by Greg Bear
But she had been correct, and no other scheme of life had been discovered. And wherever they went, they found no scions willing to eat them—but sufficient edible forms to sustain the crew. The voyage had been horrific, nonetheless—improper nutritional balances and immune challenges had played havoc with the health of the expedition.
In the end, out of two ships and two hundred and five men and women, one ship and sixty-five had returned to Jakarta. The sinking of the second ship had drowned many of the crew, including Kia Ry Lenk and her husband and two sons.
Exploration lost its charms for Able Lenk. He never quite recovered from the death of his sister. He departed from Jakarta, sailing north to the smaller continent of Tasman, discovered three years earlier by merchant ships. There, he founded what was now Lamarckia's second largest city, Athenai. He had not since returned to Jakarta or Calcutta. This had left Elizabeth's Land to an uneasy kind of independence.
Shortly after, Hoagland and her splinter group had sailed for Hsia and founded Godwin, later Naderville.
Only one other expedition—led by Dassin Ry Baker and Lucius Shulago—had carried on from Jiddermeyer's example. Twenty-five years after the Crossing, they sailed from Jakarta across the Darwin Sea to Hsia, then down to the Cook Straits and Cook Islands, between Efhraia's Land and Hsia. They rounded Efhraia's Land, returned to the Darwin Sea, and sailed north until they reencountered Martha's Island, quite by accident. They headed south again, and one ship turned back, carrying all the records from that expedition. On the far side of Hsia, in an ocean still almost completely unknown, in search of two small continents rumored to have been seen by merchant ships blown astray—Basilica and Nihon—Baker and Shulago and the second ship vanished, after sending a weak radio signal that all was well.
Dawn began as a thin pink line against the eastern sky, much of it obscured by the low arborid-crowned hills directly east of Calcutta. The silva's great four-legged cathedral trees stood against the morning glow like sentinels, feathery fronds below their crowns waving gently with intermittent puffs of breeze that had not yet reached the harbor. The pink horizon turned briefly red, then pale violet; the stars gave way, and the entire sky began to fill with rays of gray and shallow blue.
I stretched and swung my arms, working the chill out of my body, then ran around the deck as warm-up, joining French the navigator and three others similarly engaged.
The sun stood half above the headland when wakeup was announced by the ringing of a brass bell.
Belowdecks, I joined the rest of the crew at the mess. The cook, Leo Frey, a peaceful-looking man of about forty with a thin body but a prominent belly and fat face, and the cook's sour-looking, heavy-set assistant, called simply Passey, dolloped gruel into xyla bowls and handed each of us a thick slice of river celery. Officers shared the same lines and ate the same food, but sat at a separate table in the officer's mess beyond a narrow open doorway. The rest of the crew—including the navigator, the engineer, the sailmaker, and other craft rates—sat around rough-planed tables in the crew mess in no particular order. The crew went through morning routine in stolid silence punctuated only by half awake grunts.
When breakfast was finished, in less than ten minutes, the crew lined up again to drop their bowls into a pot of boiling, frothing water outside the galley. A few minutes attending to personal hygiene (this was a clean ship, with a clean crew, for which I was grateful) and they all gathered on the upper deck to receive the captain's words, inaugurating the voyage.
Captain Keyser-Bach stood on the puppis, looking down on the crew with bright eyes. He stepped to the rail, smiling confidently, and his hands gripped the smoothly turned xyla. “Today we begin our journey to the extremities of this world, and to understand the life upon it. We bow, all of us, to Jiddermeyer, and to Baker and Shulago, but we will not repeat their mistakes. We add also years more experience on the seas, a better ship, and I am certain, a better crew.” He spread his feet wide, balancing from one to the other, clasped his hands, and bowed his head. The crew did likewise. “We set our faith in the lines drawn by Star and Fate, that all of our worlds here conjoin to make one rope, each strand a man or woman, all pulling in unison for the joy of life well-lived. In the name of Star, Fate, and Breath, illuminated by Logos, inspired by the example of the Good Man, we will not fail in our duties, though the seas roar and mountains shoot flame.” He added, in a voice barely audible, “And though our own kindred set against us.” With a shrug of his shoulder, three fingers rubbing his chin vigorously, he turned to Randall and said, “Set our slates for ship's time. We depart in fifteen minutes.”
