by Roger Elwood
After he roused her, she—who had been unawake when the world was broken and refashioned—could not understand why he led her outside to pray that they be granted mercy, now and in the hour of their dissolution.
VII
Darkington did not regain full consciousness until the boat was in space. Then he pulled himself into the seat beside Frederika. “How did you do it?” he breathed.
Her attention remain focused on piloting. Even with the help of the director and radio instructions from the ship, it was no easy task for a novice. Absently, she answered, “I scared the robots away. They’d made the boat fast, you see. With cables too thick to pull apart. I had to go back out and cut them with a torch. But I’d barely gotten inside ahead of the pack. I didn’t expect they would let me emerge. So I scared them off. After that, I went out, burned off the cables, and flew to get you.”
“Barely in time,” he shuddered. “I was about to pass out. I did keel over once I was aboard.” A time went by with only the soft rushing noise of brake jets. “O.K.,” he said, “I give up. I admit you’re beautiful, a marvel of resourcefulness, and I can’t guess how you shooed away the enemy. So tell me.”
The director shut off the engine. They floated free. She turned her face, haggard, sweaty, begrimed, and dear, toward him and said diffidently, “I didn’t have any inspiration. Just a guess and nothing to lose. We knew for pretty sure that the robots communicated by radio. I turned the boat’s ’caster on full blast, hoping the sheer volume would be too much for them. Then something else occurred to me. If you have a radio transceiver in your head, hooked directly into your nervous system, wouldn’t that be sort of like telepathy? I mean, it seems more direct somehow than routing everything we say through a larynx. Maybe I could confuse them by emitting unfamiliar signals. They’d be used to natural radio noise. But … well … the boat’s general director includes a pretty complicated computer, carrying out millions of operations per second. Information is conveyed, not noise; but at the same time, it didn’t seem to me like information that a bunch of semisavages could handle.
“Anyhow, there was no harm in trying. I hooked the broadcaster in parallel with the effector circuits, so the computer’s output not only controlled the boat as usual but also modulated the radio emission. Then I assigned the computer a good tough problem in celestial navigation, put my armor back on, summoned every ounce of nerve I had and went outside. Nothing happened. I cut the cables without seeing any trace of the robots. I kept the computer ‘talking’ while I jockeyed the boat over in search of the cave. It must have been working frantically to compensate for my clumsiness; I hate to imagine what its output ‘sounded’ like. Felt like? Well, when I’d landed, I opened the air lock and, and you came inside, and—” Her fists doubled. ‘‘Oh, Hugh! How can we tell Sam’s girl?”
He didn’t answer.
With a final soft impulse, the boat nudged against the ship. As grapnels made fast, the altered spin of the vessels put Earth back in view. Darkington looked at the planet for minutes before he said:
‘‘Good-bye. Good luck.”
Frederika wiped her eyes with hands that left streaks of dirt in the tears. ‘‘Do you think we’ll ever come back?” she wondered.
“No,” he said. “It isn’t ours anymore.”
The Longest Voyage
When first we heard of the Sky Ship, we were on an island whose name, as nearly as Montalirian tongues can wrap themselves about so barbarous a noise, was Yarzik. That was almost a year after the Golden Leaper sailed from Lavre Town, and we judged we had come halfway round the world. So befouled was our poor caravel with weeds and shells that all sail could scarce drag her across the sea. What drinking water remained in the butts was turned green and evil, the biscuit was full of worms, and the first signs of scurvy had appeared on certain crewmen.
“Hazard or no,” decreed Captain Rovic, “we must land somewhere.” A gleam I remembered appeared in his eyes. He stroked his red beard and murmured, “Besides, it’s long since we asked for the Aureate Cities. Perhaps this time they’ll have intelligence of such a place.”
Steering by that ogre planet which climbed daily higher as we bore westward, we crossed such an emptiness that mutinous talk broke out afresh. In my heart I could not blame the crew. Imagine, my lords. Day upon day upon day where we saw naught but blue waters, white foam, high clouds in a tropic sky; heard only the wind, whoosh of waves, creak of timbers, sometimes at night the huge sucking and rushing as a sea monster breached. These were terrible enough to common sailors, unlettered men who still thought the world must be flat. But then to have Tambur hang forever above the bowsprit, and climb, so that all could see we must eventually pass directly beneath that brooding thing … and what upbore it?
the crew mumbled in the forecastle. Would an angered God not let fall down on us?
