by Lloyd Kropp
Peter nodded. He had the vague feeling now that if he could get a firm grasp on just one impossibility, if he could defy Tabor and The Drift with one articulate, absolute, unanswerable question, then the whole world of The Sargasso Sea would disintegrate in the storm of his rhetoric and he would find himself back in his office at Harrington University, the victim of a dispeptic daydream.
“But what happens when there’s a storm?” he asked. “I should think a really good storm would break everything apart. These old wrecks could never hold up in a heavy wind and a rough sea.”
“There are no storms here,” said Tabor. His voice was calm, reassuring, as if storms occurred only on other worlds or in legends. “In the first place, there is relatively little wind or rain anywhere in The Sargasso Sea. But for some reason it’s especially calm on The Drift. Sometimes the winds whirl around us a mile or so away; sometimes we see large waves breaking in the distance. But we are always at the eye of the wind and current. Nothing ever touches us here.”
“Nothing at all?”
“Occasionally we do get gusts of wind or a light breeze. Sometimes it rains. But often the rainbarrels get so low we have to depend on fishjuice and even seawater in very small amounts. No, there’s never been a real storm here.” Then his eyes lost their focus and he seemed to be thinking of something far away. “At least not for three hundred years,” he said finally.
“I see. Then actually we’re quite safe.”
Tabor laughed. “Much safer than on land,” he answered. “But of course you have to be careful about the condemned ships. Only about two hundred and fifty are still safe. The other four or five hundred are broken up or half submerged.”
“That’s a lot of ships,” said Peter.
“Yes. And that’s not counting the ones underneath.”
“Underneath?”
“Here on the eastern part of Northside the boats sit on top of other boats in a sort of artificial cliff that The Madrids and Bluewaters have been working on for almost a hundred years. Our divers have found many boats that are entirely submerged now. Apparently the weeds go down a hundred feet or more in some places, and it seems they can hold a boat suspended even after it’s completely waterlogged. There may be hundreds of ships down there that none of us have ever seen.”
Peter tried to imagine a hundred boats lurking under the weeds, dark and enormous, like sleeping whales. It was one more odd possibility in a world of extravagantly odd things. Then he glanced up and saw that Tabor was looking at him very closely, smiling a little, his head cocked to one side as he perched on the edge of the rail and smoked his pipe.
“It’s not so bad after a few days,” said Tabor. “The first thing that will happen to you when you begin to adjust to life here is that you will get used to all these mysteries, and many more. They become a part of you. The sea has always been filled with mysteries, and men who live by the sea have the power to accept them, to live with them as they live with their own shadows. No one knows why the deep scattering layer reflects sonar long before it reaches the bottom. No one really knows where the deep currents come from or where they go or how they affect the surface currents. No one knows why monsters swim in Loch Ness.”
“There are no such things as monsters,” said Peter. He was growing very weary now of Tabor. The man seemed friendly enough, but he was clearly in love with his own words and he was full of misinformation.
“I have photos of the Loch Ness Monster in a magazine I got from that expedition ship I mentioned a while back. I’ll show them to you someday, if you’re interested.”
Peter did not answer. There was no point in arguing the matter, he thought. He was in Tabor’s world now and it would be best not to argue too openly with anyone. Tabor seemed to him a strange man, given to odd analogies and a curious sort of erudition based on a miscellany of scattered information. He had a predilection for the mysterious. He seemed in a gentle way to enjoy Peter’s confusion, and the tone of his conversation was too openly expansive, too romantic. Peter could not quite put it all together, but it seemed to him that Tabor was initiating him into a spirit world, and Peter had never believed in spirits, not even as a child.
As they talked, Tabor motioned him toward a narrow gangplank that led to another ship, opposite the point which he had jumped. They began walking from boat to boat along the edge of The Northside Cliff. Toward the western end of The Drift it sank to a depth of only two ships, and here The Drift narrowed so he could see water on both sides. A group of sloops and small yachts extended in parallel rows for another hundred yards. They rose and fell very gently in a long rolling chain above the gentle undulations of the green water.
“This narrow channel of boats just before The Drift comes to an end is called The Bridge. Once there was a story about how the people who lived here two hundred years ago were trying to extend it all the way to The New World, but that’s probably just superstition.”
“It does look like a bridge,” said Peter.
“The children sometimes play here in the morning,” said Tabor. “They have some sort of shadowgame about The Bridge leading somewhere underwater. Perhaps they’ll tell you about it after they get to know you.”
It had taken them less than fifteen minutes to walk from the center of The Northside Cliff to The Bridge, but the tour of The Southern Edge, as Tabor called it, took nearly an hour. It did not move in a more or less straight line as did Northside, but described a curve that swung outward and then inward so that The Drift was not strictly an ellipse as Tabor had suggested, but more of a bow shape. At first they came to long ribbons of seaweed and garlands of yellow and red vegetables growing like vine fruit for dozens of yards out into the water. It was like an enormous pool of sunset colors shimmering in the morning light. Narrow pontoon docks extended out into the water at different angles, occasionally turning and joining so as to cut the area into odd-shaped fields of color.
