12

 

For two days after we left Martha's Island, the ocean overside and to the horizon lay glass-smooth and the still air hung hot and wet and smelled stale. Thunderheads towered in the west. Each evening, chores done—choke-oiling the decks, tightening the standing rigging yet again to take in a few centimeters slack (mostly, I think, a figment of Soterio's imagination), and spreading dragnets to catch samples (the ocean here was barren and the nets came up empty)—the crew not on night watch ate cold freechunk and dried fruit and drank mat fiber beer in the mess, then lay out on the deck as they had the day before, as they might the next day and for a thousand years after. Each took a piece of the deck for his or her territory. As they lay, flat and still, they watched the few unfortunates still in the rigging or hauling on sheets and braces and halyards, and spoke softly among themselves. 

I stood on the puppis, waiting for the stifling laboratory below to cool. The researchers met in the laboratory next to the captain's cabin each day several hours after sunset, working in the coolest portion of the night, sometimes into the next morning, dissecting and measuring the components of a humanoid skeleton. This night, however, the air on deck was not much better than the air below. We all hoped for a cooling breeze, but no relief came. 

Randall did not expect the discovery to stay secret for long, and it did not. The ship was dispirited. Randall sensed it; the captain was too preoccupied to care. Shimchisko carried the burden of his knowledge badly. While not telling the truth of the matter even to Ibert, his best friend, he had let on that something very bad had been found on Martha's Island, something important to all of them. The crew picked Ry Diem and the sailmaker Meissner—surrogate mother and father as they had become—to extract more from the captain and the researchers. 

I felt guilty at not volunteering the information, but my allegiances had shifted, taking me away from the crew. Ry Diem and Meissner petitioned Randall, and Randall spoke to the captain in private. Finally he gathered a meeting of the entire crew and provided full details of what had been found on Martha's Island, in the palaces of the still-theoretical queens. 

They were still digesting this news. It changed the way they thought about Lamarckia. 

For Keyser-Bach, I thought, this voyage was at an end. He would sacrifice it for the chance at a larger, grander expedition. The captain was seldom seen without an expression of shrewd calculation, already adding up the pieces of equipment he might order made by Lenk's craftsman, or commandeer from around Elizabeth and Tasman. We had only to proceed to Jakarta and report our findings to Lenk's officers. The captain's cause—the cause of science and exploration on Lamarckia—would be elevated beyond all expectations. 

At midnight, Salap climbed up onto the puppis, weary and oppressed by the heat, bare to the waist, brown skin shining in the lamplight. “We might as well get started. It isn't going to get any cooler.” Shatro, Cassir, Thornwheel, and I followed him below, to resume our studies of the homunculi. 

Cutting cross-sections through the limbs, we found fibrous polysaccharides, not true calcium-rich bone. The “head” was made of three sections, and where the brain would have rested in a human, there lay a soggy lump of oily tissue supported by a mat of thin, translucent fibers. Cassir, who had had extensive medical training in Jakarta, commented: “Whatever Martha learned from sampling humans, she didn't learn how to make a brain.” 

The captain performed this work with grim resolve. He did not like these poor imitations. They were his ticket, his shining hope, but it was obvious he regarded them less with scientific dispassion than revulsion. 

Shatro, Thornwheel, and Cassir arranged these dissections so that I performed the simplest and least elevated tasks. I made sketches of the separated pieces of the pseudo-skeleton, laid thin sheets of gridded paper over them, and compared the dimensions with those for human bones. I fetched water for all, and mixed solutions for preserving the specimens. 

After another few hours of work, Salap dismissed the researchers. I came up on deck and found the crew as I had left them, sprawled under the bright early-morning stars, the double oxbow rising, one lone moon casting a wan light in the west, sinking fast. They were restless, and most were awake and still talking. 

I heard Kissbegh's scratchy tones and walked forward to listen. “If we're all going to be replaced by scions,” he said, “then why did Lenk bring us here?” 

“He didn't know,” Ry Diem said with weary disdain. 

“No, I mean, we've all been taught we owe so much to Able Lenk, for taking us away from the ‘distortions and presumptions of Thistledown.’ That's what my teachers called it.” 

“They were right,” Shimchisko said. “Thistledown would have been worse.” 

“But we're all going to die here,” Kissbegh said. “How could that be better, and why didn't Lenk at least sense what he was getting his people into? Aren't great people supposed to be lucky?” 

“We don't know we're going to die,” I heard Shirla say. She sounded sleepy. 

“If the zones rise up against us...” Kissbegh persisted. 

“We don't know that, either. We don't know what Martha's queens wanted to do,” Shirla said. Her voice carried through the night, clear and sensible. I wanted to go down among them and sit next to her. We had not spoken for some days. 

I felt more at home with the sailors than I had with any other people in my adult life—but I was no longer one of them. Their talk seemed at once naive and perfect—the talk of humans who lived their lives in a direct and simple fashion, without the kinks and knots I had twisted into mine. 

“I wish I had a woman who loved me back home,” Kissbegh said. “I've always been too much the clown to make friends or attract serious women.” 

“I'm your friend,” Ridjel said. 

“You're no woman,” Shankara observed placidly. 

“Thank our fate,” Ry Diem murmured. 

