Nirgal felt his pulse jarring through him. His balance had left him, he had to hold on to the rail. Over the side, onto the dock. Down to the last building, a seafront boarding-house or something like, now much broken up and glimmering in all the cracks; air inside; filled by a bubble. Green plants, vague and blurry seen through sloshing gray water. He had a hand on Ely’s shoulder. The little man led him in a door and down narrow stairs, into a room with one whole wall exposed to the sea, like a dirty aquarium.
A diminutive woman in a rust-colored jumpsuit came through the far door. White-haired, black-eyed, quick and precise; birdlike. Not Hiroko. She stared at them.
“Are you the one came over from Vlissingen?” Ely asked, after glancing up at Nirgal. “The one that’s been building these submariners?”
“Yes,” the woman said. “May I help you?” She had a high voice, a British accent. She stared at Nirgal without expression. There were other people in the room, more coming in. She looked like the face he had seen in the cliffside, in Medusa Vallis. Perhaps there was another Hiroko, a different one, wandering the two planets building things…
Nirgal shook his head. The air was like a greenhouse gone bad. The light, so dim. He could barely get back up the stairs. Ely had made their farewells. Back into the bright mist. Back onto the boat. Chasing wisps. A ruse, to get him out of Bern. Or an honest mistake. Or a simple fool’s errand.
Ely sat him down in the boat’s cabin, next to a rail. “Ah well.”
Pitching and yawing, through the mist, which closed back down. Dark dim day on the water, sloshing through the phase change where water and mist turned into each other, sandwiched between them. Nirgal got a little drowsy. No doubt she was back on Mars. Doing her work there in her usual secrecy, yes. It had been absurd to think otherwise. When he got back he would find her. Yes: it was a goal, a task he gave himself. He would find her and make her come back out into the open. Make sure she had survived. It was the only way to be sure, the only way to remove this horrible weight from his heart. Yes: he would find her.
Then as they motored on over the choppy water, the mist lifted. Low gray clouds rushed overhead, dropping swirls of rain into the waves. The tide was ebbing now, and as they crossed the great estuary the flow of the Thames was released full force. The gray-brown surface of the water was broken to mush, waves coming from all directions at once, a wild bouncing surface of foamy dark water, all carried rapidly east, out into the North Sea. And then the wind turned and poured over the tide, and all the waves were suddenly rushing out to sea together. Among the long cakes of foam were floating objects of all kinds: boxes, furniture, roofs, entire houses, capsized boats, pieces of wood. Flotsam and jetsam. Ely’s crew stood on the deck, leaning over the rails with grapnels and binoculars, calling back to him to avoid things or to try to approach them. They were absorbed in the work. “What is all of this stuff?” Nirgal asked Bly.
“It’s London,” Bly said. “It’s fucking London, washing out to sea.”
The cloud bottoms rushed east over their heads. Looking around Nirgal saw many other small boats on the tossing water of the great rivermouth, salvaging the flotsam or just fishing. Bly waved to some as they passed through, tooted at others. Horn blasts floated on the wind over the gray-speckled estuary, apparently signaling messages, as Ely’s crews commented on each.
Then Kev exclaimed, “Hey what’s that now!” pointing upstream.
Out of a fog bank covering the mouth of the Thames had emerged a ship with sails, many sails, sails square-rigged on three masts in the archetypal configuration, deeply familiar to Nirgal even though he had never seen it before. A chorus of horn blasts greeted this apparition — mad toots, long sustained blasts, all joining together and sustaining longer and longer, like a neighborhood of dogs roused and baying at night, warming to their task. Above them exploded the sharp penetrating blast of Ely’s air horn, joining the chorus — Nirgal had never heard such a shattering sound, it hurt his ears! Thicker air, denser sound — Ely was grinning, his fist shoved against the air-horn button — the men of the crew all standing at the rail or on it, Nirgal’s escorts as well, screaming soundlessly at the sudden vision.
Finally Ely let off. “What is it?” Nirgal shouted.
“It’s the Cutty Sarkl” Ely said, and threw his head back and laughed. “It was bolted down in Greenwich! Stuck in a park! Some mad bastards must have liberated it. What a brilliant idea. They must have towed it around the flood barrier. Look at her sail!”
The old clipper ship had four or five sails unfurled on each of the three masts, and a few triangular ones between the masts as well, and extending forward to the bowsprit. It was sailing in the midst of the ebb flow, and there was a strong wind behind it, so that it sliced through the foam and flotsam, splitting water away from its sharp bow in a quick succession of white waves. There were men standing in its rigging, Nirgal saw, most of them out leaning over the yard-arms, waving one-armed at the ragged flotilla of motorboats as they passed through it. Pennants extended from the mast tops, a big blue flag with red crosses — when it ca’me abreast of Ely’s boat, Ely hit the air-horn trigger again and again, and the men roared. A sailor out at the end of the Cutty Sark’s mainsail yard waved at them with both hands, leaning his chest forward against the big polished cylinder of wood. Then he lost his balance, they all saw it happen, as if in slow motion; and with his mouth a round little O the sailor fell backward, dropping into the white water that foamed away from the ship’s side. The men on Ely’s boat shouted all together: “NO!” Ely cursed loudly and gunned . his engine, which was suddenly loud in the absence of the air horn. The rear of the boat dug deep into the water, and then they were grumbling toward the man overboard, now one black dot among the rest, a raised arm waving frantically.
Boats everywhere were tooting, honking, blasting their horns; but the Cutty Sark never slowed. It sailed away at full speed, sails all taut-bellied when seen from behind, a beautiful sight. By the time they reached the fallen sailor, the stern of the clipper was low on the water to the east, its masts a cluster of white sail and black rigging, until it disappeared abruptly into another wall of mist.
“What a glorious sight,” one of the men was still repeating. “What a glorious sight.”
“Yeah yeah, glorious, here fish this poor bastard in.”
Ely threw the engine in reverse, then idled. They threw a ladder over the side, leaned over to help the wet sailor up the steps. Finally he made it over the rail, stood bent over in his soaking clothes, holding on to the rail, shivering. “Ah thanks,” he said between retches over the side. Kev and the other crew members got his wet clothes off him, wrapped him in thick dirty blankets.
“You’re a stupid fucking idiot,” Ely shouted down from the wheelhouse. “There you were about to sail the world on the Cutty Sark, and now here you are on The Bride ofFaver-sham. You’re a stupid fucking idiot.”
“I know,” the man said between retches.
The men threw jackets over his back, laughing. “Silly fool, waving at us like that!” All the way back to Sheerness they proclaimed his ineptitude, while getting the bereft man dried and into the wind protection of the wheelhouse, dressed in spare clothes much too small for him. He laughed with them, cursed his luck, described the fall, reenacted coming loose. Back in Sheerness they helped him down into the submerged warehouse, and fed him hot stew, and pint after pint of bitter beer, meanwhile telling the people inside, and everyone who came down the ladder, all about his fall from grace. “Look here, this silly wanker fell off the Cutty Sark this afternoon, the clumsy bastard, when it was running down the tide under full sail to Tahiti!”
“To Pitcairn,” Ely corrected.
The sailor himself, extremely drunk, told his tale as often as his rescuers. “Just took me hands off for a second, and it gave a little lurch and I was flying. Flying in space. Didn’t think it would matter, I didn’t. Took me hands off all the time up the Thames. Oh one mo here, ‘scuse me, I’ve got to go spew.”