Picnic

First Written    Mon May  7 07:28:44 2018
File Modified    Wed Feb 14 18:32:26 2024
Latest Upload    Thu Sep 19 03:09:54 2024

"Mariana!" the voice called out from the shore, "Mariana, are you there?"

Mariana heard the call. She had been expecting it this morning, and so although she was only out to collect clams from the littoral shelf, she had made sure to dress accordingly for a meeting. A dress of metal and reinforced glass was her choice of attire, as it usually was when her kind decided to wander out from the depths. The walker, a cylinder of armoured plates and viewing ports, carried her along the seabed. Her limbs, though numerous, were all at work managing the myriad controls that steered everything from the walker's six legs to the salinity and temperature of its cockpit. Built for a mother-to-be, the walker was constructed wider and bulkier than a standard walker chassis. Its, or as she preferred to think of them, her legs stood stalwart in the silt even as the waves crashed around her. Mariana would not be easily moved unless she wished to, as she did to seek out her visitor.

Her metal body, when it breached the surface, did so alarmingly fast. Though she could not make out the figure before her until the seawater had run off her viewing glass, she could tell it was surprised by her rising.

"Are you Mariana of Orichalcum?" the woman's voice asked with force, its source clutching a wicker basket as though a bucket of woven reeds could be thrown with enough force to bring down steel.

"Yes," Mariana replied, the walker translating her words to English as it had been doing in reverse, "it's me. You still haven't learned to recognize my face, have you, Henriette of Glaskirk?"

The woman sighed a breath of relief.

"Forgive me, Mar. My first instinct when I see a half-tonne iron sea spider isn't to inspect her complexion."

Mariana stifled a disapproving smirk, not that Henriette would have recognized it. She had put some work into decorating the iridescent patterns on the 'forehead' of her carapace. A rosy orange derived from the carotenoids in shrimp outlined her natural flakes of blue pigment against the greys and browns of her shell. She had hoped that doing so would make her a little more distinguishable. It had certainly earned her a good share of looks back at the city. As Henriette's people might say, she had done her makeup.

"You are forgiven," Mariana proclaimed, "I'll be honest, Ettie, until I heard your voice I thought you were a fisherman."

"You mean a fisherwoman."

"No, I know my Human genders, Ettie."

Henriette splashed a handful of seawater towards the walker. The spray against her viewing glass echoed through the water in Mariana's cockpit.

"What a rude, terrible sea lady," Henriette said as she shook her head and wrung out her skirt, "Now come closer before I ruin my dress. I have something cool to show you."

Mariana followed. Her legs sunk into the wet beach with a satisfying scraping sound. If there was any silt left on her soles, it would be scoured off soon. For each step she took, Henriette took two or three. Still, the woman with the basket seemed eager to outpace her visitor.

Once she was as far from the water as she was from the side of the beach where sand met the rocky outcrops of dry land, Henriette sat down to unpack her belongings. The first thing she pulled out, as she always did, was a cloth blanket. The cloth would provide little barrier between the moisture of the beach and whatever else was to come out of the basket, but it had long been apparent to Mariana that keeping feet dry was no more a concern to Henriette than it was to her. She considered the cloth an unspoken border much like the beach around them. If past the rocks laid the edges of Glaskirk and beneath the tide sat the outer fringes of Orichalcum, then here was nowhere. And out of nowhere, they had carved out their picnic space.

"Look," Henriette proclaimed as she held out a pale block of something wrapped in more cloth, "do you know what this is?"

"I know what cheese is. We found some in the storage holds the other month."

"Not that stuff, no. Those are glorified military rations. This, now this is cheese. Made from cows and everything."

The walker scanned the block, confirming both its identity and edibility. Mariana limited her scan to the cheese, careful not to ruin any other surprises left waiting in the basket.

"Curious it isn't yellow like the pictures. Since when does Glaskirk have cows anyways?"

"We don't. A pair of traders came by last week. A Mechanical and an Arash'Mi. Oh wow, you don't see too many of either now a days and you should have heard the Deacon gush."

"Did he go full ecclesiastical again?"

"You don't know the half of it," Henriette replied as she broke off a piece of cheese for herself, "Welcome serpent, son of the silkworm! Welcome golem, daughter of the great ape! And then he bought all of the cheese."

"And he gave it all to you, that charmer."

Henriette rolled her eyes. "I took my share and only a little extra for you. A little more than a little actually. Take the rest with you, please. Maybe the little ones will like it. Human kids go nuts for this stuff. How are they anyways?"

"They're inquisitive, if anything. Especially the navigators," Mariana described, her longer front limbs steering the two metal plated tendrils of her walker towards the block of cheese, "I've been meaning to start telling them about our history but I keep worrying I won't tell it fairly."

"You're talking about the war."

