“Why haven’t they contacted Grimsby, then?” asked Fishcake.
“Maybe they’re having too much fun,” suggested Wren. “Maybe they were scared that Gargle would punish them for going to Brighton without his orders.”
Fishcake gazed up at the screens. “Those people look so rich. The Lost Boys take only kids nobody’s going to miss: orphans and urchins from the underdecks who nobody wants…”
“That’s what Gargle and Uncle told you,” said Wren. “What if it isn’t true? What if they take children from rich families sometimes too? Anyway, probably even an orphan would be missed by somebody. Probably even an urchin’s mummy and daddy would want to find him if he got himself stolen away…”
Two big tears ran down Fishcake’s face, pearly in the light from the screens.
“I’ll send a message-fish to Grimsby and ask Uncle what to do,” he decided.
“But Fishcake,” said Wren, “he might tell you not to go!”
“Uncle Knows Best,” said Fishcake, but he didn’t sound very certain.
“Anyway, by the time you get a reply, Brighton might have sailed away. Autumn’s coming. Storms and high seas. Miss Freya always taught us that raft cities head for sheltered waters in the autumn. So this might be your only chance…”
“But it’s one of the rules. What they teach us in the Burglarium. Never show yourself. Never give the Drys a chance to find out about the Lost Boys—that’s what Gargle says…”
“These Drys seem to know all about you already,” Wren reminded him.
Fishcake shook his head and smudged the tears away with the heel of his hand. His Burglarium training was fighting against the rising hope that his own mother and father might have been among that crowd of smiling faces on the screens. He did not remember them, but he felt sure that if he met his parents in the flesh, he would know them at once.
“All right,” he said. “We’ll go closer. We’ll have a good look at this Brighton place, get crab-cams aboard if we can. Check these WOPCART people are on the level…” He looked at Wren and pitied her; after all, she had no hope of finding her parents aboard the waiting city.
“You must be starved,” he said.
“Pretty hungry,” admitted Wren.
Fishcake smiled shyly at her. “Me too. Mora used to do all the cooking. Do you know how to cook?”
Chapter 10
The Parent Trap
Usually at this time of year the raft resort of Brighton would have been cruising the Middle Sea, anchoring now and then so that visitors from the mobile towns and cities that prowled the shores could come out by balloon and motor launch to explore its amusement arcades and aquarium, its beaches and boutiques. But business had been poor these past few seasons, and so the Council had agreed to venture into the North Atlantic in search of parasite-pirates.
Now they were beginning to regret it. There had been much excitement when the first three limpets had made contact, east of the Azores. Crowds of visitors had come swarming out by airship from the cities of the Hunting Ground to see the strange new arrivals. But that had been weeks ago. There had been no sign of Lost Boys since, and the long banners that were stretched along the city’s bows, declaring WOPCART summer expedition and Brighton welcomes parasite-pirates, were starting to look tattered, and a little bit sad.
Fishcake brought the Autolycus up to periscope depth about a mile from Brighton. A night had passed since he’d first picked up the transmission from WOPCART. The morning sky was the color of the inside of a cowrie shell, and big gray waves heaved up and down. When Wren took a turn at the periscope, she could not see Brighton at all, just the waves, which now and then allowed her a glimpse of a big island away to windward, ringed by dirty white cliffs, with clouds hugging its summit.
And then she realized that it was not an island at alclass="underline" What she had taken for cliffs were rows of white buildings, and the clouds were steam and exhaust fumes rising from a dense thicket of smokestacks. It was a city, a three-tiered raft city with two outrigger districts linked to its central hull by spidery gantries and a bank of huge paddle wheels beating the sea to foam astern. “Oh!” cried Wren, amazed. She’d seen pictures of cities in books, but she had never grasped how big they really were: far bigger than Anchorage-in-Vineland. Airships moved to and fro above a jagged skyline of spires and domes and rooftops, and a circular deck plate held up by immense gasbags hung a few hundred feet above the upper tier, anchored to it by thick hawsers. Wren could see green trees on the edge of the deck plate, and a building with unlikely onion domes.
“What’s that?” she gasped.
“That’s called Cloud 9,” said Fishcake, who had managed to get a picture of the city from a crab-cam that he had sent up to perch upon the periscope. He had fetched out the Autolycus’s tattered old copy of Cade’s Almanac of Traction Towns (Maritime Edition), and was comparing Ms. Cade’s diagram of Brighton with the image on the screen. “It’s a sort of airborne park. The big building in the middle is where the mayor of Brighton lives.”
“Gosh” breathed Wren. “I mean— Gosh!”
“No jaws,” said Fishcake, checking the screens to make sure Brighton had not added anything nasty since Cade’s Almanac went to press. There were a few air defense cannon mounted on revolving platforms on the promenades, but no more weapons than any town carried in these troubled times. “It’s just a pleasure resort.”
He lowered the periscope. As he switched off the crab-cam signal, the screens filled again with the transmission from Brighton, clearer and stronger now that the limpet was so close. “We only want a chance to see our dear lost boys again,” the woman from WOPCART was saying. Fishcake felt a silly, happy hopefulness rising up inside him. What if she was his mummy? Mums and dads are a chain that binds, a pain, a strain; they stop boys being boys. That’s what he’d been taught to chant down in the Burglarium. Now that he was faced with the prospect of meeting his own mum and dad, he found that he’d never really believed it. He’d been missing his parents his whole life long, and he’d not even known it until he heard the message from WOPCART.
He took the Autolycus deeper, nearer, down into the shadows beneath Brighton’s hull. Trailing cables and a huge, complicated steering array loomed out of the murk; green forests of weed swirled through the cone of light from the limpet’s nose lamp. Near the city’s bow, a metallic sphere dangled on cables; Fishcake guessed it was the machine that WOPCART used to transmit its message through the sea.
A metallic ping rang through the cabin. Wren thought that something must have fallen over in the hold, but the sound came again and then again, chiming out a rhythm, as if someone were carefully tapping the outside of the hull with a hammer.
“Oh, gods’” said Fishcake suddenly.
“What?” asked Wren. “What is that noise?”
Fishcake was frantically working the limpet’s controls, steering for brighter water beyond the edge of the city. “Gargle told us he ran into something like this once, under a big predator raft. It’s a type of Old Tech listening device… The mummies and daddies know we’re here now!” He wasn’t sure if he was scared or happy.