“All right,” Delagard said finally. “If they’re still afloat, maybe they’ll find a way to get in touch with us. If they aren’t, they won’t. But we can’t sit here forever.”
“Will we ever find out what happened to them?” Pilya Braun asked.
“Probably not,” Lawler said. “It’s a big ocean full of dangerous things that we don’t know a goddamned thing about.”
“If we knew what it was that got them,” said Dann Henders, “we’d have a better chance of guarding against it ourselves if it showed up again to try to get us.”
“When whatever it was that got them shows up to get us,” Lawler said, “that’s when we’ll find out what it was. Not before.”
“Let’s hope we don’t find out, then,” said Pilya.
7
On a day of heavy fog and rolling seas big unfamiliar diamond-shaped creatures with thick, heavily ridged green shells covering their back came up alongside the ship and accompanied it for a time. They looked like floating storage tanks that had equipped themselves with swimming flippers. Their armoured heads were flat and squat with pointed snouts, their eyes were bleak little white slits, their underslung jaws seemed extremely unforgiving. Lawler was at the rail watching them when Onyos Felk appeared at his side and said, “Can I talk to you for a minute, doc?”
Felk was First Family, like Lawler, a distinction that meant nothing at all now that the Sorve Island community had taken to the sea. The mapkeeper was something like fifty-five years old, a dour little short-legged heavy-boned man who had never married. Supposedly he knew a great deal about the geography of Hydros and the way of the sea, and if things had gone differently over the years it could easily have been Felk and not Nid Delagard who controlled the Sorve shipyard; but the Felks had a reputation for bad luck and, sometimes, poor judgement.
“You not feeling well, Onyos?” Lawler asked.
“You won’t be either, when you hear what I’ve got to say. Let’s go down below.”
From his compartment in the forecastle Felk produced a small greenish globe, a sea-chart, though nothing much like the elaborate clockwork one that belonged to Delagard. This one had to be wound up with a little wooden key and the position of its islands had to be reset by hand every time it started up: a joke, compared with Delagard’s spectacular device. After a few moments spent adjusting it Felk held it out toward Lawler and said, “All right. Look closely, here. This is Sorve, over here. This is Grayvard, all the way around here to the northwest. This is the route we’ve been travelling.”
The lettering on the chart was cramped and faded and very hard to read. The islands were so close to one another that it wasn’t easy for Lawler to make clear sense of what he was seeing even where he could make out the labels. But he followed the line of Felk’s pointing finger westward around the globe, and as the mapkeeper retraced the journey Lawler began to translate the symbols on the chart into an understanding of the shape of their journey.
“This is where we were when the net grabbed Struvin. Here’s where we saw the Gillies building that new island. Now, this here is where we entered the Yellow Sea, and this is where we were when the rammerhorns attacked us the first time. We ran into that big tidal surge over here, and it knocked us a little way off course, like this. You following me, doc?”
“Keep going.”
“This is the Green Sea here. Just beyond it is that place where the coral was growing. Here’s where we passed those two islands, the Gillie one and then the one that Delagard said was Thetopal. This is where we hit the three-day windstorm that scattered the fleet. The hagfish were swarming over here. This is where we lost the Golden Sun.” Felk’s stubby finger was far around the curve of the little globe by now. “Are you beginning to notice anything a little strange?”
“Show me where Grayvard is, again?”
“Up here. Northwest of Sorve.”
“Am I reading things wrong, or is there some reason having to do with the currents why we’re sailing due west along the equator instead of on a northerly diagonal toward Grayvard?”
“We aren’t sailing due west,” Felk said.
Lawler frowned. “No?”
“The chart’s very small, and it’s hard to see the latitude lines unless you’re used to them. But in fact we’re not just going due west, we’re actually veering south west.”
“Awayfrom Grayvard?”
“Away from Grayvard, yes.”
“You’re absolutely sure of this?”
An expression of barely suppressed fury appeared for a moment, but only for a moment, in Felk’s small dark eyes. In a tightly controlled voice he said, “Let’s assume for the sake of the discussion that I understand how to read a chart, all right, doc? And that when I get up in the morning and look at where the sun’s coming up, I can remember where it came up the day before and the day before that and where it rose a week ago, and from that I can form at least an approximate idea of whether we’re sailing northwest or southwest, okay?”
“And we’ve been sailing southwest all this time?”
“No. We started out on a proper northwest course. Someplace around the coral sea we levelled off back into tropical waters and began heading due west, right along the equator, getting farther and farther off course every day. I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t realize how wrong it was until we went by those islands. Because that wasn’t Thetopal at all. Not only does the real Thetopal happen to be in high temperate waters right now, up toward Grayvard way, but it’s a round island. This one was curved, remember? In fact the island we passed was really Hygala. Here it is down here.”
“Practically on the equator.”
“Right. We should have been a long way north of Hygala if we were on a Grayvard course. But it was north of us, actually. And when Delagard recalculated our positions after the windstorm broke up the fleet, he got us going again in a sharp southerly veer. We’re down below the Equator now a little way. You can tell that from the position of the Cross, if you know anything about the night sky. Maybe you haven’t been looking, I guess. But for at least the last week we’ve been travelling precisely ninety degrees off our proper course. Would you like to see where we’re heading now? Or have you already figured that out for yourself?”
“Tell me.”
Felk turned the chart. “This is what we’re currently sailing toward. You don’t notice any islands shown here, do you?”
“We’re going into the Empty Sea?”
“We’re already in it. Islands have been sparse ever since we set out. We’ve only passed two, two and a half, on the whole trip, and since Hygala there haven’t been any. There won’t be any, now. The Empty Sea is empty because the currents don’t bring any islands that way. If we were on course for Grayvard, we’d be all the way up here north of the equator, and we’d have passed four different islands by this time. Barinan, Sivalak, Muril, Thetopal. One, two, three, four. Whereas way down over here there’s nothing at all once we’re beyond Hygala.”
Lawler contemplated the quadrant of the chart that Felk had turned toward him. He saw the little crescent shape that was Hygala; to the west and south of it he saw only nothingness and nothingness and more nothingness, and then, far away around the bend of the little globe, the dark splotch that was the Face of the Waters.
“You think Delagard’s made a mistake in figuring our course?”
“That’s the last thing I think. Delagards have been running ships around this planet since the days this was a penal colony. You know that. He isn’t any more likely to set us on a southwesterly course when he wants to go northwesterly than you are to start spelling “Lawler” wrong when you sign your name.”