SPINEL STOOD WITH the captain in the darkened viewport, lost amid the throng of stars. Shora was now a immense globe of ocean, patched with clouds. He reached out to it until his hand met the in-curving dome. And Shora seemed to reach back to him, as it swelled ever larger.
Dak said, “See those greenish specks down there? That's where your native friends live.”
Spinel blinked. “On greenish specks?”
“
Rafts
, starling; strong as anything, some of them with a hundred years' growth of raftwood. Even traders can't do better. We'll land on one any minute now, if this old bird can manage it.”
Uneasily Spinel shifted his feet. “Uh, Captain, won't you be busy soon? With the landing and all.”
“What, me? You think they'd let me touch the controls? That would really give your Hyalite lady the fits. No, Iâdamned if I don't feel more like a janitor on this servo-ship.” Dak paused. “Wasn't always that way. Back in the fifth centuryâgive or take a fewânow, that was my heyday.”
“Come on, there's a fish tale,” Spinel muttered.
“Oh, no, starling; I used to run the Malachite ship. At your service, here to Torrâdecades at light-speed were but days to me.”
Spinel looked up.
“You see, I was just a starling like you when my home worldââââ” âhe birdwhistled the nameâ“burnt to a cinder in the Brother Wars. After that, why, I wanted to get just as far away as time and space allowed. So I took the Torran route and ran it for centuries. Until they retired me to this hole.” He sighed.
“The Brother Warsâthat was before the Patriarch. What, are you one of the
Primes?”
Those men who lived like godsâthis old troll was one?
Dak puffed his chest out. “That's right, I'm a Prime. I'm older than the Patriarch of Torr, and near as old as Shora. I was there when the new age began, when they pulled all the planets together like lobsters in a trap. I can tell youâ”
“What do you mean about Shora? Was âShora' a person, too, a Prime?”
Dak shrugged. “Shora was a legend even in my own birthtime. Off the regular trade routes; never worth the bother, for the powers of Torr. But I tell you, out of the thousand worlds ruled by the Patriarch, you won't find one like Shora.”
At that, Spinel frowned: finally, he had caught the man out. “There aren't that many worlds in the Patriarchy. Torr's Nine Legions rule ninety-three planets. I learned
that
in school.”
“There used to be more. Nine out of ten are congealed chunks of rock today; some still smolder. Weed out the bad ones, you know. What else is the Patriarch for?”
Just then the deck lurched and shoved at Spinel's feet as if there were an earthquake. While he scrambled to keep his balance, his tongue stiffened in back and he knew he would be sick.
“We've hit the atmosphere,” cried the captain. “Back to your seat-belt now, and hope the sea's not too strong when we touch raft.”
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By the exit, Spinel slumped on the deck with his travel bags. His stomach had been violently emptied but still felt queasy; the deck remained unsteady, though the ship supposedly had landed on something.
A crack of light appeared. A breeze invaded the ship, carrying ocean salt and an indefinable sweetish scent, mingled rose and orange.
On Merwen's head, the clickfly was perched again, emitting loud sputters and chirps. Usha chirped back at it, more lively than Spinel had ever seen her.
Weakly Spinel asked, “Where is all your luggage?”
“To be delivered.” Lady Berenice brushed past him, her manicured hands empty. Clearly she meant to keep her place above him. Yet Merwen ingenuously treated her little different from himself: with respect but not obeisance. Did Merwen not know the difference? Did Shora lack nobles, as well as men?
Outside, Merwen and Usha were down the ramp already. The clickfly circled overhead in a frenzy, emitting swooping cries. From nowhere a swarm of clickflies descended to buzz excitedly about the Sharers like bees at a honeycomb, but the insects seemed to do no harm.
As Spinel stepped down the exit ramp, he surveyed the surface below. It looked like hard crusted soil, with a sort of evergreen matting,
yet it could not be “land” underneath. His feet lost weight for an instant, and he gripped the railing until the swell subsided. The land-that-was-not-land stretched outward, about a fifteen-minute walk, he guessed, to where it branched into a herringbone pattern of channels all around. Beyond that, the gray girdle of ocean faded into sky.
Merwen came back to the ramp, with a lightness in her step and a glow in her eyes that she had never shown on Valedon. Dozens of clickflies perched on her arms or hovered above.
“Share-the-day,
Spinel, it's a glorious day!” she called, mixing the two tongues. “Do you hear the
clickflies?
All our sisters, from rafts and clusters across Shora,
share welcome
with us. Come on, our daughters await us.”
“Does the raft always ⦠move like this?”
“Oh, it's a good strong raft, it flexes well. It is many person-lengths thick. It is shared by traders; see?” She gestured toward the concrete buildings that lay behind the ferryship. “And our home raft is stronger yet, twice as thick at the center. The sea names ours Raia-el. Come home to Raia-el.” She clasped his hand, and the umbrella folds of webbing hung loosely across his fingers. At the foot of the ramp, his soles met the tough, matted crust of plant growth.
“Hear me, starling!” Captain Dak's voice sang out from the ferryship. “You won't catch this old bird on Shora when the seaswallowers come. Two months you've got, to turn back,” he warned.
“Thanks, I'llâ”
“With all the rest of the Valan cowards,” Lady Berenice called back. Scornfully she tossed her head and turned her high shoulders.
The unladylike outburst startled Spinel. Blood rushed to his face, and he clenched his travel bag. “Thanks anyhow, Dak.”
“Stop by and see me then. If you survive.” A whistled arpeggio was the Captain's sign-off.
