Nebula Award Stories - 1983 #18

by Robert Silverberg (ed)

  He looked strangely familiar.

  “It won’t work,” the man said. “You cannot get away. You have signed the articles, like the rest, and are in for a three-hundreth lay. ”

  “Three-hundreth lay?” Fallon was bewildered.

  “A three-hundreth part of the general catastrophe is yours. Don’t thank me. It isn’t necessary.” The old man looked even more sorrowful and more wild, if it were possible to combine those seemingly incompatible emotions.

  “To tell you the truth,” he said, “I wouldn’t hold you to the contract if it were strictly up to me.” He shrugged his shoulders and opened his palms before him. “But it isn’t.”

  Fallon’s heart was beating fast again. “I don’t remember any contract. You’re not one of' my clients. I don’t trade for you. I’ve been in this business for a long time, mister, and I know better than to sign. ...”

  The wildness swelled in the man. There was something burning in him, and he looked about to scream, or cry.

  “Z have been in the business longer than you!” He swung his leg out from beneath the table and rapped'it loudly with his knuckle. Fallon saw that the leg was of white bone. “And 1 can tell you that you signed the contract when you signed aboard this ship—there’s no other way to get aboard—and you must serve until you strike land again or it sinks beneath you!”

  The diners in the restaurant dined on, oblivious. Fallon looked toward the plate glass at the front of the room and saw the water rising rapidly up it, sea-green and turbid, as the restaurant and the city fell to the bottom of the sea.

  THIRTEEN

  Once again he was jerked awake, this time by the din of someone beating the deck of the forecastle above them with a club. The other sleepers were as startled as Fallon. He rolled out of the hammock with the mists of his dream still clinging to him, pulled on his shirt and scrambled up to the deck.

  Ahab was stalking the quarter-deck in a frenzy of impatience. “Man the mastheads!” he shouted.

  The men who had risen with Fallon did just that, some of them only half-dressed. Fallon was one of the first up and gained one of the hoops at the main masthead. Three others stood on the mainyard below him. Fallon scanned the horizon and saw off to starboard and about a mile ahead of them the jet of mist that indicated a whale. As it rose and fell in its course through the rolling seas, Fallon saw that it was white.

  “What do you see?” Ahab called from far below. Had he noticed Fallon’s gaze fixed on the spot in front of them?

  “Nothing! Nothing, sir!” Fallon called. Ahab and the men on deck looked helpless so far below him. Fallon did not know if his lying would work, but there was the chance that the other men in the rigging, not being as high as he, would not be able to make out Moby Dick from their lower vantage points. He turned away from the whale and made a good show of scanning the empty horizon.

  “Top gallant sails!—stunsails! Alow and aloft, and on both sides!” Ahab ordered. The men fixed a line from the mainmast to the deck, looped its lower end around Ahab’s rigid leg. Ahab wound the rope around his shoulders and arm, and they hoisted him aloft, twisting with the pressure on the hemp, toward the masthead. He twirled slowly as they raised him up, arid his line of sight was obscured by the rigging and sails he had to peer through.

  Before they had lifted him two-thirds of the way up, he began to shout.

  “There she blows!—there she blows! A hump like a snowhill! It is Moby Dick!”

  Fallon knew enough to begin shouting and pointing immediately, and the men at the other two masts did the same. Within a minute everyone who had remained on the deck was in the rigging trying to catch a glimpse of the creature they had sought, half of them doubting his existence, for so many months.

  Fallon looked down toward the helmsman, who stood on his toes, the whalebone tiller under his arm, arching his neck trying to see the whale.

  The others in the rigging were now arguing about who had spotted Moby Dick first, with Ahab the eventual victor. It was his fate, he said, to be the one to first spot the whale. Fallon couldn’t argue with that.

  Ahab was lowered to the deck, giving orders all the way, and three boats were swung outboard in preparation for the chase. Starbuck was ordered to stay behind and keep the ship.

