I’ve managed to catch ten minutes to myself. The morning has been really hectic.

I think I’m beginning to understand the sealin mindset. When they need to get something done—learn English, repel invaders, get a spacesuit out of a wrecked ship in a lake at the top of a hill—they obsess about it. When there’s nothing for them to do, they relax completely. The switch between the two is not as smooth as it could be.

Green has switched from relaxation mode into obsession mode.

About five minutes after dawn was turned on, Green was ringing my doorbell energetically. When I opened the door, she stormed in with Black trailing behind. I managed to put her off long enough to get dressed and have my usual morning cup of coffeeoid, before she started instructing me in great detail what I was going to do today.

Unfortunately she forgot how bad my memory is. When I finally managed to get through that there was no way I was going to remember all the details, which sounded quite important, I could practically see the frustration boiling off her. I could tell that she really wanted to do this herself. Alas, the sealin body is not particularly equipped for battling undergrowth and climbing hills.

As a result the morning turned into memorisation drill. There’s a lot to remember.

You see, she doesn’t know what kind of ship it is. She doesn’t know whether the ship power’s still on. She doesn’t know whether the spacesuit power is still on. She doesn’t know what species the spacesuit is designed to fit—she wasn’t entirely clear on this; I gather the Builder ships mostly carried humans, with some ships being assigned to non-humans—and she doesn’t know what the suit’s been configured for. If, indeed, there is one.

Which means that there are contingency plans layered on top of contingency plans. Luckily, I am able to make notes; after a few tries I got a rich, dark sauce from the invisible chefs. That plus a finger and a blanket makes an incredibly crude but serviceable means of recording diagrams. But I can’t write with it, not properly, so I’m reduced to diagrams and single letters indicating important features.

Here’s a summary:

If the ship’s power is on, I can tell the onboard computer to open the spacesuit hatch. But it’s not likely to work in English. I have a phrase in Builder that supposed to do the trick.

If the ship’s power is not on, I’m going to have to locate the hatch and cut through it with Green’s magic pocket knife. (Apparently the hull is only cuttable if the power’s off. A structural integrity field?) I have diagrams showing which hatch it is.

I have a number of diagrams that will allow me to identify what kind of ship it is. Some kinds, unfortunately, require me to look at the tail of the ship, which is at the bottom of the lake. I am going to have to see how feasible that is; if not, I’ll just have to guess. The make of ship is important because the spacesuit hatch location varies from ship to ship. If necessary, I suppose I could cut them all open.

I have stick figures of five different types of space suit. Three are human. I know how to check the suit power plant for each of them, and instructions for removing the lift harness. Some of the suits require careful use of the knife to do this. Green instructed me to be very, very careful. I asked what would happen if I cut the power plant by mistake. She avoided the question.

I do not have instructions on how to operate the suits. I am supposed to remove the lift belts and walk back. She was very insistent on this.

Also, I had the following conversation:

“You have known the space suit,” she said at one point. “You have known the space suit and you have not say-ed. You have known the space suit prior to the storm. If you have say-ed then you have fly-ed with the space suit away from the storm. If you have say-ed then now you and we not on the island. The Big Ship have come and it have take-ed the island and we not on the Big Ship.”

Damn it. I’m stuck here too, you know? How was I supposed to know I could have used it to escape from the storm? I’ve never even seen one, for God’s sake!

Hell.

She’s ringing the door bell. I’d better get started.

[break]

Argh.

I have it.

Things did not go according to plan.

I set off up the hill. On my back was a makeshift pack made out of blanket and strips of blanket. In the middle, carefully rolled up and smeared with fat from a dozen or so salmon-things was the blanket with all my scribbles on it. Guess who had to rip open a pile of dead fish and pull out the fatty tissues with their bare hands? Oh, yes, it’s the only person on the island with hands. It stinks. But with any luck it should protect my notes from getting to wet during the swim across the lake. The pack also contains the magic pocket knife.

Up the hill. Remember a few days ago I said that the forests weren’t flattened as badly as I thought? Well, I’d only seen the edge of the forest at that point. Uphill of the Observation Tower they got worse. A lot worse. It was a single tangled mass of undergrowth that I had to pick my way through. Eventually I got out the pocket knife, turned it on, and waved it back and forth in front of me, machete-style; that helped, but I couldn’t walk with it as I was terrified I’d trip and impale myself on the blade. And that damned pack caught on every protruding branch all the way up, I’ll swear.

