by Tom DeMarco
The radar lookout on the Alturas had seen the catamaran return at about midnight. They had noted Loren and Sonia setting out in the early evening, so didn’t think very much about the little boat’s return. They did radio down to the docks to confirm the arrival of a friendly craft. Proctor Pinkham had set up a twenty-four hour guard for their vessels in port. The guard members had seen Sonia arriving late, but not considered it curious. They paid no notice at all when she set sail an hour later. Their concern was hostile arrivals, not friendly departures. Whoever had been on duty on the radar had tracked her leaving on a course of almost due north. On a broad reach, she would have been doing an easy ten knots, perhaps as much as fifteen if the seas were smooth enough for the cat to plane. She had passed out of radar range by early morning. As he thought about it that afternoon, Loren calculated that she could be as much as one hundred and fifty miles away, well into the Crooked Island Passage. He raised Kiruna, the Bahama Channel lookout on their secure radio channel, to ask for the crew to watch for her passing near Rum Cay. They had not seen her then, and still hadn’t caught sight of her by the time of the evening contact.
Loren skipped dinner to sit by himself on the beach. Something was terribly wrong, he knew. He kept going back over and over what had happened, looking for clues. The early part of the evening had been full of signs that Sonia was content about what was happening, content, he had thought, about what was about to happen. She must have known. How could she not have known? What had he done so wrong? What different behavior had she expected of him? What could she have been thinking? What had he done so wrong?
She had been shy as he had undressed her. She always was when they swam nude together. When he began to fondle her after their meal, she may have been uneasy about having nothing on but the thin kimono. But that much they had done before. She had begun their embraces as fondly and as generously as ever. And as she warmed to what was happening to her, she had been full of affection for him. Only near the end had she shown any signs of distress. He tried now to think if he had pressed her at all then, before she had been completely ready. But he hadn’t. The only struggle had been between Sonia and herself, with Loren a fascinated observer. She had seemed to want what happened. He thought she had risen above whatever had held her back before. Even when she seemed depressed after, he still believed she had lent herself completely to their lovemaking.
Now the dull pain of realization was coming over him. He had violated some rule, had violated Sonia in some undefined but unforgivable way. And she was gone. She had gone back to the mainland. Her leaving was the clearest statement of what she felt. It gave her judgment. Each hour that passed made it more and more clear that she was rejecting his love. It shouldn’t have been true, but it was. He had been motivated only by love. He had felt desire too, but that was not what had directed his action. He wasn’t a schoolboy, plunging thoughtlessly after physical gratification. He had kept that desire in check for more than a year. He could have gone longer, too, if only she had said what she wanted, if only she had given him some hope that her way would lead eventually to the commitment they both required. But what was her way? What had her alternative been? He would have been open to whatever direction she chose for them, but she had given no direction at all. And finally he had believed that she was looking to him to take the lead. He had done what he thought she wanted most of all. But somehow that had been dreadfully wrong; that was why she was gone. She was gone. What, he thought again and again, What had he done so wrong?
The night was turning damp and cold, signs of a storm approaching. He thought miserably of Sonia being thrown about on the sea in her small boat. He couldn’t say for sure just how good a seaman Sonia was. She had always left the navigation to him, for example, had always depended on him to make the decisions. Now that he thought of it, he couldn’t remember that she had ever taken a small boat out by herself. And he knew she got seasick. She often dosed herself with Dramamine. He wondered if she had any now. He hated the thought of her being sick on the storm-tossed sea.
Finally, Loren wandered back up toward the village. It was clear to everyone that Sonia had left. It was probably clear to most of them what had precipitated her depart—people guessed such things—but there was almost no one he could talk to about what had happened. Really no one but Kelly.
He walked toward her cottage in the gathering darkness. Kelly was there, sitting on the porch. She had a dark blanket thrown over her hair and shoulders against the chill. He sat down beside her on the wooden planks. They had not spoken all day. For a long time they did not speak now.
Finally Loren said, “I was wrong, I guess, in what I did. I thought that was what she wanted, and I was wrong.”
Kelly didn’t say anything. In the glint of light from the village, he noticed that her lashes were wet. “It was my fault,” he said, “not yours.”
A long pause before Kelly spoke. When at last she began, her voice was very low. Loren had to lean toward her to hear the words. “I didn’t tell you everything, Loren…I was in such a snit that day you came to me for advice.” He couldn’t see her expression at all. Her face was turned partly away from him. “I felt rejected, Loren. I was thinking only of myself. You came to me as a friend for help, but I was thinking only ‘poor Kelly,’ not really applying my mind to working out was best for two people that I loved. And so I failed you both. I didn’t tell you the only thing that really needed to be said. I had a clue to this whole miserable matter. I didn’t know what to make of it, but if only I had told you…”
“Tell me now.”
“I said she never shared anything with me that mattered, that she was a cipher. And that was mostly true. But there was one time when she tried to tell me. She came to me one night and poured her heart out. Only it made no sense to me, none at all. At the time. Now it makes more sense. At least I’m beginning to understand that there was something wrong that needed to be made right before anything else.”