“Yes, you're my friend,” Kissbegh said, “but you're here, and if I die, you'll probably die, too. I want someone alive to remember me.” 

“My wife's a good woman,” Shankara said. “But she's a perfect sailor's wife. Right now that makes me sad.” 

“Why?” Shirla asked. 

“If I don't come back, she'll miss me for a while, but she'll get along. My being gone won't tear her heart out.” 

“It's the way,” Ry Diem said, in a voice intended to soothe. 

“I'd like someone to always miss me, always think of me,” Shankara continued. “My wife will find another husband and he'll fill her heart as much as I've ever filled it. Not that she's uncaring...” 

“If I had a good woman on shore,” Ridjel said, “I'd love her so hard and so long she'd never forget me. Her heart would break if I didn't come home.” 

“All memory's like this ocean,” Ry Diem said. A short silence followed as everyone thought this over, and then decided to ignore it—it could not be riddled quickly enough. 

“Will Lamarckia remember us?” Shimchisko asked. 

The talk turned to how much Lamarckia knew about each of us, and how much the queen (or now, the queens) of Elizabeth's Land or Petain would keep us in some sort of biological memory if we did not return to Calcutta or Jakarta ... or, by implication, if they actually did get around to replacing us. Shimchisko began to speculate wildly. He wondered whether they would duplicate us so completely we might live again, even if we died. 

Randall stepped up behind me. “They're getting far too metaphysical,” he complained in a low voice. “Shimchisko's become a very religious fellow. But it's infecting us all.” 

I nodded, but asked myself who, back on Thistledown, would ever remember me... 

On Lamarckia, I would leave no impression at all. 

My homesickness for Thistledown had become a dark shadow, mingling doubt and dream, wish and self-disgust. The flaws in my armor multiplied and were glaringly apparent: I did not know who or what I was, my past seemed a confused jumble, my present a mess I would never successfully resolve. 

If I was any example, I doubted Lamarckia's ecoi could learn anything useful from humans, yet Nimzhian's last words before we left the island haunted me. 

Lamarckia's marvels were truly simple and delicate, as if she had suffered some natural handicap at the beginning of her time. She had flowered in a wonderful but hesitant way. 

Our natural passengers—the selected bacteria and viruses humans found valuable—had left no mark on Lamarckia's ecoi. But we ourselves were a kind of infection, injected into the planet's tissues by the most sophisticated of delivery systems—the Way itself, an infinitely long syringe with infinitely many openings. What would I report to my superiors in the Axis City and on Thistledown, if I could make a report now? 

Lamarckia is still healthy. But humans and the ecoi will change each other immeasurably, and very soon. 

Lamarckia is not for us. 

We are far too robust. 

We come from a green planet. 

I did not have the luxury of time. To preserve Lamarckia, I had to act quickly. I had to locate Lenk's clavicle and report my findings to the Hexamon soon. 

 

Fifteen days out from Martha's Island, our batteries drained, our windscrews idle, sharp-eyed Ibert stood his watch on the maintree top. Late in the morning, he spotted something on the horizon, and called down to the master. I sat repairing a dragnet on the forecastle deck near the bowsprit. 

Soterio pulled himself out of his hammock belowdecks and groggily followed Randall forward. The captain stayed below. Randall surveyed the horizon following Ibert's directions—fine on the starboard quarter. I stood and shaded my eyes against the steady beat of the sun. At first, I could not see anything, but soon I resolved a thin line of smoke, and then another. 

“No land here,” Ry Diem said, coming forward. “Couldn't be fires.” Shirla and Shankara followed, then Cham and Shimchisko. Soterio trailed Randall like a faithful dog, a worried expression on his dark-bearded features. 

Salap emerged on deck, as elegant and seemingly unconcerned as ever. He glanced at the group of us near the bow, then sauntered around the skylight to join Randall. 

“Is it a racer?” Soterio asked. 

“Racers don't smoke,” Randall said. “Two ships. They're burning something.” 

“Steamships, then,” Salap said. 

“Likely.” 

“Brionist,” Soterio said, hoping he would be contradicted. 

“Sure as hell not out of Calcutta or Jakarta or Athenai,” Randall said. “Get the captain up here.” 

Keyser-Bach came on deck in an apron, hands still gloved. He shed the apron and gloves and handed them to Thornwheel, then took the binoculars from Randall. After a few minutes’ scrutiny, he said, “No flags. Of course, that may not mean anything.” He looked up and shook his head. “We didn't set our flag after leaving Martha's Island. They're ten miles away. They've seen us.” He lowered the binoculars. “They're turning to cross our course.” 

Shatro took the apron and gloves from Thornwheel and handed them to Cassir. They all needed something to do. Nobody spoke for a few minutes. Keyser-Bach watched the lines of smoke with a face as blank as a child's. Then he pulled his chin with three fingers and said, “Ser Soterio, bring her about and we'll hope for some wind.” 

I looked up at the sails. A puff of wind had struck my back, and I saw the limp, sad cloths bat and slap. Every morning at this hour, winds of varying speed and direction would slip up on us, forming fine small chop on the water but neither refreshing the air nor offering much speed to the Vigilant. The wind did not mean much. There had been no good wind for four days. 

