“Six at most,” Randall said.
“It's part of this beast and it's going to ram us.”
“Or we'll beach on it,” Randall said.
“It is not a solid mass, that I guarantee,” Salap said, shaking his head. “It must be divided into smaller structures.”
There was little wind to maneuver in. The captain ordered two boats put out with lines attached to the bow. This time I had to volunteer, if only to keep my sanity, and I clambered into the longboat. Neither Salap nor Randall objected. Shatro volunteered just after I did, loath to let me one-up him in any way.
Shirla climbed into the longboat and sat beside me, favoring me with a faint smile. Her skin was pale, however. She was terrified.
The mass was less than seven miles away by the time we had rowed the line taut and swung the Vigilant about. Twenty in the longboat, twelve in the captain's boat, we pulled with all we had.
Vigilant seemed mounted on the top of an underwater mountain, immobile. The sea barely stirred past the cutwater. The gloom all around had lightened to dismal light gray. Sweat stood out on my brow in the moisture and heat. My shirt clung to me. It seemed all wrong; I wanted to be anywhere but where I was. Shirla beside me, pulling with me on the oar, was small comfort. I knew, with an animal instinct I had not felt even during the storm, that something bad was coming.
Behind us, Shimchisko and Ibert shared an oar, swearing steadily and rhythmically under their breath, as if singing a sportster's chant. Across from us, on the same thwart, Shatro and Cham concentrated on their oar. Shatro glanced sideways at me, but our eyes did not meet for long. We worked too hard to care about anything but moving Vigilant.
It was useless. Half an hour and we reduced the ship's speed in the current by perhaps a knot. The captain ordered the boats back, but did not haul them aboard. Leaving crews of four in each boat, he ordered the rest of us to our stations. Soterio followed at the crew's heels, voice sharp.
Less than a mile away, the long dark mass whispered like children in a room, heard through a half-shut door. At its base, water foamed like breakers hitting a shore. The knobby surface now clearly resolved into vertical corrugations, not so much a range of hills as an irregular wall, cut like sliced cheese, bearing down on us. It extended to either side as far as the eye could see, no escape.
All around the ship, the water suddenly filled with scions. They rose and twisted and rolled like breaching whales, spraying thick dark plumes that floated off as brownish mist. Above, the cloudy ceiling showed patches of blue. Light shafted down through these patches across the awful fecund waters, and I thought of an ancient engraving, a phantasma of Earth's seas, filled with bat-finned, slack-jawed, many-eyed grotesques. These scions—what detail we could see in the masses—did not resemble any particular baroque creatures, sticking instead to the storm's steady run of designs: serpents of many colors; long black or purple piscids, featureless except for smoothly tapered fins; writhing hollow cylinders a meter wide, lined along their inner length with coarse bristles like hairy nostrils (and some of them turning inside out as I watched); three-cornered flat shapes reddish brown trimmed with blue that filled the interstices between all the others. I did not have the concentration to keep track of other designs; there were hundreds.
“They're spitting blood!” Shimchisko screamed. Before the advancing wall, the scions’ expelled vapors turned brilliant red. Less than half a mile away, we saw the wall push against the scions, bunching them at its base where they leaped and thrashed against the swell, then rushing over them it seemed, though they may have merely submerged and swum away. But before they vanished, they spewed plumes of brilliant red fluid that stained the wall. And when the wall whispered, the stain vanished, sucked within the sliced-cheese corrugations.
I last saw Captain Keyser-Bach on his knees, praying. We had abandoned our lines despite Soterio's yells, and finally even the first mate stopped his frantic shouting, for it no longer mattered. William French, Frey the cook, and Gusmao the carpenter—who had finally come up on deck—stood by the gunwale, transfixed. Shankara rushed past, heading forward.
Shirla and I met in the middle of the deck, as far from the bulwarks as possible, as if trying to stave off the rush of the sea. Salap I caught a glimpse of, heading to the bow with a bag in his hands. I suddenly realized the bag contained the remains of a humanoid skeleton; he was trying to save it.
