The Choir Boats (28 page)

“No,” said Dorentius. “It’s why we call our contact with Big Land
‘the Blessed Encounter.’ Centuries and centuries, tens of centuries,
passed after the Great Confluxion before we found you. We were
alone. It’s why we have another name for Big Land: ‘Pash’ma-soom,’
which means ‘Human Land.’ We often shorten that, saying we are
going to ‘Pash’ when we leave for a voyage to your world.”

“We’ve charted thousands of places since the Great Confluxion
ripped us from wherever it is that we came from,” said Reglum.
“We have classified and catalogued thousands upon thousands of
species. But none are sapient so far as we can tell. Though there are
possible exceptions.”

Barnabas said, “What about Strix Tender Wurm?”

Reglum said, “We don’t know what he is. Nor the Cretched
Man. Some things are best considered as being categories unto
themselves.”

No one spoke for a while, until Dorentius resumed. “We are not
certain what places are indigenous to the Interrugal Lands — that
is, permanently resident between the worlds, and what places have
been dislocated and discharged here by violent coincidence. The
in-between lands are backwaters where flotsam and jetsam land.
Imagine that you are tossed into a rushing river, battered by rocks
and bars. You lose your hat, your shoes, maybe even your coat, which
swirl in your wake. Yount is a hat or pair of gloves, a stray bit that
has been stripped off in passage.”

“We have other evidence,” said Reglum. “Over the centuries,
we’ve recovered three corpses from the seas that were neither from
Yount nor Big Land. Humans to most appearances, but with certain
. . . differences. Nictating membranes, extra digits, idiosyncratic
organelles, that sort of thing. All described in our literature, and one
preserved onboard in alcohol and today to be seen in the museum in
Yount Great-Port. We call him simply ‘The Specimen.’”

Sally queried again, “But, until you found Big Land, no others
like us?”

Reglum smiled, a bittersweet tone crept in. “No, no one like you.
Or like us.”

Sally cried out, “But, Mr. Bammary, we
are
you, and you
are
us!
Why, sir, I do not mean to state this so boldly, but no one else has
commented on it, so I feel I must. We Big Landers and Small Landers,
we can . . . have union . . . we can marry with success,” she ended in
a rush.

Reglum smiled again, with no trace of bitterness this time,
“Yes, there are some like me, with parents or grandparents from
both worlds. We can mix, and not just like horses and donkeys, the
offspring of which can bear no young themselves. We are, in terms
your dear Linnaeus has set out, the same species. Strange as that
may sound, and impossible as that might seem.”

Out of the darkness that had fallen on the island of ghosts,
Reglum said, “Big Land and Small Land, our fates are entwined.
Hence the key. Hence your voyage.”

Three days out from Supply Island the
Gallinule
stumbled. Sally felt
it immediately. Deep within the clacking-clicking-chunking-ticking
of the Fulginator something went astray. An atomized current of
energy or evanescent burst of sonic motion, whatever it was, it had
impeded the process. The Fulginator’s calculations were suddenly
and completely amiss. Assured seeking became groping. Sally,
knowing the Fulginator’s cantata in her essence, cried aloud in her
cabin and then stumbled half-blind to the fulgination room.

Dorentius had lost his cap and was running around the Fulginator.
The rest of the
equipe
were yelling and consulting charts. Reglum
and the ship’s captain raced through the door. Outside mists arose.
As if a giant in the sky waved a fan in front of the sun, shadows
washed over the
Gallinule
followed by stabbing beams of light. Out
of the mists poured ululating voices. In the fulgination room, Sally
felt a chill, sat down, stood up, and then could not move at all. In her
mind she saw a dolphin. She heard it speaking in the staccato tongue
of dolphins, but she did not understand except that the dolphin was
frantic.
Concentrate
, she thought, and focussed on the dolphin’s eye,
so bright and looking straight at her. Nearer and nearer and then
. . . darkness. Nothing. Like a candle doused. She tried to find the
dolphin in her mind but could not.

Sally staggered out of the fulgination room, followed closely by
Reglum. On deck, they were buffeted by winds that had not been
there minutes ago. They looked to the Small Moon, which clattered
against the mast. Someone called from the bow that the dolphins
were gone. Dreading what they would see, Sally and Reglum went to
the bow, where the ship’s captain joined them and the watch.

