The boat was rising and falling on the water as the swells came in to break on the docks and the quay. I waited until the boat was rising and then stepped in. I almost slipped, but I held my feet and then moved carefully to the front, grabbing on when I had to. When I got by the mast, I sat down on the seat that ran across the front. Helga dropped into the boat as I was sitting, and Ralph was right behind her.
I blinked a little as a trace of spray wet my cheek. “Aren’t we going to get wet?” I asked.
They didn’t hear, and I repeated my question in a louder voice.
“It’s just spindrift,” Helga said. “You’ve got to expect that. We won’t get too wet.”
Ralph said, “Besides, the water will get you clear. I know you don’t see much water in your Ship.”
That was another thing that irritated me about Ralph and Helga. They had all sorts of misconceptions about the Ship which they insisted on trotting out. Ralph was worse, because he was dogmatic. I thought at first he was being malicious until I realized he actually believed what he was saying, like that bit about going naked — that wasn’t completely wrong; some people do go without clothes in the privacy of their own apartments, but I would like to see somebody trying to play soccer while completely bare. The point is that what he said wasn’t quite right, either, and he wouldn’t listen. He would just say his misconceptions flatly and expect you to agree with him.
Right at the beginning he’d said something about how it was too bad we had to live in crowded barracks — something along that line — and didn’t I like all the space here? I tried to explain that that was only the way it used to be on the Ship, right at the beginning, but then I made the mistake of bringing in the dormitories, which are a little bit that way, trying to be honest, and that only confused the issue. Ralph finally said that everybody knew what things were like, and I didn’t have to try to explain.
Helga was a little more bearable because she only asked questions.
“Is it true you don’t eat food on your Ship?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, they say you don’t grow food like we do, that you eat dirt or something.”
“No,” I said.
And: “Is it true that you kill babies who are born looking wrong?”
“Do you?”
“Well, no. But everybody says you do.”
The thing that really annoyed me about Ralph and his “water to get you clean” remark is that we on the Ship had very clear memories of how dirty the colonists had been. Ralph apparently wasn’t even able to notice the horrid odors that clung to the whole harbor, which demonstrated how defective his sense of smell was, but I still didn’t like the blithe, “of course” way he said it.
Ralph and Helga got the sail up in short order, while I watched, and then Helga came up by me, untied the bow, and sat down. Ralph untied the stern and we pushed off. He had a little stick tiller to steer with and held the boom by a line. He put the boom over and the breeze filled the sail with an audible flap.
We started from the right-hand curve of the harbor with the wind behind us, and sailed across the long width of the harbor. The chop of the waves and the spray were annoying, and the grayness of the day wasn’t very nice, but I thought I could see how, given better weather and time to get used to this sort of thing, sailing could he fun.
Uncharitably, though, I couldn’t help thinking that we handled weather much better on the Third Level than they did here. When we wanted rain, everybody knows it’s coming ahead of time. We throw a switch and it rains until we want it to stop, and then it stops. None of this thick air with its clamminess.
As we were sailing, Helga started a conversation, trying to be friendly I think. She said, “Do you have any brothers and sisters?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t think so. I never heard of any.”
“Well, wouldn’t you know? I mean half-brothers and half-sisters, too.”
“I don’t know for sure, but I was never told of any. My parents have been married so long that if I had a brother he’d be all grown or dead years ago.” This may seem strange, but it was an idea that I’d never entertained before. I just never thought in terms of brothers and sisters. It was an interesting notion, but I didn’t really take it seriously even now.
Helga looked at me with a slightly puzzled look. “Married? I thought you didn’t get married like regular people. I thought you just lived with anybody you wanted to.”
I said, “My parents have been married more than fifty years. That’s Earth years.”
“Fifty years? Oh, you know that isn’t so. I just saw your father and he isn’t even as old as my dad.”
“Well, how old is your dad?”
“Let’s see,” she said. She did some obvious figuring. “About fifty.”
I said, “Well, my dad is eighty-one. Earth years.”
She looked at me with an expression of total disbelief. “Oh, that’s a lie.”
“And my mother is seventy-four. Or seventy-five. I’m not sure which it is.”
Helga gave me a disgusted look and turned away.
Well, it was true, and if she didn’t want to believe it, too bad. I won’t say it’s usual for people to be married as long as fifty years. I get the impression that people tend to get tired of each other after twenty or thirty years, and split up, and there are some people who don’t want anything as permanent as marriage and just live together. And people who don’t even know each other who have children because the Ship’s Eugenist advises it. Whatever Helga had heard, it had been a garbled or twisted version of this.
My parents were a strange pair. They’d been married for fifty years, which wasn’t usual, and they hadn’t lived together for eight years. When I was four, my mother got an opportunity she had been looking forward to for the study of art under Lemuel Carpentier, and she’d moved out. I guess that if you’ve been married as long as fifty years, and apparently expect it to go on for maybe fifty years more, that a vacation of eight years or so is hardly noticeable.
To tell the truth, I didn’t know what my parents saw in each other. I liked and respected my father, but I didn’t like my mother at all. I’d like to say that it was simply that we didn’t understand each other, and that was partly true. I thought her “art” was plain bad. One of the few times I went to her apartment to visit, I looked at a sculpture she’d done and asked her about it.
“That’s called ‘The Bird,’ ” she said.
I could see that it was meant to be a bird. Mother was working directly from a picture and it looked just like it. But it was so stiff and formal that it had no feel of life at all. I said something about that, and she didn’t like the remark at all. We got into an argument, and she finally put me out.
So part of it was misunderstanding, but not all. For one thing, she made it quite clear to me that she’d had me as a duty and not because she particularly wanted to. I firmly believed that she was just waiting for me to go on Trial, and then she’d move back in with Daddy. As I say, I didn’t like her.
When we got to the far side of the harbor, instead of coming directly back, as I somehow had thought we would, Ralph turned us so that we were traveling out at an angle toward the mouth of the harbor. Traveling that way, we were running at an angle through the waves, too, and the chop increased tremendously. We would go up in the air, and then quite suddenly down again, and after a few minutes of this, I was starting to feel queasy. It was a different sort of upset that I’d been suffering earlier in the day. This was nausea and accompanied by a whirling in the head.