It lifted the boats and the raft and let them scrape gently onto land, where the dark people leaped out and helped the newcomers onto dry sand and grass.
Beyond the grass, houses of the same materials that formed the boats and the cables.
Wood, Milo realized, remembering his classes and sims. Vines and trees. Wonderful!
Beyond the little houses, a great crowd of green and wood and vines—a forest!—which rose up the flanks of steep hills.
More islanders came running from the village. All dark, like their rescuers, and all naked.
“Thank you,” said Mom, her voice raw.
The strangers nodded.
“You’re the third package in two days,” said one of the strangers, a man with long gray hair and a missing eye. “What in the star-spangled hell is going on up there?”
—
The man’s name was Boone, and he didn’t waste a lot of time on chitchat. He introduced himself, shook some hands, and then called out, “Where’s Jale?”
“Here, Boone,” answered one of the rescuers, sitting in the grass.
One of the rescuers with breasts, Milo noticed. His own age, maybe a little younger.
“We need you to go back out again.”
“Aw, dammit, Boone, we just—”
“We’re out of redfish. O-U-T out.”
They glared at each other, the girl and the one-eyed man. Then the girl stood and waved her arms up and down.
“Fish Committee!” she shouted. “Pony, make sure freshwater bags are aboard, and Chili Pepper, baby, check the nets, will ya?”
The dark, naked people who had rescued them—nearly all kids and teens, Milo now realized—popped up and ran in various directions, grabbing this and that. Most of them converged on the skinny wooden boats they’d just arrived in, yelling back and forth. Singing, some of them.
Jale—the leader of this wild young navy—took three long steps across the sand and stood looking down at Milo.
“Come fishing,” she said.
“I…we just got here,” he stammered.
“You’ve seen about all there is to see,” said Jale, shrugging. “It ain’t complicated.”
“He’ll go,” said another voice, behind him. Another girl.
Squinting against the sun, Milo looked back over his shoulder, and there was the girl from the crawler, from the night the riots began. And she was naked.
Milo produced a croaking noise.
“Go!” called his mother, not far away, one twin in each arm, surrounded by islanders.
Then they had him by the arms, the two girls and a variety of children, and he was aboard a wooden outrigger. Twenty or so island kids splashed alongside, pushing the boat into the surf. The girl from the crawler ran with them, laughing. Then they all vaulted into the waist with him, balancing expertly.
Jale clambered up to the prow and crouched there, tugging ropes, freeing a sail, which snapped open like a wing.
The ocean and the wind whipped them away from the island.
The girl from the crawler sat facing him. Looking at him. She seemed amused.
She’s beautiful, Milo thought. He struggled to focus on her eyes, because she was so, so naked.
“I’m Suzie,” she said.
—
Two other outriggers sailed alongside them, and the three boats were out for three days.
Three clock-days, in crawler time. Earth days. In Jupiter orbit, that was one day. Eighty-odd hours from one dim sunrise to the next.
Milo had time, finally, to think about his father. If he stared into the sun long enough, he could project Dad’s face onto the cloud bands of Jupiter. He was wary of tears, though. The people around him had losses of their own. He would handle his loss alone, for now.
I shouldn’t have left the twins so soon, he thought. Or Mom.
The islanders leaped around and over Milo and Suzie, pulling ropes, loosing nets. The nets came back with fish in them, and the islanders would sing out and pack them away in a hole up front, covered in palm fronds. Or they would make evil faces and empty the nets back into the sea. Milo glimpsed one fish with a mouth in its belly. Another had tumors for eyes, writhing with tiny pink tentacles.
Suzie, Milo learned, had been a victim of the anaconda, sucked up and jailed less than an hour after rescuing Milo. Like him, she had no memory of being transported downplanet. She had been here for four days. This was her second fishing trip.
“It’s beautiful here,” she said, “but it’s toxic. The terraformers’ big learning experience. They need fish—like, lots of fish, especially redfish—for the antioxidants.”
“What’s an antioxidant?”
“I don’t know. We have a lot to learn. Like how to sail and how to walk around on this stupid boat without falling in the water, and how come you still have your clothes on? It’s warm. It’s always warm.”
Because I have an erection, Milo thought.
When in Rome, said a voice inside him.
Seized by a sudden and particular courage, Milo half-stood, worked his way out of his clothes, and cast them overboard.
Suzie eyed his erection.
“Is that because of me?” she asked.
Milo nodded.
“Wow,” she said. Then she stood and climbed up to the prow with Jale and asked if someone could please teach her how to work the nets.
—
They learned the nets, and the sails, and how to read the weather.
They learned the islanders’ names. Among the younger kids were Zardoz, High Voltage, and Demon Rum. The teens were Gilgamesh, Talk Pretty, Frodo, Pony, and Chili Pepper, Jale’s boyfriend. Jale was the captain; they deferred to her on all three boats.
The sky went through changes. Jupiter changed shape. The distant sun crept between horizons. Smaller moons passed. Dark clouds boiled up sometimes, and they sailed around these when they could.
“You watch the water, too,” Jale told them. “Not just the sky.”
“For fish?” asked Suzie.
“Fish and tsunami,” answered Jale, eyes on the sea. “The tides here make everything bigger.”
When they slept, they left a few kids to mind the sails and watch the sea. The crews curled up in the bottom, jumbled together in knots, while Jupiter eclipsed the sun and haunted the sky like a hole with a glowing rim, and the stars came out, and the other moons shined brighter than ever.
Milo and Suzie didn’t sleep. Not then.
They slumped together with the outrigger’s wooden hull on one side and a pile of sleeping kids on the other. Their bare arms and shoulders touching sent shivers all over Milo.
“You talk to yourself,” Suzie whispered.
“Hmmm?”
“You heard me. What’s going on when you do that?”
What was he going to say?
“Sometimes my head talks to me,” he said.
“Mine, too,” she said, and they went back to being silent and not sleeping.
—
“Redfish!” Chili Pepper called out in the middle of the second day.
The crews boiled into action, tying sails down.
“What about the nets?” asked Suzie.
“Don’t use nets for redfish,” said Zardoz.“You gots to dive for ’em.”
Milo searched the water. All he saw was a school of tiny, iridescent guppies darting around. Leaping and splashing on the surface.
“Dive for what?” he asked. “There’s nothing here big enough to eat. Just these—”