“Karsavina,” I said.
“Aye, sir. Karsavina.”
The word had become a beacon for us. Thurlow understanding all, our two hearts sailed with the Russian submarine far away, headed north, as the James pointed her bow toward far different, and faraway, waters.
2
A Charred World
Proceeding at our creeping twelve knots, we had reached a point about forty miles off Bombay when the first intimation of the fate of the Indian subcontinent presented itself. We came on. Selmon standing at his repeater in the pilot house, giving frequent readings—eerily like a leadsman sounding out constant depth readings lest his boat hit shoals—I was still somewhat surprised when still fifteen miles away, he offered me a reading which left no alternative. Thurlow had the conn. I informed him.
“All engines stop.” I heard him give the order to the lee helm and presently the ship came dead in a placid sea.
We stood at the bulwark of the starboard bridge wing staring in wonder and incredulity across the waters of the Arabian Sea with that brilliant aniline blue that characterizes them; observing both the place where we knew by navigational fixes the city of Bombay to be and the littorals extending on a N.W. by S.E. bearing both ways from it. Below me along the lifelines I was aware of many sailors joining in these observations, gazing dumbstruck at it as at something transmundane. A great stillness lay over all. No winds stirred heavens or waters and from the men and women themselves I heard not a sound or a sigh. I was aware of a signalman standing nearby crossing himself. It stood there in a terrible brooding silence. I think it was the very size of it, its overpowering immensity, that more than anything brought our minds and our souls stilled, in a nameless fear—a quiet terror, I believe I could call it—and of a new kind. The immensity, I mean, of that black and monstrous mantle. Grotesque, hideous, it blanketed the entire eastern horizon, extending vertically from sea level to as high as the heavens went; horizontally from as far as the eye took you on the N.W. bearing to as far as it took you on the S.E. one. The mantle was at once brutal and eloquent, the first in the sense of the horror it emanated, the second in the sense of its true power made known. There was something absolutely anarchic about it, and utterly barbarous. Looking at it, one felt one had never known until now what fear was; one felt an invisible paroxysm pass through one, a motionless trembling of the body.
Sailors all, we were no strangers to nature’s great and humbling manifestations: the ferocious seas, the black howling nights of the Barents; dark massiveness of thunderclouds—we had seen these, many others. They seemed in memory casual things. This appeared in its hugeness, its dominion, an occupation force of the firmament itself. Something discarnate, otherworldly and mercilessly real, the very badge of the cataclysm. More black than gray, it gave the appearance of absolute opacity and seemed less gaseous than a solid and hard wall, impenetrable, permanent in character, as if it were here the earth came to an end. This part of the illusion at least was modified by looking through our Big Eyes which revealed the billowing, swirling nature of the mass, but further increased its emanation of ominous menace by a feature not seen by the naked eye: long lashings of lurid red flames licking now and then across its surface and through the pall, stabbing out from it like giant inflamed tongues. I raised up and looked again with the naked eye. Again that overpowering grossness of it, extending in a sinister shroud across half the visible sky, struck down upon us. Our silent and stopped ship seeming tiny, infinitesimal before it. The thing had an awful and tyrannical force to it. Even across this distance its smell carried, exhaling that absolute promise of infinite peril, virulent, harboring the new corruption, this no illusion, the knowledge of this weaponry it carried being the most frightening aspect of all to us—had it not spoken across fifteen miles of sea and, lest there be any misunderstanding, informed us of the very fact on Selmon’s instruments? A fair warning: Approach me not; not one inch farther. If it said anything it said that, and with all arrogance, confident of strict obedience, for it spoke the truth. We had learned: We stood in quite proper terror before it. I don’t know how long we just stood there watching it, appraising it. It was time for practical matters.
“Do you think they got a direct hit, Mr. Selmon?”
“God alone knows, Captain. No way to tell.”
