Blue Mars Part 44

Back into the Alchemist's Quarter, all the machines in the old buildings shut down, hopelessly outdated, even the very clever Sabatier processor. He had enjoyed watching that thing work. Nadia had fixed it one day when everyone else was baffled; little round woman humming some tune in a world of her own, communing with machinery, back when machines could be understood. Thank G.o.d for Nadia, the anchor holding them all to reality, the one they could always count on. He wanted to give her a hug, this most beloved sister of his, who it appeared was over there in the vehicle yard trying to get a museum-exhibit bulldozer to run.

But there on the horizon was a figure walking westward over a knoll: Ann. Had she been circling the horizon, walking and walking? He ran out toward her, stumbling just as he would have in the first week. He caught up with her, slowly, gasping.

"Ann? Ann?"

She turned and he saw the instinctive fear on her face, as on the face of a hunted animal. He was a creature to run from; this was what he had been to her. "I made mistakes," he said as he stopped before her. They could speak in the open air, in the air he had made over her objection. Though it was still thin enough to make one gasp. "I didn't see the- the beauty until it was too late. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry." Oh he had tried to say it before, in Michel's car when the deluge poured, in Zygote, in Tempe Terra; never had it worked. Ann and Mars, all intertwined- and yet he had no apology to make to Mars, every sunset was beautiful, the sky's color a different washed tint every minute of every day, blue sign of their power and their responsibility, their place in the cosmos and their power within it, so small and yet so important; they had brought life to Mars and it was good, he was sure of that.

But to Ann he needed to apologize. For the years of missionary fervor, the pressure applied to make make her agree, the hunt for the wild beast of her refusal, to kill it dead. Sorry for that, so sorry- his face wet with tears, and she stared at him so- just precisely as she had on that cold rock in Antarctica, in that first refusal- which had all come back and rested inside him now. His past. her agree, the hunt for the wild beast of her refusal, to kill it dead. Sorry for that, so sorry- his face wet with tears, and she stared at him so- just precisely as she had on that cold rock in Antarctica, in that first refusal- which had all come back and rested inside him now. His past.

"Do you remember?" he said to her curiously, shunted onto that new train of thought. "We walked out to Lookout Point together- I mean one after the next- but to meet, to talk in private? We went out separately, I mean- you know how it was then- that Russian couple had fought and been sent home- we all hid everything we could from the selection people!" He laughed, choking somewhat, at the image of their deeply irrational beginnings. So apt! And everything since played out so in keeping with such a beginning! They had come out to Mars and replayed everything just as it had always been played before, it was nothing but trait recurrence, pattern repet.i.tion. "We sat there and I thought we were getting on and I took your hand but you pulled it away, you didn't like it. I felt, I felt bad. We went back separately and didn't talk again like that, in that way, not ever. And then I hounded you through all this, I guess, and I thought it was because of the, the..." He waved at the blue sky.

"I remember," she said.

She was looking cross-eyed at him. He felt the shock of it; one didn't get to do this, one never got to say to the lost love of one's youth I remember, it still hurts. And yet there she stood, looking at his face amazed.

"Yes," she said. "But that wasn't what happened," she said, frowning. "It was me. I mean, I put my hand on your shoulder, I liked you, it seemed like we might become... but you jumped! Ha, you jumped like I had shocked you with a cattle prod! Static electricity was bad down there, but still"- sharp laugh-"no. It was you. You didn't- it wasn't your kind of thing, I figured. And it wasn't mine either! In a way it should have worked, just because of that. But it didn't. And then I forgot about it."

"No," Sax said.

He shook his head, in a primitive attempt to recast his thought, to re-remember. He could still see in his mental theater that awkward instant at Lookout Point, the whole thing clear almost word for word, move for move, it's a net gain in order, he had said, trying to explain the purpose of science; and she had said, for that you would destroy the entire face of a planet. He remembered it.

