by Greg Bear
I saw more clearly why the captain had taken me on with so little resistance.
The sun hung within a few degrees of the hills behind Calcutta. After the last of our food and equipment had been lowered into the hold and stowed securely, the mate, a blocky, red-faced man of forty with the auspicious name of Salvator Soterio, assembled the crew on the deck before the wheelhouse. Randall sat on the capstan, arms folded, a roll of lizboo parasol under one arm. The sunset cast ship, crew, docks, and warehouses in a fiery glow; black dust from the silvas, blown far out to sea from the continent, made for spectacular day's-end colors.
Waiting for the captain, I stood among the apprentices and A.B.s, who, shuffling their feet, those who knew each other murmuring and exchanging knowing glances, ignored me but for sideling glances and occasional gruff instructions, one of them being to “Watch his way, watch your way. Learn and be meshed.” By which they meant, follow the example of experienced crew members and fit into the way of the ship.
The mate called us to respectful attention. The captain emerged from his quarters and gazed at the setting sun with a squint as if he were some bug emerging from under a rock. He came to the rail and swept his eye over the crew on the quarterdeck.
“We've received our orders and confirmed our mission,” Keyser-Bach began. “With first light tomorrow, we put out to sea. Most of you are new to the Vigilant. New to me and the master, as well. You've signed on from Tasman grain ships and merchant vessels and a few from pleasure boats, and you should know the Vigilant runs a different course. We are out for learning, not for trade. We will circumnavigate for the glory of knowledge.
“We'll chart the life of Lamarckia in its most extreme forms. It's been tried before ... Two missions, four ships, two of them sunk, Fate be kind and the winds rest above them. There are hazards enough where we'll go, some known, some not.
“We are as infants on the face of Lamarckia. I've spent twenty years on these seas and still know them only poorly. And half the world has yet to be seen at all. This voyage depends on all of us to keep our senses sharp.
“Because what is taught in Lenk schools, even in secondary, is so tentative and inadequate, I feel it is my duty to train you all to a finer sense of nature. That makes this as much a schoolship as a research and exploration vessel.
“Some of you will think me eccentric. And if my eccentricities spread rumor along the dock, and make me a laughingstock, so be it.
“So now all of you know my style. Fairness follows performance. We'll all make history, if we mind our weather and keep eyes bright and straight ahead.”
The gloom of the past few days was lifting. I glanced at the crew around me, at Randall. The master's face seemed to take on a new light, his weariness fading. They truly were in their early age of exploration here, hazards enough for any adventurer. I looked on the Vigilant, with all her eccentricities and inadequacies, with blossoming affection.
I was the last of the new crew. The navigator and provisions mate, French, whom I had met earlier, wrote me into the crew list and the supplies roster, gave me a thick oiled canvas coat and pants, a pair of boots more appropriate to shipboard duties, and took me to my assigned berth in the forecastle.
Thick-jawed, pouch-cheeked, with enormous shoulders and unforgiving black eyes, Soterio, the mate, called the crew together before sunset on the foredeck. Randall watched with little apparent interest, leaning on the starboard rail. I took my place with the apprentices, scrawny fellows, little more than gangling, uneasy boys.
“Good evening,” Soterio said, forcing what could be mistaken for an amiable smile.
“Good evening,” we murmured.
“It looks to be a glorious one, too,” he said, his face betraying no great enthusiasm. “I'll leave talk about pride and accomplishment to the master and the captain. I'm practical, myself, and care only for my life, my ship and my crew, in whatever order you find most comforting.” He huffed out his cheeks, shook his head. “But there's rules we lay down here and now.”
He paced before us, thick arms crossed over his chest, jaw thrust forward.
“What the master tells me, I tell you, and you do. No flarking, no stumping about, nothing lax. Flark and I'm on you. There's no ship on this world that runs herself, and none so complicated a fool can't learn her, but learn we must.” He huffed again. “This is no yacht, so put your days at Lenk school or wherever behind you. The Great Darwin is no lake, it's a sea, foaming and thick, as unforgiving as any sailed by man or woman on any world.” He glared at us through those cold black marbles.
