A Daughter of No Nation (13 page)

“I don't know ‘nun.'”

“Celibate. I'm not celibate.” She gave that a second to sink in, steeling herself against embarrassment—it wasn't as bad as having this same conversation with her dad at home would be. “And you told me Sylvanna wasn't one of those places where women had to creep around with their heads bowed and their legs together.”

“That isn't quite what I said,” he replied. “But I can assure you I'd be just as—”

“Horrified? Scandalized?”

“—disturbed by this news were you my son.”

“Seriously? So if I was male and I'd screwed Lais, we'd be having the same conversation?”

“Don't be coarse. But yes.”

“Why? What's the rule? No sex outside marriage, for men and women alike?”

“For boys and girls alike.”

“I'm not a girl. I'm twenty-five.”

“One isn't an adult until one is married.”

“What, even if you're a fifty-year-old bachelor?”

“Indeed,” he said, and there was a note of bitterness in his voice.

“An unmarried person is a kid?” She saw it suddenly. “This is why you can't stop calling me child. This is why the contract I signed goes on and endlessly on about my status on Sylvanna being as ‘a guest with the rights of a sovereign foreign adult.'”

Cly was shaking his head. “This is Beatrice's fault. If you'd been properly raised—”

“Oh no, you don't. I was raised just fine by the standards of the United States of America. I am, in fact, totally grown up. And who I have sex with is none of your business.”

He threw up his hands, gave her one last balked look, and vanished down the hall.

“Oh, that was fun.”

She closed the door, pulling out her sheets of magic paper. Bram had written one line under hers:
WHY DIDN'T V TELL US THEY HAD TEXTING? XOB

She hunted up a pencil.
V'S ORDERED TO LIMIT RESEARCH/EXPLORATION.

HOW'S THAT GOING?

She thought a second, then wrote:
MAKING RANDOM PROGRESS ON VARIOUS FRONTS.

WHAT'VE YOU LEARNED?

Map coordinates, they'd agreed, should be their first priority.
0 LATITUDE STORMWRACK LOCATED IN MOSCASIPAY, VERDANII. ALMOST EXACTLY WHERE SASKATCHEWAN CANADA IS. I'M BOUND FOR SYLVANNA (ROUGHLY TENNESSEE) WITH CLY.

She paused. Should she mention seeing Lais? Or all this stuff about Sylvanna and children and Cly assuming she was a virgin? Did it matter?

No, she decided. Better to save the magic paper. She signed off:
XOSOFE.

They might warn her about being an overcurious spy here, but they wouldn't actively stop her from finding out everything she could about Sylvanna. It was time to take a good look at the books and equipment in that laboratory.

 

CHAPTER    
8

Sawtooth
was Cly's private sailing vessel, but he had some kind of complicated agreement with the Fleet whereby he leased it to them for training purposes and they provided his crew.

On Earth a couple hundred years ago, he'd have been a titular admiral, giving the orders while leaving Captain Beck to run the ship.

Normally training meant getting judges ready for dueling out-of-court settlements for Stormwrack's thousands of unresolved lawsuits. Right now, as he'd said, he'd packed off most of the fighters. The reason he had a boat full of teens was because they were practicing their seacraft. The officers herding the kids around were Sophie's age; everyone else was younger.

Since they were teaching anyway, Beck was happy to let her join a watch, to practice hauling sails and belaying lines. It gave her a chance to sharpen her archaic sailing skills and to learn the proprietary language of sailing used within the Fleet.

The memorician, Krispos, was essentially a searchable text archive. By a tragic mischance, he had spent most of his life on an island nation, Volos, serving as the backup repository of the entire creative output of a colony of budding poets. At this point in his career he should have had a head filled with useful knowledge, facts he could hire out. Instead, he was carrying reams of verse written in an obscure, rarely spoken language.

The poets had gone broke. He'd been bouncing from job to job ever since. Sophie got the idea that the scars on his foot had something to do with one particularly bad bounce. Now he was starting over.