Selmon had long since educated us: Even if the missiles and the bombs had been dropped elsewhere, sufficient dust and soot would have been injected into the atmosphere and massive quantities of pollutants released in the form of NOx, cyanides, vinyl chlorides, dioxins, furans, pyrotoxins—oh, yes, I had been a quick study as to the recondite terminology, it being absolutely urgent as to our own future—to inflict an equivalent punishment on lands and peoples quite far away and having nothing to do with the conflict, the winds transporting these toxins, shedding them, their radioactive fallout, and the attendant fires as they moved across land masses. We had once had a discussion, one I believe I could describe as philosophical in character, as to the two categories of victims: concluding that those killed immediately in target nations were more fortunate than those in countries which were in no way the object of direct attack by anyone, their inhabitants thereby enduring more lingering deaths from the process I have just described. We gazed at that thing across the blue waters.
“The winds have had more than enough time to bring it here,” Selmon said in that detached voice which I had come to consider as one of the more important ingredients of our salvation in circumstances where alarm of manner could have started its own fires and ones which would have consumed ourselves quickly enough. “Still, there’s no way to know to a certainty. Except ordinary reasoning telling you that no one had any reason to drop them on India.”
“Pakistan possibly.”
“That’s true. I’d forgotten about that fuss. And vice versa.”
First I, then Selmon, bent and looked again. Nothing but the tawdry sameness—the red flagellations across the solid black. We straightened up.
“I wonder if there’s anyone alive in back of all that.”
“Let’s hope not,” Selmon said. “But I’m afraid . . . there’s not been that much time. Quite a number still somewhere in there I’d judge. I’m glad we don’t have to see them, sir,” he said as if in thanks to that vast obscuring black purdah.
I asked for a reading. He stepped into the pilot house and brought it back. It had gone up slightly even without our moving, up from the reading which itself had prohibited any further advance. I looked north where the curtain extended, if anything more massively.
“Well, Mr. Selmon. Would you agree we’ve reached our northernmost point? No further in that direction?”
“Aye, sir. It could only be worse. We should get below the equator, sir. The north has nothing for us.” His tone had a rare urgency to it. “Except to harm us.”
Knowing that when I gave the order the ship would have reached as far north as she would ever in all her life go, I waited a moment.
“Mr. Thurlow,” I said then.
“Aye, sir.”
“Bring her about. One hundred and fifty degrees. Down the coastline. Fifteen miles off at all times. Unless Mr. Selmon allows us closer.”
“One hundred and fifty degrees, aye, sir.” And in a moment to the helmsman, Porterfield. “Right full rudder.”
“Right full rudder, aye, sir.”
“Steady on course one five zero.”
“Steady on course one five zero, sir. Checking one five five magnetic . . .”
I could feel the ship make her wide half circle and come about, something both real and forever symbolic, forever poignant, about it. We who had come from, lived there, would never again venture into northern latitudes. All the way down we could come no closer than the designated fifteen miles. All the way down the coastline unrevealed, clothed in the same towering dark cerements, rising thousands of feet into the atmosphere and now and then through it the same gleamings of red flames. Passing through the Gulf of Mannar and approachi
ng Colombo we could see across the waters the identical phenomena, the city invisible, the entire land embraced in the thick billowing smoke, and the whole of the nation of Sri Lanka seeming on fire. Bending on our course around it, we proceeded in the coming days across the lower reach of the Bay of Bengal, across Ten Degree Channel, and entering the Strait of Malacca, Sumatra to our starboard, Malaysia to our port, we passed where our readings told us Singapore to be, also enshrouded in the great black pillars. A hush had fallen over the earth; the only sounds the occasionally heard crackling of fires in the distance, like dark death rattles. Moving ever southerly, we coursed the eastern littorals of Sumatra, finding something fractionally different. Slight liftings of the pall to give brief glimpses of empty beaches, the forests behind them engulfed in smoke and flames as of long duration.
