“Well, perhaps Ser Olmy makes up for my lapse in that regard,” Randall said.
“We will see,” Salap said.
Nimzhian seemed taken completely by surprise. “There's so much more to study,” she said to Salap, her face wrinkled with concern and disappointment. “Surely we don't have the broad picture yet.”
“No,” Salap conceded. “Yet greater storms are brewing. We believe our time is better spent elsewhere.”
She walked to the door of the porch. For a moment, I thought she might cry. “Half our drawings and paintings are still here.”
“They will be picked up tomorrow. And your supplies will be replenished from ship's stores.”
“I need so little, actually. I've enjoyed this company, all this talk. You're going to Jakarta next?”
“With perhaps one or two other stops, if the situation permits.”
Nimzhian sat in her graceful woven chair. “Is the captain coming back?”
“He expresses his deepest regrets, and says he will never forget our meeting, our association. Your work brightens our expedition.”
“Tell the captain I will miss his company. I admire his dedication. My husband would have enjoyed all of you.” She frowned and shook her head. “You seemed so interested in the palaces, so eager to understand them. Why, they could easily take years to study.”
“It is not entirely my wish that we leave,” Salap said. “As I said, there are pressures.”
“When you leave, will the Brionists come?” Nimzhian asked, her blue eyes wide. She lifted her hand and Salap immediately clasped it in both of his, a courtly gesture. Randall stood in the doorway, tall and stooped, lost in his own thoughts.
“I doubt they will stop here if they see the island is barren,” Salap said.
“But if scientists arrive, Brionist scientists, would you mind if I am candid with them, as well?”
“Not at all,” Salap said. “It is your duty. I hope truth will make us all reasonable. This is no time for division and war.”
The third boat had returned, carrying Shirla, Meissner, Ry Diem, and Thornwheel. The replacement party had hiked from the beach to the orphan grove and met us beside the pond as we left the house.
Shirla and I had a moment to talk as Salap relayed instructions to Thornwheel.
“We passed the captain's boat,” she said. “He said we're leaving, but to come ashore and keep Nimzhian company. He looks proper serious. Anything you can tell us, now that you're rank?”
I tried for a conciliatory smile. She gave in return a sharp sniff.
“Shatro looked like he wanted to kill somebody, and Shimchisko like he wanted to die. Is everybody crazy?”
I shook my head. “Pressures from across the seas,” I said, “and that's the main reason.”
“Brionists?”
I nodded.
“Where are we going, then?”
“To Jakarta. After that, to Athenai.”
“No lush silvas for me and thee, hm, Olmy, sir?”
She was clearly in a dirty mood. I found my own mood too complicated to tolerate any unpleasantry. I patted her arm and got in step behind Salap as we left the valley. Nimzhian watched after us, mouth open, head shaking slightly from side to side. Then she fell to talking with Shirla and Ry Diem.
We moved the specimens from the cave to the second boat and rowed them over mildly choppy waters to the ship. There, we carried them under blankets to the captain's quarters, where they were stowed in a locker behind the boxes of specimens already put aboard. A padlock was provided, and a bolt, and Randall installed them and handed the key to Salap.
“We will sacrifice one specimen to a general anatomical study this evening,” Salap said. “Olmy, you will assist.”
I went topside and observed the starboard watch performing their afternoon duties, clambering up the trees to prepare the sails for the next leg of the voyage. I felt a strong urge to join them. But I had made significant progress, and there was no returning to the comforts of an apprentice's life.
Twilight would be on us soon, and the sailor's hours of rest.
I thought of the gate opener's words in the Way. I look for things of interest to humans, Ser Olmy, and I find them.
If the captain was going to have an audience with Lenk, perhaps I could come along. I would be that much closer to finding the clavicle.
At dawn, one last party of twelve went to the island to deliver Nimzhian's promised supplies. I accompanied the party on the longboat. Shatro seemed resigned this morning to the shift in ranks. He sat on his thwart and pulled his oar with apparent good humor. Shimchisko, Kissbegh, Cham, and French the navigator were also on the boat. French wanted to check a few last elevations.