“What did she say?”
“It wasn’t what she said. She couldn’t put it into words. She talked around it. I’ve been thinking all today about that night we talked, Sonia and I, about the way I reacted then. Loren, the thing we needed to confront in Sonia was Sin. I think she was obsessed with Sin.”
“Sin?”
“That was what she was struggling with. She kept talking about interior blackness, about stain that was all over her inner being.”
“She didn’t tell me that.”
“How could she? What would your reaction have been? How does the man of science respond on the notion of Sin? What could she have hoped for from you or from Homer or from Edward? So she came to me. And I just dismissed what was upsetting her as silliness. I don’t believe in those things any more than you do, Loren. I responded to the idea, not to the distress that had prompted her to come to me. I was a perfect bigot. I think I even laughed at her. And she never spoke to me about it again.”
“Sin…” What did that even mean?
Kelly turned to put her hand on his arm. “I am so terribly sorry, Loren. I would give anything now to have been a better friend to you both.”
Loren nodded dumbly.
“I think she does love you, Loren. For what it’s worth. If we could know what’s tormenting her, it would not be that you had failed her, but that she had somehow failed herself. She is at war with herself, I think. At war with something inside herself.”
“What could her sin have been? What was it that tormented her? Was it just her physical urges?”
“I think it was everything. Her desire, her part in building and then turning on the Effector, her very humanity. She said there was wickedness inside her that had always always been there. She called it ‘unholiness.’”
Loren lifted himself from the porch step. “Thank you, Kelly, for the clue.” And he headed back toward the beach.
There was still the hope that she would come back. One possibility was that she had gone away to one of the Channel islands or somewh
ere else to be alone and to punish him or punish herself. And if she had, she would come back after a period of retreat. There was no use in punishment if she did not intend to give Loren and herself a chance to try again. When she came back, they would talk out what divided them and make some peace with it. And then they could begin to rebuild, based on whatever rules she imposed. There was still that hope. at least for the moment. Over the next few months it faded. And finally it died.
The airship trials were now being conducted on a more scientific basis. The whole community was involved in assembling flat wooden hulls, some of them as large as one hundred feet long. Because of the wild winds that swept the deck of a flyer at full speed, it made sense to make them long enough to leave room for shelter. The first of the big ships—Kelly dubbed them ‘pavilions’—were used as freighters to bring back materials collected from as far away as Havana. They brought heavy bolts of fabric for sails, extruded aluminum stock for masts and booms and Lucite sheets to be formed into windshields and observation ports.
After a period of evolution, the pavilions began to look like huge floating greenhouses with sails. They had glass and plastic surfaces everywhere, a glassed-in upper deck, and an enclosed area beneath it with slanted observation windows all the way around the periphery. Inside, there was generous headroom and increasingly more livable space, cabins and control rooms and chart- and radio-rooms. The weight hardly mattered, so they were building their pavilions big enough to be comfortable.
Lamar Armitage began running computerized simulations of sailforms that would be effective at high speeds. He worked up a Simula dataset that analyzed flow over the leading edges of the sails at speeds up to two hundred mph. Under his direction, Pease built prototypes with sharply raked masts. The early sails were all made of cloth, but soon they were experimenting with arrays of solid plastic panels, similar to venetian blinds.
In the various forays for materials, airships would sometimes encounter pockets of population. As often as not they brought back volunteers who were eager to join a society that could make such marvel as a sailing airship. By the end of March, there were airships on permanent station over the Bahama Channel and along the outside of the Leeward Islands and to the northeast of Puerto Rico. So far, they had not ventured as far north as the U.S. mainland.
The first trip north was a scouting expedition led by Captain Van Hooten. He beat up the American coast well offshore. During one night, he glided in over the DelMar peninsula to drop a party of uniformed sailors (they had all the uniforms they needed from Guantanamo) under the orders of Commander Wu. Captain Van took his pavilion back off shore and hove to at an altitude of a thousand feet to await a call from the group. He picked his party up at the drop spot at night just a week later. All members returned. One group of the scouts had walked down to the capitol to reconnoiter there for rumors and hints of what might be afoot. The second half of the party had been busy around Annapolis. As Loren had suggested months before, the main body of Rupert Paule’s new attack force was being assembled there. They had a fleet of multi-hulls and racing yachts, now being fitted out with a variety of weapons. The party saw no signs of nerve gas, but virtually all the vessels were armed with cylinders of chlorine gas. Loren had foreseen that, as well. Chlorine was a commonly used industrial gas, probably in abundant supply almost everywhere. It was unsophisticated as a weapon, but deadly. For a fleet approaching with the wind behind it, it would be a potent threat. There were no signs of steamships or of linear accelerators.
The adventure of scouting the enemy in disguise was one that would have been irresistible to Loren only a few months before. It would have been he who led the expedition instead of Commander Wu. But now he had no taste for adventure. He was listless, uninvolved. Edward would assign him some bit of work, and Loren would apply himself to it as best he could. He didn’t have much interest in anything.