Two or three hours later I finally got to the top; total distance, maybe about a kilometre. Maybe two. The shallow basin containing the lake fell away in front of me, and it was a single morass of branch-filled mud. The ship hadn’t shifted in the storm.

The heat of the fake sun, shining vertically downwards and now a bit closer than it had been at the bottom of the hill, had dried the surface of a lot of the mud. This made it more difficult. There was just enough crust to make it impossible to swim through, even if I could find a stretch that wasn’t clogged with branches.

Eventually I cut myself a couple of long staffs and used them as a tripod. I would stand on an invisible, submerged branch, leaning on one of the sticks. I would probe ahead with the other stick until it hit bottom. Then I would try and find another subsurface branch with my foot. Then I would attempt to take my weight off the second stick so I could remove it and repeat. By the time I got past the watery mud into the muddy water, where the sticks wouldn’t touch bottom but it was actually possible to swim, another two or three hours had passed and I was (a) exhausted and (b) actually worrying that the sun might turn off soon.

But I got there. Eventually.

When I hauled myself up onto the nose of the ship, I just lay flat out of sheer tiredness. The sun glared down into my eyes but I was too exhausted to raise an arm to sheild them. I just lay there. I don’t think I fell asleep, but it took me a while to finally get some energy back and sit up.

The sun hadn’t moved, of course.

I was covered in mud from head to toe. Mud was in my ears and in my mouth. It tasted disgusting, like the stuff dredged up from the bottom of a really old duck-pond. I promised myself, once I returned to the hotel, a very long bath, a very large drink, and an even larger meal—like an idiot I’d forgotten to bring any food with me and it was now a fair way past lunch-time.

The black-glass window was covered with mud and twigs. I washed it off as best as I could and peered through. Nothing I could make out through the dark glass. But, good news: according to the diagram, which miraculously hadn’t got wet, this was indeed a small shuttle of the same kind I had arrived in (the blunt nose was so-many paces wide and so-many paces high and the window was such-and-such a shape, etc).

This was the moment I was dreading. I had to dive under that thick, muddy water and get into the ship. If there was an air pocket and it wasn’t stale, I could breath it. If there wasn’t… well… I’d have to get out again somehow.

I got into the water, and felt for the hatch edge with my feet. It was maybe a metre and a half down. The water was quite opaque. I floated there for a while, mustering up the nerve, and finally took a couple of deep breaths and grabbed for the edge.

I missed and came to the surface again.

A couple of tries later I finally got my hand around the lip, and pulled myself under. I had my eyes closed tightly and the warm liquid mud pressed around my mouth and nostrils and in my ears… I couldn’t spare a hand for my nose so I frantically tried not to tilt my head too much and I was running out of breath although it couldn’t have been more than a few seconds and I was certain that this was a very, very stupid thing to do and I could quite easily drown here and then my head broke the surface again, and I was inside.

I gasped through my mouth. The air was, well, air. I managed to scrape away the mud from my eyes and face and got my first look at the inside of the ship.

The sun shone down through the smeared front window, lighting the inside dimly but visibly with a warm orange glow. It could have been my old ship. There was the pilot’s chair, now canted back at an angle and raised towards the sky. There were some of the hatches, now closed. There were the lighting panels, now dark.

The water level was only a little above above hatch entrance, which meant the nose of the ship was still airtight. In turn, that meant that unless the life support was still working—extremely unlikely—the air wouldn’t last long.

I spat out some mud, and said the first sentence.

Green had told me, somewhere between the tenth and fifteenth try at getting my pronunciation right, that it meant something like ‘ship, respond’. If the power was still working, I should hear the ship reply in Builder. What it said would be irrelevant. If that failed, I could try wanting at it.

Nothing happened.

I tried a few more times, with the stress in different places, but no luck. I even tried the second sentence, which meant something like ‘emergency, open suit locker immediately’. So I tried wanting; usually I needed a target, so I aimed at the pilot’s chair. And, miracle upon miracles, there was a faint rattling buzz in response.

But that was all.

I tried again, and got the same buzz. Was the ship too damaged to respond to my commands? If so, I was stuffed, because with the power on I couldn’t cut through the hull with the pocket knife. I had to get the ship to open voluntarily.

I repeated the experiment, this time moving around the small space to try and find where the sound was coming from. It seemed to be directionless, until suddenly I had a thought and put one ear in the water. Yes, there was a very faint voice speaking in Builder. The speaker was underwater.

