Cut Off (34 page)

This proved to be one of the dumbest mistakes of Ness' life.

When he ventured below, he found tubs, bins, fruit, and debris floating in a lake of saltwater. Their three main water tubs had lost their lids or been broken open. The smaller, flimsier gallon jugs had been busted to chunks, blue milk caps floating on top of the onboard sea. After the three of them waded through the mess, they came up with just two sources of untainted water: a red, five-gallon gas jug, more than half empty, and the gallon container they'd been keeping in the cabin.

In near silence, they set the jugs on the galley table. Ness and Sprite sat at the benches, staring at their meager supplies, while Sebastian loomed over the proceedings.

"
How
far away are we?" Sprite said.

"Haven't got an accurate update on our position," Ness said. "But the storm took us southeast. Lookin' at fifteen, sixteen hundred miles east, a few more north."

"As much as eighteen hundred miles. In dead winds and the wrong current. You're talking two weeks of travel or more, with two gallons of water between two people and one aquatic being."

"Yup." Ness laid his arms on the table and rested his chin on them. "So the problem is we don't have water."

"No shit!"

"Let me think!" He signed along with his spoken words. "More accurately, we don't have enough water to
last
. That means time is a major factor here, too. That gives us two routes to solutions. First, figure out a way to get more water. Second, cut down on the time we're out here. We can do that by running the engines. Right down to the edge of dry, leaving a few gallons to maneuver into port. Meanwhile, I'm going to figure out exactly where we are—and the shortest, straight-line distance between us and Hawaii."

Sprite stuck out his lower lip. "Think you can do that?"

"I think we're dead if I don't."

"Unless we can make ourselves some more water."

Ness shut his eyes. "Maybe it'll rain again."

"Maybe?"

"We still got clouds. It's not that crazy."

"What's crazy," Sprite said, "is relying on those clouds to save our lives."

"Then think of something!"

He sighed and tipped back his head. "It never doesn't rain in Macau. We hardly had to worry about purity. Just collect it and drink it the same day." He went still. "Because rain's evaporated. Leaving all the shit behind. The problem isn't no water. We've got all the water in the world." He swept his hands to take in the ocean. "It's the salt
in
the water."

"Evaporate it and recondense it," Ness said.

"Booyah."

Ness transmitted the remainder of this to Sebastian. Sebastian signed, "Remember that ice is water convinced to take another form."

"The freezer?" Ness gestured back. "Won't be able to scrape much ice from it, but it's better than nothing. Our pineapples probably aren't too pickled yet, either, and they're pretty juicy. Think we can do this crazy thing?"

"It took much self to get this far. I think we can get farther."

They stashed their water in the cabin, then went to work on the sails. It was nearing evening and the sky spat a few drops, sending Ness scrambling down the rigging to set up a tarp, but it wasn't enough to collect. By the time the cloud-hidden sun dimmed in the west, they were back underway, making use of the meager winds, the engine chugging along at partial power.

Stringing up an evaporation system on a sea-borne ship proved aggravating in the extreme. The best way to do it would have been to set down a tarp, slant a second above it, and let the angle of the upper tarp funnel the condensed water to a container, but with all the pitching and rolling, that would wind up spilling water everywhere. Ness spent a few hours stripping rattan from the bolted-down furniture and tying it into hoops using fishing line. He then bent two more strips in a curved cross and affixed them to the hoops, forming the frame of a bowl, and lined it with tarp, affixing these upside down above metal bowls. To finalize the project, he built a broader, much shallower rattan-and-tarp bowl to set beneath the metal ones. With any luck, the sunlight would evaporate sea water from the metal containers, which would condense on the inverted bowl and drip into the large, shallow collectors below.

While he worked away on this, Sprite napped and Sebastian piloted the ship. Those two switched positions shortly before Ness finally rolled into a bunk halfway through the night. Ness got up mid-morning, sipped water, and checked his evaporators, which had only gathered a few drops, then brought his octant out to the deck.

