by Greg Bear
Coming into the margin of the main harbor, separated from the Terra Nova by a curving wall, I saw the two Brionist flatboats tied up. Tractors and other equipment were being offloaded on ramps and with small cranes. Farther along, the largest ship in port was a full-rigged vessel about forty meters long, with three masts and two cylindrical slatted windmills for generating power. Two gangplanks linked the ship with the pier, and men carried boxes along the planks, loading them onto the ship. More sailing ships—three-masted schooners, barques, a small ketch, all with elegant sharp prows, all wide in the beam—lay at anchor. One of these ships, a barque with a single low, large canvas windmill mounted astern, glowed along its rigging and rails with hundreds of little electric lights, and, as if that might not be enough, additional gas lanterns hissed port and starboard.
As I watched from the dockside, a sailor walked along the deck, extinguishing the lanterns. She walked aft, reached into a box, and the electric lights went out.
I smiled in anticipation. Here at last was something I thought I might be competent to handle. I had sailed many times in the fourth chamber waterways on Thistledown and had studied sailing ships extensively for this mission, clued by the informer's description of travel and commerce. I knew the nautical terms—what I did not know was which terms the immigrants had retained in the decades since the informant had made his gate and left, and what they had added. Nkwanno's slate had little to say about ships or travel on Lamarckia's oceans and waterways.
I walked a few dozen meters along the pier, to the next vessel, a full-rigged ship. A tall, lank, discouraged-looking man stood by a pile of lizboo-plank boxes wrapped in nets, waiting for a short, thick crane to lift the assemblage and convey it into the ship's hold. I approached. “I'd like to find Erwin Randall's ship—I mean, Captain Keyser-Bach's ship.”
The man looked me over woefully. “I'm the chandler's assistant,” he said. “This is the Vigilant.”
“Keyser-Bach?” I persisted.
“He's the captain, yes.”
“Where's Ser Randall?”
The discouraged-looking man curled his lip. “I'm not from the ship, man. I deal with supplies.”
“Who would I talk to?”
“I don't want to judge, but by your dress ... You've not had work in some time.” He chuckled and shook his head. “She's an eccentric ship, the Vigilant. There's a shortage of seamen here, but you don't look the grade.” The man sucked in his cheeks. “I don't spread tales, besides, but Captain Keyser-Bach is not the man I'd sail under. A thinking man's thinking man, and what kind of a sailor would that make him? All wrapped in charts and studies.” He tapped his head meaningfully.
I thanked him and waited for someone to disembark the Vigilant. Within a few minutes, a man of middle years in long brown breeches and a light coat, chest bare between two half-tied strings, picked his way along the plank with grace. I said, “I'm looking for Ser Randall.”
“Not a passenger ship,” the man said, regarding me curiously. “I don't know you.” He waited for a moment, then began to move off again before adding, “Not that I know everybody here.”
“Ser Randall told me to report to Captain Keyser-Bach.”
The man turned and spent more time looking me over. “Name's French. Navigation and meteorology. Randall isn't back yet. Here's what you do. You go to the researcher's mate—he's in that little shed with the black lizzie fringe. He's seen Randall recently and he might know something. But beware. He's arguing with the chief chandler and he's in a whiney mood, right?”
I crossed the yard to the shed, and entered. Inside, bare dim bulbs cast a waxy yellow glow over a dusty desk. Two men argued across the desk, one sitting behind it on a battered stool, the other, a chunky blond, standing, leaning on the desk with thick arms. It was Shatro. He looked surprised to see me. The man behind the desk looked up, fixed me with sharp blue eyes, and said, “Ship? Needs?” His narrow face and thin cheeks gave him a skeletal appearance.
“Randall told me to report to the ship,” I said to Shatro.
“I'm chandler here,” the seated man said, a broad if not convincing smile displaying fine teeth under his long pale nose. “Do you know—”
“I know this man,” Shatro said. “Why did he tell you to come here?”
I did not really want to explain myself to Shatro and did not understand why he asked the question. “He did, and I'm here. Where is Ser Randall?”
