Shine (37 page)

Child always hoped to see the leftover bones from meals reform in their proper shapes: seagull, turtle, swordfish. When she was little, she used to think Grappa was saying they had to put meal leftovers out to
sleep
, not out to sea. So even though she knew better now--being almost seven--she still thought of the bones as sleeping. And it was their little fun thing that they said, her and Grappa:
out to sleep
.

She checked the fishing lines on this side of the island for any catches--none--and scanned the horizon for pirates. The blue-green sea stretched in gentle swells to the edge of the world. No pirates today. If you saw pirates you had to crawl to the trap door to meet Grappa who would have a rat for protection. They'd practiced many times, always quiet and serious, but Child would have liked a glimpse of pirates. The book had a picture of one, but Grappa said, no, that was like in the movies, and not a real pirate. Movies was a before word. The book didn't have a picture of movies. But it had other before things, like fire hydrant, bicycle, and nano assembler.

"You dropped a bone, Child."

Grappa stood, his beard fluttering in the wind, and pointed to the tiny bone.

"Can I watch Nora kick it off?"

He nodded, and they crouched beside the bone, watching as the nanobots slowly moved the fragment toward the water's edge. You couldn't see the nanobots because of being too small, but they were there, working hard, passing the bone to the nanobots next to them. It would take all afternoon for Nora to put the bone out to sleep. Child would come back later to check on the progress.

"Nora doesn't like our garbage," Child pronounced.

"Not her kind." Grappa stood and looked out over their floating home. It was made entirely from garbage, an island of toxic trash, collected over years of swirling round the ocean gyre. The more garbage collected, the bigger Nora got. Here and there you could see plastic bottles, sty-ro-foam cups, white and yellow bags, and crunched up cans. Over there, a collection of tiny stirrers and straws, lined up like a miniature forest. (Forest: many trees clumped together. Tree: tall growing thingy.) Nora was going to break all these things down and make them into good stuff so that bad stuff wouldn't leak into the water.

Grappa said Nora wasn't alive. But they called her
her
, because he said you could call ships
her
, and what they were on was like a ship or maybe a raft.

Grappa held up a bulky sack, his eyes sparkling. "A new rat."

They tramped over to the rat collection, carefully hung up on little poles so Nora wouldn't try to eject them. Nora couldn't take any extra weight, or the whole ship might go down. Things like a dead rat could go into the ocean, because it was good stuff that could rot. Nora just collected bad stuff like pee-cee-bee, pee-vee-cee, dee-dee-tee, and nurdles so she could turn them into derm. The trawlers were supposed to pick up the Noras once a year, but there weren't trawlers any more, so their Nora was starting to have a weight problem and threw overboard anything that wouldn't hurt the ocean.

It was Grappa's idea to hang the dead rats up on wooden poles. Sooner or later Nora would take apart the wooden poles and flush them away, but until then they had good stashes of rats in case of pirates. When the oldest rats got too slimy, out to sleep they must go. But neither did you want a nice-looking dead rat. Best was a just-right dead rat, one rotted just so, and that's how come so many rats all lined up.

Using scraps of fishing net twine, Grappa secured the body onto a pole. Then Child followed him, past the privy hole, past the hot spot, to his big net where they finished pulling the catch from the webbing. Her hat slipped off while she worked.

She caught Grappa's eye. Quickly, she stuck the broad brimmed hat back on her head so as not to get skin sores.

But he kept looking at her. "Where's your belt, Child?"

"I don't need it. I've got these." She pointed to the little nuggets that went down her shirt. They slipped into holes on the other side, keeping her shirt closed against the sun.

Grappa came over to her, fingering the nuggets. "Buttons. Where..."

"Nora made them." They'd started as little nubs and then grew in about a week to be the right size for the holes.

He gazed at her in silence.

"Maybe she told her nanobots to help my shirt stay closed."

"Nora's nothing but a Nanobotic Oceanic Refuse Accumulator."

They faced off on the old argument. If she talked back, he'd frown and mutter,
Just like your mother. Magical thinking.
Mom died soon after she was born. Grappa said that when they put her out to sleep, a tern hovered over her, circling like a guard-yan angel.

