Hegira (16 page)

The captain ordered a sample taken from the water, and a cup was lowered over the side bringing up a liter of silty liquid. Prekari tentatively dipped his finger into it and tasted a drop. “It's not salty now,” he said. “We're not in an ocean at all. We must be in a river.”

Parts of the puzzle of the Pale Seas began to fall into place. From a few hundred kilometers north of Weggismarche on, the Pale Seas were actually one enormous river delta, conveying mud and silt from lands thousands of kilometers beyond. But the size of the river was staggering — where was its source? At the Wall?

Barthel learned from Avra why few Weggismarche sailors had ever traveled into the Pale Seas, and none as far as this. More than legends of unknown danger the Pale Seas were periodically flooded with a poisonous discharge, noxious gases rising from the effluent and discouraging passage. The peninsular Obelisk, it was assumed, marked a boundary line, since no other Obelisks could be seen to the north. What that implied, no one knew. But to the inhabitants of Weggis-marche, Pallasta, and the lands around them, the north was obviously inhospitable. Yet now they had proof that people lived there.

The ship-on-legs hailed them by late afternoon and instructed them to weigh anchor. They were going to leave the harbor and sail against the current. Fortunately, the wind would be with them.

By evening they saw smoke and haze. They pushed at full steam against the relentless water, sails taking a stiff breeze and masts and spars creaking with the strain. An unpleasant odor rose to greet them, subtler but more acrid than the single smell of the methane tanks. It stung the nostrils and made the eyes water.

From the distant shore, plumes of smoke rose from a colonnade of stacks. The air was filled with grease and soot. A brief, unpleasant thought occurred to Kiril — they were heading into hell, and fire and ice lay beyond.

The night was sleepless and unpleasant. As they lay at anchor in a small inlet, outside the swirling current, the darkness filled with the roar of machines and the bellow of furnaces. The wind had dropped and now smoke drifted thick about them, a foggy pall slowly closing in to suffocate. Barthel confessed he didn't like it at all. The trio met on the main deck at midnight and talked about what they'd do if they had to abandon ship. Barthel was reluctant to think about that; Kiril, on the other hand, was almost anxious. “I don't see any other chance,” he said. “We'd be better off on our own now — ”

“How's that?” Bar-Woten asked. “We don't know the local language, or what type of people live here, or anything we'd need to know if we wanted to slip by unnoticed. I'm frightened by these machines — I'll admit that and laugh at anyone who says he isn't.”

“You've lost the spirit of the thing. We're supposed to proceed whenever possible,” Kiril said.

The Ibisian examined Kiril in the dim glow of their covered lantern. The Mediwevan stared into the dark.

“Not when we walk into an open fire instead of around it,” Barthel said, shifting from his seat of ropes to the wooden deck. Kiril snorted.

“Listen,” Bar-Woten hissed. “If this ship gets into a position no one can escape from, then we are trapped, too, and that's no good, I'll admit. We'll have to avoid that. But for the moment we can only wait and see. If the people who run the machines are as wise as they are clever, we may be better off than we think.”

A whistle blasted beyond the hills surrounding the inlet. It sounded like a dying saurian. Kiril sweated profusely, though the night air was almost freezing.

“So we do nothing,” he said. “We sit and wait to die and give it all up.”

Bar-Woten turned to the glowing night air beyond the hills and licked his dry lips.

The morning was obscured by fog. It would be a bad time to cut and run in unfamiliar territory. Most of the Trident's crew waited on deck for the fog to clear, talking and playing cards or resting quietly. Kiril wrote in a bound notebook he had bought from the ship's purser, who had a surplus of ledgers and logs. His entries were generally short, but this morning he was prolix. He stopped occasionally to put his pencil to the dp of his lower lip and reread his entry. He frowned. Then he set pencil to paper again and continued his pinched scrawl.

“How did you ever become a scrittori with handwriting like that?” Bar-Woten asked. Kiril looked up with a start at the Ibisian standing beside him and scowled fiercely.