The captain, however, started to whistle through his teeth. He strode to the bowsprit and watched the four of us gathered there. Soterio followed him and said, “There isn't enough wind to bring her about.” 

“There will be,” the captain said, pulling the whistle back through his teeth, then sucking on the teeth speculatively, making a small, sharp hiss-squeak. 

“He can feel it,” Randall said. They both looked up at the sails, and for a moment, I felt as if I were in a dream, an entertaining muse about being lost among superstitious savages somehow more deeply connected to nature, able to feel the presence of gods and spirits ... and wind. 

“Can't you catch it?” the captain asked, as casually as if we were discussing tonight's dinner in the mess. 

“The sea has the color,” Randall said. 

Soterio peered over the gunwale, then straightened. He looked lost. 

“If those are Brionists, and they're riding steam, they don't need any wind,” Shatro said, just to be part of the conversation. 

The captain raised his binoculars and peered southwest, four points abaft the port beam. “There it is,” he said. 

We all turned. A bank of thick cloud had risen beneath the southernmost thunderheads, like a predator stalking immense gray giraffes. 

“We've been carried into its circle,” Salap said. “It's far north on its accustomed track.” 

The captain raised his hands to his chest and gripped them there, supplicating. 

Salap sat on the butt of the bowsprit. “It's been stroking us with its feelers for three days,” he said. “The little puffs of wind each morning.” 

“What are you going to do?” Soterio asked, licking his lips and glancing around the small circle. 

“Nothing right now,” the captain answered. “We'll wait until we see who's going to catch us first.” 

“There'll be more wind,” Salap said. “Enough to maneuver. If we wait here, the storm will suck us toward it.” 

The captain handed the binoculars around for us to see. Shatro took them from Thornwheel; I was still ranked last. He handed them to me after a few seconds, face pale. I looked. 

“What do you see?” Salap asked. 

“Sparkles,” I said. “Like mica flecks in water.” I swung the glasses around. Beneath the lines of smoke I could make out two funnels, one each surmounting long white hulls. The steamships were sailing at about ten knots. They'd be upon us within an hour and a half. 

The storm's cloudy mass was perhaps forty miles away. The feelers, as Salap called them, had already gained strength. 

“Should we hail them on the radio?” Randall asked. 

“No,” the captain said. “I do not doubt where they're from, or why they're here. We're a prize if they can catch us.” He jerked abruptly, muscles taut in his jaw and neck, and gave his orders. The sails bellied and Soterio immediately pulled the starboard watch together to bring the ship about. We would face into the wind and tack across a course headed due south. The steamships would see the storm and perhaps decide they did not want us so much. 

Soterio called out the port watch. Salap crossed the deck and put one hand on my shoulder, the other on Thornwheel's. “This is truly going to be what the captain calls primary science,” he said. The wind pulled his black beard and hair. “I will station all my researchers around the ship, and one in the tops ... Ser Shatro, please join Ibert on the maintree.” 

Shatro put on a face of unexpected hurt, but went to the shrouds. He had climbed shrouds before, but not for some time. “Ser Olmy, you will stay at the bow with Ser Thornwheel. Ser Cassir, you and I will stand by the bulwarks port and starboard amidships. We will record wind speed and direction, and anything else that happens to be interesting.” He pulled slim paper notebooks from his pocket, and small carbon pencils. 

The captain kept turning the glasses from the steamships to the storm. 

“It is going to be very complex,” Salap said. “The sparkles in the clouds must be how it regulates its temperature and pressure. I suggest they are very light tissues of different reflectivity born by winds controlled and directed by formations in the ocean.” 

A sharp gust hit us and the ship shuddered, swung around by the fore course and jibs like a horse on a rope. When the wind was on our port beam, Soterio ordered the jibs furled, the fore course reefed and the spanker raised. We practically spun about in the water. 

“If we end up in the thick of it,” Salap said, “we can learn how it keeps itself going.” He clapped the captain on the shoulder and walked aft with Cassir. The captain did not seem to notice. The ship heeled over ten degrees. Salap lurched on the tilted deck, yet still kept some dignity, his long coat flapping out like a tail. Cassir grabbed a brace for support and Soterio snatched it from him. “Not that one, sir,” he said, chin jutting. 

“Sorry,” Cassir murmured, and took his position. 

Sails set, Soterio put Shirla at the wheel, replacing an exhausted Kissbegh, and stood behind her. Now came the waiting. The distance between the steamships and Vigilant briefly increased. Then they turned as one and followed, applying more steam. The smoke from their stacks billowed thick and gray like the breaths of two tiny volcanoes on the head of the sea. 

“It's a chase, all right,” Soterio called from behind the wheel. Thornwheel, standing beside me, braced himself as the wind kicked at the ship from ahead with increased force. The deck lurched. Soterio ordered both watches to unfurl all courses and the lower topgallants and swing the yards about to take full advantage of running close-hauled. The captain was intent on narrowing the angle of each tack, to give us maximum speed away from the steamships. 

But it was clear from the beginning that we were not going to win this particular race. The storm grew tall and showed long, thick black skirts; the sea became a lively green all around the ship, flecked by vigorous tall whitecaps. We veered onto the next tack and the ship heeled to starboard. After half an hour, with the storm barely thirty miles away and the wind increasing to twenty knots, the captain kept the ship on a steady course, running on a beam reach at ten knots, clearly hoping to round the northern extent of the storm and slip away from both storm and pursuing ships. But the ships were not dissuaded by the advance of the storm. 

