EFFECTS OF OPENNESS / CH. 8: HATHELLAH
YOUNG FAMILY COMPLEX. 12.15PM, MONSOL 5TH SEPTEMBER
“Hi Hathie, allow me to introduce Her Excellency the ambassador of Atlantis, Ruth Emilia Matthew ... Oh, bother.” Robert blushed, “Sorry Ruth, I should used the long form, shouldn't I? What was it?”
“I, Ruth bnt Emilia Yzella Edwin hi Matthew Wilma Boris, ambassador of Karella, queen of all Merfolk by will of the high council of Atlantis, undisputed sovereign over the deeps and shallows, greet you Hathellah, grand-daughter of Hathellah, grand-daughter of Hathellah in the name of her majesty. But I admit surprise. There hasn't been a bearer of the name Hathellah in Atlantis since around the time of Karella Iron trader.”
“I know.” Hathellah replied, “In the early twenty-first century, as the Mer hid, Hathellah the younger died. My ancestor heard by letter from Hathellah his grandmother that his sister was dead, and that although he now walked among landmen, he must so name a daughter, and so keep the line alive. I have the letter.”
“Then Hathellah, undisputed princess of the Outer Mer, though there has been peace between the Mer for many centuries, by the oath that joined the Inner and Outer Mer, I must ask: do you wish to claim your crown over the outer Mer, and separate what has been joined?”
Hathellah had spent a long time with her grandmother, and with Atlantis making its presence known, she'd realised she might be be asked that question sometime, though it had seemed impossible when she first heard about it. She knew what to say: “What need have I of a crown, or war, when there are fish in the sea and my people are governed wisely and without prejudice?”
“That's a relief then!” Ruth said, “Out of interest, if I'd asked in Mer would you have understood?”
“I might have been able to guess what you were asking. Grandma did try to teach me, but even she struggled.”
“You have rights, Hathellah. Do you know them?”
“A seat on the council of Atlantis, the right to divide the Mer, and confusingly, the right to choose any man as husband. Can't I do that anyway?”
“In other words, it means no arranged or forced marriages for you, unless you're doing the arranging or forcing, and if you found that right being trampled on, then the armies and navies of the mer are yours to defend your honour. Shame they're all on Earth at the moment. Except for me, I guess, and a few others. I presume you've never met my cousin James who works for Robert's professor's wife?”
“No. Should I have?”
“No, I was just wondering if I needed to throttle him for not mentioning you.”
“How did you hear about me?”
“Accident or divine providence, highness. I was wondering if I was at all related to your brother, who's rather caught my attention, and your father asked if you'd heard about your brother's plans.”
“What, the shuttle service? It'd destroy the economy, wouldn't it?”
“That's what my cousin Boris Fieldshaper told him, but he also sent him some calculations showing that a variant of it could suck comets to pieces in order to fill the odd crater or two with salt water.”
“Salt water as in fish and... squid?” Hathellah asked.
“Exactly,” Rose agreed. It seemed Hathellah knew far more than her brother.
“A thought occurred to me, when the impossible came true.” Hathellah said. “A few months ago my only realistic option for meeting Mer-men consisted of drifting in a boat in the middle of the sea and shouting out what my name was. Now there are a few more options, aren't there? And for the sake of the bloodline I need to marry one, don't I?”
“You have the right to choose, but the only unmarried Mer-man I know on Mars is James who's getting married any week now, so I don't recommend choosing him.”
“I could do that?”
“He'd probably hate you forever, she certainly would, but unless they'd vowed to marry each other, the law and histories say you could.”
“Just in case I change my mind if I meet him, tell them to, can you? I don't like having that option.”
“OK.”
“Now, please?”
“Really? OK.” Bemused, but somewhat scared at the way Hathellah accepted that she might use that ancient right, Ruth called James.
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JAMES' FIELD DOME. 12:30PM
“Hi Ruth, what's up?” James asked, glad for the excuse to have a break from the hoeing.
“Hi cousin, I don't suppose you're in the presence of your beloved are you?”
“Yes. She's just out of ear-shot and deciding she's going to ask me why I'm getting calls on my day off.”
“An oath must be kept, but a mere promise or understanding can be unmade. So Hathellah granddaughter of Hathellah granddaughter of Hathellah asks that you make yourself unavailable to her ancient right of free choice.” James dropped his hoe.
