Sky-Water

The Border of Outer Space

No one was in the infirmary or anywhere else on the mess deck. I could hear the crew running this way and that on the decks above us, working grappling cannons, which they continually reloaded, aimed and fired upward to pull us higher on the telescope. The engines were readjusted and sporadically fired on to keep our drag on the telescope to a minimum. All of this took a lot of yelling back and forth between bursts of noise so that everything was in sync and level.

Maypop sat on a bench near a port window while I patched up the cuts on her back. "It's so beautiful out there," she said. Her nose was nearly touching the glass and her vines clung to the wall like they wanted to bore through it. "And it seems so much brighter up here. It almost hurts my eyes."

"Oh, that reminds me," I said. "I should probably go upstairs and get protective glasses for us. Dr. Zimmerman gave us a box full to protect our eyes from the radiation. It's going to get a lot worse the higher up we go."

"Oh." Her voice dropped, along with her face. "That explains..." But she cut herself off.

"Are you feeling okay?" I asked.

"Yeah," she said. "Just a little... I don't know. I'll be fine."

My eyes were starting to hurt quite a bit, so I left her in the infirmary and ran upstairs to get two pairs of glasses.

The rest of the crew were already wearing theirs as they ran this way and that on the gun deck (which, before now, had only ever had one cannon used for signals). "Stay out of our way, interpreter," one of them said to me in Arabic as he worked quickly to reseal a leak around one of the new cannon barrels.

"I forgot to get a pair of glasses," I said.

"At the mast," he said.

I looked over to the foot of the main mast where a box sat on the floor.

The engines came on again, pushing us several meters higher in the sky-water. The sudden lift made my knees buckle beneath me and drop to the floor. Another crew member grabbed my arm and pulled me up quickly. "Get your glasses and get to the mess deck," he said. "We can't have you in our way."

It was the only time I had ever heard the crew speak with such gruff attitudes toward me. My shock forced me to realize how out-of-place I was on this mission. I had used my family as an excuse to be there, but really, I might as well have been a stow-away like Maypop. There was nothing useful for me to do on this journey. I couldn't talk to the man-o-war, and I didn't know how to do anything else.

I grabbed two pairs of glasses from the box and ran downstairs to the mess deck before anyone else could say anything to me.

We watched the sky-water for quite some time, Maypop and I. But there were no good angles for me to get a picture for Dr. Chen or Dr. Zimmerman. And after a while, the light hurt, even with the glasses on. So I took Maypop down to my room in the hold of the ship and we laid on the hammock and talked about what we had done since the last time I had visited the Moon-Castle. Every once in awhile, we had to yawn to relieve the pressure in our ears as the ship ascended closer to the top of the sky-water.

The ascension wasn't all that pleasant for me. Even though the darkness of my room kept my eyes safe, the low air pressure made my body start to hurt. But it seemed to be doing even more to Maypop, who squirmed in the hammock until her vines started going limp.

"Are you okay, Maypop?"

"Yeah." She forced a cheerful tone, but her vine resting on my arm reminded me of Odanatan's weak form on his way up to the Moon-Castle. "You always talked about how different the air was down in the trench forest," she said. "Does it feel like this for you to come up to the Moon-Castle?"