“I'd like some privacy,” he said, closing the book with a slap and putting the pencil behind his ear under a lock of hair. The Ibisian shrugged and started to walk away. Kiril looked distinctly miserable, then called for him. “I'm sorry,” he said. “Come back and sit down.” He patted the deck across from where he squatted. Bar-Woten returned just as stoically as he had left and sat. “We shouldn't fight all the time,” Kiril said.

“No need for it,” Bar-Woten agreed. “Not today, at least. We've chosen our fate.”

“How's that?”

“We're going to run for it and follow the fog.”

“How?”

“It will break with the wind and the wind is going south today, very gentle. We'll weigh anchor when we can see more to the north than to the south. The captain knows we have a clear channel directly east. We'll sound and follow the currents.”

“But the submarine can see us whether there's fog or not.”

“I don't see how,” Bar-Woten said. “Water's silty.”

“It must have some way. These ships don't sound as they sail; they just move.”

“The submarine isn't here today anyway, unless it moved in during the night, and nobody heard anything. When the sub moves you can hear it in the hull.”

Kiril shook his head dubiously and leaned against the back of a vent. “We won't get away that easily.”

“We'll see.”

They never had a chance to try their plan. Before the fog lifted the submarine was heard on the surface. When the fog thinned they saw two ships-on-legs moving too slowly to show their foils. Clusters of men in dark uniforms stood on the decks. A bull horn was brought out, and one of the men in black hailed the Trident.

“Captain Prekari!”

The captain came forward and answered the call.

“I am Vice-Admiral Gyorgi Lassfal, in command of Ocean Restoration. I was formerly in command of the Weggismarche Merchant Navy. Do you recognize my voice?”

Prekari, standing on the wing of the bridge, answered that he did not — further identification would be necessary. An exchange of personal pleasantries followed, which left no doubt in Prekari's mind that he was talking to his bureaucratic superior. He passed the word along the deck.

“Captain, I have been invited here to tell you there is no danger. These men wish us no harm. In fact, they want our help in the Restoration. Am I allowed to board your ship and explain these things to you?”

Prekari told him he could come aboard alone.

The vice-admiral was brought to the lowered gangway by a small motor-launch. He came aboard without ceremony and was ushered quickly into Prekari's stateroom. There was nothing left to do on deck but watch the rising fog and examine the near ships more closely.

By midday the vice-admiral left the Trident, and Prekari came back to the quarterdeck. He stood on the boat platform to tell them what had been decided.

“Weggismarche, Pallasta, and Nin are now under control of Northerners,” he began. He cleared his throat and leaned on a davit. Bar-Woten thought of the day they had first met him, stomping along the deck to his cabin; now he looked tired and weak, half the man he had been. "That is, they are under the care of these people . . . who have lived in peace for many hundreds of years. The weapons and ships, they say, are defensive, used only when exploring in dangerous waters. I believe that story is true on the whole. So does Vice-Admiral Lassfal. They've come south to see what aid they can give to our country.

“They are building emergency shelters for the survivors. The factories we passed are for that purpose. The admiral claims they were brought here piece by piece in the last few weeks. They have ships much larger than any of ours. There are only five or six million people left in our country, a few more in the lands south. Most were killed when the Obelisk fell. All of our cities have been destroyed. The weather has changed. The crops are all gone of course, and so is our livelihood. It sounds as if they might be benevolent, but I think they have other motives. Not unreasonable motives, mind you, but ulterior nonetheless. They have come to read the Obelisk. They have requested our help in digging out the buried portions — as much as possible — and reading and deciphering. The admiral tells me this is a monumental task, enough to fill decades, perhaps centuries. In that time the Northerners will support us, help rebuild, reestablish our economy — apparently making the Obelisk the center of all business and trade. They seem to be decent people — strong-willed, but not unreasonable. They have certain moral strictures we are requested to abide by. These will be outlined at a later date. There is nothing that should be repugnant to us. ...” He didn't sound completely convinced. Kiril frowned. The captain's message seemed one of defeat — defeat without war, without even preliminary defiance.

