Aesop led him through a milling crowd of reifications, past Hoopers wandering around bemusedly, and groups of watchful Kladites. They traversed the wide area of deck beside the Tank Rooms, passed midchain anchor points, where Janer peered down the length of the three ceramal chains reaching down into the sea, and finally reached the embarkation stair. Two Kladites stood below, armed with laser carbines, watching out for hostile life forms, since already some frog whelks had tried to board the ship.
Janer’s admiration for the Golem builders was tempered by the fact that they had neglected to put up some kind of fence along the jetty’s edges. Just then, shadows drew across him, and he glanced up to see two living sails gliding in to land up in the rigging. Then transferring his attention ashore, he saw, on the beach, Bloc, a group of his Kladites and Bones, all standing beside some large metallic object. Halfway down the ramp and he saw the metallic object move, and realized it was a sail holding something flat to the beach with one talon. That something was struggling, and after a moment he realized it was human; and that what he could see of its skin was very blue.
Returning his attention to the one holding it, he said, ‘That is a very odd-looking sail.’
‘Golem,’ Aesop replied briefly.
Janer noted that the reif’s head was moving back and forth, scanning the island as if worried about something there, though it was difficult to be sure, what with Aesop’s lack of expression and a distracting lump missing from his head.
The beach consisted of polished quartz pebbles lying in drifts on pale grey sand, seeming like something tipped out of a giant lapidary drum. As he approached the group gathered around the Golem sail and its captive, Janer pulled out the hollow-laser injector and clicked a cartridge of Intertox into it. Obviously here was someone undergoing the viral transformation which, if left unchecked, might result in something nasty.
‘We have one more passenger,’ said Bloc, turning towards him. ‘One even more important than yourself.’
Janer did not like this obsequious and oblique compliment. His distrust of Bloc was growing on every contact with him. Bloc walked beside him as he stepped over to the sail. The great Golem turned and fixed him in its emerald regard, then simply bowed its head to indicate its prize with its snout. The sail was holding a woman face down with some sort of handle jutting up from a harness she wore. From this Janer surmised the creature had been carrying her. She was struggling and grunting with effort to escape. Only when he stooped down to pull back her collar did recognition dawn. He set the dosage at its highest, and placed the injector against her neck. It burned a pinhole deep into her flesh and squirted a stream of Intertox into her as she continued struggling. His mind running scenarios and discarding them one after another, Janer stood and turned to face Bloc. He knew Erlin would never have risked any journey so unprepared as to end up in this state. But would it be a good idea to voice his suspicions right now?
‘I’ll give her another shot in about an hour or so,’ he said, ‘but we need to get some supplements inside her.’
‘You can do that aboard the ship. We have restraints there for anyone undergoing cybermotor nerve conflict as they Arise.’ Bloc’s spectacle irrigator sprayed his eyes.
‘I see.’ Janer remembered how he and Erlin had ministered to Sable Keech when, as a reification, he had arrived stinking, half-decayed and half-alive on the deck of Ron’s sailing ship, the Ahab. Keech’s convulsions, shortly after he had returned to life, had been the result of cybermotor nerve conflict. It was because of this that Bloc wanted himself and Erlin along. This was the reason for all the chainglass tanks aboard. This was the entire purpose of the voyage. He was not here for a celebrity’s free ride; he was here to work. He wondered, judging by her condition, how willing a volunteer was Erlin.
Bloc gestured in turn to a couple of Kladites. ‘You two take her to the ship.’ He turned back to the Golem sail. ‘Zephyr, release her now.’
Not thinking this a good idea at all, Janer stepped back. The sail released the handle with which it had clamped Erlin to the ground, and shuffled out of the way. Erlin paused before heaving herself to her feet.
‘Jaannersss!’ she hissed, her leech tongue waving about obscenely. ‘Lovelllies!’ She launched towards him, her hands open in blue claws. The two Kladites tried to grab her, but she shrugged them off as if they were not there. Bones stepped forward aiming a flat-nosed weapon. Janer flinched at the first stun blast—and the one after it. Erlin dropped face down at his feet, sighing into unconsciousness.
‘It is well to remember Hooper strength,’ said Bloc, irrigators again working furiously.
Damned right, thought Janer.
Huff’s memory of the time prior to his receiving severe injuries aboard Captain Drum’s Cohorn was not so good. But the horrible occasion when he actually received those injuries he remembered in lurid detail. Admittedly, his memory would never have been so clear now without the assistance his Polity aug gave his fibre-locked brain, but certainly he would never have forgotten that time even without it. The memory of that mad woman Rebecca Frisk boiling his head with a laser still made his eye sockets ache sometimes, but going to see her confined in her tube at Olian’s was always a pleasant remedy. A taste forever on his tongue was of the two human blanks whose heads he had bitten off at the time he escaped and carried Captain Drum ashore to hunt that Prador adolescent. The memory of Shib, the Batian mercenary, stapling his neck to the mast elicited a psychosomatic choking. This last memory was why Huff, surprisingly, felt happy now. Via his aug, he had learnt of the recent events here on this island. And discovering that a number of Batian mercenaries had been torn to pieces was cheering news indeed.
Growling contentedly to himself, Huff spread his wings and gripped the control spars with his spur claws. Being this way up felt very strange, but was not entirely unpleasant. He shifted his position and felt the assister motors cutting in to move the spars above and below him, and on foremasts behind and in front of him. Turning his head he checked the mast console and, onlining the program in his aug, understood it perfectly: these controls to adjust trim, reefing controls on a percentage scale so that he could put just as much sail to the wind as he wanted, cable motors he could set to change the angle of the other fabric sails in relation to himself—but all these controls within parameters set by Zephyr, who would occupy the middle one of the three mainmasts, controlling those ahead and behind him. Puff was towards the stern of the ship, controlling the two mizzen-masts and the jigger mast.
However, still studying the console, Huff came across many terms unfamiliar to him. He knew about course, gallant and top sails, but only through his aug did he learn about skysails, moonrakers and staysails, and numerous terms for the different kinds of rigging. He realized that this job would not be quite so easy as he had supposed, and understood then something Windcheater had once told him: ‘Technology means you work harder with your brain than you did with your muscles, but the rewards can be greater.’
Huff agreed with the first part, but wondered when the second part might materialize. However, his speculations were cut short when Zephyr arrived on the central mainmast, his voice issuing from Huff’s mast console.
‘Now, we begin to learn,’ said the Golem sail.
The quarter deck was crowded with reifications gazing back towards the island as it retreated from view. Above them the hundreds of square metres of doubled staysails cut up into the sky like blades and, forward, more sailswere opening to the wind all the time, as if the ship were a closed flower brought out into the sunshine. Many other reifs, John Styx knew, were, out of long habit, shy of company and so would be watching through their cabin windows—those with hull-side cabins that is, which on the whole had been occupied by Bloc’s people. Others, he knew, had no interest at all in the voyage itself, and had immediately interred themselves in their quarters, shutting themselves down until it ended. It occurred to him that those on deck were evidently the ones still with some appreciation of life, even though they were dead. He surveyed the crowd, studied their varied dress, varied styles of reification, various visible death wounds. It did not matter to him how accustomed he was getting to the sight of dead people walking; this was still a macabre scene.