“And Nicole lives at the mine?” I asked.
“The crews don’t really live there”—Berenice frowned as she tried to frame her explanation—“but Nicole does. Most of the crews come to the settlement when they’re ashore, but not Nicole. She stays with the boats, you see, and they shelter at the mine because they had real bad trouble with southerly gales at the settlement. The anchorage at the mine is much safer, and they’ve got an old slipway there so they can haul the boats out of the water if the weather gets really awful.”
David brought us each a mug of oxtail soup and a hunk of hot buttered bread, and I remembered, too late, that both Berenice’s mother and erstwhile best friend were vegetarians, which meant this girl could very well be an herbivore as well, but she made no objection to the oxtail; she gulped it down as though she had not eaten in weeks.
Between spoonfuls she told us how strict the division was between the Genesis community’s yacht crews and the settlement’s workers. The workers, as Jackie Potten had envisaged, were virtual slaves to the privileged crew members. The distinction was even sartorial, for the yacht crews wore the Genesis green, while the workers were given the more utilitarian gray clothes. “He’s real strict about that,” Berenice said sadly.
She began to tell us about the daily chores of the settlement, but I was not listening. Instead, in a state of half shock, I was assimilating a very unpleasant truth. The same truth had also occurred to David, who now watched me with a troubled expression. We had both traveled to Patagonia in the belief that Nicole was being victimized by von Rellsteb, but from Berenice’s description it was clear that our preconceptions had been horribly wrong, and that Nicole, far from being one of von Rellsteb’s victims, was one of his privileged crew members. “And Nicole,” I finally asked Berenice, “wears green?”
“Of course.” Berenice nodded.
Upon which answer hung a slew of other messy deductions, too messy to think about. “And I’ll find Nicole at the mine?” I asked grimly.
“Unless she’s at sea,” Berenice said dubiously, “but we don’t really know who’s at sea and who isn’t most of the time. But Nicole does more sailing than most of the others. She’s the skipper of a boat, you see, and they say she’s the best sailor of them all, better even than Caspar!”
I smiled, as if acknowledging a compliment to my family, while inside I was trying to come to terms with the destruction of one of my most comforting beliefs. Nicole was not being held prisoner! She was not a victim, but a free agent. She had her own boat. She could come and go where she pleased, and it had never pleased her to find me.
David, realizing how hard it was for me to come to terms with Berenice’s news, took over the questioning by asking how many seagoing yachts the Genesis community operated.
“Four,” Berenice said. “Two catamarans and two like this one.” She waved around Stormchild’s cabin. “I saw one of the catamarans a week ago, but I don’t know if it’s still here.” David pressed her for more details of the small fleet’s activities, but Berenice knew remarkably little about the movements of the four boats, only that they sailed away to make a better world, and that only those community members who wore green were allowed to crew the yachts.
“How many people are in Genesis?” David asked when it was clear Berenice could tell us nothing more about the four yachts.
“There’s thirty-one of us at the settlement, and I suppose there must be at least another thirty in the crews. And there are fourteen children at the settlement.” Tears came to Berenice’s eyes at the mention of the children.
“Are you a mother?” I guessed at the reason for her tears.
“I had a baby,” Berenice said, then her voice choked in a pathetically childlike tone, “but it was stillborn.” She began to cry, the tears streaming silently down her cheeks. We waited until she managed to sniff the tears away. “The children have to work,” she went on, “mostly they collect seaweed and mussels. And they help with the wood-collecting. We’re always cutting wood, and we have to go farther and farther away to find decent trees.” She shivered suddenly. “I’m so tired of cutting wood, but Caspar says that since I can’t breed children I’m no good for anything except fetching and carrying.”
“Dear God,” David said in distaste.
“Has Nicole had a baby?” I had to ask.
“I don’t think so.” She sniffed back her tears and tried to drink more of the soup. “Lisl did.”
“Who’s Lisl?” I asked.
“She’s Caspar’s girl,” Berenice said, as though it was an important piece of information. “She’s German, too. She was the one who made me wear chains.” She gestured at the leg irons that David had slung into a corner of the saloon.
“Was that a punishment?” David asked.
“Yes.”
“For what?”
“I burned a stew,” Berenice said, but in a voice that seemed genuinely penitent for such a grievous offense. She might have fled the Genesis community, but she was still thinking like one of the group, for she hastened to justify her punishment. “Food is very precious, you see, so one of the first rules we learn is never to waste any. It was mutton,” she explained, as though that made her offense worse.
“So you cook for the group?” I asked.
“I do everything. I work in the gardens, clean the buildings, collect shellfish, tan the pelts…”
“Pelts?” David interjected.
“They hunt sea otters,” Berenice explained, “and sell the fur in Tierra del Fuego. At first the fur was just for us, because it’s so cold, but now they sell it as well.”
“Some bloody conservationists,” I said angrily, wondering how self-styled ecologists could hunt and kill harmless and playful sea otters.
“He wanted to start a fish farm, but it didn’t work, and we used to do experiments”—Berenice paused—“but they failed.”
“What experiments?” David asked with a note of dread, expecting, like me, to hear of some awful cruelty imposed on man or beast, but the experiments had merely been efforts to determine a bacteriological method of destroying oil spills at sea. The experiment had been tried in the forlorn concrete tanks in front of the house, but the tests had failed and the experiment had petered messily out. I wondered whether enthusiasm for the experiment, like Genesis’s ecological idealism, had been abraded and destroyed by the hardships of surviving the Patagonian winters, but Berenice, despite her desperate eagerness to escape from the settlement, still seemed proud of the community’s achievements. The yacht crews, she said, had destroyed drift nets, crippled Japanese whaling ships, and had even made commando-style forays into the Malaysian province of Sabah to spike hardwood trees threatened by the timber industry.
“Spike?” David asked.
“They hammer metal spikes into the trunks of trees marked for felling, and when the chain saw hits the spike it breaks the saw. And they have to stop cutting the tree.” Berenice concluded the explanation very lamely.
“What happens,” I said laconically, “is that the chain saw rips itself into steel fragments that very often blind the log cutter and are quite likely to kill the poor sod.”
“But it stops the forestry!” Berenice said earnestly.
“Oh, whoopee,” I said.
“Why did you run away today?” David, who rightly thought my disapproval of Genesis’s methodology was a waste of our time, asked Berenice.