Grappa went back to sorting the catch, looking up at her now and then, and squinting his eyes at the buttons. In the end his catch was--not including the rat--three medium-sized fish, two tiny crabs, and a piece of sty-ro-foam.

Holding the flakey blue piece of garbage, Child asked, "What was it?"

Grappa pulled his hat down tighter, getting his face sore into the shade of his brim. "Oh, it's polystyrene foam."

She rolled her eyes at the big word.

"Well, it was a cooler. People used it to keep food, maybe for a picnic."

"Picnic?"

"The family going some place fun to have a meal."

"We could have a picnic."

He eyed her, scratching his beard. "Might could."

"When mother comes back. Then."

He didn't answer for awhile. "What makes you think she's coming back, Child?"

She shrugged. "Out to sleep."

"That's what we say."

"Yes."

"Maybe we shouldn't say that anymore. Call it out to sea."

"Let's not, though."

He pointed to the hot spot, where they threw the bad stuff. It was a big pile in the middle of their garbage island where most of Nora's nanobots worked.

Child made her way over to it. The closer she got, the more the tiny nurdles clung to her feet and legs. You could brush them off, except then they'd stick to your hands. They leapt up on her like fleas, but that was just stat-ick, Grappa said; they weren't alive. Grappa had strict ideas on what was alive and what wasn't.
Nurdles are pre-production industrial plastic pellets. Everything plastic gets made from nurdles
.
The ocean is nurdle soup, Child.
He smiled at that, but she didn't know why.

She tossed the sty-ro-foam into the hot spot. Maybe people didn't throw the cooler in the ocean, only lost it, like the ghost nets that still caught fish and turtles. But whether on purpose or on accident, Nora was against it.

Even so, Child liked garbage. It made Nora bigger and stronger, all made from derm, the material left over after Nora changed pollu-tants into good stuff. And sometimes things that came into their nets got a story going, a story of before, the time when Grappa was an ocean-o-grapher, and helped make the Noras. Some of the best stories were from: cath-ode ray tube of teli-vision (check out picture in the book), inflated volley ball (learn to play until it got bumped into ocean), and the doll's head (if lonely in time before, you could have a small friend and talk to it). Child kept the doll's head until Grappa said he couldn't stand to look at just a head. Then they argued about whether hot spot or out to sleep.
People don't go into the hot spot
, she insisted. Grappa turned away.
She doesn't know the difference
, she heard him whisper. When she finally put the doll's head in the hot spot, it sank down, becoming island.

The really exciting thing? There were more islands like this out there. Probably every Nora had a child and a grappa. She kept a sharp eye out for other Noras so that she'd have a playmate, but the only time she saw one, it was a lonely, empty place. Except for seagulls nesting and churning around it in the air, a white gyre.

The ocean rocked them in their den under the trap door. Lantern light splashed off the smooth sides of the desal-inizer that Grappa said was too heavy for Nora to eject. Child watched his bearded face as he leaned against the desal-inizer and considered a bedtime story.

"Tell about Mom and Dad again."

"Well, your Dad was a good fisherman. Kept us going those first years."

"Until the tuna fish took his fishing pole." In the lantern's glow she imagined the tuna swimming away, laughing, and Dad so mad he threw his hat in the ocean after it.

"Yes. Dragged it away. He made others, but none were as good as that pole we got from Reel Good Sports. It about broke your Dad's heart to see it go."

She glanced up at the ceiling at the big red kayak. It hung by leather cords out of Nora's reach. It had two open places for people to sit in, and together with a second kayak that had got lost, this was how they got to the island: Dad and Mom and Grappa.

Nora wanted in the worst way to get a hold of that plastic kayak, but she let them have a few other things in the den without pulling them apart. For instance, she let them store food for a few days. Also a plastic bag or two to carry stuff around and also a few ghost nets, even though they were poly-propy-lene. Grappa said Nora had to go against her program to allow it.
She wants us to be happy
, Child had said once. Grappa had looked at her funny.
She doesn't know
happy.
She knows garbage detox and sequestering.
She'd objected,
But, Grappa, we're helping her pick up garbage. We dragged in that big drum. We catch sty-ro-foam, don't we?
He scratched around his face sore, not answering.