“They're fools,” Thornwheel muttered. “They don't know this monster.” 

“Will the captain take us into the storm?” Thornwheel asked. “You've sailed with him longer than I have.” 

“He might,” I said. 

“But it terrifies him,” Thornwheel said, raising his voice over the hum and whistle of the wind in the rigging. 

I shook my head and smiled. “Better that than Brionists. He's no coward. But he wants to get this ship to Jakarta.” 

On the main deck, Cassir and Salap stood by the rails port and starboard. Aloft, Shatro clung miserably to the shrouds, and Ibert stared ahead and to the west intently, shouting observations to the captain and Soterio that we could not hear. Randall came forward, grinning like a happy dog. “Breath and fates,” he shouted at us, “we're in the claws now, if not the teeth. Time to show more courage, eh, Olmy?” I had never seen him in such a mood. 

We tacked back and forth for another hour. The storm towered above us, having swallowed and decapitated the thunderheads, which spread out above the dark gray and brilliant white mass in long separate streamers of cloud. These were quickly dissipated. 

I wondered if the captain had miscalculated. We might soon be faced with winds sweeping around from behind, hitting us from the starboard quarter, and we'd have to fight to keep from bring drawn into the body of the storm. 

Somehow, it did not seem to matter. I had always known the triviality of my life, something not common among my peers, surrounded by the thick armor of Thistledown's immensity. I had always calculated the risks taken against my basically ephemeral nature, gambling the benefit of sensation and knowledge against the danger. To fall into this storm would be an experience to remember, and if that memory lasted only a short time, fell quickly into oblivion, at least there was the real moment of experience ... Like nothing I would ever have seen on Thistledown. 

I held this brave attitude, stalwart and admirable, for only a few minutes before my unfettered body told me, without allowing for debate, that it was terrified. I sweated despite the chill of the winds, and my hands trembled. Thornwheel squinted west and then north, and tied a short coiled rope around the butt of the bowsprit. For a minute, I ran around the deck looking for another coil, cursing my luck, and finally found one hanging from a belaying pin. I wrapped it around the bowsprit and squatted on the deck. Along the length of the ship, sailors stationed on deck were tying similar lines from bulwark to bulwark, or to the hatch tie downs and the trees. Looking aft, as the fore and main courses were reefed to give the helm more control, I saw Shirla at the wheel, and Soterio behind her, and felt a stab of regret. 

Then my calm returned. There was nothing more I could do. I held my pencil and notebook and clenched my jaw. Thick spats of rain hit the deck and blew across the sails. 

Behind us, the flying jib tore with a loud bang and was carried out beyond the jibboom like a mad ghost. Kissbegh and Ridjel leaped past us and climbed out along the bowsprit to cut it loose. 

Over my shoulder, I saw the sky suddenly dip below the bow, as if pushing hard on the horizon of rough water. The ship shivered and leaped. The sky suddenly retreated at the rise of a wall of water; the bow plunged into a trough between waves and we nosed into that green wall. It slammed against me and I snapped to the end of my line like a fish and seemed to half swim, half crawl along the submerged deck. Then the water fell away like a heavy curtain and sloshed to all sides, running in rivers, and I spread out on my back on the deck, coughing water, wiping my face. My pencil and notebook were gone. Forward, Thornwheel clung to the rail, hair in his eyes, sputtering. Kissbegh climbed back along the bowsprit, very lucky to be alive; Ridjel stood on the jibboom like a sea sprite, arms wrapped around the forestays, and I laughed at his grace and presumption. 

“Shit on you!” Kissbegh shouted at me, scrambling onto the deck and helping Ridjel over the tangle of ropes. “Shit on you all!” 

Thornwheel got to his feet despite the pitching of the deck. The waves had come on us so suddenly that the ship took several long, tense minutes to turn into them. Both watches reefed and furled sails frantically. The fore course had ripped halfway and snapped its ragged tails like a cracking whip. The wind now came strong from the starboard quarter, as I had feared, drawing us into the storm. 

I could see nothing of the steamships. We had made our gamble, and chosen what suddenly seemed the greater of two evils. I could picture myself surviving among pirates; surviving the storm seemed much less certain. 

“How many knots?” Thornwheel shouted. He still gripped his notebook, though it was sodden through. 

I watched the spray being whipped from the dripping gunwales, and from the forestays and jib sheets. “Forty,” I guessed. 

Thornwheel tucked one arm under his rope where it was tied to the butt of the bowsprit, squatted, and wrote the figure meticulously into the limp notebook. Then he looked up and cried out, “What time is it?” 

I did not know. 

Our world seemed confined to the forecastle deck. The storm and sudden waves had knocked loose all sense of minutes or hours. I could not get to my slate, still secure—I hoped—in my bunk a few meters below. “Afternoon,” I said. Thornwheel screwed up his face and shook the dripping notebook in disgust. 