Shirla clung to me. We knew we were dead. The wall's whisper, less than a dozen meters away, sounded like shrill fluting. The corrugations had become blades, the edges of knives pressed tight against each other and arrayed into an endless wall taller than the ship's highest mast by at least a hundred meters. The shadow of the wall fell over the ship and, almost gently, it bumped the stern. With a jolt, it pushed the ship, and for a few moments, we began to cheer, despite our terror. It had all been a false alarm: our fate was simply to be pushed along by the wall, perhaps forever. I imagined climbing the vertical face, seeing what was on the other side. I looked down at Shirla, folded in my arms, and she looked up, and we smiled.
Then the knives grabbed the stern and chewed it to splinters. The ship shuddered and lurched up and down, back and forth, caught in grabbing, grinding blades. Shirla and I fell down. Chips and splinters of xyla showered down on us. I heard the suck of a breached hull, water rushing in, and some of the hatches lifted or were blown aside as air pushed out. Cracks in the deck ran along board seams and puffs of caulk rose along their lengths.
Hauling Shirla up with all my strength, I held her hand and we both ran forward, to where we imagined the boats still were, somehow managing to stay on our feet as the deck tilted five, then ten degrees. Others had the same idea. Cham, Ibert, Kissbegh, Riddle, the sailmaker Meissner and cook Leo Frey and Passey and Thornwheel, Gusmao, Pyotr Khovansk the engineer, all ran with us. I saw Khovansk slip into a crack, which clamped down on his leg; he shrieked in agony. The ship rolled to port and Kissbegh fell and rolled with it, behind us.
The masts and rigging that had survived all of the storm-beast so far now gave way and yards fell, their parrels strained open, striking people to each side. Cassir was crushed. The forecourse yard writhed on the foretree, then broke loose and fell directly before us, pulling blocks and sheets and shrouds down about us. I lay stunned under a web of fallen ratlines and shrouds. Shirla cut me free with her knife.
“No boats,” she said, pulling me out. Ahead, we saw both boats loaded with five or six crew, pulling for all they were worth.
The ship had been half chewed to pieces. The deck canted back at twenty degrees, awash behind us, scions crawling and flopping across the wreckage before the grinding wall.
“We'll have to swim,” I said, and Shirla shook her head, lips tight. The deck rolled to starboard this time, and we came up hard against the splintered shaft of the foremast, then fell and rolled to the bulwarks. Shirla's face was bloody. Water sprayed over the gunwale and sluiced her clean. Immediately her nose and a cut on her cheek began to bleed again.
“Jump!” I shouted.
“We're dead!” she screamed. She did not want to join the thrashing scions. Neither did I, but Vigilant had no future. We could last a few seconds or minutes longer in the water. I grabbed her by the upper arms and jumped, carrying both of us over the bulwark.
We went in headfirst. Water filled my nose and I thrashed through rubbery, slippery masses, trying to fight my way to the surface. Shirla and I came up at the same time. She gasped and screamed as a large gray shape slithered through the water between us. Blood-red spray shot up a few meters away and drifted across us, a choking mist that smelled of sour breath and fresh bread.
Shirla could swim as well as I, but the scions blocked our efforts to move away from the Vigilant. I managed to push through the welter to her, and together, we fought to stay afloat and to get away from the hull, now more than halfway chewed. I had no time to think of anyone else; Shirla seemed an important obligation, but I was willing to give her up, give up anyth
ing to keep my head above water, to keep from being dragged under by the mash of frantic bobbing, slapping creatures around me.
We managed to stay afloat independently. Facing each other, separated by a couple of meters of hissing, blood-spraying, multicolored soup, she cried out, “Where?”
“I don't know,” I said. A massive eyeless snout poked up beside us, striped blue and gray lengthwise, its slashed skin flapping back in ribbons. It sank with a sucking wash that nearly pulled us under.
“The ship,” Shirla called after spitting out water. I turned my head around to see what was left of the Vigilant, still uncomfortably close—five or six meters away. The packed, oscillating knives that formed the wall had chewed it to within seven or eight meters of the bow, pushing ropes, yards, and chunks of cathedral xyla into a tangle that threatened to topple on us at any moment. I could see no one on deck. Everyone had leaped off, yet I saw no one around us. We seemed to be alone.
