If you’ve ever tried to sleep in a grumbly old house with
pipes that hiss and clank, floors that creak, walls that groan, windows that
rattle, you’ve maybe a tenth of an idea what it’s like to try sleeping on a
ship like the Monetta’s Mourn. If it wasn’t the restless noises of the
ship it was someone barking out an instruction, someone calling the hour of a
watch, or a mad woman screaming while bound to a bed.
Just when I might
have managed to sleep for half an hour, there was a soft knock, and then
Mattice drew aside the curtain that shielded our quarters, making enough of a
gap for his big beardy face to loom into my vision and say: ‘Morning watch.
There’s hot tea in the galley, hot water in the washroom. You’ll feel like
death now but we’ve all had our first night on a ship and it gets better.’
‘How many nights
does it take?’ Adrana asked.
‘Oh, not many.
Sometimes as few as twenty.’
‘Thank you, Mattice,’
I said, shivering despite all the layers I’d pulled around myself in the night.
‘Take your time.
But not too much of it if you want to see the sails run out. Hirtshal’s already
begun.’
Running out the
sails got everyone twitchy. Hirtshal was the master of sail, the man in charge
of them, but if something went badly wrong at this stage, half the crew would
need to go out in suits to untangle the mess.
‘We run a tight
crew,’ Rackamore told me, while we were gathered at the hemispherical window,
watching the sail-control gear swing out from the hull. ‘That’s not just
because a light ship is a fast ship. It means we don’t have to split our
profits too many ways.’
‘I want to learn
what I can,’ I said.
He nodded. ‘That’s
a fine attitude. And you will – within reason. Knowing how to wear a suit,
operate an airlock, find your way around the outside of the ship – that’s basic
survival ability. And some knowledge of the other areas of expertise is
always useful. You’ll want to know a little about baubles, a little about
relics, and so on, if only because it’ll give you a healthy respect for what
you don’t know.’ His jaw tensed. ‘But I have to draw a different line
with my Bone Readers. You’re scarce . . . too scarce to expose to the risks
that the other crewmembers naturally accept.’
Prozor, next to
us, said: ‘What he means is, girlies, you’re goin’ to be pampered, so get used
to it.’
Beyond the glass,
the barbs that had been folded along the Monetta’s hull were angling
out, just as if that bad-tempered fish were stiffening its spines in some
defensive reaction. These were the anchor-points for the rigging, the whiskery
filaments which linked the ship to her sails. Under Hirtshal’s supervision,
they’d be tugged and released all the while, making up for tiny shifts in the
solar flux and accommodating the changes in our course that Rackamore had in
mind.
‘We don’t run out
the main sails all in one go,’ he was saying. ‘They’d snag and rip. Hirtshal
uses the drogue sails first. Do you see them, unfurling about a league away
from us? They’ll take up the slack in the lines, get them handsomely taut and
aligned, and then we run out the main sails, a thousand square leagues of
reflective area.’
He had a way of
saying ‘main sails’ that sounded as if the two words were running together.
‘It might seem
simple,’ he went on. ‘It’s anything but. The sails are as tricky as they’re
delicate.’
Hirtshal was
already outside, standing with magnetic boots on the back of the Monetta,
using controls that came out through her hull for exactly this sort of
operation. If something jammed or tangled, he could sort it out before it got
too bad. The launch was ready as well, just in case something got snarled up
tens of leagues beyond the ship.
But all was going
well. The drogues snapped open, blossoming like sudden chrome flowers, and they
in turn helped the unfolding of the main sails, intricate, interlaced arrays of
them. I don’t mind saying: it was properly marvellous, the way they gradually
opened out, planing apart along seams we’d never have known were there, layer
after layer of them, snapping wider all the time. It was like a conjuring
trick, something a cove would do in Neural Alley, with cards and a sly gleam in
his eye. The sails blazed back at us, each glittering facet silver tinged with
red and purple, reflecting the world-filtered light of the Old Sun. The rigging
was invisible, but already it was straining to move the ship. In response, Monetta’s
creaks and groans had a different sort of music to them. An eagerness, now. The
ship was straining, wanting to catch the photon winds.
And so we sailed. Monetta’s
Mourn no longer had to slink around on ion thrust, or cower from the
gravity well of a swallower. She’d become the thing she was always meant to be:
a vessel of the deep void, a creature of the Empty.
That ship of ours
was a sunjammer.
Excerpt from REVENGER, copyright Alastair Reynolds 2016, due to be published in September.