But there was that look on Ann's face as she recalled the incident, that look of someone in full possession of a moment of her past, alive with the upwelling- clearly she remembered it too- and yet remembered something different than he had. One of them had to be wrong, didn't they? Didn't they?

"Could we really," he said, and had to stop and try again. "Could we really have been two such maladroit people as to both go out- intending to- to reveal ourselves-"

Ann laughed. "And both go away feeling rebuffed by the other?" She laughed again. "Why sure."

He laughed as well. They turned their faces to the sky and laughed.

But then Sax shook his head, rueful to the point of agony. Whatever had happened- well. No way of knowing, now. Even with his memory upwelling like an artesian fountain, like one of the cataclysmic outbreak floods themselves, there was still no way to be sure what had really happened.

Which gave him a sudden chill. If he could not trust these upwelling memories to be true- if one so crucial as this one was now cast in doubt- what then of the others, what about Hiroko there in the storm, leading him to his car, hand on his wrist- could that too be.... No. That hand on his wrist. But Ann's hand had had jerked away from him, a somatic memory just as solidly real, just as physical, a kinetic event remembered in his body, in the pattern of cells for as long as he should live. That one had to be true; they both had to be true. jerked away from him, a somatic memory just as solidly real, just as physical, a kinetic event remembered in his body, in the pattern of cells for as long as he should live. That one had to be true; they both had to be true.

And so?

So that was the past. There and not there. His whole life. If nothing was real but this moment, Planck instant after Planck instant, an unimaginably thin membrane of becoming between past and future- his life- what then was it, so thin, so without any tangible past or future: a blaze of color. A thread of thought lost in the act of thinking. Reality so tenuous, so barely there; was there nothing they could hold to?

He tried to say some of this, stammered, failed, gave up.

"Well," Ann said, apparently understanding him. "At least we remember that much. I mean, we agree that we went out there. We had ideas, they didn't work out. Something happened that we probably neither understood at the time, so it's no surprise we can't remember it properly now, or that we recall it differently. We have to understand something to remember it."

"Is that true?"

"I think so. It's why two-year-olds can't remember. They feel things like crazy, but they don't remember them because they don't really understand them."

"Perhaps."

He wasn't sure that was how memory worked. Early childhood memories were eidetic images, like exposed photographic plates. But if it was true, then he was perhaps all right; for he had definitely understood Hiroko's appearance in the storm, her hand on his wrist. These things of the heart, in the violence of the storm....

Ann stepped forward and gave him a hug. He turned his face to the side, his ear pressed against her collarbone. She was tall. He felt her body against his, and he hugged her back, hard. You will remember this forever, he thought. She held him away from her, held him by the arms. "That's the past," she said. "It doesn't explain what happened between us on Mars, I don't think. It's a different matter."

"Perhaps."

"We haven't agreed, but we had the same- the same terms. The same things were important to us. I remember when you tried to make me feel better, in that boulder car in Marineris, during the outbreak flood."

"And you me. When Maya was yelling at me, after Frank died."

"Yes," she said, thinking back. Such power of recall they had in these amazing hours! That car had been a crucible, they had all metamorphosed in it, in their own ways. "I suppose I did. It wasn't fair, you were just trying to help her. And that look on your face...."

They stood there, looking back at the scattering of low structures that was Underhill.

"And here we are," Sax said finally.

"Yes. Here we are."

Awkward instant. Another awkward instant. This was life with the other: one awkward instant after the next. He would have to get used to it, somehow. He stepped back. He reached out and held her hand, squeezed it hard. Then let go. She wanted to walk out past Nadia's arcade, she said, into the untouched wilderness west of Underhill. She was experiencing a rush of memory too strong to concentrate on the present. She needed to walk.

He understood. Off she went, with a wave. With a wave! And there was Coyote, over there near the salt pyramids so brilliant in the afternoon light. Feeling Mars's gravity for the first time in decades, Sax hopped over to the little man. The only one of the First Hundred's men who had been shorter than Sax. His brother in arms.

