In Twenty and Three, born at sea,
Her daddy endowed her a legacy.
In Twenty and Ten her brother
Ben Stole the inheritance back again.
She loves but she loses, she weeps as she smiles,
The sweet, sad queen of the grazing isles
BECAUSE I DID THE OLD COMMODORE A FAVOR, he promised I would always have a job with the Fleet. I always did. I always do still, because even now I have the job. The title and the pay and the working conditions have changed a dozen times, and these times not the best of them. But even Jimmy Rex knows I have that right to a job, and grants it. Meanly.
The favor I did for Commodore Mackenzie was done long before he was a Commodore, and I could have gone to jail for it. Jason, he said, give me a month. I need an extension on my loans, thirty days at most, and if you give it me, you'll never have to worry again as long as you live. I will worry, though, I said-a boy still in his twenties, just a keypuncher in the records section of a bank-I'll worry about the law, at least until the statute of limitations runs out, because buggering the records is a penal offense. Only if they catch you, he said, laughing, and that they can't do. For you'll be at sea, where the land law cannot reach. It was his first oaty-boat that was building at the time, you see, and he had used up all his wife's money and all he could cajole out of his first two financial backers, and the third one, the big one, was trying to make up his mind to plunge.
He was a powerful man even then, James Mackenzie. No older than forty. no gigger than most but the blue eyes flashed and the smile was sure, and he knew how to talk a person toward any place he chose. But what decided me was not Mackenzie. It was his young wife, the lady Ella. She loved him. So I worked overtime one night, and displayed his file, and changed a few dates, sweating with fear. He had his thirty days. And the backer did, at the last minute, come through with the money to finish the boat, and so James William Mackenzie became the Commodore.
He was a son of a bitch, Commodore Mackenzie, but he had style. Fifty shares of stock I got and a title: Executive Assistant to the Fleet Captain. Very grand. Even if the fleet was still only a single vessel. But even one oaty-boat is a huge and costly machine, two hundred thousand metric tons of hull and works, towing twenty kilometers of tubes and pumps, with a deck the size of a township. The Commodore did something you won't believe with that deck, or at least with the part forward of the bridge. He planted it. He pumped aboard half a million cubic meters of San Francisco Bay bottom muck while the boat was still at the builder's dock. The water ran off through the scuppers, and the soil remained. He sailed it up toward Tacoma for the deep-water fitting and steamed slowly around the wettest, stormiest part of the Pacific Coast until the rain had rinsed it clean. Seeds and slips and bulbs and saplings came aboard, and by the time we were on our first cruise there was grass there, and gardens, and the beginnings of a grove. For his dear lady Ella hated the sea. So Owner's Quarters were an apartment below deck and a terrace above, and if you looked only forward you could think you were in some fine manor house with the weather always balmy and the lawn as steady as any on Earth. The weather was always fine because oaty-boats are never in bad weather. That is why they are boats, instead of drilling platforms or moored barges, so that they can seek out the places where sea and air are best to do their work.
And for four years they were happy, and I was happy, and the great boat steamed slowly through the fruitful patches of the southern ocean, sucking up the cold and pitting it against the warm, and, oh, how the money rolled in! And we were happiest of all in the fourth year, when Ella was pregnant. She was a tiny, frail woman, all spirit and no stamina, and there were times when in even the calmest seas she seemed unwell. Yet as a pregnant woman she bloomed, prettier than ever and glowing with the child inside. The baby was born, even prettier than her mother. It was in the month of May, and so they called her May, and then the happiness stopped because Ella died. It was not childbirth alone-she had the best of doctors, flown in from Sydney and San Francisco. It was cancer. She had known she had it, and kept it secret, and wouldn't let them cut it away because it would have cut away the unborn child as well. Childbirth merely finished her off.
It was her wish to be buried on land. The Commodore walked dry-eyed through the crew quarters and crooked a finger at an oiler's mate named Elsie Van Dorn. A large, plain woman, but a kind one. And when he came back from the funeral, he took all the Fleet stock that was in Ella's name and put it into baby May's, and gave me a new job. "Van Dorn will be May's nursemaid, he said, "but you'll be her godfather. That was a joke, I think, because we had been told that money was his god. "You're Managing Director of the May Mackenzie Trust, and if you do anything wrong with it I'll kill you. Even if I die for it. Even if I die first, for I'll leave a little sum of money and some orders, and someone will be watching who has a gun. He still owed me for the favor I had done him, you see, but he remembered what it was.
And for seven years baby May grew, and wasn't a baby any more.
There are little girls with a face so fine and a look so sweet that they'll break your heart. May was one. She was slight for her age, and all her life. Yet even when she first toddled she would pause, and stick her thumb in her mouth, and gaze out over the privet and the boxwood hedges at the southern seas with an ancient mariner's look of sadness and resignation that made you forget the rumpled hair and the dragging diaper; and when she was old enough to talk and tie her shoes, I fell in love. It is not a thing I want to have laughed at and so I will say no more, but it's true. I did. I loved her truly and purely, and went on doing so. Not as a godfather.
She had a father's love for those seven years, though. She was the Commodore's only daughter and his only legitimate child-the only child of his I saw then, for the bastard was away at school and then at work in the Fleet's landside offices. He was busy every minute, the Commodore, but he always found time to see May and to play with her, and to tuck her in at night. I was less busy than that. There was not much work attached to being the Managing Director of the May Mackenzie Trust, for every penny of it was invested in the oaty fleet, two ships, and then seven, and then a dozen; the money rolled in, but every spare penny went back into building more. So I competed with Elsie Van Dorn. I became May's other nanny. They were the best years I have ever lived. I took her with me around the boat. We watched the dry ammonia powder being pumped out of our belly into the hold of a tanker, kerchiefs to our noses to keep from sneezing, and we listened to the screaming hydrogen flow as it went into the refrigeration ships, the huge red flags warning us not to light a match or scratch a spark-as though anyone in the Fleet were such a fool! We watched the huge slow spinning of the low-pressure turbines as they transformed the heat into power, and we waved good-by to the crews of the scout skimmers as they went out to seek colder depths and warmer air to steer toward. Every member of the crew knew May, and petted her when she would let them. They weren't truly a crew. They were more like a city, for we had power workers and fertilizer chemists and oceanographers and engineers and navigators and cooks and cleaning men and fire wardens and a ship's master and five assistants to guide us and half a dozen gardeners for the greensward and the farms on the afterdeck. There were more than eighteen hundred human beings on board, and I think May knew the name of every one. She knew none better than me. I was her godfather and her friend. There were a hundred other children on board, and four who were her special friends, but there was no person who was more special than I.