by Allen Steele
The Zephyr had successfully made its maiden voyage already; its cargo included the equipment necessary to build another powersat in a Trojan orbit near Jupiter for the return trip. As ConSpace figured, the freighter had travelled through the asteroid belt too fast for Pax ships to match course with it. For its second voyage, it was slated to carry passengers along with its four-person crew: eight men and women, recently hired by ConSpace to replace the miners on Callisto Station and who would make the journey in biostasis.
No one at ConSpace was aware that these replacements belonged to the Heliotropic Congregation, or that Jupiter was not their intended destination.
Since its inception, the Congregation had attempted to reach the Heliotropes. First they tried telepathy, gathering in circles to clasp hands and project their thoughts to any astral beings who might be listening. When that didn’t work, they purchased a radio transmitter and erected the antenna that stood in the midst of their compound; they used this until the FCC cited them for operating an unlicensed broadcast station and confiscated their equipment. They even went so far as to go out into the prairie, drench the grass with gasoline in a half-mile-diameter symbol of a triangle encompassed by a circle, then set it afire in hopes that it would be seen from space.
Then Dr. Sneed had a revelation. He had no doubt that the Heliotropes were aware of the Congregation. However, because of their reclusive nature, they wouldn’t reveal themselves unless it was absolutely necessary. Therefore, the Congregation’s only recourse would be to put themselves in a situation where the Heliotropes would be forced to step in and save them.
To accomplish this, though, the Congregation couldn’t remain on Earth. It would have to travel out to where the Heliotropes lived, there to deliberately place themselves in jeopardy and await salvation.
The cult’s twelve members agreed—no one ever challenged their leader when he had a new revelation—and so they went about formulating a plan and carrying it out. No doubt Terry had a lot to do with this. After all, he was the member best suited for coming up a scheme to hijack a spacecraft and send it toward the Sun.
It was surprisingly easy for members of the cult to get hired by ConSpace for employment on Callisto Station. Its distance from Earth deterred most off-world job seekers, and the fact that the outpost was being threatened by the Pax Astra made working there even less desirable. The Congregationalists all submitted applications, each and every one under false names and with phony addresses, credentials, and references. Eight were hired, including both Terry and Dr. Sneed; it was eventually learned that ConSpace’s computer system had been hacked and all other applications deleted. The four who weren’t accepted remained in South Dakota while the others reported to ConSpace’s training facility in Texas. Six weeks later, they caught a shuttle to Earth orbit, where they boarded the Jove Zephyr.
As passengers, the cult members were supposed to spend the entire trip to Jupiter in hibernation. Yet one of them apparently knew how to reprogram the computer controlling the zombie tanks and change things so that they would be awakened earlier than scheduled, because exactly 180 days after the Zephyr departed from Earth, the eight biostasis cells injected their occupants with the drugs that would revive them from their long sleep, and a few minutes later Terry and his companions rose from the tanks and left the hibernation compartment.
We can only speculate what occurred next. Based on the testimonies of the Congregation members who were left behind, though, we have a pretty good idea. The Zephyr was equipped with lifeboats, but they were never launched, nor was a distress signal ever transmitted. The captain, executive officer, helmsman, and engineer were most likely asleep in their bunks when the cult members crept down the silent corridors to their quarters, knives in their hands. They probably woke up just long enough to realize that their throats had been cut.
I’d like to think that Terry didn’t murder anyone. However, he was doubtless responsible for everything that happened next. No one else would have known how to jettison the sail from its spars, reset the navigation system so that the destination coordinates were now -00.-00.-00, or perform a 180-degree turn and fire the auxiliary engine in a prolonged burst that broke the freighter away from its planned trajectory. In fact, I suspect the entire plan was his idea from the beginning.
The ship’s transponder, of course, automatically transmitted telemetry regarding the course change to ConSpace’s deep-space tracking network. Within minutes, the communications specialist on duty sent a message to the wayward freighter, requesting an explanation. When no reply was received, she alerted her supervisor, who checked the data and contacted his superiors, and so on down the line until a lot of people had come to the cold realization that something was seriously wrong with the Jove Zephyr.