It was as if we had passed through the gates of Acheron to bear witness to the immolation of the planet, a whole world on fire, smoldering, a charred earth. We did not linger. I chafed at the necessity of keeping our running speed at twelve knots, would have preferred to open her up and flee past these places. It was not that we did not feel compassion, not that we had become hardened. No, it lay more within the mind’s apparent ability, if sufficiently conditioned over a period of time, to accept almost anything as normal when verified by observation. At least it was at this state that we had now arrived. I was not surprised. Observing these cities, places, nations, consumed already or in the process of being consumed, become charnel houses, the very fact of there being nothing to be done about it, by us or anyone else, kept the emotions on a kind of hold, a certain sadness but no more. What else was there? One learned to ration compassion; to draw miserly on one’s not-unlimited bank account of feelings. Rather, and this was not a brutal thing, there was a desire to put them behind us, to see what better lay ahead: What lay ahead could not—so we felt then—be worse. A man who learns when not to weep is a stronger man, and certainly a more effective one, for that knowledge. Indeed, under conditions so final, weeping itself would have seemed to constitute a kind of sin, a sacrilege; most of all for the reason of being so inadequate. Passing by, we looked, then looked away. Passing by, we did not weep.
And so we moved, a solitary ship coursing through the waters which have always been kind to ships, letting them pass; moved past these funeral pyres, the men seeming after a while scarcely to notice them; our ship, our minds, our beings pointed only ahead; after a while glad of every single mile which placed them in our wake. We did what we could. Everywhere we went we bombarded the nearby country with communications in its own language, on every available frequency. Our nautical library afforded a considerable amount of translation of essential navigational material and calls of all kinds—identification calls, distress calls, “I require assistance” calls, “Do you require assistance?” calls, every call possibly needed by men to send or receive—into every language used where ships went, which meant the entire globe. Nothing came back to us.
One of these was China. Reaching our nearest point to it, in the South China Sea, we had turned all our frequencies loose on her. Nothing. We had wondered what had happened to China. It was too far out of the way to go have a look, we had not the fuel to spare; not a drop for sightseeing. Nothing suggested it would be any different. Worse, Selmon felt.
“All that land mass,” the radiation officer said, “the fallout coming directly at it, from right next door. Massive, unbelievably massive amounts of it—probably making what we’ve seen look like cloud puffs. They must have been among the first to go. By the same token, I suppose, a blessing of going quickly, very quickly—something rather comforting in that, isn’t there, Captain? It wouldn’t be too surprising if there wasn’t a single Chinese left by now. Not in China anyhow.”
“Yes. Well, I suppose we must take our comforts where we can find them.”
“My thoughts exactly, sir.”
Selmon had moved into a sphere of thinking which I sometimes envied, sometimes abhorred; knowing I was helplessly approaching the same sphere myself.
Sometimes we got glimpses through the pall, and in the case of one town, Maura in the Bangha Islands, a good deal more. It was a singular experience. Almost no smoke at all lay over it and Selmon’s readings enabled us astonishingly to keep approaching until we had reached a point no more than five miles off, where they attained a level that made us stop the ship. The word had passed quickly throughout the ship and all hands came topside to stare at this wonder, the sailors lining the lifelines. It was a fishing port I knew from an earlier Navy cruise, myself an executive officer on another destroyer; the town well-known throughout the world of sailors, ships putting in there because of its exceptional natural harbor, deep and embraced in long and protective encircling promontories; become in consequence a refuge from storms, a place of replenishment, a liberty port familiar to all Asiatic hands. The town had a certain charming aspect I had observed in only a few other ports on earth: The sea opened directly into the town. Curaçao in the Caribbean was like that, where you stepped off the ship almost straight into the main-street shops with their Dutch aura. By a coincidence this island was also originally colonized by the Dutch and seemed noticeably like its Caribbean sister, in neatness, in charm. From the stopped ship, now well within the harbor, we could see with absolute clarity straight down the principal street, see the buildings and the shops, none over two stories, each well cared for, see where the street went up a hill, see the houses on both sides, see at the very top of the hill the Catholic church. Everything well kept, shipshape—and undisturbed. The town appeared utterly intact, ready for business, even a couple of bars I remembered. We could see the merchandise in the unshuttered windows of the shops. One expected people momentarily to emerge from the shops, others to enter the bars. Everything ready, waiting; waiting in fact to receive the sailors of the Nathan James. For one blind second, a fleeting forgetfulness as to the new nature of things, it occurred to me I should turn my attention to liberty parties for my ship’s company, in extreme need of it, so long without it—in a breath of shock brought myself back to reality. Everything ready for such parties with only one difference from the time I had been here before: There were no people. That there were no live ones did not seem so strange as the fact that there were none of any kind. Not a body, a corpse, revealed anywhere under the sweepings of binoculars, of Big Eyes.