But the microphone was underwater, too. There wasn’t a contingency for this.

I thought in desperation. Could I speak underwater? Well, no. The sealin could, though. I could go and get Green up here, on a sledge or something… no, I couldn’t. Not through that forest.

I got tired of treading water, so grabbed the base of the pilot’s chair and hauled myself up on it. The back was nearly level, and there was just enough space for me to sit on it with my head not quite touching the window.

Perhaps I could sabotage the ship with the pocket knife somehow? Disable the power systems? But I didn’t know where to start, and any power plant was almost certainly at the stern, deep under water.

There was a lighting panel in front of my face. Reflexively, I wanted at it. To my surprise it came on; a deep, sullen orange glow, but it lit.

I filled with a sudden excitement. There was a hatch off to my right; the food hatch, if I remembered correctly. I wanted at it. It sprung open a few centimetres and then, very slowly, began to open the rest of the way.

This was the key. Where was the space suit hatch? On the left of the door as you went in. And the door was on the starboard side of the ship. Which meant that the hatch was somewhere down there, below that murky surface.

I turned on all the panels I could see, and wanted blindly into the water. Faint glimmers of light came up through the watery mud, but it wasn’t transparent enough for me to make out the other side of the hatch. Was I going to have to swim down and find the hatch by feel? I didn’t have to see the underwater lighting panels, and they came on.

Dropping back into the water, I felt for the other side of the hatch. It was only a metre or so wide. Inside the ship, the water level was low enough that I could rest my feet on it easily. Which meant that about fifty centimetres below my feet, in the thick wall of the ship, there was a compartment. I tried to visualise, concentrated, and wanted as hard as I could…

There was a great glup of air. The empty suit came bobbing to the surface, brushing the back of my legs.

I couple of minutes later, I was back on the surface and hauling the suit up onto the nose of the ship. It was good to get back into the sunlight, even if it was fake, and breathe the fresh air. It was even better to know that I had the suit and I wasn’t going to have to go back down there again. All I had to do now was to cut away the lift harness, wrap it and the suit’s power pack into my makeshift rucksack, pick my way through the mud and down the hill, deliver it all into Green’s greedy… ah… flippers, and then I could sleep.

There was just one minor flaw: the suit was not one that Green had told me about. Oh, I know I’d never seen any suit before, but she was quite clear in what to look for. Of the three humanoid suits, one of them was lightweight like my shirt, with a bubble helmet. Another was scaled like a fish with an opaque helmet. The third was like a suit of armour, made of hard plates and the helmet was part of the shoulder section and practically non-existent. This suit was like a traditional Earth space suit, made of heavy fabric with arm and knee pads. The helmet had a hundred-and-eighty degree wraparound visor that was only ten centimetres or so high. The whole thing was, after I had brushed the mud off, orange. There was no life support pack on the back; apparently the Builder’s suits didn’t need air tanks.

I found the lift belt all right; the controls were on the belt around the waist, except that the belt was part of the fabric of the suit. It would be another cut-up job. Unfortunately there were no nice, easy-to-find pieces of webbing making the harness that I could cut around… and the power pack was internal, too.

So I would have to carry this large, cumbersome, heavy space suit across the lake, through the forest, under the bushes, through the undergrowth…

The hell with that. There was a little blue light on the waist that meant that the power pack was running. If Green could fly this thing with just flippers and a wish, so could I. The helmet unclipped easily enough—it rotated an eighth of a turn clockwise and lifted off. Part of the helmet ring was a thing like a big zip. I grabbed it and pulled and the whole front of the thing opened up.

Putting it on was just as easy. Legs go in, arms go in, pull the zip up until you feel it lock… the suit was just my size and surprisingly comfortable. I was wet and muddy but it stopped chafing completely after a few seconds. Super-technology or good tailoring, I didn’t care. I thought about leaving the helmet off, as I was having doubts about the air supply, but there wasn’t anywhere to clip it, so I carefully placed it on the neck ring, twisted, and it locked into place. Very suddenly, the suit inflated around me, deflated again, and glowing letters in the Builder scribble scrolled across my field of view.

The suit was working.

I couldn’t read any of the messages. But they quickly vanished, leaving a reassuring blue dot in the corner of my vision. There was a just barely noticeable breeze in the helmet and the air was cool. The field of view was cramped, but with that wrap-around visor, I could see pretty well. The one thing I couldn’t see was down.

