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many orders were filled; the furnaces of ’Troi could only turn out so much metal goods per five-year. Tools, weapons, and
replacement parts for the few machines still in use had priority. Extra work-time and material tended to go into luxury items like jewelry, which only Seniors could afford.
    The ferries were powered by machines. ’Troi engineers had designed a system of gears by means of which the strength of men on the winch was amplified and transferred to rotary blades at the rear of the craft. Certainty of staying within sight of land was assured by the long cable which fed down from the pylons through a wheel fixed to the midships decking. The whole arrangement was slow and clumsy, but free of the perils of fast-moving, free-ranging boats. The Holdfast could not afford to lose another ferry.
    All that remained of shipyard skill was the ability to patch and trim existing vessels with wood won from the Wild. Each bit of the precious material was polished and shaped by the hand of every man in a given crew before being ceremonially installed. The names of the men who dared the empty lands beyond the borders of the Holdfast to obtain wood went into special Chants Celebratory concerning the ferries. Every step of the patching process was, like most of the things the ferrymen did, part of a fabric of custom intended to hold ferrycrews together in manly order, despite their isolation between empty sea and empty sky.
    The huge hold of the coastal ferry was lit by hanging lamps and stray sunlight that entered the high-set ports. The air was hot, moist and permanently impregnated with the reek of sweat, lammins and beer. The noise never stopped.
    At the center of the hold was the play-pen, a pit of sand that was the scene of the perpetual contests and games with which ferrymen filled their off-deck hours. Something was always going on in the pen and at the tile gameboards that made up the apron around it. Every match drew its mob of shouting spectators.
    Forward, the sweating sloppers tended cook-tubs sunk into the tops of great clay fire-boxes in which fires roared day and night. Aft, past the cargo-space and the rows of crewmen’s hammocks, someone was always playing the part of story-box to whatever audience he could keep, bellowing out his tale in order to be heard above the general din. The entire ship reverberated ceaselessly to the growling of winch and propeller blades.
    The gleaming skins of the ferrymen, who went about in shorts or nothing at all below decks, reminded Kelmz of insect armor. Even
the interminable activity and racket struck him as mimicry of the meaningless scurryings of those strange, tiny beasts of the Ancients’ times.
    He had never travelled by water before, except under awnings on the decks of river barges. His journeys had commonly been overland, with a brace or two of Rovers in his charge. There were no Rovers on the ferry; there was nothing familiar or easy. The heat made him dizzy; the stuffiness choked him; the constant rolling cost him several meals. It was impossible to sleep in all the noise, but he didn’t need much sleep, having nothing active to do; and he didn’t eat a lot.
    The food – never enough of it here any more than elsewhere at Juniors’ tables – was invariably blue-stew with dollops of the hemp-root starch called taydo in it; thin slices of hempseed bread smeared with plankton jelly; and pale beer to wash it all down. The only relief was the occasional fresh salad made with the lammins that d Layo had turned over to the sloppers on first entering the hold. That gesture had won him friends from the start.
    He had built on this beginning by becoming an enthusiastic participant in the games at the play-pen. As a DarkDreamer and an outlaw he lived outside the company system of work- and gamepoints, so he took his winnings in cash. This should have made trouble for him since Juniors were always short of cash, their only means of buying any sort of luxury beyond the