“Right,” said Tharp sourly. “But Hydros Cross answered when I called them just now. So did the Star, the Three Moons and the Goddess. All silent out of the Golden Sun.”
“You absolutely certain? Couldn’t raise them at all?” Delagard asked. “Wasn’t any way at all you could bring them in?”
“You want to try, you go and try. I called around the fleet. Four ships answered.”
“Including the Sisters?” Kinverson persisted.
“I talked to Sister Halla herself, okay?”
Lawler said, “Whose ship is the Golden Sun? I forget.”
“Damis Sawtelle’s,” Leo Martello replied.
“Damis would never go off on his own. He isn’t like that.”
“No,” Delagard said, with a look of suspicion and distrust. “He isn’t, is he, doc?”
Tharp kept on trying to pick up the Golden Sun’s frequency all day long. The radio operators of the other four ships tried also.
Silence on the Golden Sun channel. Silence. Silence. Silence.
“A ship just doesn’t vanish in the night,” Delagard said, pacing ferociously.
“Well, this one seems to have,” said Lis Niklaus.
“Shut your fucking mouth!”
“Oh, nice, Nid, very nice.”
“Shut it or I’ll shut it for you!”
“This isn’t helping,” Lawler said. He turned toward Delagard. “You ever lose one of your ships like this before? Just quietly disappearing, no SOS, nothing?”
“I never lost a ship. Period.”
“They would have radioed, if there was trouble, right?”
“If they could have,” Kinverson said.
“What does that mean?” Delagard asked.
“Suppose a whole bunch of those net-things came crawling up on board during the night. The watch changes at three in the morning, the people in the rigging come down, the watch below goes up on deck, they all step on nets and get pulled over the side. And you’ve got half the ship’s complement gone just like that. Damis or whoever comes down out of the wheel-box while the massacre is going on to see what’s what and a net gets him too. And then the rest, one by one—”
“Gospo yelled like crazy when the net got him,” Pilya Braun pointed out. “You think a whole shipload of people is going to get tangled up in those things and dragged overboard and not one person will make enough noise to warn the others of what’s going on?”
“So it wasn’t nets,” said Kinverson. “It was something else that came on board. Or it was nets plus something else. And they all died.”
“And then a mouth came along and swallowed the ship too?” Delagard asked. “Where the fuck is the ship? Everybody on it may be gone, but what happened to the ship?”
“A ship under sail can drift a long way in a few hours, even in a quiet sea,” Onyos Felk observed. “Ten, fifteen, twenty kilometres—who knows? And still moving. We’d never find it if we looked for a million years.”
“Or maybe it sank,” Neyana Golghoz said. “Something came up beneath it and drilled a hole in its bottom and it went right down just like that.”
“Without even sending a signal?” Delagard asked. “Ships don’t sink in two minutes. Somebody would have had time to radio to us.”
“Do I know?” said Neyana. “Let’s say fifty things came up beneath it and drilled holes. It was full of holes all at once. And it went down faster than you can fart. It just sank, bam, no time to do anything. I don’t know. I’m just suggesting.”
“Who was on board the Golden Sun? ” Lawler asked.
Delagard counted up on his fingers, “Damis and Dana and their little boy. Sidero Volkin. The Sweyners. That’s six.”
Each name fell like an axe. Lawler thought of the gnarled old toolmaker and his gnarled old wife. How clever Sweyner had been with his hands, how adept at employing the limited materials that Hydros made available to them. Volkin, the shipwright, tough and hard working. Damis. Dana.
“Who else?”
“Let me think. I’ve got the list somewhere, but let me think. The Hains? No, they’re with Yanez on the Three Moons.
But Freddo Wong was on board, and his wife—what the hell was her name-”
“Lucia,” Lis said.
“Lucia, right. Freddo and Lucia Wong, and that girl Berylda, the one with the tits. And Martin Yanez” kid brother, I think. Yes. Yes.”
“Josc,” someone said.
Josc, yes.
Lawler felt a savage pain. That eager bright-eyed boy. The future doctor, the one who was going to take the burden of being the healer from him some day.
He heard a voice saying, “All right, that’s ten. What were there, fourteen on board? So we have to account for four more.”
People began to suggest names. It was hard to remember who had been on which ship, so many weeks after the departure from Sorve. But there had been fourteen on board the Golden Sun, everyone agreed on that.
Fourteen deaths, Lawler thought, dazed by the enormity of the loss. He felt it in his bones. Felt personally diminished. These people had shared his life, his past. Gone. Gone without warning, forever. Nearly a fifth of the community gone in a single stroke. On Sorve Island, in a bad year, they might have had two or three deaths. In most years, none. And now fourteen all at once. The disappearance of the Golden Sun had ripped a ragged hole in the fabric of the community. But wasn’t the community shattered already? Would they ever be able to restore on Grayvard anything resembling what they had been forced to abandon on Sorve?
Josc. The Sawtelles. The Sweyners. The Wongs. Volkin. Berylda Cray. And four others.
Lawler left them still discussing it on the bridge and went below. The numbweed flask was in his hand a moment after he entered his cabin. Eight drops, nine, ten, eleven. Let’s say a dozen for this, shall we? Yes. Yes. A dozen. What the hell. A double dose: that should take the sting out of anything.
“Val?” Sundira’s voice, outside the cabin door. “Are you all right?”
He let her in. Her eyes went to the glass in his hand, then back to his face.
“God, it really hurts you, doesn’t it?”
“Like losing some of my fingers.”
“Did they mean a lot to you?”
“Some of them did.” The numbweed was hitting, now. He felt the sharp edge of the pain blurring. His voice sounded furry in his ears. “Others were just people I knew, part of the island scene, old familiar faces. One was my apprentice.”
“Josc Yanez.”
“You knew him?”
She smiled sadly. “A sweet boy. I was swimming, once, and he came along, and we talked for a while. Mostly about you. He worshipped you, Val. Even more than he did his brother, the sea-captain.” A frown crossed her face. “I’m making it worse, not better.”
“Not?—really-”
His tongue was thick. He knew he had had too much numbweed.
She took the glass from his hand and put it down.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I wish I could help.”
Come closer, Lawler wanted to say, but somehow he couldn’t, and didn’t.
She seemed to understand anyway.
For two days the fleet lay at anchor in the middle of nowhere while Delagard had Dag Tharp run through the whole spectrum of radio frequencies, trying to bring in the Golden Sun. He picked up radio operators on half a dozen islands, he picked up a ship called Empress of Sunrise that was running ferry service in the Azure Sea, he picked up a floating mining station working somewhere in the far northeast, the existence of which came as a complete surprise, and not a welcome one, to Delagard. But from the Golden Sun Tharp heard not a whisper.