1799 Planetfall

by Chogan Swan

  Tiana stepped close to him. “I recognize the involuntary muscle contractions as the body’s need for increased core temperature, but I’m not sure what the breathing irregularity means. What does it signify in humans?”

  Marcos chuckled. “A need for sleep.”

  “Then you should get in your hammock. If you like I will join you there under the blanket to provide you with extra heat.”

  “As attractive as that sounds,” Marcos said, “it would distract me from sleep.” He reached into his trunk to pull out a long, loose-fitting shirt and slipped it over his head before rolling himself into the lower berth. Tiana pulled the blankets from the top berth and covered him with those too.

  “Gracias,” Marcos said, falling asleep during the last syllable.

  Tiana went to the bookshelf and selected another book. She was not sleepy and viewing the rest of the little library would no doubt be the best use of her time.

  Hours later, she was on the floor of the cabin, exercising and stretching her muscles as she reviewed the contents of the library now captured in her memory. Light had been coming through the little portal since three bells and shortly after four bells she heard an outcry on deck.

  “Tierra a la vista!”

  Voices echoed the call up and down the weather deck, and feet thumped as sailors rushed to the port side. Marcos started up and threw off the blankets, rolling from the hammock. He tossed his nightshirt on the bed and struggled into his clothes. Tiana handed them to him in the order that seemed to make the most sense.

  “Gracias,” Marcos said as he finished buttoning his topcoat. “I will return shortly and we can discuss how to proceed.”

  “As you wish,” Tiana said. “Also, as much as I am enjoying your hospitality and the transport, I would like to discuss when it would be possible for me to come out on deck. I will need to see the world to learn about it. Now that I've finished reading your library. Do you think there are more books in Puerto Soledad?”

  “My mind has been running in the same paths, I assure you,” Marcos said. “I will be back as soon as I have seen exactly where we are. We should have a bit of time after that to discuss plans before I need to bring us in to port.” He paused. “I think with a headscarf and a veil, you could pass as Tiana from Morocco, a distant cousin of Sultan Sulieman and my ward and assistant in matters of science. I am certain that people will think it scandalous, but that will distract them from the truth. You saw my notes and drawings concerning the fashion and customs of Morocco?”

  “Yes, I agree. Your drawings of the people there are not that different from the way I look.”

  “Good, there is some material that went with your dress in my trunk, see if you can turn it into what we need to complete the costume. Until we get some gloves for you, we can wrap your palms in bandages and say that you are recovering from burns caused by an experiment that went wrong. With stockings and sandals we can work up from ship’s stores, you should be able to accompany me. You need to learn to pass as human and Puerto Soledad is the most remote place in the civilized world. Since it scarcely holds more than a hundred people, it is perfect for practicing, but the consequences of discovery could still be serious.”

  He paused. “Also, though I am not certain of it, there are probably rumors about your tail, so I am not going to give the crew shore leave.”

  He straightened his sleeves and unlocked the door. “I will be back soon.”

  Tiana nodded. “I will be ready.” She turned and opened the trunk as he went out the door.

  The wind fluttered the veil on her face as they plied their way into la Bahía de la Anunciación. Behind the shelter of the hill-dotted island, the wind became fitful and uncertain, slowing their progress. Marcos held off on the command to drop la Niña Bonita’s longer boat. Instead, he took the long tiller himself and rode the gusts, watching the ripples in the water for signs of wind.

  The crew cheered every time he found progress. Every yard he gained using the wind was a yard they wouldn't need to toil warping them in with the longboat.

  At last they turned north into the harbor which was wide enough to allow la Niña Bonita to work her way to an anchorage near a crude pier near the mouth.

  The wind ruffled the tall grass on the hills where a loose herd of uninterested bovines grazed. She could see twenty-six buildings on the shore.

  One had a tall triangular roof. “A church,” Marcos informed her.

