The Consul was impressed. The thing was wooden, handcrafted, and huge—curved in the pregnant lines of some seagoing galleon out of Old Earth’s ancient history. The single gigantic wheel, set in the center of the curving hull, normally would have been invisible in the two-meter-tall grass, but the Consul caught a glimpse of the underside as he carried luggage onto the wharf. From the ground it would be six or seven meters to the railing, and more than five times that height to the tip of the mainmast. From where he stood, panting from exertion, the Consul could hear the snap of pennants far above and a steady, almost subsonic hum that would be coming from either the ship’s interior flywheel or its massive gyroscopes.
A gangplank extruded from the upper hull and lowered itself to the wharf. Father Hoyt and Brawne Lamia had to step back quickly or be crushed.
The windwagon was less well lighted than the Benares; illumination appeared to consist of several lanterns hanging from spars. No crew had been visible during the approach of the ship and no one came into view now.
“Hallo!” called the Consul from the base of the gangplank. No one answered.
“Wait here a minute, please,” said Kassad and mounted the long ramp in five strides.
The others watched while Kassad paused at the top, touched his belt where the small deathwand was tucked, and then disappeared amidships. Several minutes later a light flared through broad windows at the stern, casting trapezoids of yellow on the grass below.
“Come up,” called Kassad from the head of the ramp. “It’s empty.”
The group struggled with their luggage, making several trips. The Consul helped Het Masteen with the heavy Möbius trunk and through his fingertips he could feel a faint but intense vibration.
“So where the fuck is the crew?” asked Martin Silenus when they were assembled on the foredeck. They had taken their single-file tour through the narrow corridors and cabins, down stairways more ladder than stairs, and through cabins not much bigger than the built-in bunks they contained. Only the rearmost cabin—the captain’s cabin, if that is what it was—approached the size and comfort of standard accommodations on the Benares.
“It’s obviously automated,” said Kassad. The FORCE officer pointed to halyards which disappeared into slots in the deck, manipulators all but invisible among the rigging and spars, and the subtle hint of gears halfway up the lateen-rigged rear mast.
“I didn’t see a control center,” said Lamia. “Not so much as a diskey or C-spot nexus.” She slipped her comlog from a breast pocket and tried to interface on standard data, comm, and biomed frequencies. There was no response from the ship.
“The ships used to be crewed,” said the Consul. “Temple initiates used to accompany the pilgrims to the mountains.”
“Well, they’re not here now,” said Hoyt. “But I guess we can assume that someone is still alive at the tram station or Keep Chronos. They sent the wagon for us.”
“Or everyone’s dead and the windwagon is running on an automatic schedule,” said Lamia. She looked over her shoulder as rigging and canvas creaked in a sudden gust of wind. “Damn, it’s weird to be cut off from everybody and everything like this. It’s like being blind and deaf. I don’t know how colonials stand it.”
Martin Silenus approached the group and sat on the railing. He drank from a long green bottle and said:
“Where’s the Poet? Show him! Show him,
Muses mine, that I may know him!
’Tis the man who with a man
Is an equal, be he king.
Or poorest of the beggar-class,
Or any other wondrous thing
A man may be ’twixt ape and Plato.
’Tis the man who with a bird,
Wren or eagle, finds his way to
All its instincts. He hath heard
The lion’s roaring, and can tell
What his horny throat expresseth,
And to him the tigers yell
Comes articulate and presseth
On his ear like mother-tongue.”
“Where did you get that wine bottle?” asked Kassad.
Martin Silenus smiled. His eyes were small and bright in the lantern glow. “The galley’s fully stocked and there’s a bar. I declared it open.”
“We should fix some dinner,” said the Consul although all he wanted at the moment was some wine. It had been more than ten hours since they had last eaten.
There came a clank and whir and all six of them moved to the starboard rail. The gangplank had drawn itself in. They whirled again as canvas unfurled, lines grew taut, and somewhere a flywheel hummed into the ultrasonic. Sails filled, the deck tilted slightly, and the windwagon moved away from the wharf and into the darkness. The only sounds were the flap and creak of the ship, the distant rumble of the wheel, and the rasp of grass on the hull bottom.
The six of them watched as the shadow of the bluff fell behind, the unlighted beacon pyre receding as a faint gleam of starlight on pale wood, and then there were only the sky and night and swaying circles of lantern light.
“I’ll go below,” said the Consul, “and see if I can get a meal together.”
The others stayed above awhile, feeling the slight surge and rumble through the soles of their feet and watching darkness pass. The Sea of Grass was visible only as the place where stars ended and flat blackness began. Kassad used a handbeam to illuminate glimpses of canvas and rigging, lines being pulled tight by invisible hands, and then he checked all the corners and shadowed places from stern to bow. The others watched in silence. When he clicked the light off, the darkness seemed less oppressive, the starlight brighter. A rich, fertile smell—more of a farm in springtime than of the sea—came to them on a breeze which had swept across a thousand kilometers of grass.
Sometime later the Consul called to them and they went below to eat.
The galley was cramped and there was no mess table, so they used the large cabin in the stern as their common room, pushing three of the trunks together as a makeshift table. Four lanterns swinging from low beams made the room bright. A breeze blew in when Het Masteen opened one of the tall windows above the bed.
The Consul set plates piled high with sandwiches on the largest trunk and returned again with thick white cups and a coffee therm. He poured while the others ate.
“This is quite good,” said Fedmahn Kassad. “Where did you get the roast beef?”
“The cold box is fully stocked. There’s another large freezer in the aft pantry.”
“Electrical?” asked Het Masteen.
“No. Double insulated.”
Martin Silenus sniffed a jar, found a knife on the sandwich plate, and added great dollops of horseradish to his sandwich. His eyes sparkled with tears as he ate.
“How long does this crossing generally take?” Lamia asked the Consul.
He looked up from his study of the circle of hot black coffee in his cup. “I’m sorry, what?”
“Crossing the Sea of Grass. How long?”
“A night and a half a day to the mountains,” said the Consul. “If the winds are with us.”
“And then … how long to cross the mountains?” asked Father Hoyt.
“Less than a day,” said the Consul.