Nimzhian sat on her porch, barely glancing at us as we deposited boxes of food and supplies. Kissbegh and Cham began to stow the boxes beneath a shelter behind the house. French spoke to the old woman, but she merely nodded, saying little in return. He then went off into the interior for a few hours, accompanied by Shatro.
Nimzhian stood up after they had left and waved for Shirla and me to come up on the porch.
“I've been doing a great deal of thinking,” she said, “Could you relay my thoughts to Salap? They are not very complicated, certainly not complete.”
“I'll try,” I said.
“You're junior among the researchers, aren't you?” Nimzhian asked.
“Yes.”
Shirla gave me a wry, brief smile.
“I was junior aboard the Hanno, as well. Marrying Yeshova was a good social move for me. You and I haven't spoken much, but I feel it's right to talk with you. You'll take my thoughts to Randall and the captain. The captain ... may not be very clear about what is actually happening here. As for you, my dear Shirla, it's been so wonderful speaking with the women...”
Nimzhian's eyes moistened. “I must stay here. I'll miss the company, but my life is here. Yeshova is still here, his spirit.”
Shirla took her hand and stroked it. Nimzhian leaned her head back and closed her eyes. She seemed to have aged ten years since we arrived. Duty had kept her going this long; I wondered if she would pass on one final secret, and then be ready to die.
“Do you realize how simple and primitive all life on Lamarckia is? How delicately balanced? Yeshova and I, the more we explored and learned, became more and more astonished at the delicacy and crudity of Martha. It is all like a dream. And then we wake up.”
“Why like a dream?” Shirla asked.
“There is no competition or synergy between animals and plants to propel change. All change comes from within, from the observers, whatever and wherever they may be—queens or factories or palace wombs. And there's precious little competition between the ecoi. Day in, day out, nearly all of life on this planet struggles simply to get enough energy to stay alive ... Something is missing, some vital strategy or trick. Lamarckia may someday blossom. But are the hidden designers creative enough to supply what is missing?”
“Maybe we're what's missing,” Shirla said. She did not know about the half-formed skeletons. “But now we're here. The queens—the observers have to learn how to use us.”
“Admirably homocentric,” Nimzhian said softly, eyes staring between us dreamily. “That is part of our strength, to always place ourselves at the center. But despite all recent evidence...” She looked at me sharply, resenting the secrecy imposed by the captain. “Despite that, I do not think we are the missing element. I believe it is a technique, a trick, none of the ecoi have stumbled across. Poor Martha—so reliant on the stingy trace elements ... Martha did not have the strength to survive when things changed.”
She sat forward now, and gripped Shirla's hand tightly. “What is missing on Martha's Island, and everywhere else we've visited on Lamarckia?”
“What?” I asked.
“Green,” she said. “Brilliant, lovely green. Shirla, you were born here, and you spend little time thinking about Earth. But Earth was a green world.”
12
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For two days after we left Martha's Island, the ocean overside and to the horizon lay glass-smooth and the still air hung hot and wet and smelled stale. Thunderheads towered in the west. Each evening, chores done—choke-oiling the decks, tightening the standing rigging yet again to take in a few centimeters slack (mostly, I think, a figment of Soterio's imagination), and spreading dragnets to catch samples (the ocean here was barren and the nets came up empty)—the crew not on night watch ate cold freechunk and dried fruit and drank mat fiber beer in the mess, then lay out on the deck as they had the day before, as they might the next day and for a thousand years after. Each took a piece of the deck for his or her territory. As they lay, flat and still, they watched the few unfortunates still in the rigging or hauling on sheets and braces and halyards, and spoke softly among themselves.
I stood on the puppis, waiting for the stifling laboratory below to cool. The researchers met in the laboratory next to the captain's cabin each day several hours after sunset, working in the coolest portion of the night, sometimes into the next morning, dissecting and measuring the components of a humanoid skeleton. This night, however, the air on deck was not much better than the air below. We all hoped for a cooling breeze, but no relief came.
