Bombay

The mention of Bombay anchors their location to a late Victorian-era port city, its harbor clogged with steamships and tall-masted clippers tied to the docks with fraying hemp ropes. The air hangs heavy with coal smoke from dockside furnaces and the sharp briny tang of monsoon-swollen seawater lapping against barnacled pilings. Warehouses packed with jute and tea tower overhead, their cracked red-brick walls oozing moisture from the constant damp. Street vendors in dhoti and sari weave between sailors and merchants, their shouts and negotiations rising above the percussive clang of winches and the distant groan of hulls shifting in the swell. From this vantage, the ruse of the SS Bernice as an Earth vessel becomes both plausible and inevitable—a 1926 cargo liner bound for Bombay, indistinguishable from the dozens of other vessels crowding the docks, all carrying goods and travelers toward a future that may not belong to them.