Bloody spray shot up on all sides. I reached for Shirla, one last touch before we died; and then the waters swirled violently and we were pulled apart. Unable to breathe in the thick red vapor, I spun in an eddy, choking and thrashing my arms and legs. My eyes filled with the yeasty mist, leaving me almost blind.
I gained a dark and blurred impression of walls rising, masses passing to each side. Shirla moaned and I heard other voices now, some praying, others simply screaming. My vision cleared to see the Vigilant's stempost looming over me, rising and falling with majestic slowness. Ridjel clung to the shattered bowsprit like a monkey, eyes tight shut.
The hull turned between two advancing walls, dragging me in its wash.
Everything whirled violently and I sank for a few seconds. Eyes open, I saw pale shapes around me, some sinking into darkness, others twisting and writhing in the water. I had no doubt at all that I was dead. All I had to do was open my mouth and I wouldn't prolong the agony.
My mouth stayed shut. I kicked and waved my arms. The water around me seemed clear; I could not feel the passing bodies of scions, or anything else. I rolled in a universe of bubbles and lancing beams of sun. Gradually, I oriented myself and floated toward the brightness, arms hanging limp, legs dangling, my body an enormous burning hunger for a single breath.
I lay my head back, and my face broke the surface. I exhaled, felt my lungs catch as if a tight band constricted them, and then my chest filled like a balloon. I became giddy with air.
I floated on my back, rising and falling in a gentle swell, the sky above cloudless and blue. When I rose to the crest of the swell, I saw a sloping shore, dark brown and corrugated, capped by a thick brownish mist. In the water around me, tiny brown disks floated like chips of xyla. At first, I thought they were remains of the Vigilant, but small piscids rose and plucked them from the surface, leaving spreading ripples across the smooth rolls of ocean.
Still alive. Still breathing, still floating. None of it seemed real. With a lazy nonchalance, I turned over in the water and tried to look around. I could not remember at first what had happened. I knew there had been a ship, and crewmates in the water, but nothing else seemed clear.
I found the ship—the bowsprit and prow rising and bobbing in the water a dozen meters away, ropes dangling. Ridjel had vanished from the bowsprit. Bits of wreckage slid down the gentle slopes of sea. I reached out for a long yard, perhaps from a lower top-gallant, but it passed by and I could not grab it. A flat piece of xyla, part of a hatch cover, caught my attention, and I swam toward it, grabbing the frame and crawling halfway out of the water. It made a fair raft, two meters on a side, two edges chewed, but floating even under my weight.
Memory came back as I realized I did not need to die soon. I thought of Shirla and clumsily pushed up onto my knees on the chewed hatch cover, shielding my eyes against the sun's glare. A body floated facedown about thirty meters away, on the other side of the ship's bow and the swaying bowsprit. I recognized the thick shoulders and short hair of Talya Ry Diem. I moaned and turned again, hoping to see someone alive.
I looked back at what Salap had called the caudal end of the storm. More wreckage drifted in that direction, a trail of broken planks, snakes-nest rigging, a few round objects that were either fiddleblocks or deadeyes ... or bobbing heads.
I tried to get to my feet, but the hatch cover tilted dangerously and I fell back on hands and knees. “Shirla!” I yelled. “Salap! Captain! Anybody!”
Two or three weak voices answered. Among them, a woman—too hoarse to identify immediately. I grabbed a splintered lizboo plank and began to paddle toward the bobbing heads. Awkwardly, I whirled this way and that until I found the best part of the hatch cover to assign as a bow.
The storm still filled the eastern horizon, columns of brown mist rising in air currents, parting in distinct streams, and being sucked back into gray masses of clouds on either side. It was about six miles away. I rowed and watched the remaining brown disks being plucked from the surface by stray scions, and tried to piece together what had happened, how we had survived, but my thinking was too ragged.
Three people hung along the length of a slender skysail yard. They could not all rest their weight on the yard or it would sink, so two were swimming and a third was resting. They called to me hoarsely, voices mere squeaks above the slosh and hiss of the wreckage in the gentle waves.