“You're serious?” he asked, and beckoned Margaret over.
“You never asked Robert what his twin sister was called,” Ruth's voice said from his wrist as he put her on speaker.
“Hathellah died!” James said, feeling a chill go down his spine, “Centuries ago!”
“Hathellah the younger died, but Hathellah the elder still lived. So she passed her name to a daughter of her grandson, who walked among men. Thus Hathellah lives.”
“My grandmother had but one child. When grandfather died, she followed her son and taught me what I know about my name.” Hathellah added.
“Did you hear that?” Ruth asked.
“I did, please thank the princess for restricting her free choice.”
“She does not restrict it, James, she cannot under the oath. So she asks that you make yourself unavailable,” Ruth said. “She has no need of a crown but recognises the need for a husband of pure Mer blood, and there are not so many mermen on Mars. Do not present her with an easy fish.”
“I understand. Thank her on behalf of both of us. Margaret, with Ruth hearing, and in the sight of God, I vow to you that I will marry you within two months.”
“It is done, princess.” Ruth said, sounding relieved, and ended the connection.
“Urm, that wasn't necessary, was it, James?” Margaret said.
“Yes it was. You know I spoke about the Outer Mer? It turns out that, despite it being general knowledge that their royal line died out with the death in childbirth of Hathellah around the year twenty-twenty, they do have a princess, she's here on Mars, and one of the treaty conditions vowed under oath three millennia ago was that she could pick anyone to be her husband. As long as they weren't bound by an oath, of course. No Hathellah's going to make herself an oath-breaker.”
“Hold on, are we talking about a name or a title?”
“It's both. When Hathellah has children or grandchildren she can choose which will produce an heir and carry on the royal name, and they name a daughter Hathellah. There can never be more than two Hathellahs, an elder and younger.”
“I guess I understand. And Hathellah can choose anyone?”
“One Hathellah chose the crown prince of all merdom, just before his wedding day, but someone got him word that she was thinking of him and he and his bride-to-be made vows to marry before he got the message of her decision. If he'd heard that she had chosen, then by swearing to his intended then he'd have broken the oath that brought peace, but he had witnesses that he hadn't. She insisted on a trial, and he and his beloved swam a mile in shark-infested waters to prove their innocence. That was proven and they had their honeymoon, Hathellah chose his younger brother instead, and all lived happily ever after, etc, according to the song. According to another version she secretly poisoned big brother to make herself queen of all Merdom, and her husband declared being king is too much like hard work, let the council rule.”
“Hmm. When was this?”
“I can't remember. I guess it was some time after Jason and the Argonauts tried to kidnap the royal choir. Back to the young princess, I guess she's just heard I'm here and doesn't want to think about exercising that right she's got.”
“Nice of her to think of not stealing you from me,” Margaret said.
“I'm not so sure its good that she thought she might, though.”
“But... marriage has to be without undue pressure.”
“I'd have to have choose between breaking an oath which has stood for three millennia or a miserable marriage. Also, if she decided you'd made me break the oath, she could have you classed as a dangerous shark that needed dealing with. It'd be the sort of thing that would rip mer society in two. Almost as certainly as her picking up her crown.”
“Her crown?”
“Theoretically, she could dissolve the oath that unites Inner and Outer Mer. I expect that she'll get really bored of answering that she doesn't want to do that if she meets many people formally.”
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YOUNG FAMILY COMPLEX, MARS, 12.35PM
“It is done, princess,” Ruth reported.
“Thank you, ambassador. You understand, I don't want that power, but...”
“You really don't need the temptation to use it either,” Ruth said, nodding.
Mrs Young looked between Ruth and her daughter, and said, “I understood all the words, but I've no concept about what you girls are talking about.”
“Mrs Young, the Mer language had contact with semitic languages like Hebrew and Aramaic for a long time. The Hebrew word hamalkah means the queen, with the ha at the beginning meaning 'the' and the 'ah' at the end turning melek, king into the feminine, queen. We borrowed the 'ha' and 'ah', and stuck them on a word 'thell' from our language. But the language has
moved on now, and we no longer use the word 'thell' to mean king or prince. But your mother-in-law bore a name which used to mean 'The Princess', and passed it on to your daughter. And it's not just a name, it is also title, with rights, and authority. The Mer used to be two tribes, the Outer and Inner Mer, that is to say the mer who used to live in the Atlantic, as opposed to the Mediterranean. Your daughter is princess of one part of the Mer people, and if she wishes to undo more than three thousand years of integration, under the treaty that united our peoples she has the right to take up her crown and become queen of the Outer Mer — I don't honestly know how many people she would have, how many families she would tear apart, but she could do it.”