The clouds had scudded away to the west, meaning no rain, but the silver lining was that would make Ness' present job much easier. He set the octant's arm to zero, aligned it to the horizon, and squinted through its eyepiece. The view through it and of the horizon was an uninterrupted whole; his mirrors were calibrated.

This done, he brought out his chronometer and what he'd dubbed his "Noonseeker," a length of fishing pole embedded upright in a piece of a styrofoam cooler. With an accurate chronometer, it was easy to figure out local noon (and thus calculate longitude) by measuring the length of the pole's shadow every few minutes and determining when it was at its shortest.

This, however, was where things could get extremely fubar: he didn't have a steady surface. The boat was constantly pitching and rolling. He thought he could counteract this by marking the full sweep of the shadow and then measuring the midpoint of each range, but that left a lot of room for error.

Oh well: the others didn't have to know. He found a calm spot beside the cabin and went to work, marking his shadows every five minutes. When the sun hit what he figured to be its apex, he grabbed his octant, set it to his eye, and slowly moved its arm forward. A filtered version of the sun appeared in its mirror. Once he brought it in alignment with the actual horizon, he locked the octant's arm in place, then adjusted the secondary screw until the sun and horizon became a perfect match. That done, he returned to his graph, continuing to mark the length of the shadow. At 12:30 by his clock, he gathered his materials and raced inside the cabin.

Turning his measurements into coordinates was a simple matter of comparing charts and running a few calculations. Once that was done, he stood and delivered their new course to Sprite, trying to inject his voice with far more confidence than he felt.

"Ahoy to starboard!" Sprite declared nonsensically, adding a sweeping salute.

Ness fooled with the evaporators for the rest of the day, collecting a few ounces of water from the under-bowls. It wasn't much, but every drip helped. That night, once the stars were up, he checked their latitude and found that it had changed roughly what he would have expected given the course he'd assigned Sprite.

The morning brought a half cup of water from the collectors. Ness got up and hacked up one of their remaining pineapples, careful to keep his cuts as close to the skin as possible.

"We're below half a tank," Sprite announced.

"Burning fuel will do that."

"I guess what I'm really asking is are we going to die?"

"Can't say."

"'Can't say' as in 'I don't have enough information'? Or like 'I can't say because it's totally depressing and I don't want everyone to spend their last remaining hours dwelling on their impending death'?"

Ness got his charts from the drawer in the galley table and sat down. "We're drinking more water than we're creating. We got two pineapples left, and once they're gone, our water will only go faster. Sounds like we'll be out of gas in another day. How's our wind?"

"Better," Sprite said, gesturing through the window to the swollen sails. "Seven knots, maybe."

"Let me see how it looks at noon."

As the sun headed toward its peak, he ran his measurements and took them back inside the cabin. "Good news: we're keeping a straight course, and we made great time yesterday."

Sprite glanced over from the dash. "And the bad?"

"By the time we run out of gas tomorrow, we'll still have close to a thousand miles ahead of us."

"Five, six days." Sprite rubbed his mouth. "On a gallon and a half of water."

With nothing else to say, Ness went to the freezer to scrape out the ice, leaving it propped open to regenerate faster. He worked on two more evaporators and brought them out to the deck, then went back into the cabin to shade himself from the thirsty sun. Sprite shut down the engines the next morning, leaving them in the quiet of the sails and the waves.

The day after that, as they ate the last of the pineapple, wiping up every drop of juice, they spotted a pod of humpbacks two hundred yards from the boat, spewing water high into the sky.

Ness tore up every bit of rattan in the cabin, blanketing the deck with evaporators. Some slid free, tumbling over the rails. Others took on spray; Ness gave their contents to Sebastian, who could handle somewhat brackish water. Two days after the whales, the battery died. They rationed the best they could, but the last of their stored water gave out the day after that, leaving them with four to eight ounces daily from the condensers, and a billion trillion gallons of undrinkable sea.

Every morning, Ness woke with his skin blazing hot and his tongue so dry it hurt. Sprite looked like he'd spent the last year trapped in the trunk of a car. Sebastian didn't look so bad on the outside, but he rarely moved from one of the bunks.

