Brave New Worlds

the ten sailing crews were proudest of all. A fishing crew that did its job well and met its quotas kept the whole system running smoothly. I was lucky to even have the Amaryllis and be a part of it.
    I climbed up to the dock with my folk after securing the boat, and saw that Anders was the scalemaster on duty. The week's trip might as well have been for nothing, then.
    Thirty-five years ago, my mother ripped out her implant and broke up her household. Might as well have been yesterday to a man like Anders.
    The old man took a nail-biting forty minutes to weigh our catch and add up our numbers, at which point he announced, "You're fifty pounds over quota. "
    Quotas were the only way to keep the stock healthy, to prevent overfishing, shortages, and ultimately starvation. The committee based quotas on how much you needed, not how much you could catch. To exceed that—to pretend you needed more than other people—showed so much disrespect to the committee, the community, to the fishing stock.
    My knees weak, I almost sat down. I'd gotten it exactly right, I knew I had. I glared at him. Garrett and Sun, a pair of brawny sailors helpless before the scalemaster in his dull gray tunic of authority, glared at him. Some days felt like nothing I did would ever be enough. I'd always be too far one way or the other over the line of "just right. " Most days, I'd accept the scalemaster's judgment and walk away, but today, after setting loose the tuna and a dozen pounds of legitimate catch with it, it was too much.
    "You're joking," I said. "Fifty pounds?"
    "Really," Anders said, marking the penalty on the chalkboard behind him where all the crews could see it. "You ought to know better, an experienced captain like you. "
    He wouldn't even look at me. Couldn't look me in the eye while telling me I was trash.
    "What do you want me to do, throw the surplus overboard? We can eat those fifty pounds. The livestock can eat those fifty pounds. "
    "It'll get eaten, don't worry. But it's on your record. " then he marked it on his clipboard, as if he thought we'd come along and alter the public record.
    "Might as well not sail out at all next week, eh?" I said.
    The scalemaster frowned and turned away. A fifty pound surplus—if it even existed—would go to make up another crew's shortfall, and next week our catch would be needed just as much as it had been this week, however little some folk wanted to admit it. We could get our quota raised like Nina wanted, and we wouldn't have to worry about surpluses at all. No, then we'd worry about shortfalls, and not earning credits to feed the mouths we had, much less the extra one Nina wanted.
    Surpluses must be penalized, or everyone would go fishing for surpluses and having spare babies, and then where would we be? Too many mouths, not enough food, no resiliency to survive disaster, and all the disease and starvation that followed. I'd seen the pictures in the archives, of what happened after the big fall.
    Just enough and no more. Moderation. But so help me I wasn't going to dump fifty pounds just to keep my record clean.
    "We're done here. Thank you, Captain Marie," Anders said, his back to me, like he couldn't stand the sight of me.
    When we left, I found Nina at the doorway, staring. I pushed her in front of me, back to the boat, so we could put Amaryllis to bed for the night.
    "The Amaryllis' scales aren't that far off," Garrett grumbled as we rowed to her slip. "Ten pounds, maybe. Not fifty. "
    "Anders had his foot on the pad, throwing it off. I'd bet on it," Sun said. "Ever notice how we're only ever off when Anders is running the scales?"
    We'd all noticed.
    "Is that true? But why would he do that?" said Nina, innocent Nina.
    Everyone looked at me. A weight seemed to settle on us.
    "What?" Nina said. "What is it?"
    It was the kind of thing no one talked about, and Nina was too young to have grown up knowing. The others had all known what they were getting into, signing on with me. But not Nina.
    I shook my head at them. "We'll never prove that Anders has it in for us so there's no good arguing. We'll take our licks and that's the end of it. "
    Sun said, "Too many black marks like that they'll break up the house. "
    That was the worry, wasn't it?
    "How many black marks?" Nina said. "He can't do that. Can he?"
    Garrett smiled and tried to take the weight off. He was the first to sign on with me when I inherited the boat. We'd been through a lot together. "We'll just have to find out