Lavon knelt beside them. No doubt of it, the stuff was seaweed of some sort, each flat fleshy strand about as long as a man, about as wide as a forearm, about as thick as a finger. It twitched and jerked convulsively, as though on strings, but its motions grew perceptibly slower from moment to moment as it dried, and the brilliant colors were fading quickly.
“Scoop up some more,” Joachil Noor told the Skandars. “And this time, dump it in a tub of sea-water to keep it alive.”
The Skandars did not move. “The stench—such a filthy stench—” one of the hairy beings grunted.
Joachil Noor walked toward them—the short wiry woman looked like a child beside the gigantic creatures—and waved her hand brusquely. The Skandars, shrugging, limbered to their task.
Sinnabor Lavon said to her, “What do you make of it?”
“Algae. Some unknown species, but everything’s unknown this far out at sea. The color changes are interesting. I don’t know whether they’re caused by pigment fluctuations or simply result from optical tricks, the play of light over the shifting epidermal layers.”
“And the movements? Algae don’t have muscles.”
“Plenty of plants are capable of motion. Minor oscillations of electrical current, causing variances in columns of fluid within the plant’s structure—you know the sensitivos of northwestern Zimroel? You shout at them and they cringe. Sea-water’s an excellent conductor, these algae must pick up all sorts of electrical impulses. We’ll study them carefully.” Joachil Noor smiled. “I tell you they come as a gift from the Divine. Another week of empty sea and I’d have jumped overboard.”
Lavon nodded. He had been feeling it too: that hideous killing boredom, that frightful choking feeling of having condemned himself to an endless journey to nowhere. Even he, who had given seven years of his life to organizing this expedition, who was willing to spend all the rest of it carrying it to completion, even he, in this fifth year of the voyage, paralyzed by listlessness, numb with apathy—
“Tonight,” he said, “give us a report, eh? Preliminary findings. Unique new species of seaweed.”
Joachil Noor signaled and the Skandars hoisted the tub of seaweed to their broad backs and carried it off toward the laboratory. The three biologists followed.
“There’ll be plenty of it for them to study,” said Vonnecht. The first mate pointed. “Look, there! The sea ahead is thick with it!”
“Too thick, perhaps?” Mikdal Hasz said.
Sinnabor Lavon turned to the chronicler, a dry-voiced little man with pale eyes and one shoulder higher than the other. “What do you mean?”
“I mean fouled rotors, captain. If the seaweed gets much thicker. There are tales from Old Earth that I’ve read, of oceans where the weeds were impenetrable, where ships became hopelessly enmeshed, their crews living on crabs and fishes and eventually dying of thirst, and the vessels drifting on and on for hundreds of years with skeletons aboard—”
Chief Navigator Galimoin snorted. “Fantasy. Fable.”
“And if it happens to us?” asked Mikdal Hasz.
Vormecht said, “How likely is that?”
Lavon realized they were all looking at him. He stared at the sea. Yes, the weeds did appear thicker; beyond the bow they gathered in bunched clumps, and their rhythmic writhings made the flat and listless surface of the water seem to throb and swell. But broad channels lay between each clump. Was it possible that these weeds could engulf so capable a ship as the Spurifon? There was silence on the deck. It was almost comic: the dread menace of the seaweed, the tense officers divided and contentious, the captain required to make the decision that might mean life or death—
The true menace, Lavon thought, is not seaweed but boredom. For months the journey had been so uneventful that the days had become voids that had to be filled with the most desperate entertainments. Each dawn the swollen bronze-green sun of the tropics rose out of Zimroel, by noon it blazed overhead out of a cloudless sky, in the afternoon it plunged toward the inconceivably distant horizon, and the next day it was the same. There had been no rain for weeks, no changes of any kind in the weather. The Great Sea filled all the universe. They saw no land, not even a scrap of island this far out, no birds, no creatures of the water. In such an existence an unknown species of seaweed became a delicious novelty. A ferocious restlessness was consuming the spirits of the voyagers, these dedicated and committed explorers who once had shared Lavon’s vision of an epic quest and who now were grimly and miserably enduring the torment of knowing that they had thrown away their lives in a moment of romantic folly. No one had expected it to be like this, when they had set out to make the first crossing in history of the Great Sea that occupied nearly half of their giant planet. They had imagined daily adventure, new beasts of fantastic nature, unknown islands, heroic storms, a sky riven by lightning and daubed with clouds of fifty unfamiliar hues. But not this, this grinding sameness, this unvarying repetition of days. Lavon had already begun to calculate the risks of mutiny, for it might be seven or nine or eleven more years before they made landfall on the shores of far-off Alhanroel, and he doubted that there were many on board who had the heart to see it through to the end. There must be dozens who had begun to dream dreams of turning the ship around and heading back to Zimroel; there were times when he dreamed of it himself. Therefore let us seek risks, he thought, and if need be let us manufacture them out of fantasy. Therefore let us brave the peril, real or imagined, of the seaweed. The possibility of danger will awaken us from our deadly lethargy.
