by Richard Farr
He was staring wildly, trying to sit up, beating at the air with his hands, shouting. Daniel forced his eyes open, and they stung as if he’d opened them underwater. Hope was holding her partner by the shoulders so that he wouldn’t throw himself onto the floor.
“What is it, babes? What are you saying?”
“Los Arquitectos. Están aquí. Por todos lados.”
“Everywhere?”
“So beautiful. They have returned to rescue us. We have to make for the summit now. Let’s go!”
His legs made spasmodic movements. Then he paused, one hand still in midair, rolling his eyes around as if checking that the people looming over him were listening, or following.
“I’m here, Tomás,” Hope said. “We’re not there yet. We’re not at Fuji yet.”
“Los Arquitectos. Han llegado. Esperanza, la luz es tan brillante. Debemos—”
He arched his back slightly, as if taking an extra-deep breath. Then he went completely still. One hand stayed upright for a second, before it toppled back onto his chest. A bead of sweat ran from his forehead, past his ear, and onto the cushions.
Lorna took the hand and placed it by his side. There was a long silence. Hope seemed too tired for emotion, as if she was already in some later stage of grief, a stage beyond the raging and wailing. Lorna put an arm around her. Then Hope said, quietly and evenly, “He always loved the night sky. He loved it even more after we’d read Anabasis. After we’d, you know, accepted the call. I think the stars represented infinity for him. They represented what we were going to gain. So we should bury him at night, after the stars are out.”
“What you are doing up here, Daniel Calder?” Kit said when she saw him coming out of the cabin. “You go down there twenty minutes. You think I cannot hold wheel? Everything is fine.”
When Daniel explained what had happened, Morag went below to see if she could help. The wind was freshening and the northern sky had darkened. Nothing much, but he was not looking forward to another night spent struggling to stay awake. A ripple of nausea went through him and he fought to ignore it. “Can’t sleep now,” he said. “You should get some. I may need you later.”
“I am not possible to sleep either with this happen,” she said. “Don’t worry. In forest, I was too frightening to sleep ever, more than a few minutes. Now, I maybe don’t even remember how to sleep long time. So I sit with you, OK?”
“Sure it’s OK.”
She found two orange Gore-Tex jackets, handed one to Daniel, and put on the other one. The color reminded him of being with his mother on her trimaran. For a while they sat and watched the sea.
“We have to work together, Daniel. Yah?”
“What do you mean?”
“We have to be strong, for Morag. Keep her in one piece. Help her do what she has to do.”
For another hour there was no change, except perhaps a knot or two of bluster added to the wind. Then, as usual on the equator, darkness came down with the speed of a dropped eyelid. The northern sky was obscured, but the south was thick with stars as they brought Tomás up and wrapped him in a weighted sheet, and Lorna sang out the parts of the burial-at-sea service that she remembered from movies and Patrick O’Brian novels. Having to project her voice above the wind made her accent stronger.
“A man thass born o’ wuman hath but a wee short time te live, an’ is full o’ misery. He comes up, an’ is cut doon, aye, like a flower. He brought nothin’ intae th’ wurld, an’ he takes nothin’ oot. He flees like a shadow. In the midst o’ life, we are in death. We commut his body te th’ deep, te be tur-uned intae corrup-shun, an’ we luik fer th’ resurrec-shun of th’ body, when th’ sea shall gie up th’ deid—”
Daniel was still thinking about Tomás’s last few words, and how they fitted in with what Pinkie had said, and with some of the little pieces of the visions he’d had. He could have done without the idea of resurrecting the dead. Was that really what was happening now—the Architects reaching some threshold, where they had enough power to take on human form?
No time to think more about it now. Hope had one hand on the shroud, her lips moving with the words, but the whole time she was shaking her head. “Good-bye, Tomás,” she said. “No resurrection, not now.” And she broke down, sobbing. Lorna put an arm round her. Kit was still at the wheel; Morag opened a little gate in the side rail and Daniel slid the weighted body into the water.
