Reading the Wind (Silver Ship) (21 page)

“So tell me again why you are training me.”

“You should not have been able to do what you did—learn to read the wind on your own, fly a ship. Not and stayed sane. But you did. That implies much balance inside of you. You intrigue me.” And then, laughing. “Besides, I’m getting paid.”

“I haven’t forgotten this is a job for you,” I blurted out. Silence fell
between us, and I thought about the other things he’d said. “I’m off balance,” I said, more softly. “I can’t even open to the data here—it almost kills me.”

He put his hands on my shoulders and looked me in the eye. “If you work hard, I’ll teach you the beauty of creation.”

“I want to learn.”

He dropped his arms. “Sit down.” After I sat on the cool stone bench, he said, “Lean back, close your eyes, and feel the garden.”

I took a deep breath and opened. Data poured in, temperature, air mix, pressure, bits from every plant. In no more than two breaths it was too much. My stomach roiled while pain slammed into my forehead. I opened my eyes, searching for Marcus.

He seemed to be trying not to laugh. “Listen more carefully next time. I did not suggest you ride the garden’s data, but that you feel the garden itself. Close your eyes again.”

“But if this is a single system, why can’t I handle it?” I protested.

“Who said this is a single system? There are webs here for plants, for animals, and traces of the geo web and affiliation web. My security web, letting some things in and keeping others out. And more. Linkages between them all. Now, close your eyes.”

I wanted to ask more questions, but his commanding tone of voice didn’t encourage questioning. I closed my eyes.

“Good. Now, feel the temperature. Tell me about it.”

“Warm, not too hot.”

“Is there a wind?”

“No.”

“Smell the grass.”

“Okay.”

“Can you smell just the grass?”

“No.”

“Try.”

And so we worked.

He pushed me to separate and then synthesize my senses, focusing down on one thing, one thing, one thing, then another. It felt like work for a schoolchild.

We drank water, but didn’t eat.

I grew incredibly sick of isolating one sense at a time, one individual
thread within one sense at a time. My stomach and head hurt, but there was no way I’d admit it to Marcus.

He pushed me until the mid-afternoon sun turned the light a deeper gold. Finally, he said, “Stop.”

My stomach cried out for food, but I didn’t want to look weak and ask. “Did I do well?”

“What do you think?”

I had only used my simple senses for information. “How will this help?”

He cocked his head and gave me a half-smile. “Sit back down and try again to read the garden’s data.”

I did. Again, data poured in, filling me, jolting my body. At once I was overfull and light as air. The two feelings together seemed twisted, as if my body was falling, even though the stone bench was hard and cool under my back.

“Focus on the temperature.”

Threads of data pulsed around me and through me. They bunched, separated, knotted, and stretched. Paying attention to one thread at a time felt easier now, and one by one, they became knowable. Some clearly originated nearby; queries produced the history of plants or the composition of dirt. Unchanging threads were from temperature sensors or other mechanical devices. Data about butterflies and birds swarmed chaotically against data about and from trees, and everything linked to information about place. I sampled, fighting a sense of falling, of losing myself. The temperature thread had to be from nearby, had to be steady. I focused on steady straight threads, checking one by one. Location. Air pressure. Humidity. Finally, I could whisper, “Twenty-three degrees.”

“How many square meters of land are inside the garden fence?”

I dove back down, querying. Pain lanced through my stomach, and the data threads seemed to bunch and knot more than they had the first time. Surely that wasn’t the data itself, but me. I forced three deep breaths, and on the last one I came fully into physical presence, coughing and spluttering.

Marcus looked like he was hiding a laugh again. “Did you progress?”

“Sure, now I can go catatonic and get sick as a dog just to find out what my skin will pretty much tell me.”

He threw back his head and laughed loudly. “Exactly. Good thing. A sense of humor.”

Alicia always teased me for being too damned serious. I watched him as he reached into his pocket and tossed me a handkerchief. “Wipe your face. We’ll break for lunch and then work on something physical.”

I groaned, thinking of Jenna’s endless physical sessions on the ship. She’d taught me and Chelo and Kayleen this way—making us work for knowledge. Maybe it was a habit on Silver’s Home.