She and he went through the books Cly had bought her and she started him with an overview of all the so-called scientific disciplines. Pretty soon she had confirmed her suspicions about the state of science on Stormwrack: it was a mess. The Fleet had approved a number of practices that were mixes of fact and superstition.

Temperamentalism, for example, ascribed moods and qualities to a variety of substances—wax, iron, water, you name it—based on the temperatures at which they froze, liquefied, and boiled. Take copper: in the books, it was described as the element of vanity. Steel was made by condensing “the murderous principles of iron.” The book had a chapter devoted to a lengthy argument between two scholars about whether the devilish substance known as petroleum did exist. If it did, one of them argued, it had such a noxious effect that it blighted the life of anyone who had ever found or used any, thus leaving that person unable to report the find.

Facts were leavened in with the magical thinking, which made it all the more interesting. The temperamentalism book contained an excellent chart of temperatures, allowing her to confirm that the boiling point of water was the same here as it was at home, and that the Stormwrackers understood that this changed with altitude (though this property was ascribed to the frivolous temperament of a fluid).

It was within temperamentalism that she found Corsetta's argument, stated as fact, that the magnetic qualities of lodestone showed that everyone had a single true love.

Then there was aetherism, a mishmash of superstitious beliefs about measurable densities of a particular type of spiritual energy, “frizion.” According to the text, frizion increased with landmass and was dispersed by oceanic activity. The gist allowed practitioners to assume that bigger nations had more spiritual heft than smaller ones—it was a veiled rationalization for ethnocentrism. Aetherism also warned that the bigger the landmass, the more spooks, spirits, and other “manifestations” it might have.

“Consider the Butcher's Baste, for example,” Krispos said, referring to a passage of water between Sylvanna and their near neighbor Haversham. “It's haunted by ghosts and hazards. If it wasn't properly tended by a well-paid detachment of aetherists, it might be unpassable.”

“What ghosts?”

“A Havershamite seamstress and her ill-fated lover,” Krispos said. “He was a butcher, from Sylvanna. Her family killed him in some horrible fashion.”

Stormwrackers used aetherism as a basis for weather prediction and to explain the underpinning of spells that affected the weather. Along the way, it had tripped over some of the principles of chaos theory. That book also contained intriguing observations about magical backlash: when someone used an inscription to create a rainstorm in one part of the world, the authors noted, there was an unpredictable reaction elsewhere. Every action produced an equal but opposite reaction.

So they said, anyway. The evidence in that particular passage was haphazardly documented and, at best, anecdotal.

The discipline that packed the most common sense per square inch of printed text wasn't considered high science at all—it was seacraft. Sailors understood barometric pressure and inertia and celestial navigation. They could do a reasonable amount of trigonometry if fog or cloud made it impossible to chart their course by other means. A sailing master could calculate the volume of a ship's hold.

They also practiced something called interval navigation in hazard-filled waters. This seemed to amount to using precise velocity calculations and timed intervals to slalom one's way through a precisely charted passage when fog or simple darkness rendered sailors blind.

“Why is sailing ‘low craft'?”

Krispos shrugged. He was more like a database than a fellow scholar. If he hadn't read something, he wouldn't speculate. He had no opinions of his own.

It was Zita who offered an answer. “It's primarily mechanical—so it smacks of atomism and mummery.”

“And what's the problem with atomism, exactly?”

“Atomism is what destroyed the outlands, isn't it?” Zita said, offering this—like so much in the books—as a certainty. “Tapping into wells of noxious ichor, unleashing monstrous entities?”

Sophie laughed. “Since when are the outlands destroyed?”

Krispos took this as a search request: “In the final days of the Wasting, the seas climbed ever higher, devouring the land, attempting to drown the finery spawn.”

“Which were?”

“Spawn of the finery?” he said, shrugging.

“Great. Very helpful.”
Maybe it means rich people?

He continued: “Panicked survivors rained mummer fire on each other, scorching all that remained. Creatures of the land drowned or starved. Birds burned in the air. Those in the seas saw their very shells and bones dissolve. Where there had been plenty, there was shortage, hunger, and want.”