Stumbling here and there through his life, step-by-step shocked elsewhere, it was actually quite difficult to focus on Coyote's asymmetrical face, faceted like Deimos- but there it was, most vibrantly there, pulsing it seemed with all its past shapes as well. At least Desmond had more or less resembled himself throughout. G.o.d knew what Sax looked like to the others, or what he would see if he looked in a mirror- the idea was dizzying, it might even be interesting to test it, look in a mirror while remembering something from his youth, the view might distort. Desmond, a Tobagonian of Indian descent, now saying something difficult to comprehend, something about rapture of the deeps, unclear if he was referring to the memory drug or to some nautical incident from his youth. Sax wanted so much to tell him that Hiroko was alive, but just as the words were on the tip of his tongue, he stopped himself. Desmond looked so happy at this moment; and he would not believe Sax. So it would only upset him. Knowledge by experience is not always translatable into discursive knowledge, which was a shame, but there it was. Desmond would not believe him because he had not felt that hand on his wrist. And why should he, after all?

They walked out toward Chern.o.byl, talking about Arkady and Spencer. "We're getting old," Sax said.

Desmond hooted. He still had a most alarming laugh- infectious, however, and Sax laughed too. "Getting old? old? Getting Getting old?" old?"

The sight of their little Rickover put them into paroxysms. Though it was pathetic as well, and brave, and stupid, and clever. Their limbic systems were overloaded still, Sax noted, jangling with all the emotions at once. All his past was coming clearer and clearer, in a kind of simultaneous overlay of sequences, each event with its unique emotional charge, now firing all at once: so full, so full. Perhaps fuller than the, the what- the mind? the soul?- fuller than it was capable of being. Overflowing Overflowing, yes, that was the way it felt. "Desmond, I'm overflowing."

Desmond only laughed harder.

His life had exceeded his capacity to feel it all at once. Except what was this, then, this feeling? A limbic hum, the roaring hum of the wind in conifers high in the mountains, lying in a sleeping bag at night in the Rockies, with the wind thrumming through the pine needles.... Very interesting. Possibly an effect of the drug, which would pa.s.s, although he was hoping that there were effects of the drug that would last, and who could say if this aspect might not as well, as an integral part of the whole? Thus: if you can remember your past, and it is very long, then you will necessarily feel very full, full of experiences and emotions, perhaps to the point where it might not be easy to feel much more. Wasn't that possible? Or perhaps everything would feel more intensely than was appropriate; perhaps he had inadvertently turned them all into horribly sentimental people, stricken with grief if they stepped on an ant, weeping with joy at the sight of sunrise, etc. That would be unfortunate. Enough was enough, or more than enough. In fact Sax had always believed that the amplitude of emotional response exhibited in the people around him could be turned down a fair bit with no very great loss to humanity. Of course it wouldn't work to try consciously to damp one's emotions, that was repression, sublimation, with a resulting overpressure elsewhere. Curious how useful Freud's steam-engine model of the mind remained, compression, venting, the entire apparatus, as if the brain had been designed by James Watt. But reductive models were useful, they were at the heart of science. And he had needed to blow off steam for a long time.

So he and Desmond walked around Chern.o.byl, throwing rocks at it, laughing, talking in a halting rush and flow, not so much a conversation as a simultaneous transmission, as they were both absorbed by their own thoughts. Thus very dislocated talk, but companionable nevertheless, and rea.s.suring to hear someone else sounding so confused. And altogether a great pleasure to feel so close to this man, so different from him in so many ways, and yet now babbling together with him about school, the snowscapes of the southern polar region, the parks in the Ares Ares; and they were so similar anyway.

"We all go through the same things."

"It's true! It's true!"

Curious that this fact didn't affect people's behavior more.

