by Greg Bear
“Unless it furnishes your ship,” Randall said gloomily, hoping to head off this clumsy metaphor.
“And the other is that storm.” The captain pointed emphatically out the window. “It nearly overtook me when I dropped off Salap at his station two years ago. Which of my white whales is worse?”
Shatro shook his head, unable to follow the captain. “Sir, I am unclear about the promotion of Ser Olmy.”
“No doubt,” Keyser-Bach said with an acid tone. “I understand this young fellow is bright, and we are short of researchers. Salap tells me on the radio that he cannot spare more than two from Wallace to accompany us.” He held out his hand as if to cue Randall. “But how will Ser Olmy serve?”
“I leave that up to Salap,” Randall said. “I would like to have as many capable minds as possible at work on this expedition, and at the chief researcher's disposal.”
“How does one more mind help?” Shatro asked with a sniff.
“This expedition should not face the same problem we all face on this planet,” Randall said. “We came here knowing we would be a small group, and completely isolated. We did not understand what that would cost us intellectually and culturally.”
“What does culture have to do with it?” Shatro asked.
“I understand what Erwin is saying,” the captain said. “We face a huge puzzle that would challenge our greatest minds, even if they had access to all the resources of Thistledown. But we don't have access to those resources. And this ship—all due respect to all aboard at present—is not filled to overflowing with creative geniuses. Right, Erwin?”
“Though by no means a ship of fools,” Randall said, waggling one hand slowly.
“By no means,” the captain echoed, eyes half lidded.
Shatro shrugged and puffed out his cheeks.
“I recognized that Olmy was bright the day he came aboard,” the captain said. “But I feel little sympathy for those so-called explorers who launch themselves into the silva, uneducated and ill-prepared. I've seen too many of them come back wild-eyed mystics, if they come back at all. Did the silva give you a fit of vastitude, Ser Olmy?”
“I felt lost in it, sir,” I said. “Overwhelmed. But I came back still myself, if that's what you mean.”
“All right,” the captain said. “I will go along with this promotion, with Salap's approval, so long as we do not have to sail with one less hand.”
“I'll enjoy my work either way, sir,” I said, trying for the proper humility. Shatro scowled, then resumed his mask of patent neutrality.
“I'd like to be securely moored at the station by tomorrow morning,” the captain said.
Night had obscured the ocean and the coast as I came up on deck, but looking north, I saw bright flashes, orange and pink, dozens of miles away in the general darkness: the captain's immortal storm.
By morning, the storm had moved out of sight, and tension on the Vigilant eased. The wind held, and we sailed smoothly over deep blue water, beneath a sky filled with cotton-puff clouds and high, fleecy cirrus.
The land at the southeastern extreme of the Cheng Ho Coast consisted of a line of low, intermittent cliffs, dotted by granite domes, against which the sea broke in thin lines of breakers. Inland, what first caught the eye were twisted, squat towers like immense, thick thorn bushes trimmed by giant gardeners. As we sailed closer to the shore, these towers resolved themselves as thickly intertwined trunks spreading across several hectares of ground, rising to heights of more than a hundred and fifty meters, and crowned with brilliant red discus-shaped leaves as much as ten meters in diameter. Between the towers, a pale tan uniformity painted the low, gently rolling hills, giving the impression of featureless sand stretching to infinity. This was not sand, however, but Petain's prairie, which covered thousands of square kilometers south of the sootbrush country. The prairie was made not of dried grasslands, which might have been a second guess, but of a thick, shiny surface dotted every few meters with dimples deep enough to hide a human.
I performed my sailor's duties on the starboard morning watch with the other A.B.s and apprentices. Shirla had been part of the night watch, and passed me on deck with a weary, satirical grin. “Kiss-up,” she whispered. “Now you'll get the best duty. Never hang off a yard again...”
“Not so lucky,” I said. “You're stuck with me for a while.”
She stopped, surveyed me with an expression of mock disdain, hands on hips. “I hardly feel worthy of your company.”
