And yet

7 WHAT IS THIS

She feels the thump of the splash, the slosh and dip of the ferry in the water, she unlatches her restraints and gets onto her feet, falls over immediately. Ah yes, feet still numb. Damn. Like walking with both feet asleep at once, very difficult, very annoying. Balancing on an ocean swell, oh my she falls.

Up again, she staggers to Badim. He’s awake, he grips her arm and smiles, says, “Help the others.”

The floor sways and bounces under her as she crawls to the operations console and joins the people already crowding around it. Aram is there tapping away. He eyes Freya with a wild glance, like no look she has ever seen on his face.

“We’re down,” he says. “We’re alive.”

“All of us?” she asks.

He grins broadly at her, as if she is predictable to him, says, “Not sure yet. Probably not. That was one hell of a squeeze for a while there.”

“Let’s check and see,” Freya says. “Help the injured. Have we got contact with anyone yet?”

“Yes, they’re on their way. A ship, or maybe a little flotilla. They’ll be here soon.”

“Good. Let’s be ready for them. Don’t let’s sink to the bottom of the ocean after all this. I think that has a tendency to happen in landings like this.”

“Yes, good point. It feels lighter than one g, don’t you think?” Aram is still grinning in a manner completely unlike him. She would have said he was the predictable one.

“I have no idea,” she says irritably. “I can’t feel my feet. I can’t even stand. Are we in big waves or something?”

“Who knows?” He spreads his hands wide. “We’ll have to ask!”

People in what look like spacesuits come into the room and help them to their feet and out of the ferry, into a tube with a moving floor that carries them up into some kind of large room, very stable underfoot compared to the lander, but she keeps falling anyway. Obscurely she is afraid of the people in spacesuits, quarantine suits no doubt, people who are all shorter than her. Keep hold of Badim no matter what. Behind her more people pour into the room, all her fellow voyagers; she tries to count, fails, tries to recall any faces she doesn’t see, says to the suited people around her, “Is everyone all right? Have we all lived?”

But then out of the end of the tube come spacesuited figures pulling gurneys, and she cries out and tries to run to them, falls, crawls, is pulled by her arms to her feet, is helped along. There’s Chulen, there’s Toba, unconscious at least, possibly dead, she cries out again. “Chulen! Toba!” No sign they have heard her.

Badim is beside her again, saying “Freya, please, let them get them to their infirmary.”

“Yes, yes.” She stands, hand on his shoulder, swaying. “You’re all right?” she asks him, staring at him closely.

“Yes, dear. Fine. We’re almost all fine, it looks like. We’ll get a count soon. For now, let them work. Come with me. Look, they have a window.”

Killed at the last minute, in the final approach. So bad, so—something she can’t name. Cruel fate. Stupid irony. That’s it: so stupid. Reality is stupid.

Slowly they move. She keeps stumbling. It’s like walking on stilts tied to her knees. Very frustrating.

“Look, here’s a window. Let’s see what we can see.”

They move through the crowd by the window. The starship people are crammed against it, looking out, squinting, hands held over eyes. Very bright out there. Very blue. A dark blue plane under them, a light blue dome over them. The sea. Earth’s ocean. They’ve seen it so often on screens, and this window could be a big screen too, but somehow it’s immediately clear that it’s not. Why it is so obvious to the eye that it is a window and not a screen is a puzzling question but she puts that aside, stares with the rest. Sunlight breaking on water spangles the sea surface everywhere, it’s really very hard to look at and stay balanced, tears are pouring down her cheeks, but not from any emotion she can feel, it’s just the brilliant light in her eyes, causing her to blink over and over. Lots of voices, all known to her, crying out, exclaiming, commenting, laughing. She can’t look out the window, a dread at the sheer size of the visible world seizes her in the guts and twists until she has to hunch over, duck her head under the window. Nausea, seasickness. Earth sickness.

“It’s lighter here,” Badim says, not for the first time; she hears that in his voice, that he is repeating himself, and recalls him saying it earlier, when she was not hearing things. “More light than what we called sunlight. And I don’t think the one g here is the same as our one g, do you? It’s lighter!”

“I can’t tell,” she says. She can’t feel the ship swaying on the waves either. “Is this a ship?”

“I think so.”

“Why can’t we feel the waves?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s so big the waves don’t rock it.”

“Wow. Can that be?”

One of their hosts speaks, they can’t be sure which one, the voice is amplified, and all the helmeted figures stare at them curiously.

“Welcome aboard Macao’s Big Sister.” Strange accent; from her memories of the feeds from Earth she guesses it is some kind of South Asian English, but different too. She’s never heard this accent before, and it’s hard to follow. “We are happy you are all with us and safe. We are sad to report that seven of your colleagues died in the descent, and several more are injured or distressed, none critically, we are happy to venture. We hope you will understand that we are wearing protective suits for our mutual safety. Until we are sure that we are not a problem for you, nor you a problem for us, we are instructed to ask you to stay in these rooms we will keep on Macao’s Big Sister for you, and to please not touch us. The period of quarantine will not last long, but we need to do a complete analysis of you, and your overall health, for our mutual safety. We know that because of your experiences around Tau Ceti you will understand our concern.”

The starship people are nodding, looking at each other uneasily, looking, some of them, at her.

She says, “Please tell us who died, and who’s in the hospital. We can help with identification if you have any trouble reading their chips. Also, can you please tell us what has happened to the ship and Jochi? Have they rounded the sun yet?”

She’s lost all sense of time, but it seems at least possible that in the same time it has taken them to descend through the atmosphere, splash down, and get picked up and led here, the ship may have already reached the sun and circled it, or not. But it isn’t so; the ship is going much slower now, and is still on its way to the orbit of Venus.

They learn that the ship they are on is two kilometers long and its upper deck is two hundred meters off the water, it’s a kind of floating island, moving slowly around the ocean, pulled on its way by masts that shape-shift into various sail shapes, also by kites lofting so high overhead that they are mere dots, or even invisible. The kite sails are up there catching the jet stream, apparently. The ship plows through the waves slowly, like an island cut free of its moorings. There are many of these floating islands, apparently, none in a hurry to get anywhere, obviously. Townships, their hosts call them. Like all of them, Macao’s Big Sister follows the winds, thus on some voyages it circumnavigates the Earth west to east, other times uses the trade winds in the mid-latitudes to circle back to the west, in the Pacific and Atlantic. They can tack into the wind, to an extent, and have electric motors for auxiliary power, or when they need fine movement. They moor off the harbors of coastal cities that are not very different from the townships, they are told. The feeds sent to the starship never mentioned these things at all. All the coastal cities are in large part new, they are told, as sea level is higher than when they left the solar system, twenty-four meters higher. Much has therefore had to change. They never mentioned these things in the feed.