Hegira by Greg Bear Page A

numerous, some with small fishing settlements and huts on tall poles. The sea frequently rose above the islands during a storm, Bar-Woten learned. It was a rough life. Still people clung like barnacles, and he knew the glue that held them was the past. Where the past had meaning, people stayed.
    The Trident did brisk trade between the islands, also acting as a hauler and mediator. Her principal load was destined for Weggismarche, but she had several tons of tools and nets which she'd picked up on other landfalls. Kiril and Barthel helped with the inventory. Bar-Woten drove one of the motor launches that delivered the goods to the islands lacking port facilities.
    In these weeks they saw white beaches backed with palm trees that rustled and crackled in the breeze, and high green mountains thick with brush no man had ever crawled through, and islands so big there was no way to tell they weren't the mainland until you had sailed completely around one and seen the same banyan tree from two directions. Kiril breathed it in and blew it out and took energy from it all. At night he ran his hands along his back and felt the ridges of lash scars there, asking: Who did this? I did? Not I. The other one.
    The Young One.
    He worked with the loading crews on cargo watches until sweat covered him in a fine sheen. He helped trim and refit piping from the methane tanks and went with the boats to kelp beds to gather the great underwater trees. On deck they hung in canvas-covered bags until they were cut and stacked to dry. The smell was outrageous. In a few days, though, they were in neat odorless blocks, boxed and stored for use in the methane-generation tanks. The wind was from the sea, and the kelp was from the sea, and he knew, as he sweated in the day and felt his scars by night, that the Trident did nothing to the sea that any other sea creature didn't do. He was no longer a penitent, a traveler out of fear, but a crewman of the Trident.
    Conversely, Bar-Woten enjoyed the work and grew familiar with the sea, but was not part of the ship. He could never wholeheartedly join anything again. He worked with the boilers and the engine and knew them for what they were, pieces of metal that filled and pumped and thrust, not parts of a living thing.
    Barthel's enthusiasm seldom reached him. Most of what the Khemite was learning from Avra wouldn't be much use to them when they landed in the north and started the trek again. It seemed to Bar-Woten that the original journey was losing steam. It was being absorbed into this lesser, niggling trip across sea and between islands.
    The central island of the Bicht was called Golumbine. It was twenty-five hundred kilometers from Weggismarche. On extremely clear days, the Weggismarche Obelisk could be seen from its northern side as an almost invisible line. The Trident sailed around the eastern tip, passing huge pillars of granite topped with temples carved from solid rock thousands of years ago. Above the beaches, in the craggy hills, three statues rose from the jungle. Each was a hundred meters tall, made from bronze almost black with the centuries. The central sculpture was a woman dancing, her right leg crooked to put her foot just over her left knee, both arms held out with palms up toward the sky. She was rounded and stocky, built to hold her weight as much as to resemble a woman. Her hair radiated in bronze sunbursts, a fan of metal twenty meters wide. To each side her companion statues were serpents curling around central columns of rock white as snow, except where the bronze had stained them green.
    The Trident put into the deepwater port in the north of the island eight months after leaving Mur-es-Werd, and the brown, light-baked inhabitants welcomed them to Golumbine. Liberty was granted to all aboard the ship but a skeleton watch, of which Bar-Woten was a disgruntled member.
    That evening the crew of the Trident feasted in a palace made of quartz. It was only the climax of a heady day spent as