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Sil carries a sword. a three foot long gleaming length of Japanese cold water steel. He has no gun and only one stun device because he has found, through awkard and dangerous trial and error that most people are strangely unable to connect guns with the threat of imminent death unless the gun is pointed directly in their face. But a sword. Something about a swaord imspires utter terror even before it is drawn out and you can see the balanced edges of the blade and single groove in the steel, which is designed to get blood, your blood, off the blade as quickly as possible. It activates the lizard brain, which in most people means either a tramatic shock condition that renders them in capable of movement, or alternately sends them immediately diving under the nearest substantial object their reptilian reactor judges sufficiently sturdy to withstand a direct blow from cold water steel. Both of which leave Sil free to retreat, which is primarily what he wants from a weapon, a clear path out of the room.
Right now the sword is secured to his back. Tonight he brought along a japanese karata sword, though there are several others, inlucing his favorite, if highly impractical tk Marias sword, back on the boat. Where Sil would rather be. Anchored a few miles off shore. Where scratch is probably just now starting the electomagentic pulse engne for an almost entirely silent run through the shallow and narrow straight of water that separates miami island from the remnants of the Georgia coastline, where Sil will shortly meet up with said boat and be merrily on his way, a few Ameros richer. If he can find the wagon that should be somewhere out in the utter blackness that stretches out in front of him. Sil has done this hundreds of times. He is no stranger to sitting in the creaking unstable branches of water oak just as he is now, scanning the remnants of the freeway with night vision googles, waiting. Waiting for another crate. It's a kind of regression he knows. His ancestors spent years getting out of tree, eveolving tools, language, fois gras and noosperes all so, apparently, he cold climb back up in a tree like the apes from which he came. It's a routine thought pattern, one he uses to kill time while he waits. Monkeys, trees, descent, savahnna, fire, language, tools, fire savahnna, ascent, monkey. It has symetry.
The noosphere is accessed via tk (scanned imprint things in magazines) originally it also required something similar to pyschadelics but then it was found that propery coded tk, when viewed at the right angle could produce the same effect. The noosphere itself is laregely binary, though Waiben is always working to change that, but the doorways are decidedly not. and there aren't many doorways. It turns out that most people prefer windows, richly detailed, interactive, 3D windows which they can reach into an extract what they want -- an orbiting photomodel o the kids, video of the floods in New York or a pictogram from mom -- but very few, only a slight few in fact, want a doorway through which they can pass into the three dimensional relaity of the noosphere.
Sil used to write noosphere code. Still does occasionally and when pressed after several beer will grudgingly admit that he owes both his present freedom and Arbella to his strange fortune of having been born in the right place at the right time and eaten mushrooms with the right, if slightly crazy man.
Sil is off the coast of georgia, picks up a shipment he need to deliver to new orleans, crates. The girl is in the crates.
Sailing scenes, Sil comes across his nemesis an assholey kind of guy with a massive dual hulled catermeran that he's rigged together using two old small destroyers. It's a floating armada bristling with guns. Sil and Scratch watch it being loaded up in new orleans, or maybe miami, which has retreated with the encrouching sea level rise so that it's now stilt houses and floating building in the middle of a brackish water swamp marsh full of reeds and thickets, with islands here and there, much like okeefenokee swamp. red water like blood. the tide goes out for miles and miles every day. periodic tide waves destroy the city, hurricane pummel it, it is a very temporary place, perfect for picking up cargo that needs to make it's way inside the the protectorate.
There has to be a city there. it's the mouth fo a mississippi river, the second largest freshwater river basin in the world. There can't not be a new orleans. unthinkable.
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