The wind quickly grew to fifty knots. The Vigilant was now rigged for a storm, all but her fore and main courses furled and those reefed close to their yards, straining alarmingly at their gaskets. I could see men and women running along the deck, a few descending the shrouds with exquisite slowness, hanging on for life, but could not pick out their features through the stinging spray. Personality did not seem to matter in the noise. So long as I kept my position, I could not be accused of shirking my duty—and that mattered suddenly more than I would have believed it could. I did owe everything to my shipmates, my captain, the ship itself; if I did not owe them all, then I was not part of something strong and capable of surviving. I might as well be lost in the foam on the waves. I could picture that vividly. I saw myself surrounded by volumes of cold water. My lungs halted in the sudden whoop of spray-heavy wind and my body thought I was drowning; it no longer trusted my senses. 

The captain sidled forward, gripping the ropes tied at regular intervals between the mast bits and the gunwales. Salap followed, and at one point we shipped another sea across the port bow and both of them had their legs swept out from under. Standing again, tightening their safety ropes about their waists, they made their way to the forecastle desk, climbed up, and came to the bows. 

Salap saw that I had no notebook and shook his head sadly. “Ser Olmy, how will you pass this on to posterity?” he chided. “I hope you've kept a record,” he shouted to Thornwheel. 

“We don't know the time,” Thornwheel said. 

That stopped Salap. He looked at the captain, who looked at all of us, and then broke into a braying laugh. “My god, it's half past sixteen hundred,” Keyser-Bach said. “I think.” We all seemed to be made equals by the storm, like small children at play. 

“Cassir just dropped a note stuffed into a spare deadeye. Damned near brained the mate,” Salap said. “They claim to see still water ahead, about a mile off the starboard bow.” 

“They're out of their minds,” Keyser-Bach yelled, straining to see through the spray from waves slapping at the striker and parting along the bow. The waves had declined a little in the past few minutes, however. 

“Do they see any ships?” Thornwheel asked. 

“No,” Salap said. “I hope the bastards sink!” His smile was broad and wild, his eyes black and wide like a man caught in a fight he deeply enjoyed. 

The wind blew as strong as ever—the gauge registered fifty-five knots—and the ship climbed and bounced and cut through waves, but the waves were diminishing even more. I saw floating objects in the glistening hills of water flying past, gray and pink shapes like closed umbrellas rising from the water. We shipped another formidable scoop of ocean and clung miserably to our ropes and whatever else we could grab. Thornwheel raised his notebook triumphantly above a rushing floor of blue sea, then rose sputtering and whooping. Salap slipped and was washed along the deck until his line snapped him to a halt; he swung at the end of the line, his robe drenched and wrapped around scrawny, scrambling legs, his face and beard streaming. The captain managed to stay on his feet, but he looked battered and kept his eye out for the patch of calm as if it might be our only hope. 

I looked up at the trees and yards, the furled sails, the rigging, the greenish-gray sky beyond. All leaped and surged but the sky, which formed thick gray bands perpendicular to the length of the ship. Within those bands I saw a constant twinkling, a coruscating flow of myriads of corpuscles one moment brilliant white and the next black. 

The ship spun about like a skater suddenly thrown down and sliding on his rear. With a shudder, the Vigilant seemed to leap over the border between one kind of madness—the sea that threatened any second to break her back and kill us all—and another. 

Astern, as the hull settled, its pitching and rolling much reduced, we saw furious waves and a haze of driving spume. But all around and for hundreds of meters ahead, the waves were flattened, subdued, by thick layers of brown and red and yellow pads. In the center of each pad rose a growth like a folded umbrella, and at the tip of each umbrella, a fan or paddle spread, perhaps two meters in diameter, black on one side, white on the other. We seemed caught on the field of some impossible sport. The wind still blew unabated through our rigging, but it could not ruffle this tightly controlled field of sea within the storm. 

The wind blew off the starboard quarter. I turned and the wind whooped through my half-open mouth, making me a living bottle-organ. I struggled to pull air back into my lungs. Salap gripped the gunwale and leaned out to peer into the water beneath the bow. I did the same, and saw the cutwater pushing through the broad pads, shoving aside the fans, some of which bent and spun before our faces, just beyond the forward rails. On the edges of the pads, thick flattened growths like gear teeth meshed with adjacent pads and propelled them as they slowly spun. When the ship's bow forced the pads apart, with a sound like tiny suckers popping, the water between was black as night. 

Above the ship, great flocks of silvery triangles from a few centimeters to half a meter on a side blew through the sky, half hidden, and then entirely revealed, in thick curtains of moisture. The air blew alternately freezing cold or hot and moist, as if the ship were caught in some uncertain gradient between winter and tropic summer. 

“It is alive!” Salap shouted above the steady, shrill scream of the wind. “It's in control!” 

“What?” Keyser-Bach shouted back. “What's in control?” 

A flight of triangles caught up against the masts, shattered, and slipped away in the storm. Pieces fell and whirled forward, blowing and flipping across the deck like leaves. 

“It's a storm-beast! It's master of the warm water and the rising and falling air. We're not yet anywhere near the middle of it. We're on its outskirts. What must it be like farther in?” 

Thornwheel scribbled quickly in his notebook. The pages bunched and tore beneath his pencil. Still, he kept writing: wind speed, pressure, the things we saw in air and water around us. He looked up, lips pulled back, squinting into the hot and cold winds. 

