“Are you joking?” Ursala yelled out. “The condition it’s in will be fifty fathoms down if you don’t get us off this boat!”
“That’s hardly my problem,” the voice said. “Or my fault. You came out here of your own free will. The quicker you answer, the sooner we’ll get through this. Tell me what model your unit is, and give me a rough summary of its functionality. We need to have a full picture before we decide what’s to be done here.”
“We’re going down!” Cup yelled.
“Then if I were you I wouldn’t waste any more time.”
Ursala sweared an oath. Her eyes was big and wide. She pointed to the back of the boat where the dagnostic was sitting on the thwart wrapped in an oilskin cloth. The water hadn’t reached it yet, but it was not far off. “It’s a mounted unit, from a Zed-Seven medical drudge. Now it’s exposed to the elements, as you can see. Its state is deteriorating every second!”
“But it’s still functional?” the voice said.
“Yes! For now!”
“And it’s yours?”
“Yes!”
“So I assume you’re trained in its use?”
Ursala throwed up her hands. “Fuck and damn this nonsense! Get us to safety! We’ll talk then.”
There was a few moments when we couldn’t hear nothing except that growling again, as the big drone bobbed and wobbled in the air. “All right,” the voice said. “Climb into the raven. Quickly.”
A door opened up in the belly of the big drone and a kind of a ladder spilled out. I say it was a ladder, but it was made all out of silver metal and it rolled and swung like it was knotted rope. The loose end of it bumped against the side of our boat. It was clear that we was supposed to climb up inside the drone. Ursala didn’t move though, and it seemed like both me and Cup was waiting to see what she did before we made a move our own selves. “What about the diagnostic?” Ursala shouted.
“Leave that to me,” the voice said.
Ursala still stood her ground. “What does that mean?”
“Ursala, we’re like to drown here,” Cup muttered. “Maybe we should just go.”
But I knowed why Ursala was being so stubborn, and I felt pretty much the same way. The dagnostic could make medicines for any sickness. It was a marvel and a miracle. And besides that, it was the onliest hope we had got left to save humankind, that was close to dying off for aye and ever. When it was fixed right, the dagnostic could make babies drop into the world alive that otherwise would of been born dead or not born at all. If we let it be whelmed by the sea, there was not any point in us coming here in the first place or doing anything else after.
“I can raise the unit up on a winch,” the voice said. “But manhandling a weight that large risks swamping your boat. Please get into the raven. There’s no more time to argue.”
Well, now we was come to it. We looked each to other, and I guess we was all thinking the same thoughts, which was: who was on the other end of that voice, and of the first voice we heard, and what did they want out of us? We was like to jump from the grate onto the griddle if we was not careful.
But we was not well placed to argue it. Ursala give a nod at last, and we all crowded forward, making the wallowing boat pitch and rock under us. We climbed up the ladder one by one, into the big drone that the man had called a raven. Cup, who knowed how to swim and didn’t have no fear of deep water, went first. She struggled with the ladder to start with, but then found out where to put her hands and feet and went up fast. As soon as she got inside, she kneeled down and waited so she could help Ursala up when she come. She drawed her up with both of her hands gripped onto one of Ursala’s raised arms.
That just left me, and I have got to say I was not happy to put my feet on that ladder. It was not like a ladder in a lookout nor yet like the ladders between the houses in Many Fishes village, but was swinging free in the air in a way that was troubling to look at. Still, I seen there wasn’t no other way out of this, so finally I grabbed the sides of the ladder in my two hands to steady it and set my foot on the bottom rung.
Climbing a free ladder, as I learned right there and then, is a different thing from climbing a fixed one. Your own body’s weight tilts it, so it slips out from under you unless you hold it from both sides and put yourself in the right place to balance it. I did the one of them things, but not the other. With my first step, the ladder gun to rock. With my second step, it bucked and tossed like a horse saying no to a saddle.
And with my third step, it tipped me off.
I throwed out my hand to catch the side of the boat, but I missed it by a yard or more. I went into the water, and once I was in there I kept right on going. The chill of it was like a giant had punched me inside my heart. I couldn’t move any part of me. I just fell down into the ocean the same way you’d fall through the air if you jumped off a house’s roof, only not so fast.
I guess it was my own fault I couldn’t make no better fist of swimming than that. I had lived in a village right by the ocean for the best part of four months, and there wasn’t a boy or girl there that couldn’t swim like a fish just about as soon as they could walk. Lots of times, people had offered to teach me, but I thought it was easier just to stay out of the water, which had never been a problem for me up to that time.
Now here I was, in the water all the way and getting deeper, what with the weight of my clothes and my knife and the DreamSleeve and all the other stuff I had about me pulling me down. I seen the keel of our boat above me, getting further and further away. I thought, well, that’s that then, I’m going to drown. And I done my best to make good on that decision, for I let out all the breath that was in my lungs in a kind of a hiccup, just out of surprise and not knowing to hold it in. The sea poured into me, filling up the place where the air had been.
You would think swapping air for water would make me heavier, but my sinking down into the water slowed and stopped. I seemed to hang there, in a space that was all striped with light and dark.
Something passed by me, very close. I seen its eye first, like the window of a house with no lights on inside. Then its grey flank glided past, all set with spikes and spears longer than my arm. It took a very long time to go by. I hoped with all my heart that I was too small a morsel to be worth turning around for.
Then something grabbed a hold of me, high up on my left leg, and I come up out of the water even quicker than I went into it. I was flying through the air. Not like a bird, for birds is not much inclined to fly upside down. More like a flung stone, and maybe most of all like a fish that’s being hauled up on the end of a line.
I seen the ocean all churning and foaming under me, and a long stream of water going down from my drenched body to join it. I seen our little boat, wallowing and sinking. I seen that great wall of metal, right alongside me, so close I was like to dash my brains out against it.
And then, as I kept on going up and up, I seen something so strange I couldn’t make no sense of it. I was up above the wall, looking right over it. I would of expected to see a village on the other side, as big as Half-Ax or even lost London – and it’s true there was a place where people might live, though it was drawed out long instead of round like Mythen Rood and Ludden and Many Fishes. There was great towers rising up out of that long, wide place, and on the far side of it another wall. The two walls was not flat to each other like the walls of a house, but come together in a point. And where they touched, they cut a furrow through the ocean like a plough does in a field, throwing a great spume of white sea-froth out behind.