“But what was that about free choice?”
“Under the treaty sworn by oath, which forever unites our people, Hathellah has free choice of any man not sworn to another as her husband. Which technically would include anyone who's made promises but not vows. Reasonably enough, she wishes that her granddaughter or great-granddaughter on whom she will bestow the title to be able to hunt and swim as merfolk, not just splash around in the water like landfolk. For that to happen she needs to marry a merman. And there aren't many of those on Mars as far as I know.”
“So you're thinking of leaving Mars?” Mr Young asked his daughter.
“Of course not, Dad. Why would I want to go to overcrowded Earth? No, what I'm thinking is that Ruth's plans are going to bring some engineers here, and maybe some forcefield designers and I get to choose one of them. Please ask her Majesty to send me some nice ones to pick from, Ruth. Absolutely no third cousins. Speaking of which, want to come and have a look at the genealogy?”
“Absolutely.”
“Can the rest of us look too?” Mrs Young asked.
“Ruth? Grandma told me it was a secret of the deep.”
“Atlantis is secret no longer, Hathellah, and you have the rights of a council-member.”
“What does that mean?”
“In this case, you can decide to reveal secrets to people.”
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
“I've got a lot to learn, don't I?”
“Probably.”
“I suppose there are plus points to the fact I'm probably going to get fired then.”
“What?” her parents exclaimed in unison.
“Can I explain over lunch? I do want to see if Ruth's a relative.”
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YOUNG FAMILY COMPLEX. 12.50
“Now there is a name I recognise,” Ruth said, as they sorted back through the family tree. The name was one of Robert and Hathellah's great-great grandmother's husband's great grandparents.
“Really him?” Hathellah said, surprised.
“Not him, exactly, but his sister. Parent's names match, anyway. She got mid-Atlantic in a rowing boat, but ran into some trouble. I can't remember if it was a broken arm or dislocated shoulder, or what it was, but she couldn't row any more. She was drifting and miserable and a storm was on its way and got some unexpected help.”
“Nothing quite so romantic as being saved from almost certain miserable death?” Hathellah asked.
“Not according to the version I heard. Guy who rescued her didn't stop to ask if help was on the way or not. Since it had been, she was really miffed. But by then she'd seen a bit too much.”
“So what happened?” Robert asked.
“Well, he'd planned to just sink her boat, but he'd called someone to help earlier. Then that guy turned up and being the charmer he was said of course they'd take her personal possessions off it, and rather than sink her beloved boat, why not tow it a long way from her last reported position? While Mr Rescuer was doing the towing, he treated her wound, offered her a nice warm shower on his sub, clean clothes — he was a trader so he had loads — and then cooked her a candle-lit meal. She decided that she liked him much better than Mr Rescuer. The clinching issue was that he said it was perfectly OK for her to call her parents and tell them some cover story. I think the final version was she'd been rescued by a really reclusive millionaire, and a few months later they got an invitation and tickets to a private wedding on some Greek island.”
“What would her alternative have been? Prison?” Mr Young asked.
“Another option was her boat drifting at sea not far from where she'd started from and someone writing to the press saying that yes, she'd bottled out early on, he'd helped her get her computer to report false readings and had hidden her, but the stress of all the false reports had got to her and she'd gone a bit loopy, unable to separate truth from fantasy, plus the boat had slipped its secret moorings.”
“So not imprisonment, but her reputation in tatters?”
“Yes. It had to be something so that if she said anything about what had really happened she wouldn't be believed. At the time our leaders were pretty sure that discovery would mean extermination, so basically she was presented with three choices: stay of her own free will, stay anyway, or return with negative credibility.”
“And were they right?”
“I don't know. But I'm not aware of any genuine thought-hearers lining up to be tested by the Institute for the Human Mind during the relevant time period.”
“Ah, no.”
“So, what does that link make us, Ruth?” Robert asked.
“Roughly eighth cousins so far, but let's keep looking, if that's OK.”