Everyone scanned the sea in front of them. Minutes went by. No
one spoke. More minutes. No grey forms leaped in front of the ship,
no sleek forms accompanied it.

Morning brought no relief. The ship’s captain assembled everyone
on deck. The
Gallinule
was lost. The Fulginator had failed. Dorentius
and Reglum and every member of their teams were working around
the clock to identify and repair the problem and, most important, to
find the ship’s location so they could plot a route home. Until then,
everyone without exception would be on short rations.

“At least the steam engine is performing well, thank the Mother,”
said Reglum. “And the ship’s adequately provisioned.”

“So far,” muttered Nexius.

The voyagers had never seen such a sea. It was inky black, and gave
off a sweet, resinous smell that soon became cloying. There was no
wind, and only the barest wisps of cloud in a bright blue sky. The A.B.s
tested the water with lines, buckets, and seines. The water contained
no life: no fish, no turtles, no copepods, not a scrap of seaweed or algae,
and most certainly no dolphins or whales. The
Gallinule
chugged on for
two days.

“We cannot simply steam ahead in a completely empty sea,” said
the ship’s captain. “Not knowing where we are going. We do not have
enough coal.”

“But we cannot stop and drift in open ocean,” said Nexius. “There is
no wind for sailing.”

“Don’t tell a mariner his business,” said the ship’s captain. “Though
you are right, of course.”

“We cannot understand what happened,” said Dorentius, answering
the
captain’s
(and
everyone
else’s)
question
for
the
tenth
time.
“Rebarbative flux, a purling of the xantrophicious ebblines, we do not
know. We have come to a place utterly outside our charts. Not knowing
our coordinates, we cannot calculate how to find the roads to Yount.”

“That cannot answer, Mr. Bunce,” said the ship’s captain. “Surely
there is a way to calculate our position.”

“Difficult, but not impossible, sir,” said Dorentius, looking anything
but certain about that. “However, the mathematics are daunting,
complex, and will take much time, even working at it night and day.”

“How much time, Mr. Bunce?” asked the captain.

“It might be three or four months, sir,” the fulginator said. “With
luck.”

“We have food enough for that plus the time it will take us to
regain the road to Yount,” the captain said. “But I worry about our
supplies of fresh water. Well, Mr. Bunce, do what you can, and may
the Mother speed your work.”

Sally worked with the fulginators and the A.B.s. Her math skills
equalled theirs, despite her lack of formal training (Sally had
taught herself math, the subject not being one taught to respectable
merchants’ girls). She did not always follow the notation but she
was quicker than almost anyone at finding the solution and she
was peerless at deriving alternatives to the standard procedures of
calculation. Reglum saw that Sally understood the principles better
than he did; only Dorentius was better. They both instructed their
men to follow her lead.

The
Gallinule
had been steaming in an empty ocean for three
days, and the captain had decided to switch to sail on the morrow to
conserve coal, when land was sighted.

The landmass was flat as far as the eye could see. As the ship got
closer, Reglum saw a very pale green beach (
Sand made of smaragdite?
he thought.
Perhaps feldspar?
), with a uniform level of deep-green
trees behind it. About five hundred yards from shore, pale-green
mudbanks appeared. The captain feared running aground, so the
Gallinule
turned to port and steamed parallel to the shore. All day
they worked their way up a coastline that never varied, always
confronted by mudbanks at four to five hundred yards offshore. As
they cruised by, they saw how queachy and jellified the mud was.
Sally shuddered. This place looked too much like the Gelid Sea for
comfort, only at least
that
place was on the map and so could be
gotten away from. For eight days the
Gallinule
steamed along the
coast, steadily turning and turning as the coast did. Until . . .

“It’s an island,” said the ship’s captain. “We have just returned
to the very spot where we first arrived. There is the one inlet we’ve
seen on this coast, we’ve come back to it. See, there it is! If, as I am
guessing, we will have to prospect for fresh water on the island, then
this is the likeliest place to start.”

