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Save Point: The Solar Barque

Sethkill is proudly showing Mariel around the boat-pits as though he was responsible for them, even though he is neither building nor designing the vessel that will become the new Vermillion Dragon. That responsibility lies with another sethura entirely who has extensive experience with sailcraft, and has put together the many smaller barques that now ply up and down the river, with retroactive reference to the entire history of sethura seafaring.

The boat pits are large square excavations cut crisply deep into the numalitic limestone, meant to be part of a showpiece that was to consist of an artificially engineered branch off the main river, with selectively floodable boat-pits and docks at either mouth and the Jiargnei Committee statue rising above a small lake in the middle. Everything is perfectly leveled and ready to go, the whole plateau has in fact been readied, but the connecting channels are unfinished and the statue stands half-completed, waiting for a final design to be imposed.

The Vermillion Dragon mark two, or at least its basic framing, occupies two adjacent pits which are joined by crossbeams. To try and create something that optimally addresses the new, unique requirements of what are likely to be its future trading runs around the shorelines of the seven cities, but is still robust enough for the occasional deep-water run, the boat designer has modified an existing plan for a kind of double-hulled catamaran in which each hull can float independently of the other if they are somehow broken apart. It's an openly technological design, something that is now possible in the absence of Azatlani restrictive legislation.

Each hull, as indicated in the design rendering, will have two downward shapes resembling fins extending beneath the water, to add stability in slower conditions and provide speed and smooth running when the wind is behind her. Matching the downward fins on each hull are two upward facing ones, which will be covered with solar cells and can be adjusted to different angles under their own power, or at the end of a rope as an emergency measure, for optimal collection of light. Two hidden engines of intentionally simplistic design, compact electrically powered turbines, will give the vessel a fallback means of propulsion should they find themselves becalmed, needing to resist onshore winds, or just to idle slowly into dock. Having a ready supply of electricity will also let them power basic devices such as a small desalinator, in case they run out of fresh water, lights that do not create the same risk as a lantern or flame, and cooling boxes to sustain supplies.

The rendering, of course, does not in any way really represent the way it looks in real life, which is why Mariel is here to observe their progress. For all its technological credentials, the ship will be assembled almost entirely out of wood, although admittedly it will be the sethura equivalent of the material, a substance she has been told is called silva and which is uncannily light and strong, like bamboo, but with solid grain like real wood. Silica deposited within the laminated layers, also sometimes seen as an partly coagulated gel resembling tabashir in fractures and joints, gives the material a structural strength vastly disproportionate to its weight.

The sethura have long since learned how to effectively print out structures made of silva wood to any desired shape, a process that combines biotechnology with the plants own growth process to allow a substrate of loose cells to be extruded in a solution of their own siliceous sap, whereupon they swiftly self-organize to form a rigid structure, complete with internal grain and fine channels for the transport of water and nutrients to the whole from any exposed surfaces. Separate pieces can be combined with more of the mixture as though it was glue, forming a single whole, or larger structures can be built up gradually a layer at a time.

With proper design and a suitably vascular structure - say, the keel of a ship, branching into many ribs, each sustaining its own crossbeams and bulkheads and hull planks - it becomes possible to create something that, like a silva tree, is alive deep inside its spreading branches, shading to dead on the outermost parts where the discarded layers, no longer vital, form a protective shell around the parts that matter. Such a vessel can heal itself, to a limited degree, accommodating the many fractures and stresses of the journey and growing around them to become stronger.

~*~

In the risen stern of the boat, its high point, the lioness goddess performs her dance, all moves repeated exactly twice, once and again, first by themselves and then with a coruscating splash of flame that spreads outward and upward to spare the carpentry from scorching. She is cast against the sunrise by its firey light.

The boy called Khaibit, meaning shadow-self, thinks that she is the most amazing thing he has ever seen and watches her practice with bated breath, looking out from behind one of the blocks of stray limestone that litter every building site, not realizing except for somewhere deep inside that she has deliberately positioned herself thus, knowing herself seen and eager for witness. He lets himself believe that she does not know he sees, to preserve the purity of the moment.

She strikes sparks to a yearning inside him that he's not quite sure yet how to interpret.

They are calling it the ship of Re, both because it has been blessed by the sun, and because in a moment of candor, one of the gods was heard to say that it would take one mortal man a million years to make a boat such as this. Because they are gods though, it progresses easily as though the pieces were being assembled to an unseen plan, each arriving as the time is right.

When the gods ask for things they are given them, because what they provide in return is infinite compared to what is asked for. Their modesty is also terrifying, because they ask for so little.

He knows for a fact that the lioness goddess is living down in the workers quarter of the city with her husband, the sneaky one who looks like a person, but is sometimes a tall thing with crazy ears when it thinks no-one is looking. He has also seen the oxen goddess, the Haythe, with her lustful, teasingly fertile ways, acting like some soft of uncanny sister-wife to both of them, another aspect of the same thing. They are often together in unusual ways.

The crazy ears husband was last seen having talked a jobbing potter into letting him try out his wheel and splattered with clay and green slip, singing impossibly thin pottery shells into being as though it took no effort at all. For some reason, though, he has not told either the lioness or the oxen about it, which is a little mysterious. Maybe he is bad at it by god standards?

Oh to be a god. Would that were I; it is to envy. Not too much though, because they are gods and it would not do to anger them. Fortunately they appear benign.