Islands in the Sky

3.8

Sema looked around herself a little more. She could see fairly well, and see further into the city, from where she was standing. Everything was crowded, she noticed again. Most of the buildings were three and four stories high, and the streets were very narrow, at best barely only two hand-carts wide, and often not even that. There were constant arguments and reprimands from all around as people tried to move goods past one another, and each complained that the other was in the way.

There were people everywhere, and constant noise, and there was a terrible smell, too. Sameh began to notice it now she was in among the city’s buildings, and on the downwind side of an island. The wind had been blowing onto the docks when she was walking around them earlier, blowing from the open sky and onto the city. Earlier, on the docks, she had been breathing fresh air, and while mostly she still was here, close to the city’s edge, she was now also inside the city, entirely surrounded by it, and the air was stiller and was carrying scents from the buildings upwind of her, too.

Now, she began to notice the smell more strongly.

It wasn’t an overwhelming smell, but it was noticeable. An unpleasant smell, like a pigsty and a cesspit combined, but mixed through with the odour of cooking food and the sweaty staleness people got at the end of winter, when it had been too cold to wash for several months.

The smell wasn’t so strong it was choking, but Sema was still very aware of it. The sweatiness was probably just the sheer number of people here, she thought, all packed together, all working hard. She’d never been around so many people before, and that was probably why she was noticing it now. It wasn’t that they were especially unclean, she decided, it was just there were a large number of them. She supposed the cesspit part of the smell was probably noticeable for the same reason. The people here must do what everyone did with waste, simply cast it off the side of their island. Just like Sema had at home, and on her boat, but with many thousands more people doing so, all at once. That must make the air smell a little as it went over, she thought. That was all.

She would get used to it.

She stood there thinking, and suddenly realized part of her assumption was wrong. The city didn’t actually smell nearly as awful as it should, not with this many people about. That cesspit part of the smell was too mild. There were so many people here that she could smell their sweat, but she could barely smell their toilet waste. Not strongly.

That didn’t quite make sense.

She thought about that, and looked around, and eventually realized why.

Here, unlike at home, there were pipes for the toilet waste. Pipes, rather than buckets. All along the gap between the islands, she could see the ends of pipes extending out into the air. She looked, and after a moment understood what those pipes were for. The toilet apparatuses which filled ancient buildings, and which on Sema’s island had not worked in generations, here they worked. Here the waste ran through pipes and then fell neatly into the sky. And here, as well, the piping was sensibly designed. The pipes stuck out from the cliff-faces a little way, so waste fell cleanly away from the island, and didn’t slide down the banks, and catch, and fester, to make a horrible smell for days afterwards.

That was probably a very important thing, Sema thought. She remembered making that mistake more than once, the way everyone had, throwing a bucket where the edge of an island sloped outwards, rather than back beneath her feet. You did once, and usually smelled it as soon as you had, and then all you could do was not go back to that spot for a month, hoping the mess would drop off or wash away with rain on its own. Unless you wished to climb down on a rope and clean it away, which would be both dangerous and unpleasant to try, hoping was all you could do. It was probably the worst thing about living in the sky, other than slipping and falling off an island. Thinking about it, Sema could see how it would quickly become a terrible problem with thousands of people all casting buckets into the air, all making a mess on the island-sides, and with nowhere else to go and throw buckets out, either, because there were so many of them here. Using the old pipes was a much better way.

It was a much, much better way.

She thought about that, and the ingenuity needed to realize it, and also the craft and organisation needed to make the system work. It was another indication of what this city was, she thought. It wasn’t just a collection of people who happened to have ended up here. It was cleverness. It was finding better ways to do things. It was making people’s lives better, too.

She wanted to do that, she thought. She wanted to be clever, the way she had been clever when she was working out how to make her boat. And in a place like this city, which seemed to value that kind of cleverness, she ought to be able to useful somewhere, if only she could work out where.

She turned away from the view of the city, and decided to go and explore it later. It looked big and a little frightening, and like it would be very easy to get lost, or taken advantage of, or worse.

Before she did anything else, she needed to trade for money, and then she needed to work out what to do with herself in the days ahead. It seemed better to do both those things near the docks, along the edge of the city, where things were a little familiar, and what she was accustomed to.

Or at least, what she had become accustomed to in the last few hours.