Viator

by Lucius Shepard

  —It’s the same, Wilander said. There are differences, but the same thing is happening again.

  He had stopped at the point on the rail where Viator’s stern emerged from the forest. Beyond, the sea stretched a glittering blue beneath a sky crowded with white clouds so huge and stately, they might have been migratory nations bursting with the purity of their founding ideals. The sight comforted him, not by its beauty, but by the fact that he seemed removed from it, as if it were something he was seeing through an airplane window.

  —It’s happened much more slowly for you, Lunde said. And perhaps the rest of the story speaks to that. By the time we finished the repairs, the relationships among the five of us had become strained. It remained my intention to continue south to Panama. Despite having faith in the charts I’d drawn, despite my belief that Viator had influenced their creation, I refused to acknowledge that Viator’s will was of more consequence than my career concerns. I wanted that new tanker. None of the others agreed, however, and tensions were high. One morning I was in my cabin, preparing for the day, when Kameus asked to speak with me. My memories of what occurred thereafter are unclear, but I imagine I turned my back on him. The next I recall, I was lying on the floor, my head throbbing. Kameus was standing above me, shouting something about Viator. I lost consciousness again and didn’t wake until the mid-afternoon. Kameus had bound me and the sun was low before I managed to free myself. I took my side-arm and went searching for him. The ship was empty, the launch missing. They had abandoned me. I ran up to the radio room, intending to call for assistance, but Kameus had destroyed the receiver.

  Lunde paused and Wilander heard a faint rapping that might have been the old man drumming his fingers on the desktop.

  —I knew they must have made for Gambell on Saint Lawrence Island, Lunde said. It was less than a day from our position. But I have no idea how they managed to act together after being so thoroughly divided. No clue as to what informed their decision…or even if there was a decision. One of them may have taken control by force. At my hearing, they told the company I had gone mad and thrown them off the ship. How could I refute their story? They were four and I had run Viator aground. Those facts outweighed everything I said, anything I could have said. After I’d been stripped of my license, I telephoned Kameus and begged him to explain why they had done this, but he didn’t trust the phone and he refused to meet with me. All he admitted was that he had been afraid. You know what I said to him? I said, You should have been alone aboard Viator. Then you could talk to me about fear. He hung up on me. My friend had abandoned me again and this second occasion was more painful, because he was no longer influenced by Viator. He was serving his own interests. Lunde let out a sigh. I’d never been afraid of the sea. I understood, of course, that it killed men and ships, but I had long since come to terms with that. Yet alone on Viator, I was afraid. The weather continued to hold. If I steered due east, I would harbor at Gambell in a matter of hours. I had no reason to fear, but I was panic-stricken. Partly this was due to the feeling that I was a flea riding atop an enormous metal beast. The ship’s life seemed larger and more important than my own, and that of itself was frightening. But to this day I believe it was mainly Viator s fear I felt. The product of her understanding that she would not survive another storm. Her desperation to reach land…though not just any landfall. She had a specific destination in view, one defined by my charts. With the engines half ahead—I didn’t dare run them full—I steered north and east, bypassing Saint Lawrence and making for the Alaskan coast. Those next three days and nights, so much was going on in my mind, so many strange thoughts…of that time I can only clearly recall that I was afraid. I didn’t sleep, I ate little. I trembled before the prospect of death, living in a fearful delirium, surrounded by my enemy, the sea. Until the very end. Until I saw that green haven north of Kaliaska. Then I was deliriously happy. It was early morning, mist everywhere, but I knew where to aim the bow. I lashed myself to the pilot’s chair and ran the engines full ahead. To starboard, a fishing boat emerged from the mist, bearing straight for midships. There was a moment when my heart was in my throat and I feared we would be rammed, thrown off-course. But whoever was manning the fisherman’s wheel avoided a collision. Watching the shingle widen ahead, I grinned as if I’d won some great contest and had no thought that I was about to destroy my career. The hull grating across the sand sounded like the bottom was being ripped out. If I hadn’t secured myself to the chair, I would have been flung about and likely killed. And then the trees came up. Viator slewed and veered to port. I thought we would go over, but the boulders on either side kept us on an even keel. The noise…It might have been the end of the world. Groans, shrieks, concussions. A wall of boughs loomed close. I ducked my head as the windows exploded inward. We kept on plowing forward, smashing deep into the forest, chewing up towering firs as if they were papier-mâché. And at last Viator was still. There were settling noises, and then silence.