But the big question was, could I make it fly?

There was only one control, a big dial at the waist. I felt for it with one hand, grasped it firmly, and turned gingerly. It was stiff, but rotated quarter of a turn and went click, some read-outs appeared, and the suit suddenly felt buoyant.

It couldn’t possibly be that easy.

It was.

I wanted. The suit moved. It was as easy as that. I could make it move in any direction, rotate it about any axis, merely by wanting it to happen. It took maybe five minutes to become proficient. Even the read-outs were easy; altitude and velocity were obvious, and the proximity sensor was unfamiliar enough to take a couple of minutes before I worked out what it was for.

I drifted over the lake for a while, marvelling at just how simple it felt. It was, if anything, disappointingly simple. I’d had dreams of flying; gliding, swooping, diving effortlessly through the air, powered by nothing but a thought. Making the suit fly was just as trivial, so mundane as to suck the joy out of it. The suit moved upright, pushing its way through the air. It wouldn’t swoop. It had a top speed of maybe thirty kilometres an hour. It was a machine.

Stopping briefly back at the wrecked ship to pick up Green’s magic pocket knife and attach it to a handy belt loop, I went home. It took ten minutes to fly over what it had taken me four or five hours to hack through.

The sealin were waiting on the beach. I got a certain amount of pleasure from dropping vertically down on them out of the sun.

They both leapt up, Green stammering profusely. “You fly,” she kept saying, as she looked the suit over. “I have say-ed not fly!”

“Only way of getting the suit back,” I replied coolly, unzipping it and stepping out.

She groped for words. “The power pack is more prior… too much prior… not dead but will die. You fly and you are scared. If the power pack die then you fall and you die.”

I suddenly felt cold. “But the blue light?”

“The blue light say the power pack has power. The blue light say the power pack has few power.”

I thought about the engine giving out, the suit suddenly dropping from the sky… and that blue light in the corner of my field of view. Reassuring status indicator? Low power alert? “You didn’t tell me that.”

“I say not fly.”

“You didn’t say why I wasn’t to fly.”

“I say not… I…” Green suddenly looked around wildly. Black said something, and they rattled back and forth for quite a while. Eventually Green looked up at me and held my eyes.

“No. I did not say. I… I do not have the words…”

And then she closed her eyes and rolled over onto her back in a piece of body language so obviously submissive that I realised that the word she had been looking for had been ‘sorry’. I felt vaguely ashamed of thinking badly of her earlier. She had no doubt been under even more stress than I had been when I first arrived here.

I noticed Black pointedly looking away, and in haze of general embarrassment and knowledge that I really did not want to get involved in sealin dominance rituals, managed to get Green to roll over again.

The moment passed, and we talked about the suit. Neither of them had seen anything like it. Nothing in Green’s prodigious memory told her how to remove the lift belt and power pack. It seemed to be some new, integrated model.

Finally she gave up on it and said: “I do not wear this space suit. You will wear this space suit. You will fly.”

“Fly where?”

“You will fly to the Big Ship. You will tell it that it will come to our home.”

“How will I tell it?”

“I will say.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow,” she replied. “Tonight you will take the space suit to the apartment. The apartment will not-dead the power pack.”

The suit is now lying untidily in a corner of the apartment. I zipped it up and put the helmet on, and it half-inflated again; and the power light on the waist band is blinking rapidly. I assume that means that the suit is charging up.

And now I think I have spent enough time in the bath, I’ve had the drink, so it must be time for the meal.

I love this room.

[break]

I’ve just got back from the beach. Night fell about two minutes ago.

I’d been relaxing in the chair with a drink of something unidentifiable, almost falling asleep, before I realised that there was something I needed to do, and there wasn’t a lot of daylight left in which to do it.

I put the drink down and hurried out of the hotel. Green was on the beach but, to my relief, Black was nowhere to be seen. She looked round as I approached.

“This morning,” I said, “You said I didn’t tell you about the suit.”

She blinked. “Yes.”

I sat down in front of her, closed my eyes, and lay down on my back.

There was a long moment, and then she said ‘yes’ again, very quietly. I opened my eyes to see her blinking rapidly. She looked down at me, said, “I do not have the words,” nuzzled me very gently with her snout, and then slithered down the beach into the water.

And then night fell.

[transmit]

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