But food? If it tasted like breakfast had, it would be worth all the work. I grinned, wiped my face, and followed Marcus into the house.

I sat at the table while he bustled about the kitchen. After a few minutes he looked over at me. “You could help.”

Of course I could. Chagrined, I got up and stood near him. He handed me a knife and some tomatoes. “Cut these up into small cubes.” As soon as I’d started in on them, I drew up my courage. This morning he’d told me not to ask questions, but surely now I could? “Tell me about my father.”

Marcus frowned. “I never knew him well. He’s strong, but I don’t think he’s as strong as you are. Before they left, he was very intense, always focused on making money to finance the journey. He did that by flying ships between planets.”

“Like taking stuff from place to place?”

Marcus shook his head, reaching for some small round green vegetables I didn’t recognize. “People. It’s not much use taking stuff—almost anything can be made anywhere. That, by the way, is why whatever you brought with you from Fremont will fetch you a lot of credit. It’s unique.”

“We brought some art, but most of it is just scientific samples and stuff.”

“Newness has value. Whatever you brought here, people will eventually copy it, and change it. If you brought paw-cat DNA, there will be paw-cats on Water Lily by next summer.”

Akashi would hate that. The West Band always returned captured animals to the wild once they’d studied them. “Isn’t it wrong to sell things just so they can be copied?”

Marcus pushed his pile of cut vegetables to one side and turned to
watch me finish cubing the tomatoes. “Does that mean you think it’s wrong to create things?” He waved a hand at the garden window. “Almost every idea and every thing starts as something we improve on. But there is always a beginning, even if it’s hard to see.”

Akashi would probably hate everything about this place. But I liked it; I felt I belonged here more than on Fremont. I thought about how to answer Marcus. “I guess that—here—it doesn’t feel wrong. I want to make flowers for the garden—I’m already thinking about what they look like. But Fremont isn’t made, and mixing the two feels strange.”

“If your parents had succeeded, Fremont would be closer to this place by now. They went there to start with new things. To explore, but also to create. They thought a fresh start would let them create a fantastic world.” He grimaced. “Maybe the paw-cats would be as big as houses.”

The idea confused me, so I returned to my original questions. “You saw my father after he came back. And I know the Family of Exploration is in trouble of some kind. What did he look like after he got back? How was my father?”

Marcus held out two cupped hands for the tomatoes and dumped them into the bowl he had been filling with cheese and vegetables. “He looked bitter. His eyes were years older than when he left. I guess, maybe sad, too.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry; I didn’t really notice much more. We aren’t friends—we just know each other.”

Maybe it would make him happier if he knew I was alive. “Can we find him?”

“When you can post a find-me query to the webs, you should do that.”

“But you could post one now!” I protested.

“How do you know I haven’t?” he asked, and then he started for the table with the bowl of vegetables. I stared at his back, trying to bore holes into it. I did want to learn from him—I needed to. But why couldn’t he be more straightforward? He was just like Jenna!

As we sat down, I kept pressing. “You said he looked sad. Was he with anyone?”

“No, I had a drink in a bar with him. Look, he’s likable enough, at least he was, just a little intense. Jenna will probably find him.”

“When can I see Jenna and the others?”

He grinned, holding up a hand flat in front of me, signaling a stop. “Maybe that’s where you get your intensity. Maybe it’s inherited. Don’t worry. You haven’t lost them forever.”

“I promised Alicia I’d stay in touch.”

“That little slip of hellfire who came with you? I don’t blame you.”

I nodded, feeling pleased he saw how beautiful she was.

“Hmmm. First love? Don’t answer. It must be. Jenna will keep her busy. But you and she will both change while you’re here.”

Duh. “I want to talk to her.”

He shook his head. “You’re safe with me, but there’s no reason to make this place a target.”

“A target for what?”

“Attention. For people who want the power you may eventually have.”

“Won’t your geo web tell anyone who asks where I am?”

He looked pleased with himself. “No. I blocked queries about your whereabouts.”

Meaning the webs didn’t report out that I was here automatically? “So not all data can be relied on?” I asked.

