Tender north, surface day

The tender leaves before dawn. There is a logic to this that I understand — the weather window, the tidal timing — but the first thing I see when I come up from the access ladder is a sky still full of stars, and this takes longer than it should to process. I have been below for eleven weeks. The stars are fine. I simply had stopped expecting them.

By the time we are two hours north the sky has become the sky: grey-white, January, a low sun that offers presence without warmth. The Lipless Reach coastline is visible on the starboard side as a pale line of bluffs, eroded into forms that look deliberate but are not. The sea in between is calm enough to be boring, which is a condition I have learned to find restful.

The Surfaceborne community is working the outer shallows when we arrive — three small craft, moving in a pattern that takes a moment to read as systematic rather than casual. They are tending the margin beds: harvesting, reseeding, checking the marker stakes. The tender's captain exchanges halwa with the lead craft, which is the surface courtesy — a brief call-and-response that I can follow well enough to know nothing is being asked of us. We are noted and not unwelcome.

I watch from the rail.

There is something specific about watching people who live on the surface tend a coast. They move differently. Not better — differently. A body that orients to wind and weather and the surface state of the water has a different centre of gravity than one accustomed to the small adjusted spaces of saturation. They wear the cold in a way I have stopped wearing it; they read the sky continuously, the way I read instrument readouts below, with the low-level attention of someone for whom the information is constant and consequential.

I do not feel estranged from them. I feel that we are competent in different geometries.

The surface day is six hours, in practice — the tender's schedule, not the light. I walk the small deck twice. I eat something from the hold that tastes, in the open air, better than it deserves. The captain points out a formation on the bluffs that she says has a name in the Reach community's usage, a name I do not know. I write it down and will probably not find it in any document.

On the way back the stars are not yet visible. The horizon line is very precise — the kind of clean that comes after weather has passed. I stand at the rail until the cold is the whole of my attention, and then I go below, and the tender carries me south.

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M. Vael, aboard the tender, returning from the Lipless Reach.