Salap pointed dead ahead. “Everything in here is alive and growing, prospering! A garden in a whirlwind! Even so, if this is a cyclonic, there must be a calm center!” 

Randall worked his way forward, stepping carefully over each safety rope, fastening his line, tugging it free with the secondary loop-line, refastening. He climbed onto the forecastle deck. “We're taking water like a colander,” he shouted at the captain. “Every board's been jarred. I've got half the crew below pumping and caulking, but I don't think we can last more than another hour.” 

“Set the fore course and main lower topgallants,” Keyser-Bach said. “Keep the wind on our port quarter.” 

“That will put us right into the center!” Randall shouted. 

“That's where Salap wants to be!” the captain replied. The winds nearly drowned him out. 

“Fine!” Randall said, raising his hands and preparing to head aft. He shook his fists at the chaotic sky until he reached the ladder, then glanced back and said something that nobody heard. 

I turned to sight along the bowsprit. The waving and whirling fans had passed. Ahead, the ocean seemed covered with silvery grass taller than our upper topgallants, making great steady clockwise waves like cilia on the skin of a cell. 

“Storm cell!” I said to Thornwheel. Salap turned to me. Both called out, “What?” 

“We're inside a storm cell,” I said, but I could not convey my joke, if it was a joke; it might have been a serious observation, a clever metaphor, a crazy way of dealing with incomprehensible phenomena. I did not care. I felt so battered and dazzled, beyond fear, sliding smoothly into exhausted disengagement. The waving silvery grass ahead could have become the hair of some huge giant, rising from the sea like old Neptune, and I wouldn't have been much surprised. 

With the sails set, our speed increased, and Vigilant moved at fifteen or twenty knots toward the immense rolling wall. The crew worked steadily on deck and in the rigging, Soterio guiding them as best he could from the main deck. Randall had climbed halfway up the shrouds, inspecting something on the foretree. I wondered if Shirla had been relieved on the wheel. I saw Ry Diem and Meissner hauling the tattered remains of a blown-out sail aft. 

The fore and main trees and sails stood out brilliantly in a shaft of light like a searchlight beam, and I turned into its dazzle, high above the wall of grass. The sparkles had coalesced into a concentrated shimmer, throwing light on the sea around us like a lens or concave mirror. The whole storm was a system of reflection and absorption of sunlight, the scions in the atmosphere encouraging the heating or cooling of the surrounding air even as they flew through it, turning silvery white or dark black. The scions on the ocean's surface shifted and controlled the surface winds, and perhaps also conserved or radiated heat from the water itself. 

Salap marched back and forth across the forecastle deck, staring hawklike port and then starboard, trying to see and understand everything. The captain paid attention to little but the ship and its immediate obstacles. He lifted his arm, bellowed something, and we all turned to look off the port bow. If we could turn the ship a few points more on the starboard bow, we could pass through an opening in the wall of grass, a space of wide water like the gap left by a swinging scythe. 

Randall came forward and the captain gave his instructions. The crew worked—Ridjel took a starboard brace with Shankara and Kissbegh and turned the fore course yard—and slowly, as the wall approached, Vigilant aimed for the opening. 

“We're going into its belly,” Thornwheel said. “How far in are we already?” 

“I don't know,” I cried. “Seven, maybe eight miles.” 

“Twenty at least, with that wind,” Salap said. 

On either side, the grass rose around us, silvery tops swaying. Vigilant sailed into the gap. Abruptly, the wind stopped and the sails hung slack. 

Keyser-Bach looked at them with a furrowed brow, obviously stumped. What to do next—put on more sail to take advantage of what little wind remained, or drift and wait for another blow? Salap offered no advice. We were all beyond any human experience. 

Alternating red and black disks covered the water around the ship, a polka-dot sea as lurid in the glittering light as any child's drawing. The disks rose and fell on a gentle swell, while above the grass, and beyond the opening of the gap, the wind wailed like a fading echo. 

The sky above filled with thick black streamers of cloud. Rain spattered down. A warm wind blew from directly ahead and the ship yawed to starboard. The wind ceased as abruptly as it began. 

We lay in stillness, if not complete silence. A current in the water around Vigilant pushed us slowly, smoothly ahead, along the curve of the gap between the walls of grass. Randall went belowdecks to supervise the pumping. I felt guilty at not pitching in; but Salap shook his head at the look on my face, pinched his lips together, said, “Eyes and ears. Let the muscles work now. We'll pitch in if the master demands it.” 

This did not make me feel any more comfortable, but it was an order. 

A few hundred meters into the gap, we heard a steady thumping sound, like the beating of a huge heart, though rapid as a bird's. The sails had been set to the captain's satisfaction, the hand pumps seemed to be gaining on the water in the hold, and both master and mate were on deck to take in the scene around us. 

Thornwheel had made all the notes there were to make at this point. The wind was light and steady at about five knots, the grass undulated as it had for the past ten or fifteen minutes, and he had recorded the beginning of the sound. We glanced at each other, nodded as if making acquaintance across a busy boulevard, and returned to gazing at the grass, the polka-dotted water, the bands of cloud and spinning scions high above. 

“Is it worth it?” the captain suddenly asked Salap. We had grown so used to shouting that his voice boomed across the deck. 