  As they chased the whale, the sea became calmer, so the rowing became easier—though just as back-breaking—and they knifed through the water, here as placid as a farm pond, faster than ever. Accompanying the sound of their own wake, Fallon heard the wake of the whale they must be approaching. He strained arms, back, and legs, pulling harder in time to Stubbs cajoling chant, and the rushing grew. He snatched a glance over his shoulder, turned to the rowing, then looked again.

  The white whale glided through the sea smoothly, giving the impression of immeasurable strength. The wake he left was as steady as that of a schooner; the bow waves created by the progress of his broad, blank brow through the water fanned away in precise lines whose angle with respect to the massive body did not change. The three whaleboats rocked gently as they broke closer through these successive waves; the foam of Moby Dick’s wake was abreast of them now, and Fallon saw how quickly it subsided into itself, giving the sea back its calm face, innocent of knowledge of the creature that had passed. Attendant white birds circled above their heads, now and then falling to or rising from the surface in busy flutterings of wings and awkward beaks. One of them had landed on the broken shaft of a harpoon that protruded from the snow-white whales humped back; it bobbed up and down with the slight rocking of the whale in its long, muscular surging through the sea. Oblivious. Strangely quiet. Fallon felt as if they had entered a magic circle.

  He knew Ahabs boat, manned by the absurd Filipinos, was ahead of them and no doubt preparing to strike first. Fallon closed his eyes, pulled on his oar, and wished for it not to happen. For it to stop now, or just continue without any change. He felt as if he could row a very long time; he was no longer tired or afraid. He just wanted to keep rowing, feeling the rhythm of the work, hearing the low and insistent voice of Stubb telling them to break their backs. Fallon wanted to listen to the rushing white sound of the whales wake in the water, to know that they were perhaps keeping pace with it, to know that, if he should tire, he could look for a second over his shoulder and find Moby Dick there still. Let the monomaniac stand in the bow of his boat—if he was meant to stand there, if it was an unavoidable necessity—let him stand there with the raised lance and concentrate his hate into one purified moment of will. Let him send that will into the tip of that lance so that it might physically glow with the frustrated obtuseness of it. Let him stand there until he froze from the suspended desire, and let the whale swim on.

  Fallon heard a sudden increase in the rushing of the water, several inarticulate cries. He stopped pulling, as did the others, and turned to look in time to see the whale lift itself out of the water, exposing flanks and flukes the bluish white of cemetery marble, and flip its huge tail upward to dive perpendicularly into the sea. Spray drenched them, and sound returned with the crash of the waves coming together to fill the vacuum left by the departure of the creature that had seconds before given weight and direction, place, to the placeless expanse of level waters. The birds circled above the subsiding foam.

  They lifted their oars. They waited.

  “An hour,” Ahab said.

  They waited. It was another beautiful day. The sky was hard and blue as the floor of the swimming pool where he had met Carol. Fallon wondered again if she missed him, if he had indeed disappeared from that other life when he had taken up residence in this one—but he thrust those thoughts away. They were meaningless. There was no time in that world after his leaving it; that world did not exist, or if it existed, the order of its existence was not of the order of the existence of the rough wood he sat on, the raw flesh of his hands and the air he breathed. Time was the time between the breaths he drew. Time was the duration of the dream he had had about being back in Chicago, and he could not say how long
that had been, even if it had begun or ended. He might be dreaming still. The word “dream” was meaningless, and “awake.” And “real,” and “insane,” and “known,” and all those other interesting words he had once known. Time was waiting for Moby Dick to surface again.

  The breeze freshened. The sea began to swell.

  “The birds!—the birds!” Tashtego shouted, so close behind Fallons ear that he winced. The Indian half-stood, rocking the whaleboat as he pointed to the sea birds, which had risen and were flying toward Ahab’s boat twenty yards away.

  “The whale will breach there,” Stubb said.

  Ahab was up immediately. Peering into the water, he leaned on the steering oar and reversed the orientation of his boat. He then exchanged places with Fedallah, the other men reaching up to help him through the rocking boat. He picked up the harpoon, and the oarsmen stood ready to row.

