Hilfa laughed his slightly forced laugh. He’d learned it the way he’d learned Greek. A laugh was a word to him, a part of human communication. I didn’t know whether the Saeli really laughed or not. I’d learned to read Hilfa’s expressions, a little, working with him for so long, and I thought one of them meant amusement, but I wasn’t sure. He knew I was joking about him eating a fish, but I didn’t know if he really understood what a joke was, or why I might think it was funny to make one. “I don’t eat fish,” he said, seriously.

“Silly Hilfa. Why do you work on a fishing boat if you don’t eat fish?” I teased.

“I like the waves and the wind,” Hilfa said, seriously. I wondered whether he would stay and take oath or leave for another planet on some Saeli ship. I hoped he’d stay. I liked him. And he might. He liked the waves and the wind, after all.

“We’re glad to have you working with us,” Marsilia said, as the jib came around a final time.

“Also I can study the Platonic fish,” Hilfa said, entirely serious, as usual. “The radial symmetry of fish on this planet is fascinating. Everything in this ocean is symmetrical. I keep hoping we will one day pull something out that isn’t, but we never do.”

“We’re never going to,” I said, thinking of mosaics of Greek fish and their strange stretched shapes. Then I saw Marsilia stiffen, staring at the quay.

“Trouble,” she said, then shook her head at me as she saw me twitch. “Only for me. Probably some kind of political disruption. We’re signing a new foreign relations treaty, and maybe some of our negotiations came unstuck.” She let the gloater slide back into the tub. “It looks as if I’m going to have to rush off. Can you two manage unloading without me?”

“Of course,” I said, without even a sigh. Knowing that she’d have to dash off to a crisis, or have one prevent her from showing up now and then, was all part of having Marsilia working for me. I wondered sometimes whether part of the attraction of working on the boat for her was the fact she couldn’t be interrupted while we were out at sea. But I knew a lot of it was that the sea was in her blood, from her mother—she too liked the waves and the wind.