The occasional puffs of breeze had finally come to the harbor in greater strength, united as a westerly blowing steady at five to seven knots. On the sea, distance and speed here as on Earth were measured in nautical miles and knots, or nautical miles per hour. For Lamarckia, with its radius of 5931 kilometers, a nautical mile came to about 1725 meters.
I took to the shrouds of the fore and main trees with the least senior apprentices—those who had been aboard the ship a month or less, six in all—and two junior A.B.s. My group of four set the fore course. Others unfurled the main course and main lower topsail. We then set the upper topsails and lower topgallants, and three of us—myself included—descended to the deck and forward to bend and raise the outer and inner bellies. With the breeze blowing across the beam—perpendicular to the ship—the captain and mate skillfully ordered us here and there, pulling on this halyard and that, and the ship began to work about, pushing from the dock in gradual zigs and zags.
On the dock, wives, children, family, and friends—a fair crowd of about two hundred—sat waving hands or hats or handkerchiefs, again in somber dignity, with few cheers. However momentous this occasion, however monumental the import of this expedition, the citizens of Calcutta did not reveal their emotions.
I remembered wedding or funeral gatherings on Thistledown among orthodox Naderites—emotion aplenty locked in each breast; but a strong, dedicated face to the world. That restraint had always made me uneasy. As a youngster, dreaming of glory and challenges, I had always wished for a more appreciative farewell from family and friends.
The Vigilant sailed with dreamlike smoothness toward the middle of the river. Both port and starboard watches were busy on the deck and in the rigging. The captain stood at the bow with one foot on the bowsprit, inspecting every meter of the water ahead.
I scrambled high up the ratlines, muscles aching, to adjust a jammed block. For a brief moment, I looked across the river and silva from a top, hands aching, toes and insteps of my feet feeling as if they had been broken. Then as quickly back down; on deck, dizzy with the height, I pulled on halyards with my team to raise the christian on the mizzen and secured them to belaying pins. Then we all scrambled aloft again.
The waters spread wide in the delta, flowing around dozens of sandy black islands. Beaches sparkled like diamonds against velvet in shafts of light breaking through the thick clouds. Avoiding darker shifting shallows and gnarls of rivervine required more deft maneuvering.
After an hour, we saw lines of breakers fighting through thick tangles of vine, an open channel forty meters deep and a hundred wide, and beyond that, blue-gray and finally slate gray, the Darwin Sea.
As we crossed to brackish and finally ocean water, the air took on a sharp tang. Captain Keyser-Bach remained on the bow, thin nose pointing due west. The breeze had stiffened to twelve knots and we were moving very briskly. “Shorten sail, Mr. Randall,” he instructed. “Take the main courses up two points, the fore topgallants two points, and let's loose and stow the windscrews for the time being. Steer her northeast by east until we cross the Sticks. Then due east.”
Hanging on to a yard, helping five other seamen lift and tie the points on the fore tree's upper topgallant, I felt the touch of a new kind of wind and air, and my skin prickled. The mix of minerals in these waters was not the same as in Earth's seas, not familiar to my blood; less sodium salt, more potassium
, more dissolved silicates and carbon dioxide and oxygen. Yet despite the constant faint hiss of oxygen bubbles in the water, like a gassy soda, this was undeniably an ocean.
Later, as the wind strengthened even more, the captain amended, “Take in all but main and lower topsails. Once we're out in open sea we'll set for our best speed, and keep well away from shore.”
“Yes, sir,” Randall responded, and called the apprentices out again.
Twenty miles and two and a half-hours out of the delta, the foam of oxygen bubbles subsided. Surrounding Lamarckia's continents, and in many huge patches throughout the oceans, microscopic scions of pelagic ecoi dissociated seawater into hydrogen and oxygen. Reducing metabolisms had been chosen here, very early in life's history, as on Earth—the routes and processes were substantially different, however.