So a deputation waited on Captain Rovic. Very timid and respectful they were, those rough burly men, as they asked him to turn about. But their comrades massed below, muscled sun-blackened bodies taut in the ragged kilts, with daggers and belaying pins ready to hand. We officers on the quarterdeck had swords and pistols, true. But we numbered a mere six, including that frightened boy who was myself, and aged Froad the astrologue, whose robe and white beard were reverend to see but of small use in a fight.
Rovic stood mute for a long while after the spokesman had voiced this demand. The stillness grew, until the empty shriek of wind in our shrouds, the empty glitter of ocean out to the world’s rim, became all there was. Most splendid our master looked, for he had donned scarlet hose and bell-tipped shoon when he knew the deputation was coming; as well as helmet and corselet polished to mirror brightness. The plumes blew around that blinding steel head and the diamonds on his fingers flashed against the rubies in his sword hilt. Yet when at last he spoke, it was not as a knight of the Queen’s court, but in the broad Anday of his fisher boyhood.
“So ’tis back ye’d wend, lads? Wi’ a fair wind an’ a warm sun, liefer ye’d come “about an’ beat half round the globe? How ye’re changed from yere fathers! Ken ye nay the legend, that once all things did as man commanded, an’ Was an Andayman’s lazy fault that now men must work? For see ye, Was nay too much that he told his ax to cut down a tree for him, an’ told the faggots to walk home, but when he told ’em to carry him, then God was wroth an’ took the power away. Though to be sure, as recompense God gave all Andaymen sea-luck, dice-luck, an’ love-luck. What more d’ye ask for, lads?”
Bewildered at this response, the spokesman wrung his hands, flushed, looked at the deck, and stammered that we’d all perish miserably … starve, or thirst, or drown, or be crushed under that horrible moon, or sail off the world’s edge … the
Golden Leaper had come farther than ship had sailed since the Fall of Man, and if we returned at once, our fame would live forever—
“But can ye eat fame, Eden?” asked Rovic, still mild and smiling. “We’ve had fights an’ storms, aye, an’ merry carouses too; but devil an Aureate City we’ve seen, though well ye ken they lie out here someplace, stuffed wi’ treasure for the first bold man who’ll come plunder ’em. What ails yere gutworks, lad? Is’t nay an easy cruise? What would the foreigners say? How will yon arrogant cavaliers o’ Sathayn, yon grubby chapmen o’ Woodland, laugh—nay alone at us, but at all Montalir —did we turn back!”
Thus he jollied them. Only once did he touch his sword, half drawing it, as if absent-mindedly, when he recalled how we had weathered the hurricane off Xingu. But they remembered the mutiny that followed then, and how that same sword had pierced three armed sailors who attacked him together. His dialect told them he would let bygones lie forgotten: if they would. His bawdy promises of sport among lascivious heathen tribes yet to be discovered, his recital of treasure legends, his appeal to their pride as seamen and Montalirians, soothed fear. And then in the end, when he saw them malleable, he dropped the provincial speech. He stood forth on the quarterdeck with burning casque and tossing plumes, and the
flag of Montalir blew its sea-faded colors above him, and he said as the knights of the Queen say:
“Now you know I do not propose to turn back until the great globe has been rounded and we bring to Her Majesty that gift which is most peculiarly ours to give. The which is not gold or slaves, nor even that lore of far places that she and her most excellent Company of Merchant Adventurers desire. No, what we shall lift in our hands to give her, on that day when again we lie by the long docks of Lavre, shall be our achievement: that we did this thing which no men have dared in all the world erenow, and did it to her glory.”
A while longer he stood, through a silence full of the sea’s noise. Then he said quietly, ‘Dismissed,” turned on his heel and went back into his cabin.