“The Obelisk is a thousand kilometers long. Until now, we've never had a chance to read more than a few kilometers of its surface. We've known that the history of the Firstborn extended far higher, with knowledge we could never hope to attain by ourselves. We are now offered the chance.” He added in a lower voice, “But at what a cost!” The crew of the Trident was deathly still. The fog was gone now. They could smell the smoke from the factories.

“We have nothing else to do. We can't trade our cargo, we can't buy necessary materials and parts, we can't leave the Pale Seas and survive for long with our hearts cut out of us. We have to regrow our hearts here, by giving up the sea, if need be, or working in whatever way we can with this ship to help rebuild Weggismarche. Of this I am convinced. Are you convinced with me?”

The crew said nothing. Then, as if by one motion, they looked over the starboard side to the rugged and denuded land and agreed in a low rumble. Kiril spoke with them, and Barthel nodded with a catch in his throat, mixed fear and sorrow.

Bar-Woten stood silent with his one eye fixed on Prekari and his lips set. It would soon be time to begin the third leg of their journey.

From the top of Barometer Mountain, two kilometers above the barren plains that stretched to the Pale Seas, the long, geometric bulk of the Obelisk could be seen for at least four hundred kilometers. At the horizon, half of its bulk was buried in the rock and soil of Hegira. Closer than that, the curve of the planet slacked away from the spire until its end spanned the isthmus of Weggismarche and wedged into another mountain four kilometers from Barometer.

Kiril looked down the southern slope and saw the base camp of the surveying party from the Trident, and in the bay beyond, the Trident herself, tiny as a toy in a puddle. He turned his eyes skyward and shielded them. The light that had replaced the Obelisk's glow was at its noontime peak. Clouds drifted in patches across its concentrated center, casting broad shadows over Barometer and the bay. Bar-Woten climbed slowly and deliberately over the rock pile that edged the northern slope of the peak, and joined Kiril. Barthel wasn't far behind.

“I'm beginning to piece together this stuff about the Wall of the World,” Bar-Woten said, regaining his breath with even, deep inhalations. “It's five thousand kilometers from here, to the north, which explains why there are no more Obelisks visible no matter how far north you travel. From what I understand, the Wall itself gives off a glow at the top. There may be smaller Obelisks there or normal ones just beyond it.”

“How tall is it?” Kiril asked. Barthel stood beside them and leaned on his climbing pkk, his face red and sweaty.

“At least as tall as an Obelisk.”

Kiril looked down the northern slope and saw a helicopter landing on a broad rock outcrop, like a bee setting down on a stony gray flower. “Is it true there's writing on the Wall, too?”

“They say so. Because it starts at a forty-two-degree angle, they can climb up its face easier than any of us could scale an Obelisk. That's why they know more than we do. But they can't go higher than a hundred kilometers. The slope increases beyond that, and there's not enough air — not for a man or his machines anyway.”

Kiril tried to picture the civilizations along the Wall developing faster, teaming faster, trying to spread their culture and knowledge farther south. How long ago had they reached the point where they could learn about submarines, hydrofoils, airplanes, and helicopters in sufficient detail to build them? A few centuries? How long after that before they could build rockets and read even more of the writing higher up? His past few weeks of education still stunned him.

There were huge factories farther north, whose only purpose was to create artificial petroleum products, following a formula on the Wall of the World. There was no natural petroleum on Hegira, as most half-civilized people had learned long ago. Some — such as those in Weggismarche and Pallasta, and even in Mediweva and Ibis — had developed efficient methane engines and made do with that. Those near the Wall, having access to more complicated instructions and designs and the method of making artificial petroleum from waste products, built their factories and developed engines with far more power, and also far more waste.

They had radio communication and were developing the transmission of moving pictures. They had basic rockets, though nowhere near as large as the one in the chasm south of Ubidharm. They had advanced medical knowledge. In all ways they were ahead of their southern neighbors. Yet they had been blocked by solid bands of ignorance, tribes and cities and countryside populations intent on stopping them from spreading Unholy Knowledge any farther. The People of the Wall had had to pass their information across the cultural interfaces gradually — over three hundred years' time — bringing their neighbors into their own fold. But even the People of the Wall had limitations — which began one hundred kilometers from the surface of Hegira.