Ahead, spread across our course like thick straight fingers, five tall dirty-brown towers stuck up from the sea, each over a hundred meters high. Huge purple and red “sails” ballooned out from the tops of the towers, light-absorbing tissues each perhaps a hectare in area. From where I caught a few moment's rest on a top, I saw the towers were shot through with man-high tunnels.
“The Sticks. Bunyan's walking sticks,” A.B. Shankara said, clinging to the mast. “From zone five. The captain will thread them for luck, then we'll head east.”
The ship slipped between the southernmost two giants. We watched the waves swell and beat against their immense bases, sucking and booming through the worm-hole tunnels. Bulbous black shapes the size of cow's heads poked from some of the narrower tunnels, sporting three rows of eyes gleaming in the late-afternoon light as the sun flashed beneath a thickening deck of clouds. Shankara had something to say about them, too. “Sirens,” he shouted over the flapping of the sails and hum of wind, as we hung from a yard, tying reef points. “They watch all the time, everything. They watch our ships come and go. Spies for their zone. Their bodies...”
I held my breath against a sudden whoop of wind that sang through the braces and forced the sails aback, nearly knocking our boots loose from the footropes.
“They twist all through the insides, like worms,” he continued. “That's what I'm told. I've never explored the holes.”
“You think they're intelligent?” I yelled back at him.
“Hell, no!” Shankara said. “They just watch. Who knows what they see?”
“Work, don't flark!” the mate shouted from below.
A hundred miles out of Calcutta, the westerly picked up again, blowing at fifteen and then twenty knots, driving strong seas beneath night sky covered with a ceiling of black clouds. We rigged for a steady blow. The dinner was cold for the fifth watch—Leo Frey decided not to risk cooking fires in such a wind or drain the batteries with hotplates. Seven of the starboard watch and I descended to the mess as our watch ended, sitting to eat with stiff fingers our plates of freechunk and fruit, heads drooping in abject exhaustion. With the windscrews stowed, and the ship on backup batteries, the electric lights glowed fitfully and in alternation, first three on one side, then three on the other, as if trading duty. They cast long alternating flickers of brown shadow around us while we tried to eat.
With sails properly rigged, a storm watch was called, and the rest of the crew retired to take their dinner as well.
Randall stood at a podium forward of the tables and rang a small bell. Heavy heads rose, mouths doggedly chewing, and Randall announced that the captain wished to give a short lecture. The captain took the podium, grabbing it with both hands as a swell lifted and then dropped the ship.
“Each night,” he began, “I hope to continue our education on the goals of this journey, to discuss the nature of the ecoi and their benefits and potential dangers...”
Many of the newer members of the crew—myself included—did not yet have their sea legs, or rather, their sea lungs. It took some time to get used to the combination of the ship's motion and the invigorating but initially upsetting smell of Lamarckia's sea spray. One by one, cold paste heavy on our stomachs, but perhaps not heavy enough, the newer sailors begged the captain's pardon and retreated, either to go topside or to the heads, two fore and one aft. I counted six desertions as the ship pitched and rolled. My own stomach felt none too calm as the seas became rougher. The air was beginning to smell peculiar, like an old orange.
“Yes,” the captain said, watching his audience decline. Then, “Yes,” again, and finally he gave it up, postponing the talk until the morning.
“He's a good captain, really,” said Algis Bas Shimchisko. “The best on Lamarckia, I bet. A true seaman.”
Miszta Ibert went for a second helping of paste and brought it back, grinning as if he'd won a prize. “He's a very good captain,” young Ibert agreed, forking the paste hungrily. “Just enthusiastic, and who's to judge against that?”
I watched him eat and felt my insides quiver.
“Hooo,” said Shimchisko. “Lost a few this evening, haven't we, Mish?”
“A few,” Ibert said. “No more than I expected.”
“They'll get right after tomorrow. It's the sea,” Shimchisko explained. “Sometimes when even a good sailor spends some time ashore, the smell of the sea, the broad foaming sea, gets them.”
“You all right?” Ibert asked me.
“Never better,” I said. I refused to go topside.
Once my body had been equipped to handle almost any emergency, any illness, any unease. I was truly on my own now, this naked and natural body as unfamiliar as somebody else's, a complete stranger's, might have been.