Afterward, Morag agreed to sit up with Daniel so that Lorna and Kit could be with Hope, or maybe even get some rest. An hour later, the first squalls of a storm hit the sails. Morag sat huddled against the mast with one hand on a line, appalled by the closeness of the dark water but refusing to leave him.
“I’ve sailed worse,” he said as the waves steepened. “Not a big deal.” The first part was true, but he’d never been so tired, and it was only the lashing rain that kept him awake as he shifted to an easier course and struggled to keep Esperanza on it.
In the middle of the night, Kit did persuade Morag to go below, and took her place. At one point Lorna came up, holding Hope by the elbow, so that they could both take deep lungfuls of salt air and heave emptily together over the side. The night was so dark that Daniel could barely see them.
They had no running lights, and the lights would probably have been invisible to an approaching ship anyway, but at least out here they were unlikely to run into anything.
Another hour passed, and both Morag and Lorna must have been asleep because Hope came up, alone, and turned like a wraith toward the prow. The wind had dropped some, but she still couldn’t hear him—or ignored him—when he screamed at her to get below. At first he mistook the strange new noise for a variation in the wind:
Yon-AH-pel
Eth-GAN-du
Vin-UTZ-ya
“She is not safe there?” Kit said.
“No, she’s not.”
“I get her.”
“Be careful, Kit! If you—”
She’d already taken two cautious steps across the deck when he saw something out of the corner of his eye. Or rather, he saw nothing, where something should have been: a hole in his visual field that was distinct from the sea only because it was more deeply, more uniformly dark.
The lowering wind and a hint of light had lulled him into a false sense of security. A large wave was coming toward the bow from that side, and it was bearing an even darker shape across their path. He’d already been thrown off his feet by the impact when he saw that it was the lifeless, lightless hull of a vessel three or four times their size—an abandoned trawler.
He was in midair, face down. He managed to get his arms out, but still landed with a thud on his rib cage. The air left his lungs with a sigh; it was like a bike tire going over a nail. The deck was rolling hard over on the port side. He managed to get one arm around the compass binnacle and tried to take a breath, but the muscles in his chest might as well have been frozen. His hand was slipping on the binnacle too, as the Esperanza continued to roll.
Something heavy was wrapped around his leg. The weight of it was threatening to pry his hand loose and drag him overboard. He tried to kick it off.
“Aih!”
He’d kicked Kit in the face. Her body was half on board, half through the rail. Both her hands were around his left shin, and her feet were being dragged sideways by the water. If she went in, there would be no saving her. Sorry, he wanted to say, but no sound came out, and when he’d had enough time to grasp how ridiculous it was to waste time apologizing, and how impossible it was to help her, he mouthed, “Climb! Climb!” and focused on willing his fingers to hang on.
She began to pull herself up, hand over hand, using him as a rope. Just as he thought he would have to let go, sending them both into the sea, the deck started to level out, pulling her free of the water. She got hold of a cleat, taking some of the weight off him. And he was able to get his other hand around the binnacle—and sensed at once, from the changing angle, that they had a problem even worse than going over.
Kit was hanging on, face down, gasping. “Help me,” he said. “We have to get the sail down fast, or we’ll sink.” Luckily, she remembered what to do, and though she looked like a dunked cat, she moved with the speed of a cat too. It was the work of a moment to release the lines. The sail ran down, a mess of fabric billowing across the deck, but all forward motion ceased. Like a sleeper reluctantly awakened, the bow hesitated, groaned, and came up.
The trawler had already returned to the darkness, a monster from a dream. And though they were wallowing horribly in the wave troughs, the wind was still dropping. Morag came up from the cabin with a nasty cut that turned out to be no big deal. Lorna had somehow avoided being injured at all. After an emergency assessment, Daniel concluded that Esperanza would continue to float, for a while anyway. But they were drifting now, and continuing slowly to take on water.
“What about Hope?” Lorna asked. “She was wi’ ye, aye?”
“She was standing at the bow when we were hit,” Daniel said. He pointed to the spot where the bow had been.