“Is there any more about the shells and bones?”

Krispos shook his head.

It's the Noah's Ark legend again, Sophie thought. On their last visit, Bram had begun digging into old tales about a great flood to see if they could find clues as to why Stormwrack's landmasses were so different from those of home when the moon, constellations, and boiling point of water were all the same.

“That's just a story,” Zita said, earning a glare from Krispos. “We have no idea what the outlands are like. Obviously.”

“You're being polite.” Sophie's attention had been snagged by the parallel between the dissolving shell reference, in the memorician's story, and real-world acidification of the ocean. At home, rising carbon levels in the seas were making life ever less tenable for anything with a calcium exoskeleton.

But climate change and rising seas couldn't wipe the Rocky Mountains off the map, let alone all of Asia.

Zita sat up suddenly. “We're changing course.”

They found Cly and Captain Beck up on deck, spyglasses trained on a sail so far away that it was a mere dot on the horizon. “Ah, Sophie—we were just about to send for you. Is that the ship you sighted when you were on
Nightjar
?”

Her camera's telephoto was a better glass than either of theirs: she zoomed in, then nodded. “Looks similar. I can make out the curve of that spherical wheel of theirs.”

“The raider that's been sinking portside ships in Northwater?” Zita said. “You saw it?”

“Raise the mainsail,” Beck ordered. “Pursuit course.”

“I'm afraid we'll have to delay our homecoming, girls,” Cly said as his young crew leapt to obey. “We are still a Judiciary vessel.”

“You gotta do what you gotta do, right?” Sophie said.

“I believe I just said so.”

“Never mind, Cly—it's an expression,” Sophie said.

“Ah, I see. How long until we catch them, Lena?”

“Before nightfall, hopefully. After dark it would be easier to lose us.”

“Don't give them cause to try too hard, mmm?”

“Deploy convex,” Beck ordered. The ship shivered and a haze of steam rose before her in a curved curtain. The water was perfectly clear—glassine—and curved to bend light around
Sawtooth
in a way that would present a smaller image of the ship.

“Magic?” Sophie said. “The ship has magic?”

Cly nodded. “It's a parlor trick. As they look back, they'll see us maintaining our distance.”

“Even as we catch up?”

“Exactly.”

This explained how
Sawtooth
had crept up on
Nightjar
six months ago.

“Objects in mirror are closer than they appear,” Sophie murmured.

“Ah, you're familiar with the principle.”

Yeah, and I actually understand it, she thought, somewhat grumpily.

This was why they didn't trifle with proof and mistook science for a matter of opinion. When you could bend the rules of physics, it was only too natural to assume that the nature of the universe was malleable.

“I was rude last night.” Cly interrupted her ruminations. “I hope you'll forgive me.”

She nodded, unwilling to get into talking about sex or Lais again.

“Is Krispos working out?” He led her to a low table where he could keep an eye on the sail and indicated that one of the servants should bring tea. “Aiding with your investigations?”

It was a peace offering and she was happy to take it. “All of the schools of ‘science' I've looked into so far seem to be built around a couple of reasonable observations, but they're wrapped in … do you know what I mean if I say superstition?”

He nodded.

“As far as I can tell, people here figure the nature of the world is a matter of opinion. If you're an aetherist, gravity works one way; if you do fluidics, then we're bound to the earth by sticky invisible strings. You pick and choose.”

“Many of the nations have an approved state science,” Cly said. “One that conforms well with their religious beliefs or their proprietary spells.”

“That's insane. Science isn't a matter of opinion. I don't understand yet how magic fits into the rules, but something's either true or it isn't.”

“I think you'll find any number of learned people who'd disagree,” he said. “No, don't get offended. I'm not one such. I believe in immutable truths, and I've been pondering your chosen profession, daughter, ever since I learned of it.”

She felt a sting, an interior desire to harden herself.
Here's where he'll tell me it's trivial or frivolous.