But nothing happened. All was peaceful. They were drifting in a time outside of time, silent, calm. It occurred to Lawler now that they must already be dead, that this was the next life in which he had never been able to believe, and he laughed and looked around, hoping to find Father Quillan near by so that he could ask the priest, “Is this what you thought it would be like? An endless suspended drifting? Lying here in the very place where you died, still conscious, with an enormous silence all around you?”
He smiled at his own foolishness. The next life wouldn’t merely be a continuation of this one. This was still the old one. There were his familiar feet; these were his hands, with fading scars on their palms; that was the sound of his own breathing. He was still alive. The ship must still be afloat. The Wave had passed on at last.
“Val?” a voice said. “Val, are you all right?”
“Sundira?”
She came crawling toward him down the narrow passageway, cluttered now by all manner of things that had shaken loose. Her face was very pale. She looked dazed. Her eyes had a frozen glint to them. Lawler stirred, freed himself from a plank that had fallen from somewhere and landed on his chest without his being aware of it, and began to scramble out of his snug hiding-place. They met midway.
“Jesus,” she said softly. “Oh, Jesus God!”
She began to cry. Lawler reached for her and realized he was crying too. They held each other and wept together in the weird dreamlike stillness.
One of the hatches was open and a shaft of light was coming through it. Hand in hand they emerged into the open air.
The ship was upright, seated normally in the water as though nothing at all had happened. The deck was wet and shining as Lawler had never seen it shine before. It looked as if an army of a million deckhands had been swabbing it down for a million years. The wheel-box was still there, the binnacle, the quarterdeck, the bridge. The masts, amazingly, were still in place, though the foremast had lost one of its yards.
Kinverson was already on deck down by the gantry area, and Lawler saw Delagard up by the bow, splayfooted and motionless, stupefied by shock. He seemed rooted to the deck: it was as if he had been standing in that one place all the time that the ship had been swept along in the grip of the Wave. Beyond him to starboard was Onyos Felk, standing in that same stunned immobile way.
One by one the others were leaving their hiding places:
Neyana Golghoz, Dann Henders, Leo Martello, Pilya Braun. Then Gharkid, limping a little from some misadventure belowdecks, and Lis Niklaus, and Father Quillan. They moved about cautiously, shuffling like sleepwalkers, assuring themselves in a tentative way that the ship was still intact, touching the rails, the seatings of the masts, the roof of the forecastle. The only one missing was Dag Tharp. Lawler assumed that he had stayed below to try to make radio contact with the other ships.
The other ships? They were nowhere in sight.
“Look how calm it is,” Sundira said softly.
“Calm, yes. And empty.”
It looked the way the world must have looked on the first day of creation. To all sides stretched a totally featureless sea, grey-blue and tranquil, not a swell in it, not a wave, not a whitecap, not the merest ripple: a placid horizontal nothingness. The passage of the Wave had purged it of all energy.
The sky too was smooth and grey and nearly empty. A single low cloud lay across it in the distant west, with the sun setting behind it. Pale light streamed up from beyond the horizon. Of the storm that had preceded the Wave there was no trace. It had vanished as completely as the Wave itself.
And the other ships? The other ships?
Lawler walked slowly from one side of the vessel to the other and back again. His eyes searched the water for signs and portents: floating timbers, drifting fragments of sail, scattered clothing, even struggling swimmers. He saw nothing. Once before in this voyage, after that other great storm, the three-day gale, he had looked out onto a sea in which no other ship could be seen. That time the fleet had merely been strewn around by the winds, and within hours it had reassembled. Lawler was afraid that it was going to be different this time.
There’s Dag,” Sundira murmured. “My God, look at his face!”
Tharp was coming up the rear hatch now, pale, blank-eyed, slack-jawed, his shoulders stooped and his arms dangling limply. Delagard, breaking from his stasis, whirled and snapped, “Well? What’s the news?”
“Nothing. No news.” Tharp’s voice was a hollow whisper. “Not a sound. I tried and tried. Come in. Goddess, come in. Star, come in, Moons, come in. Cross. This is Queen. Come in, come in, come in.” He sounded half out of his mind. “Not a sound. Nothing.”
Delagard’s jowly face went leaden. His flesh sagged.
“None of them?”
“Nothing, Nid. They won’t come in. They aren’t there.”
“Your radio’s broken.”
“I picked up islands. I got Kentrup. I got Kaggeram. It was a bad Wave, Nid. Really bad.”
“But my ships—!”
“Nothing.”
“My ships. Dag!”
Delagard’s eyes were wild. He charged forward as though he meant to seize Tharp by the shoulders and shake better news out of him. Kinverson stepped between them out of nowhere and held Delagard back, steadying him while he shivered and trembled.
“Go back down,” Delagard ordered the radioman. “Try again.”
“It’s no use,” Tharp said.
“My ships! My ships!” Delagard spun about and ran to the rail. For one startling moment Lawler thought he was going to hurl himself overboard. But he simply wanted to hit something. He made clubs out of his fists and battered them against the rail, again and again, striking with such astonishing force that half a metre of the rail dented, bent, collapsed under the impact. “My ships!” Delagard wailed.
Lawler felt himself beginning to tremble now. The ships, yes. And all those who had been aboard them. He turned to Sundira and saw sympathy in her eyes. She knew what sort of pain he was feeling. But how could she possibly understand, really? They had all been strangers to her. To him, though, they represented his whole past: the substance of his life, for better or for worse. Nicko Thalheim, Nicko’s old father Sandor, Bamber Cadrell, the Sweyners, the Tanaminds, Brondo, the poor crazy Sisters, Volkin, Yanez, Stayvol, everyone, everyone he had ever known, everything, his childhood, his boyhood, his manhood, the custodians of a lifetime’s shared memories, all swept away at once. How could she comprehend that? Had she ever been part of a long-established community? Ever? She had left the island of her birth without giving it a second thought and wandered from place to place, never looking back. You couldn’t know what it was like to lose what you had never had.
“Val—” she said softly.
“Let me be, all right?”
“If I could only help somehow—”
“But you can’t,” Lawler said.
Now darkness was coming on. The Cross was starting to enter the sky, hanging at a curious angle, strangely askew, slanting from southwest to northeast. There was no wind. The Queen of Hydros wallowed languidly in the calm sea. Everyone was still on deck. No one had bothered to rig the sails again, though it was hours since the Wave had passed by. But that scarcely mattered in this stillness, these doldrums.
Delagard turned to Onyos Felk. In a lifeless voice he asked, “Where do you think we are?”
“By dead reckoning, or you want me to get my instruments out?”
“Just take a fucking guess, Onyos.”
“The Empty Sea.”
“I can figure that out for myself. Give me a longitude.”
“You think I’m a magician, Nid?”