Flat calm. Almost no wind. And a tropical sun that was unpleasant by nine in the morning and unbearable by noon. They used the sail as a shade and set up a chain of buckets to bail out the cabin, working hour after hour until their hands bled and they no longer had the energy to move. When the immediate danger was past, Lorna dismantled the pump that made the head work and managed to turn the parts into a bilge siphon.
“I’m sorry te say, ladies and gents, that in an unscheduled reduction o’ normal services, ye’ll jes’ hafta crap o’er the rail.”
Days passed.
Twice, when there was a half-hearted breeze, Daniel tried to raise sail again, but any forward motion caused the bow to plunge, bringing water in over the top of the damaged section. Despite the siphon, and more bailing, Esperanza continued to settle gradually lower in the water.
More bailing, more drifting. The canned food and crackers ran out. Lorna and Daniel each caught one more fish, but they were scrawny, nothing like the first one, and even when they’d eaten every scrap, from the skin and the eyeballs to the carefully chewed bones, it wasn’t nearly enough to satisfy their hunger. After that, as if they’d not shown enough gratitude for Neptune’s abundance, nothing. Not even birds in the sky—they were too far from land. The boat’s solar still was producing enough water to keep them alive, barely.
Every night, trying to remember everything Iona had taught him about navigation, Daniel measured the positions of stars using the most sophisticated technology available to him—the compass, his memory of what the constellations were supposed to look like, and his knuckles. After hours of squinting and guesstimating, even his optimism was beginning to fray. He spoke quietly about it to Lorna: “I think we’re caught in the North Equatorial Countercurrent. A hundred miles farther north, we’d have had a chance. The currents there would have carried us north and west, into the shipping lanes. But we’re drifting east into the mid-Pacific, at two or three knots.”
“Walkin’ pace, aye, in the wrong feck’n direction.”
Kit had overheard them. “So. We die of starve in middle of ocean. Or maybe drown first. Which is quicker I guess, but not such the great options. And Morag—”
Morag was up at the other end of the boat, scratching her head and muttering to herself. In the hunt for food—which had taken them into every nook and cranny of the boat, and netted one pack of cherry-flavored gum and a thousand waterlogged cigarettes—she’d found a pack of fat permanent markers. Now she was covering every available surface with strings of digits. Lorna and Kit looked darkly at each other, a fact she didn’t miss. “I’m just making double-sure I know it,” she said, defensively.
Kit turned back to Daniel, and said, plenty loud, “And Morag is going like total basket-cake.”
“It’s basket case,” Daniel said. “I told you that months ago, in Seattle.”
“When you was chasing me, silly boy.”
“I don’t remember that part.”
“Yah sure.”
“Anyway, she isn’t going like even slightly basket-cake. She’s just being obsessive, which is situation normal when she has a puzzle to solve. She’ll be all right.”
“I’ll be all right,” Morag said drily. “Funny, isn’t it? This is a computational puzzle involving giant prime numbers. Exactly what Internet encryption’s based on. So the Architects are basically the same as us. Mathematicians and technologists, only smarter, more advanced. We’ve been misled by all the world’s religions saying that god means something really, totally, fundamentally different from us—something transcendent, unknowable, beyond our understanding. They’re not.”
“Like, before Newton everyone think planets and moon and such is made from different stuff from the Earth?”
“Aye. Newton showed that everything material is basically the same. And I think that’s just happened again. The Architects are the same as us, just several steps ahead of our technical game. This is the key to their minds. I just hope Murakami can help me figure out how to use it.”
In the early light of the following morning, they were contemplating the agony of another day without food when Lorna saw something on the horizon. It could have been a ship, a cloud, or a trick of the light. “Or a trick of the mind,” Lorna muttered to herself, willing her bloodshot eyes to give her more information. Their only pair of binoculars, damaged in the tsunami, made the image larger, but no more intelligible, and they began to squabble about whether to use one of their three flares. Daniel said yes, definitely they should. Lorna wanted to agree, but she forced herself to be strong. “No,” she said. “It’s too far away. Better not waste one.” Morag shrugged. “It’s not a problem with a rational solution, given the available data. So the rational thing is to stop pretending we can come up with a rational solution. Save energy. Flip a coin.”