He looked at me as if I was asking whether the moons were made of water. He shook his head. “Only a stronger, wiser Wind Reader could get in here.”

And of course, there weren’t any. Maybe pride was his biggest weakness, too. It didn’t seem like the right thing for me to say, so I dug into my salad, wondering if it was prison food or school food.

D
irt coated my fingertips as I twisted tiny weeds into my palm, yanking them from under the bushy tops of young carrots. A red bird landed on the top crossbar of our small greenhouse. The bird pecked at the clear plastic, leaving whitish marks where its long black beak nearly punctured the roof. Liam had named it a “black-throated red seed-stealer” in a fit of pique. The many bright, long-beaked, wild birds were a plague, stealing seedlings and anything bright and shiny we left out. At this rate, if we did winter here, we’d be living on forage.

Maybe we could eat the birds.

I threw the weeds aside and stood outside, blinking in the bright sunshine. The steady thwack … scrape … clunk … thwack of Liam cutting wood was nearly obscured by the waterfall. I sighed, already exhausted after a morning’s work. Our now-strong perimeter had screamed at the ever-hopeful demon dogs three times last night. Good for us; bad for our sleep.

The perimeters kept large predators at bay, but I watched my footing for snakes and trap-spiders as I walked past the waterfall, stopping only when I reached the top of the rocky path that led to our little encampment, which we’d dubbed West Home in honor of the band we might never see again.

We’d made no progress freeing the skimmer.

At the path’s summit, I looked down over Golden Cat Valley. Kayleen raced along a path she and Windy had worn to dirt across the center of the valley. The hebra followed her, keeping up easily. They ran
through white, purple, and blue flowers peppering the knee-high grass, Kayleen’s black hair streaming behind her. She began twisting away from the path, keeping Windy right behind her with voice command, training her to follow. It was only in this daily race and play that Kayleen ever looked truly happy.

Liam came up next to me, his bare torso clothed in sweat from chopping wood. My belly warmed and my cheeks flushed at his nearness. He pursed his lips, ready, I was sure, to tell me what we needed to do next. We’d been here nearly seven weeks, and every day had its long list of tasks. We’d set and re-set the perimeter, hauled piles of goods from the skimmer, built a one-room house and small corral, set up the greenhouse, and explored the valley. Still, it was nowhere near enough. I expected to be building food or wood storage next, so I looked up in surprise when Liam said, “I think we should go west. I want to pack today and head for the Fire River tomorrow.”

Much more fun than endless woodcutting. “Your roaming blood is telling,” I teased, reaching up to stroke his cheek. “You haven’t complained about missing home for a whole day.”

He narrowed his eyes at Kayleen and Windy below us. “We’ll get home if I have to build a boat.”

“Right. A day’s flight is a month’s sail, even if we had the materials.” I lifted my face for a kiss. He leaned down and took my offer, but only for a brief brushing of the lips.

“I miss being alone with you.” I said it softly, but loud enough that he heard me.

He kissed me again, just as briefly, then looked down at the valley, the girl, and the hebra. I took his chin in my hand and turned his face back toward me. “She’s not here to see us right now. Kiss me.”

He did, periodically glancing at the valley. Intimacy had become tough.

“I hate it that you’re watching for her,” I said.

He pulled me in close. “I’m sorry. It’s just … so awkward. When we’re close, she looks so hungry.”

“She chose this,” I whispered. But I’d given in, too, letting a combination of exhaustion and unease keep me from doing more than just curling next to him in a tangle of limbs at night. Our tiny house
offered no privacy except during Kayleen’s watch, and of course, she was awake then. “We should start the second house soon,” I said.

“I wish.”

I took his hand. There were a million other things that mattered more. We sat quietly, watching Kayleen race. She’d placed six long-range warning perimeter nodes along the sides of the valley, so it had become a reasonably safe place as long as Kayleen was around to read them. Unlike the more sophisticated equipment we’d used protecting West Home, these didn’t deliver audible warnings.

He glanced at me. “Are you up for it? The river? It will be at least a two-day trip. Probably more.”