“Yes, Ser,” we responded.
“And when the voyage begins, none of this ‘Ser’ stuff. It's the ‘sir’ of many seagoing centuries and not for politesse.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Some have sailed before, some a lot, most not. Some have sailed under the master and me. But all will follow me around the deck this evening and learn this ship and her ways.”
Soterio then took us around the boat, stem to stern, talking rapidly for an hour. All that I had studied of ships and seamanship for this mission only began to prepare me for the shift of language, for the invention of the immigrants. Many sailing terms used by the mate were familiar, but the immigrants had built their ships without benefit of years at sea, using only what references they found in the slates they had brought with them. There were differences, and mixtures of nautical terms across the centuries.
The Vigilant was three-masted, full-rigged, by old Earth standards, yet here she was called a spankered three-tree. The masts, in the mate's lingo, were all trees and he named them foretree, maintree, and mizzen. The names of the major sails were easy enough to adjust to, the lowermost called courses and named after their trees—fore course, main course, but then, on the mizzen, the christian, called crojack or crossjack traditionally; the next pair, gallant and topgallant; above them, upper and lower topsails became hightop and lowtop. But the jibs from bowsprit and jibboom to foremast were called bellies, the outermost called (without a single smile among the apprentices) the flying belly. The seldom-used royals, above the hightops, took the name skysails. Stays supporting the masts remained stays, and the sails sometimes hung from them, staysails. Studding sails, however, were called wings, bent or fastened to extensions of the yards called outbrooms. “So it is,” the mate said, “when the Vigilant's going to sweep with the wind up her ass, we beat with our wings, bellies in the breeze, clear?”
He dared anyone to smile.
The halyards, braces, sheets and other rigging working all these reflected such changes. I labored to memorize—and to forget some of what I had learned on the Lake of the Winds.
Fortunately, on the upper decks and belowdecks, the names had changed little. Fore and aft still applied: bow, midships, stern; forecastle, foredeck or maindeck, quarter deck aft of the maintree, but the poop aft of the mizzen had reverted to the original Latin, puppis. The long superstructure on the puppis, which appeared top-heavy to me, was called, with affection, the pupcastle. On the Vigilant, the captain, master, doctor, and researchers kept quarters here, and the two laboratories were also in the pupcastle.
The ship's craft rates—Story Meissner, the dark, sepulchral sail-maker; the small, dour female carpenter Varia Gusmao; William French the navigator; stooped, grizzled and wrinkled Pyotr Khovansk the engineer; and Shatro, the only researcher already on board—bunked in the pupcastle as well, sharing a common cabin, or adjacent to their work-cabins. The able-bodied seamen or A.B.s, and apprentices (sometimes called monkeys, since they spent much of their time in the trees) were each allotted a bunk in the forecastle.
All below the craft rates served watches, four hours on and four off, divided into port and starboard. Each craft rate and A.B. and apprentice received three meals a day. Grain from Jakarta and Tasman provided the staple, supplemented by flockweed flour. The mainstay was freechunk, a paste made of soy and flockweed, served up fried or baked, or ground into flour and made into bread. Packed and dried river c
elery and diospuros served for essential vitamins. Fresh terrestrial fruits and vegetables, grown on plantations outside Calcutta, served as treats. Sailors, it seemed, did not favor scion fruits such as Liz cherries, and seagoing or pelagic scions, whatever ecos they came from, were by and large inedible, unlike their riparian counterparts, which could at times be nutritious and not provoke immune challenges.
There were plans (Soterio told us darkly) to feed the crew occasionally on land scions deemed edible by the cook—with the second opinion of the captain and the chief researcher, the mate added. This was obviously something of a sore point with the more experienced crew, since nearly all—according to whispers—had eaten one or another type of non-Liz scion that had not agreed with them.
The tour finished with a brief lecture from Soterio on discipline. “Each is expected to do his work. Favoritism of any sort is considered flarking.” The mate used the word “flarking” constantly, to describe anything in opposition to the ship's established order. Now, his brows almost obscured his black marble eyes, and he crooked his mouth as if remembering a bitter taste. “There is to be no sex between crew members at sea. No need to explain why. We are all equally valuable here, and such leads to serious disputes. Phylactics,” meaning drugs to dampen sexual drive, an interesting misuse of a word, “are available from the medical.”
