by Greg Bear
Salap's face and beard glistened with ink. His vivid white eyes stared from his black face, the ink glazed and cracking on his skin. “This warm water,” he said, “will be pushed outward, to power the outskirts of the storm. If we stay with it, we may get out.”
The captain stood beside Salap, a blackened towel in his hand. “Why do you think that?” he asked.
Salap lifted his hands. “Somewhere high up in the storm, scions spray black pigment into suspended moisture, and the pigment absorbs sunlight. When the clouds have reached their maximum temperature, they drop hot rain into the sea, warming it. It's part of this monster's infernal engine. Scions in the water absorb the black pigment, turn the sea milky, and ... it is pushed outward, full of heat...” He shrugged, as if this were elementary. “I imagine at the heart of this beast, there are great sheets of ice, like the inside of a freezer ... The air cools and falls.” He took the captain's towel and wiped his face. “The ship looks sad,” he said.
The captain shook his head. “We just follow the current.”
“It will get rough again, I imagine,” Salap said. “But perhaps we can get out, and get washed clean in the process.”
All around the ship, the sea was beginning to take on a milky pallor. Salap nodded his satisfaction. Thornwheel smiled and shook his head, as if amused by another magic trick.
The captain stood deep in thought, fingers tugging at his chin, eyes distant. “The storm will put this water on the outer edge sometime after dark. Is that what you're thinking?” he asked Salap.
“Precisely,” Salap said. “The night air will warm all around the edge, and rise rapidly as the surrounding air cools. The air over the center of the system will fall ... And the storm will build up enough energy for tomorrow.”
“We'll have two miracles to present to Lenk,” Keyser-Bach said.
The wind began to pick up again. Around the ship, processions of eel-like black scions, drawing long, thin curved lines following the direction of the wind, channeled the milky sea. We turned the ship to go with the wind, and slid between the lines as if following the surface of an immense chart. The waves grew as we sailed toward the wall of fog, now in ragged patches, revealing depths of tortured, billowing white cloud beyond.
Our passage out of the storm was little less remarkable or strenuous than our journey in. We were blown with the milky sea for dozens of miles, through rank after rank of mists, enveloping clouds, fleeting rain showers that left long streaks and smears and whorls of black stain on our deck and hull. The spanker, christian, and all the courses, unfurled to push us swiftly, carried smeared and bleeding meanders of black.
Behind us now, the thumping started again, triphammer pounding that cooled my blood. I did not want to ever hear such a sound again. I felt like a germ invading a huge pulsing heart.
I still expected to die. So did most of the crew, I think, and their behavior was a credit to them. They worked quietly, focused on the ship. There was certainly the temptation to stare at the mysteries, the powers surrounding us, until we were filled like bottles with terror.
Flights of batlike pterids filled the sky, piercing the boiling, ragged cloud-ceiling, rushing to some unknown place in the storm's scheme. The milky sea thrashed with eight-meter waves like peaks in living meringue, slapping pale spray and silvery rivulets across the deck; the waves increased to ten meters, and then became formless, all-consuming monsters again, the lines of eel scions vanishing in their fury.
Blasts of cooler air poured down through rents in the clouds, making the seas steam, until we could see nothing in a general white-out. Thornwheel and I continued to make measurements with the barometer and thermometer, holding the instruments up to our eyes in the impenetrable fog, trying to write them down in fresh notebooks, or calling out figures to the captain, who recorded them on his slate.
After a tense half-hour, the fog cleared.
Outside the storm, night was falling, but within, the sea scintillated with a pale radiance that bounced from the clouds. For the first time, lightning flashed in the clouds above us, silent and vague, like candles behind draped windows. These brief glows popped up here, there, ahead and behind, warm orange in the general lividity.
The water crashing across the bow and sloshing over the decks smelled remarkably like wet soil, and then began to give off an offensive stench, combining molasses sweetness with ammonia. We wrapped our faces in whatever fabric was available, including the crusty, smothering sheets of canvas Meissner had brought up to protect us against the rain of hot ink, but the smell persisted.