I gave in to a flush of irritation. “Shirla, I am what I am. I can't help being interested in what the captain and Shatro study. Are you mad at me?”
She sneered. “Don't presume that you arouse such strong emotions, Sir Olmy. It doesn't become you.”
“No more sweets?” I asked. Now it was her turn to blush.
“Flirts with a higher rate are doomed, you know,” she said.
“We've been so involved,” I chided.
Her expression fell then, no mocking, and I realized I had caused genuine pain. “Screw that,” she said, and turned to go below.
The first mate glared at me, but before he could speak, I was down by the mizzen with Ibert and Riddle, unfurling the christian and raising the spanker before putting in to the cove near the station.
The captain came on deck with Randall and stationed Shimchisko and Cham fore and aft to drop depth lines and report. Ibert and Kissbegh climbed to the tops to look for shifting vine reefs, always a danger around Petain. Three miles ahead, five low brown huts stood on the beach above the wave line—there were hardly any tides on Lamarckia—while a few small boats bobbed offshore in the regular, gentle surf. The wind blew offshore at two or three knots, complicating our maneuvers; we tacked back and forth across several miles before dropping anchor in sixteen meters of effervescent water, about two hundred meters off the beach.
The captain ordered the longboat lowered. Randall and Shatro supervised the loading of boxes of provisions for the crew that would remain at the station and the packet of mail. It had been three months since the last ship visited this cove.
Shimchisko, Shirla, Ry Diem, Shankara, and I crewed the longboat. All but Randall and the captain pulled on the oars across the short distance. Ry Diem and I leaped out into the foaming, hissing waves, pushed through a thick line of sea crust—dried foam with the consistency of baked meringue—and tugged the boat onto the beach, tying the rope to a thick woody stem of sea vine rooted deep in the sand. We walked up the beach in line of rank.
Shirla pointedly said nothing, lips set tight. I wondered how much of this sea flirtation was a kind of hidden courtship, and what rules I had violated.
Five men and four women met us on the beach. The chief researcher, Mansur Salap, stepped forward and embraced Keyser-Bach with a warm smile. Salap was the eldest of the station's nine personnel, fifty-seven years of age, streaks of gray in his close-cropped black hair and narrow goatee. Dressed in loose black pants, black shirt, with a long black coat draped over them, feet shod in fiber sandals, he was smaller than the captain, and a touch thinner, though his thinness seemed more in proportion. In truth he was an elegant fellow, not a movement wasted, his long fingers on feminine hands making small, precise gestures as he spoke in a pleasant tenor, explaining the nature of their work the past few weeks. The captain walked beside him, chin in hand, nodding and frowning in concentration.
Thornwheel and Cassir, two of Salap's assistants at the station, were younger than I, though we appeared about the same age. Youth passed more quickly on Lamarckia than in Thistledown. The captain preceded us into the main lab building. The walls were made of thin frames covered with dark leathery sheets; the roof was thatched sea vine strips.
The captain took a seat and Salap gave us a tour of the apparatus on the tables within the lab, relating the outcomes of some of his most recent experiments. “The prairie is not just one continuous scion, as we thought a year ago ... It consists of at least five different types, adapted from one form across centuries or eve
n millennia, a new kind of growth and development in our experience ... Instead of recalling and reshaping the scions at some point far from their habitat, the ecos provides them with modified templates and they change themselves.”
The captain listened attentively, clearly feeling at ease with Salap, and fascinated by his discoveries, but not eager to speak his mind.
“With the equipment on Vigilant, we could easily understand the prairie's relations to the sea vines and other pelagic scions. There is a reciprocal arrangement, of course, as Jiddermeyer thought—a constant for all ecoi—but the nature of the arrangement between land-dwellers and the pelagic or riparian scions has not been clearly established. Here, we've charted the deliveries of nutrients from the sea, measured and estimated the rates of exchange and what gets returned to the sea ... We begin to understand the metabolism, as it were, of all Petain.”