“He hasn't reported in yet,” Shatro said. He gestured for me to go away, but I stood my ground and he turned back to the chandler with a look of one more weight laid upon his shoulders.
The argument between the two continued. The chandler's prices had gone up twice in the past year, against Lenk's economic suggestions, Shatro claimed. The chandler calmly responded that with seven ships lost in that year and metal at a premium, it stood to reason gear would cost, and especially gear useful for research. “Good-quality jars and steel receptacles are at a special premium,” the chandler said.
Shatro faced me in exasperation. “We're putting foam on the beard tomorrow morning, and this... man cares nothing for science.” But the argument seemed to have lost its momentum. Shatro sighed and stood back from the desk. “I can't believe Ser Randall told you any such thing,” he said to me in a pointed undertone. “Our crew is select. We need Lenk schooling and strong secondary training. Seamanship desirable. Forgive me, but you don't look it.”
“I have many skills. Technical training and experience. And I'm strong.”
The chandler looked between us with some amusement. “Everybody's strong, now,” he said with a low hoot of humor. “Just a few years ago, now—”
“Been under sail?” Shatro asked.
I nodded.
“You certainly don't look it,” the chandler said, shaking his head sadly.
“He wants you to be a ship's hand, right?” Shatro asked. “We're short of hands, but not that short. Excuse me, Ser Costa,” he said to the man behind the desk. “Charge what your conscience suggests. You can serve all knowledge, bring honor to your children, and share the adventure, or you can prosper on our hunger.”
The chandler received this with a broad smile and squint. “I trust the next ship you serve on—if there is a next ship—you'll be back with a better argument.” He swiveled on the stool to look more closely at me. “I suggest you find yourself a less ambitious vessel.”
Shatro walked heavily from the shed, across the stone paving. I followed, and behind, the chandler began to crow with laughter.
“You must have misunderstood Ser Randall,” Shatro said. “He's master of the Vigilant, but the captain chooses the crew. We've been in Calcutta six months waiting for funding from Athenai and trying to put together a scientific team. How can you help us?”
I crab-gated, almost skipped beside him, yet spoke firmly—to appear at once youthfully obsequious and competent, assured. Shatro, I judged, lacked the basic elements of self-confidence. Somehow or other, I posed a threat to him. “I know physics and the principles of meteorology. I know the basics of ships and the sea. And I'm a quick learner.”
Shatro stopped, held up his hands with palms toward me, and said, “Let me add to the chandler's poor description of our itinerary.”
“Ser Randall explained—”
“I doubt he gave you the whole itinerary. It's going to be a difficult voyage, to say the least. We'll go east along the Sumner Coast, then swing south-southeast around Mount Pascal, drop in to Jakarta to pick up some more real researchers, then south to Wallace Station for another load of researchers. Along the way, we might study the pins in the Chefla Lava Waste, then sail out to Martha's Island. A journey of eight thousand nautical miles, fourteen thousand eight hundred kilometers to you. After Martha's Island, we'll head south to Cape Magellan, make landfall there and study zone six, then round the cape and run west with the Kangxi current, if it exists, around the unknown side of Lamarckia, We hope to reach Basilica and Nihon, if they exist, and touch Hsia from the eas
tern side. Then we slip through the Cook Straits. An additional twelve thousand nautical miles. And still we won't be home. We'll cross the Darwin Sea at the lowest longitudes to La Pèrouse Land. Only then will we turn north for Athenai, if our ship lasts so long. So, would-be-sailor, how many days do we have left before we miss the spring northers and the southeasters from the Walking Sticks?”
“I don't know,” I said.
“Right,” he said, suspicions confirmed. He turned and boarded the ship. “Ser Randall will be here any moment. It's really up to the captain, and to him.”
I took a deep breath and spent the next twenty minutes sitting on a bench at the head of the pier where Vigilant was moored, watching men and women come and go. A small electric tractor pulled a wagon of foodstuffs in casks and boxes to the side of the ship. There it was left, to be loaded aboard later.