  Lunde made a clicking with his tongue, a vocal gesture that seemed to signal regret. I was dazed, he said. Dazed and groggy from shock, from lack of sleep, from stress. I sat staring out the glassless windows at the misted peace of the firs and was overcome by a feeling of calmness and security…though not of completion. I had no sense of finality. There was much more to do, I thought. What had gone before was just the beginning. I untied myself and made my way out onto the deck, going on unsteady legs toward the stern, intending to inspect the damage. The fisherman had followed us in, anchoring so close to shore, I could read its name and port of origin painted on a white tire that hung from its side: the Fat Allie out of Mayorkiq. They put forth a small boat bearing half-a-dozen men—Inupiat, judging by their complexions. They jumped out into the shallows and scrambled up the shingle. Some, I saw, carried rifles. Had I witnessed a ship run aground in a similar fashion, I would not have investigated without benefit of arms. Who knows what one might find onboard? But I assumed these men were bent on thievery and capable of worse. I hid in a storage locker off the bridge until I could no longer hear shouts and movement. Then I sneaked into the stern and watched them load their boat with tools, the big microwave from the galley, the crates consigned to Panama. Later I discovered they had stolen personal items from my cabin. And they were only the first vultures. Before the Fat Allie could get underway, townspeople began arriving in outboards and on foot through the forest. There must have been a hundred of them. Entire families bent on acquisition. Women with toddlers and old men with canes accompanying those who did the actual stealing. They swarmed over the ship. I didn’t bother to hide. I wandered in a fog among them, all but unnoticed. Soon I felt lightheaded and I took a seat on a hatch cover. I must have passed out and someone must have noticed me then, for I woke that afternoon in Kaliaska. The following morning, a company plane flew me to Anchorage; two days later, another plane flew me to Stockholm. I haven’t set foot on Viator since.

  —Why not? Wilander asked. You came back to Alaska.

  —I was many years in Sweden, attempting unsuccessfully to resurrect my career. The strain took a toll. I spent my health in the effort. Viator was always in my mind. I was convinced she was alive and wanted to understand her, to explore her. But I had no means of satisfying these ambitions. I worked for a nautical supply house. My commissions brought in scarcely enough for food and shelter. And then my parents died, passing within months of each other. My father had been prudent in his financial dealings, but the size of the inheritance was a shock for all that. I had the wherewithal to do anything I chose. My physical condition, however, was frail. I would not be able to endure life aboard a wrecked ship. I needed to be close to a decent medical facility.

  A fishing boat steamed out from behind the headland, moving north and west, dark against the glittering blue water, heading—it appeared—for an empty quarter of the sea. Wilander felt an almost physical affinity with it. And so you came up with your plan, he said.

  —There was nothing to keep me in Sweden. I had no
children and my wife had initiated divorce proceedings as soon as she saw how things would go with my career. I flew to Alaska and bought the agency. And now I know I was right about everything.

  —About Viator being alive?

  —That…yes. And about the presentiment I had after we ran aground—that there was more to be done. More I had to do. I gave this short shrift in my story, but that feeling was stronger in me than any other I had during the entire experience. The company dragged me away so quickly, I had no opportunity to understand the role I was to play in Viator’s future. I knew she needed me. Whatever happened during the storm…and I’m not sure now the storm was significant. Or if it was, if it served to awaken the ship, no spirit came to us on its winds. I’ve come to think it was our lives, through some affinity, some freakish unity, that provided Viator with the energy she required to live. I believe she manipulated Kameus and the others to isolate me on board, so she could then direct me to run her aground in a specific place. I think her control over the five of us was imprecise and she needed to be precise in controlling me. For years I’ve believed as much, but I’ve had nothing to flesh out my belief. What you’ve told me makes everything comprehensible.

