Read Online Empire Dreams by Ian McDonald - Free Book Online Page B

it, and on the face of the white moon is a sharp black spot: the black kite.
    You return the binoculars to their case and are about to tiptoe back across the treacherous floorboards when something goes
click
! in your head, something you saw today, a wooden staff with silver heels. Close concentration reveals forgotten details: the notches on the staff, little nickmarks all the way down its length to within six inches of its foot. Memory clarifies: one of Da’s hand-me-down sailing stories: that there’s a mark on his staff for every passage of Cape Infinity a Pilot makes. Reason concludes: the man flying kites from Cannery Pier can be nothing other than a Pilot.
    * * * *
    And now it is another hot, irritable day and you are getting underfoot even if you’re just sitting playing with Mr. Cat on the window ledge. Ma throws a packed lunch at you and chases you out of the house, forbidden to return before tea. So away down the beach you go, secretly glad because there are a hundred questions you want to ask, each of which breeds a thousand more, and the answer to even one of them would be worth ten of Da’s stupid old sailor stories. Your head rings with echoes of Pilots and SailShips, black suns and lightspeed horizons, sudden squalls and staffs and kites that fly inwards and outwards; half-understood fragments of overheard stories or lessons from school that have all solidified in the presence of a real Pilot flying his kites from the end of your pier. And as sure as eggs are eggs, there is the blue kite flying proudly in the clear morning air, so blue that it makes the sky seem pale in comparison.
    As the tide is out you have planned to take Christian for a walk out to the hulks. Maybe they will prompt him to answer some of your nervous questions. Christian is only too pleased to fasten his kites, the blue, the black, and the bright yellow sun, to his little black box and follow you down the weedy-wet steps onto the sand.
    “A fine morning for a walk,” he declares and comes with you out over the sand ripples and through the shallow drift-locked lagoons to the damp place where the hulks lie. Behind you two lines of wet footprints meander over the glistening sand. Seagulls bicker above you and all around stand the tired old bones of the hulks. You squeeze puddingy sand between your toes and point to a barnacle-crusty cylinder of rusting plate about a mile off, slightly less decrepit than its two companions.
    “My Da says when he was a wee boy he can remember that one coming down.” Christian screws up his eyes against the glare and peers.
    “He’s not the only one,” he says. Now what could that mean? Subtlety breeds subtlety, it seems. Time for a more direct approach.
    “You were a Pilot once, weren’t you, Christian?”
    “Oh, you must have seen my staff yesterday, I left it on the pier, I remember. Well, yes, I am a Pilot, and let me see; yes, I am hundreds of worldbound years old, yes, I was conning ships around Cape Infinity when your grandfather’s grandfather was your age, and no, I am not immortal, for not even a Pilot can cheat God, but perhaps I am a little less mortal than I once was, though my starfaring days are done. And that’s your first question answered, Fraser.”
    Now it’s your turn to gape.
    “But how did you know that?”
    “Foursight, Fraser, but it doesn’t take foursight to tell me that you’d like to know every little thing I had to learn to be a Pilot. And I’d tell you that if I started now to tell you all that I learned I might be finished by St. Agnes’s Eve, 1816, because it takes ten years for a man to learn the Pilot’s art, and only then if he’s the right man, for without the gift of foursight you might as well try teaching a handful of sand from this beach. Instead I think I’ll tell you a story, and it’s a story in three parts and this is the first part of it.”
    THE STORY OF THE BOY WHO WANTED TO BE HAPPY
    IN THE NARROW lands that lie between the mountains and