The Choir Boats (29 page)

“They are what you call Congreve rockets,” said Nexius to
Barnabas, Sanford, and Ben. “What your fleet used to burn
Copenhagen.”

Barnabas felt remorse, even if it felt unpatriotic to do so, at the
bombardment of Copenhagen, since McDoon & Associates had so
many good friends in commerce at the Danish capital. He thought,
“How very strange to think of it: Copenhagen. London, for that
matter. Hard to know if such places really exist or if I’ve dreamed
them until this very moment. But how silly of me, of course they do . . .
exist, that is.”

At two minutes past one o’clock in the afternoon of the third day,
all four ansible pendants winked out. No sound could be heard. Oos
was everywhere, a silence like clay-wrapped roots brooding deep in
the earth, a silence like the floor of an ocean that has never seen
sun, moon, or stars. The captain assembled the crew.

“Our four comrades are dead,” the captain said, as he and the crew
made the circling gesture. “Let us sing.” The crew faced the island.
As if to shatter Oos, the crew sang with strong, deep voices. Their
song echoed off the beach and off the holly-like trees. Maybe it was
the first such sound this world had ever heard. The song, as Reglum
later explained to the McDoons, was called the “
Jassajoharrian
,”
which is the “Song of Homecoming and Humility.”

This place I do not know

And yet I know the place.

The earth holds up a mighty yew

A mace to guard this place

This place I never knew.

Ivory roses screen my eyes

From a gated grove

Whose members, sleeping, will not rise.

Will not rise or gaze or stand

Within the slotted wall

Where counsels, doddered, run a-strand.

Where lichened keystone, bell, and arch

Within the rooted hall

Foretell a silent earthbound march.

The wind-sered roses rasp and rustle

Around that unknown place

Where clay is blood and stone is muscle.

The earth lets out a subtle sigh

A shade to mark the space

The place it knows for I.

When the last echoes of the
Jassajoharrian
had subsided, the
ship’s captain raised a fist to the island and yelled, “Our colleagues’
names will be forever known on the walls of the Hall of Long
Remembrance. Whatever you are, keep your silence, but not their
names!”

That evening the captain called to meeting Nexius, Reglum,
Dorentius, Barnabas, Sanford, and the young Purser with the
flutist’s fingers, Noreous. The captain said, “Gentlemen, we are
not in a good way. Let us speak frankly. Noreous, how long will our
stores hold out?”

Noreous twisted his fingers and said, “Four months at least,
assuming half-rations. We are getting low on fruit and other anti-scorbutics, so I begin to fear scurvy. The lack of fish and game also
haunts us. But, of course, I speak only of food — we are running low
already on fresh water, as you know. We have at best six weeks worth
of water, not more.”

“Dorentius, that gives you no more than a week to complete your
calculations and still give the
Gallinule
leeway to make our final run
for home,” said the captain.

“A week is . . .” he started. “With the integers used by Gaspard
Monge perhaps we might . . . or if we had more time for the
differentials scaled by Laplace . . .”

“Mr. Bunce,” said the captain. “We don’t have time now to hear
about Monge and Laplace.”

Reglum stepped in and said, “What Dorentius means — and he
and his men have hardly slept since we arrived — is that we have the
equivalent of latitude but cannot find the equivalent of longitude.
As you know, we need both.”

Reglum added, “And it is at least eight axes we are working on,
not just two. We have the proper coordinates for six of the eight
plotted, but the interlacing of the final two has proven to be more
problematic than expected.”

The captain nodded, turned to Nexius, and said, “How is the
condition of the Fencibles?”

“Ready to fight,” said Nexius. “Will go ashore to find water until
there are no more of us, if that is required.”

“Not yet,” said the ship’s captain. “We wait one more week for the
Fulginator to show us the way home. If at that time we are still blind
to our correct route, then we will
wiiswiis malan
.”

Reglum turned to Barnabas and Sanford, and said, “That
means . . . it is very hard to translate . . . ‘to flee at random.’”

“‘To range without hope’ is another translation,” said Dorentius.
“We can fulginate knowing some of the coordinates and hope that
we, through blind chance, hit upon lands or roads known to us.
Success is not likely but failure is assured if we sit here starving to
death.”