§
So we continued for some days more, the men subdued but not uncheerful, the officers taking care to hide their doubts. I found myself busied, not so much with the clerical duties for which I was paid or the study of captaincy for which I was apprenticed—both these amounting to little by now—as with assisting Froad the astrologue. In these balmy airs he could carry on his work even on shipboard. To him it scarce mattered whether we sank or swam; he had lived more than a common span of years already. But the knowledge of the heavens to be gained here, that was something else. At night, standing on the foredeck with quadrant, astrolabe, and telescope, drenched in the radiance from above, he resembled some frosty-bearded saint in the windows of Provien Minster.
“See there, Zhean.” His thin hand pointed above seas that glowed and rippled with light, past the purple sky and the few stars still daring to show themselves, toward Tambur. Huge it was in full phase at midnight, sprawling over seven degrees of sky, a shield or barry of soft vert and azure, splotched with angry sable that could be seen to move across its face. The firefly moon we had named Siett twinkled near the hazy edge of the giant. Balant, espied rarely and low on the horizon in our part of the world, here stood high: a crescent, but with the dark part of the disk tinged by luminous Tambur.
“Observe,” declared Froad, “there’s no doubt left, one can see how it rotates on an axis, and how storms boil up in its air. Tambur is no longer the dimmest of frightened legends, nor a dreadful apparition seen to rise as we entered unknown waters; Tambur is real. A world like our own. Immensely bigger, certes, but still a spheroid in space: around which our own world moves, always turning the same hemisphere to her monarch. The conjectures of the ancients are triumphantly confirmed. Not merely that our world is round, pouf, that’s obvious to anyone … but that we move about a greater center, which in turn has an annual path about the sun. But, then, how big is the sun?”
“Siett and Balant are inner satellites of Tambur,” I rehearsed, struggling for comprehension. “Vieng, Darou, and the other moons commonly seen at home, have paths outside our own worlds. Aye. But what holds it all up?”
“That I don’t know. Mayhap the crystal sphere containing the stars exerts an inward pressure. The same pressure, maybe, that hurled mankind down onto the earth, at the time of the Fall From Heaven.”
That night was warm, but I shivered, as if those had been winter stars. “Then,” I breathed, “there may also be men on … Siett, Balant, Vieng … even on Tambur?”
“Who knows? We’ll need many lifetimes to find out. And what lifetimes they’ll be! Thank the good God, Zhean, that you were born in this dawn of the coming age.”
Froad returned to making measurements. A dull business, the other officers thought; but by now I had learned enough of the mathematic arts to understand that from these endless tabulations might come the true size of the earth, of Tambur, sun and moons and stars, the path they took through space and the direction of Paradise. So the common sailors, who muttered and made signs against evil as they passed our instruments, were closer to fact than Rovic’s gentlemen: for indeed Froad practiced a most potent gramarye.
§
At length we saw weeds floating on the sea, birds, towering cloud masses, all the signs of land. Three days later we raised an island. It was an intense green under those calm skies. Surf, still more violent than in our hemisphere, flung against high cliffs, burst in a smother of foam and roared back down again. We coasted carefully, the palomers aloft to seek an approach, the gunners standing by our cannon with lighted matches. For not only were there unknown currents and shoals—familiar hazards—but we had had brushes with canoesailing cannibals in the past. Especially did we fear the eclipses. My lords can visualize how in that hemisphere the sun each day must go behind Tambur. In that longitude the occurrence was about midafternoon and lasted nearly ten minutes. An awesome sight: the primary planet—for so Froad now called it, a planet akin to Diell or Coint, with our own world humbled to a mere satellite thereof!—become a black disk encircled with red, up in a sky suddenly full of stars. A cold wind blew across the sea, and even the breakers seemed hushed. Yet so impudent is the soul of man that we continued about our duties, stopping only for the briefest prayer as the sun disappeared, thinking more about the chance of shipwreck in the gloom than of God’s Majesty.
So bright is Tambur that we continued to work our way around the island at night. From sunup to sunup, twelve mortal hours, we kept the Golden Leaper slowly moving. Toward the second noon, Captain Rovic’s persistence was rewarded. An opening in the cliffs revealed a long fjord. Swampy shores overgrown with saltwater trees told us that while the tides rose high in that bay, it was not one of those roosts so dreaded by mariners. The wind being against us, we furled sail and lowered the boats, towing in our caravel by the power of oars. This was a vulnerable moment, especially since we had perceived a village within the fjord. “Should we not stand out, master, and let them come first to us?” I ventured.
