The numbweed flask stood next to the brandy. He pondered it for a moment or two.
He had had his usual ration of it already today, before breakfast. He didn’t need any more just now.
But what the hell, he thought. What the hell.
Later Lawler found himself wandering up to the crew compartments, looking for companionship, he wasn’t sure whose.
The shift had changed again. The second watch was on duty now, and the starboard compartment was empty. Lawler peered into the other compartment and saw Kinverson asleep on his bunk, Natim Gharkid sitting up crosslegged with his eyes closed as though in some kind of meditation, and Leo Martello scribbling away, writing by feeble lamplight with his pages spread out on a low wooden chest. Working on his interminable epic poem, Lawler supposed.
Martello was about thirty, strongly built, full of energy, usually jigging around as if on springs. He had large brown eyes and a lively, open face, and liked to keep his head shaved. His father had come voluntarily to Hydros, a self-exiled drop-capsule man. He had turned up on Sorve when Lawler was a boy and had married Jinna Sawtelle, Damis” elder sister. They were both gone now, swept away by the Wave while out in a small boat at the wrong time.
Since he was fourteen or so Martello had worked in Delagard’s shipyard, but his chief claim to distinction was the immense poem he claimed to be writing, a retelling of the great migration from doomed Earth to the worlds of the galaxy. He had been busy with it for years, so he said. No one had ever seen more than a few lines of it.
Lawler stood in the doorway, not wanting to disturb him.
“Doctor,” Martello said. “Just the man I want to see. I need some sunburn medicine. I did a really good job on myself today.”
“Let’s have a peek at it.”
Martello shrugged out of his shirt. Though deeply tanned, he was reddened now beneath the tan. Hydros” sun was stronger than the one under which the ancestral race of humans had evolved. Lawler was kept busy all the time treating skin cancers, sun poisoning, all sorts of dermatological miseries.
“Doesn’t look so terrible,” Lawler told him. “Come around to my cabin in the morning and I’ll take care of it, all right? If you think you’ll have trouble sleeping, I can give you something now.”
“I’ll be okay. I’ll sleep on my belly.”
Lawler nodded. “How’s the famous poem going?”
“Slowly. I’ve been rewriting Canto Five.”
A little to his own surprise Lawler heard himself say, “Can I have a look?”
Martello seemed surprised too. But he pushed one of the curling algae-paper sheets toward him. Lawler held it open with both hands to read it. Martello’s handwriting was boyish and crude, all great looping whorls and swirls.
“And our mothers too,” Lawler pointed out.
“Them too,” Martello said, looking a little annoyed. “They get a canto of their own a little farther on.”
“Right,” Lawler said. “It’s very powerful poetry. Of course, I’m no real judge. You don’t like poems that rhyme?”
“Rhyme’s been obsolete for hundreds of years, doctor.”
“Has it? I didn’t know that. My father used to recite poems sometimes, ones from Earth. They liked using rhymes back then. It is an ancient Mariner / And he stoppeth one of three./“By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,/ Now wherefore stopp’st thou me?"”
“What poem was that?” Martello asked.
“It’s called “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner". It’s about a sea voyage—a very troubled voyage. The very deep did rot: O Christ! / That ever this should be!/Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs/ Upon the slimy sea.”
“Powerful stuff. Do you know the rest of it?”
“Just stray fragments here and there,” Lawler said.
“We ought to get together and talk about poetry some time, doctor. I didn’t realize you knew any.” Martello’s sunny expression darkened for a moment. “My father loved the old poems too. He brought a book of Earth poetry with him from the planet where he lived before he came here. Did you know that?”
“No,” Lawler said, excited. “Where is it?”
“Gone. It was with him when he and my mother drowned.”
“I would have wanted to see it,” said Lawler sadly.
“There are times I think I miss that book as much as I do my mother and father,” Martello said. He added ingenuously, “Is that a horrible thing to say, doctor?”
“I don’t think so, I think I understand what you mean.” Water, water, every where, Lawler thought. And all the boards did shrink. “Listen, come around to see me first thing after your morning shift, will you, Leo? I’ll fix up that sunburned back of yours then.”
Water, water, every where/Nor any drop to drink.
Still later Lawler found himself alone on deck again, under the night sky, throbbing blackness above him, a cool steady breeze blowing out of the north. It was past midnight. Delagard, Henders and Sundira were in the rigging, calling arcane cryptic things to one another. The Cross was perfectly centred overhead.
Lawler looked up at it, neatly arranged there in its crisscross way, thousands of unthinkably huge balls of exploding hydrogen lined up so very cleanly in the sky, one row this way and one row that. Martello’s unskilful verses were still in his mind. Now speared the long ships outward/Into the dark of darks. Was one of the suns in that formidable constellation the sun of Earth? No. No. They said you couldn’t see that star from Hydros. These were other stars, the ones that made up the Cross. But somewhere farther out in the darkness, hidden from his view by the great right-angled blast of light that was the Cross, lay that smallish yellow sun under whose mild rays the whole human saga had begun. Golden worlds gleaming, calling/As our fathers went forth. And our mothers, yes. That sun whose swift unexpected ferocity, in a few minutes of cosmic cruelty, had cancelled out that earlier gift of life. Turning ultimately against its own creations, sending implacable gusts of hard radiation, instantly transforming humanity’s mother world to a blackened crisp.
He had dreamed about Earth all his life, ever since his grandfather first had told him tales of the ancestral world, and yet it was still a mystery to him. And always would be, he knew. Hydros was too isolated, too backward, too remote from whatever centres of scholarship might still exist. There was no one here to teach him what Earth had been like. He understood hardly anything about it, its music, its books, its art, its history. Only dribbets and drabbets of data had come down to him, usually only the container, not the thing contained. Lawler knew that there had been a thing called opera, but it was impossible for him to visualize what it had been like. People singing a story? With a hundred musicians playing at the same time? He had never seen a hundred human beings in one place all at once, ever. Cathedrals? Symphonies? Suspension bridges? Highways? He had heard the names of those things; the things themselves were unknown to him. Mysteries, all mysteries. The lost mysteries of Earth.