Randall did not expect the discovery to stay secret for long, and it did not. The ship was dispirited. Randall sensed it; the captain was too preoccupied to care. Shimchisko carried the burden of his knowledge badly. While not telling the truth of the matter even to Ibert, his best friend, he had let on that something very bad had been found on Martha's Island, something important to all of them. The crew picked Ry Diem and the sailmaker Meissner—surrogate mother and father as they had become—to extract more from the captain and the researchers.
I felt guilty at not volunteering the information, but my allegiances had shifted, taking me away from the crew. Ry Diem and Meissner petitioned Randall, and Randall spoke to the captain in private. Finally he gathered a meeting of the entire crew and provided full details of what had been found on Martha's Island, in the palaces of the still-theoretical queens.
They were still digesting this news. It changed the way they thought about Lamarckia.
For Keyser-Bach, I thought, this voyage was at an end. He would sacrifice it for the chance at a larger, grander expedition. The captain was seldom seen without an expression of shrewd calculation, already adding up the pieces of equipment he might order made by Lenk's craftsman, or commandeer from around Elizabeth and Tasman. We had only to proceed to Jakarta and report our findings to Lenk's officers. The captain's cause—the cause of science and exploration on Lamarckia—would be elevated beyond all expectations.
At midnight, Salap climbed up onto the puppis, weary and oppressed by the heat, bare to the waist, brown skin shining in the lamplight. “We might as well get started. It isn't going to get any cooler.” Shatro, Cassir, Thornwheel, and I followed him below, to resume our studies of the homunculi.
Cutting cross-sections through the limbs, we found fibrous polysaccharides, not true calcium-rich bone. The “head” was made of three sections, and where the brain would have rested in a human, there lay a soggy lump of oily tissue supported by a mat of thin, translucent fibers. Cassir, who had had extensive medical training in Jakarta, commented: “Whatever Martha learned from sampling humans, she didn't learn how to make a brain.”
The captain performed this work with grim resolve. He did not like these poor imitations. They were his ticket, his shining hope, but it was obvious he regarded them less with scientific dispassion than revulsion.
Shatro, Thornwheel, and Cassir arranged these dissections so that I performed the simplest and least elevated tasks. I made sketches of the separated pieces of the pseudo-skeleton, laid thin sheets of gridded paper over them, and compared the dimensions with those for human bones. I fetched water for all, and mixed solutions for preserving the specimens.
After another few hours of work, Salap dismissed the researchers. I came up on deck and found the crew as I had left them, sprawled under the bright early-morning stars, the double oxbow rising, one lone moon casting a wan light in the west, sinking fast. They were restless, and most were awake and still talking.
I heard Kissbegh's scratchy tones and walked forward to listen. “If we're all going to be replaced by scions,” he said, “then why did Lenk bring us here?”
“He didn't know,” Ry Diem said with weary disdain.
“No, I mean, we've all been taught we owe so much to Able Lenk, for taking us away from the ‘distortions and presumptions of Thistledown.’ That's what my teachers called it.”
“They were right,” Shimchisko said. “Thistledown would have been worse.”
“But we're all going to die here,” Kissbegh said. “How could that be better, and why didn't Lenk at least sense what he was getting his people into? Aren't great people supposed to be lucky?”
“We don't know we're going to die,” I heard Shirla say. She sounded sleepy.
“If the zones rise up against us...” Kissbegh persisted.
“We don't know that, either. We don't know what Martha's queens wanted to do,” Shirla said. Her voice carried through the night, clear and sensible. I wanted to go down among them and sit next to her. We had not spoken for some days.
I felt more at home with the sailors than I had with any other people in my adult life—but I was no longer one of them. Their talk seemed at once naive and perfect—the talk of humans who lived their lives in a direct and simple fashion, without the kinks and knots I had twisted into mine.