  Fallon looked down into the sea, trying to make out what Ahab saw. Nothing, until a sudden explosion of white as the whale, rocketing upward, turned over as it finally hit the surface. In a moment Ahab’s boat was in the whales jaws, Ahab in the bows almost between them. Stubb was shouting and gesturing, and Fallon’s fellows fell to the oars in a disorganized rush. The Filipinos in the lead boat crowded into the stern while Ahab, like a man trying to open a recalcitrant garage door, tugged and shoved at Moby Dick’s jaw, trying insanely to dislodge the whale’s grip. Within seconds filled with crashing water, cries and confusion, Moby Dick had bitten the boat in two, and Ahab had belly-flopped over the side like a swim-ming-class novice.

  Moby Dick then began to swim tight circles around the smashed boat and its crew. Ahab struggled to keep his head above water. Neither Stubb nor Flask could bring his boat close enough to pick him up. The Pequod was drawing nearer, and finally Ahab was able to shout loudly enough to be heard, “Sail on the whale—drive him off!”

  It worked. The Pequod picked up the remnants of the whaleboat while Fallon and the others dragged its crew and Ahab into their own boat.

  The old man collapsed in the bottom of the boat, gasping for breath, broken and exhausted. He moaned and shook. Fallon was sure he was finished whale chasing, that Stubb and the others would see the man was used up, that Starbuck would take over and sail them home. But in a minute or two Ahab was leaning on his elbow asking after his boat’s crew, and a few minutes after that they had resumed the chase with double oarsmen in Stubbs boat.

  Moby Dick drew steadily away as exhaustion wore them down. Fallon did not feel he could row any more after all. The Pequod picked them up and they gave chase in vain under all sail until dark.

  FOURTEEN

  On the second day’s chase all three boats were smashed in. Many suffered sprains and contusions, and one was bitten by a shark. Ahab’s whale-bone leg was shattered, with a splinter driven into his own flesh. Fedallah, who had been the captain’s second shadow, was tangled in the line Ahab had shot into the white whale, dragged out of the boat, and drowned. Moby Dick escaped.

  FIFTEEN

  It came down to what Fallon had known it would come down to eventually.

  In the middle of that night he went to talk to Ahab, who slept in one of the hatchways as he had the night before. The carpenter was making him another leg, wooden this time, and Ahab was curled sullenly in the dark lee of the after scuttle. Fallon did not know whether he was waiting or asleep.

  He started down the stairs, hesitated on the second step. Ahab lifted his head. “What do you need?” he asked.

  Fallon wondered what he wanted to say. He looked at the man huddled in the darkness and tried to imagine what moved him, tried to see him as a man instead of a thing. Was it possible he was only a man, or had Fallon himself become stylized and distorted by living in the book of Melville’s imagination?

  “You said—talking to Starbuck today—you said that everything that happens is fixed, decreed. You said it was rehearsed a billion years before any of it took place. Is it true?” Ahab straightened and leaned toward Fallon, bringing his face into the dim light thrown by the lamps on deck. He looked at him for a moment in silence.

  “I don’t know. So it seemed as the words left my lips. The Parsee is dead before me, as he foretold. I don’t know.” “That is why you’re hunting the whale.”

  “That is why I’m hunting the whale.”

  “How can this hunt, how can killing an animal tell you anything? How can it justify your life? What satisfaction can it give you in the end, even if you boil it all down to oil, even if you cut Moby Dick into bible-leaves and eat him? I don’t understand it.”

  The captain looked at him earnestly. He seemed to be listening, and leaping ahead of the questions. It was very dark in the scuttle, and they could hardly see each other. Fallon kept his hands folded tightly behind him. The blade of the cleaver he had shoved into his belt lay cool against the skin at the small of his back; it was the same knife he used to butcher the whale.

  “If it is immutably fixed, then it does not matter what I do. The purpose and meaning are out of my hands, and thine. We have only to take our parts, to be the thing that it is written for us to be. Better to live that role given us than to struggle against it or play the coward, when the actions must be the same nonetheless. Some say I am mad to chase the whale. Perhaps I am mad. But if it is my destiny to seek him, to tear, to burn and kill those things that stand in my path—then the matter of my madness is not relevant, do you see?”

