Chapter Text
Julienne Derviş stands on the ship’s deck, her gaze to the south. The sky is the faded orange of late afternoon, the waves she knows so well a deep blue capped with motes of white. The wood beneath her feet creaks rhythmically with the waves; the sails above her billow out to catch the wind. Sailors run about the ship, readying it for return to port, but she’s responsible only for the goods in the ship’s hold. So for now she admires the landscape. Her home.
Pinpricks of electric light stud the facades of concrete towers, hundreds of meters tall, as motor vehicles scurry about in the streets below. A sharp contrast indeed to the rolling hills and green meadows of Silver Sage. Julienne can imagine the black posts of gas lamps dotting its countryside.
What barbarians.
Her people abandoned gas lighting a millennia ago. Gas heating followed three centuries later. Each a casualty of the relentless march of Progress. And gas electricity would die too, but that was a casualty of the status quo with the mainland.
From the corner of her eye, she sees a flash of light from a lighthouse off the coast of Silver Sage – a truly primitive way to mark where hazards lie. No lighthouses mar the coast of her homeland, for their ships rely instead on computerized charts and sonar depth finders. Radar too: an antenna spins atop the ship’s mainmast, and a black weatherproofed wire runs down the thick wood towards the battery and computer mainframe belowdecks.
Julienne once suffered through a debate over whether such measures are, strictly speaking, forbidden by the agreements with Tangled Branch. It was pointless. The charts and computers and radar, at least, are not issues Parliament will ever press. Even if they violate the letter of the law... The creatures of Silver Sage know full well that the seas around what they call “Abroad” are treacherous: dangers lurk below the surface that rend open the hull of any ship which gets too close. Without lighthouses to mark the safe channels, sailing these waters is – for them – suicidal. And Parliament welcomes this fact, Parliament finds it convenient: all the better to enforce its self-imposed ignorance.
Her own government finds it convenient too, but for very different reasons. For if foreign ships full of illicit goods or too-curious adventurers risk dashing themselves upon the rocks…
Foreign ships full of soldiers can sink too.
There was a war, you see. Six centuries ago. Her people lost.
Thoroughly.
Thoroughly, but not totally. Not quite totally. They clung then, and cling still, to this island. Julienne’s home.
And the cowards who rule over her, fear the war still.
Fools, all of them, too afraid of a crisis long dead to strive for a brighter future. She’s seen the world outside Sovereignty’s reach: heaven on earth, full of wonders and abundance compared to which her native soil is hardly better-off than the barbarians across the water.
She dwells on such thoughts as the ship trundles to harbor. A kilometer or so from shore, a deep rumbling begins filling the belly of the ship as motors deep in the hull finally kick in, guiding the vessel home more surely than the fickle wind can. But they also conjure up a prominent wake. Their use too far from shore is strictly forbidden by Parliament, and this prohibition is enforced. Once, on a voyage delayed by weather, Julienne tried to ply the captain to use the motors to make up for the lost time – she cringes at the memory. The captain wouldn’t allow it, and he was right: if they had tried, and were caught by Silver Sage’s patrols, Parliament would have demanded the heads of everyone involved.
And the buffoons who rule this land would have rushed to deliver them. All to preserve the status quo. Spineless bastards.
Before too long, the ship reaches its allotted pier, and sailors and dockworkers alike rush to secure it with lines faded by exposure to the harsh saltwater. Her work begins after they finish. She oversees the removal of tarps and covers protecting the cargo in the ship’s hold, and then sends the signal to begin unloading. Laborers on ship and on shore all make themselves scarce as gargantuan metal claws, controlled by neither paw nor hand, mechanically extract corrugated metal containers from the wooden hold and stack them on the black tarmac ashore.
But Julienne still has work to do. She crosses a gangplank connecting ship and shore and heads to the customs office. They’ll want to know what exactly she’s importing and where it’s all headed to. But before she can get there, she’s intercepted by a dockhand who wants her to fill out some forms.
If certain things were tracked better, someone might notice that this particular dockhand has handed these forms to this particular cargo master suspiciously often.
“Your goods are in container AL-102,” Julienne whispers to her compatriot, as pen scrawls over recycled paper. “Your key fits the lock, take only the four boxes labeled ‘GRAYCOVE PACIFIC’. And any word on our friend Prometheus?”
A codeword. It’s shared between like-minded fellows who are rather uninterested in preserving the status quo.
“I don’t know him, and neither do you,” comes the whispered reply . “We’re retiring that codeword. It leaked.”
“What happened?”
“Someone got caught. They won’t tell me who. New codeword is ‘Jenner’. The work continues.”
“The work continues.”
Julienne signs her name at the bottom and hands over the papers. Tonight’s business concluded, the two part ways.
Someday, in a happier future, there will be no need for such secrecy.
Someday, in a happier future, the government here will finally stand for what’s right.
Someday, in a happier future, the barbarians across the water will finally kneel before their betters.
Julienne’s work continues.