"Yes," Mariana continued, "How do you tell your children their existence was bought with grandma's weapon walker without them hating themselves or wanting to take up the family business? Damned if I know, but on that note, I've procured something for you too which I find relevantly named."

Her tendrils withdrew into her walker with the cheese. Though it disappeared from both their sights, she could taste the freshness of dairy sugars and milk fats the moment she engaged the gates of her fluid lock and exposed the gift to her chamber's water. From behind her, with her flesh and blood limbs, she dislodged a silvery mass from the walker's internal storage and swapped it with the cheese. When her metal tendrils emerged again, they did so carrying something which lifted up Henriette's eyes just as well as it weighed down her lips with apprehension.

"A swordfish," Henriette remarked. Her gaze scanned down and up at the animal before her and the waiting titan that produced it while she searched for a proper response.

"If you don't like it-"

"No, I love it. It's just, the mercury content. Swordfish are predators. I can't eat this because I'm, well, pregnant."

Mariana paused to comprehend the word. It meant something foreign to her just as much as it was familiar. Henriette had laid eggs. Internally, and most likely no more than two, but in any case the message was clear. Her friend was going to be a mother.

"Goodness, my dear Ettie," Mariana said with rejoicement as she took Henriette's hands in her metal tendrils, "I am so excited for you. Does that mean you aren't going to be alone anymore? Goodness, I don't see you for a few weeks and now I see what you've been up to!"

"It's not like that, Mar! No, this is something else. It's a church thing. They needed a donor womb and I was young and unmarried so they asked me. It's nine months off of scavenging and good pay afterwards so I-"

"So you chose to bear a child you don't even want. Alone. Without a father! Ettie, I don't know how you're going to do this! This is not something you can just do without turning your life upside down, Ettie!"

She was still holding Henriette by the arms when she felt drops of saltwater on her tendrils again, this time not from the sea. She had long thought her own motherhood had not changed her, but now she was finding it too hard not to overstep and talk to Henriette like a parent instead of a friend.

"What life, Mar? I'm not a carefree fool. I know what this will cost me! I know what waiting for a future that will not come this century will cost me too. This is not the church's decision. It's mine. And I thought about you too! You had like, fifty eggs last year and you're doing just fine!"

"I had a dozen! And I've had Elmo and Daku to help me and I still can barely keep track of them."

"That's still a four to one ratio of children to parents. I'm having one. The church will help. They have to. They're the ones who wanted her. And for staying sane, I have you. Do I?"

Mariana let go of Henriette.

"Yes. You do. I'm sorry and I know you don't need this. Look, whatever you can't tell the church, tell me. Do it now before I run back to Orichalcum and blow open a storage hold looking for infant formula."

Henriette fell back on the picnic blanket, swallowing the cheese she had forgotten to chew.

"I'm scared, Mar. Not about the baby. Well, partly that, but about our lives. Those traders, they say half the other settlements this side of the continent don't even remember the Republic let alone care about rebuilding it. Please tell me your people have found something hopeful because we certainly have not. Is this it for us, Mar? Are we just another antebellum generation here to live our lives mothering a future we won't get to see?"

Mariana struggled to reply, "I don't know, Ettie. We've been expanding our searches too. We know the Seaboard Monitor used to patrol this area but until we find it, Orichalcum is the only sunken Oversee we know about. And there aren't many storage holds left to crack."

"So instead of betterment, we can only hope to persevere."

"No, Ettie. We can only persevere because we hope for betterment."

"I," Mariana continued, reaching back to unlock another of her walker's storages, "I think I have some herring. You can eat that still, can't you?"

When she opened the compartment, her expectation of dead and oily fish was subsumed by the scent of something, no, someone familiar. The faint hum of a now well-fed but still inquisitive young navigator's electrical impulses filled the walker's cockpit. Mariana turned to see behind her, but could only go as far as to see Henriette wiping her tears with her dress hem in the corner of one eye and the paddling limbs of her son in another.

"Oh wow," Henriette remarked, her disposition swinging from gloom to mirth at the sight of another visitor, "So that's what baby Neumannoids look like. He's, I think he's a he, right? He's so small! And transparent! But he has your blue, the forehead things! So, you're barely keeping track of them, huh Mar?"

"Like I said, barely," Mariana sighed, her vocal clicks translating into English for Henriette while her electrical field nagged and scolded the stowaway, "His name is Marlin."

"Hi Marlin. I'm Henriette of Glaskirk."

Henriette grabbed one of Mariana's walker legs and pulled herself up to Mariana's eye level, something she had never done before and which Mariana figured she would not be able to do for long if her pregnancy continued. Steadying herself, she waved at the young Neumannoid before stretching up further until her belly rested against the glass.

"Hi," she continued, "Little Marlin of Orichalcum, I want you to meet Arcadia Yem. Of Glaskirk."