Страница 12 из 32
Namalee seated herself while a cabin boy served the first cooked meal the two had eaten for a long time. The whale meat was strange but delicious; the familiar cockroach meat was well steamed and served with a delicious brown-red sauce; and there were piles of a rice-like grain, pale blue, on which a dark orange gravy was poured. The drink was served in skin vessels which had to be lifted up and tilted, the dark green fiery stuff jetting out into their mouths.
Neither the captain nor Namalee seemed to be affected by the liquor. They continued to pour down great drafts, though their large green eyes did glow as if fires had been lit behind them. Presently, the dishes being taken away, more skins of shahamchiz were brought in. Ishmael spoke to Namalee, who looked sharply at him. The captain seemed angered, and then Namalee suddenly smiled and explained that he was not aware of the protocol which he must observe now that they were on a part of Zalarapamtra.
Nevertheless, Ishmael was led away by the boy, who took him up several ladders to a small open-walled cubicle, where he was expected to sleep. He stretched out on his hammock, but he did not sleep at once. The ship did not sail smoothly but lifted and dropped unpredictably. He was glad to be away from the continual slight nausea caused by the never-ending shaking of the earth, but this was almost as bad. The vessel bucked with every updraft or downdraft of air. He would have thought that such a huge structure would sail smoothly on, disdaining the currents that played with lesser things. After a while he slept anyway, and he was to become accustomed to the motion of the vessel. It took him a long time, however, to get used to the transparent fragility on which he walked.
The third day, the first rain clouds he had seen since his arrival darkened the west. An hour later, a wind struck. It was a hard blow but not a typhoon, and the captain had ordered most of the sails furled before the wind reached them. The great ship rolled twenty-five degrees at the first impact and continued to sail leaning to the starboard. Ishmael had strapped himself to the pole of the bottom mat, which extended deep into the vessel. The captain had so ordered, and Ishmael could not understand at first why this particular place was his post. After a while he reasoned that, since he was useless as a hand, he was placed where his weight would give the most stability. He was at least useful as ballast.
The wind became stronger. The ship continued to sail close-hauled but it was being carried eastward off its course. And the wind, now close to typhoon strength, did not blow steadily. It came in gust after gust, as if some mammoth animal over the horizon were blowing, stopping to draw in breath and blowing again. Then rain struck, and lightning and thunder flashed and bellowed somewhere in the clouds.
The captain now had nothing to guide him. He did not possess a compass, since compasses were made of metal, and metal seemed to be absent or at least extremely rare in this world. It might be, Ishmael reasoned, that man had used up the earth's metals. He was well on his way even in the 1840's, if the extrapolations of some scientists could be trusted. How many millions of years had man survived without metals?
That question did not matter. The fact was that the captain did not even have a lodestone. By day he navigated by the sun and the moon and at night by the stars and the moon. When visibility was cut off, he sailed blindly. He had nothing but the direction of the wind to guide him in this almost complete darkness; if the wind shifted, he would not know which way he was going.
Ishmael sat miserably for an unaccountable time. There were neither watches nor sand glasses in this world nor, for all he knew, even sundials. The human beings living in the days of the end of Time did not seem to care about time.
Occasionally he was replaced, and he slept as well as he could or ate in the galley. He saw no one except a few sailors and the cook. The galley was a cage of bonework. The stove was a securely fixed box of some fire-resistant wood, the heaviest object per cubic inch of anything aboard. The fuel was an oil, not derived from the wind whales, as he had expected, but from a free-floating plant.
Ishmael would have liked to have talked with Cookie for a long time and to study his character, as he did with everybody he met. But the man spoke little and shivered frequently, whenever the ship rolled too far or dropped or rose with shocking sudde
Ishmael returned to his seat in the "hold" and sat in a half-drowse most of the time, awakened now and then by the pitching and tossing. Three times, he was sure that the vessel, the Roolanga, had been completely swung around several times. If this was so, then the captain was sailing in the opposite direction, unless luck had turned the ship back to its original heading after the whirlings.
The Roolanga was headed northwest, but either the wind had carried it straight eastward or it had sailed southeast once or twice after the uncontrollable turnings. Captain Baramha a
To their starboard rose a solid range of mountains that seemed to go up and up until they merged with the dark skies. They were reddish, grayish and blackish and much carved by winds.
Ishmael, lunching with the captain and Namalee, asked how high they went.
Baramha, who had just looked at the primitive altimeter of wood and water, said, "The Roolanga is ten thousand feet high. The top of these mountains must be at least four miles up or about twenty-one thousand feet from our altitude. I could take the Roolanga up to near the top, but the air would be too thin to breathe."
And so, thought Ishmael, the Earth had been losing its atmosphere for a billion years. The plateaus on top of those mountains must once have been the surface of a continent, probably South America. And there would be mountains on top of this mountain, the Andes. How high did they tower? Up where there was no air at all? Or did the Andes exist any more? Or was this South America? Had not some wild-eyed, shock-headed scholar once said that continents, like beans on a thin soup, drifted?
He looked at the terrible cliffs, and a piece fell off with a majestic shrug and a roar that reached him many seconds later. Slowly, perhaps not so slowly, considering the unending shaking, everything high was being brought down.
Captain Baramha had laid out a vellum map and indicated where Zalarapamtra was. Ishmael thought that it was on the intermediate plateau of a mountainside that had once been the submerged slope of one of the Samoas. The area to the right of the ship was marked EDGE OF THE WORLD.
From time to time, as he drank more shahamchiz, Ishmael looked down through the floor. The long furious rains had swollen the dead seas so that they had drowned their near shores and in many places had joined other seas. Where he had first landed, he would now find water and would have to dive a dozen feet or more to reach the roof of the jungle.
One of the seas they passed during that long lunch was red, and Ishmael, asking about it, was told that the red air brit had been forced down into the water by the rains.
"Does that explain why I have seen no clouds of brit?" he said.
"Yes," the captain said. "The rains are vitally needed, and they must come, or else all life dies. But they also bring some bad, as every good does. They wash out the brit, and it takes many days before the breeding grounds to the west can produce new. During this time, the great wind whales go hungry and get lean. And the smaller life which feeds on the brit also starves. And the sharks and other predators find that they can eat more of the weakened browsers. They stuff themselves and grow fat, and it is then that the sharks breed. But their eggs, which they produce by the billions, and which float in clouds like the brit, are eaten by the whales. Only a few of the eggs hatch. So I can also say that the bad brings some good with it.