  There were various other buildings, including a pentagonal fortification and a corral with domesticated quadrupeds that reminded her painfully of the dymba.

  The longboat settled into the water and the rowboat followed soon after. Marcos and Tiana clambered down the netting. Marcos tucked his satchel of correspondence next to the crate of the recent issues of La Gaceta de Madrid then unshipped the oars and pulled for the pier.

  Tiana sat in the bow. A crew of workers from dockside was readying a pair of dories to resupply the ship. Fresh water barrels already rolled down the dock.

  “That’s the governor waiting at the dock with his first officer,” Marcos said after glancing over his shoulder. “A curtsey and a polite greeting will satisfy him. I doubt he will look twice at you since your skin is dark and all he will see is your eyes. I will ask him to let you view his library while we conduct business and I fill him in on his dispatches. Also, I will get the clothing for you.”

  “Cervantes referred to a class system based on racial characteristics two hundred years ago. It still exists then?”

  “It does, though not everywhere.”

  “Marcos, you should know that Alférez Ruis is planning to report us to los inquisitors when we reach Buenos Aires. He plans to tell them I am a demoness and that I have seduced you for el diablo. Should I be concerned?”

  Marcos sighed. “It seems Alférez Ruis is determined to advance himself by stupidity. I had suspected he would try something of the sort. It should not be a problem. Given the current support of la illuminacion among the nobility and Manuel de Godoy’s deal with the French devil Napoleon, the inquisition is not the force it once was. My superiors in Buenos Aires will not want to give the inquisitors any purchase in the Navy. That much is certain.”

  When they reached the pier, Tiana tossed the line to a dockworker, and Marcos did the same with the stern line. The governor ignored her, and in a short time, she was alone in the library, with only occasional interruptions by a dark-skinned servant woman with wide, lustrous, brown eyes and full lashes.

  She resolved to change her own eyes to match them.

  Tiana distracted the woman and put her to sleep to conduct a quick examination. She discovered a venereal virus in the woman and eradicated it, inoculating her against future infection. She wished she could have gotten permission first, but it would have been too risky considering the circumstances.

  The greatest treasures in the governor’s library were a Spanish/English Dictionary and a book in French that Tiana had already read in Spanish. The last gave her the key to unlock the contents of a huge, thirty-five volume set of Le Encyclopédie. Though written over thirty years before, it gave her an idea of where humanity stood in Math and Science.

  The most important discovery was that humans had developed an understanding of what they called calcul intégral et différentiel. So they were poised to make rapid developments in the sciences. She turned pages as fast as she could register them, and the entire library was hers by the time Marcos came to collect her at dusk.

  “Did you enjoy yourself?” he asked, his dark eyes laughing.

  “I will tell you when my head clears,” she said. “You should tell the governor that his water supply is contaminated with fecal germs. I will have to treat all the water barrels we get here, and if you have a supply of silver, you should store an ounce or two in each barrel.”

  “¡Ay! That explains the illnesses they have been experiencing. I will do that tomorrow when we bring the captain to shore. I doubt his surgeon will agree the water is the source of
the illness, but until the captain's miraculous recovery tomorrow, the governor will take my word over his. The silver in the water barrel I do already.”

  He showed her the clothing and material he had bought then they hurried back to the dock.

  The dockworkers were finishing the last trip, and Marcos and Tiana pushed through the press, though Tiana had to slap aside an attempt by one of the men to touch her between the legs. The laughter from the other dockworkers confirmed that it was in character for a human woman.

  She went back to the cabin and spent the rest of the evening processing the new information from the library and exercising. When Marcos returned, she was nude, balancing on the fingertips of one hand and doing slow pushups while swinging her legs in various patterns. The slow rocking of the waves was providing a challenge and a welcome change to her workout.

  When he opened the door and held up the lantern, she turned her head to smile at him. He shut the door behind him and locked it.

  “How do you do that, and what happened to your skin and your eyes?” he whispered.