“I wish I had a woman who loved me back home,” Kissbegh said. “I've always been too much the clown to make friends or attract serious women.”
“I'm your friend,” Ridjel said.
“You're no woman,” Shankara observed placidly.
“Thank our fate,” Ry Diem murmured.
“Yes, you're my friend,” Kissbegh said, “but you're here, and if I die, you'll probably die, too. I want someone alive to remember me.”
“My wife's a good woman,” Shankara said. “But she's a perfect sailor's wife. Right now that makes me sad.”
“Why?” Shirla asked.
“If I don't come back, she'll miss me for a while, but she'll get along. My being gone won't tear her heart out.”
“It's the way,” Ry Diem said, in a voice intended to soothe.
“I'd like someone to always miss me, always think of me,” Shankara continued. “My wife will find another husband and he'll fill her heart as much as I've ever filled it. Not that she's uncaring...”
“If I had a good woman on shore,” Ridjel said, “I'd love her so hard and so long she'd never forget me. Her heart would break if I didn't come home.”
“All memory's like this ocean,” Ry Diem said. A short silence followed as everyone thought this over, and then decided to ignore it—it could not be riddled quickly enough.
“Will Lamarckia remember us?” Shimchisko asked.
The talk turned to how much Lamarckia knew about each of us, and how much the queen (or now, the queens) of Elizabeth's Land or Petain would keep us in some sort of biological memory if we did not return to Calcutta or Jakarta ... or, by implication, if they actually did get around to replacing us. Shimchisko began to speculate wildly. He wondered whether they would duplicate us so completely we might live again, even if we died.
Randall stepped up behind me. “They're getting far too metaphysical,” he complained in a low voice. “Shimchisko's become a very religious fellow. But it's infecting us all.”
I nodded, but asked myself who, back on Thistledown, would ever remember me...
On Lamarckia, I would leave no impression at all.
My homesickness for Thistledown had become a dark shadow, mingling doubt and dream, wish and self-disgust. The flaws in my armor multiplied and were glaringly apparent: I did not know who or what I was, my past seemed a confused jumble, my present a mess I would never successfully resolve.
If I was any examp
le, I doubted Lamarckia's ecoi could learn anything useful from humans, yet Nimzhian's last words before we left the island haunted me.
Lamarckia's marvels were truly simple and delicate, as if she had suffered some natural handicap at the beginning of her time. She had flowered in a wonderful but hesitant way.
Our natural passengers—the selected bacteria and viruses humans found valuable—had left no mark on Lamarckia's ecoi. But we ourselves were a kind of infection, injected into the planet's tissues by the most sophisticated of delivery systems—the Way itself, an infinitely long syringe with infinitely many openings. What would I report to my superiors in the Axis City and on Thistledown, if I could make a report now?
Lamarckia is still healthy. But humans and the ecoi will change each other immeasurably, and very soon.
Lamarckia is not for us.
We are far too robust.
We come from a green planet.
I did not have the luxury of time. To preserve Lamarckia, I had to act quickly. I had to locate Lenk's clavicle and report my findings to the Hexamon soon.
Fifteen days out from Martha's Island, our batteries drained, our windscrews idle, sharp-eyed Ibert stood his watch on the maintree top. Late in the morning, he spotted something on the horizon, and called down to the master. I sat repairing a dragnet on the forecastle deck near the bowsprit.
Soterio pulled himself out of his hammock belowdecks and groggily followed Randall forward. The captain stayed below. Randall surveyed the horizon following Ibert's directions—fine on the starboard quarter. I stood and shaded my eyes against the steady beat of the sun. At first, I could not see anything, but soon I resolved a thin line of smoke, and then another.
“No land here,” Ry Diem said, coming forward. “Couldn't be fires.” Shirla and Shankara followed, then Cham and Shimchisko. Soterio trailed Randall like a faithful dog, a worried expression on his dark-bearded features.
Salap emerged on deck, as elegant and seemingly unconcerned as ever. He glanced at the group of us near the bow, then sauntered around the skylight to join Randall.