There was no word from the Zephyr for several hours after the course-change was detected, then ConSpace received a communiqué from the ship. In a message that was both brief and utterly mad, Dr. Sneed informed the company that the Heliotropic Congregation had taken control of the freighter, that it was now heading directly toward the Sun, and that it would remain on this trajectory until he and his people made the Heliotropes reveal themselves by forcing them to rescue their most devoted believers. We will stay in touch as we await the glorious moment of first contact with powers greater than our own, his message said. Open your hearts…a new era is being born.
It might have been funny if it hadn’t been insane.
You know how the story ends. Most people do; the Jove Zephyr hijacking dominated the news sites for months, and since then has become legend. But you don’t know what happened to Terry Koenig.
It quickly became obvious that any attempt to intercept the freighter before it reached the Sun would fail. Even if a rescue vessel had been launched from Evening Star, which was then under construction above Venus, it couldn’t have rendezvoused with the Zephyr, the freighter’s velocity was too high, its trajectory too distant. Station personnel could only watch as the freighter streaked past, a tiny comet hurtling sunward.
Aboard the Zephyr, though, it seemed as if the Congregation was oblivious to their fate. Judging from the transmissions ConSpace regularly received from the freighter, the cultists were delirious with anticipation; they truly believed that all-knowing, all-powerful aliens would soon swoop in to save them. They sent messages to friends and family, telling them not to worry, that everything would be okay. I heard much the same thing from Terry:
I believe that this is what I’ve been meant to do, from the moment I was born. I always knew that I had a destiny, but I didn’t know what it would be. Now it’s all clear. My life has been leading up to this; my moment has come.
Venus is approximately sixty-seven million miles from the Sun; it took the Zephyr nearly three months to cross that distance. As the days become weeks and the weeks became months, communiqués received from the ship became less enthusiastic, more worrisome. When are the Heliotropes going to show themselves? We’re running out of food. We’re low on water. The compartments are getting warm, and no one is sleeping well. Have you seen anything? Is something coming our way?
The Zephyr crossed the orbit of Mercury, and still there was no sign of the Heliotropes. By then, the messages had become desperate. The Heliotropes aren’t coming! We have to turn back. Can you send a ship to pick us up? Yet those options were no longer available. The sail had been discarded, and too much fuel had been consumed during the trajectory change for the freighter’s engine to pull it free of the Sun’s gravity well. Rescue had long-since been ruled out.
The Zephyr was falling into the Sun; nothing could change that.
For awhile, there was only silence. When communications finally resumed, it came as text-only messages: Our provisions have run out. We can no longer enter the bridge. The Heliotropes don’t exist. We’ve killed Dr. Sneed, and the rest of us are contemplating suicide. More silence, this time even longer. The Zephyr had almost reached the Sun’s corona when a final transmission was received:
I’m sorry, Matt. I think I screwed up.
No one knew who sent it, or what it meant, except me.
In the end, Terry must have realized how wrong he’d been. He may have even tried to turn the ship around, if he’d been able to enter a bridge that had become a furnace. At some point, though, neither intelligence nor technology can resist the forces of nature. I can only hope that he died before the Jove Zephyr was consumed.
As children, we’re told not to stare into the Sun. This is common sense, of course, but there’s always a temptation to do so, if only to see how long one can look before being blinded. But Terry didn’t just stare into the Sun; he threw himself into it. And death was his only destiny.
Poor Terry. Poor damned, deluded Terry.
Some years ago, my friend and long-time editor Gardner Dozois put together a theme anthology with an intriguing premise: take the opening line of a classic work and write a new story from it. When he came to me, I immediately knew which story I wanted to use.
As I said earlier, I love pulp fiction. I’m not a complete Philistine, though: I also enjoy the classics, particularly the works of Herman Melville. I know there’s difference between dime novels and the canon of great American literature.
