Viator

by Lucius Shepard

  —Haven’t you been listening? You’re at risk!

  —You can’t expect me to leave now…now we’re so close.

  —God, Thomas! Don’t you understand! Everything that’s happened is the fault of that fucking ship!

  He sat up, swung his legs off the bunk. Not everything…not everything’s the fault of that fucking ship! You turned into an animal! You didn’t have to do that! An animal! That wasn’t the ship’s fault, that wasn’t the ship’s fault!!

  —Thomas, please. I’m just…

  —You keep telling me to leave! You keep telling me! Well, why don’t you try it, huh? Why don’t you try! Ahhh…fuck!

  He threw the phone at the wall, satisfied to watch it splinter into little plastic bones, and sank back on the bed, emptied by rage, empty of hope, of vitality, of delirium—he could make a long list of the things he was empty of; and for a while he checked off this item and that, yes, yes, no, almost, and it got to be like counting sheep, he tried to sleep, but the sound and light were almost constant, and he just lay there, listening to the groaning, watching the flashes of light, so vivid, so pure a white he could see every color in them, see anything he wanted, and he wanted to see Arlene, she wasn’t really angry at him, she was sad he was leaving, and it saddened him to be leaving. He had a long, cool thought of her, an eyes-closed thought of how she’d drag her pendulant breasts over his chest, and when he opened his eyes she was sitting astride him, her red hair undone, in all her full, sweet, hot life, but as for him, his chest was bones, just a ribcage and shriveled heart and lungs within, and he wasn’t shocked, the image tired him, but he wasn’t shocked, because he was leaving, she was staying; it was the voice of hallucinatory reason warning him away from things he could not have. He replaced her with the whistler. The queen of Kaliaska replaced by a kitten with vacant eyes who made lustful cooing noises; but at least his chest had been restored. The weight of his thoughts dragged him under the ground of sleep and into a dream; he was back in school, something about acorns, Bliss put in an appearance, as did Arlene and a giant, and then he woke to a prolonged grating shudder, to the signal long awaited, of Viator getting under way.

  Feeling creaky in his joints, Wilander stumbled along the passage and came out into light which, though gray, absent all but a tin-colored smear of sun, hurt his eyes, out into blustery weather, snow flurries driven by gusts of wind, and just ahead of the prow, no more than a few feet, a dazzling corona twice the height of the ship, flaring and dwindling, every few seconds opening to reveal a view of another coast, a different view each time, as if Viator were choosing the perfect point of entry onto the Iron Shore, and they were edging forward, inch by painful inch—he could feel the living skin of her tormented by the pressure of rock, accompanied by groans, shrieks, shrill sounds of metal swelling and constricting, pushed through a narrows like no other, and he staggered, caught the rail, peering out into the coronal depths, at Cape Lorraine, at the sweep of the virgin forest, at all the wonders of that new world, and felt life pour through him, Viator’s life and his, they shared a heart, or rather his heart was Viator’s laboring engine, embarked upon a journey to end all journeys. He’d been wrong to picture his life ending in ignominy, wrong in his conjuring of days and nights spent in the forest with the whistlers; he would stay aboard Viator, remain her captain and sail the seas (more than seven by his reckoning), traverse the globe, going from port to port, and once they’d done the tour, once they’d gone from Cape Lorraine to Port Satine—the name came unbidden to his tongue, with a promise attached of wild tropics, talking statues, golden birds, distinguished gentlemen with exotic secrets to convey, enchanted prisoners with whispered tales of worse than life, blind wizards, black princesses, back-stair madonnas who would drain the poisons from a sailor’s flesh with their perfect lips and work their spittle into white beads they sold as remedies—why not another world, another escape, why not go on and on? Ceaselessly, tirelessly. A glorious future was to be theirs, Columbus’ dream of heaven, the voyage of endless discovery. And then Mortensen, Saint Mortensen, a ragged figure, his beard wider than his chest, ran into the bow just as the image of the coast of Mutikelio appeared in the corona, just as fire began to chew iridescent sparks from the prow. He shouted something, but there was too much din too hear, and he smiled, a fiercely enjoining smile, and, turning to the prow, to the light of his salvation, addressing the fire as he might his deliverer, with his arms outspread, he let it wash over him.

