Now Remi and Roland were gone, while he still lived. Who could figure it?
Roland, for some reason, had willed Crat his bank balance, augmented by a hero’s bonus. There was supposed to be a medal, too. It was probably still out there somewhere, following him around the world in the unreliable tangle of real-matter post. As for Roland’s money… Crat had blown it all in card games and buying rounds of drinks to his friends’ memory. But he did want the medal.
After mail call, off-duty crew retired to the aft deck, where three enterprising Annamese sold a pungent home brew from clay pots. While the flotilla sailed southward from the debacle with the green raiders, Crat discovered he could now stomach the foul-smelling beer. It was a milestone that showed he was adapting.
The evening was dark, with a heavy overcast cutting off most of the stars. A pearly opalescence in the west became a blaze whenever the clouds parted briefly to spill moonlight across the smooth water.
At the fantail, two sets of meditators seemed to square off for a silent, contemplative showdown. Sufis on the portside and neo-Zen adepts to starboard. Beginners in both groups were wired to brain-wave monitors the size of thimbles, which led to earplug button speakers. Using identical, inexpensive techno-aids, each side nevertheless claimed it was true tradition, while the other taught mere dazing. Whatever. Like the majority of the crew, Crat preferred more honest, traditional forms of intoxication.
“… Commodore bloody misreads his charts—” someone said in the darkness beyond the rear hatch. “That El Nino thing… It’s’pozed drive all them fish over here Wes’ Pacific side, every ten-’leven year so. But bloody dammit commodore, he miss them sure.”
“It come more often than every ten year now, I hear,” someone else replied. Idly, Crat wondered who they were. Their English was better than average for this barge.
“Dey got de eco-loggy all fucked sure,” said someone with a Caribbean accent. “Evryt’ing all change. So I say don’t listen to UNEPA bastards, not at all. Dey don’ know no’t’ing better than we do.”
Someone else agreed. “Ach, UNEPA. They wants us dead, just like greeners do, ’cause we mess up they stinking planet. Might catch wrong type dumpit fish. Ooh, bad thing! So better we just die. Maybe put something in vitamins. Do us cheap an’ quiet.”
That was the steady gossip of course, even when Sea State chemists — university-trained men and women from lands now drowned under the rising tides — went from boat to boat reassuring crews and urging them to take the pills, rumors nevertheless spread like viruses. Crat himself sometimes wondered. His tiredness no doubt came mostly from hard work. That probably also explained the low ebb of his sex drive. But if he ever did find out somebody was slipping something into the food…
The old rage flickered momentarily and he tried to nurse it. But it just damped out, ebbing of its own accord. He lifted his head to glance over Congo’s prow at the night lights of the floating town, up ahead. The old Crat would have already been pacing — eager to prowl the red-light district or find a good brawl. Now all he could think of were the clean if threadbare sheets of the transients’ barracks and then tomorrow’s visit to the meat market.
“Ah, I find you at last. Sorry. I was lost.”
Crat looked up. It was his new friend, the elderly Zuricher, Peter Schultheiss. Peter’s was the one face Crat would miss when he transferred off this misbegotten tub. He grinned and held out a full jar. “Got you another beer, Peter.”
“Goot. Thanks. Took me some time to find my notebook with the name of my comrade at the market. But I found.” He held up a heavy black volume. To Crat’s surprise, it wasn’t a cheap store-and-write plaque, such as even the poorest deckhand owned, but a binder fat with paper pages! Schultheiss murmured as he flipped the scratchy sheets. “Let’s see. He’s in here somewhere. This fellow should, if you mention my name, be able to get you jobs in salvage… maybe training for the deep-sea work you so desire. Ah, here, let me write it down for you.”
Crat accepted the slip of paper. Nearing his rendezvous with the recruiters, he had grown a little less sure he really wanted to try nodule mining — diving far below the reach of light encased in a slimy bubble, sifting mud for crusty lumps. Though well paid, such men tended to have short lives. The alternative of shallow dredging in drowned villages was beginning to sound attractive after all.
Schultheiss looked toward the town lights and sighed.
“What’cha thinkin’ about?” Crat asked.
“I was just remembering how, when I was a boy, my father took me with him on a business trip to Tokyo. As our plane came in at night, we saw an amazing sight. The ocean, around every island as far as you could see, was alight! So many lights I could not count them. The water seemed to be on fire. White fire.
“Such a spectacle, I asked my father what festival this was. But he said, no, it was no oriental holiday. It was like this every night, he said. Every night at sea around Japan.”
The idea of such extravagance made Crat blink. “But, why?”
“Fishing lights,” Peter answered plainly. “At night the ships would run big generators and draw in fish by millions. Very effective, I heard. Efficient, too, if you trade energy for food and don’t worry about tomorrow.”
Schultheiss paused. His voice seemed far away. “My father and his comrades… they prided themselves on future-sightedness. Unlike the Yankees of those days — no offense — he thought he was thinking about tomorrow. While the Yanks bought toys and spent themselves poor, my father and his compeers saved. He invested prudently other people’s funds for them. Took their money with no questions asked and made it grow like vegetables in a garden.”
The old Helvetian sighed. “Maybe it only shows there are many kinds of shortsightedness. Did it ever occur to the Japanese, I wonder, that evolution might change the species they called with their great lights? The easy, stupid ones would die in nets, certainly. But meanwhile those who stayed away would breed future generations. Did they ponder this? No, I think not.
“Likewise it never occurred to my father that the world might someday tire of all its bad men having nice safe places to stash their loot. He never dreamed all the nations might drop their bickering, might get together and say enough, we want our money back. We want the names of those bad men, too… men who betrayed our trust, who robbed our treasuries, or who sold drugs to our children.
“How could my poor father imagine the world’s masses might come pounding on his door someday to take back in anger what he’d invested so carefully, so well?”
The lights of the floating village now glittered in the old man’s moist eyes. Stunned by the depth of this confession, Crat wondered. Why me? Why is he telling me all this?
Peter turned to look at him, struggling with a smile. “Did you see Pikeman, when she came to rescue us from the greeners? How beautiful she was? People used to joke about the Swiss navy. But only fools laugh now! Ton per ton, it gives Sea State — our adopted nation — the best fighting fleet in the world! So we adapt, in that way and so many others. We Helvetians find new roles in the world, performing them with pride in craft.”
Crat noticed the old man’s English had improved. Perhaps it was the passion of sudden memory. Or maybe he was letting down a mask.
“Oh, we and our allies were arrogant before the war. Mea culpa, we admit that now. And history shows the arrogant must always fall.
“But then, to fall can be a gift, no? What is diaspora, after all, except an opportunity, a second chance for a people to learn, to grow out of shallow self-involvement and become righteous, deep, and strong?”