Somehow, they hung on, until the afternoon Ness' measurements told him they were no more than forty miles from the islands. He went to the prow with his binoculars, shielding himself with one of the few remaining scraps of tarp he hadn't put to use making water. By four that afternoon, he still hadn't seen a speck of green. He was positive he had the correct latitude, but if his earlier vector had been out of whack, distorted by inaccurate longitudes, they could have under- or overshot the islands by dozens of miles. Without the ability to take a perfect reading of local noon—the waves jostled him too much—he had no way to tell whether Hawaii lay ahead or behind them.

His stomach twisted like a wrung sponge. He would have to tell the others; Sprite would need to stop the ship before it grew too dark to see what they were passing. Because the only option was to keep cruising forward until he was positive they'd gone too far. Only then—if they were still alive—would it make sense to turn back and try to hit it from the other side.

The sun made for the sea. After a look to all sides, Ness checked his octant's calibrations for the twentieth time, sighting in on the eastern horizon. A dim blue lump sat against the sky.

He nearly dropped his octant overboard as he sprinted to the cabin.

Sprite hove straight for the bump. Black peaks clarified from the haze. By the time Sprite dropped anchor two hundred yards from shore, they were down to their last few minutes of light. Ness swam in beside the others, stars watching from above. The shore was murderous ridges of black lava and they had to dog paddle along it until they found a protected inlet of low waves and a shallow beach.

After weeks at sea, the rocky ground felt wrong. Ness and Sprite laughed; Sebastian clicked his claws. As they moved along the shore, searching for a creek, it began to rain.

23

The garden was a wonder of fruit trees, berried shrubs, white and purple flowers, and cottony pink puffs like something from a Dr. Seuss book. Tristan only had eyes for motion and the brain-arresting shape of things that weren't born on her world. Seeing neither intrusion, she advanced into the green lanes trimmed through the growth, surrounded by the smell of citrus and pollen.

Beside her, Ke fished out his earplugs. "Is this still...theirs?"

She gestured down at the orange pathways grown over the red-brown dirt. "It is now."

It was headed toward evening, but after the otherworldly vision of the night vision goggles, the sunlight felt overwhelming. Tristan got behind a shrub to let her eyes adjust. The explosion of foliage made it hard to take in the exact shape of their surroundings, but they appeared to be inside a bowl scooped into the land. Something open to the sun yet effectively invisible from outside unless you were to stumble right into it. Despite the lack of wind, the shade and elevation kept the heat tolerable.

Beside her, Ke rested his shotgun on his knees and put his goggles in his pack. "Looks clear."

"All except where we go next."

"We know they brought her this way. There must be another door around here. Watch the ground. She might have dropped more charms."

She nodded. Ke pointed to himself, then down a row of raspberry vines. He moved forward in a crouch, eyes skipping between the rich dirt and the trellised plants. Bees floated lazily, lurching from flower to flower. Round holes and straight lines marred the ground, documenting the passage of aliens. The plants were arranged in concentric circles, interrupted by spoking paths. In the center of the massive garden, low orange mounds poked from the grass. Seating, she thought. At present, all were unoccupied.

They moved from row to row in an outward spiral, doing a quick scan of the ground, stopping at every rustle of branches and leaves. Three rows in, a thin slab of dark plastic stood at gut-level. Stray trimmings spangled its surface. An upright case of transparent plastic stood beside it, housing an array of snips and trimmers.

"Weird," Ke murmured. "You'd think they'd use their own claws."

"Maybe they don't like getting their hand-things dirty."

"What if they came all this way to set up awesome gardens? I bet if they'd asked, Earth's leaders would have said yes."

"Not ours," Tristan said. "Why do you really suppose they did it?"

He laughed. "They came for our shit. That's what alien invaders do."

They made it all the way to the outside circle without finding another of Robi's fallen charms. The walls enclosing the bowl were blank black lava. Six orange doors were set around the circumference, including the one they'd come through. They searched the grounds around each for metal charms or human tracks. Finding nothing, they made another sweep of the rows, hoping to turn up sign of her there.