My father worked for a merchant shipping company: a sky-trader. There are so many islands here, and their produce so diverse, that there is a constant shuffling of goods between one isle and another.
The trading boats are vast affairs: huge, flat container sky-ships, hundreds of metres long. Or sometimes the cargoes are transported in great barges, one tied to the next, all pulled along in convoy by a tugboat at the front. There are usually a few security outriders too, who patrol up and down along by the barges, making sure that nobody tries to steal anything. There’s always the danger of piracy on the high skies. The great container ships and barges ride on the solar wind in a ponderous, stately fashion, making slow but sure progress, lumbering along like pods of sky-whales.
As well as watching out for pirates and hijackers, the patrols have to keep the hulls of the boats free from sky-lice and sky-riders. Sky-riders are small, cat-sized, whiskery creatures, with squashed-looking faces and smooth coats, parasites in their way, that travel by clinging onto the undersides of the boats. They can fly under their own steam when they want to, but mostly they don’t. They prefer to travel under your steam instead of their own. They’re basically bone idle, and all they want in life is a free ride.
For the most part, they’re harmless, or at least they are when it’s only four or five of them. But one follows another – as they like to be sociable – and soon, if you’re not careful, the whole hull of a boat can be covered in sky-riders, all holding on tight with the suckers on their feet. Soon you’ve got a colony of them and they’re weighing the boat down.
Even one of the great barges can start to sink in the sky, if too many freeloaders latch onto it. Then, as it falls, it will pull the other barges with it, until they all lose buoyancy and suddenly plummet towards the fire of the sun beneath. Then it’s too late. Even if the sky-riders abandon the hull to save themselves, the boats go on plunging down under their gathered momentum. Whole cargoes and many lives have been lost that way.
So the outriders constantly patrol the barges on small craft. They keep the sky-riders moving with prods and kicks (for they’re thick-skinned and it doesn’t do to be too gentle with them) and they try not to let them settle. It’s an interminable job at first – you swat them, they come back; you swat them again, they come back again. But once you are out in the Main Drift and far from land, the sky-riders are fewer and you’re safe until you approach the islands again.
The strange thing is that, on land, sky-riders are often treated as favoured pets. You find them in people’s kitchens, snuggled up in a basket and chewing on titbits, or sitting on their owner’s knee. My own grandmother had one. She used to call it Sky-Puss and let it sleep by the window, next to her knitting. But it wasn’t much use for anything. If it ever saw a sky-rat, it just stared at it and watched it fly by. It never bothered chasing it. It was simply too much trouble.
Our whole world here thrives on trade. One island grows fruit, another makes machinery. And although most islands are more or less self-sufficient, no single place can produce everything it requires. So there is always travel and great caravans of traders crossing the sky, moving like nomads across a vast desert waste.
And then there’s water. Water is wealth and water is prosperity; water is influence; water is power; and water is politics. It’s like oil used to be in the old world, so the history books say. Some countries had oil and some did not, and those that did could control the price or trade oil for concessions and favours. Wars were fought over oil, and have been fought here over water too. The richest people in the system are not the ones with the most land; they are the ones who own rivers and reservoirs.
Those islands without natural water sources, or without the wherewithal to collect water for themselves, rely on Cloud Hunters to bring it to them, for both drinking and irrigation. Without this source of supply, many would perish.
There is never a shortage of customers, only ever a shortage of clouds.
I asked Jenine to bring me in some cloud water one day. I wanted to taste it. So she did. They had harvested it just that weekend. It was cool and sweet. You could almost taste the distance in it, taste the adventure of finding it, taste the journey, taste the romance. I told her so, but she said I was mad and that all it tasted of was ordinary water – which isn’t much of a taste at all. She said the taste wasn’t in the water, it was in my head.
But it didn’t seem that way to me.