“We can cope with seaweed,” Lavon said. “Let’s move onward.”
Within an hour he was beginning to have doubts. From his pacing-place on the bridge he stared warily at the ever-thickening seaweed. It was forming little islands now, fifty or a hundred yards across, and the channels between were narrower. All the surface of the sea was in motion, quivering, trembling. Under the searing rays of an almost vertical sun the seaweed grew richer in color, sliding in a manic way from tone to tone as if pumped higher by the inrush of solar energy. He saw creatures moving about in the tight-packed strands: enormous crablike things, many-legged, spherical, with knobby green shells, and sinuous serpentine animals something like squid, harvesting other lifeforms too small for Lavon to see.
Vormecht said nervously, “Perhaps a change of course—”
“Perhaps,” Lavon said. “I’ll send a lookout up to tell us how far this mess extends.”
Changing course, even by a few degrees, held no appeal for him. His course was set; his mind was fixed; he feared that any deviation would shatter his increasingly frail resolve. And yet he was no monomaniac, pressing ahead without regard to risk. It was only that he saw how easy it would be for the people of the Spurifon to lose what was left of their dedication to the immense enterprise on which they had embarked.
This was a golden age for Majipoor, a time of heroic figures and mighty deeds. Explorers were going everywhere, into the desert barrens of Suvrael and the forests and marshes of Zimroel and the virgin outlands of Alhanroel, and into the archipelagoes and island clusters that bordered the three continents. The population was expanding rapidly, towns were turning into cities and cities into improbably great metropolises, nonhuman settlers were pouring in from the neighboring worlds to seek their fortunes, everything was excitement, change, growth. And Sinnabor Lavon had chosen for himself the craziest feat of all, to cross the Great Sea by ship. No one had ever attempted that. From space one could see that the giant planet was half water, that the continents, huge though they were, were cramped together in a single hemisphere and all the other face of the world was a blankness of ocean. And though it was some thousands of years since the human colonization of Majipoor had begun, there had been work aplenty to do on land, and the Great Sea had been left to itself and to the armadas of sea-dragons that untiringly crossed it from west to east in migrations lasting decades.
But Lavon was in love with Majipoor and yearned to embrace it all. He had traversed it from Amblemo
rn at the foot of Castle Mount to Til-omon an the other shore of the Great Sea; and now, driven by the need to close the circle, he had poured all his resources and energies into outfitting this awesome vessel, as self-contained and self-sufficient as an island, aboard which he and a crew as crazy as himself intended to spend a decade or more exploring that unknown ocean. He knew, and probably they knew too, that they had sent themselves off on what might be an impossible task. But if they succeeded, and brought their argosy safely into harbor on Alhanroel’s eastern coast where no oceanfaring ship had ever landed, their names would live forever.
“Hoy!” cried the lookout suddenly. “Dragons ho! Hoy! Hoy!”
“Weeks of boredom,” Vormecht muttered, “and then everything at once!”
Lavon saw the lookout, dark against the dazzling sky, pointing rigidly north-northwest. He shaded his eyes and followed the outstretched arm. Yes! Great humped shapes, gliding serenely toward them, flukes high, wings held close to their bodies or in a few cases magnificently outspread—
“Dragons!” Galimoin called. “Dragons, look!” shouted a dozen other voices at once.