“These are called The Seafields,” said Tabor. “They take up about a third of The Southern Edge. Most of our food comes from here. Reuben and Javitt will show you how we farm here in a day or so.”
Halfway down The Southern Edge, The Seafields disappeared, and there was no longer any sharp line of demarcation between The Drift and the open swamps that bordered on The Sargasso Sea. Here there were many places where pieces of wood and wrecks of small ships had spread out into the water for nearly a hundred yards. Occasionally he saw spots where moss or Sargassum had bound boats together into green islands. In other places, pieces of wood had been nailed together to make a series of bridges and walkways out into the water, connecting the separate ships beyond The Southern Edge.
“Out there is a kind of no man’s land,” said Tabor. “I suppose you’ve noticed that here on The Drift many of the old ships have been caulked and varnished recently. And we spend a good deal of time scraping barnacles and keeping the weeds out of the ship’s hulls. Sometimes we even try to move ships around when a new one comes in or when one of the big ones threatens to float free or topple over. But out there it’s very untidy and we make no attempt to keep it up. We call it The Outland. It’s a good place to stay away from.”
“You mean it’s dangerous?”
Tabor nodded. “Many of the boats are on the point of sinking or capsizing, and the walkways between them are too long and usually very unstable. And besides, there are people who live out there.”
“Out there? You mean by their own choice?”
“More or less. Well no, not exactly. They’re what you might call exiles. I don’t think they would want to live with us here, but the fact is they’re not permitted on The Drift. They’re all people who can’t get along with the rest of us for one reason or another, so they’ve been sent out on the water to live by themselves. There are only about eight or nine of them now, and we very seldom see them during the day. But they’re very hostile to anyone who goes out into their world.”
“Has there been no attempt to—well, to rehabilitate them?”
“It’s better to leave them alone,” said Tabor. “The Outlanders are all right if you leave them alone. They prowl around The Southern Edge at night, but if you stay inside your cabin they won’t bother you.”
A few minutes later they reached the eastern end of The Drift, marked by three large nineteenth-century clipper ships.
“This is called Driftsend,” he said, pointing to the three ships. “It’s another place we generally avoid. Pao sometimes calls it ‘The Stern,’ and the children have picked that up and insist that there are little men who live inside the last three ships who always frown and have very ‘stern’ looks. Driftsend is harmless enough, but still it’s the custom to stay away.”
“Then no one really lives in the last three ships?” said Peter.
“No. Well, no one that we really know of.” He shrugged his shoulders and smiled in an embarrassed way. “Only The Hatchmaker,” he said finally.
Three
PAO
That evening in his room after Pao had brought him dinner and he was alone near the lighted circle of his oil lamp, he thought about the mysteries of The Drift. There were certainly many of them: the nature of the inward-turning currents that had brought all these derelicts hundreds and thousands of miles to this place over so many centuries; the fact that so many old ships had managed to survive, or at least partly survive, for so long; and the incredible fact that The Drift had never been discovered—incredible even with all of Tabor’s explanations of temperature inversions and seasonal mists and what not. Had no one ever tried to leave? Had no one ever repaired one of the ships and returned to land to tell the story of this impossible world? And finally, The Hatchmaker. Who in the world was The Hatchmaker?
Peter had always thought of himself as a speculative, thoughtful kind of person, and yet he had never really speculated very far or thought very much about anything. He was a victim of his first impressions, and in his own quiet way he was at the mercy of his feelings, of fleeting images, of a quixotic intuition that had nearly always led him astray, and he realized now how inadequate, how utterly incapable he was of evaluating what had happened to him in the last two days. He could not imagine how people lived here, castaways from the world. He could not imagine what they thought or what they did with their time. He could not imagine himself living here for more than a few more days. Escape was the only idea his mind seemed able to hold onto, the only thing that seemed really important. He would have to ask questions—careful questions. He would have to make plans.
Suddenly his thoughts were interrupted by an odd sound. At first it seemed to be an echo in his imagination, something from the dream world in which he had spent so much time while lost at sea. It reminded him of a water organ, or perhaps a weird harp played by the random fingers of the wind. Its vague rhythmical recurrences suggested some order, some form that he could not quite grasp. He got up, went to the window, and stared out into the night. For a moment the sound seemed to come from the white moon that dipped near the horizon, silvering the water. Then it faded beyond the moon and disappeared. He rubbed his eyes and lay back on the bed. It was too late and he was too tired to contemplate yet another mystery. The music played on in the darkness of his imagination until finally everything faded in the oblivion of sleep.
When he awoke the next morning Pao was again standing at the foot of his bed and again she had brought breakfast.