  “I do it like this…,” She switched to the other arm. “And I changed them. Do they not look more human now?”

  “Like the camaleón,” he said, reaching out to touch her skin.

  She wrapped her tail around his arm. “Yesterday you shared your life essence with me and all I did for you was remove a wart and get rid of the vermin from the cabin. I want to learn more about your physiology so I can do more.”

  “That would be fine with me, but I want to share the same with you again tonight.”

  “So soon! Marcos, you are a treasure. I will help you remove all those clothes. We will share your hammock so you can relax.”

  Later, she rested her head in the crook of his neck. As he slept, she dipped into his neck vein with her filaments, filtering out toxins. His penis was still inside her; she had left it there because he was reluctant to pull out afterwards. She squeezed to discover if there was more of the wonderful substance and extracted a trickle. His blood flow quickened as he swelled in response to the pressure. She resisted the urge to see if he could do it again.

  He needed to rest. She put her head on his chest, listening to his heart as his body told her its secrets.

  When the reddish light of dawn touched the portal, she rose, knowing the ship’s bell would ring the morning watch soon. Marcos murmured a protest as the chill touched his skin when hers departed so she drew the blanket over him.

  She dressed silently, slipping into one of the more practical gowns acquired yesterday and donned the turban and veil along with the stockings and sandals. An old leather belt—cut to fit—only needed an extra hole so the knife could fit snugly when tucked behind her back. Then she spent a few moments assembling the antidote to the sedative that kept the captain sleeping, adjusting it so he would wake in the late afternoon.

  At first bell, Marcos lurched out of his hammock. He was getting better at taking her help—and soon he was out the door with her trailing in his wake as he hurried to the captain’s cabin.

  When Ruis answered the knock, Marcos put his hand on his shoulder in a comradely fashion. “Good morning Alférez! I am putting you in charge of transporting the captain to shore for medical attention. Please ready a team and supervise his passage to the governor’s surgeon. I will pack his trunk so he has his belongings with him when he wakes. I will also have a letter for the governor’s attention. Please be so good as to bring me a receipt for it and any other last minute dispatches and letters bound for Buenos Aires.”

  The look of surprise on Ruis’s face told Tiana that Marcos had kept him in the dark about the arrangements, no doubt a wise precaution considering the tendency the man had to scheme at every turn.

  His mouth opened and closed a few times as though he was ready to protest.

  Marcos stared at him. “You are dismissed, Alférez,” he said, raising his eyebrows as though shocked that he still lingered.

  When the fuming Ruis closed the door behind him, Tiana trickled water down the captain’s throat and administered the antidote. He was dehydrated. Ruis had ignored orders about the water.

  Marcos soon had the captain’s sword, clothing and other belongings packed in the sea chest. Then he sat at the captain’s desk and took out a quill, ink and paper.

  “I am writing to the governor to tell him my recommendations on the captain’s treatment. Especially that he forego any bloodletting or treatments designed to shock him to wakefulness. Is there anything you want to add?”

  Tiana nodded. “Ruis has been negligent about giving him water, make sure they see he gets plenty of it, clean and boiled—a gallon by nightfall. He will be awake then.”

  “Yes, I will also mention the contamination problem and recommend moving the latrines and boiling the drinking water. Maybe the governor will give me Nuñez and keep Ruis… He huffed. ¡Maldita Sea! There is no time. I swear if the man is not back in an hour I will leave him with his trunk floating in the harbor.” He waved the letter to dry the ink, sealed it with candle wax, pressed his ring into the wax then addressed it.

  When the crew finished installing the captain in the longboat and Ruis had climbed down to join the two stretcher carriers, Marcos called to them. “The tide will turn soon, Señores. We sail in an hour. Please make every effort to be here when we leave. We should not want to do without your company, but will make do if need be.”

  “But Señor,” protested Ruis. “How shall we three get the captain and his luggage there by then?”