  The fire continued eating the ship inch by inch, the groaning and shrieking grew louder, and Wilander, aghast at this act of self-immolation, made less certain of his fate, backed away, backed until he could back no more, and sat down heavily in the stern. He thought he should do something, but could think of nothing and so began to weep, to sob as Viator, shuddering violently, launched into an unfathomed sea. As the fire devoured the collapsed winch and reached the verge of the superstructure, he hid his face in his hands and wept. He did not know why he wept—it seemed a matter of convenience that he not know and so he wept for the sadness of not knowing. Then hands were laid on him, soft hands, Arlene’s hands; Arlene and Terry, cluttering his thoughts with their daft fumbling, their clumsy touches. What could they want? He had nothing for them. He doubted their existence, they were ghosts, demons come to tempt him. He pulled away, clambered to his feet, and stood unsteadily, his legs miles long and swaying. They tried to encircle him, to pen him in, and he fended them off with wild swings of his fists, weeping all the while. They spoke words he could not hear, yet knew were entreaties. He glanced at the fire. Forty feet away. He started for it, heard Arlene shout his name, and saw her standing with arms outstretched, face broken with fear. He took a step toward her, intending to console, to remedy, and it seemed in that step were all the steps he had ever taken, all the mis-steps, all the firm first steps, all the steps leading to good and evil, only this one had no ending, no landfall, and he pitched downward, falling into a pool of blackness like a sailor who had mistaken a puddle of rain for the sea.

  * * *

  Over the fifty-nine days of his confinement in a military hospital, Wilander pieced together a story that, like any story, had its flaws, its holes, but sufficed to encompass more or less the facts of which it was made. Viator’s cargo, unlisted on the manifest, consisted of two containers of a virus as yet unnamed (It’s a lentivirus, actually. Maybe we’ll name it for you, huh?), a Russian bioweapon, one of which had cracked open in Lunde’s storm and polluted the hold. Perhaps it had been intended to be destroyed with the ship, but this was thought unlikely; more likely, it had been meant for terrorist hands. The lentivirus bonded with DNA in brain neurons, gradually driving the host mad (You’re going to have to put up with this bad boy for a while, but we’ll keep him calm with drugs). Halmus and Arnsparger had been dead for weeks and days respectively when he happened upon them. Everything he had seen and experienced on the ship was, after a certain point, fantasy. The gigantic lentivirus of his dreams, his madness? They mumbled some business about impingement on the optic nerve and told him not to worry about it.

  —But what about Mortensen? he asked. And Nygaard…what about him?

  —Who knows? I guess they ran off in the woods somewhere, was the answer.