“Very good,” the captain said, tapping his chin with one finger.
Salap folded his arms. “Something you wish to say, Captain?” he asked coolly.
“We can't stay long. Two days at most—”
“Because of the troubles,” Salap said.
“Randall agrees with me,” the captain said, as if there might be a debate, and he wished to squelch it early.
The master sat on a stool across from the captain. He raised his eyebrows and smiled uneasily.
“Do you think it will be war?” Salap asked.
“It's going to be a bureaucratic nightmare, whatever it is,” Randall said. “We've endured enough of those.”
“We'll need as many researchers as you can spare,” the captain said. “Erwin's already been recruiting from among the crew.” He looked at me.
Salap stepped forward and looked me over critically, as if I were a peculiar animal, perhaps a scion. “This is... ?”
“Ser Olmy Ap Datchetong,” Randall said. “A student of Elizabeth. More competent than most.”
“A pleasure to meet you, Ser Olmy. The master has always had a soft heart,” Salap said. “Fortunately, he's also a good judge of people.”
“I'd like to leave as soon as possible,” the captain said.
Salap shook his head, clearly disliking the pressure. “Give me two days. We will pack up the equipment I need on the ship, transfer the equipment you are delivering to the station, and finish our measurements of nocturnal weather-born transfers.”
The captain looked surprised. “Weather-born?”
Salap gave us a coldly smug smile. “My special surprise. We've learned much about the storm that lies out there now, that chased us both around the Darwin Sea, but never caught us.”
“What have you learned?” Keyser-Bach asked.
“That it is alive,” Salap said.
9
By late afternoon, the last boatload had been delivered, and the captain and Salap stood on the beach, staring out to sea. The storm had swung in close to the coast again, thirty or forty miles offshore, filling the northern horizon almost east to west with pillars and whorls of cloud arranged in spreading, stacked layers. This close, the clouds had a scintillant quality, as if filled with flakes of mica.
Shatro, Thornwheel and Cassir stood by the boat, waiting to be taken to the ship. I stood beside Randall, a few meters from the captain and Salap.
“He still hasn't explained,” Randall said in an undertone. He looked around anxiously. “We should put out immediately or we'll be blown onto the beach or the vine reefs. I'd hate to weather that bastard in any case—but I'd rather meet it at sea.”
The captain motioned for all of us to join him and Salap. “We've been talking,” he said. “We both agree that things can be finished here by tomorrow afternoon, or by morning if we put our backs into it. We'll need to help rig and test the equipment we just delivered, and then we'll—” His words trailed off, and he stared at the storm as if lost in a dream.
“It never comes ashore. It sends emissaries,” Salap said.
“Mansur, you have my infinite admiration, but I'd like to know what to expect,” the captain said sharply, “in clear language.”
Salap seemed to enjoy the captain's discomfiture. “The emissaries are small fronts of cloud, rich with water and materials picked up within the storm itself. Difficult to describe.”
“How strong?” Randall asked.
“A few knots of wind. Enough to blow them in gently—not enough to hurt the ship, or rip up the fabric on the prairie.” Fabric was what Salap and the station's researchers had come to call the shiny brown tissue that spread over the prairie—and concealed the inner workings of the five types of scions. “In truth, the storm serves many purposes. It stirs the sea, grows nutrients like a gigantic bio-reactor ... and it controls the weather. For hundreds of miles, there is no storm but the one storm.”
The captain was torn between scientific elation, concern for the storm, as a sailor should be concerned about all storms, and what might have been incredulity. “A remarkable discovery,” he allowed, “but I think I'll feel more secure when we're all on the boat.”
The captain returned to the boat before dark, taking Salap with him to arrange the equipment and specimens aboard Vigilant. Shatro had been waiting for this moment, and when Randall was out of sight—walking off the dinner Salap had prepared, a dubious feast of unfamiliar bits of prairie fabric—the three researchers found me on the beach, watching the storm in its unmoving, ever-changing grandeur.