The days passed in a way I had never experienced before. Time took on a new quality. The ship became a world unto itself; I had difficulty imagining anything else, especially during watches, when one assigned task succeeded another in dizzying succession. Steady, exhausting work, day and night, clutching ratlines or hanging onto yards during driving rain storms and rugged seas, watching foam-ribboned billows as high as the courses on each side ... Flat calms when Vigilant drifted motionless or slid ahead slowly on a single screw driven by her reserve batteries. Up the shrouds, into the tops and out on the yards, reefing or furling, setting brooms to take advantage of running downwind, bending new sails when the old needed repair, manning the winches when the electric motors failed (as they did more often than not).
Greasing the trees, the lowest and thickest trees consisting of three straight legs of a cathedral tree strapped together with thick iron bands; pulling mat fiber strands from great wads of junk and spinning them into twine; drawing the standing rigging taut as it stretched with use. Rubbing down the rippled patterns on the xyla deck with pumice holystones, raising a faint scent of cloves and garlic; performing the daily ablution of all deck surfaces...
Only as I rolled into my bunk, lost in an almost spiritual state of physical exhaustion, did I think of any prior life, of immense chambers within an asteroid and the dreamlike infinity of the Way. None of that seemed real. And yet I still did not feel firmly established on Lamarckia. It seemed anyone around me—wise old Shankara, nonchalant Ibert, clownish Kissbegh and Ridjel, cynical but intelligent Shimchisko, round-faced Shirla—could tell just by looking at me that I wasn't real.
Only the sensual details, minute by minute, gave my self a solidity memory could not corroborate: the invigorating smell of charged air as we sailed the edge of a brewing storm; towering cumulus clouds swelling into massive anvils over the flat sandy prairies and setback mesas of the Sumner Coast, the crimsons and siennas of vivid sunsets over the stern.
Under the chafing of ropes and wires, the press of capstan spokes, the palming of marlinspike, my hands became a maze of cuts, scratches, and bruises, until they seemed little more than bloody claws; what would have healed in minutes or hours on Thistledown, now took days. Still, they toughened, and I no longer flinched from actions that, in my inexperience of days before, might have caused me painful injury. I dodged, grappled, hung, pulled, shifted, learned when to groan and when to swear.
The
sun burned bright most days and I tanned to pale chocolate. The skin on my arms flaked and peeled, and I followed the example of the experienced A.B.s and smeared my cheeks and arms with thick, milky lizboo sap scooped from ceramic jugs. To cut the glare, I smeared my lower eyelids with blackrouge—the fine powder that fell from all arborid scions in Liz's silva. My hair dried to a stiff wiry brush, crusted between infrequent fresh-water rinses with a residue of salt spray.
Ibert loaned me a pocket mirror. I did not recognize myself: white eyes underscored by blackrouge, dark-skinned, brushy-haired. A pirate.
I had not spoken much with Randall since being assigned to my berth.
After dinner, when weather permitted, the captain told us more about Jiddermeyer and Baker and Shulago's visit to Martha's Island. Martha's Island differed greatly from most of Elizabeth's Land. Volcanic, isolated from other landmasses by a thousand miles of ocean, a thriving ecos at the center of a sterile sea, it was a perfect site for Keyser-Bach's science. Little was known about most of the island; and over a decade had passed since Baker and Shulago's journey. Few ships crossed now between Hsia and Elizabeth or Tasman; none had passed Martha's Island since the visit by Baker and Shulago.
“We are engaged in primary science,” the captain enthused, standing before the lecture board, raising and fastening his sheets of illustrations from Shulago's artists, reproductions of photographs from Baker's cameras.
I examined the photographs of Martha's scions, and Shulago's drawings, with a growing bewilderment. Snakes without mouths, arborids that picked up their roots every few days and slunk across the rugged landscape like immense slugs; entire silvas migrating from one side of the island to the other in a few days’ time. Hard-carapaced guardians rolling on dozens of tough calcareous wheels propelled by vigorous tiny cilia, searching the beaches for intruders, “sniffing up” humans but paying them little attention...