Still, I can’t help but think that Moby Dick’s first line could have been the opening of a Mickey Spillane novel.
THE BIG WHALE
Call me Ishmael. That’s what everyone does, down on the New Bedford waterfront: the longshoremen and wharf rats and sailors who’ve been away from sea for too long and are drowning their sorrows in a jug of grog. They don’t call me unless they’re in trouble, though. Trouble is my business. I carry a harpoon.
I’d just returned from a trip to New York. The Bartleby case had been tough, but I got it done. Not that the client was grateful. When I asked him to pay me for helping him keep his job at a Wall Street law firm, he’d said that he’d prefer not to, so I stuck his nose in his ledger book and slammed it shut a few times until he finally coughed up. Never trust a scrivener.
I was pretty wrung out when I got back to Massachusetts. I tried to sleep during the long ride home, but the carriage needed a new set of wheels and by the time the driver put me off in the middle of town, I could have used my spleen as a doormat. If I’d had any sense, I would have gone straight home. Instead, I decided to drop by the office first. I told myself that it was just to check the mail, but the truth of the matter is that I missed the place. For all of its seediness—the stench of cod, the drunks passed out on the sidewalks, the painted women lounging in tavern doorways—the waterfront still has its own bleak, salt-crusted majesty. New Bedford may not be in the same class as Boston, but it’s home.
My office was on the second floor of the Customs House, a one-room loft with a view of the wharf. As usual, the door was blocked by a small hill of mail that had been dropped over the transom, most of it bills that would have to be covered by the handful of gold I’d managed to frisk from Bartleby’s pockets after I smeared his meticulous handwriting with his face. I transferred the mail from the floor to the desk, and was searching the drawers for the bottle of Jamaican rum I kept stashed in there, when there was a knock at the door. Thinking it was the landlord dropping by for the rent, I told my visitor to come in…and that was when she appeared.
The moment I laid eyes on her, I knew the dame was trouble. The beautiful ones always are. A vision in crinoline and wool, her lavender dress covered her from neck down, but as she levitated into the room, I caught a glimpse of a well-turned ankle, the kind of lateral malleolus that keeps lonely men awake at night. A lock of lustrous chestnut hair fell from beneath her fringed pink bonnet; I found myself wondering what it might be like to run my fingers through it. Yeah, somewhere beneath three layers of store-bought clothes was a woman with the body of a ship’s figurehead. And not a mermaid, either.
“Pardon me,” she said, “but are you Mister…?”
“Ishmael. Just call me Ishmael.” I beckoned to the chair on the other side of the desk. “Have a seat, will you, Miss…?”
“Ahab…Mrs. Ahab,” she added, emphasizing her marital status a little more than necessary. If she knew my name, though, then it was a good guess that she also knew my reputation. “And thank you, but I’d rather stand.”
She didn’t have a choice. Her dress had a bustle in the rear big enough to hide a Navy crew. Not that they’d mind very much. I thought about offering her a drink, but I could tell she was the sort of lady who never had anything more than a dainty glass of sherry once a week on Sunday. So I left the rum in the drawer and refrained from putting my feet up on the desk.
“How can I help you, Mrs. Ahab?”
“I understand you solve people’s problems, Mr. Ishmael.”
I shrugged. “Depends what they are, ma’am. I can recommend a good doctor.”
She frowned. “I don’t require the services of a physician. My problem is…shall we say, of a delicate nature.”
A high-class dame, all right. I could tell from the way she spoke that she’d had some schooling. Which was good. The ones with class have money. “Perhaps you can tell me about it.”
“It involves my husband, Mr. Ishmael…Captain Ahab, master of the whaling vessel Pequod. Perhaps you’ve heard of him?”
I shook my head. “Name doesn’t ring a bell, sorry. A lot of ships come and go out of New Bedford, and you can’t throw a rock without hitting a captain.”