“How do you explain it, Mr. Selmon?” I said where we stood on the bridge wing, looking down and point-blank into the town.
“A fluke of the winds, I’d say, sir. They brought it. Then they moved on.”
“But the people?”
He shrugged. “They managed to do something with themselves. When they found out what was happening to them I’d say. Just left, maybe. In their boats . . . I don’t see any boats . . .”
His voice trailed away. He stepped inside, looked at his repeater, stepped back.
“Sir, I’d say just about five minutes more here.”
I looked up the street; down on the hands lining the lifelines. They simply stood gazing at the town as at a curiosity. From high on the hill a shaft of sunlight flashed from the cross atop the church. I had once been to Mass there. I remembered that for the fact that they still did it in Latin, the priest either not having heard of Vatican II or ignoring it. It had been a kind of reassurance. I turned away.
“Take us out, Mr. Bartlett,” I said smartly to the OOD.
We proceeded through the South China Sea, the black monsters in the heavens still visible far off, hanging on, as though tracking us. We knew, of course, that they would move on us when the waters got narrower within the ganglion of lands in which we would soon be trapped. We braced ourselves for them.
3
The Dark And the Cold
We first began to notice their approach one morning passing through the waters of the Sunda Islands in the Malay Archipelago, at approximately 01°10' S. and 105°20' E., our position having just been checked by myself with Thurlow in the chartroom. I
had stepped out onto the bridge wing and looked up into a sky free of clouds in our immediate vicinity, the same black masses standing far off as they had been for days; had looked routinely at the bridge thermometer which recorded a temperature of 74° F. Presently, high in the sky, bearing N. by N.W. from the ship, I noticed casually a few clouds make their entrance into the virgin blue. They were altocumulus but instead of being their characteristic flocculent white bore long brown and even black stripings. I proceeded about the ship’s business.
No day passes but that a mariner looks up at the sky fifty times, on one of possibly changing weather, many times that; that sky which tells so much to him who has eyes to see. Throughout the day the clouding increased, especially that altocumulus with its curious darkened aspect; more so now, full overcast never coming, the sun always shining down. So long accustomed to observing cloud formations, I had the peculiar sensation, making no sense as related to anything I had ever seen in the behavior of clouds, that the altocumulus had somehow been penetrated by some of that higher and distant black mass we had observed for such a considerable period now. It was as if strange combinations, mutations involving the very clouds, violating traditional performance, were underway in the heavens themselves. We had become accustomed to seeing new manifestations aplenty. Looking back, one was aware almost daily that the numerous prophets of events had missed entirely many of these; they had been as babes in forecasting what it would be like in actuality. (In fairness, one should add that the failure of their predictions fell principally on the underside; and that a number of them had spoken, using one of their favorite words to cover any possible oversights or failures to foresee, of unpredictable “synergisms.”) This one I felt was improbable. Nevertheless worry, in a certain discernment as to what was happening, with it a foreboding that seemed rooted in reality, a curious expectation that had been in me all along, had begun to penetrate my consciousness. The following morning saw simply more of the same. Around midday rains fell on the ship, not particularly heavy, but steady for an hour or so. Then stopped. Clouds remaining over us. I was standing on the port bridge wing around 1430 studying these when Selmon stepped through the pilot house door and approached me.
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