Eventually they wandered back to the trailer park, slowing down as they pa.s.sed through it, held by ever-thickening cobwebs of past a.s.sociation. It was near sunset. In the barrel vaults people were milling around, working on dinner. Most had been too distracted to eat during the day, and the drug appeared to be a mild appet.i.te suppressant; but now people were famished. Maya had been cooking a big pot of stew, chopping and peeling potatoes and throwing them in. Borscht? Bouillabaisse? She had had the forethought to start a breadmaker in the morning, and now the yeasty smell filled the warm air of the barrel vaults.

They congregated in the large double vault at the southwest corner, the room where Sax and Ann had had their famous debate at the beginning of the formal terraforming effort. Hopefully this would not occur to Ann when she came in. Except that a videotape of the debate was playing on a small screen in the corner. Oh well. She would arrive soon after dark, in her old way; this constancy was a pleasure to all of them. It made it possible in some sense to say Here we are- the others are away tonight- otherwise everything is the same. An ordinary night in Underhill. Talk about work, the various sites- food- the old familiar faces. As if Arkady or John or Tatiana might walk in any second, just as Ann was now, right on time, stomping her feet to warm them, ignoring the others- just as always.

But she came and sat beside him. Ate her meal (a Provensect;al stew that Michel used to make) beside him. In her customary silence. Still, people stared. Nadia watched them with tears in her eyes. Permanent sentimentality: it could be a problem.

Later, under the clatter of dishes and voices, everyone seemingly talking at once- and sometimes it seemed possible also to understand everyone all at once, even while speaking- under that noise, Ann leaned into him and said: "Where are you going after this?"

"Well," he said, suddenly nervous again, "some Da Vinci colleagues invited me to, to, to- to sail sail. To try out a new boat they've designed for me, for my, my sailing trips. A sailboat. On Chryse- on Chryse Gulf Gulf."

"Ah."

Terrible silence, despite all the noise.

"Can I come with you?"

Burning sensation in the skin of the face; capillary engorgement; very odd. But he must remember to speak! "Oh yes."

And then everyone sitting around, thinking, talking, remembering. Sipping Maya's tea. Maya looked content, taking care of them. Much later, well into the middle of the night, with almost everyone still slumped in a chair, or hunched over the heater, Sax decided he would go over to the trailer park, where they had spent their first few months. Just to see.

Nadia was already out there, lying down on one of the mattresses. Sax pulled down another one from the wall; his old mattress, yes. And then Maya was there, and then all the rest of them, pulling along the reluctant and one had to say fearful Desmond, sitting him on a mattress in the middle, gathering around him, some in their old spots, others who had slept in other trailers filling the empty mattresses, the ones that had been occupied by people now gone. A single trailer now housed them all quite easily. And sometime in the depth of the night they all lay down, and slid down the slow uneven glide into sleep. All around the room, people falling to sleep in their beds- and that too was a memory, drowsy and warm, this was how it had always felt, to drift off in a bath of one's friends, weary with the day's work, the oh-so-interesting work of building a town and a world. Sleep, memory, sleep, body; fall thankfully into the moment, and dream.

They sailed out of the Florentine on a windy cloudless day, Ann at the rudder and Sax up in the starboard bow of the sleek new catamaran, making sure the anchor cat had secured the anchor; which reeked of anaerobic bottom mud, so much so that Sax got distracted and spent some time hanging over the rail looking at samples of the mud through his wristpad magnifying lens: a great quant.i.ty of dead algae and other bottom organisms. An interesting question whether or not this was typical of the North Sea's bottom, or was restricted for some reason to the Chryse Gulf environs, or to the Florentine, or shallows more generally- "Sax, get back here," Ann called. "You're the one who knows how to sail."

"So I am."

Though in truth the boat's AI would do everything at the most general command; he could say for instance "Go to Rhodos," and there would be nothing more to be done for the rest of the week. But he had grown fond of the feeling of a tiller under his hand. So he abandoned the anchor's muck to another time, and made his way to the wide shallow c.o.c.kpit suspended between the two narrow hulls.

"Da Vinci is about to go under the horizon, look."

"So it is."