The mate concluded this lecture with a list of punishments. “First-time offense, four hours at the skysail top. Second, confinement in stores antechamber for a time deemed sufficient by the captain and master. Third, we put you off at the next settlement landfall and take aboard someone more suited.”
The crew was then sent to arrange their personal effects. There would be no dinner served aboard this evening; instead, the crew could spend their last night in town.
In the forecastle, all had been assigned their bunks by number, but the A.B.s quietly and with little resistance traded assignments with the others for a section of their own. The social weaving took perhaps ten minutes, with the apprentices left a step behind, somewhat bewildered.
Talya Ry Diem, the senior female A.B., a grizzled, stocky woman with thick, well-muscled arms and legs and a bulldog countenance, took it upon herself to explain. “There's rates and there's ranks, even on a free citizens’ ship. More experience, more time at sea, more privileges. The A.B.s know enough to keep you from killing yourselves. It's only right. And what's more, it puts me in a better bunk.”
A curtain was drawn forming a partition for the twelve women. All the women were A.B.s, and they commandeered a portion of the elite section and put an angle in the curtain to mark their special territory. As there were no female apprentices, we could divide no farther, and received the least desirable berths—with so little difference between them that arguing was useless.
Names were exchanged again for the benefit of the newer crew members. I shook hands with my shipmates, a pot of Tasman tea was set boiling, and sweet biscuits passed around from Ry Diem's chest. “These are especially for the new ones, who don't know how this kind of ship works,” Ry Diem said. “We all have to get along in a special way—a seagoing way, that works across months or years without much in the way of fighting. If you have any questions or problems, you can come to me, or to Ser Shankara. Or to Meissner, the sail-maker. He's a good man. He and I have sailed before.”
The apprentices, after trying to brighten the picture of being closest to the bow, in the tightest spaces and with the smallest bunks, set to displaying and describing their few valued possessions, that all would know who might have stolen from whom. Already, two likely characters had been singled out as potential thieves: the youngest and scrawniest, both with narrow, lackadaisical faces, Uwe Kissbegh and Uri Ridjel, who seemed to wear perpetual smiles of shocked innocence.
A tall boy of eighteen, with a thick shock of brown hair, shaven thin at the sides, shook my hand with extra conviction. “My name's Algis Bas Shimchisko. My first ship. Yours, too?”
I smiled and nodded.
“Apprentices have to stick together,” Shimchisko said. “The A.B.s lord it if we don't. From Calcutta?”
“Jakarta,” I said.
“Meet Miszta Ibert,” Shimchisko said, putting his arm around the wide shoulders of a thin boy of sixteen or seventeen, with a small, mouse-like face and short foxfur hair. Ibert smiled. “We joined together. We've both taken science at the Lenk schools. We spent five months in the depths of Liz.”
“Inland from Cape Zhuraitis,” Ibert said. “We think we know Liz very well.”
“What does she think of you?” I asked.
The boys laughed loudly. Shimchisko slapped his knee. “We think she favors us, of course. All the women do.”
Among the other faces, I paid immediate attention to Ellis Shankara, senior male A.B., a quiet, dark-skinned man with humored eyes, large and examining, but a stern mouth. Shankara's alert expression and calm manner impressed me. I spent a few minutes watching a short-legged, round-faced woman A.B. with a quick, birdlike manner, whom I found oddly attractive, but whose name I did not then catch.
Kissbegh and Ridjel took it upon themselves to play an ill-timed jape as we put our valuables away in shallow drawers beside the bunks. Kiss-begh leaped about in seeming abandon, claiming to perform a farewell dance to the land. Ridjel tootled him along with a raucous lip-warble, and as if by accident, Kissbegh swooped down upon, and fell through, the curtain separating our bow space from the space set aside for the female A.B.s. Hair on end like a furious cat, Talya Ry Diem yanked Kissbegh up with two strong hands around his jaw and ears and dragged him until she jammed him against the forward fiber locker. “I'm kind,” she growled, “but I'll kick your ass if you don't act the man.”
