Looking at My Whole Life

Writers: Jane
Date Posted: 5th January 2008

Characters: Lineal, Demerand
Description: Lineal talks to the waypoint Holder early in the morning.
Location: Elsewhere on Pern
Date: month 8, day 3 of Turn 4

Long before the passengers were woken with the delivery of morning klah or juice to their staterooms the riverboat captain was awake and active, though this morning he found himself standing just outside of the larger hold buildings looking slightly upstream to where the Sungazer's stacks were already showing signs of life. The dark smoke that rose straight into the dawn sky in twin plumes reassured him that all was well with the preparations to leave the waypoint and head upstream, stopping wherever they were signalled, and finally making it to Emerald Falls with their cargo and passengers.

For the life of him he couldn't remember what had made him so determined to escape life on the riverboats of the Nettleweed River.

"Looks like you're ready to go," Demerand commented when he stepped outside the door and found Lineal hadn't got any further than a step beyond the building.

"Oh, yes." Lineal grinned. "The Sungazer is. I'm dawdling."

"Admiring your riverboat?" the grizzle-haired man suggested wryly. It still seemed strange to him that Jesten wasn't in command of the Sungazer, and even stranger that the young Lineal was.

Long before he had inherited the Hold from his grandfather, Demerand had tried the riverboat life. On the Sungazer, naturally, since Nettleweed Dock was the waypoint for that riverboat. They were all one family; some living aboard, some on land, with a few like himself who had tried both lives.

Lineal had been a youngster then. Lively, intelligent, and always looking further afield than the Sungazer – further afield than the Nettleweed River itself. Demerand had been a little envious of Lineal's birthright – the likely Captaincy of the Sungazer – and baffled by the boy's disinterest in such an inheritance.

Life flowed on, though, and here they were; Demerand on the land as the waypoint Holder, just as his grandfather had been before him, and Lineal back from the sea to Captain the Sungazer as his father had.

Lineal smiled at Demerand's question. "A little." he dragged his eyes away from the smoke plumes and looked at the older man. "Feeling pretty pleased with my life, actually. Smug, even."

"Having the Sungazer, you mean?"

"Having it all." Lineal sighed, but it was a sound of contentment. "I see my wife and children every day. I'm back on the river, back with my family. Yes, and the Captaincy. That's nice, but I think I would have been happy to come back without it." He laughed. "I can't believe that I didn't realise that, all those Turns."

He had got what he wanted when he had apprenticed to the Seacraft. He'd travelled widely around the oceans of Pern and then settled down on a coastal run along a stretch of tropical Southern Continent coastline not too different to the harbour where the Sungazer's route terminated. He had thought he was happy, especially once he had met Rahona and they had started a family. Life had been good, in his estimation, and that was what sometimes startled him. He had thought that life was good, then he had come home and realised just how much better life was back on the Nettleweed. His good life had got better and every now and then that realisation struck him like a bucket of water in the face.

As it had a few moments ago when he had stepped out of the main building and caught sight of the Sungazer.

"I was a dimglow."

"I always thought so," Demerand agreed amiably. "But then I realised that riverboat life wasn't for me. I actually liked the idea of running a waypoint, one day. Living amongst a bigger group of people; having crops and animals to care for."

"Having a large family," Lineal teased in return for Demerand's too-easy agreement that he was a dimglow. The Holder's wife was expecting their seventh child, something that would be considered selfish in the extreme onboard any riverboat where space was at a premium.

"Yes. I like being a father. I love every one of the pesky little darlings and I would have missed that if I hadn't come back ashore."

"So, do you stand out here, sometimes, and just admire your Hold?"

"Not here. There's a spot up on the cliffs. Not far from where we buried your father. I'll take you and your boy up there, one day, if you like. The entire Hold is spread out over the river flats below, and the Nettleweed forms the boundary. The Dock's plain to see ... When the Sungazer's alongside it's like looking at my whole life."

That was what had been missing when he had been at sea, Lineal thought.
The ability to stand somewhere and see all of his life. There was the sea, the ship he'd been crewing on, his family who were usually far away at River Bluff Weyr. But now his whole life was encapsulated in the Sungazer as she paddled up and down the Nettleweed River.

"That's what I'm doing now," the Sungazer's Captain said, nodding toward the riverboat where she was being prepared for departure. "Looking at my whole life."

Last updated on the January 12th 2008

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Looking at My Whole Life