The outer points of the crater rim were the only parts of Da Vinci Island still visible over the water, though they weren't more than twenty kilometers away. There was an intimacy to a small globe. And the boat was very fast; it hydroplaned in any wind over fifty kilometers an hour, and the hulls had underwater outriggerkeels that extended and set in various dolphinlike shapes, which along with sliding counterbalance weights in the cross struts kept the windward hull in contact with the water, and the leeward hull from driving too far under. So in even moderate winds, like the one striking their unfurled mast sail now, the boat shoved up onto the water and skated over it like an iceboat over ice, moving at a speed just a few percent slower than the wind itself. Looking over the stern Sax could see that a very small percentage of the hulls were actually in contact with the water; it looked like the rudder and the outrigger-keels were the only things that kept them from taking flight. He saw the last bits of Da Vinci Island disappear, under a bouncing serrated horizon no more than four kilometers away from them. He glanced at Ann; she was clutching the rail, looking back at the brilliant white V-tapestries of their wake. Sax said, "Have you been at sea before?" meaning, entirely out of the sight of land.

"No."

"Ah."

They sailed on north, out into Chryse Gulf. Copernicus Island appeared over the water to their right, then Galileo Island behind it. Then both receded under the blue horizon again. The swells on the horizon were individually distinct, so that the horizon was not a straight blue line against the sky, but rather a s.h.i.+fting array of swell tops, one after another in swift succession. The groundswell was coming out of the north, almost directly ahead of them, so that looking to port or starboard the horizon line was particularly jagged, a wavy line of blue water against the blue sky, in a too-small circle surrounding the s.h.i.+p- as if the proper Terran distance to the horizon were stubbornly embedded in the brain's optics, so that when they saw things clearly here, they would always appear to stand on a planet too small for them. Certainly there was a look of the most extreme discomfort on Ann's face; she glared at the waves, groundswell after groundswell lifting the bow and then the stern. There was a cross chop nearly at right angles to the groundswell, pushed by the west wind and ruffling the bigger broader swells. Wavetank physics; one could see it all laid out; it reminded Sax of the physics lab on the second story of the northeasternmost building in his high school, where hours had pa.s.sed like minutes, the flat little wavetank full of marvels. Here the groundswell originated in the North Sea's perpetual eastward motion around the globe; the swell was greater or smaller depending on whether local winds reinforced it or interfered with it. The light gravity made for big broad waves, quickly generated by strong winds; if today's wind got very much stronger, for instance, then the wind-chop from the west would quickly grow bigger than the groundswell from the north, and obscure it completely. Waves on the North Sea were notorious for their size and mutability, their recombinant surprises, though it was also true that they moved fairly slowly through the water; big slow hills, like the giant dunes of Vast.i.tas far underneath them, migrating around the planet. Sometimes they could get very big indeed; in the aftermath of the typhoons that blew over the North Sea, waves seventy meters high had been reported.

This lively cross chop seemed enough for Ann, who was looking a bit distressed. Sax could not think what to say to her. He doubted that his thoughts on wave mechanics would be appropriate, though it was very interesting of course, and would be to anyone interested in the physical sciences. As Ann was. But perhaps not now. Now the sheer sensory array of water, wind, sky- it looked like it was enough for her. Perhaps silence was in order.

Whitecaps began to roll down the faces of some of the cross-chop waves, and Sax immediately checked into the s.h.i.+p's weather system to see what the wind speed was. The s.h.i.+p had it at thirty-two kilometers per hour. So this was about the speed at which the crests of waves were first knocked over. A simple matter of surface tension against wind speed, calculable, in fact... yes, the appropriate equation in fluid dynamics suggested they should start to collapse at a wind speed of thirty-five kilometers per hour, and here they were: whitecaps, startlingly white against the water, which was a dark blue, Prussian blue Sax thought it might be. The sky today was almost sky blue, slightly em-purpled at the zenith, and somewhat whitened around the sun, with a metallic sheen between sun and the horizon under it.

"What are you doing?" Ann said, sounding annoyed.

