“You can notify your company if you want,” Indra said. “You can do whatever you like—but you don’t have your guards here to defend you anymore. The best thing to do is make for the next port. All we want is to go home to our families, do you hear? Our families! The people your company stole us from!” His voice broke. “Now turn to land. We’ve made a pact, the lot of us. If you won’t take us to shore, we’ll sink you. We know the lifeboats are all locked away, and only you can release them. It doesn’t matter. We’ll all step on dry land together, or we’ll all go down together—and we’ll take you with us. Your mind might be safe in there, behind all that armor, but we’ll tear out your bilge pumps, smash your engines, and let water in through your propeller assemblies. We’ll open your bulkheads and flood your compartments. We’ll send you to the bottom. And us along with you. It’s either that, or you turn to land and bring us to port. You hear?” Indra banged on the hatch with the bloody iron bar, for emphasis. “Do you hear?”

There was a long pause. Then the Sea Wolf’s engines whined, revving up, and the bow turned and began to bear east, toward the American shore.

A shout went up through the crew, the men embracing each other.

But there was no expression on Son’s face at all.

III Semiosphere

1

Chapter 25

It is not just the symbols we use in our language that are arbitrary—it is what we choose to signify with them.

We give words only to the things that matter to us as a society. The things that make no difference to us are erased from our world by never becoming a part of language in the first place.

In this way, each language organizes the world into a pattern. Each language decides what has meaning—and what does not. As native speakers, we are born inside this pattern, this semiotic cosmos.

—Dr. Ha Nguyen, How Oceans Think

25

ISTANBUL. The “café” where they had agreed to meet Deniz was nothing more than an empty space on the Asian side of the Bosporus. An ancient chinar tree shaded the patchwork of cobblestones and concrete. Once there had probably been a wooden house here—one of the yalis, the mansions that lined the Bosporus.

The mansion must have burned, long ago, and never been replaced. Now, in that gap, there was a view out onto the Bosporus from the city benches and the clutch of tables the café next door had set up.