But the red plastic kayak was too much for Nora. Every now and then, they'd come into the den and find that Nora had chewed through the leather straps and the kayak had fallen.

Grappa was saving the boat for when it was time to go to shore, which would be when it was safe, when there'd be picnics and stores again.

"Reel Good Sports was a
store
," she said, hoping to keep Grappa talking. "You could point at things that you wanted, and trade monies for them."

"Well, the owner was long gone. We just took things. Buying things, that was in the time before."

"On land."

"California," Grappa said. "It used to have stores, a lot of them."

"And toasters and cars and baseball gloves. Except Mom and Dad didn't, just you, Grappa. You had cars and toasters."

"Oh, for awhile, and then I didn't anymore. I raised your Mom in a compound where we didn't have cars or such. When the bad men came we escaped. She was grown by then and we hid in the woods until your Dad came along and helped us--"

"And then we were a family."

"--and then your Mom was pregnant and we needed a safe place for you, so we found the kayaks and scouted around for a portable desalinizer. I knew where Nora was, because I brought my GPS with me, and we came here, to be safe."

"Except for the pirates. They're not safe."

"Lights out, now." He blew out the lantern, and pulled derm mats over them.

"How was Nora born?"

"Lights out."

"Yes, but how did Nora get born? What was her Mom?"

She closed her eyes and thought about how Nora kept growing, and that maybe someday she'd stretch all the way to land.

"A seed," came Grappa's voice. "We put little seeds in the ocean, and programmed them to sweep up garbage."

"Seeds with nanobots."

"And you told the nanobots to get garbage out of the water and to make DERM from pollutants."

Sleep tugged on her, but she wanted to prove she knew what derm was: "De-graded Rewoven Refuse Matters."

"
Materials
. Degraded Rewoven Refuse Materials. And the Noras got big, some of them. This Nora swirls in a big vortex, vacuuming up one of the North Pacific gyres, just a never-ending clockwise rotation. Whole thing's kept in place by a mountain of high pressure."

"Like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch."

"Except that one, that's as big as Texas."

Texas was a place so big you could walk for months and you'd still be there. Whenever they wanted to say how big something was--like the tuna that defeated Dad--she and Grappa would say, "big as Texas."

She fought against sleep, because Grappa was talking even past lights out. But the great ocean gyre had her in its arms. The gyre was a huge ocean creature that danced in a big soft circle, carrying turtles, volley balls, tunas, ghost nets, and their island around and around and around and into dreams.

"Grappa, why are you sleeping out here?"

Sometime during the night Grappa had got up and left the den. This morning she found him top side just waking up in a nest of derm.

He brushed the nurdles off his clothes. "Oh, its nice out here, Child."

But she thought he looked cold. "I don't like it when you sleep out here."

He started to make their breakfast fire in the metal drum that Nora let them keep. Child tried rotating the sticks, but she didn't have the knack of it, yet. Once the fire was going, she fetched crabs they'd saved from yesterday and they roasted them. The ocean had big swells today, rolling softly under Nora, lifting and settling them, the sunlight caught in the tops, going along for the ride.

"I'll be sleeping up here from now on," Grappa said.

"No. Nothing should change."

"Listen to me, Jessie." Oh boy, when he called her her real name, that was the worst.

"I've been collecting garbage a long time. But now I've got the same sore your Dad had. Soon I'll have to... have to be done with it. When the time comes--" He nodded toward the edge of the island, toward the ocean gyre. "You know Nora can't keep me. You help her. Can you do that? Because if I'm down in the den you won't be able to put me out to... out to ..."

"But we'll always be together. You said, Grappa."

"I said." He turned away. "It's just sleep, Child."

As his words sank in, they released a weight from her chest, as though a big rock had lain atop her. It lifted, letting in a good light that fired up her heart like a lantern. So he'd be coming back. They'd all be coming back.

That's what she'd been trying to tell him all along.

She put the crab shells in the ocean and watched as they bobbed away. Then she sat down to watch her nets, pulling them in now and then, expecting good luck today. She hummed a tune and lay down on her stomach trying to see the nanobots. Looking real close, sometimes she saw a seething and sparkling, and she knew the bots were breaking down pee cee bees and other pollu-tants and car-cino... car-cino...