by Richard Farr
The helpers drifted away again after that. Four minds had potentially been saved for eternity; now, the individual Seraphim needed to focus again on their own minds. So the “saved” wandered the great ship, at first pretending to the same blankness, and then risking a few questions:
Where are we going? Aren’t we sailing east? Can you tell us any news? Who’s running the ship? Are the satellites still down? Can we communicate with land at all? Do you know what’s happened?
Nothing: the “passengers” were too far gone down the road of simplification. Having given up their jobs and their families, having given up every vestige of ordinary life because they expected soon to leave life itself behind, they’d given up language too: as they’d been taught, human communication and human knowledge were only impediments, delusions, drugs to which they and their ancestors had been addicted these few thousand years, and from which they must wean themselves or lose everything. They looked inward only, sitting cross-legged on the white steel decks, or the wool carpets of the fancy cocktail bars, or the polished hardwood of the cheesy, over-the-top Grand Stairway. They were intent on nothing but their softly chanted incantations.
Ux-VA-ret
Hul-AN-ga
Qi-KOT-bao
Goddess was a city of happy, mumbling ghosts. With at least one exception.
Short, muscular, and sunburned, with a beard the color of rust, a man named Powers (“Captain Powers,” someone said) gave speeches from a platform on one of the open decks. He certainly looked like a ship’s captain. What none of the Seraphim knew was that he also looked exactly like an early Seraphim convert, Roy Powers, who had once upon a time been a welder for a South African mining company. That Roy Powers (thirty-seven, competent despite being a bit of a drinker, no family to speak of) had disappeared on a prospecting trip on the volcanic island of New Britain, only to show up again in Australia a changed man, going from town to town like an old-fashioned preacher and telling the big news and gathering disciples. He even made it into the news, without being named—leading a group of Seraphim on what would turn out to be a one-way hike to the uninhabited, scarce-visited wilderness of the Great Basalt Wall. (Lots of bodies found. Roy Powers not among them.)
The figure addressing the passengers aboard the Goddess said none of this, of course. By way of personal information, he allowed only that he and all the rest of the crew had been with the Architects, and had been “among those whose task is to return, and guide others to the stairway.”
Powers wasn’t good-looking, but in a rough-diamond sort of way he had something attractive about him. He projected clarity and authority the way Julius Quinn had once done. The voice too was a singer’s voice, rich and full of nuance, and the accent was soft, without any of the stereotypical Sarth Efrica harshness. “You can tell he grew up speaking English, not Afrikaans,” Morag said. “Cape Town, probably.”
With a controlled passion that also reminded her of Quinn, he exhorted the shoulder-to-shoulder crowds; though they had more or less robbed themselves of the capacity for speech, he could talk for hours at a time. He mentioned Quinn repeatedly, and the Seraphim’s origins, and the need for exactly the right preparation if the mind was to achieve release from the body and meet with the eternal at last. He spoke few actual sentences, though—his words were more like chanted slogans than normal speech. (“Absolute universality. The end of ambiguity. Freedom from the need to translate. And from language itself. And from the body itself. Freedom from diversity. Freedom from the tyranny of space and time.”) And these slogans led into a true chant, in the language of the Architects, as if English phrases could only be a clumsy prelude to the real thing. Long, extraordinarily complex patterns of sound came out of him, like music, filled with obscure patterns but never repeating, and the crowd lilted along like a choir in rehearsal, eagerly and dutifully learning:
Min-KEB-uq
Zal-UQ-bwe
Mun-VO-sef
Ur-DZE-chol
Min-VO-chol
Zal-UQ-mun
Bwe-KEB-sef
Ur-DZE-uq
“Is fascinate,” Kit said, her eyes glittering. “Makes not the much sense maybe, but you want to agree anyway.”
“Aye,” Lorna said. “So real. Sweatin’ an all. I can almost smell ’im. And such emotion. Ye wanna kiss the man.”