“You have an amazing memory,” Robert said.
“Stories like that make family history fun and easy to remember. I'd be pretty stuck to remember her grand-son's name if he hadn't done something really stupid.”
“What?” Robert asked.
“I'll tell you later, but it's a sad story. His widow didn't discover she was pregnant with their child until after the funeral.”
“Oh.”
“Next page backwards,” Hathellah said, “and we're into Mer.”
“Hmm,” Ruth said, “Interesting. This one's sister is really famous, Karella Iron-trader's grandmother, Sathzakara Evangelia. So there's another link, but it's a long way back.”
“And you're descended from Karella Iron-trader?”
“No her cousin, Martha Booklover, who married Kostas Atomworker.”
“Those names don't mean anything to me.”
“I'm not really surprised, your ancestor left a long time ago. Do you even know of Thomas Bombuilder's legacy?”
“No? What was that?”
“I expect your ancestor's grandmother was one of those who approved his plans, but it was a deep deep secret at the time. Did she tell him to make sure he lived inland, and not near a major city?”
“She did. Why?”
“Because while your ancestor and his friends were thinking of getting passports to ease their travels among the land-folk, someone else — my ancestor, Thomas Bomb-builder — was arguing that there was no way we were going to be able to establish a home for ourselves in space or on Mars without being detected, we were at least a couple of generations too slow. But we could rig the power supplies to be bombs, which would be something that might persuade the landmen to leave us alone if they found us. Nasty indiscriminate things. They're almost as bad as depth-charges.”
“Almost?” Robert has heard about the Mer's hatred of that weapon system.
“They were designed as an automatic system. There's one, now safely tucked away inside lots of forcefields in Atlantis, which was designed as a demonstrator
'our bomb's bigger than your bomb' sort of thing. The rest are purely automatic. No one has their finger on the button.”
“You make it sound like they're still around,” Mr Young said.
“Disarmament is in progress,” Ruth said, “but no one wants to make a mistake, so it's happening very very carefully.”
“The Mer put booby-trapped nuclear bombs under major coastal cities?” Mrs Young asked.
“If you remember, Maam, land-men have set off rather a lot in past centuries, so we knew you as a sub-species — or at least some of those you chose as leaders — were psychologically capable of deciding to vapourize half a million people. We wanted to make sure it didn't happen to us and our children.”
“I don't think we should be disarming yet,” Hathellah said, “Someone might need more persuading than most before they give us what we want.”
“Hathie, be nice!” her mother rebuked her.
Ruth also looked at Hathellah in surprise, and said “Princess of the outer Mer, you have inherited authority and power. I pray that before you use them you will learn the values of the hundreds of ancestresses who bore your title, and unlearn the values you have learned from entertainment channels. We are not barbarians who take pleasure in violence or forced submission. We might ask a whale for help, and of course we might kill a dangerous shark, but before your ancestor left us we took an oath to accept no slavery of women, and we have not made slaves of men nor animals since the days of the Romans. We do not issue threats that we are not prepared to carry out. Would you really choose to destroy a city and leave it a radioactive hole in the ground? If not, if you are Mer, you do not threaten to.”
Hathellah didn't cry, but Ruth heard the sadness in her voice. “I have not been raised Mer, but a mixture of cultures. Martian, land-Earthling, some bits of Mer. I do not even have much Mer blood in me. Can you help me learn what I must?”
“Of course, princess,” Ruth said. “I'll even try to teach your brother some things too. I wonder if he remembers a lesson from earlier today, or if I need to remind him?”
“Urm, about catching fish?” Robert asked, nervously.
“Yes, that lesson.”
“Really?” he asked, deciding she couldn't want him to ask her out now.
Ruth raised her eyebrows, and decided that he clearly hadn't learned his lesson well enough.
“I guess you do mean now,” he shook his head in amazement, “Ruth, since we're urm, right in the middle of a discussion about bombs and genealogies and entirely not private, will you go out with me?”
“Yes I will, Robert, that's why we're talking genealogies, remember? And we've just checked that we're not close relatives. I'm very happy to start walking together with you, which is the Mer way of talking about it. For everyone's future reference, the Mer way of things involves a fairly long period of walking together, and if everything works out well that's followed by the decision to marry, calling a party and taking marriage vows probably within thirty-six hours.”
