Dalia couldn’t pick things up or separate anything with her hands. She seemed clumsy and careless and her hands were weak. Asin knew that it was because she didn’t have nails. She had made her small and thin metal nails with leather bands and had trained her to use them. Although Dalia’s hands were clumsy and weak, she had strong arms and full volume lungs that made her capable of long hours of swimming and diving, better than most men and women of the ship.

Asin would go on diving trips with her husband. She too had strong and muscular arms and she was the fastest swimmer in the ship. She would find and dive out peculiar objects from the drowned cities, stones shaped like the creatures of pre-rain times, wooden frames, large glass panels etc. Once she had recovered a moss covered stone that looked like a man’s head with a scarf rolled around his head. Everyone had taken a guess of what the stone was about. Most of them believed that it was a man’s head but since the face of the statue was corroded, it was hard to say for sure. It was a valuable one-piece stone that had many uses and was sold for a good price in Oxan market to a blacksmith ship that needed it for anvil. Asin didn’t get pregnant for five years after Dalia’s birth and she always regretted that she had. Everyone knew that the sea brought amnesia, whether it was because of the salt water, the hot and humid weather of the dry season, the fog and storms of the rainy season or the fish they ate that had very short memories, no one knew for sure. The residents of the sea were forgetful of their past and memories meant nothing to them. Perhaps that was the reason they relied on the stranded Saviour Ship to keep their past memories for them. Not that they would forget everything, but what they remembered was always vague and ambiguous. They had no past or future. Time, like their ship, had been suspended. The vague memory of the ship residents that had put Asin in the safe side for some time had caused her trouble. Although Asin had not given them anything from her past, and she had an unusual girl, but the ship residents didn’t have a clearer past than she did. Asin was a member of the Avij diving team and this group was the income source of the ship. They all agreed to that, but as long as Asin was still a member of the team, before her diving career was forgotten.