Since the black rain, the air around the ship, and across the sea, had generally been warm, topping out at thirty-two degrees. Now, more frequently, we sailed through the cool masses of air the sea was intended to warm. But in its silvery pallor, the sea could not release its heat efficiently. The next step—if I followed Salap's reasoning—would be for the ocean to turn black again, or to effect some other artifice to release the heat more rapidly.
The mate had gone below and checked the ship's clock. He told us it was eighteen-thirty hours—twenty minutes past sunset. We sailed in ghostly twilight, barely able to see across the deck, lanterns coming on fitfully as the engineer managed to put the windscrews to work. The ship's batteries had been soaked during the heavy seas; their membranes would have to be washed and the distilled water replaced before they would function again. We were working on circuits connected directly to the windscrews, and their vanes were wet and whirled uncertainly in the steady wind.
All I could see, staring ahead, were dull flashes of orange behind greasy black clouds and luminous wave peaks. The plunging and leaping of the ship made my knees and head hurt. I felt sick to my stomach—whether because of the stench, the pitching, or exhaustion, I could not decide and didn't care. Salap handed me a small thermometer and I read off the temperature every few minutes, and Thornwheel replied with the barometer. Atmospheric pressure at sea level on Lamarckia was about nine-tenths of Earth normal, rich for Thistledown's citizens, who were used to quite a bit less than that; and by consensus that was called one bar.
Thirty degrees and nine hundred and forty millibars. Thirty-one degrees and nine hundred and forty-three millibars.
The captain recorded our figures when he wasn't shouting orders to the mate, and we tried to keep them in our notebooks. After a while, sick as I was, I couldn't help laughing as we shouted out new figures. Thornwheel grinned as well, his face a smudge in the obscurity.
The lightning grew brighter just as we emerged from a thick wall of cloud. Ahead, lost in the miasma, we heard a chorus of chirrups and whistles, crossing from off the port bow to off the starboard bow, as if a flight of unknown birds taunted us in the dark.
Flashes of forked lightning revealed serpentheads rising from the water, outlined in pale blue, bobbing, chirping and singing.
“Sirens!” I shouted to Thornwheel. The captain glared at me, but the sound grew louder. I tried to see the serpents more clearly, but they were always featureless, smooth, rising and uncurling slowly, or sinking with tips half-curled, like limp hooks. Again we saw low, flat islands floating between the crowds of serpents, but lacking towers, covered instead with rounded bumps.
What little thinking I could manage was half delirious. I imagined cybernetic control systems within the storm, sensing and guiding, the queens of this storm-beast, sending forth flights of pterids this way, ordering the shoals of scions that way, bringing up serpents and lining eels across white seas, making the waves rise and the winds blow hot and cold. Somehow my thoughts became tangled and when I called out temperatures, the air seemed to respond; I believed myself in control, orchestrating all that we barely saw and did not even begin to comprehend.
We shipped a particularly large wave right over the bow, which plunged us all into a darker and deadlier night. Again I lost my notebook, slid to the end of my safety line and spun, then hit and rolled over the deck. In the water, I heard muffled sounds like murmuring, bubbling whispers,
and felt something explore my leg. I reached down, blind, to push it away, and my fingers closed on a smooth, cold surface like hard rubber. It shifted beneath my fingers, and then it stung me. I almost opened my mouth to scream, but some instinct kept my jaws shut tight.
Eyes burning in the sea water, trying to find my way to the surface and safety, my head suddenly bobbed into air. I thought I had gone overboard for sure. The safety rope had broken. I hit hard on deck again, got to my feet, and resisted the wash of water into the scuppers. Lights burned above and to each side of me. I had been swept off the forecastle deck, onto the main deck. My crewmates huddled around me. “Where's the captain?” I shouted. “Where's Thornwheel?”
