“Well, Cuz,” she drawled, “I see your taste has improved—and gotten a lot more conventional.”
“Ha,” Adrienne said flatly. “Ha. You always were such a kidder, Cuz.” Heather’s handshake was lingering when she took Tom’s hand. “And here are the keys. I presume Irene is around?”
“At the town house,” Heather said. “It wouldn’t do to have her standing next to you where people could see; it might give them ideas.”
“Thanks for helping out.”
“All a mispocha-mitzvah, as the saying goes,” Heather said, taking the keys and dropping them into her handbag. “And it’s a guilt-free chance to get away from my kids for a while.” She wiggled her fingers at the rest of the party. “Ta,” she finished, and walked away.
Tom blinked. “I got the impression she doesn’t like you?” he said, taking in Sandra’s black scowl at the retreating back of the woman of the Families.
“I’m not exactly popular, and Heather’s a model of respectability,” Adrienne said. “I warned you about that, remember… but Heather has a perfectly adequate sense of responsibility, fortunately, so I could ask her for a favor.”
“Mmmm… mispocha-mitzvah… something ‘good deeds’?” Tully said. “If that was Yiddish.”
“More or less,” Adrienne said. “‘Clan duty’ might be closer to the actual colloquial meaning.”
“I didn’t think mispocha meant family.”
“It doesn’t, FirstSide. It sort of came to here; old Sol Pearlmutter used to mutter, ‘What a mispocha!’ about the Families, so… Heather’s my aunt Jennifer’s daughter—her father’s a Fitzmorton, of course, a collateral, and they have a place just across the Mayacamas in the Fitzmorton domain—Sonoma Valley, you’d say.”
“And Irene?”
“Another cousin; and she looks a lot more like me than dear Heather. Blame it on the way the Fitzmortons and Rolfes kept interbreeding back on Firstside. In the meantime, let’s get to the hotel.”
The San Diego Arms knew they were coming in, and sent transport—a brand-new European fuel-cell van; it was open in back, and Adrienne enjoyed pointing out the sights as they moved inland, through the bustle of the harbor district and into the town proper: the paved highway and pipeline stretching north toward Long Beach, the new movie theater…
“And who the hell are they?” Tom blurted, pointing to two men.
“Those?” Adrienne said. Got to remember what looks weird to a FirstSider, she chided herself.
Those were two big brown-skinned men, with middle-aged fat overlying impressive muscles, swirling tattoos over much of their faces and bodies, wearing what looked like crested Grecian helmets made of orange and green feathers, multicolored cloaks and sarongs. They strode along the sidewalk under the pepper trees, occasionally stopping to look in a shop window. Nobody but a few fascinated small boys noticed them.
“Those are Hawaiian ali’i—nobles—from Tahiti.”
“Ah…” Tully scratched his head. “If they’re Hawaiian, how come they’re from Tahiti?”
“Long story… well, about the time we sent our first ships across the Pacific, the Hawaiian islands got hit with a really bad series of plagues—smallpox from the Selang-Arsi country and chicken pox and measles from who knows where. We bought the islands from the survivors—paid them with vaccination and, umm, a few other things.”
“And they moved to Tahiti?” Tom asked, his fair brows knotted in thought. “Because they’re closely related cultures, I suppose?”
“Well, it was more on the order of Tahiti being part of the ‘few other things’ we paid them with. Their ancestors had come from there, and they remembered.”
“Wait a minute,” Tom said. “What did the Tahitians say to all this?”
“The ‘few other things’ also included ships, a couple of thousand trade muskets, some muzzle-loading brass cannon, and a lot of gunpowder.”
“Oh,” he said. “Then they conquered Tahiti?”
Adrienne felt like patting him on the cheek. Tom’s so gentle and sweet! she thought. Aloud, she went on: “Sort of. Actually, they ate a lot of the Tahitians, as I understand it: You could consider it a conquest, or a really big hunt for long pig. And sacrificed a lot of them to Kuka’ilimoku—the war god.”
Tom and his friend winced. Adrienne went on: “Just because someone gets the dirty end of the stick doesn’t mean they’re very nice,” she pointed out.
Tom would have enjoyed the Sea-Witch more if he’d been able to relax, if they were really headed west to the islands for nothing more serious than scuba diving and surfing and climbs among the mountain forests.
As it was… I’m enjoying myself anyway, he thought. Just not as much.
He’d done a little boating—canoeing in the North Woods of Minnesota, and a little sailing in California; he’d have done a lot more, but it took money he didn’t have.
Right now he was standing at the forepeak, clinging to the foresail shroud where the long bowsprit lanced out from the hull, and looking back at the taut curve of the sails. The two-masted schooner was sailing reach before a following wind, slicing its way northwest and throwing bursts of spray twice the height of his head as it rose to the swells. Land had dropped below the eastern horizon hours ago. The sea was indigo under an azure bowl of sky, cloudless save for a little high haze in the east; the wind was not quite stiff enough to show whitecaps, and the waves were long and smooth. Foam peeled back from the yacht’s sharp cutwater, and the bow-wave curled deep along the hull, showing the copper sheathing that protected the wood from teredo-worms. A school of bottlenose dolphins rode the wave, lancing out of the water in smooth curves and spearing back with hardly a splash, dancing with the sea and the ship.
Let me sail, let me sail, let the Orinoco flow,
Let me reach, let me beach, on the shores of Tripoli.
The tune ran through his head as he watched, like a lilt of infinite possibilities beyond the horizon.
Adrienne waved from the rear of the yacht near the wheel and aft of the deckhouse, a hundred and forty feet back. That was only a little more than the height of the mainmast—the foremast was a bit shorter—and she carried ten thousand square feet of canvas in her fore-and-aft sails. That was a number; the dazzling mass piled overhead was reality, like clouds brought to earth and imprisoned in a suave geometry of curves and lines. He levered himself up and walked backward—sternward, he reminded himself—along the deck; it was relatively narrow, nowhere more than thirty feet across, and uncluttered save for the low shapes of the geared winches that controlled the sails.
The crew nodded as he passed, not pausing in their work, and Tom returned the gesture. There were twelve men aboard, and three women. Captain McKay was a taciturn man whose hair had been lion-colored before it went mostly badger gray, with blue eyes and a kink in his nose that looked as if it had been put there with something sharp, and scar tissue half an inch thick over his knuckles. His accent was an improbable mixture of Scots and Aussie, when he did speak; his wife was purser-cook, his daughter her assistant, and his son first mate. Evidently McKay had been running the Sea-Witch since she was built in the Pearlmutter yards in New Brooklyn thirty-five years before. What he’d done before that, FirstSide, was not mentioned. The rest of the crew were New Virginian-born, except for one Dahaean picked up recently in San Diego, a dark Eurasian-looking man with the front of his scalp shaved and the black hair at the rear worked up into braids and looped over his ears.