“Clip yourself onto this line,” Singh told him, pointing to a cable bolted at intervals to the underside of the slender moonsail yard. “Now put your feet on the footrope”—which looped three or four feet under the yard—“and follow me out. And if you would please grab these handles on top of the yard. One step at a time. Okay? Okay.”
Tom was in a harness like a rock-climber’s, which was clipped to the line under the yard. Even if his foot slipped and his arm gave away, he would still be there, hanging by his chest, swinging far above the deck, but it beat the alternative. “I can’t believe sailors used to climb out here without these,” he said, shuffling down the footrope.
“Oh, yes, they were a dangerous bunch of men,” Singh said, looking back at him, “Are you okay? Are you sure you want to be doing this?”
“Yes.”
“Very good. Yes, they would be standing on the footrope and giving their hands to the sails, reefing them or letting them out, tying frozen gasket knots, and sometimes in most wicked weather. They were quite the athletes, there is no doubt of that. Rounding Cape Horn east to west, that would be a trial for anyone.”
“Some of them must have fallen.”
“Yes, they lost men overboard, no doubt of that. Once a ship lost every man aloft when it gusted hard south of Cape Horn—five men in all. Here we are, at the end. Look at this block, the little runner inside it has pulled itself away from the side. A case of poor manufacturing, if you ask me. Now the line is stuck, and if you tried to reel it in it would snap the line or short the reel. Here now, you can lean out in your harness if you are wanting, you don’t have to hold on like that.”
“Oh.” Tom let go and leaned back in his harness, felt the wind and groundswell swirl him about. Up here you could see the pattern the waves made on the sea’s surface, long curving swells rippling the reflected sunlight. Blue everywhere. He watched the bosun repair the tackle block, asked him questions about it. “This line allows you to bring down this side of the sail. It is called bunting. Without it you can’t use the sail at all.”
Singh concentrated on his screwdriver and the block, swaying about as he worked. He explained some of the network of lines matted below them. “They are beautiful patterns, aren’t they? A very pretty technology indeed. Free locomotion for major freight hauling. Hard to believe it was ever abandoned.”
“Wasn’t it dangerous? I mean, that last generation of sailing ships, the big ones with five and six masts, most of them came to grief, didn’t they?”
“Yes, they did. The Kopenhagen and the Karpfanger disappeared from the face of the sea. But so did a lot of diesel-driven tubs. As for that particular generation of sailing ships, it was a matter of insufficient materials, and poor weather forecasts, and carrying too much aloft. And some design flaws. It was yet another case of false economies of scale—they built them too big. Bigger as better, pah! When you’re burning fuel to transport fuel, then it might look true. Until the ship strikes a reef or catches fire. But if the fuel is the wind, if you’re interested in full employment, in safety, in a larger definition of efficiency, then there is nothing like this beauty here. It is big but not too big. Actually it is as big as those old six-masters were, but the design and the materials are much improved. And with radio, and sonar to look at the bottom, and radar to look at the surface, and satellite photos to look at the sky, and the computer to be putting it all together…. Ah, it is a beauty, isn’t it?”
They stopped in Corinto, Nicaragua, and had to wait a day to get to the docks, anchored in a long line of ships like theirs. Tom and Nadezhda joined a group going ashore, and they spent the day in the markets behind the docks, buying fruit, an old-fashioned sextant, and clothing light enough to wear in the tropics. Tom sat for an hour in the bird market, fascinated by the vibrant coloration of the tropical birds on sale. “Can they be real?” he said to Nadezhda.
“The parrots and the mynah birds and the quetzals are real. The New Guinea lories are real, though they aren’t native to the area. The rest are not real, not in the way you mean. Haven’t you ever seen gene-engineered hummingbirds?”
Flashes of saffron, violet, pink, silk blue, scarlet, tangerine. “No, I don’t believe I have.”
“You need to travel more.” She laughed at the look on his face, kissed him, took his arm and pulled him along. “Come on, they make some fine bikes here, that’s something you know about.”
A day in a tropical market. Sharp smells of cinnamon and clove, the bleating of a pig, the clashing of amplified guitar riffs, the heat, dust, light, noise. Tom followed Nadezhda’s lead, dazed.
In the end they spent all the money they had brought ashore. The ship unloaded some microchips, titanium, manganese and wine, and took on coffee, stereo speakers, clothing and gene-engineered seeds.
The following evening, the last before they embarked, they went back ashore and danced the night away, sweating in the warm tropical air. Very late that night they stood on the dance floor swaying slightly, arms around each other, foreheads pressed together, bodies all around them.
They set sail, headed west across the wide Pacific. Endless days in the blue of water and sky. Tom became a connoisseur of clouds. He took more of the geriatric drugs. He spent time in the foretop, he spotted whales and dreamed great dreams. They passed a coral atoll and he dreamed a whole life there, Polynesian sensuousness in the peace of the lagoon.
One balmy evening Nadezhda’s class met on the foredeck, and Tom described his part in the struggle to make the international agreements curtailing corporations. “It was like trust busting in Teddy Roosevelt’s time. In those days people agreed monopolies were bad because they were bad for business, basically—they cut at the possibility of free trade, of competition. But multinational corporations were a similar thing in a new format—they were big enough to make tacit agreements among themselves, and so it was a cartel world. Governments hated multinationals because they were out of government control. People hated them because they made everyone cogs in machines, making money for someone else you never saw. That was the combination needed to take them on. And even then we nearly lost.”
“You talk like it was war,” Pravi said scornfully. She was one of the sharpest of Nadezhda’s students, well-read, quick-minded, skeptical of her teachers’ memories and biases.
“It was war,” Tom said, looking at her with interest. In the twilight the whites of her eyes looked phosphorescent, she seemed a dangerous young Hindu woman, a Kali. “They bought people, courts, newspapers—they killed people. And we really had to put the arm on the countries who decided that becoming a corporation haven would be a good source of revenue.”
“Put the arm on them,” Pravi said angrily. “You superpowers in your arrogance, ordering the world around again—what was it but another form of imperialism. Make the world do what you decide is right! A new kind of colonialism.”