“Olmy,” said one, and left the yard to swim toward my hatch cover. I saw it was Shatro and was very disappointed. But then I saw Shirla clinging to the yard, her face smeared with brown, hair in sticky strands, but alive, and I welcomed Shatro aboard as if we were the best of friends. Together, we paddled with hands and the single plank toward the yard, and Salap, wearing only black pants, swam weakly toward one side of the hatch. Shirla held out one arm and I pulled her onto the other side. Four were too many, and the hatch began to founder, so I jumped into the water and let them settle themselves as best they could while I clung to one side.
We were all too exhausted and emotionally drained to say much. Shirla took hold of my hand and patted it, looking at me with wide, haunted eyes and a weak smile. “Where?” she said, and coughed. “Wherever,” I answered.
Shatro stared over our heads blankly.
“Have you seen Randall or the captain?” Salap managed to ask,
balancing himself half-on, half-off the unstable raft.
“No,” I said.
“The others,” Salap said. “They might have been swallowed...”
“We were spat out,” Shatro said. “I saw it. The wall broke in two and let us slip through.”
“Not before it ate our ship,” Shirla said.
“A tiny morsel it did not want,” Salap said. Resting on the hatch cover, breathing for once without swallowing water, they seemed to revive a little. The water was cooling rapidly in the wake of the storm. Soon it would be chilly. The sun, on the other hand, was brilliant and would soon toast us.
Salap studied the departing mass of clouds with half-closed eyes. “The whole expedition,” he said, and shook his head, his face hard and eyes narrowed.
For a long time nobody said anything. I tried to feel something, grief or elation at having survived, but my thoughts were jumbled and I felt nothing clearly.
“Where now?” Shirla asked again.
“Nowhere,” Shatro said.
From a few dozen meters away, another voice called. With a sudden burst of energy, we arranged ourselves to swim and push the hatch cover toward the new voice. Erwin Randall clung to a large piece of hull, five meters long and two meters across, still attached to several ribs. This floated planks-up and he lay flat on it. With a quick reconnoiter, we lashed the hatch cover to the larger piece of hull and all climbed from the water.
“The captain's dead,” Randall said. “I saw his body before the storm spat us out.”
Salap rubbed his cheeks wearily with his palms and nodded, down-turned lips and deep black eyes asking without words, What is there to be done?
We lay back to contemplate our last hours in
this, or any, world.
Night came as a great relief. We were very thirsty and the sun only made our condition worse. We bobbed gently under the pure welded-metal smear of sunset, in a cloudless twilight sky, the water splashing us, stinging cold at first, then numbing. Salap and Shirla slept for a while. A few small meteors lanced the starry night. I felt dead weary but not sleepy. I realized with a calming certainty that we were as isolated as could be, on a sparsely populated world, and that death was the only likely outcome.
Randall did not agree, however. He responded to my unspoken gloomy certainty with, “You know, there's still the steamships.”
Shatro grumbled. I did not want to argue the point. My mouth was dry and my tongue stuck to the roof so tightly that I thought I might choke. The ocean waters of Lamarckia were notoriously drying. Potassium salts and other minerals crusted on my legs and arms.
“We could catch a scion,” Randall continued, his words thick. “We really should paddle around and look for others.”
I made no response. We had no tools, no bait a scion would go for—all the brown disks left by the storm had been gobbled before nightfall. We could have eaten them ourselves, had we had the presence of mind to scoop a few out of the waves.
“Thirsty,” Shatro murmured. He curled up on the far end and slept, snoring loudly in bursts every few minutes.
I had heard that disaster bred a wonderful clarity of thought. All I felt was layers of thick tangled fuzz pulled through my brain. I would die comfortably enough: as I was too dumb to remember anything, death would merely snuff a dull instant of unconnected being. Olmy was already gone.
I gave little thought to my responsibilities back on Thistledown. Family, Nexus, the Hexamon itself—secret duties—seemed like half remembered dreams.
“The captain was a fine man,” Randall said.
Salap had awoken. “He was.”