“I wonder if that become fashionable because of a previous Hathellah looking for a husband,” Hathellah asked.
“Maybe,” Ruth replied.
“I'm probably going to really embarrass my children,” Mrs Young said, “but what does that do to contraception?”
“Mer life is a bit like Martian life, Mrs Young: traditionally dangerous, without a long long list of beauty spots people hope to visit together. That tends to mean that a couple don't aim at having a few years of honeymoon before adding midnight interruptions, since that might mean childless widowhood.”
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YOUNG FAMILY COMPLEX, 2PM
“So, I don't believe there's anyone who'd start a life on Mars just to get cheap medical care,” Hathie said, “I don't believe there's anyone who should come to Mars for that reason, but they're asking me to promise to tell people I know who might benefit from it all about it. It's immoral or at least unethical, surely? If they're not fit and healthy, how are they going to contribute to Martian society?”
“What about people who'd be interested in coming to Mars, but need an operation, and think that means before they come? They might think they can't afford to do both.” Ruth suggested.
“Anywhere? I mean.... are you really suggesting it'd be cheaper to pay for treatment here than get medical treatment elsewhere on the planet?”
“Maybe nowhere else with Martian standards of care, where they speak English, plus of course lower gravity which might help recovery," Robert suggested, “You did say there are too many doctors here, due to the university expecting MarsCorp to massively increase immigration.”
“OK, so there are bored doctors... that doesn't mean we need to fill Mars with sick people!”
“Ah, I get it,” Ruth said, “you're thinking the only people this might apply to have some sort of chronic problem?”
“Who else?”
“Well, getting personal, my cousin Boris. Back injury when he was a kid, paralysed from the waist down. From what I understand it's perfectly fixable here, with a bit of this modern wizardry called regrowth therapy, but it isn't possible on Atlantis. I can't really imagine him tending any crops, but maybe I'm just misjudging him. It's years since I've spoken to him much.”
“What's he like?”
“Just your run of the mill mad scientist,” Ruth said, “only without quite as much drive to take over the world.”
“And apparently he's biased in favour of brunettes,” chipped in Robert. “But Hathie, can I check that notice you were waving around earlier?”
“Sure,” Hathellah passed the letter that had got her so upset.
“This isn't the right number,” he said, a few seconds later, “and there's no signature.”
“Pardon?”
“No signature, so it's not official policy, and I've had to get all sorts of stuff signed by the employment office and the vice chancellor's office to get the remote site set up. The phone numbers all start zero one, not forty-two.”
“Forty-two?” Mrs Young asked, with a growing smile.
“What are you grinning about, Mum?” Hathellah asked.
“Well, when I worked at the university, which was a while ago, I admit, the forty-two numbers were someone's idea of an in-joke.”
“A joke?”
“Remember your classics, Hathie? What's forty-two?”
“The ultimate answer to life the universe and everything, you mean? No, you mean this is from the experimental philosophy department?”
“That or artificial intelligence,” her mother replied.
“Ruth, do I have the authority to have someone throttled?” Hathie asked.
“No, sorry princess, you could threaten them with a forced marriage, but that might cause some political tension, I expect.”
“What you could do,” Robert said, “is let the office know you've forwarded it to Ruth, for her cousin. Then we could see how deep the pocket of their research budget is, I mean, they do promise that people will get a twenty-five percent discount on their treatment costs.”
“Call their bluff you mean?” Hathellah asked.
“Would your cousin be interested in coming to Mars?” Robert asked.
“Well, on one hand space exploration has been his dream since he was about six or seven. On the other hand, there's a difference between dreaming of being a spaceman and the wonderful world of turning compost.”
“If he were here, would he be able to continue to continue his normal work?” Hathellah asked.
“Boris? His official work or his normal work? According to his sister, his normal work is sitting around daydreaming or inventing useless things to do with forcefields. Officially he's supposed to be working on something that's probably secret from most people here.”
“You mean it's not from me?” Hathellah asked.
“Princess, I think I'd need confirmation from my queen before I reveal secrets to you. I expect there's not much I can withhold from you, but it might depend on you first taking vows of some sort, you formally taking up your seat on the council, and other such things.”
“But you said I can reveal secrets?”
“Some, like the genealogy, are really only hiding the fact that Mer are, or about your family history. I'm sure that class of secret can be shared with family.”