The Spurifon had encountered two herds of sea-dragons earlier in the voyage: six months out, among the islands that they had named the Stiamot Archipelago, and then two years after that, in the part of the ocean that they had dubbed the Arioc Deep. Both times the herds had been large ones, hundreds of the huge creatures, with many pregnant cows, and they had stayed far away from the Spurifon. But these appeared to be only the outliers of their herd, no more than fifteen or twenty of them, a handful of giant males and the others adolescents hardly forty feet in length. The writhing seaweed now looked inconsequential as the dragons neared. Everyone seemed to be on deck at once, almost dancing with excitement.
Lavon gripped the rail tightly. He had wanted risk for the sake of diversion: well, here was risk. An angry adult sea-dragon could cripple a ship, even one so well defended as the Spurifon, with a few mighty blows. Only rarely did they attack vessels that had not attacked them first, but it had been known to happen. Did these creatures imagine that the Spurifon was a dragon-hunting ship? Each year a new herd of sea-dragons passed through the waters between Piliplok and the Isle of Sleep, where hunting them was permitted, and fleets of dragon-ships greatly thinned their numbers then; these big ones, at least, must be survivors of that gamut, and who knew what resentments they harbored? The Spurifon’s harpooners moved into readiness at a signal from Lavon.
But no attack came. The dragons seemed to regard the ship as a curiosity, nothing more. They had come here to feed. When they reached the first clumps of seaweed they opened their immense mouths and began to gulp the stuff down by the bale, sucking in along with it the squid-things and the crab-things and all the rest. For several hours they grazed noisily amid the seaweed; and then, as if by common agreement, they slipped below the surface and within minutes were gone.
A great ring of open sea now surrounded the Spurifon.
“They must have eaten tons of it,” Lavon murmured. “Tons!”
“And now our way is clear,” said Galimoin.
Vormecht shook his head. “No. See, captain? The dragon-grass, farther out. Thicker and thicker and thicker!”
Lavon stared into the distance. Wherever he looked there was a thin dark line along the horizon.
“Land,” Galimoin suggested. “Islands—atolls—”
“On every side of us?” Vormecht said scornfully. “No, Galimoin. We’ve sailed into the middle of a continent of this dragon-grass stuff. The opening that the dragons ate for us is just a delusion. We’re trapped!”
“It’s only seaweed,” Galimoin said. “If we have to, we’ll cut our way through it.”
Lavon eyed the horizon uneasily. He was beginning to share Vormecht’s discomfort. A few hours ago the dragon-grass had amounted to mere isolated strands, then scattered patches and clumps; but now, although the ship was for the moment in clear water, it did indeed look as if an unbroken ring of the seaweed had come to enclose them fore and aft. And yet could it possibly become thick enough to block their passage?
Twilight was descending. The warm heavy air grew pink, then quickly gray. Darkness rushed down upon the voyagers out of the eastern sky.
“We’ll send out boats in the morning and see what there is to see,” Lavon announced.
That evening after dinner Joachil Noor reported on the dragon-grass: a giant alga, she said, with an intricate biochemistry, well worth detailed investigation. She spoke at length about its complex system of color-nodes, its powerful contractile capacity. Everyone on board, even some who had been lost in fogs of hopeless depression for weeks, crowded around to peer at the specimens in the tub, to touch them, to speculate and comment. Sinnabor Lavon rejoiced to see such liveliness aboard the Spurifon once again after these weeks of doldrums.
He dreamed that night that he was dancing on the water, performing a vigorous solo in some high-spirited ballet. The dragon-grass was firm and resilient beneath his flashing feet.
An hour before dawn he was awakened by urgent knocking at his cabin door. A Skandar was there—Skeen, standing third watch. “Come quickly—the dragon-grass, captain—”
The extent of the disaster was evident even by the faint pearly gleams of the new day. All night the Spurifon had been on the move and the dragon-grass had been on the move, and now the ship lay in the heart of a tight-woven fabric of seaweed that seemed to stretch to the ends of the universe. The landscape that presented itself as the first green streaks of morning tinted the sky was like something out of a dream: a single unbroken carpet of a trillion trillion knotted strands, its surface pulsing, twitching, throbbing, trembling, and its colors shifting everywhere through a restless spectrum of deep assertive tones. Here and there in this infinitely entangled webwork its inhabitants could be seen variously scuttling, creeping, slithering, crawling, clambering, and scampering. From the densely entwined masses of seaweed rose an odor so piercing it seemed to go straight past the nostrils to the back of the skull. No clear water was in sight. The Spurifon was becalmed, stalled, as motionless as if in the night she had sailed a thousand miles overland into the heart of the Suvrael desert.
