Aur Child
Chapter 58

Sand Flea watched, her jaw hung low, as the little tender approached the Odyssey. Until this moment, since she had been abandoned twice before and deprived the opportunity to see it, she had always spoken derogatorily about the vessel onto which Digambar and Alai had scurried as “the ghost ship”. But now, with its refractory skin looming above her like sheer cliffs of mist and ice, it seemed to her like nothing short of a fairy tale castle. The sharp, vertical bows, the planar decks and symmetrical rigging, the mysteriously hued windows circumscribing a rotunda saloon, and the towering mast that seemed to pierce the sky where an ephemeral sphere, like a polished boulder of onyx, the eye of Odyssey, seemed to peek and hide within the steel clouds. She was not immune to the contempt in which her people held the technologies of the Apostates, and throughout these past weeks, she had heard brief mention and caught glimpses of it, but it had always been construed in a context of derision. Until this moment, being confronted with a most colossal specimen of that technology, she had never imagined that it could be so awesome.

It took only a few minutes for Linus to carry his three passengers across the fjord and be hoisted up into the tender garage. Alai held Gallia’s hand as she stepped aboard the Odyssey. Sand Flea helped Alai remove Gallia’s travel chest and the Aur child from the tender. They slid the chest to the side of the room to be collected later. Alai grabbed the Aur child with one hand and steadied Gallia’s arm with the other.

“Come,” he said, as they exited the tender garage, shivering from the short trip across the fjord. “Let’s get you upstairs, where we can have something warm to drink.”

Sand Flea stayed behind to look around the strange room. She had been dazzled by the tender, shiny and transparent at the same time, and wondered if it was the same one she had caught a momentary glimpse of many weeks ago when Digambar first approached Gjoa. She watched the large bay door shut tight under its own invisible power, buckets of water draining out through scupper holes, leaving the room silent except for the soft hum of hidden pumps and, eventually, just a few muffled drips.

“So, you’re a talking boat?” she asked tentatively, doing her best to mimic the seemingly absurd manner in which Alai had recently initiated a conversation with the boat when they were climbing into it from the ice. As she spoke, she ran her finger along the sleek gunwale.

“Actually,” the same adolescent voice she had heard earlier said, “The boat is just a boat, and I’m in it for the duration of my training period. Presently, I am studying a nautical curriculum in addition to my general computational and Guest services programming. My name is Linus, by the way.”

Sand Flea giggled. “You sure do talk funny, Linus. My name is Sand Flea.”

“V-very n-nice to meet you, Sand Flea f-from Gjoa.”

Her eyes glanced up as she cocked her head; it wasn’t only his suddenly shaky voice that had caught her attention. She walked around to the stern of the boat, inspecting its shape and gingerly testing the resistance in its rudder assembly.

“So then, you’re a boy in a boat?”

“Well,” Linus answered in a haughty tone. “That would be an understatement. I’m a hyper intelligent entity embedded in this tender to better facilitate an extended data harvesting potential.”

Sand Flea struggled to suppresses a smile. “What’s a hyper entity?” she asked.

“I said, hyper intelligent entity.” Linus spoke with a slight huff in his digital voice.

“Oh, right. Well, what’s that mean?”

“It means I’m really smart.”

“Oh yeah?” Sand Flea’s eyebrows raised. “How smart are you?”

“Well,” Linus said, “like really, really, really, really, really smart.”

Sand Flea giggled once again. “Is that how you measure it?”

“No, not exactly. But if I tried to explain the method to a Tellurian like you, you probably wouldn’t understand.”

Sand Flea squeezed her lips tight and nodded slowly. “I see,” she said. “So, I can think of you as five ‘reallys’ smart?”

“Quite so.”

“Yet …you’re stuck in a boat.”

“No!” Linus’ voice cracked. “I’m not stuck here. Didn’t you hear anything I said before? I’m temporarily embedded for the purposes of data collection and studying.”

“Ok, ok. Take it easy.” Sand Flea uncrossed her arms and uncoiled a rope that had been neatly wrapped around one of the tender’s winches. “I can understand why you’re called hyper.”

“But you just seem to make everything I say sound …silly.”

Sand Flea pointed to her chest and let out a little gasp. “Do I do that?”

“Well, it seems that way to me.”

