Eventually, despite his boundless thirst for learning, Laurence began to tire in listening to Yun and Louisa talk about things that were far above what he understood of the subject. So when they began discussing The Shift he would explore the ship they flew in.
The ship’s insides were as wonderful to Laurence as on the outside, filled with interesting design choices and shapes that were beautiful in their simplicity. He spent hours just walking round the ship and looking at all the idiosyncrasies that made Rosie’s Demise the airship that Jonas loved so much, but even that was not enough to keep his attention permanently. The rest of the time he spent just sitting on the skydeck of the ship, feeling the wind blow through his air as they soared over the desolate land below.
One day, around a week into the journey, Laurence was sitting on the skydeck when a young woman came up to sit next to him. They both stared out into the distance for half an hour before the woman spoke. “I love the streams. Each slipstream that the airships run on has a different scent and feeling as we ride them. Some are fast, some are slow, and some are turbulent to the point of being dangerous.” Her voice was rapturous as she spoke of the pathways of wind that the ship flew on. “I've seen you walking round the ship before, but I never expected you to sit on the skydeck and appreciate the wind like I do. I'm Dunwu, but most of the people in the ship call me Sleepy if they want to keep their face intact. What’s your name?”
“I’m Laurence. Why do you have two names? And why will you attack people if they use the first name you told me? I don’t understand.” Laurence cocked his head.
“It’s because my half-brother is captain of the vessel and he introduced me as Dunwu when I first got on the ship. I’ve always hated that name, but he still introduces me to people that way to annoy me.” She leant back, allowing the wind to properly run through her long black hair. “People started calling me Sleepy when I took on the role of engineer. There was so much to fix on here originally, but that’s why my brother bought it so cheaply. For a good three months I had next to no sleep because there was so much to fix. I ended up looking like a grumpy monster with huge bags under my eyes.” She laughed into the wind then lay spread eagle on the floor. “It was worth it though, to get all of this flying in the sky.”
“It was. Everything I’ve seen since getting on the ship was really well maintained. If the ship was a wreck when you got it then I’m impressed. All the workmanship has been flawless. If you fixed up this entire ship in three months then you are a gifted mechanic.” Laurence smiled, looking at the tanned woman beside him. He had already realised that she would be a perfect vessel for spreading the Book of Creation. Since he met Damascus he had began thinking about how to spread his book. He knew that there were likely next to no practitioners of the Book left in Babel because if there were, people would not treat him as such a commodity. Every so often he would come across people like Jake or Trevor, or now Sleepy who he felt like deserved to learn from the book. He could not tell if they had good character but when they had potential to become a practitioner of the book he would get a strange feeling in his gut and a couple of days later there would be a book for them to learn from.
“I never said that I fixed everything in three months. In fact I still don’t think this ship is anywhere near finished. It just took me three months to realise I was doing worse work when I was sleep deprived than when I was well rested. If I was smarter I would have realised that sooner.” Standing up, she began to stretch her legs, letting her long, loose trousers roll back down over her calves and bare feet. “If you want I could show you round the ship. I could tell you how things work.” She held out her hand. “But in return you have to tell me why you're such an odd child.”
Laurence grasped the hand without a second thought. The knowledge of how this ship worked would be helpful to him, but he would have taken the tour anyway. Telling the woman about himself took no effort on his part, and he felt like he had no reason to hide things from her. She would find out the one thing he needed to be hidden from people because of her brother anyway. “Deal.”
“Well we may as well start with the skydeck, seeing as we are on it.” She swept her hand in front of her. “Welcome to the main access port of Rosie’s Demise. From this point on I will be conducting a detailed tour of the ship we are standing on.” They both laughed at Sleepy’s feigned seriousness. “I really like the skydeck, mainly because there is a set of «Array Markers» at key points round the floor that make the wind less powerful up here. It obviously can't stop storms or tornadoes, but for things like the winds we make while we travel it quashes them.”
“What's an array marker? And what's a quash?” Interrupted Laurence. Reading the Book had given him an incredible vocabulary, especially in fields of creative learning; it was not perfect, however.
“Quash is a word that means to suppress, or to flatten. As for an array marker, they are items that dictate a range or location for an array. There are markers all over the ship that correspond to a specific array in the engine room, but I'll show you that later. You know about the entry hatch that we take to get out here, but you see this depression in the floor?” She pointed at an area about a meter away from where Laurence sat. He nodded after having a quick look. “That is the second array up here. The depression only occurs when it's deactivated, but when it's active you can step on it and it will swap your space with the space that is currently inhabiting the matching array point in the brig.”
“Can you activate it now?” Laurence’s eyes glittered as he thought about the concept of instant transpiration. He had tried to work out the concept of how a set of symbols that he repeated could pull an item into a special dimension but a key concept had avoided him. Giving his most winning smile he said, “I really want to know how this works.”
“Aren't you a cute one.” Said Sleepy. “Unfortunately I can't. We literally cannot turn it on while the ship is in movement. If we did then you might end up inside a crate or something.” She frowned, “I'm not sure about the specifics because we've never tried it, but that could happen if we were moving quick enough.
“Either way, that's basically everything up here. Do you want to see the bridge?”
“The bridge? Why do you have a river on a ship?”
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