  —I’m glad you comprehend it. I don’t.

  —It’s not that I can explain any of it in rational terms, Lunde said. All events have a genius. When two people meet and fall in love, it can be explained. Biology. Social reasons. But there’s an inexplicable genius at its heart. We can’t explain it, so many of us pretend we’re being rational by ignoring it. You and I, though…We realize the genius of certain events cannot be ignored. Somehow Viator became alive and saved herself from the breaking ground. She has lain dormant for twenty years, denied the energy she needed to continue on her way. By the time men returned to her decks, she had rusted. Her life, her newborn vitality, had rusted as well and it took her months to be revitalized. To make repairs. Well, she’s made them and now she’s on her way. Where she’s bound, you have a better idea than I.

  —I don’t know, said Wilander.

  —You doubt it, then? Even after hearing what I’ve told you?

  —Do I doubt Viator is bound for…another world? Or that she’s piercing a dimensional barrier? Those seem to be the options, don’t they?

  —I’m sure you have some degree of doubt. It would be impossible not to. But can you deny what’s happening? I don’t think so.

  Wilander’s anger, most of it, had been dissipated, diffused by his attentiveness, but now it resurfaced. I have to tell the others, he said stiffly. What they’ll decide, I don’t know. After that I’m going to pack and walk into Kaliaska.

  —What will you do in Kaliaska?

  —Not that it’s your business, but I’m going to try and repair a relationship.

  —With the Daupinee woman?

  —How did you know that?

  —She called the office some weeks ago. She made several calls, I believe. Judging by her manner, I thought there must be more than a casual involvement.

  Wilander chose not to comment.

  —One night at dinner, Lunde said. Not long after we met. You told me how as a child you dreamed of being an explorer, of standing in places where no man before you had stood. Do you remember?

  —If you say so, Wilander said, amazed that he had been so open with Lunde; but then, thinking back to those days, he recalled with some revulsion how desperate he had been to get off the streets, out of the shelters, the missions, and his eagerness to be befriended, to be acquired as a charitable venture.

  —Will you walk away from that dream when it is so close to fulfillment? Give it up for an ordinary life?

  —Dreams change. Having any sort of life seems extraordinary to me now.

  —Childhood dreams express the true depth of our desires. You can learn to make accommodations, to settle for less, but when such a dream offers itself, surely this is not your response?

  —I’m not certain it is offering itself.

  —I grant you, what lies ahead is unknown. There is risk, but it’s one we all dare even if we’re not daring by nature. The unknown is always with us.

  —If you’re convinced this is the right path, and you believe Viator’s truly on its way somewhere, why don’t you join us? Why not reclaim your command? You won’t have to endure a long wait now things have proceeded to this point.

  —I would be pleased to join you, but the trip to Kaliaska might finish me off, Lunde said. I have a few months, they tell me. Less, perhaps.

  The fishing boat had turned due west, dwindled to a speck, and the masses of clouds were also westering, as if the boat were towing them along on an invisible rope; the sky directly overhead was vacant, a pure wintry blue.

  —I’m sorry, Wilander said, a comment that summarized an emotion more complicated and much less poignant than sorrow.

  Lunde grunted in acknowledgement. As am I. Look, I’ll pay you to stay on board. I’ll pay you a lot of money.

  —Why would you do that? You said you knew enough, your curiosity’s satisfied.

  —Perhaps because it’s all that’s left for me to do. And it would be pleasant to wake one morning and learn that Viator has vanished to another sea. That might reassure me as regards the nature of the voyage I’m soon to take. To tell the truth, I have so many reasons, you could likely construct a reason of your own and it would be at least partially correct.

  —How much will you pay me?

  —Twenty thousand.

  —Fifty thousand, Wilander said. Put fifty thousand in my account by tomorrow, and I’ll consider staying.

  —You’ll consider it? I would expect a guarantee.

  —That’s a risk you’ll have to take. In fact, I can assure you the money will have minimal impact on my decision…though it may have sufficient weight to make a difference. Give some money to the others, too. Ten thousand each.