“You mean, is it worth my life, to experience this?” Salap asked in return. 

“We've seen a lot together,” the captain said. “It would be fitting to die like this.” 

Lamarckia is a good place to die. Swallowed by a living storm, with no chance to be of any use to the Hexamon, no longer seemed the best end to me. I had answered their question hours ago, but had changed my mind since. 

“I have a lot more I'd like to see,” Salap said. “Things even more remarkable. And to die without telling ... With what we know...” 

“I don't intend to die,” the captain said. “But my intentions don't mean much here.” 

Salap said, “Cassir and I are going to take a few specimens at the stern.” He descended the ladder and walked aft, taking Cassir from his post. Pieces of shattered wind-driven scions lay brown and withered on the deck, their glory of white and silver fading quickly. Cassir retrieved a few and bottled them, then stowed the bottles belowdecks and returned with a specimen net and gaff to join the head researcher. 

The thumping grew louder. Ahead, the walls of grass turned reddish brown, though each blade was still silver-tipped. The tips became flattened, and the stalks shorter, the rhythm of undulation more rapid. Breaks in the walls to either side allowed strong breezes to blow across the ship, heeling and pushing it one way and then back the other. 

Soterio came forward. The captain asked who was steering, and the mate replied that Shimchisko had replaced Shankara, and that Ry Diem was on backup. Shirla had been relieved just after the beginning of the storm. 

It all seemed more than just dreamlike; it seemed feverishly mad. The light on our faces was mottled white and pink, with flashes of silver from the clouds above. The fore course luffed and bellied in the alternating winds. All around us, the waving blades rose no higher than the yard of the course, and from the tops, Ibert called down that he could see an end to the grass a few hundred meters ahead. 

Vigilant emerged from the grass ten minutes later. Ahead, a dense wall of gleaming white cloud churned. In the broad lane of sea before this wall, dozens of different kinds of scions eeled and floated through the water, passing broad black masses like small low islands. Atop the masses rose translucent pillars that gleamed like glass, but shivered with each thump like stiff jelly; within the pillars, long gray and blue cylinders clustered like wires through insulation. The pillars were about twice as high as the truck at the top of the maintree and two-thirds as broad as the Vigilant's length from jibboom to stern. 

Above and ahead, the sky filled with detail that eluded explanation, confusing my eyes and mind. I saw pinwheels of darkness spinning lithe as snakes that fell behind the wall of cloud. One of the vortices broke through the wall and fell apart, scattering as sheets of very dark rain into the sea, which seethed like living soup. The thumping began to hurt our ears, a rapid surge in pressure as much as a sound, and we could not talk at all and be heard. 

Vigilant would not be controlled. No matter which way we set the sails or steered, the thick mass of scions around us carried us in the flow, leaving the waving grass behind, like brown beach cliffs rising to a silvery prairie on a sloping hill. All behind was wrapped in drifts of brilliant white cloud, pierced by searchlight beams; and above, rising several thousand meters into the air, an immense curtain of black shot with spreading fans of powdery gold. I had never seen anything so awesomely beautiful, not even the advancing wall of a Jart offensive... 

I felt like a Jonah lost in the belly of a godlike monster, this storm-beast as Salap had called it, the captain's nemesis, and my chest hurt with fear and something like shame. My throat clutched and even if I could have been heard, I couldn't have said a word. 

Suddenly all my thoughts focused on Shirla. She was the closest thing to a woman and a friend I had on this planet; she was female. Being near her seemed essential. I looked back along the deck, actually made a step to go aft, caught myself and looked over my shoulder at Thornwheel. He had put away his sodden notebook and now lay curled up by the bowsprit, hands over his ears, trying to hide from the pounding triphammer pressure. Salap had fallen to his knees beside the port gunwale, his safety line tangled around his legs. The captain still stood, but leaned against the curved black vent over the galley, his face locked in a grimace of pain, eyes mostly shut. 

So much energy, I thought. I turned about myself where I stood, taking it all in, for the moment losing all the pain in my ears, my lips calling for Shirla. I wondered if she were dead or alive. If I got out of this, I thought, I would give up everything—my mission, my reluctance to become part of the immigrants—everything, just to be with Shirla. 

But Shirla became an abstraction. Suddenly I missed Uleysa, on Thistledown. The faces of several dozen other women, friends and lovers, chance acquaintances, came with extraordinary clarity. I was surrounded by them. I saw my mother, her angular, half-angry, half-puzzled face unable to comprehend that she had just hurt her small son with a sharp, unsympathetic word, and I loved her, forgave her, needed her. 

The thumping stopped. Vigilant floated for the moment in comparative quiet. The other sounds—whistle of wind from our starboard quarter through the rigging, sloshing and slapping of water and the confused sliding whisper of scions in that water, came back only gradually, as if having been in hiding and only now emerging. 

The quiet seemed like an indrawn breath before a scream, but no scream came. 

“We are going to get out of this,” Keyser-Bach said, enunciating each word like a schoolmaster. He went to the rail. “I hope to breath and fate Cassir is taking specimens.” He pointed into the water, lips counting softly. “I can't count how many different types of scion there are. What do they do?” 