She shook her head. “Look, I’m sorry if I’m having trouble understanding some things about you. I am just a Tellurian, after all.”

In what seemed to Sand Flea as complete sincerity, Linus replied. “Yeah, well. That’s true.”

Sand Flea pursed her lips. She squinted one eye and looked down the line of the coaming. “So, how long have you been studying in there, Linus?”

“All together, this would be my fourth decade,” he said, with a renewed wisp of pride in his voice.

Again, Sand Flea let out a giggle.

“What’s so funny about that?” Linus asked, the exasperation in his voice unmistakable.

She placed her hand upon the textured grip of the winch and spun it with a flick of her wrist so that it whizzed and clicked until it returned to a state of rest. “It just seems like someone who calls himself hyper intelligent shouldn’t need four decades to learn to sail a boat.”

“Well,” Linus replied in a huff. “It’s a lot more involved than you might think. I’m expected to calculate all the tidal streams and heights, dynamically interpolating springs and neaps in real time within a radius of one thousand nautical miles in combination with wind and leeway records based on any number of hull or foil configurations, and apply all that to crew preferences and position data based on celestial observations to deliver optimized passage recommendations at any time of day or night.”

“Wow,” she said. “That really does sound complicated.”

“It is.”

Sand Flea nodded. “And boring. So, where are we going right now, then?”

Linus paused. “I, I don’t know yet, because –”

“You’re still learning to calculate?” Sand Flea interrupted with a mischievous smile.

“N-no,” he said in a whine. “It’s just that no one has told me –

“What else can you do?” Sand Flea interrupted Linus again. She was at the bow of the tender now, throwing one leg over the gunwale and climbing back on board.

“You, you shouldn’t step aboard like that. You should ask for permission first.”

Ignoring this protest, Sand Flea swung her other leg into the boat and sat down in the seat she had taken during the short journey earlier, recalling how pleasant it felt against the curve of her back and how well she could see everything going on in the boat from that vantage point. “What else can you do?” she repeated.

“What do you mean?”

“Like, besides that dull stuff you were talking about. Do you do anything, like …fun?”

Sand Flea fidgeted in the seat waiting for Linus to reply.

“Linus?”

“Yes.”

“I was asking if you do anything fun?”

“Well, in my free time, I like to compose music.”

Sand Flea scrunched her little nose. “You mean you make it?”

“Yes. Make it, play it. I usually write my own compositions.”

She lifted her foot up and rested it against another seat. “Can you play something for me?”

“Well, I guess. What would you like to hear?”

Again, Sand Flea flashed a playful smile. “How about something about me.”

“B-but I don’t know anything about you.”

“Are you sure? You already seem to know that I’m from Gjoa?”

“What? How do you know that?”

“Well, of course I know that. The question is, if you don’t know anything about me, how did you know that?”

Linus harrumphed. “My mother warned me about girls like you.”

Sand Flea burst out in a loud guffaw. “Your mother isn’t here. It’s just you and me. Now are you going to play me a song or what?”

“You’re kind of tricky, aren’t you?”

“Well, there you go. You have my name, where I’m from, and that I’m, so you say, ‘tricky’. What can you make of that?”

There was a moment where the slosh of the sea against the outer hull was the only sound in the room. Then, Linus played a single string followed by a chord of four. Sand Flea had been in a reclined position to receive her requested serenade, but she immediately sat up straight and swept a lock of thick black hair behind her ear. That single chord had generated a vivid memory of Gjoa in her mind that rivalled anything her dreams might manifest. The following chords swept her up and delivered her to a childhood fantasy where spicy tastes and smiling family enveloped her as if she rested beneath the manicured canopy of a clan courtyard. Linus entered the dream with the words of an invisible bard:

Tender girl,

From far away,

Lone, dark pearl,

Please do stay.

Treat thee kind,

As you care,

To be not blind,

To be aware.

Lost soul,

Strong, your heart,

Think to me,

When alone thou art.

The final chords disappeared into the dark corners of the room as Sand Flea remained seated stiffly upright in a profound trance. She breathed in deeply, her eyes closed, gently rocking upon the sea within a boat within a boat. After a long exhale, she said in a dreamy murmur, “You’re more intelligent than I thought, hyper entity Linus.”