  —Why less for them?

  —If things don’t work out for us here, Wilander said, or they don’t work out for me in Kaliaska, if we end up with nowhere to go, alone on this filthy wreck, I don’t expect they’ll need as much as I will to drink themselves to death.

  Nine

  “…Come here…”

  Had he given it the least thought, Wilander might have anticipated the reactions of his shipmates on hearing Lunde’s story. Arnsparger wanted to know if they would continue to be paid, and Halmus scoffed, saying, Why should I believe you? Or Lunde, for that matter? If that’s really the story he told, what proof can you give me that it’s the truth? I don’t know what you’re up to, either one of you, but I’m not buying it. Nygaard barely listened, sitting on the chair in Wilander’s cabin, his attention commanded by a faucet handle he was holding, admiring it as if it were a chrome daisy with four petals, and as for Mortensen…After giving up on finding him, Wilander was at the table in the officers’ mess, idly working on his maps, feeling listless each time he engaged the idea of walking into Kaliaska, worrying that Arlene might turn him away, when Mortensen appeared in the door that opened onto the passageway, gaunt and ghastly looking, his shoulder-length hair matted, his beard begrimed, yet uncustomarily cheerful—he smiled as Wilander retold Lunde’s story, ruining his image of revenant saintliness with a display of crooked brown teeth, looking instead as if he were the spiritual relic of an especially noisome odor or the astral guardian of a landfill, and once the story was complete, rather than responding to it, he poked at the maps with a bony, whitish-gray forefinger, like a parsnip in color, and praised Wilander for having devised so intriguing a destination (he had taken the liberty of studying the maps while Wilander was otherwise occupied), saying also that while he had doubted Wilander’s suitability for the captain’s cabin, he doubted it no longer. And when Wilander asked why he had used the word devised, Mortensen said, Didn’t you listen to Lunde? It should be clear what’s happened. The life force of Lunde and his officers fused with Viator during the storm. They were wedded to the instincts of the ship, her instinct to survive, to tra
vel, just as the ship’s life was ultimately wedded to the life of the forest. Since Lunde proved to be most in accord with her instincts, the ship chose him to plot the course of her survival. Now that you’ve taken Lunde’s place, in union both with Viator and the forest, you’re creating not only maps of the land to which we’re traveling, but also the land itself, the (here he shuffled the maps about, peering at their legends)…the Iron Shore.

  This astonishing recitation, so glibly delivered that it seemed practiced, left Wilander speechless.

  —Arnsparger and Halmus view things somewhat differently, Mortensen went on. And yet I wouldn’t call their views contrary. They’re more complimentary, I’d say. Variant.

  Still astonished, Wilander asked, You knew about the storm? And about Lunde?

  —Not in so many words, but it was obvious something like that had happened. It’s happened to us, after all. Maybe you’ve been so wrapped up in your mapmaking, you haven’t had the opportunity to step back and view the situation, but…

  —You believe the maps, my maps, are making this place real?

  Mortensen gave a sweeping gesture, like one a preacher might employ when enthusing about promised glories, and said, There are worlds of possibility out there. Real as mist. Your mind, in alliance with Viator and the forest, with their power, their steadfastness, is influencing one of those worlds to harden into physical form. The signs of its three creators are present in your maps. The forest, the sea, the city. Surely you can see it? Even Nygaard sees it in his simple-minded way. Every reality is given form by means of a similar consensus.