  “Alférez, there should be men waiting at the dock to assist you. If not you will conscript them to expedite my orders.”

  Marcos turned back to the deck and bawled out, “Guardiamarina Abarca, have the crew raise the bow anchor and prepare for departure.”

  Ruis shouted at the men to row for shore. Tiana grinned when he almost landed in the harbor as they pulled on the oars. The rowers kept their faces impassive and pulled with a will as the Alférez steered and snapped at them to ‘put their backs into it’.

  It seemed Puerto Soledad was not a popular port. All of them were eager to get back on time.

  She found an out of the way spot against the stern rail and studied the crew as they crawled over the rigging, unfurling sails and making ready to go. Well before the hour was up, the two men who had gone ashore with Ruis came pelting down the pier. Ruis followed; berating the men as he came. Tiana was certain they would have left him to fend for himself if the hour had been any older or he had been further behind them.

  Marcos gave the commands to haul in the stern anchor and the ship’s boat, and la Niña Bonita bucked as the anchor came free of the bottom.

  “Welcome back, Alférez,” Marcos said. “I am so glad you could join us. You may have your berth again. Guardiamarina Abarca will share the cabin with you. I hope for your sake he snores more quietly than I do. Sargento Nuñez and his men have moved your things, and you are at liberty until the fourth bell so you can get settled again. I apologize for all the moving about.”

  “Si, Teniente,” said Ruis.

  “Alférez, since I am in command of la Niña Bonita until the Vicealmirante says otherwise, let us avoid confusion.”

  “Si Capitán,”

  “Excellent, Alférez. You are dismissed.”

  Chapter 5 (Privateer)

  Tiana was in la cofa atop the rear mast. la Niña Bonita had been on course for Buenos Aires for ten days making good time with a fast northerly reach on the winds from the west. Tiana often took watches there, especially in freezing or wet weather when humans would be miserable. It helped everyone when she stood watch in the daytime since her superior eyesight and monocular made her an ideal lookout and freed an extra deckhand.

  It was almost impossible and considered shockingly immodest to climb the rigging in a dress. The drawings of Moorish women in long harem pants in the journals Marcos showed her had come to the rescue. She'd sewn up two from the Puerto Soledad cloth. The low-hanging space between the
legs was perfect for concealing her tail.

  She tied the long legs below her spring heels and now went barefoot with complete freedom on deck.

  Marcos had arranged the officer’s schedules so that Alférez de Navío Ruis usually had the nighttime first and middle watches, so she needn't tolerate his hostile stares. Now she usually shared watches with Marcos.

  Once she signaled that she needed someone to spell her then climbed down to ask the helmsman to cut further into the wind. An hour later, she pulled thirty pounds of ambergris from where it floated, half submerged below the waves. She had given Marcos a chunk as a prize for the crew—with an extra nugget for the helmsman—winning instant friends among the men.

  The math for using a sextant was an easy exercise that helped her develop the spatial sense she needed on this world for dead reckoning. It had given her instant credibility with the crew when her calculations proved more exact than anyone else’s.

  Now she knew the name of every sheet, line and peg on la Niña Bonita. She'd also studied drawings of many others Marcos kept in the officer's library.

  Marcos was a great teacher; his decades of experience with his world’s ships had made him a master in ways that her familiarity with small boats could not equal. But she had spent hours at the tiller on la Niña and picked the brains of everyone worth talking to onboard about the sailing ships of el Globo Terráqueo.

  Today the sky was blue, and it felt as though she was flying as la Niña Bonita cut through the waves at twelve knots. It was second nature to her now to watch the horizon with one eye and the men working the ship with the other.

  The sun had been above the horizon for three hours when she spotted the speck on the horizon. She pushed the monocular's magnification higher. There was a red and yellow flag and a topsail due west of them, appearing and disappearing behind the waves.

  “Capitán,” she called to where he stood by the tiller. “Spanish flag, due west.”