Barnabas recalled one of his favourite prints on the wall of the
partners’ office at Mincing Lane: Acteon and Diana. He imagined
the panicked Acteon fleeing as he turned into a stag, crashing
blindly into trees, falling, eventually to be hunted down and eaten
by his own hounds.

“You are part of this decision,” the ship’s captain said to Barnabas
and Sanford. “Our mission is to protect and deliver you, so you can
deliver us with the key. Is our plan acceptable?”

Barnabas looked at Sanford, who nodded his assent. He reached
into his vest and pulled out the key. Holding it up for all to see,
Barnabas said: “I will bring the key to Yount. I will get my boy back.”

Like many plans, however, the one agreed to by the men in the
captain’s cabin lacked one essential contributor: Sally. Even as the
men sat in conclave, Sally was drifting into another dream. On short
rations she found that she sometimes could not tell her dreams
from her waking sight. As the strange stars came out above Oos,
and something lurked on the island, silence smothering everything,
Sally dreamed a master-dream.

“We will die,” she said to Reglum in her dream.

“Yes, it is possible,” he said. “But that time has not yet come.
Not yet.”

He showed her a book. All the Yountians onboard had a copy of
this book. He said, “Here is the
Som-manri
. Your copy. What you might
call in English ‘The Berosiana’ or ‘Book of Rue and Repentance.’ We
cannot die until we have written what we must write in the
Som-manri
, but your pages are still blank.”

Sally looked at the book, and saw that Reglum spoke truly. Yet
even as she looked, words appeared on the pages, in her handwriting.
She peered at the pages but could not make out what the words were,
except for names: “Fraulein Reimer” and “Shawdelia Sedgewick,”
and more names and more names, everyone she had ever known.
“Uncle Barnabas.” “Sanford.” The writing became slower, more
jagged, darker. “Tom.” The script became fiery-black, as if written
with a sharpened coal. The writing stopped, and then suddenly
began again. “James Kidlington.” The ink burned, the book smoked.
Sally dropped it and ran from Reglum, ran and ran until she found
herself running on the green grass at the Sign of the Ear. Panting,
gasping, she fell to her knees among the little blue flowers, the
sela-manri
, the flower of repentance.

“I repent,” she said, heaving for breath. “I repent!” she shouted
so that blood came up from her lungs, her throat, up to her lips.
The wind roared its approbation. In rapid succession she saw faces
of those on her pages in the Book of Rue and Repentance. The faces
gathered, one by one:

Barnabas, Sanford, Tom.

The cook, her niece, the fraulein.

Mr. Fletcher and Mr. Harris.

Mr. Sedgewick and Mrs. Sedgewick.

Salmius, Nexius, Reglum, Dorentius, Noreous.

The Termuydens.

. . . James Kidlington.

Others, many others she did not know.

A white woman in a dress from the last century, with a face that
looked like Sally’s might in a few years time.

A dark-eyed young woman with silver threads woven into her
glossy black hair and silver half-moons dangling from her ears.

The African woman in a hand-me-down sailor’s jacket, wearing a
red neckerchief, looking up from a brick courtyard.

More and more crowded together and chanted with one voice. The
chanting grew and grew, and at last Sally knew what the chanting
meant, and knew what she must do.

She awoke so quickly that Isaak had to jump off the bed.
Grabbing Isaak, Sally ran past the fulgination room (Reglum looked
up, marvelled at her speed, and followed) up to the deck and out
to the bow. The sailors on duty greeted her, startled at her sudden
appearance, but she did not hear them. She paused to catch her
breath, licked a drop of blood from her lips, stepped to the very front
of the ship, and began to sing.

Low at first, then louder and louder, Sally sang. She sang in a
language that was neither English nor Yountish, not German or
Latin or any other tongue known to anyone onboard. She sang in
the language that came before all these, and rests still at the heart of
all words, all thought. She sang of longing and seeking and yearning
and finding. She sang to defeat Oos, to banish the silence that kills,
to find a way home for the
Gallinule
.