  He was not speaking in character.

  “If these things are not fixed, and it was not my destiny to have my leg taken by the whale, to have my hopes blasted in this chase, then how cruel a world it is. No mercy, no power but its own controls it; it blights our lives out of merest whim. No, not whim, for there would then be no will behind it, no builder of this Bedlam hospital, and in the madhouse, when the keeper is gone, what is to stop the inmates from doing as they please? In a universe of cannibals, where all creatures have preyed upon each other, carrying on an eternal war since the world began, why should I not exert my will in whatever direction I choose? Why should I not bend others to my will?” The voice was reasonable, and tired. “Have I answered your question?”

  Fallon felt the time drawing near. He felt light, as if the next breeze might lift him from the deck and carry him away. “I have an idea,” he said. “My idea is-—and it is an idea I have had for some time now, and despite everything that has happened, and what you say, I can’t give it up—my idea is that all that is happening ...” Fallon waved his hand at the world, “. . . is a story. It is a book written by a man named Herman Melville and told by a character named Ishmael. You are the main character in the book. All the things that have happened are events in the book.

  “My idea also is that I am not from the book, or at least I wasn’t originally. Originally I lived a different life in another time and place, a life in the real world and not in a book. It was not ordered and plotted like a book, and. ...”

  Ahab interrupted in a quiet voice: “You call this an ordered book? I see no order. If it were so orderly, why would the whale task me so?”

  Fallon knotted his fingers tighter behind him. Ahab was going to make him do it. He felt the threads of the situation weaving together to create only that bloody alternative, of all the alternatives that might be. In the open market, the price for the future and price for the physical reality converged on delivery day.

  “The order’s not an easy thing to see, I’ll admit,” Fallon said. He laughed nervously.

  Ahab laughed louder. “It certainly is not. And how do you know this other life you speak of was not a play? A different kind of play. How do you know your thoughts are your own? How do you know that this dark little scene was not prepared just for us, or perhaps for someone who is reading about us at this very moment and wondering about the point of the drama just as much as we wonder at the pointlessness of our lives?” Ahab’s voice rose, gaining an edge of compulsion. “How do we know anything?” He grabbed his left wrist, pinched the fles
h and shook it.

  “How do we know what lies behind this matter? This flesh is a wall, the painting over the canvas, the mask drawn over the players face, the snow fallen over the fertile field, or perhaps the scorched earth. I know there is something there; there must be something, but it cannot be touched because we are smothered in this flesh, this life. How do we know—” “Stop it! Stop it!” Fallon shouted. “Please stop asking things! You should not be able to say things like that to me! Ahab does not talk to me!”

  “Isn’t this what I am supposed to say?”

  Fallon shuddered.

  “Isn’t this scene in your book?”

  He was dizzy, sick. “No! Of course not!”

  “Then why does that disturb you? Doesn’t this prove that we are not pieces of a larger dream, that this is a real world, that the blood that flows within our veins is real blood, that the pain we feel has meaning, that the things we do have consequence? We break the mold of existence by existing. Isn’t that reassurance enough?” Ahab was shouting now, and the men awake on deck trying to get the boats in shape for the last days chase and the Pequods ultimate destruction put aside their hammers and rope and listened to his justification.

  It was time. Fallon, shaking with anger and fear, drew the knife from behind him and leapt at the old man. In bringing up the blade for the attack he hit it against the side of the narrow hatchway. His grip loosened. Ahab threw up his hands, and despite the difference in age and mobility between them, managed to grab Fallon’s wrist before he could strike the killing blow. Instead, the deflected cleaver struck the beam beside Ahab’s head and stuck there. As Fallon tried to free it, Ahab brought his forearm up and smashed him beneath the jaw. Fallon fell backward, striking his head with stunning force against the opposite side of the scuttle. He momentarily lost consciousness.