The water around the ship seethed with color and form, as if Vigilant had been scooped up in a net filled with the concentrated creatures of an entire terrestrial ocean. Soterio came forward, a dirty white cloth wrapped around his head and ears. He removed the cloth sheepishly and cocked his left ear close to the captain's mouth to receive orders. But the captain said one thing, then belayed it; another, and belayed that, as well. There was nowhere to go, no clear direction for safety. We were turned around in the creature, and our compass was of little use. The storm could have shifted course around us as much as we turned within it. We had been inside the system for five hours; we could be as much as thirty miles from the perimeter, or even forty. 

“Shit,” the captain finally said, throwing up his hands. He turned, stared toward the wall of mist, turned again and looked down a corridor between the false brown hills and silvery grass prairie, his eye following the curve off into more mist, black shot with gold and silver. “It's pure instinct, or guesswork, Ser Soterio.” 

“Let it be instinct, sir,” Soterio said. 

Salap and Cassir came forward. Cassir deposited the contents of a bulging net into a barrel, then poured a bucket of water over the contents, which seethed. With a look of fascination and caution, and a touch of disgust, Cassir clamped the lid down on the barrel. 

“What do you see?” Randall shouted to Ibert and Shatro in the maintree top. I shielded my eyes against another flash of light and saw the two draped limply on the small platform high over the ship. Shatro raised an arm and pulled himself to a kneeling position, gripping the shrouds. He scanned the surrounding sea. 

“I don't know,” he called back. 

Ibert stood beside him. “None of it makes any sense,” he added. 

“We're looking for a way out! What do you see?” Randall called up angrily. 

“What would it look like?” Ibert asked plaintively. 

“A door,” Thornwheel said, uncertain on his feet. “With a big brass knob.” 

A large drop of black ink fell at his feet, splashing his shoes and pants. He stared at it dumbly, then looked up at us, What next? More drops fell, steam rising from the spreading stains. One struck me on the back and was hot enough to sting. 

“Wonderful!” Shatro screamed from the platform. “We've gone straight to hell!” 

We scrambled on the deck to get away from the sudden barrage of hot inky drops. All around, the sea was dappled and roiled with the dark rain, and the mass of writhing scions sank with a chorus of bubbling gurgles. In the tops, Shatro and Ibert screamed. Ibert came down the shrouds as fast as he could, stopping to shriek as a splatter of steaming rain struck his head and back. He nearly fell. Shatro lay on the platform, hands wrapped behind his head, yelling incoherently. 

There was no place to hide on the forecastle deck. I saw Meissner run forward with scraps of ruined sail, throwing them at sailors cowering on the deck. Ibert tumbled the last few meters from the shrouds, landing heavily on the deck, and snatched a shred of canvas from the sailmaker. Everyone, covered or not, made a dash for the hatches and pushed and shoved their way below. 

In the press of bodies, I found myself standing beside the carpenter, Gusmao, in her workspace in the ship's waist, beneath the upper deck. She blinked at the unwelcome intruders. She had not been on deck since we entered the storm. She was not a curious sort. 

“My god, you're a mess,” she said to the four of us. “What's going on up there?” 

Nobody answered for long seconds. “Black rain,” said Kissbegh, his face covered with thick splotches, almost unrecognizable beside the stocky, oily-black figure of Ry Diem. 

“Who's steering?” Shirla asked, walking down the aisle between the carpenter's shop and the sail locker. 

“Shimchisko's still up there. Soterio's with him,” Shankara said. The ship rolled. The deck drummed with heavy rain. The air became stifling, and moisture thickened it until we could hardly breathe. Shirla put her hand on my arm, solicitous. I laid my hand over it and felt like a young boy. Thornwheel came down the aisle, calling my name. “Salap's forward,” he said, “in the lab. They got the specimens inside.” 

I wiped black goo from my face. Where it had thickened, not quite dry, it caked and fell away, leaving no stain on the skin beneath. I touched Shirla's face and tried to wipe it. She held my hand and drew back slightly, but smiled. “It's in my eyes,” she said. 

Gusmao recovered enough to order us out of her workshop. “I don't know what's happening topside, but the captain wants his barrels and boxes.” She shooed us into the corridor, where the air, away from the shop's vents, was even thicker. 

“You're going to work in this?” Kissbegh asked, peering around the door into the carpenter's tiny workspace. 

“I'm going to breathe, dammit,” Gusmao said, and shut the door in his face. 

After a few minutes, the drumming stopped. We heard the wind pick up, and the creak of the trees and rattle of yards and rigging. We delegated Ridjel to poke his head up and see what there was to see. He climbed the steps, lifted the hatch cover, and said, “Salap's out there. The black stuff's stopped falling, but it's all over the deck. There's the captain—and Randall.” 

We hastily climbed out on the quarterdeck and returned to where we had been before the black rain began, all but Ibert, who stood by the shrouds, calling up to Shatro. Shatro answered and said he was coming down. Soterio passed by, half-inked, half-clean, like a festival harlequin. He did not comment on Ibert's reluctance to go topside again. 

All around, the ship drifted through twists and curls of fog. The air temperature had climbed at least ten degrees and our stained clothes clung to us. My throat was parched, but the water butts on deck had been bumped, losing their caps, and were fouled by ink. Leo Frey, the cook, and his assistant Passey emptied the contents of the butts and went below to bring up more water. 

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.