The nearest person to me, Meissner, had been washed against the bulwark and huddled there like a frightened child. I glanced at my hand in the light of the swaying lanterns, vision blurred, saw a thin trickle of blood from my palm, wondered if I was going to die, and then realized, I've been sampled.
That made me laugh again. Hearing Thornwheel call from the bow, and hearing the captain cursing loudly and shouting orders to keep the ship steady, I began to bray like a mule. Shatro rushed past, glanced at me, shook his head, off on some errand. That seemed even funnier. Cham and Shimchisko poked their heads over the edge of a hatch cover. Shimchisko came around the hatch and took my shoulders in his hands.
“Don't shake me,” I shouted. “I'm not hysterical. It's just funny.” To prove myself sane, I instantly made a sober face and poked my nose against his, peering with bloodshot eyes.
“The water's black!” he yelled, pulling back. I looked around, and indeed, the deck was covered with ink, as was I.
“What does that mean?” he asked.
“I think it's good,” I answered. Then I yanked one of his hands from my shoulder, shook it vigorously, smiled, and headed forward to my post.
I didn't much care about anything for the moment but being alive. If someone had asked me about my mission, about any other secret I had ever held in sacred trust, I would have revealed everything.
Nothing mattered but the laughter and being alive.
13
The water's sudden blackness seemed to calm the waves, or at least reduce them to frisky youngsters no higher than the bulwarks. These hit the ship like a drummer's pounding fists, but the deck did not leap and roll nearly as much, and we had a chance to clear the broken yards and tangled rigging. Everybody pitched in, even the captain and Salap.
Soterio had broken his wrist in the deluge of water that had parted my safety line, but he let Cassir and Ry Diem set and wrap it, and gave us as much help as he could with his remaining good arm, though his face was gray with pain.
The black water carried the ship through dancing pillars of rising fog. The air was almost unbearably humid, and the wind came from the starboard quarter, no faster than the current that gripped the hull, so we seemed suspended in motionless air.
Through gaps in the thick deck of clouds, I could see patches of stars. French the navigator was quick enough at sighting constellations to get a rough idea which way we were being pushed—due south. No one was certain what that meant; the horizon was blocked by an impenetrable darkness, unrelieved by lightning or any other detail.
The water grew calmer still. We stood about the deck, wobbling with exhaustion; Kissbegh and Ibert lay where they fell, sound asleep. I managed to find Shirla in the dim light of the few functional lanterns and put my arm around her. She did not push it off; instead, she reached up and gripped my hand in hers, tugging on the fingers like a child. It was such a casual, familiar gesture that one might have thought we had been lovers for years.
“Did you know it would be like this?” she asked. Her eyes were
lovely, brown and alive.
“No,” I said.
“Do you think it's over?”
“No.”
“We're still inside of it?”
“I think so.”
Randall walked slowly along the deck. The work that could be done had been done, he said; it was time to get whatever rest we could.
Most of us collapsed where we stood and curled up on the deck in the thick, sticky puddles of black water and the wretched heat, sweating. Shirla lay beside me, knees drawn up, and immediately slept. We had been inside the storm-beast for nine hours.
My own need to sleep had fled. I was exhausted yet wide-awake. My mind, however, became as clear of thought as a fine summer sky. I stared up at the patches of stars and watched them be obscured, one by one. The clouds were thickening overhead.
Far to the east, the triphammer pulse continued. It did not shake the air or upset our bodies, though Shirla twitched and moaned.
Somewhere aft, the generators whined faintly and the windscrews stilled. I recognized the sounds of their gearing being disengaged. The remaining electric lanterns immediately went out. Someone, I could not see who, walked past with a small electric torch, whispering a string of curses.
Still inside. Still Jonahs.
The black water gave off its heat around the ship and, by morning, as grayish light filtered through the clouds and curls of mist, the sea acquired a dusty greenish color. I got to my feet, leaving Shirla to sleep as long as circumstances allowed, and looked around to see who else was up and about.