“You sleep very badly,” she said. “You have bad dreams.”
He could not think of an answer. He rolled over.
“It’s nine o’clock,” she said. “Time to get up.”
“Nine o’clock is no time at all to get up,” he mumbled. He opened his eyes and scratched his head. “You and breakfast both look very good this morning,” he said.
“You also look very lovely, Sutherland,” she answered.
“Don’t kid me. I look like a tree full of owls.”
She laughed. “What are owls?” she asked.
“Owls are funny birds. They look like this.” He turned his head slowly from side to side and made a face like an owl. Pao laughed so hard she finally had to sit down on the bed, nearly upsetting his breakfast.
“No bird ever looked like that,” she said.
He was very pleased. No one he had ever known had ever found him amusing before. Especially no woman. But then, he thought, Pao was not exactly a woman. She was only a girl.
“Tell me,” he said after her laughter subsided, “what’s your name? Tabor calls you Pao. Is that short for something?”
“No. That’s my real name.”
“What’s your last name?”
“I have only one name,” she answered. “No one on The Drift has more than one name. My father’s name was Paolozzi. He gave me an Italian name that no one could remember, so finally The Madrids began to call me Pao. Pao is my real name now.”
“Is your father alive?”
“He died a few weeks after we came here. My mother was lost in a storm after an ocean liner sank. I was only four then. I really don’t remember much about it.”
“Do you remember what it was like to live on land?”
She smiled distantly. “Not exactly. I remember being in different rooms, and I remember blue wallpaper with silver birds. I had a very large bedroom window and when I got up in the morning there were all sorts of colored things outside, but I can’t ever think what they were. I can’t remember anything about the outdoors except that my mother warned me never to go there alone. Tabor says that land gives you a different feeling about things. He says you never feel the land moving. Is that true?”
Peter shook his head in a kind of baffled amusement. “Yes,” he said. “The land never moves.”
“How far down does it go?”
He looked at her for a long moment before answering. “All the way to the. bottom,” he said finally.
“The bottom of the ocean?” And then it was her turn to be silent as she looked beyond him into her own imaginings. “I used to dive sometimes with Tabor,” she said after a while. “Sometimes we got down nearly a hundred feet, but we never saw anything but more water. It seems to go down forever.”
“It seems to, but it doesn’t. Everything has a bottom, an ending. At least everything on earth.”
“Everything on earth?” Again she was silent for a moment. “I wish,” she said, “there were more books to read. I would like to read about everything.”
“Who taught you to read? Are there schools here?”
“Someone in each clan is responsible for teaching the children.”
“Who’s the teacher in your clan?”
“When I was little, Rose taught all the Mary Strattford children. From her I learned music and dancing and shadowgames and mathematics. But Rose is too old to teach now. She goes on The Long Journey almost every week and no one can really speak to her. So Tabor is the teacher now for The Mary Strattfords. He taught me English and Spanish and German and marine biology and poetry.”
He paused in the middle of his seaweed and scallops to look at her again very carefully. Tabor was right. She was full of surprises. And what a shame to throw away all her beauty and intelligence in this wasteland.
When he had finished eating, they went out onto the deck of his schooner. He looked around him. Today things seemed much more familiar. His ship was about seventy-five yards below Northside and about as far from the three forbidden ships to the east at Driftsend. Tabor’s boat was somewhere above him on The Cliff, and all the other boats in his clan were apparently gathered in the same area.
He looked down at the lovely young girl named Pao and shook his head very slowly. “Well,” he said, “I’m shipwrecked in The Sargasso Sea. It’s morning and I’ve just had a delicious breakfast. What now?”
Pao smiled up at him and took his arm. “You’ll see how things are here very quickly. Then you won’t feel so strange.”
The mists of the last two days had dissipated and the air was bright and clear. He took a deep breath.
“Follow me,” she said to him. “I want to show you something.”
As they talked, she led him from boat to boat across the center of The Drift. “Over here,” she said. She pointed to a place where two large French brigantines had been tied together. The deck sidings had been removed, and a rough, continuous deck had been built where the boats normally would have curved away from each other. At the south end he saw something that looked like a slide. It went down over the stern of the first ship and disappeared in the shadows.
“This is called Twoboats,” said Pao. “It’s where all the meetings and dances are held. Anything that involves all the clans together.”
Suddenly he remembered the strange music he had heard the previous night. “Was there music here last night?” he asked. “I don’t think so. Why?”
“I heard something very strange last night just before I fell asleep.”
“There are many strange sounds on The Drift,” she said. “You will get used to them after a while.”
“Perhaps I was dreaming.” He looked across the long empty deck of the two ships. “What were you saying about this place? About the music …?”
“This is our place for dancing and music. And once every two months we do The Dance of The Nine Islands. You’ll see it next week.”
“The Dance of The Nine Islands?”
“It’s a celebration. Something I made up.”