Schultheiss looked at Crat. “Pain is how a people are tempered, prepared for greatness. Don’t you think so, fils? That wisdom comes through suffering?”
Crat could only blink in reply, moved, but not knowing what to say. In truth, he wasn’t sure he understood what Peter was talking about.
“Yes,” the old man agreed with himself, nodding firmly, both guilt and stark dignity evident in his voice. “My people have been chosen for some future, unknown task. Of that I’m sure. A task far greater than perching on safe mountaintops, high and aloof, living high off other people’s money.”
Peter stared into the night, much farther than Crat felt he himself could see.
“The world’s folk will need us yet. Mark my words. And when that day comes, we will not leave them wanting.”
At night it had been no more than a sprinkle of lights, rocking gently to rhythmic tides. By day, however, the barge-city came alive with noise and commerce. And rumors. It was said that no place, not even the Net, spread gossip as swiftly or erratically.
Crat had no way of picking up most of the hearsay, though. Unlike the working ships, where discipline required a common language, floating towns were a chaos of tongues and dialects, whispered, murmured, bellowed. All the sea towns were the same. Miniature babels, sprawled horizontally across the nervous ocean.
Night-soil collectors called as they rowed the narrow canals between multistoried housing barges, taking slops lowered down by rope in exchange for a few devalued piasters. Competing to deliver odorous fertilizer to the garden boats, they regularly sped down unbraced passages at risk of being crushed between the rocking, bobbing hulls.
Clothing, washed in sea water, hung from cluttered lines alongside banners proclaiming ideologies and gospels and advertisements in a dozen alphabets. Each district was topped with flat arrays of solar cells linked to broad, winglike rainwater collectors, all tended by small boys who climbed the swaying frames like monkeys. Kite strings angled up into the sky toward generators dipped into high stratospheric winds. By this melange of artifice and gadgetry, the barge city managed to stay alive.
Crat hungrily inhaled the smells of cooking over seaweed fires. The aromas changed from one neighborhood to the next. Still, he kept his hands out of his pockets. His dwindling cash might be needed for bribes before the day was out.
Other aromas were even harder to ignore. Women — workers and mothers and daughters and wives — could be glimpsed through windows left open to catch a stray breeze, dressed in costumes native to countries that no longer existed, sometimes smothered in far too much clothing for these humid climes. Crat knew not to stare,- many of them had menfolk who were jealous and proud. Still, at one point he stopped to watch a girl’s nimble fingers dance across a floor loom, crafting holo-carpets for export. It was a valued profession and one she had apparently mastered. In comparison, Crat knew his own hands to be clumsy things that couldn’t even knot a jute rope properly.
The young woman glanced over at him, her scarf framing a lovely oval face. Crat would have given his heart gladly when she smiled. He stumbled back, however, when another visage suddenly intervened, a crone who snarled at him in some strange dialect. Crat spun away to hurry forward again, toward the Governor’s Tower and the Admiral’s Bridge, twin monoliths that overlooked the center of town.
In a city rife with odors, the shaded bazaar was an especially pungent place where the fish was generally fresh but everything else was second hand, including the whores beckoning from a provocatively carved wooden balcony along the aft quarter.
Likewise the religions that were pitched from the opposite side, where a dozen midget temples, churches and mosques vied for the devotion of passersby. Here at least one was safe from one all-pervading creed, Gaia-worship. The few NorA ChuGa missionaries who tried preaching in Sea State were glad to depart with their lives. The lesson they took home with them was simple; it takes a full belly before a man or woman gives a tinker’s damn about anything as large as a planet.
Other types of outside recruiters were tolerated. The Resettlement Fund’s kiosk offered a third form of redemption, equidistant from sex and faith. Queued up there were men, women, whole families who had finally had enough… who would sign any document, have any surgery, swear any oath just to set foot on land again — in the Yukon, Yakutsk, Patagonia — anywhere there’d be steady meals and a patch of real ground to farm.
For Sea State this wasn’t treason. It was a population safety valve, one far less disturbing than another Crat had witnessed one dim twilight during his first stay on this drifting island-city.
He’d been lazing by one of the sidestream canals, picking away at a roast squid purchased from his shrinking purse, when a dark figure appeared slinking behind one of the shabbier apartment barges. It was a woman, he soon saw, wrapped in black from head to toe. The noise of clattering pots and shouting neighbors covered her stealth as she made her way to where the current was strongest.
Crat faded into a nearby shadow, watching her look left and right. There was a momentary flash of string as she tied two articles together, one heavy, the other wrapped in cloth. Crat had no inkling what was going on, though he thought for a moment he heard a faint cry.
The heavier object splashed decisively as it hit the water, instantly dragging the other bundle after it. Still he didn’t catch on. Only when he glimpsed the woman’s tired, bleak face and heard her sob did the light dawn. As she hurried away he knew what she had done. But he could only sit in stunned silence, his appetite quite gone.
He tried to understand, to grasp what must have driven her to do such a thing. Crat remembered what old prof Jameson used to say about Sea State… how most families who fled there came from societies where all decisions were made by men. In principle, Crat saw nothing wrong with’ that. He hated the arrogant, independent way girls were taught to act in North American schools, always judging and evaluating. Crat preferred how a thousand older, wiser cultures used to do it, before Western decadence turned women into not-women-anymore.
Still, for weeks he was haunted by the face of that anguished young mother. She came to him at night, and in his dreams he felt torn between two drives — one to protect her and the other to take her for his own.
Of course no one was asking him to do either. No one was exactly clamoring to make him a chief.
It was in the bazaar’s fourth quadrant, beyond the fish stalls and junk stands and traders hawking enzyme paste, that Crat came at last to the “Meat Market.”
“There are opportunities in Antarctica!” one recruiter shouted, near a holo depicting mineshafts and open-pit works, gouging high-grade ores out of a bleak terrain. Icy glaciers loomed in the background.
The images looked stark and honest — showing hard work in a harsh environment. Still, Crat could feel the holo’s subsonic music cajoling him to see more than that. The men depicted in those scenes grinned cheerfully beside their towering machines. They looked like bold men, the sort who tamed a wilderness and got rich doing so.
“The greeners have been given their dumpit parks and preservation areas now.” The speaker cursed, causing the crowd to mutter in agreement. “Half the bloody continent of Antarctica was set aside for ’em, almost! But the good news is, now the rest is open! Open wide for brave souls to go and win with their own strong hands!”
The recruiter sounded like he truly envied such gallant heroes. Meanwhile, the holos showed spare but comfortable barracks, hot meals being served, happy miners counting sheaves of credit slips.