“Certainly you’d recognize my husband if you saw him. He is older than I, his hair and beard already white with age. But his most noticeable feature is his left leg, which has been replaced by a wooden peg from the knee down.”
“You’ve just described half the sailors in town. The other half have pegs on their right legs.”
A smile flickered uneasily at the corners of her full lips. “Yes…quite so. Nonetheless, my husband is quite distinctive, not only in appearance, but also by his recent behavior, which has lately become rather strange.”
She nervously looked down at the bare wooden floor. I’d once had a nice oriental rug there that had come all the way from China, but I had to throw it out after one of my former clients bled all over it. The room was warm, so I stood up to open a window. From outside came the morning sounds of the wharf: the creak of sail lines, the curses of workers loading and unloading heavy crates, wagon wheels rattling across cobblestones.
“Tell me about Captain Ahab,” I said.
“You know how sea captains are, Mr. Ishmael. They’re home for only a few weeks, maybe a month or two, then they’re off to sea again. Although I wasn’t expecting this when I married my husband, I’ve become accustomed to his long absences. He has accumulated some small measure of wealth from his voyages, which has allowed us to live in comfort.”
She wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t already know. The mansions of sea captains were among New Bedford’s most stately homes. They often had so-called widow’s walks, and sometimes the lady of the house got tired of standing out there, watching for the sails of her husband’s ship to appear upon the horizon. I’d entertained the wives of more than a few captains, in a discrete way that involved entering and leaving through the kitchen door. They were rich, young, bored, and eager for the company of a gentleman who didn’t smell of whale oil and blubber.
But Mrs. Ahab didn’t fit the type. One look at her solemn brown eyes, and I knew that she hadn’t come here to see if I’d scratch an itch. “I take it that his behavior has become unusual even for someone in his line of work.”
“Yes, it has, Mr. Ishmael.” She shifted from foot to foot, the frilled hem of her bustle whisking the floor like a broom. How she’d managed to climb a flight of stairs in that thing was beyond me. “When he returned from his last voyage, it was obvious that he had changed. And it was not just that he now had a wooden leg, which he told me he’d lost while climbing up a topsail. My husband has always been a serious man, but this time he was aloof, distant. As if his mind was elsewhere.” She hesitated. “He’s b
ecome obsessed with someone named Moby.”
“Moby?”
“Yes. Moby…Moby Dick.”
“Sounds like a woman.” I was thinking of someone I knew with the same surname: Crazy Phil, who hung out in grog shops, raving about things no one could understand. Perhaps Moby was his sister.
“This is what I’ve come to suspect, yes. I know women aren’t usually allowed aboard whaling vessels, Mr. Ishmael, but a sea captain can bend the rules if he so desires. If my husband were to take a mistress…”
“All captains have a mistress, ma’am.”
“I’m not talking about the sea!” Her dark eyes flashed. “I’m talking about a woman who is sharing my husband’s cabin aboard the Pequod. He’s going on another voyage very soon, and if he has a…a hussy…who has become his secret lover, I want to know who she is.”
I was startled by her anger. Yes, Mrs. Ahab definitely strolled her widow’s walk alone. “I understand. So you want me to…”
“Find out who this Moby Dick is, Mr. Ishmael. I don’t want the Pequod to leave port without knowing whether my husband will have a woman in his cabin.”
“My fee is ten dollars a day, plus expenses.” That was more than what I usually charged, but she clearly wasn’t going to have to pawn the household silver.
“You’ll have it, Mr. Ishmael…along with my gratitude, if my suspicions are confirmed.” It may have only been my imagination, but something in her eyes hinted that she’d express her gratitude in an interesting way.
That made me smile. “Very well, then, ma’am. I’ll take the case.”
Mrs. Ahab had just left my office and was beginning to hobble downstairs when the front door slammed and someone started coming up. A shriek of horror, then the clatter of patent leather shoes running the rest of the way down the stairs. I closed my eyes, shook my head. She’d just met my partner.