep secret. But their alien passenger was obviously bothered by the risk, so Talis went at the issue sideways, always trying to ask Scrimshaw about xist-self rather than asking general questions about the Yu’Nyun. From that, she built the clues up into a rough profile.

  Class was everything, and appearance an integral part of that. Scrimshaw admitted as much when they needed xin to explain an idiom about textiles which had no local equivalent. The social class of an individual dictated the clothing and accessories they wore. An elitist tendency that, it seemed to Talis, must span the universe. But the aliens’ system was far more formalized than that of Cutter folk. All citizens, according to Scrimshaw, adhered to the strict class-based conventions. There were no variations allowed for special occasions or casual situations. No dressing up for, or attending, an opulent gathering if you were someone’s housekeeper. No dressing down if you were an aristocrat. There were harsh penalties, from what Talis could gather, for those who tried to bend the boundaries of propriety.

  Scrimshaw followed, xe explained, the permitted style of a skilled artisan. Xist chin lifted and xe squared xist shoulders as xe explained that all language was poetry. To xin, words were as carefully selected as the fabric of xist drapes and bands, or the designs that had been cut into xist body.

  But that was all xe would say on the topic of the aliens’ strange body engraving.

  The previous night, Sophie spent hours sitting on Talis’s bunk and wondering aloud about all the new questions raised in her mind by the first lesson. Having none of the answers to sate her curiosity, Talis eventually kicked the young woman out of her cabin as kindly as she could—though it eventually took a captain’s order—so she could get some sleep.

  From the persistent yawning Talis had observed throughout the day, she knew Sophie hadn’t slept at all. But her mood had lifted, and the barely contained enthusiasm was preferable to the arguments Talis knew hovered just beyond the edges of their conversations. She wished the unspoken ceasefire could last.

  Sophie reappeared after making a circuit of the railing, apparently having failed to spot a mermaid. She’d finally put on her coat, though her teeth chattered beneath the stiff hood.

  “Want me to invite xin up top, Captain?”

  Talis tried to imagine the alien in their foul weather gear, with xist long limbs hanging out of the sleeves and the extended oblong shape of xist head rendering the hood useless.

  “Feel free to try,” she said with a shrug, though she had to yell to be heard.

  Sophie scurried off. She moved confidently across the wet deck, feet sure from a life spent on airships.

  The view, already impeded by the pounding rain, became fully obscured as they reached the thickest portions of the cloud. Dug stood watch on the starboard side and Talis to port. They stared into the squall, eyes squinted against the raindrops that bounced off every surface. As they spotted each buoy marker, they called out course corrections or echoed those they heard, so Tisker could hear them over the sound of the rain pounding the outer hull and the canvas lift balloon, and the creaking of lines and wood as he fought the gusting winds.

  Turbulence rocked the ship. Lightning danced within the cloud all around them. The hidden device, wired through the hull, absorbed the flashes that came near enough, and output a low regulated charge to deter the mermaids. Talis tried to ease her clenched jaw. The way was slow, but her chest pounded with excitement. There was no room for error.

  Chapter 21

  Maybe her imagination was just inspired by Sophie’s comments, but Talis swore she could hear singing out in the gray murk. She placed a hand on one of the metal cleats to assure herself that the prickling charge from her alchemical device was pulsing through the ship. The mermaids wouldn’t land on the ship so long as they kept the noise down and kept that device running.

  “It is like nothing I have ever experienced,” came the clack of Scrimshaw’s accent beside her. She jumped, brac
ing her hands in panic against the railing of the ship. She had been so focused on watching for the signal lights that she hadn’t noticed xist approach over the sound of the storm. If she was being honest with herself, she was also straining her ears for the sound of a feminine voice coming out of the driving rain. The tension was making her jumpy.

  “The storms are dangerous,” she said. “But damned if they aren’t beautiful. A view you can’t get anywhere else, close enough to rip you out of the sky.”

  “And a necessity of your way of life.”

  Talis called out another buoy as its light became visible in the murk, then turned to xin as the ship leaned that way. Scrimshaw had not attempted the foul weather gear. Xist leather-and-silk uniform seemed to repel the water. Though the materials looked as though an unguarded sneeze could ruin them, the rain hit, beaded up, and ran off as if it was treated oilcloth.

  “How do your people collect water if not from storms?”

  “It was pumped from groundwater tables on our home planet,” xe said. “There were also moving weather systems, mountain runoff, or glacial melt. Water would run in great rivers across our continents until it joined the salt-rich oceans. On other planets we have explored, water was trapped beneath the surface and accessible once we drilled wells. On most, however, there is no water at all. Yours is the first that we have encountered where water is sourced from fixed weather systems.”

  “Some islands have mountains, and rain systems,” she said. “And those have their streams, but it’s nowhere near enough to supply all the airships in the skies.”

  “Other planets’ inhabitants have more access to water than here, but it is remarkable that your storm systems are infinite in their duration. While your steam-power transports you across the unnatural space between destinations, lifeforms on most planets are able to walk between any two points where the oceans do not prevent passage. We believe this was once also the case on your planet.”