Lorna was examining the flare gun. Kit had been sitting silently at the rail. She got up and came over, as if to join the discussion, and asked to see the gun. She turned it over and weighed it in her palm. Then she looked at the others with her eyebrows arched, raised her arm, and, without even looking up, pulled the trigger.
“Flip coin is irrational waste of energy also, Majka. Better just do something, yah? That way, we die thinking it sucks that it didn’t work, instead of die thinking it sucks that we not even try.”
No one spoke. They looked up, following the trail of smoke, and watched the orange fireball brighten at the top of the arc, like a miniature sun. It continued to brighten as it fell. But it was pathetically close to them, and much too far from the ship, or shadow, or mirage they’d seen. Its fire went out with a crushing suddenness and was replaced by silence.
And more silence.
Silence, except for the lap-lap of small waves against the hull, and the acute awareness that they were a sinking gray dot amid several million square miles of blue-gray nothing. Morag wondered whether she would manage not to cry. Daniel tried to see through the wall of the present, but could not. Lorna and Kit thought private thoughts about death.
More silence.
And then the death of the flare was answered, at last, by three long mournful blasts.
They didn’t dare believe their ears, at first. They waited and waited, not trusting themselves to speak. Slowly, the shadow on the horizon grew, and solidified, and by degrees it turned into something so bright that it looked phony, Photoshopped—an image from an advertisement, pasted onto the ocean. A huge, brand-new, sparkling-white cruise ship.
It approached slowly, but it was still pushing in front of it a bow wave that threatened to swamp what little of the Esperanza was still above water.
Goddess of the Oceans.
“Feck,” Lorna said. “Who’d a thought a life-savin’ miracle’d look
like a cross between an iceberg, the head office o’ a toothpaste company, an’ the world’s biggest weddin’ cake?”
CHAPTER 12
MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE
The logo “ONEWORLDLINE” was still painted on the superstructure, in six-foot blue letters that looked tiny. But that claim to ownership was out of date: the Seraphim had acquired her. Being in a hurry, they’d greased the deal by offering the owners double the astronomical sum she’d originally cost to build. Then they’d stripped her to the bright-white bones. She was huge—built for six thousand passengers and their smiling serfs. But those who had followed Quinn’s Anabasis, and were nearing the completion of their mental preparations, were just fine with basic accommodations on this, their final cruise. Twenty thousand had been squeezed on board.
The four survivors plucked from the Esperanza were treated well enough—in a way. They needed no encouragement to throw away their filthy rags, accept a shower, and pick from a supply of spare clothes. With a wordless, monk-like politeness, the Seraphim shepherded them to an area where there was food and water, and to a room filled with bedding and basic medical supplies. But the Goddess of the Oceans was no tourist boat, not now. The swimming pools and hot tubs were empty. The gourmet kitchens were empty too, except for packing cases filled with MREs. There wasn’t a single thousand-dollar handbag on offer in the Gucci shop. And the casino had been reduced to a huge floor space with row after row of foam camping mats: it looked like a school gym on TV being put to use after an earthquake.
“We’ll have to do some acting,” Daniel whispered. “Pretend we’re Seraphim. Keep our eyes to ourselves. Not say much.”
“Hope’s story can be ours,” Lorna said. “We were tryin’ te make our own way te Fujisan.”
But they didn’t need Hope’s story. Most of their rescuers wore the white scarf—proudly or indifferently, it was hard to tell—and they all smiled, all the time, but few of them uttered even a syllable. There was a distance, an eerie blankness to them. Only a small number managed a papery “Welcome” or “We are glad that we saved you” or just, with a nod, “Eternity.” One of these figures produced four cheap, shiny-white polyester scarves, and then, almost comically, also handed out white Nalgene water bottles adorned with the same broken-triangle logo. “Like a freebie at a feck’n sales conference,” Lorna said under her breath, giving hers a suspicious sniff.