In the evenings, he and Kelly would take one of the small flyers off to investigate the interior. Sometimes they would land in the mountains and eat sandwiches while watching the sunset. At first Kelly had been pointedly available in case Loren wanted to talk. But he didn’t. What he wanted to do was stare out over the Sierra Maestra or down to the sea and think his own private thoughts. After a while, Kelly began bringing a book along. The sail back over the mountains in the twilight or under the moon was always a pleasure. The new raked sails and soundproofed interiors made the airships nearly silent. They could glide in over the mountains at speeds of sixty or seventy miles an hour and feel contemplative and peaceful.
Loren did sometimes think about the coming battle. He looked forward to it. He wanted to deal Rupert Paule a complete and devastating blow. When the enemy fleet didn’t come and didn’t come, Loren thought wistfully of a preemptive strike on Annapolis. But it made no sense. The scheme he had come up with nearly a year ago was still the best one. They would wait for the fleet to arrive, blanket them with radio-jamming interference and wipe them out. The effect would be the same as it had been in October: Paule would see his fleet set out and then never hear a word from it again.
While he was quite ready to fight the coming battle, Loren didn’t have very much interest in planning it. He would find himself staring off down the beach while Ted Pinkham tried to draw some kind of a plan out of him. Finally, the Proctor gave up. He asked Kelly to sit in on the defense meetings to take Loren’s place. She and Candace and Jared Williams worked out the plan.
The fifth of June was the first anniversary of their arrival in Baracoa. Chandler Hopkins was planning an enormous to-do over the date, a celebration of their victory against all the odds. After some foot dragging, even Brill and Suzikaya got involved. There were plans for skits and dancing and a chorus by the school glee club. Loren didn’t even attend. He packed his camping gear in a knapsack and walked up into the hills behind the village. He was gone four days.
When he came back, he had Kelly to answer to: “Loren Martine, you are the most dreadful sad-sack. Your face is getting all horrible little frown lines, enough to scare the children. Their laughter dies out whenever you pass.”
“Sorry, Kelly. I’ll try to be better.”
“Your absence was most horribly noted at the celebration. How could you have thought to be absent? You’re not just anybody, you know. For our youngsters you are a hero, the hero of the Bahama Channel. And when you turned up missing for the anniversary party, it cast a damper on all the fun.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s not enough to be sorry. You are permanently sorry.”
“Sorry. I mean…”
“You don’t know what to do with yourself, do you? You have no idea.”
“Not just at the moment. No.”
“Well, I know. I know and you don’t, so I want to put yourself into my hands. We’re going exploring, just the two of us. It will do you good.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Not necessary. I’ve done all the thinking. We’re going to explore the Isle of Pines, the big island all the way on the other side of Cuba and a hundred miles out to sea. We’ll leave at this time tomorrow.”
They set out in the evening in a new forty foot pavilion, the Cornell. Much of the design of the first airships had been influenced by the seagoing craft they had been sailing over the past year. The Cornell, in particular, was built in a style that would have been appreciated by the original owner of a luxury yacht like the Irena. It had a control room forward, a small galley and head in the middle part, and a generous double stateroom aft. It was more or less an air yacht. Pease had taken to fitting the newer models with small wind-driven turbines to generate power to charge a bank of batteries. The turbines increased drag slightly, but there was, as Kelly had pointed out, speed to burn. The batteries drove electro-hydraulic motors to trim the sails. The Cornell was automated enough so it could be sailed entirely from inside.
They began with a good moon and a fairly gentle wind. Kelly took the controls down the coast. She gained altitude up to a
bout two thousand feet. They angled inward at Las Tunas and glided over the interior, heading south west. Loren went aft to get some sleep. Kelly stayed awake for the next four hours. When she got tired, she eased up into the wind and went back to the little stateroom to wake him. Loren went forward to take the helm. Kelly crawled into his still warm sheets. By the time she was awake again, they were skimming over the Caribbean at an altitude of thirty feet. The Isle of Pines was visible on the horizon.
A complete pass around the island took them most of the morning. There were no signs of human life. They glided over the towns and the forests and lakes at just over tree-top height, spilling wind to move slowly. There wasn’t much wind anyway. They were moving at about the same speed as the gliding gulls. The interior of the island was dotted with water. Kelly pointed toward one inviting little lake and Loren looked for a spot to glide in. He backwinded to kill most of their speed, then indexed the vertical Effector very slightly upward as they approached a grassy hill to kill the rest. As they came to rest against the edge of the hill, he indexed quickly in the opposite sense at the very moment of zero velocity.
“Look at this, Kelly, it just occurred to me. I’ve put the Effector on a downward plane, angled into the hill. So it serves as a kind of anchor. I never thought of that before.”
“Nice. I remember reading about the Wright Brothers, how they invented something nearly every day. They just never stopped. You’re like that, Loren. You’re so inventive.”
“I just stumbled on that idea,” he said.
“I’ve brought you here to seduce you, you know.” She looked at him levelly for a moment, then went to change into a swimsuit. She shut the cabin door behind her. Loren stared after her, dumbfounded.