Richard Grant by Through the Heart (epub)

Author:Through the Heart (epub)
Format: epub
Published: 2023-09-19T00:00:00+00:00

RIPE BERRIES

There never was a summer so hot. The days were long at the northern edge of the Grind, where the Oasis rumbled after leaving Riley County, and for every minute of most of those days sunlight soaked into the metal hull. Bulkheads near the surface became too hot to touch, and even deep in the craft, along passageways with no windows and little light, you could feel the heat seeping in. It was almost unbelievable and there was no relief from it. All night the heat that had built up in the vast body of the craft radiated back out, and by the time the metal cooled to a few degrees higher than skin temperature the sun came up and the whole thing started over.

The only place halfway comfortable was out on deck, if you could find a spot in the shade. There you had at least the sluggish current of air moving around the body of the craft. Actually of course it was the Oasis that moved while the air hung slack and lifeless, but from where you sat they were the same. The crew and mates and Residents alike stayed out as much of the time as they could. Kem wondered whether he would have survived this if he had still been a galley boy. He had heard that now and then one of the younger boys would succumb, the body’s immature cooling system not being equal to the problem, and he believed it. He did not believe much of what he heard anymore, rather little in fact, but he believed that you could die from the heat of the galley. At least if you were a snipe you could unbolt hull plates or climb down onto the underframe; you could share in whatever coolness the earth had managed to retain through the months of summer. You could feel the air and smell damp things, probably small plants the craft had pulverized.

The Bell Dog had said that smelling a thing was enough, sometimes—that the essence of the thing was contained in the smell, and you could breathe it inside of you. The Bell Dog had spoken of such things, of essences, of secrets and tricks that would help you get by. Nowadays the people around Kem seemed to speak another language, a more sharp-edged and calculating one. You would hear about a certain place and what it had to offer, food or clean water or new recruits, and each of these in turn would be evaluated (the food for freshness and variety, the recruits for health—like that) and in the end the speculation would turn to whether or not the Captain would decide to stop here or stop there. Everyone assumed that such things were decided by the Captain alone, though for all Kem or anyone else knew it might have been otherwise, the Oasis might have moved and stopped and moved again according to principles that were graven on stone tablets somewhere, seared into the face of the earth, beamed down from the unseen artificial moons.

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