Schultheiss looked toward the town lights and sighed.

“What’cha thinkin’ about?” Crat asked.

“I was just remembering how, when I was a boy, my father took me with him on a business trip to Tokyo. As our plane came in at night, we saw an amazing sight. The ocean, around every island as far as you could see, was alight! So many lights I could not count them. The water seemed to be on fire. White fire.

“Such a spectacle, I asked my father what festival this was. But he said, no, it was no oriental holiday. It was like this every night, he said. Every night at sea around Japan.”

The idea of such extravagance made Crat blink. “But, why?”

“Fishing lights,” Peter answered plainly. “At night the ships would run big generators and draw in fish by millions. Very effective, I heard. Efficient, too, if you trade energy for food and don’t worry about tomorrow.”

Schultheiss paused. His voice seemed far away. “My father and his comrades… they prided themselves on future-sightedness. Unlike the Yankees of those days — no offense — he thought he was thinking about tomorrow. While the Yanks bought toys and spent themselves poor, my father and his compeers saved. He invested prudently other people’s funds for them. Took their money with no questions asked and made it grow like vegetables in a garden.”

The old Helvetian sighed. “Maybe it only shows there are many kinds of shortsightedness. Did it ever occur to the Japanese, I wonder, that evolution might change the species they called with their great lights? The easy, stupid ones would die in nets, certainly. But meanwhile those who stayed away would breed future generations. Did they ponder this? No, I think not.

“Likewise it never occurred to my father that the world might someday tire of all its bad men having nice safe places to stash their loot. He never dreamed all the nations might drop their bickering, might get together and say enough, we want our money back. We want the names of those bad men, too… men who betrayed our trust, who robbed our treasuries, or who sold drugs to our children.

“How could my poor father imagine the world’s masses might come pounding on his door someday to take back in anger what he’d invested so carefully, so well?”

The lights of the floating village now glittered in the old man’s moist eyes. Stunned by the depth of this confession, Crat wondered. Why me? Why is he telling me all this?

Peter turned to look at him, struggling with a smile. “Did you see Pikeman, when she came to rescue us from the greeners? How beautiful she was? People used to joke about the Swiss navy. But only fools laugh now! Ton per ton, it gives Sea State — our adopted nation — the best fighting fleet in the world! So we adapt, in that way and so many others. We Helvetians find new roles in the world, performing them with pride in craft.”

Crat noticed the old man’s English had improved. Perhaps it was the passion of sudden memory. Or maybe he was letting down a mask.

“Oh, we and our allies were arrogant before the war. Mea culpa, we admit that now. And history shows the arrogant must always fall.

“But then, to fall can be a gift, no? What is diaspora, after all, except an opportunity, a second chance for a people to learn, to grow out of shallow self-involvement and become righteous, deep, and strong?”

Schultheiss looked at Crat. “Pain is how a people are tempered, prepared for greatness. Don’t you think so, fils? That wisdom comes through suffering?”

Crat could only blink in reply, moved, but not knowing what to say. In truth, he wasn’t sure he understood what Peter was talking about.

“Yes,” the old man agreed with himself, nodding firmly, both guilt and stark dignity evident in his voice. “My people have been chosen for some future, unknown task. Of that I’m sure. A task far greater than perching on safe mountaintops, high and aloof, living high off other people’s money.”

Peter stared into the night, much farther than Crat felt he himself could see.

“The world’s folk will need us yet. Mark my words. And when that day comes, we will not leave them wanting.”

At night it had been no more than a sprinkle of lights, rocking gently to rhythmic tides. By day, however, the barge-city came alive with noise and commerce. And rumors. It was said that no place, not even the Net, spread gossip as swiftly or erratically.

Crat had no way of picking up most of the hearsay, though. Unlike the working ships, where discipline required a common language, floating towns were a chaos of tongues and dialects, whispered, murmured, bellowed. All the sea towns were the same. Miniature babels, sprawled horizontally across the nervous ocean.

Night-soil collectors called as they rowed the narrow canals between multistoried housing barges, taking slops lowered down by rope in exchange for a few devalued piasters. Competing to deliver odorous fertilizer to the garden boats, they regularly sped down unbraced passages at risk of being crushed between the rocking, bobbing hulls.

Clothing, washed in sea water, hung from cluttered lines alongside banners proclaiming ideologies and gospels and advertisements in a dozen alphabets. Each district was topped with flat arrays of solar cells linked to broad, winglike rainwater collectors, all tended by small boys who climbed the swaying frames like monkeys. Kite strings angled up into the sky toward generators dipped into high stratospheric winds. By this melange of artifice and gadgetry, the barge city managed to stay alive.

Crat hungrily inhaled the smells of cooking over seaweed fires. The aromas changed from one neighborhood to the next. Still, he kept his hands out of his pockets. His dwindling cash might be needed for bribes before the day was out.

Other aromas were even harder to ignore. Women — workers and mothers and daughters and wives — could be glimpsed through windows left open to catch a stray breeze, dressed in costumes native to countries that no longer existed, sometimes smothered in far too much clothing for these humid climes. Crat knew not to stare,- many of them had menfolk who were jealous and proud. Still, at one point he stopped to watch a girl’s nimble fingers dance across a floor loom, crafting holo-carpets for export. It was a valued profession and one she had apparently mastered. In comparison, Crat knew his own hands to be clumsy things that couldn’t even knot a jute rope properly.

The young woman glanced over at him, her scarf framing a lovely oval face. Crat would have given his heart gladly when she smiled. He stumbled back, however, when another visage suddenly intervened, a crone who snarled at him in some strange dialect. Crat spun away to hurry forward again, toward the Governor’s Tower and the Admiral’s Bridge, twin monoliths that overlooked the center of town.

In a city rife with odors, the shaded bazaar was an especially pungent place where the fish was generally fresh but everything else was second hand, including the whores beckoning from a provocatively carved wooden balcony along the aft quarter.

Likewise the religions that were pitched from the opposite side, where a dozen midget temples, churches and mosques vied for the devotion of passersby. Here at least one was safe from one all-pervading creed, Gaia-worship. The few NorA ChuGa missionaries who tried preaching in Sea State were glad to depart with their lives. The lesson they took home with them was simple; it takes a full belly before a man or woman gives a tinker’s damn about anything as large as a planet.

Other types of outside recruiters were tolerated. The Resettlement Fund’s kiosk offered a third form of redemption, equidistant from sex and faith. Queued up there were men, women, whole families who had finally had enough… who would sign any document, have any surgery, swear any oath just to set foot on land again — in the Yukon, Yakutsk, Patagonia — anywhere there’d be steady meals and a patch of real ground to farm.