“Don’t listen to him,” Daniel said. “He’s dangerous. We need to stay away from him. There’s something—” He shook his head in frustration, unable to name or articulate what he was feeling. He had a feeling that Iona was trying to tell him something, but she was whispering across a crowded room and he couldn’t understand her. “Come on.”
“Fine,” Lorna said. “Satellites or no satellites, they gotta have some way o’ communicatin’ wi’ dry land. Let’s find out who’s really drivin’ this thing.”
But getting to the ship’s bridge, and communicating with dry land, and getting away from the sound of Powers’s voice, all proved impossible. They moved through the ship, sticking together and trying to cover its endless spaces systematically. After many hours of searching, when they’d begun to understand the layout of the many decks, they identified four different doors that appeared to lead to the bridge, but bizarrely, all of them were barred and welded shut. And their questions were ignored: the Seraphim either muttered to themselves, or stared into space, or stood slack-jawed in front of the several hundred wall monitors that were broadcasting the Roy Powers Show from the front of the ship.
The monitors aside, there seemed to be almost no working electronics. They found a locked radio room and broke into it, only to find all sorts of high-end shortwave gear smashed to pieces. Several rooms that were supposed to be crew offices had a conspicuous absence of computers—or evidence of computers hastily removed. In the back of a drawer, Morag found a tablet that had been missed. It was getting no signal, which was hardly surprising in the middle of the Pacific, but she kept it anyway and started furiously typing on it as they walked.
“Majka, come on,” Kit said. “What is you are doing? You forgetted the Number? Trying to write it out?”
She went on pecking at the screen for a while before looking up. “I’ve decided to write down everything that’s happened to us, and everything we’ve learned or think we’ve learned since before Iona died.”
“How would Bill have said—your mythos?”
Morag felt Kit had picked the word right out of her own mind. It felt intimate in a way that delighted her. “It’s a backup drive for my knowledge. Nobody else knows this story. Nobody else knows about Iona’s thesis. Or what Daniel experienced. Or what happened to the I’iwa. So I’m writing it down, in case I’m not around to tell it.”
Kit forced herself not to react to the implications of that. “Like Shul-hura did? Scribe guy in Babylon?”
“The Akkadian Version of the Babel story. Exactly. It was a warning, and without it we’d never have guessed. If things get really bad, and most of us don’t make it, we need to leave a warning. Something to dig up, three thousand years from now.”
“But dig up from where? You are going to bury it?”
“I don’t know what I’m going to do with it. Get it to Rosko, that would be good. He’d know what to do. Or your mother.”
“Yah. Just speak to my mother would be real nice also. Tell her I am not dead and such. Maybe get her to communicate with Japanese guy.”
So their hunt for a means of communication continued, and they ran right into Roy Powers.
It was a brief encounter. There were several odd things about it.
The first was that Roy Powers was so ordinary. Just a guy in jeans and a work shirt, with the white scarf of course; he had a heavy footfall, as if he was maybe a little clumsy, physically, but also a winning smile when he turned to them. Morag was merely curious, and she wanted to confront him, but both Lorna and Kit found themselves dumbstruck, longing to touch him. Daniel only felt an odd nagging inside, like an obscure itch, or like he was forgetting something.
“Captain,” Morag said. “When will we get to Fujisan?”
He paused as if assessing them all in some way, and smiled again. There was no telling whether he recognized them as the new arrivals, the survivors of the Esperanza. All he said, as if correcting a child, was:
“Tahoma. It is Tahoma you will see, Tahoma you will climb.” He reached out to Lorna, who was nearest. Like a priest giving a blessing, he held his hand over her forehead for a moment, and a shudder went through him as if he was struggling to resist some impulse.
“Tahoma? You mean Mount Rainier. You mean we’re going to—”
But with a polite dip of the head, he passed through a swing door and walked away. And that was the oddest thing of all, because they’d just come from that direction, and there was nothing at all in that direction except a white steel passageway leading to one of those mysteriously welded-shut doors.
They followed him. He wasn’t there.