Before he could change his mind, Spinel hurried off with Merwen, who seemed anxious to reach the channeled raft-edge. The soil became moist, and long weeds straggled across it. Then the soil gave out altogether where branches immense as fallen sequoias extended out to sea, covered with barnacles and other scaly things. At Merwen's footfall, half the scaly things slithered down the side. Spinel recoiled, but Merwen unconcernedly went out onto the branch, so he followed, more slowly. The rose-orange scent intensified, and its source soon appeared: blossoms, brilliant yellow tricorners sprouting from bushes on side branchlets that grew ever denser as he went on.
A narrow boat appeared, carving its way up the flowery channel. Three tiny purple figures arose in it; they jumped and waved, dancing wildly as molten glass in a flame, and the boat heaved precariously. Abruptly all three dove over the side, and in an instant they were clambering up onto the branch, waddling ducklike, for their feet were even more outsized for their height than were the adults'. They surrounded Usha first, hugging and jabbering until Usha tugged the biggest girl back down to secure the boat.
Of the other two, one was waist-high and the other a toddler. They exchanged high-pitched chatter with Merwen and pulled insistently at her shift, until she loosened the garment and it collapsed around her feet. Now they all were unclothed.
Spinel burned with embarrassment. He had not believed that Sharers went unclothed, any more than he believed they were witches. He glanced back at Lady Berenice, wondering how she would take this. To his amazement, even she had slipped off her Iridian talar, stonesign and all, and had rolled it into a neat bundle under her arm. Coolly she returned his stare, as if daring him to run back to the moonferry.
Before he could think, the Sharer girls converged on him. Their arms flashed up over his shirt and reached for his hair, which must have been a novelty for children who were bald as sapphires. At length Merwen pulled them away, saying in Valan, “Come now, Weia, Wellen; Spinel is still shy, and you know what Valan plumage looks like, anyway. Here comes Flossa; is the boat ready now?”
“
Spi
-nel,
Spi-
nel
,”
echoed Wellen, the middle child. The eldest, Flossa, started a spitting contest, and the three of them squealed with laughter. Merwen nudged them into the boat, where Usha was bailing out water with her efficient hands. “See the daughters of my womb?” Usha proudly asked him. “Grown so big and strong, with Mama and Mamasister gone.”
“And
inconsiderate,”
added Merwen.
At her selfname, Usha drew back and spoke again, in Sharer. The girls subsided. They crouched demurely on the floor of the boat, only stealing glances at the Valan creature, who huddled miserably next to the rail and wished more than anything that he had never left home.
Usha and Flossa paddled out to the open sea, where crests capped the waves and the boat heaved and smacked the water. Then, from the back of the boat, started the most unlikely sound Spinel would have expected to hear: an electric outboard motor.
Spinel turned, shook the wind-tossed locks out of his eyes, and stared in disbelief. The motor was a standard make from Iridis, used by those Chrysolite fishermen who could afford it. What in Torr's name was one doing here, on a boat made of some shiny substance completely foreign to him, with Flossa's webbed hand at the tiller? Nevertheless, this echo from home was a gift from the heavens, and as the boat leaped forward his spirits rose hopefully.
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A shadow fell. Overhead passed an enormous bird with a fish snout and four spined wings. Wellen stood up and cried out to it, snapping her fingers. The bird descended and soared just past her head, its wingspan dwarfing the boat. Spinel ducked, and the wind from its wings brushed his back before it loftily soared away.
In the distance, a thumb-shaped projectile shot out from the sea, and a stream of water arched behind. The object glided majestically for a minute or so, until it returned to the sea with a thunderous crash. Another one rocketed from the sea, then another; there must have been a school of them. Waves soon reached the boat and rocked it steeply.
“They are glider squid,” Merwen told him. “You'll see, they are good friends to share.”
Spinel shook his head. How would he ever tell about any of this, back in Chrysoport? Even his own mother would never believe him, much less Ahn or Melas.
Something nagged at him; something was missing, he did not know what. As he watched the sea, it came to him. There were no landmarks of any kind, just the flat horizon. It was hardly safe, out on the open sea in such a small craft, and with what navigation? “Merwen ⦠how do you know where you're going? I mean, you got a compass or something?”
“Yes, nowadays we get compasses from the traders. But the clickflies always tell us. Clickflies know everything; you'll have to learn to share speech with them.”
The boat pounded across the waves until it reached Merwen's raft, Raia-el. Once again he breathed the rose-orange scent, as the boat threaded in through branched channels where the flowers bloomed so profusely that they closed in a canopy just overhead. Beyond, the flowers gave out again where the great level trunks coalesced to join the raft.
Upon the raft rose a stalk of blue spires with concave sides that fit together like curved diamond shapes, broadening at the base. It might have been rock crystal, but the tips looked utterly fragile. Spinel ventured to say to Merwen, “Is that some sort of ⦠giant flower?”
Flossa collapsed in a fit of giggles. She translated to her sisters, who shrieked and rolled over backward, kicking their feet in the air.
“You trolls' brats, you!” Spinel lunged at one of those infuriating flippers.
Weia and Wellen dove overboard and vanished, while Flossa picked up her paddles again, still giggling. What a nuisance they were, even worse than Oolite.
Merwen answered, “That is our house.”
It looked flimsy for a house on the sea. In fact, he soon noticed, the sloping panels were nothing more than woven seasilk, twisted into saddle shapes and glazed somehow. What would become of it in a hurricane, let alone when “the sea swallowed”?
They walked up to the “house.” Usha touched a blue panel; with a
whoosh
, a round wrinkled hole gaped in the fabric. From inside, Sharers crowded to greet them, their voices rushing like a song of the sea. Even Merwen spoke briskly, and her hands fluttered everywhere. Spinel stepped through the doorhole, feeling lost in the confusion. The air he breathed was thick with foreign odors; light-headed, he leaned against a wall. His arm sank into a furry paste that covered the dipping walls and ceilings, glowing in flares of green and amber that created a dizzying illusion of motion. The feel of the squished material added to his queasiness.