“We have some questions,” Thornwheel said amiably enough. He wore a roughly trimmed beard, which gave his high forehead and plump boyish cheeks some maturity, but not a great deal. They sat beside me on the mottled dark sand, picking at the rough rounded quartz and granite pebbles.
“Matthew tells us you have little formal training,” Cassir said. He gave me a hard look. “We wonder how little.”
“Enough to get by,” I said. Their expressions—a little flat, with unconvincing smiles—forecast some sort of trouble.
“We're just curious,” Cassir said. “We like to know who we're working with. What you're capable of.”
“I'm self-educated,” I said. “Lenk school, but no secondary after.”
“Shatro tells us you were lost in Liz for two years,” Thornwheel said.
“Hardly lost.”
“Liz is old and familiar by now,” Shatro said.
“I never got familiar with Liz,” I said.
Thornwheel chuckled. “Our scientific paramours, right? Scholar's mistresses ... books and dreams of queens.”
Shatro was not mollified. “What did you hope to learn? Without equipment, without training ... We've been trained by Salap and Keyser-Bach. There are no better teachers on Lamarckia.”
“I haven't been so fortunate,” I admitted, trying to avoid the confrontation Shatro seemed to want. “I spent most of my time trying to track the behavior of mobile scions. Whitehats, vermids, but especially aquifer snakes...” I had read enough in Randall's library about the kilo-meters-long fluid-bearing tubes, part of which I had seen outside Moonrise, that I felt I could hold up an argument for several minutes, at least.
“I tracked one when I was a second in Lenk school,” Thornwheel said. “Never found the beginning, and never found the end.”
“I tracked one that was three kilometers long, at least. It dipped into the Terra Nova at one end...”
“What about the pink shells?” I asked, trying to get the focus off me and my experiences. “I never did see where they came from. Do you think they're remains of scions?”
Cassir took the subject eagerly. “Whitehats,” he said.
“We don't know that,” Thornwheel said contemptuously. “Don't rely on folk gossip. But we've never seen living things inhabit the shells.”
“Salap says he's sure whitehats deposit them as soil enrichers.”
Thornwheel shook his head. “They're the cast-off remains of vermids.”
Shatro shook his head in turn, more vigorously. The third degree had been averted, at least for now. He took one last sh
ot at me:
“What did you learn that we don't know anything about? You spent two years there—did you see pink shells being deposited? Did you see aquifer snakes hooking up to feed another scion, or water a silva bed?”
“No,” I said.
“Nobody's seen any of those things,” Thornwheel said. “There just aren't enough of us, and too many mysteries.”
Randall walked along the beach and joined us as the last ribbon of light in the west faded. “I'd like to try to reach Athenai on the radio, now that it's night,” he said. “The storm doesn't seem to want to throw much lightning now, does it?”
“No, ser,” Shatro said.
“Maybe we'll get lucky.”
Cassir got up and we retired to the small cabin the researchers shared with the small radio. We were not lucky, however. The radio produced nothing but hiss and voices too distorted to understand.
“The captain could do anything he wanted, under these conditions,” Shatro said. Randall gave him a passing glare, but said nothing.
In the morning, before dawn, I came awake from a vivid dream of Thistledown City. The city had been almost empty of people, and the buildings had become like limp balloons. The message was clear enough: a city was nothing without its people.
But what about people, without the city?
I walked along the boundary of the prairie, savoring its extraordinary monotony, wondering what Lamarckia had to offer that could replace a city, or all the components of civilization.
Salap and his assistants seemed contented enough. The captain and Randall found challenges enough to amuse them. But what about me? I wondered what I would grow to miss most...
Already I missed Thistledown. I missed the straightforward flirtations and courtships I had been so good at; there was nothing to either constrain or slake my physical needs but willpower, and that left me bluntly frustrated, unable to respond in kind to even the simplest gestures, which were all that Shirla seemed capable of.
