The Glass Slide World (The Naturalist Society) by Carrie Vaughn

Author:Carrie Vaughn [Vaughn, Carrie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: 47North
Published: 2025-10-07T00:00:00+00:00

Ava put out her sieve a couple of times, fishing for plankton, but in the warmer region of the tropics she didn’t pull up much. The water was clear, underpopulated. The Penelope steamed on, puffing coal smoke, cutting through chop.

A more interesting experiment struck her. With swabs and a stack of petri dishes from her lab kit in hand, she went around the ship collecting samples. She swabbed the handrail on the stairway to the dining room. The teapot in the salon—the one they’d been pouring tea from for the last two weeks. She very kindly asked the head cook if she could swab his hands, and he was skeptical but indulged her. Rails, doorknobs, the handles of mops the crew used to clean the decks, the mop heads themselves. She swabbed the wheel in the wheelhouse after promising Suminwa that she’d let him see the results.

And what fascinating results they were.

Ava nurtured the little colonies of bacteria. Within only a day or two, a dozen petri dishes held multicolored blooms in expanding circles and dotted puffs. She found examples from the Staphylococcus genus. Diphtheroids, Streptococcus, Neisseria, Bordetella. Several strains she couldn’t identify at all and might never have been categorized. Fascinated, she sketched, made notes, compared results to those in journals and catalogs she’d brought with her, and made identifications when she could. The ship was inhabited by a jungle of microorganisms. The chief cook would be horrified to see what colonies grew from organisms taken from his skin. (She lectured him on the power of handwashing and sterilization, the greatest actions that could promote public health.) She showed the dish sprouting spots and swirls of microorganisms from the wheel to Hallern and Suminwa, and they both turned a bit ashen. “Maybe just clean the wheel a bit at the end of the day,” she suggested, with a thin smile. The germs were everywhere; they had to learn to live with them.

Some of these species traveled to places they might never have reached without oceangoing ships, without people carrying them from port to port. No one could stop these migrations. A country might be able to stop people at its borders, but plagues would pass through via air and water with no one the wiser. The most powerful, omnipotent creatures on earth, and no one could see them. There must be some power in that, even if it was only the knowledge that human beings were powerless in the face of the measles or bubonic plague.

In spite of the work, her mind turned to the journey ahead and what awaited them at the end. If Diane Monroe’s dire predictions had any merit to them, the port would be swarming with spies, villains like the Brannocks waiting to ambush them. In spite of herself, Ava felt a little thrilled at the possibility. A kind of latent memory of that night’s fear and uncertainty.

So she also worked on Arcanist practica, anything that might be useful in a fight, anything she might be able to use if she faced another adversary like the Brannocks.

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