“Vanished intae thin feck’n air,” Lorna said. She was as white as a sheet.
“You are OK?” Kit asked.
“I feel cold,” she said. “I felt like he wanted te kill me or somethin’, an’ changed his mind at the last minute.”
“Well at least I know my suspicion was right,” Daniel said, staring at the welded door. “Captain Ghostly is sailing east.”
“Tahoma is original name for Mount Rainier, yah?”
“Yeah.”
He’d been trying to navigate by knuckle again, but the sky had been hazy day and night; there was just enough sun during the day to suggest that their direction didn’t make sense. On the other hand, going to the States didn’t make much sense either. “They were going from Australia to one of the Epicenters,” he said. “It must have been Fuji, or they’d never have been in the area where they picked us up. I wonder why they changed their minds.”
“It’s a right bugger,” Lorna said, “seein’ as how we’re supposed te be goin’ in t’other direction. But we canna exactly poke Redbeard here in th’ shoulder an’ say, ‘Oi, would ye turn this tub around, please?’”
Clearer weather made their direction and position easier to estimate, and Daniel calculated that they were somewhere around 47 degrees north by 126 degrees west—approaching the Oregon or Washington coast. Then Kit saw something in the morning haze, a mere shadow.
“Is boat, I think. Look.”
Lorna still had the binoculars from the Esperanza. She watched the shadow for a long time as it darkened, disappeared, and reappeared several times. Then, as the sun rose farther, the haze thinned and the shadow became more distinct. “Fishin’ boat. It’s runnin’ near parallel to us, maybe two miles away. There’s a picture on the front.”
Daniel took the binoculars. “An eagle over a whale. It’s the Makah tribal logo.”
Kit disappeared through a door marked “Casino” and came out again clutching a pen and paper. “Keep eyeball at the boat,” she said, scribbling. Then she emptied out her Seraphim-branded water bottle and stuffed the note into it.
“What did ye write?” Lorna asked.
“Names of us. Contact informations of my mother, also Rosko too. It says, Please contact these people, super-life-and-death urgent, and super-urgent we contact Professor Murakami at Kyoto University. Says we arrive Seattle about one day, maybe two.”
Morag took the bottle and held it up. “They’ll never see it,” she said. “Too small.” She looked around, frantically searching for something to signal with, and saw that they were standing next to a locker filled with life jackets.
“Come on, help me. Every single one of these, then the bottle.” She opened the locker, and they started tossing the bright-yellow jackets into the sea, counting to ten between each one.
Kit clipped the bottle to the last jacket. Once it fell, even the jacket was lost to view in the white wake of the Goddess. But, just as the fishing boat was about to be enfolded into the surface haze once again, it changed direction.
“Well,” Lorna said. “Good idea. Chances are they’ll nae find the bottle, an’ if they do, they probably don’t have a workin’ phone or radio. But ye never know.”
The fishing boat was the only other vessel they’d seen, but that wasn’t surprising: the Pacific is a big place. On the other hand, as the sun came through and they caught sight of the coast—Vancouver Island off the port rail, Tatoosh Island and Cape Flattery dead ahead—it was impossible not to feel that the continuing emptiness was strange.
“This is a major sea lane,” Daniel said. “Usually choked with container ships, tugs, navy ships out of Bremerton. Mom and I nearly ran into a nuclear sub once—it surfaced right in front of us on its way to the base at Kitsap. Now look. Nothing.”
Kit put her arm around Morag and pointed to the Olympic Peninsula’s desolate north shore. “Somewhere around here is horrible cabin where we stayed, yah?”
“It’s somewhere about here,” Morag said. But they couldn’t pick it out—the endless vistas of grass and trees and beach all looked the same. Mount Baker, on the other hand, was impossible to miss, a sunlit beacon dead ahead. And at Admiralty Inlet, where they turned into Puget Sound, the even greater mass of Mount Rainier came into view, floating on the southern horizon. The sight of it was accompanied by a deafening chant from the ship’s seventeen decks. For once, the chant wasn’t in the language of the Architects, but it sounded like a riff on the same hypnotic rhythm:
Ta-HO-ma. Ta-HO-ma. Ta-HO-ma.