Sax explained, and she listened in stony silence. He didn't know what she might be thinking. That the world was somewhat explicable- he always found that a comfort. But Ann... well, it could be as simple as seasickness. Or something from her past, distracting her; Sax had found in the weeks since the experiment at Underhill that he was often distracted by some past incident, rising unbidden from a great bulk of them in his mind. Involuntary memory. And for Ann, that might include negative incidents of one kind or another; Michel had said she had been mistreated as a child. It still seemed to Sax too shocking to believe. On Earth men had abused women; on Mars, never. Was that true? Sax did not know for sure, but he felt it was true. This was what it meant to live in a just and rational society, this was one of the main reasons it was a good thing, a value. Possibly Ann would know more about the reality of the situation these days. But he did not feel comfortable asking her. It was clearly contraindicated.

"You're awfully quiet," she said.

"Enjoying the view," he said quickly. Perhaps he had better talk about wave mechanics after all. He explained the groundswell, the cross chop, the negative and positive interference patterns that could result. But then he said, "Did you remember much about Earth, during the Underhill experiment?"

"No."

"Ah."

This was probably some kind of repression, and exactly the opposite of the psychotherapeutic method that Michel would probably have recommended. But they were not steam engines. And some things were no doubt better forgotten. He would have to work on once again forgetting John's death, for instance; also on remembering better those parts of his life when he had been most social, as during the years of work for Biotique in Burroughs. So that across the c.o.c.kpit from him sat Counter-Ann, or that third woman she had mentioned- while he was, at least in part, Stephen Lindholm. Strangers, despite that startling encounter at Underhill. Or because of it. h.e.l.lo; nice to meet you.

Once they got out from among the fjords and islands at the bottom of Chryse Gulf, Sax turned the tiller and the boat swooped northeast, rus.h.i.+ng across the wind and the whitecaps. Then the wind was behind them, and with a following wind the mast sail bloomed into its own splayed-wing version of a spinnaker, and the hulls surfed on the mushy crests of the waves before losing to their superior speed. The eastern sh.o.r.e of the Chryse Gulf appeared before them; it was less spectacular than the western sh.o.r.e, but in many ways prettier. Buildings, towers, bridges: it was a well-populated coast, as were most of them these days. Coming off Olympus all the towns must be a bit of a shock.

After they pa.s.sed the broad mouth of the Ares Fjord, Soo-chow Point emerged over the horizon, and then beyond it the Oxia Islands, one by one. Before the water's arrival these had been the Oxia Colles, an array of round hills that stood at just the height to become an archipelago. Sax sailed into the narrow waterways between these islands, each a low round brown hump, standing forty or fifty meters out of the sea. By far the larger percentage of them were uninhabited, except perhaps by goats, but on the largest ones, especially kidney-shaped ones with bays, the stones covering the hills had been gathered up into walls, which split the slopes into fields and pastures; these islands were irrigated, green with orchards laden with fruit, or pastures dotted with white sheep or miniature cows. The s.h.i.+p's maritime chart named these islands- Kipini, Wahoo, Wabash, Naukan, Libertad- and reading the map Ann snorted. "These are the names of the craters out in the middle of the gulf, underwater."

"Ah."

Still, they were pretty islands. The fis.h.i.+ng villages on the bays were whitewashed, with blue shutters and doors: the Aegean model again. Indeed, on one high point bluff there stood a little Doric temple, square and proud. The boats down below in the bays were small sloops, or simply rowboats and dories. As they sailed past Sax pointed out a hilltop windmill here, a pasture of llamas there. "It seems a nice life."

They talked about the natives then, easily and without hidden tension. About Zo; about the ferals and their strange hunter-gatherer city-shopper lifestyle; about the ag nomads, moving from crop to crop like migrant laborers who owned the farms; about the cross-fertilization of all these styles; about the new Terran settlements elbowing into the landscape; about the increasing number of harbor towns. Off in the middle of the bay, they spotted one of the new big towns.h.i.+ps, a floating island of a seacraft, with a population in the thousands; it was too big to enter the Oxia archipelago, and looked to be headed across the gulf to Nilokeras, or down to the southern fjords. As the land all over Mars was becoming more crowded, and the possibility of settling on it more and more restricted by the courts, more and more people were moving onto the North Sea, making towns.h.i.+ps like these their permanent home.