  Wilander came in time to believe the story, to have faith in it as much as he had faith in anything; not much, but he felt he should have faith because so many people told him it was true, and thus he yielded to it, he rejected fantasy and let it soothe him. Still frail and uncertain, he was discharged into Arlene’s care and together they returned to Kaliaska. Thanks to the madness of the late Jochanan Lunde, he did not need to work, but he helped out at the trading post as he felt able and things fell into a routine. One afternoon in the dead of winter, straight past the turn of the year, he borrowed Terry’s launch and motored out to Viator, anchoring just offshore. Under gray skies; sheeted with ice; steeped in the gloomy shadow of the firs; she no longer seemed haunted, merely abandoned, and this effect was ampli
fied by the lifelessness of the sea, the listless wash of black water against the sides of the launch, and by the great stillness of the scene, not a breath of wind to stir the needles and dump fresh snow on the decks, to snap the icicles, to breed a ghostly moan. The screws did not resemble crumpled flowers, but twisted metal, and the hull, which had once struck him as bloated, now was dented, derelict, empty. Biohazard teams had cut the heart from her, hosing down the hold with chemicals, and left her flensed and gutted. She looked like a place where men had gone mad. Wilander had seen enough, but was reluctant to leave, and he sat for the better part of an hour, lulled to a dreamy self-regard by the rocking of the launch, thinking about fate, how it was deemed capricious and yet was clearly insane—it went beyond randomness in its insanity, devising complicated skeins that almost meant something, that might mean something if you were short one brain chemical or took a blow to the head or fell victim to systemic shock, and he thought there must somewhere be a race of people who knew that this was true and kept themselves addled, stunned, and shocked so as to know the many-chambered world and avoid fate’s simplest snare, a reality shared by billions. He thought, too, of Arlene. Now he had gone such a curious distance from himself, could he come all the way back? Did he want to? That was the question. Did he have heart enough left in him, blood enough to tie such a simple knot? He made ready to haul up the anchor and heard a cry, a plaintive cry that planed away to a whisper, the issue of a tiny body and a metal throat. He felt a thrill run across the muscles of his chest. The qwazil. The ones who had slipped through, they must have been stranded here, and what else had been stranded, whistlers and wiccara and things he had not named and had not seen? Excitement shot through him, a familiar excitement, the excitement he had known aboard Viator, and he imagined the lentivirus flexing its ropy length, taking tentative flights across his brain. Several bizarre business opportunities occurred to him, not the least of which was the exploitation of the whistlers; they’d keep the place free of pests and be a true companion for a lonely hour. It astounded him he could be so easily persuaded to madness. Christ, this place was wrong forever. He weighed anchor, started up the launch, and recalled Mortensen reaching out to the engulfing fire, the image that had haunted him in the hospital. Saint Mortensen. Was he with the whistlers, preaching the gospel of Viator on the streets of Cape Lorraine, suffering the little children? No matter. You’re either dead or in heaven, he said, his voice startling in the silence. Whichever, you’re no good to me now. He did not look back until he was well out to sea and by then Viator had become anonymous, a black dot of solidity on a spectral shore.

  At Arlene’s TP, the wood-stove was going, Terry was listening to headphones, sitting in a lawn chair, feet propped on the counter, reading a magazine, and Arlene, wearing plaid jacket over her dress, was dealing a hand of solitaire. She glanced up when Wilander entered, but kept playing. With her hair pulled back, her lips firmed in an I-am-not-going-to-say-a-thing expression, she looked pretty. Pretty and a piece more, his father used to say. Terry flicked an eye toward him, making a sour show of dismissal. Wilander ignored him. He stripped off his coat and leggings, studying Arlene, staring at her for such a long time and so intensely, it seemed he was warming himself at a fire, and she could feel him staring at her, he could tell by the way she held herself, he could see the injury he had done her in the rigidity of her pose, the wounded pride, and he thought it was time he made things right, not because he owed it, but because it was what he wanted, it was all he wanted—though that certainty didn’t guarantee success, not having it guaranteed failure, and he supposed that was why he had fucked up with such unflagging consistency over the years.

  At last she said, noncommittally, Been out to the ship?

  —I took a look. I’m back.

  She slapped down a card.

  He stepped around the counter and put an arm around her. Don’t worry. I’m over it.

  —You say don’t worry, but…

  He turned her to face him and said, I swear to God, I am over it. I love you.

  Startled, she looked up at him and he kissed her on the mouth. She tasted of candy mints and coffee. Terry scowled at him, muttered something under his breath, went back to his magazine.

  Hearing the words gave him a platform from which to say them more assuredly. I love you, he repeated. You’ve been taking care of me long enough.

  He kissed her again, bearing her back against the counter, and felt his whole life rise up, heart to heart, with hers, in truth and in folly.

  —Get a room, said Terry.

  L U C I U S S H E P A R D

  has been honored by various awards, among them the Hugo, the Nebula, the World Fantasy Award, the International Horror Guild Award, the Theodore F. Sturgeon Award, and the Locus Award. He lives in Vancouver, Washington.