The captain cut the engines and anchored the
Gallinule
opposite
the inlet, some five hundred yards out. Shipboard routine was
the rock upon which each crew member set his stake. Sailors and
Fencibles scrubbed the decks, repaired spars, spliced rope and
rigging; they told each other stories, boxed, wrestled, and danced.
Members of the Abbey, when they weren’t with the fulginators,
charted the night sky. Sanford, reasonably healed, walked around
and around the deck, conversing with Barnabas. Everything was
normal, except that they were lost outside the world.

With the engines off, the quiet of their surroundings dominated
all else. The quiet sank into their pores, rose into their nostrils,
infiltrated their minds until they rarely spoke above a whisper.
There was no wind. The ink-black sea, devoid of life, was flat and
unmoving, except in slow, sluggish currents, the origins of which
were subject of much speculation by the A.B.s. Reglum scanned
the coast but saw nothing except the thin strip of pale-green beach
and an endless row of trees that looked vaguely like holly. Nothing
stirred on the island: not a bird, not a beast, nothing at all. Everyone
called the place “Oos,” which is “Silence” in Yountish.

Two months passed. Oos was an accursed word for them all. How
they longed to shout and stamp their feet, to start a hare from the
holly-like trees or put a gull to flight from the pale-green beach.
How they longed to hear that the Fulginator was repaired, desired
to know the coordinates for home.

Sally dreamed by day as well as by night now. Sometimes she
saw the Sign of the Ear, with its swallow-tailed owl. Sometimes she
caught a glimpse of a dolphin, but almost as soon as the dolphin
appeared, it disappeared again. Other times she thought she heard
Tom’s voice. Once, she saw the African girl in an old coat staring
at a brick wall marked with symbols Sally could not make out; the
unknown girl, with black braids peeking out from under a headscarf,
stared at the wall as if she was looking right through it. Sally thought
maybe the African girl was looking for the
Gallinule
but could not
say why she thought that. And once, Sally saw James Kidlington in
chains, gesturing as if to an interlocutor who was not there, and
saying “Erasmus Darwin — you must read his latest work, it is simply
extraordinary.”

Barnabas tried to cheer Sally, praising Isaak for the cat’s
unflappable grace and prodigious hunting of the ship’s rodents. Sally
smiled as best she could, for her uncle’s sake, and hugged Isaak, but
mostly she dwelt in the mathematics of fulgination and dreamed
down avenues flanked by Sankt Jakobi, Sankt Nikolai.

Barnabas fingered the key and marvelled at the discipline of the
Gallinule
’s crew. He hid his own anxiety with a torrent of good cheer
and outpourings of concern for Sanford. Barnabas was convinced
that Sanford would not heal fully without adequate provision of
goat’s meat, and so wondered if a hunting party might soon be
sent ashore since the ship had run out of it. A landing party was
being assembled but the captain’s chief concern was water, not
meat. Conferring with Nexius and Reglum, the captain called for
four volunteers to seek fresh water on the island: two sailors, two
marines, two pairs of
hatmoril.

The following morning the entire crew gathered on deck. Four
volunteers had come forward, and were lowered over the edge of
the ship in a rowboat. The crew watched as the rowboat picked its
way through the mudbanks to the beach at the mouth of the creek,
the sound of the oars coming very loud across the silent waters. The
officers watched through telescopes but even with the naked eye
everyone saw the four figures, each in his dark-blue padded vest,
turn to face the ship. All four waved. Silver glinted on their throats,
the sun caught in their leaping dolphin brooches. The Small Moon
flashed silver back to them — the last thing they would see of the
Gallinule
before they shouldered their muskets, picked up their
pails, turned, and entered the forest of holly-like trees. Throughout
not a word was spoken. Oos sat heavily both on the crew aboard the
ship and on the members of the water detail. They were due back by
nightfall. Each man in the party had a watch and an ansible pendant
matched to ones held by Reglum. The landing detail did not return
by nightfall or the next day. Not a sound came from the island. The
rowboat sat lodged on the beach, unmoving.

“The pendants are still glowing,” said Reglum. “They live.”

“Perhaps they are lost,” said Nexius. “We will send up a rocket.” The Fencibles sent up two rockets from the deck of the ship.