Ричард Бейкер - Valiant Dust

“She is modeled on an old Terran type called a dhow. They were common in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean during the preindustrial centuries, or so I am told.” Ranya gazed up at the clean white sails, bellied out in the afternoon breeze. “Of course, most dhows were working vessels—the trading ships of the ancient Mideast. Shihab is built for pleasure sailing, although she has power turbines belowdecks, satellite navigation, and a variety of hidden defensive systems. The Royal Guard wouldn’t dream of allowing the family to set foot on her otherwise.”

Sikander nodded. “My family’s Srinagar estate is similar. It looks like a rustic Terran lodge on the outside, but it’s fitted with the most modern comm and security systems my father can afford. I spent many summers there when I was a boy, riding and hunting in the hills near the Kharan Desert. It’s a good place to get away from things, but the realities of our situation demand that my father is never out of touch for emergencies.”

“Do you have any sailboats in Kashmir, Sikander?”

He shook his head. “No sailing yachts like Shihab, at least not on Jaipur. There just isn’t a yachting culture on my homeworld. The coastal regions are subject to powerful storms during cyclone season, so most settlements grew up well inland. On the other hand, Srinagar—the larger and more densely populated of Kashmir’s planets—is home to quite a few pleasure craft. But most of those are powered boats.”

“A shame,” Ranya said. “It’s not the same experience at all.”

“I am beginning to appreciate that.”

They passed most of the afternoon comparing more stories of their upbringing and the customs of their homeworlds. It was a pleasant way to spend the day, watching the mountains of the coast recede behind them, surrounded by the creaking of the rigging and the cool spray of the small waves slapping against the hull. Ranya was an only child, and Sultan Rashid’s two daughters were a good ten years younger than her, leaving Ranya without any relations close to her own age. She told him about the servants’ children she had played with when she was small, the gentle and good-humored side her otherwise fierce father Kamal had shown his family, and how much she had missed him over the last seven years.

“My circumstances were a little different,” said Sikander when they finished a late lunch. “The Norths are more of a horde than a household.”

“You come from a large family?”

“Oh, yes. I have four siblings: my older brothers Gamand and Devindar, my older sister Usha, and my younger brother Manvir. Not to mention a dozen or so close cousins who are more or less about my age.” Sikander smiled ruefully. “The only time I seemed to get my father’s attention was when I did something bad.”

“I find that hard to believe. Like what?”

Sikander glanced up at Shihab ’s sails. “Well, there was the time Devindar and I stole the family yacht.”

“I thought you said you didn’t sail!”

“ Ketu is a powerboat, and a very fast one at that. I was twelve, and Devindar was fourteen. Our parents were away visiting colleges with Gamand and Usha, and the two of us decided to take the boat out on Long Lake to impress Hamsi and Jaya Lawton.” He smiled. “The Lawtons had a handsome estate fifty kilometers down the lakeshore, and we were both quite smitten with Hamsi. I think we had some idea of zipping down to their place and asking the girls to join us for a boat ride.”

“And the household staff let you just take the boat?”

“Of course not. We weren’t supposed to be on Ketu without an adult, but we told them Father had given us permission to take the boat out to fish nearby if we wanted to. We simply bluffed our way on board.” Sikander shook his head. “Apparently our confidence was quite convincing.”

Ranya laughed. “Your father must have been furious when he found out!”

“We were sentenced to landscaping work for the whole summer. My father had the head gardener rip out a perfectly good sprinkler system and install a new one just so the two of us would have ditches to dig. Although Devindar had it worse than I, since he was supposedly old enough to know better.” Sikander grimaced. “I’m afraid Devindar and my father still don’t get along.”

That led to stories of other escapades and punishments, which occupied them for the next hour or more. In the middle of the afternoon, the green hills of an island crept into view ahead of the yacht. It steadily grew higher and clearer, until Shihab sailed into a magnificent half-moon bay surrounded by headlands covered in dense foliage. Sikander smelled the rich scents of exotic blooms, and listened to birdsong echoing in the forest. He glanced over to Ranya, who stood by the rail beside him. “I was led to believe that Gadira was a desert planet,” he said to her. “What is this place?”

“This is the island of Socotra, named after a similar place on Old Terra,” she told him. “It belongs to my family. The el-Nasir sultans have used it as a sort of getaway and refuge for a couple of hundred years. There is a small villa just past that headland over there, but I asked our crew to stop here for an hour or two before continuing on. There is something here every visitor to Gadira should see.”

“It’s beautiful,” Sikander admitted.

“Oh, I am not talking about the island,” Ranya laughed. “Go below to your cabin and put on a swimsuit, Sikay. We’re going in the water.”

He shrugged and did as he was told. In a few minutes, he returned to the deck in his swim trunks and a T-shirt. The afternoon was drawing on, and the harsh Gadiran sun was mellowing to a golden twilight. He admired the scenery until Ranya joined him by the rail. She wore a demure green one-piece that showed no cleavage or midriff—a pity, in Sikander’s estimation, since Ranya looked quite good in a swimsuit otherwise. A formfitting suit with bare legs and arms fell within acceptable bounds for Gadiran swimwear, but local custom frowned on the notion of a bikini or, God forbid, the topless suits popular on some Coalition worlds.

If Ranya guessed anything about the direction of his thoughts, she gave him no sign other than a slight smile. She handed him a diving mask and a pair of fins. “It’s easier to put these on in the water,” she said, and then she stepped off the side, disappearing into the bay with a silver splash.

Sikander pulled off his shirt, then hopped over the side to follow her. The deck was about two meters above the surface; he sank into warm, startlingly clear water. He could see the entire length of Shihab ’s dark hull, looking like a toy sitting in a bathtub. Ranya hovered in the water a few meters away, already dressed in her mask and fins. Her green suit shimmered like emerald, rippling with dappled light from the wavelets above. It complemented her olive skin and dark hair perfectly.

Sikander surfaced to clear his mask and fit it to his face, slipping the rebreather tube into his mouth. More modern masks used a nasal rebreather and fitted a subvocal pickup so that you could talk to your companions underwater, but it seemed those hadn’t yet reached this corner of the Montréalais empire. Then, pulling on his fins, he dove again and swam down toward Ranya. She waited a moment to make sure he was following, then led the way over the sandy bottom to a large reef head. Hundreds of tiny, brightly colored fish cruised and darted around the rocky outcropping, which was covered with flowering plants like an aquatic meadow. The fish seemed much like those Sikander had seen on other worlds; convergent evolution selected for streamlined, gilled, finned body plans, although the Gadiran species were beautifully colored. The sea plants, on the other hand, were something Sikander had never seen on any other planet. He decided that it had to be a combination of the Gadiran sun’s particular spectrum and the clarity of the water. Green plants in Gadira’s waters managed just as well in the shallows as they would on land, and the water chemistry explained how the colors remained vibrant to great depth. But the flowerlike structures he could attribute only to the randomness of evolution.