Thinwolf saw more than a casual story in Coedi's face. "Be something to find it," he said.
"Yes," Coedi said. "If someone could get inside, and out again with something.... He could buy his way out of here. Be someone." In Coedi's eyes was a sad admission. "Someday, John, I'm going to kiss off SeedCorp and take a boat north. When I'm braver."
In the morning, Coedi helped Thinwolf swing out the beautiful little boat and strap the hulk to its foredeck. Thinwolf waved good-bye without looking back.
That was three weeks before.
AT DAWN, restless sleep came, and remembrance bled seamlessly into dream.
Thinwolf's dream self, strong and well, ran swiftly over the wave-tossed ocean. His legs splashed through the foamy crests; his feet sank lightly into the bright water. His heart thumped, slow and powerful, a tireless machine. In his left hand was a heavy war bow, reinforced with strips of horn, bound with glistening sinew. He felt the weight of a quiver on his back. Otherwise he was naked, except for a narrow breechclout. Glancing down, he saw that the breechclout was embroidered with interlocking microcircuit diagrams. A nameless fear tugged at him, but then he saw that he was mistaken, that the designs were only the familiar jagged spirals favored by the weavers of his tribe.
From the corner of his eye, he caught a white glitter on the northern horizon. He turned away from the sun and ran a little faster, feeling the hunter's joy.
The pod of buffalo whales swam deliberately, as yet unaware of him, their black humps lifting above the sea. Occasionally one spouted, sending high a plume of water, sweet-scented from their feeding in the sea-meadows. He approached upwind to within a hundred meters, then turned to run parallel to their course, staying in the troughs of the waves as much as possible, ducking through the crests. He counted a dozen of the great beasts: five cows, four calves, two yearlings, and an elder bull long winters past his prime. Thinwolf felt a twinge of anxiety. Where was the pod bull? He glanced down into the blue-black water beneath his feet; what did it conceal? The anxiety sharpened. Something was wrong; what? The thought slid away from him, quick as a fish.
Then the bull rose, only fifty meters away. The bull surged closer, blocking Thinwolf from the pod, as if he were aware of Thinwolf's predatory intentions. The bull's hump was huge, covered with silky white fur. Thinwolf grew excited; he forgot his misgivings. Here was a sign, an omen of deep import.
The bull spouted, and Thinwolf saw that the water had a faint pink tinge, was tainted with the scent of blood. He wondered how many old arrows festered in the white whale’s lungs, and sadness filled him. He took from his quiver an arrow tipped with a barbed obsidian point, nocked it, drew. "Let my arrow bring you rest, Great One," he whispered, and loosed.
The arrow disappeared into the whale's side as though into a breaking wave. For an instant nothing changed.
A red gout exploded from the whale's blowhole, and where it spattered down, the waves smoothed. The blood dripped from Thinwolf's arms, and his feet sank deeper into the sea, and he felt a paralyzing fear. He remembered that men could not run over the ocean.
The whale sounded without lifting his head to look at his killer.
Thinwolf could not move. He saw a future, a heartbeat from now: the wounded whale bursting from the depths, sharp horns ripping into Thinwolf's fragile flesh, tossing the ragged remnant high into the air. He waited, frozen, for lifetimes — then the whale burst through the surface.
Where the noble head should have been, a dozen clustered eyes glared, a hundred thin muscular tentacles writhed. Thinwolf did not recognize the creature.
The tentacles seized him. Their touch was like red-hot wire, and at last he was able to scream. The thing jerked him under, swimming downward through gauzy streamers of blood, deeper and deeper, until the blood was just a deeper shade of black, and the surface was only a pale, receding fantasy.
Just before he woke, lungs bursting with held-in breath, Thinwolf looked down at his hands and saw that they had become clockwork hooks, all gears and sprockets and dark-gleaming steel.
He stirred weakly in his bunk. His head pounded. Sleep no longer rested him, even when it came.
"Oh," he groaned. He rubbed at his eyes, clutched at his head.
At some point, Thinwolf noticed that some of the pounding was coming from outside his head. Engines? He glanced at his comm board; a light flashed, marking an attempted contact. He went on deck.
A vessel was moving slowly toward him, out of the rising sun. He squinted against the glare. The boat had an apple-cheeked trawler hull, high in the bows and low at the waist. He could barely make out dark figures in the wheelhouse.
"Hoy!" Someone with a sweet voice shouted across the water. "Aboard the squirtboat, hoy!"
The voice tugged him to the rail, stretched his face into an idiot grin. He smothered the inner whisper that warned: Remember what Coedi said. "Hoy," he answered.
The boat moved deliberately. As it slid away from the glare, he took in more details. The hull was of some scarred black plastic, the wheelhouse painted with red and gold stripes, now a bit scuffed and faded. The silhouette of the woman in the wheelhouse was slender and small. Two tall, angular men, wearing nothing but leather tool harnesses, stood in the prow, grinning. One tossed Thinwolf a line. Thinwolf's boat hummed and extruded a cushioned rubrail. "Oh, a smart squirtboat," the other man said. His tone was sly and gleeful.
As the vessels touched, another man came around the corner of the wheelhouse. After a moment, Thinwolf saw that the three were a cloneset. He looked closer, and saw the silver claws of control skeins at their necks. Slaves, he wondered, or did they freely indenture their volition? He shuddered.
The trawler's engines shut down with a clanking snort, and the captain descended from her wheelhouse.
She was young in body, older in the eyes, with a carefully braided mane of honey-colored hair. Her features were good — neat, perfectly regular. A sprinkling of tiny, sparkling freckles ornamented her cheeks. Her unisuit was elegantly cut, spotless. He could not imagine her in the role of lawless bonepicker. She regarded him without expression, while her slaves giggled and nudged each other. "Hello, company man," she said.
"Hello," he answered. He felt his smile fade and break up, leaving a foolish emptiness on his face.
"You don't answer your comm?"
"Turned off," he admitted.
"Risky in these waters," she said. "You’re taking a chance, company man."
Her voice was sweet, but so emotionless that a little shudder touched his back. "How so?" he asked.
"Pirates," she said, and finally she smiled. Her teeth were rubies, faceted into sharp little shields.
He took a step away from the rail. "I'm not too worried," he said. "I wear a personal defense field."
"Thank you, company man," she said. One of the slaves produced an insulated boat hook. Before Thinwolf could dodge away, the slave had hooked him. The slave jerked, and Thinwolf tipped over the rail into the sea. His field sizzled, shorted out, and he floundered helpless in the space between the two hulls. He gasped, swallowed cold water. The dream came back to him, and he thought of the miles of black water below him, where he would soon drift forever. He flailed at the water, shouted wordlessly, tried to get a grip on his slick-sided boat. Had he ever thought himself reconciled to death? The thought was alien, incomprehensible.
While he struggled, the woman issued calm instructions to her clone-set. "Larry, you and Curly take the boat back to the nest. Moe will go with me on the squirtboat. You two stay alert: watch that port-engine pressure gauge; don't push her too hard. You break my boat, and I'll take it out of your hides for years!"