Saying not another word, glaring fiercely, she left him there minus his smile.
I liked all of this. It seemed very alive and boisterous. I might slip smoothly into the immigrant culture after all. Despite my earlier misgivings, and whatever their skills, and however isolated, these people seemed at heart decent and hard-working. They wished to learn what they could, and they were willing to take obvious risks to do so.
I could cheerfully go to sea with these people, work with them, learn what I could; I could even forget, for a time, what my mission was.
Before all introductions could be finished, with the crew's opinions of each other given an early shape, the mate returned. “You'll stare at every block and line for the next few years,” he chided. “Grab the shore for one more night.”
All but one of the women chose to stay aboard, boiling their own freechunk over a small stove, stringing mat fiber ropes to air their clothes. Most of the male A.B.s and apprentices, and several of the ranks, left the Vigilant just before sundown and took the Hill Step Road up and over a low rise, to that part of Calcutta where all sailors were supposed to go.
The nightlife of Calcutta had been walled off, concentrated and capped, in a district of town away from the center, surrounded by high stone walls, a dreary, river-damp set of narrow streets and low, ramshackle buildings the color of dust and cloudy sky. Here the cobbles had gaping holes—I saw a suspicious congeries of holes before an empty building with broken windows, a broken sign over the door reading ADVE—and the gutters had not been swept. It smelled anciently human, yet seemed quiet. The crews of several vessels wandered these few streets, mostly male. Without the women, the men became restless, peering into windows, making dull, unenthusiastic remarks, trying out their sailor's gaits, broad steps and arms swinging confidently, coming upon each other every third turn, looking for cheer and something to brace up their spirits for the coming absence from shore. Little cheer or support was to be found.
A brief flame of sunset turned our faces and the low, false-fronted buildings orange. Dusk followed quickly, gray and dismal. The fitful lighting, dim lamps on xyla poles at corners, made us all shadows. Three scattered knots of searchers, twenty in all—eight from the Vigilant including Shimchisko and Ibert; the eldest among us, Shankara; and the
round-faced young female apprentice, Shift or Shirla—went from a small bar with five stools and two tables, serving bitter rum, to a larger establishment reputed to serve food, to the largest place of all, which the most experienced men seemed to avoid with dark faces. But this, the walk-in known as the Fishless Sea, was where we ended up.
Here was entertainment, the most perverse (and therefore fatally attractive) that the divaricate city could offer. Here a half dozen blank-faced women and a few pale men offered themselves for conversation or dancing or turns in the rooms upstairs. It was fairly ritualized and acceptable; divaricates had never been prudes. But something else hung in the air of the Fishless Sea, a restless, guilty anticipation made half of dread and half of curiosity. The best entertainment in this establishment, the older hands said, was supplied by Lamarckia itself.
Shankara led us through thick xyla doors into cool air, a small, dark room at the very rear, the sounds of the kitchen coming from someplace to my left. The rum buzzed in me, a novel and not unpleasant sensation.
I sat with my shipmates before a low stage daubed with tarry black paint. A short, slender woman with long brown hair and a fixed gaze, who some said was the owner, came on stage and stood beneath a bright spot. Her voice was deep and sandy and she did not look at her audience.
Some chewed mat fiber, tasteless but scented of sweetness and garlic and filled with a mild stimulant, and others drank more rum. The young, round-faced female A.B. sat beside Shankara and balanced a plate of indifferent gruel on her lap, eating slowly, staring up with doubtful but wide eyes.
“We've all lived our lives in the shadow of the silva,” the woman said in a breathless monotone. “We've been sampled, and the silva knows us. But can we ever know the silva? There are curiosities ... peculiarities. The zones, rich with life, do they resent us? Do they notice our existence? Can they truly see and think, or are they blind as stones? Sometimes we feel we are wrapped in the depths of a heedless mother, and we cry out in our sleep like children. There are mysteries no one will ever fathom. Absurd mysteries, unexplainable phenomena. How many have heard stories?”