The sailors on watch stepped back. Reglum ran up and stopped
too. In that ancient silence, Sally’s voice went out like blazing arrows
and radiant spears. It echoed off the Small Moon on the mast. It
vibrated off the ansible pendant she wore around her neck, the thread
that connected her to Tom. It rippled through the St. Morgaine and
made the pages turn in the fraulein’s house-book.

Barnabas and Sanford and Fraulein Reimer came on deck.
Nexius, the ship’s captain, Noreous — everybody came on deck
except Dorentius, who stayed with the Fulginator down below
because something was happening to the machine. As Sally sang
longer and louder, the Fulginator responded. Sally trilled a note,
so did the Fulginator. Sally’s glissando became the Fulginator’s.
Dorentius shouted as the song pierced him. He scribbled madly, and
scrawled equations.

“The third elliptic!” Dorentius yelled. “The tortile connection to
the sixteenth element!”

No one onboard could say how long Sally sang or what the song
sounded like. Or, rather, each man had a different impression of
both time and song.

“Like a filigree of silver,” said Nexius.

“Like sun reflected in the eye of a falcon,” said Reglum.

“Like the sheen of watered silk,” said Barnabas.

“Like the blue-whiteness of flame at its hottest,” said Sanford.

Up and up the song crescendoed. Sally swayed at the bow of the
ship. Every person on the
Gallinule
hummed now, a deep brumming
sound, in unison, to support Sally’s song. Every person desired
themselves home. Sally hit one brilliant high note, sending it soaring
out into Oos. Every person on the ship hummed in perfect harmony,
sending a wave of perfect yearning out into the void.

At that moment, Dorentius shrieked, pushed a lever affecting the
22.e sub-plate, and the Fulginator struck the same note as Sally’s. A
dolphin leaped out of the sky, chased by a beam of moonlight that
reflected off the Small Moon, and tumbled into the ocean of Oos
with a great splash.

For one second, the silence returned, old and malevolent, the
emptiness between the beating of the heart, a clot of un-sound to
break their music. Then the Fulginator went “chunk-check-tunkseeoooo.” And the dolphin tossed itself up from the water calling
out in dolphin language. And one hundred voices on the
Gallinule
yelled, “Hurrah!”

Sally collapsed at the bow of the ship. Uncle Barnabas was there
to catch her.

Maggie was halfway through Thomas Simpson’s
Treatise of Fluxions
on a rainy Thursday, having borrowed it from Mrs. Sedgewick (as
well as the additional luxury of a beeswax candle), when a bolt of
silence entered her mind and smothered all thought. Maggie flung
herself back against the cellar wall, trying to call out. Her mother,
still sickly, cried out but Maggie could not hear her. A silence coursed
through Maggie’s arteries, seeking to strangle her heart. Maggie’s
fingers grasped the treatise on fluxions so hard that pages ripped.

With a soundless rush, Maggie was lifted over Bushnell’s Rope-walk and the Green Stiles, above Cinnamon Street, and Wellclose
Square, whirled back past Artichoke Lane, and slammed into the
alley outside her cellar. While her body slumped in the cellar, she
stood in the alley, mazed.

Think, think, think
, Maggie yelled inside, trying to break the
silence.
Sing, sing, SING!

She stood defiantly and sang about cardinal numbers in the
continuum
and
congruent
polyhedra
and
algebraic
vortices.
Gradually at first and then more quickly, the silence subsided. As it
diminished, Maggie heard other voices — above all, a voice like hers.
She saw the young white woman, the one she had seen before while
far-walking. The white woman was singing from the prow of a ship,
singing down the silence that gripped the ship and everyone on it.
(
How odd
, Maggie thought,
to see just a few white faces in a crowd of
dark ones
.) Maggie joined the choir, matching her notes to those of
the woman on the ship. Their music exploded the silence, moonlight
flashed everywhere (though the moon was gibbous that night over
London), and a dolphin flew through the air. Maggie glimpsed
crowds of singers on a beach, including a lean man hurrah’ing with
a Wapping accent. The vision ended and Maggie sat up in the cellar,
tears streaming down her cheeks. She hugged her mother, who said,
“Little eagle, little eagle,” over and over.