Salap stood on the puppis, facing forward. He saw me and nodded but did not smile. Cham squatted in a half-doze by the mizzen tree. The rigging pulled and caught with little popping sounds and the remaining yards creaked and rattled. The ship was riding in a normal sea—waves about half a meter at their crests, racing past us in long swells as if eager to win a race. Peering overside, I was left with the impression we were sailing backwards.
I joined Salap on the puppis deck. He had just finished trailing a net in the water, back and forth over the stern. He showed me the net: empty. The captain had gone below; Randall sat near the stern, behind the wheel, which was tended by Ry Diem.
“Do you have any idea where we are?” Salap asked.
“No,” I said. “How would I know?”
Salap chuckled humorlessly. “You're a smart man. I thought you had some consoling theories.”
“Well, I don't,” I said. Our time in the beast had changed me, at least for the moment, and I felt respect for no man, and no sense of discretion, either.
Salap seemed to find my new tone unexceptionable. Clearly, he did not care much for rank or protocol. “I would have guessed we'd be outside of the storm by now.”
“I'm surprised we're still alive,” I said. Ahead, the blackness had changed to an almost equally uninformative charcoal gray.
“There is a pattern, a process,” he said. For a moment, I expected him to reveal some religious belief, but he continued, “The storm is a well-organized system, maintained by hundreds of types of scions. I wish we could have captured a sample of each. We have a few of the flying forms, a barrel or two from the rich sea, and whatever else washed up on deck.”
“Something sampled me,” I said, holding up my hand. Salap stared at the gouge with interest.
“The storm is not part of zone five, then,” he said. Nearly everyone on Elizabeth's Land had been sampled by a river scion at one time or another, and these all came from Petain, so it was believed.
“I guess not.”
“It is a separate ecos. Yet it feeds the prairie.”
I nodded.
“So we learn more and more. The zones cooperate with sub-zones, as at the Chefla waste ... And the storm has some connection with Petain, though not a part of it. I am proven wrong all the time now.” He took a deep breath and smiled broadly. “It makes me feel young to be wrong so often.”
“The water here seems empty,” I said. “There were so many scions back there...” I waved my hand astern. “Why none here?”
“Even though we are not out of the storm, we must be near its farthest extension, its caudal portion, if I may be anatomical. There may be little of importance here.”
“I thought the
black water would just push toward the outside of the cyclone, not toward the rear.”
Salap shrugged. “It was just a theory. A hope, perhaps.”
The grayness ahead parted as the dawn advanced. We seemed to be near land—a long dark line of hills rose on the horizon. Ry Diem said hopefully, “We can find a harbor and fix the ship.”
The captain climbed to the puppis, his head wrapped in a black-stained strip of cloth. “Good morning, if it is morning,” he said.
“It seems to be,” Ry Diem said. Randall pointed out the hills on the horizon. The Captain stared at it, jaw clenching and unclenching within the bandage. He glanced at me, hooded his eyes, and said, “Slammed my jaw last night. Ruined a few molars. Soterio up and about?”
“His arm's giving him hell, but he swears he'll be on deck as soon as he can get dressed. One of the women is helping him,” Randall said.
“That is not land, whatever it is,” the captain said. “There is no land in this part of the world.” He lifted his binoculars, then handed them around. All looked but Ry Diem. When my turn came, Shatro and Thornwheel and Cassir joined us, and I barely glanced at the formation before passing the glasses on to them. I could not make out any detail, just low knobby protrusions like hills, all of a uniform dark brown. The grayness above them seemed lighter, rent here and there to reveal darker, thicker clouds beyond.
“It's part of this damned beast still,” the captain said.
“We're coming up on it rapidly,” Cassir said.
“Cast a logline and let's see how fast we're going,” the captain told Randall. Randall assigned the task to Shankara, who came back a few minutes later with a speed of four knots. Keyser-Bach examined the distant mass, lips moving as if in calculation. “Our speed with respect to whatever that is, is about nine knots. And I'd guess it's no more than five miles away. Erwin?”
