She looked behind them, and up at the sky. “No one’s coming,” she said.
He turned the speed higher and got a little more lift, but the impact when they scraped the swells was greater. He turned the speed back down. The knob was at fifty-six. “I don’t think we’re doing more than forty,” he said. “It’ll be light when we get there, if we get there. It’s just as well, I suppose; I won’t get us onto the wrong island. I don’t know how much this is throwing us off course.”
Two other islands were near Majorca: EUR91766, forty kilometers to the northeast, the site of a copper-production complex; and EUR91603, eighty-five kilometers to the southwest, where there was an algae-processing complex and a climatonomy sub-center.
Lilac leaned close to Chip, avoiding the wind and spray from the broken part of the windscreen. Chip held the steering lever. He watched the direction indicator and the moonlit sea ahead and the stars that shone above the horizon.
The stars dissolved, the sky began to lighten, and there was no Majorca. There was only the sea, placid and endless all around them.
“If we’re doing forty,” Lilac said, “it should have taken seven hours. It’s been more than that, hasn’t it?”
“Maybe we haven’t been doing forty,” Chip said.
Or maybe he had compensated too much or too little for the eastward drift of the sea. Maybe they had passed Majorca and were heading toward Eur. Or maybe Majorca didn’t exist—had been blanked from pre-U maps because pre-U members had “bombed” it to nothing and why should the Family be reminded again of folly and barbarism?
He kept the boat headed a hairline west of north, but slowed it down a little.
The sky grew lighter and still there was no island, no Majorca. They scanned the horizon silently, avoiding each other’s eyes.
One final star glimmered above the water in the northeast. No, glimmered on the water. No—“There’s a light over there,” he said.
She looked where he pointed, held his arm.
The light moved in an arc from side to side, then up and down as if beckoning. It was a kilometer or so away.
“Christ and Wei,” Chip said softly, and steered toward it.
“Be careful,” Lilac said. “Maybe it’s—”
He changed hands on the steering lever and got the knife from his pocket, laid it in his lap.
The light went out and a small boat was there. Someone sat waving in it, waving a pale thing that he put on his head—a hat—and then waving his empty hand and arm.
“One member,” Lilac said.
“One person,” Chip said. He kept steering toward the boat—a rowboat, it looked like—with one hand on the lever and the other on the speed-control knob.
“Look at him!” Lilac said.
The waving man was small and white-bearded, with a ruddy face below his broad-brimmed yellow hat. He was wearing a blue-topped white-legged garment.
Chip slowed the boat, steered it near the rowboat, and switched all three rotors off.
The man—old past sixty-two and blue-eyed, fantastically blue-eyed—smiled with brown teeth and gaps where teeth were missing and said, “Running from the dummies, are you? Looking for liberty?” His boat bobbed in their sidewaves. Poles and nets shifted in it—fish-catching equipment.
“Yes,” Chip said. “Yes, we are! We’re trying to find Majorca.”
“Majorca?” the man said. He laughed and scratched his beard. “Myorca,” he said. “Not Majorca, Myorca! But Liberty is what it’s called now. It hasn’t been called Myorca for—God knows, a hundred years, I guess! Liberty, it is.”
“Are we near it?” Lilac asked, and Chip said, “We’re friends. We haven’t come to—interfere in any way, to try to ‘cure’ you or anything.”
“We’re incurables ourselves,” Lilac said.
“You wouldn’t be coming this way if you wasn’t,” the man said. “That’s what I’m here for, to watch for folks like you and help them into port. Yes, you’re near it. That’s it over there.” He pointed to the north.
And now on the horizon a dark green bar lay low and clear. Pink streaks glowed above its western half—mountains lit by the sun’s first rays.
Chip and Lilac looked at it, and looked at each other, and looked again at Majorca-Myorca-Liberty.
“Hold fast,” the man said, “and I’ll tie onto your stern and come aboard.”
They turned in their seats and faced each other. Chip took the knife from his lap, smiled, and tossed it to the floor. He took Lilac’s hands.
They smiled at each other.
“I thought we’d gone past it,” she said.
“So did I,” he said. “Or that it didn’t even exist any more.”
They smiled at each other, and leaned forward and kissed each other.
“Hey, give me a hand here, will you?” the man said, looking at them over the back of the boat, clinging with dirty-nailed fingers.
They got up quickly and went to him. Chip kneeled on the back seat and helped him over.
His clothes were made of cloth, his hat woven of flat strips of yellow fiber. He was half a head shorter than they and smelled strangely and strongly. Chip grasped his hard-skinned hand and shook it. “I’m Chip,” he said, “and this is Lilac.”
“Glad to meet you,” the bearded blue-eyed old man said, smiling his ugly-toothed smile. “I’m Darren Costanza.” He shook Lilac’s hand.
“Darren Costanza?” Chip said.
“That’s the name.”
“It’s beautiful!” Lilac said.
“You’ve got a good boat here,” Darren Costanza said, looking about.
“It doesn’t lift,” Chip said, and Lilac said, “But it got us here. We were lucky to find it.”
Darren Costanza smiled at them. “And your pockets are filled with cameras and things?” he said.
“No,” Chip said, “we decided not to take anything. The tide was in and—”
“Oh, that was a mistake,” Darren Costanza said. “Didn’t you take anything?”
“A gun without a generator,” Chip said, taking it from his pocket. “And a few books and a razor in the bundle there.”
“Well, this is worth something,” Darren Costanza said, taking the gun and looking at it, thumbing its handle.
“We’ll have the boat to trade,” Lilac said.
“You should have taken more,” Darren Costanza said, turning from them and moving away. They glanced at each other and looked at him again, about to follow, but he turned, holding a different gun. He pointed it at them and put Chip’s gun into his pocket. “This old thing shoots bullets,” he said, backing farther away to the front seats. “Doesn’t need a generator,” he said. “Bang, bang. Into the water now, real quick. Go on. Into the water.”
They looked at him.
“Get in the water, you dumb steelies!” he shouted. “You want a bullet in your head?” He moved something at the back of the gun and pointed it at Lilac.
Chip pushed her to the side of the boat. She clambered over the rail and onto the skirting—saying “What is he doing this for?”—and slipped down into the water. Chip jumped in after her.
“Away from the boat!” Darren Costanza shouted. “Clear away! Swim!”
They swam a few meters, their coveralls ballooning around them, then turned, treading water.
“What are you doing this for?” Lilac asked.