Randall came down to the docks with several other men. He saw me sitting on the bench, gave me a curt nod, and continued about his business, walking along the pier, examining Vigilant, exchanging remarks with his companions, pointing, nodding heads. I had seen men everywhere do this—a ritual of checking and measuring and reassuring, liberally punctuated with outstretched arms and fingers.
When the men departed, still talking and pointing, Randall stood by the Vigilant's gangplank and waved for me to join him.
“Still no luggage, eh, Ser Olmy?” he asked as I approached. “Thomas will think you're a man without roots.”
“I am,” I said.
“Sorry to keep you waiting. Have you been here long?”
“Not long,” I said. “I had a talk with Ser Shatro.”
“Oh?”
“I don't think he approves of me.”
Randall grinned. “The captain makes the choices,” he said.
“That's what Ser Shatro told me.”
“Shall we get on with it?” Randall asked. We crossed the gangplank and went aboard the ship.
A small, knobby man with darting eyes, quick stringy fingers and a high forehead topped by thick red hair, Captain Keyser-Bach gave me a look of pinched concern. The mate and Shatro bustled in and out of his cabin, bringing forms on paper for signing, a printed newspaper (I had never seen one before), a box of manuals and texts, also on paper, and in the midst of this, his right hand wielding a pen and his left pushing signed forms into a folder held open by one aide, the captain said, “I assume the respectable master has given you some idea what we're facing.”
“Yes, Ser.”
’”Captain,"’ Randall said.
“Captain.” I examined the cabin, walls of white-painted cathedral tree with lizboo trim, xyla floor with brass cleats, ceramic gutters beneath a small lab table, a wall covered by rolled charts and a case filled with large, thick books. A single slate hung in a sleeve from the bulkhead beside the captain's narrow bed. The air smelled of ethanol and other chemicals, arrayed on a table beside an optical microscope. The microscope occupied the focus of the room, like an icon; I did not doubt such instruments were far rarer than slates, and that Randall and the captain had fought for permission to take one on the voyage.
Slices of a small unidentified scion were laid out on a board, pinned and labeled. But for their clothes—long shirts tied up with belts, loose pants and sandals—we might have been in a late nineteenth-century Earth laboratory.
“No one at Athenai is enthusiastic about this expedition. Some profess interest, some give encouragement, none show enthusiasm. Lenk himself wonders about its utility.” The captain finished signing and took up the newspaper. “Some of us at least have rediscovered ambition. What's your ambition?”
I said, “To learn about the ecoi and our place among them, Captain.”
“If the master says you're adequate, I won't contradict him. We'll sail short three hands—short ten, if we count seasoned sailors and A.B.s. But by Fate and Logos, we'll sail.” He plucked a sheet from the folder and waved it for Randall's benefit. “Received this while you were up the Terra Nova. Permission from the Administer of Science and Metallurgy at Athenai. Should have been here three months ago. We are forbidden to ‘risk the metal-containing ship Vigilant unnecessarily, or to report findings to anyone other than the officers and ministers of Able Lenk.’ ‘Science and Metallurgy’ indeed. As if the ship's metal is more important than crew or mission...” The captain thrust the permission form into the folder again. He shook the newspaper, turned the headline toward Randall, who bent to read it. “Villages raided on the north coast and around Jakarta, and upriver here at Moonrise. Ships taken. Crews let off in boats or rafts.” He drew up his cheeks, squeezing his eyes to slits, and sucked on his teeth, then straightened and lifted one hand, as if after all this meant very little.
“I've a hunger for knowledge,” I said. “I need passage for experience. I need to reach Athenai eventually—that's all. My mother and father told me to go where I can be educated. Apprenticed.”
“How old are you?” the captain asked. He had an odd habit of touching the prominent knob of his chin with his fingers and tugging until he had a space of one or two centimeters between his teeth, all the time keeping his jaw muscles clenched as if in defiance.
“Twenty,” I said.
“Family?”
“Datchetong. A branch not reassigned.”
“Proscribed, with no education, then?” the captain asked.
I appeared distressed, nodded.
“Bonded or linked?”
