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.
I said to Helga, “Can’t we go straight back? I’m starting to feel sick.”
“This is the quickest way back,” she said. “We can’t sail directly into the wind. We have to tack, head into the wind at an angle.”
“But we’re going so slow,” I said. It was the slow way we rammed into waves, surged high, and then pitched down on the other side that threw my stomach off stride.
Ralph yanked on the line that was attached to the boom, and swung it over from one side of the boat to the other, turning the tiller at the same time, and we headed back in toward the quay in another slow tack. By that time, I was feeling miserable.
“Don’t throw up,” Helga said cheerfully. “We’ll be back soon enough.” Then she raised her voice. “You’ve had it your fair turn, Ralnh. Let me take over.”
“Oh, all right,” Ralph said, quite reluctantly.
Helga ducked back to the stern, taking the tiller and the boom line from Ralph. She nodded at me. “She’s feeling sick,” she said.
“Oh,” Ralph said. He came forward and sat down beside me.
He looked at me and said, “It takes awhile to get your sea-legs. After you sail for awhile you get used to it.”
He didn’t say anything while we completed that leg and part of the next tack. He just watched Helga a little wistfully. I began to think that this sailing thing — provided first that you were feeling well enough to enjoy it at all — was much more fun for the person actually doing the sailing than for the passengers. Helga and Ralph, at least, both seemed to he having much more fun when they were sailing than when they were sitting up front. Perhaps it was just that they felt they had to talk to me, and that was an effort for them.
Ralph said, “Uh, well, how do you think our fathers are getting along?”
I swallowed, trying to keep control of my stomach. I said, “I don’t know. I don’t even know what they were going to trade for.”
He looked at me in surprise. “You don’t even know that? We operate placer mines just to produce tungsten ore for you, we ship it all the way here, and you don’t even know it!”
“Why don’t…” I paused, and grabbed hard onto the side of the boat (gunwale) and fought hard to hold onto my composure as we dipped into a sudden trough. “Why don’t you mine this stuff, whatever it is, just for yourselves?”
Somewhat bitterly he said, “We don’t know how to reduce it. You Ship people won’t tell us how. When we trade with you, all you give us is little bits and pieces of information.”
We were heeling over into our last tack then, about to head down the last stretch to the dock.
I said, “And why not? We preserved all the knowledge through the years since Earth was destroyed. If we gave it all to you, what would we have left to trade with?”