  The conversation evolved into a lecture, a dissertation upon the topic of Viator, Whence, Whither, and Wherefore, Mortensen pointing out the resonances between Lunde’s story and their experiences, and pointing out distinctions as well. He declared that the storm’s fury and the power of the sea had served as a battery that enabled the forging of a bond between Viator and its previous crew, essentially the same that had been forged between Viator and themselves, yet it had taken longer to complete that second bond because there had been no crucible moment of wind and enormous waves, only the battery of slow time, and the union produced by this gradual process was stronger than the original, and necessarily so, for it was no simple passage that lay ahead, no few days of wind and sea, and great strength and endurance would be demanded of them. But the primary focus of his disquisition was upon the link between Lunde’s charts and Wilander’s maps, those acts of the imagination that had created and were creating an appropriate landfall for Viator. In response to Wilander’s comment that, as far as he knew, the forest adjoining Kaliaska was not Lunde’s creation, it had existed for centuries prior to Lunde’s birth, Mortensen said, Yes, yet not in its current form; Lunde had authored a change that prepared the forest for Viator s advent, a small thing when compared to Wilander’s creation, to be sure, but Lunde’s forest was the precursor of the Iron Shore, a stage in the journey, perhaps the first of many stages, and wasn’t Wilander aware of the innumerable theories deployed about a single fundamental idea, that the observer creates reality?, my God, it was a basic tenet of philosophy, implicit in every philosophical paradigm, every religion, even Christianity, at least it had been part of the Christian belief system before the Council of Nicaea scrubbed the doctrine clean of its Asiatic influences; and both the most primitive conceptions of universal order (sympathetic magic, for instance, the notion that a voodoo priest could heal a sick man by feeding a bull meal in which a drop or two of the patient’s blood was mixed, forming a bond between animal and man that would permit the bull’s vigor to subdue the disease) and the most sophisticated insights of physics (fractals, the behaviors of subatomic particles, etc.) gave evidence of the interconnectivity of all matter, and it was this interconnection that had permitted Lunde and Wilander to channel their energies with such efficacy; then Mortensen, with a triumphant expression, his point having been firmly established (to his own mind, at any rate), proceeded to embellish his theory, his estimation of the event that surrounded them, that had closed them in, by linking the concept of an observer-created reality with the phenomenon of crop circles, with the casting of spells, and thence with the summoning of demons, exorcisms, séances, the hierarchies of the angels, astrological conjunctions, with top-secret scientific breakthroughs known to nine anonymous men in the government and the Satanic strategies codified by the webs of certain South American spiders, with the entire catalogue of lunacy from which middle-class neurotics the world over selected the crutches that allowed them to walk the earth without crumbling beneath the merciless stare and brutal radiations of a god who was nothing like the images in the catalogue variously depicting him to be a gentle dreamy shepherd, a mighty bearded apparition, an architect of fate (God’s Blueprint For YOUR Heavenly Mansion by Dr. Carter P. Zaslow, $22.95 plus shipping), a universe-sized vessel of love; and after Mortensen ended his discourse and returned to the shadowy places of Viator, Wilander, who had been halfway convinced by the initial portion of his remarks, realized that Mortensen’s mad-prophet pose masked a pitiful, ordinary madness, the madness that had doubtless afflicted him while abusing himself with fortified wine on the streets of several Alaskan cities; and, recognizing that he could trust not a word that had been said by either Mortensen or Lunde, he made a rashly considered call to Arlene, told Lunde’s story yet again, and asked her to check out the details on the Internet. She replied frostily that she would if she could find the time (she called back a day later, at an hour when he typically shut off his phone, and left a message saying that she had substantiated the basics of the story—the survival of the crew, Lunde’s dismissal, and so on—and that she had asked a hacker friend in the Forty-Eight to do a more thorough search) and said she didn’t believe this qualified as an emergency, she did not want him calling whenever he got nervous, did he understand?, okay then, goodbye. And Wilander, feeling isolated to an unparalleled degree—even sleeping alone beneath a cardboard sheet in an alley, he had heard voices, traffic, and known himself to be still part of the human sphere, but here there was only the silence and inhuman vibration of the ship—stepped out onto the deck and discovered that an inch of snow had fallen and more was coming down, big wet flakes that promised a heavy accumulation, yet vanished when they touched his palm, and he was so affected by this consolation of nature, by the whiteness of the deck, by the soft hiss of the snowfall, by the smell of heaven it brought, he stood with his face turned to the sky, watching with childish fascination as the flakes came spinning out of the incomprehensible dark, letting them melt and trickle down his cheeks like the tears of a vast immaterial entity who—eyeless and full of sorrows—had seen fit to use a lesser being to manifest its weeping.