“No triad connections,” I said. “I've been in the silva for a couple of years, on my own. Trying to study.”
“Then at least you have some survival skills ... Shall I check with the disciplinary and make sure you're not fleeing his wrath?”
“We've both met the disciplinary,” Randall said quietly.
The captain leaned closer, eyes penetrating. “You know nothing about our expedition?”
“More now than I did a few days ago,” I admitted.
“Two years in the silva—Elizabeth's Zone? Breath of Logos, you're the mystery man, aren't you? From Moonrise?” He swung around on his seat to face Randall. “You didn't tell me that, Erwin.”
“I didn't want to prejudice you. We traveled back together.”
“I should have guessed ... And the disciplinary gives him a fair mark?”
“So far,” Randall said.
Keyser-Bach pulled his chin vigorously, glancing between Randall and me. “They say the Brionists and General Beys in particular are working several sea routes, commandeering ships. I don't believe them—I think the Brionists are blamed overmuch—but we can't afford not to be—”
“Vigilant,” I said.
Randall seemed to enjoy such cheek. The captain seemed less amused.
“This expedition has been in the making for ten years, and it starts without the enthusiastic support of anybody in power. We set out with faith and strong drive and not much more.” He puffed out his cheeks. “You'd be shocked at the youth around here, and the courage of our seagoing breed.
“But if the master thinks you're fit, we'll sign you on as an apprentice. Don't expect to do a lot of science. Expect calluses and shouting.”
I made my way around the boat before the assembling of the crew, and made my own assessment. In their decades on Lamarckia, the immigrants who had taken to these seas had pushed the words for things nautical this way and that, deleted or elided, added and compressed, but still, most were recognizable. Recognizable as well was the design of the Vigilant, a forty-meter three-masted full-rigged ship made largely of xyla, with brass and steel trim. A few details would have startled sailors on Earth (or in the fourth chamber of Thistledown, where a replica clipper ship had once plied the Lake of Winds): broad in the beam, forecastle prominent, the bow sharp but with a bulbous protrusion at the waterline. Seen from above, the overall outline of the ship would have resembled a short chisel with a drop of paint hanging from the angled tip. Two canvas-vaned windscrews rose abaft and slanted outboard of the sails, their rotors connected to
generators within the hull.
What I knew of the Crossing showed that Lenk had handicapped his flock deliberately, choosing the most dedicated radical Naderites—who would, of course, eschew the fine technologies of the contemporary Hexamon. Certain instruments and technologies not available in the twentieth century—the batteries within the slates, for example—had been accepted by fiat among the divaricates. But with the significant exceptions noted in the history on Nkwanno's slate, the immigrants had come to Lamarckia remarkably innocent of such skills as engineering, mathematics, and physics, beyond the most basic sort.
Perhaps nautical engineering had not yet recovered from Lenk's choices. In strong winds, with a high forecastle and elevated poopdeck, the Vigilant would tend to roll; the windscrews seemed pasted on, and sailing downwind, or with the wind fine on the starboard or port quarter, could steal from the courses.
The dearness of iron showed. The Vigilant was xyla-hulled and solid enough, but with very few iron or steel parts; aluminum, bronze and brass, tin and copper were used sparingly. Sails and masts were suspended from and supported by a mix of rope and wire stays and braces; shrouds alternated rope and wire, and all ratlines were rope or lizboo. Where wire was used, and where rope, seemed to vary with whim; the main backstay being rope, forestay wire; and yet the backstay took the strain of the following wind. I felt a sudden shadow of worry. I hoped I was wrong, but for the Vigilant I judged there would be trouble at sea: continuous, nagging trouble.
Which could explain the loss of so many ships. As for the crew: thirty-one men to twelve women, the youngest apprentices delivered by their triad families to a sea trial, failures perhaps at Lenk school (despite the captain's speech to me); the eldest, largely able-bodied seamen or A.B.s, hired from the rejects of the none-too-large merchant fleets. Even with twenty thousand inhabitants, commerce was slow, sea travel haphazard and hazardous besides.
