Maya was surprised: “How to stop her?”
“Yes. Or more generally, to ask you to help us. I think it will take unpisting her personally. I thought you might be interested.”
And she turned her head to look at Maya with a knowing smile.
There was something vaguely familiar in the ironic smile lifting that classic little full-lipped mouth, something which though offensive was much preferable to the wide-eyed enthusiasm of the young historians pestering Michel. And as Maya considered it, the invitation began to look better and better; it was contemporary politics, an engagement with the present. The triviality of the current scene usually put her off, but now she supposed that the politics of the moment always looked petty and stupid; only later did it take on the look of respectable statecraft, of immutable History. And this issue could prove to be important, as the young woman had said. And it would put her back in the midst of things. And of course (she did not think this consciously) anything that balked Jackie would have its own satisfactions. “Tell me more about it,” Maya said, moving down the balcony out of earshot of the others. And the tall ironic young woman followed her.
Michel had always wanted to take a trip on the Grand Canal, and recently he had talked Maya into trying a move from Sabishii back to Odessa, as a way to combat Maya’s various mental afflictions; they might even take an apartment in the same Praxis complex that they had lived in before the second revolution. That was the only place Maya thought of as home, aside from Underhill, which she refused even to visit. And Michel felt that coming back to some kind of home might help her. So, Odessa. Maya was agreeable; it did not matter to her. And Michel’s desire to travel there by way of the Grand Canal seemed fine as well. Maya had not cared. She wasn’t sure of anything these days, she had few opinions, few preferences; that was the trouble.Now Vendana was saying that Jackie’s campaign was to proceed along the Grand Canal, north to south, in a big canal cruiser that doubled as campaign headquarters. They were there now, at the canal’s north end, getting ready in the Narrows.
So Maya returned to Michel on the terrace, and when the historians left them she said, “So let’s go to Odessa by the Grand Canal, like you said.”
Michel was delighted. Indeed it seemed to lift from him a certain somberness that had followed the dive into drowned Burroughs; he had been pleased at its effect on Maya, but for himself it had perhaps not been so good. He had been uncharacteristically reticent about his experience, somehow oppressed, as if overwhelmed by all that the great sunken capital represented in his own life. Hard to tell. So that now, to see Maya responding so well to the experience, and also to suddenly be given the prospect of seeing the Grand Canal— a kind of giant joke, in Maya’s opinion— it made him laugh. And that she liked to see. Michel thought that Maya needed a lot of help these days, but she knew full well that it was Michel who was struggling.
• • •
So a few days later they walked up a gangway onto the deck of a long narrow sailing ship, whose single mast and sail were one curved unit of dull white material, shaped like a bird’s wing. This ship was a kind of passenger ferry, sailing eastward around the North Sea in perpetual circumnavigations. When everyone was aboard, they motored out of DuMartheray’s little harbor, and turned east, keeping within sight of land. The ship’s mast sail proved to be flexible and mobile in many different directions; it shifted in its curves like a bird’s wing, every moment different as its AI responded minutely to catch the fitful winds.
On the second afternoon of their voyage into the Narrows, the Elysium massif came over the horizon ahead of them, bulking alpenglow pink against the hyacinth sky. The coast of the mainland rose to the south as well, as if to stretch up and see the great massif across the bay: bluffs alternated with marshes, and then a long tawny reach was succeeded by an ever-higher sea cliff. The horizontal red strata of this cliff were all broken by bands of black and ivory, and the ledges were lined with mats of samphire and grasses, and streaked with white guano. The waves slammed into the sheer rock at the bottom of these cliffs and rebounded, the arcs of the backwash intersecting the oncoming swells in quick points of upshot water. In short, beautiful sailing: long glides down the swells, the wind an offshore powerhouse, especially in the afternoons— the spray, the salt tang in the air— for the North Sea was becoming salty— the wind in her hair, the white V tapestry of the ship’s wake, luminous over the indigo sea: beautiful days. It made Maya want to stay on board, to sail around the world and then around again, to never land and never change . . . there were people doing that now, she had heard, giant greenhouse ships utterly self-sufficient, sailing the great ocean in their own thalassacracy. . . .