Lavon looked toward Vormecht—the first mate, so querulous and edgy all yesterday, now bore a calm look of vindication—and toward Chief Navigator Galimoin, whose boisterous confidence had given way to a tense and volatile frame of mind, obvious from his fixed, rigid stare and the grim clamping of his lips.
“I’ve shut the engines down,” Vormecht said. “We were sucking in dragon-grass by the barrel. The rotors were completely clogged almost at once.”
“Can they be cleared?” Lavon asked.
“We’re clearing them,” said Vormecht. “But the moment we start up again, we’ll be eating seaweed through every intake.”
Scowling, Lavon looked to Galimoin and said, “Have you been able to measure the area of the seaweed mass?”
“We can’t see beyond it, captain.”
“And have you sounded its depth?”
“It’s like a lawn. We can’t push our plumbs through it.”
Lavon let his breath out slowly. “Get boats out right away. We need to survey what we’re up against. Vormecht, send two divers down to find out how deep the seaweed goes, and whether there’s some way we can screen our intakes against it. And ask Joachil Noor to come up here.” The little biologist appeared promptly, looking weary but perversely cheerful. Before Lavon could speak she said, “I’ve been up all night studying the algae. They’re metal-fixers, with a heavy concentration of rhenium and vanadium in their—”
“Have you noticed that we’re stopped?”
She seemed indifferent to that. “So I see.”
“We find ourselves living out an ancient fable, in which ships are caught by impenetrable weeds and become derelicts. We may be here a long while.”
“It will give us a chance to study this unique ecological province, captain.”
“The rest
of our lives, perhaps.”
“Do you think so?” asked Joachil Noor, startled at last.
“I have no idea. But I want you to shift the aim of your studies, for the time being. Find out what kills these weeds, aside from exposure to the air. We may have to wage biological warfare against them if we’re ever going to get out of here. I want some chemical, some method, some scheme, that’ll clear them away from our rotors.”
“Trap a pair of sea-dragons,” Joachil Noor said at once, “and chain one to each side of the bow, and let them eat us free.”
Sinnabor Lavon did not smile. “Think about it more seriously,” he said, “and report to me later.”
He watched as two boats were lowered, each bearing a crew of four. Lavon hoped that the outboard motors would be able to keep clear of the dragon-grass, but there was no chance of that: almost immediately the blades were snarled, and it became necessary for the boatmen to unship the oars and beat a slow, grueling course through the weeds, while pausing occasionally to drive off with clubs the fearless giant crustaceans that wandered over the face of the choked sea. In fifteen minutes the boats were no more than a hundred yards from the ship. Meanwhile a pair of divers clad in breathing-masks had gone down, one Hjort, one human, hacking openings in the dragon-grass alongside the ship and vanishing into the clotted depths. When they failed to return after half an hour Lavon said to the firstmate, “Vormecht, how long can men stay underwater wearing those masks?”
“About this long, captain. Perhaps a little longer for a Hjort, but not much.”
“So I thought.”
“We can hardly send more divers after them, can we?”
“Hardly,” said Lavon bleakly. “Do you imagine the submersible would be able to penetrate the weeds?”
“Probably not.”
“I doubt it too. But we’ll have to try it. Call for volunteers.”
The Spurifon carried a small underwater vessel that it employed in its scientific research. It had not been used in months, and by the time it could be readied for descent more than an hour had passed; the fate of the two divers was certain; and Lavon felt the awareness of their deaths settling about his spirit like a skin of cold metal. He had never known anyone to die except from extreme old age, and the strangeness of accidental mortality was a hard thing for him to comprehend, nearly as hard as the knowledge that he was responsible for what had happened.