You might well ask-and some did-why bother to go to all the trouble of patrolling for kelp and rhizomes and bits of eelgrass if you weren’t going to grow anything in their place. She had no particular genius for growing things, and saw no reason to force a skill when there were so many others to cultivate. If a single polyp so much as presented its head above the ground there, she’d twist it out and fling it over the wall before it could so much as think of partitioning itself. The youngest of the daughters planted nothing at all in her garden, and no one thought any less of her for it. Most of them didn’t farm sea glass either. And most of the daughters grew up with a reasonably discerning sense of what was worth something and what wasn’t, so that’s one point in that philosophy’s favor. The only way to teach the value of something is to give someone the chance to waste it-or at least that was how the thinking went under that particular administration. They might ornament their allotted land with flowers, they might grow crops, or they might stuff it with old sea glass and bits of shipwrecked kettles, as they saw fit. You certainly wouldn’t think to call them girls, if you happened to see them.Īt any rate, these girls didn’t own their patches of land, but they had the use of them, which made for good practice. You might call them something else, too-there are words for such things that live under the sea and haven’t legs. I wouldn’t, but if it’s easier for you, then you might. There are other books about that sort of thing.) You might call the daughters princesses. (I haven’t time to explain to you the way personal property is thought about in states where all borders are by definition liquid.
Each daughter had use of the land but did not own it. Another man might have filled it with something else-potato farmers or pop-eyed scholars or merchant marines-but this one filled it with daughters, so there’s no use arguing about it now.Įach of this man’s daughters had a little plot of ground in the central gardens of the underwater city, which she could develop as she liked. There once was a king who owned a great deal of what lay under the surface of the sea, and he happened to fill it with his daughters. Kings have daughters there too, in the manner of kings everywhere, and fathers there must find something to do with daughters, just as we do on land. There are, you may know, kingdoms underneath the sea as well as above it, with all manners of governance, as it happens. They don’t cost much more than their own upkeep, which you’re on the hook for regardless, so it’s not a bad strategy to put them to use as quickly as possible.
Daughters are as good a thing as any to populate a kingdom with-if you’ve got them on hand.
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