Ta-HO-ma. Ta-HO-ma. Ta-HO-ma.
Ta-HO-ma. Ta-HO-ma. Ta-HO-ma.
It went on and on for hours, like the beating of war drums, never letting up.
Goddess of the Oceans moved more slowly now, in the narrowing waters of Puget Sound. Gradually, to the sound of continued chanting, she made her way down past Whidbey Island and into Elliott Bay. For Daniel the scene was intimately familiar, yet alien. The Space Needle—eternal reminder of how the future once looked—was still there. The seals were still raising their wet-cat heads from the waters of the bay. The big orange shipping cranes still stood on the southern docks, silent and motionless with their hands on their hips, like combat droids on coffee break. He thought of Iona paddling her kayak here, back when she was still alive. And of his father, back when he was still alive, standing at the waterfront railing, eating fries from Ivar’s and demonstrating the original pronunciation of Seattle. (“It’s a Lushootseed word,” he said. “Tough phonemes to get your tongue around.” What came out of his mouth didn’t sound like a word at all—more like someone from South Carolina saying “See y’all” while choking on an oyster.)
But much more than the pronunciation of Daniel’s city had changed. Not a single tourist was being pestered for those fries by the gulls. No one was jogging or walking the dog at the sculpture park. No ferries were running, and there wasn’t a single plane climbing out of Sea-Tac. And Rainier’s outline was dulled by columns of smoke, some large and some small, from fires burning across the city. One of the columns staggered upward from the place where the downtown library had stood.
The Seraphim came off the ship in a manner more orderly than a well-drilled army, and Powers was there at the head of the gangway, with several other figures (the rest of the crew?), chanting. An echo of the chant came up from the passengers as they left the Goddess. With a military precision that seemed to contradict their mental blankness, they formed a neat column four abreast, and turned south along the waterfront.
“Ta-HO-ma, Ta-HO-ma, Ta-HO-ma.”
“Ye don’t think, do ye,” Lorna said, “that they’re jes’ plannin’ te walk—”
“It’s ninety miles, by road,” Daniel said. “Thirty hours, if they do it nonstop.”
“They canna do it,” Lorna said.
“Sure they can.” Daniel remembered Uyuni—the twenty-five Bolivian women,
at least one of them over seventy, who walked nearly as far across the famous salt flats, in freezing weather, carrying heavy tools, mainly at night. Amazing what was possible, when your mind was prepared. Amazing what was possible, when it was the last thing your body would ever need to do.
It took a long time to get everyone off the ship. While they were waiting at the rail, wondering how to get away discreetly, Kit noticed a solitary figure, a young woman half concealed by an iron pillar under a pedestrian bridge. She seemed furtive and out of place. It was hard to see her clearly, except for the long straight black hair. She was carrying a message board, but she held it up toward the people stepping down onto the dock and they couldn’t read it from where they stood.
Kit pointed her out to Morag. “You know her?”
“Don’t think so.”
“What she is doing?”
“I don’t know.”
“We should join the queue,” Lorna said, pointing toward a stairway. “Don’t want te stand out like a sore thumb an’ all. Have to work out how te get away once we’re on dry land.”
They were about to follow her when the figure on the dock let the board fall to her side. They could read it, from that angle: D M L K. There was something else there in the shadows too, something else that seemed unwilling to advertise itself. A squarish, rust-colored shape—Morag had to squint and think hard before she worked out why it was familiar.
“Kit, look. It’s Brunhilde!”
Lorna didn’t know that Morag was referring to Derek Partridge’s ageing VW camper van. She still had the binoculars, though, and they were better than nothing at short range. What she noticed, a bit smudged, was not the van but a second figure, who had climbed down from the van and was holding the young woman’s hand.