Rovic spat over the rail. “I’ve found it best never to show doubt,” said he. “If a canoe fleet should assail us, we’ll give ‘em a whiff of grapeshot and trust to break their nerve. But I think, thus showing ourselves fearless of them from the very first, we’re less likely to meet treacherous ambuscade later.”
He proved right.
In the course of time, we learned we had come upon the eastern end of a large archipelago. The inhabitants were mighty seafarers, considering that they had only outrigger dug-outs to travel in. These, however, were often a hundred feet long. With forty paddles, or with three bast-sailed masts, such a vessel could almost match our best speed, and was more maneuverable. However, the small cargo space limited their range of travel.
Though they lived in houses of wood and thatch, possessing only stone tools, the natives were cultivated folk. They farmed as well as fished; their priests had an alphabet. Tall and vigorous, somewhat darker and less hairy than we, they were impressive to behold: whether nude as was common, or in full panoply of cloth and feathers and shell ornaments. They had formed a loose empire throughout the archipelago, raided islands lying farther north and carried on a brisk trade within their own borders. Their whole nation they called the Hisagazi, and the island on which we had chanced was Yarzik.
This we learned slowly, as we mastered somewhat their tongue. For we were several weeks at that town. The duke of the island, Guzan, made us welcome, supplying us with food, shelter, and helpers as we required. For our part, we pleased them with glassware, bolts of Wondish cloth, and suchlike trade goods. Nonetheless we encountered many difficulties. The shore above high-water mark being too swampy for beaching a vessel as heavy as ours, we must build a dry-dock before we could careen. Numerous of us took a flux from some disease, though all recovered in time, and this slowed us further.
“Yet I think our troubles will prove a blessing,” Rovic told me one night. As had become his habit, once he learned I w’as a discreet amanuensis, he confided certain thoughts in me. The captain is ever a lonely man; and Rovic, fisher lad, freebooter, self-taught navigator, victor over the Grand Fleet of Sathayn and ennobled by the Queen herself, must have found the keeping of that necessary aloofness harder than would a gentleman born .
I wa
ited silent, there in the grass hut they had given him. A soapstone lamp threw wavering light and enormous shadows over us; something rustled the thatch. Outside, the damp ground sloped past houses on stilts and murmurous fronded trees, to the fjord where it shimmered under Tambur. Faintly
I heard drums throb, a chant and stamping of feet around some sacrificial fire. Indeed the cool hills of Montalir seemed far.
Rovic leaned back his muscular form, y-clad in a mere seaman’s kilt in this heat. He had had them fetch him a civilized chair from the ship. “For see you, young fellow,” he continued, “at other times we’d have established just enough communication to ask about gold. Well, we might also try to get a few sailing directions. But all in all, we’d hear little except the old story— aye, foreign lord, indeed there’s a kingdom where the very streets are paved with gold … a hundred miles west’— anything to get rid of us, eh? But in this prolonged stay, I’ve asked out the duke and the idolater priests more subtly. I’ve been so coy about whence we came and what we already know, that they’ve let slip a gobbet of knowledge they’d not otherwise have disgorged on the rack itself.”
‘The Aureate Cities?” I cried.
“Hush! I’d not have the crew get excited and out of hand. Not yet.”
His leathery, hooknosed face turned strange with thought. “I’ve always believed those cities an old wives’ tale,” he said. My shock must have been mirrored to his gaze, for he grinned and went on, “A useful one. Like a lodestone on a stick, it’s dragging us around the world.” His mirth faded. Again he got that look, which was not unlike the look of Froad considering the heavens. “Aye, of course I want gold, too. But if we find none on this voyage, I’ll not care. I’ll just capture a few ships of Eralia or Sathayn when we’re back in home waters, and pay for the voyage thus. I spoke God’s truth that day on the quarterdeck, Zhean, that this journey was its own goal; until I can give it to Queen Odela, who once gave me the kiss of ennoblement.”