“Oh, right, thank you.”
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MARS COUNCIL OFFICES, 3PM
“Your Excellency,” Mack greeted Ruth formally.
“What ever happened to 'Wotcha, Ruthie'?” Ruth asked.
“Inappropriate, don't you think?”
“You call Alice 'Alice', please call me Ruth.”
“You're going to insist?”
“Depends.”
“What on?”
“Whether you calling me your excellency wins my new boyfriend here a better hearing. He's got a lovely idea to make me a swimming pool, and what's even better is one of Atlantis's best forcefield designers is involved too, so it's actually workable.”
“We've got a swimming pool, Ruth. I've seen you swimming in it, remember?”
“That's not a swimming pool, Mack, that's an overgrown bath. I was thinking of Hellas to start with, but there's too many claims down there, and it's too far away, too.”
“Hold on, Ruth, I think you've left me several light years behind, can you start from the beginning?”
“Sorry Mack, my strong desire for the future of Martian terraforming is that eventually there be one or more seas on the planet, complete with algae, plankton, and fish. Where when I say eventually, that's lik,e three or four years away, according to my optimistic timescale. This would hopefully have obvious benefits for atmospheric stability and give me somewhere I could go swimming. Robert here, who's Simon's apprentice, wrote a paper about using forcefields to accelerate and decelerate a life-support module between the two planets that ended up in the hands of a forcefield engineer on Atlantis. He replied, talking about some bits of it that won't work, but suggested a few modifications that would turn the receiving end into a ground-based comet shredder, capable of handling, urm, what size of comets, Robert?”
“Fifteen kilometre diameter comets, and metallic or stony asteroids up to ten kilometres. Thus giving Mars a proper defence against any stray asteroids, as well as enormously enhancing the annual water delivery potential.”
“Now,” Ruth said, “I'm also going to tell you that the Atlantis science academy are also looking at what our science could do to turn rock and regolith into oxygen, nitrogen and water for the same purpose, but if that solution works, and if the council decided to go that route, then what happens in the middle of the black box would be entirely top secret stuff.
Robert's scheme however, is an application of Martian know-how, and he'd be trying various small scale prototypes before going for the final design. Having said that, I'd personally be very keen to get the manufacturing of the final version done on Atlantis, for the sake of reliability and avoiding dangerous mistakes.”
“And you want permission to start this hare-brained scheme?” Mack asked.
“Permission to conduct small scale tests sir,” Robert said, “but ultimately, if all goes well, permission to shred a comet fragment and then a comet.”
“And then if that goes well,” Ruth added, “we'd like the council to suggest Mars Corp send bigger comets, or for what I feel is the inevitable space-going navy of Atlantis to handle the delivery of the big ones for turning craters into seas while Mars Corp keeps working on the atmospheric deliveries.”
“I see. And you're doing this all out of the goodness of your heart?”
“I was taking you at your word, from one of our previous meetings, Mack. You did say that if we could magic up some deeps and shallows on Mars, then my queen was welcome to rule them. We'll need to define what some means, but I wasn't thinking of much of Mars, really. Just a few of the bigger craters. Earth's coastline is crowded Mack. What I'm thinking is a combined treaty that gives Mars some Atlantis-style crystal domes, and massively helps terraforming, in exchange for some extra space for Mer to make their homes, swim under a different sky and play dolphin in a third of a gee. That sounds really fun. Also, and I've just thought of this, It occurs to me that if Atlantis developed a fleet of space-going subs, as was planned some centuries ago, then they'd be wanting to land in water too. Atlantis is in no hurry to be swamped by tourists and I'm sure Mars has no desire to trash its economy, but I think there would be real benefits to there being a direct service, as it were, say for the use of Martians and Mer only.”
“Ruthie, lass, you amaze me. Get your seal of office here and talk it over with your queen, if you're just making that up on the spot. If you can deliver on any of these things then I think the council would be interested. As long as you don't mind us sailing on your seas.”
“Sailing, no problem. Catching fish with a rod and line for consumption by the fisherman and his family within a few days, almost certainly no problem, That sort of subsistence fishing is one of my aims for the fish stocks, but we might have to limit how many can fish in a day. However, unless we flood half of Mars then I don't think there'll ever be enough fish to have commercial fishing.”