Brave New Worlds

power and fertility — from the top of the boat's mast for all to see. Elsie of the Californian was due to give birth in a matter of weeks. As soon as her pregnancy was confirmed, she stopped sailing and stayed in the household, sheltered and treasured. Loose hands resting atop mountainous belly, she would sometimes come out to greet her household's boat as it arrived. Nina would stare at her. Elsie might have been the first pregnant woman Nina had seen, as least since surviving puberty and developing thoughts of carrying a mountainous belly of her own.

Elsie was there now, an icon cast in bronze before the setting sun, her body canted slightly against the weight in her belly, like a ship leaning away from the wind.

We furled the sails and rowed to the pier beside the scale house. Nina hung over the prow, looking at Elsie, who was waving at Californian's captain, on the deck of the boat. Solid and dashing, everything a captain ought to be, he waved back at her. Their boat was already secured in its home slip, their catch weighed, everything tidy. Nina sighed at the image of a perfect life, and nobody yelled at her for not helping. Best thing to do in a case like this was let her dream until she grew out of it. Might take decades, but still.

My Amaryllis crew handed crates off to the dockhand, who shifted our catch to the scale house. Beyond that were the processing houses, where onshore crews smoked, canned, and shipped the fish inland. The New Oceanside community provided sixty percent of the protein for the whole region, which was our mark of pride, our reason for existing. Within the community itself, the ten sailing crews were proudest of all. A fishing crew that did its job well and met its quotas kept the whole system running smoothly. I was lucky to even have the Amaryllis and be a part of it.

I climbed up to the dock with my folk after securing the boat, and saw that Anders was the scalemaster on duty. The week's trip might as well have been for nothing, then.

Thirty-five years ago, my mother ripped out her implant and broke up her household. Might as well have been yesterday to a man like Anders.

The old man took a nail-biting forty minutes to weigh our catch and add up our numbers, at which point he announced, 'You're fifty pounds over quota. '

Quotas were the only way to keep the stock healthy, to prevent overfishing, shortages, and ultimately starvation. The committee based quotas on how much you needed, not how much you could catch. To exceed that — to pretend you needed more than other people — showed so much disrespect to the committee, the community, to the fishing stock.

My knees weak, I almost sat down. I'd gotten it exactly right, I knew I had. I glared at him. Garrett and Sun, a pair of brawny sailors helpless before the scalemaster in his dull gray tunic of authority, glared at him. Some days felt like nothing I did would ever be enough. I'd always be too far one way or the other over the line of 'just right. ' Most days, I'd accept the scalemaster's judgment and walk away, but today, after setting loose the tuna and a dozen pounds of legitimate catch with it, it was too much.

'You're joking,' I said. 'Fifty pounds?'

'Really,' Anders said, marking the penalty on the chalkboard behind him where all the crews could see it. 'You ought to know better, an experienced captain like you. '

He wouldn't even look at me. Couldn't look me in the eye while telling me I was trash.

'What do you want me to do, throw the surplus overboard? We can eat those fifty pounds. The livestock can eat those fifty pounds. '

'It'll get eaten, don't worry. But it's on your record. ' then he marked it on his clipboard, as if he thought we'd come along and alter the public record.

'Might as well not sail out at all next week, eh?' I said.

The scalemaster frowned and turned away. A fifty pound surplus — if it even existed — would go to make up another crew's shortfall, and next week our catch would be needed just as much as it had been this week, however little some folk wanted to admit it. We could get our quota raised like Nina wanted, and we wouldn't have to worry about surpluses at all. No, then we'd worry about shortfalls, and not earning credits to feed the mouths we had, much less the extra one Nina wanted.

Surpluses must be penalized, or everyone would go fishing for surpluses and having spare babies, and then where would we be? Too many mouths, not enough food, no resiliency to survive disaster, and all the disease and starvation that followed. I'd seen the pictures in the archives, of what happened after the big fall.

Just enough and no more. Moderation. But so help me I wasn't going to dump fifty pounds just to keep my record clean.

'We're done here. Thank you, Captain Marie,' Anders said, his back to me, like he couldn't stand the sight of me.

When we left, I found Nina at the doorway, staring. I pushed her in front of me, back to the boat, so we could put Amaryllis to bed for the night.

'The Amaryllis' scales aren't that far off,' Garrett grumbled as we rowed to her slip. 'Ten pounds, maybe. Not fifty. '

'Anders had his foot on the pad, throwing it off. I'd bet on it,' Sun said. 'Ever notice how we're only ever off when Anders is running the scales?'

We'd all noticed.

'Is that true? But why would he do that?' said Nina, innocent Nina.

Everyone looked at me. A weight seemed to settle on us.

'What?' Nina said. 'What is it?'

It was the kind of thing no one talked about, and Nina was too young to have grown up knowing. The others had all known what they were getting into, signing on with me. But not Nina.

I shook my head at them. 'We'll never prove that Anders has it in for us so there's no good arguing. We'll take our licks and that's the end of it. '

Sun said, 'Too many black marks like that they'll break up the house. '

That was the worry, wasn't it?

'How many black marks?' Nina said. 'He can't do that. Can he?'

Garrett smiled and tried to take the weight off. He was the first to sign on with me when I inherited the boat. We'd been through a lot together. 'We'll just have to find out Anders' schedule and make sure we come in when someone else is on duty. '

But most of the time there were no schedules — just whoever was on duty when a boat came in. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Anders kept a watch for us, just to be here to rig our weigh-in.

Amaryllis glided into her slip, and I let Garrett and Sun secure the lines. I leaned back against the side, stretching my arms, staring up along the mast. Nina sat nearby, clenching her hands, her lips. Elsie and Californian's captain had gone.

I gave her a pained smile. 'You might have a better chance of getting your extra mouth if you went to a different crew. The Californian, maybe. '

'Are you trying to get rid of me?' Nina said.

Sitting up, I put my arms across her shoulders and pulled her close. Nina came to me a clumsy thirteen-year old from Bernardino, up the coast. My household had a space for her, and I was happy to get her. She'd grown up smart and eager.

She could take my place when I retired, inherit Amaryllis in her turn. Not that I'd told her that yet.

'Never. Never ever. ' She only hesitated a moment before wrapping her arms around me and squeezing back.

Our household was an oasis. We'd worked hard to make it so. I'd inherited the boat, attracted the crew one by one — Garrett and Sun to run the boat, round and bustling Dakota to run the house, and she brought the talented J. J., and we fostered Nina. We'd been assigned fishing rights, and then we earned the land allocation. Ten years of growing, working, sweating, nurturing, living, and the place was gorgeous.

We'd dug into the side of a hill above the docks and built with adobe. In the afternoon sun, the walls gleamed golden. The part of the house projecting out from the hill served as a wall protecting the garden and well. Our path led around the house and into the courtyard. We'd found flat shale to use as flagstones around the cultivated plots, and to line the well, turning it into a spring. A tiny spring, but any open fresh water seemed like a luxury. On the hill above were the windmill and solar panels.