"Let's go visit it," Ann said. "Can we?"

"I don't see why not," Sax said, surprised at the request. "We can certainly catch it."

He brought the catamaran about and tacked south and west toward the towns.h.i.+p, pus.h.i.+ng the cat as much as he could, to impress the seafarers. In less than an hour they had reached its broad side, a rounded scarp about two kilometers long and fifty meters tall. A dock just above the waterline had a section against the towns.h.i.+p that would rise, as an open elevator, and when they had stepped across from the cat to the dock and tied their boat on, they got into this railed-off section and were lifted up to the deck of the towns.h.i.+p.

The deck was almost as broad as it was long, its central area a farm with many small trees scattered on it, so it was hard to see the other side. But it was clear from what they could see that the circ.u.mference of the deck was a kind of rectangular street or arcade, with buildings on both sides that were two to four stories high, the outer buildings topped by masts and windmills, the inner ones opening into broad breaks where parks and plazas led inward to the crops and groves of the farm, and a big freshwater pond. A floating town, somewhat like a walled city in Renaissance Tuscany in appearance, except that everything was extraordinarily neat and orderly, s.h.i.+pshape as one might say. A small group of the s.h.i.+p's citizens greeted them on the plaza overlooking the dock, and when they found out who their visitors were they were thrilled- they insisted the travelers stay for a meal, and a few of them guided them on a walk around the perimeter of the s.h.i.+p, "or for as far as you care to go, it's a good fair walk."

This was a small towns.h.i.+p, they were told. Population, five thousand. Since its launch it had been almost entirely self-sufficient. "We grow most of our food, and fish for the rest. There are arguments now with other towns.h.i.+ps about overfis.h.i.+ng certain species. We're doing perennial polyculture, growing new strains of corn, sunflower, soybean, sand plum and so on, all intermixed and harvested by robot, because harvesting is backbreaking work. We've finally got the technology to go home to gathering, that's what it comes down to. There are a lot of onboard cottage industries. We've got wineries, see the vineyards out there, and there are vintners and brandy distillers. That we do by hand. Also special-function semiconductors, and a famous bike shop."

"Most of the time we sail around the North Sea. There are some really violent storms sometimes, but we're so big that we ride them out pretty easily. Most of us have lived here for all ten years the s.h.i.+p has existed. It's a great life. The s.h.i.+p is all you need. Although it's great fun to make landfall from time to time. We come down to Nilokeras every Ls zero for the spring festival. We sell what we've made and resupply, and party all night long. Then back out to sea."

"We don't use anything but wind and sunlight, and some fish. The environmental courts like us, they agree we're minimum impact. The population of the North Sea's area might be even higher now than if it had stayed land. There are hundreds of towns.h.i.+ps now."

"Thousands. And the harbor towns with the s.h.i.+pyards, and the seaports we visit to do business, they're doing very well indeed."

Ann said, "And you think this is one way we can take on some of Earth's surplus population."

"Yes, we do. One of the best ways. It's a big ocean, it could take a lot more s.h.i.+ps like this."

"As long as they didn't rely too much on fis.h.i.+ng."

As they walked on, Sax said to Ann, "That's another reason that it just isn't worth it to force a crisis over the immigration issue."

Ann didn't reply. She was staring down at the sun-burnished water, then up at one of the couple dozen masts, each with its single schooner sail. The town looked like a tabular iceberg with its surface entirely claimed by earth. A floating island.

"So many different kinds of nomads," Sax commented. "It seems that very few of the natives feel impelled to settle in a single place."

"Unlike us."

"Point taken. But I wonder if this tendency means they are inclined to a certain redness. If you know what I mean."