A Company of Heroes Book Four: The Scientist (18 page)

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

REUNIONS

“You don’t want to be a merperson any longer?” asked the Triton in astonishment. Bronwyn felt terrible: he looked so hurt.

“I’m really very grateful for what you’ve done for me,” she said. “I mean, you saved my life and all. I can’t forget that, of course. But there are some important things that I must do and I cannot do them as a mermaid. In fact, I have to admit to you that I’m not really certain that I have it in me to be a mermaid.”

The Triton let out a long stream of bubbles in lieu of a sigh. “Don’t worry. It often comes to this, once or twice a century or so. It’s been a pleasure having you among us, but I certainly wouldn’t consider forcing our hospitality on you. You were welcome to come and you are equally welcome to go.”

“Thank you very much, that’s very decent of you.”

“Don’t mention it,” he replied as he turned to go.

“Ah, er, sir! Ah, when might I expect to, ah, change back?”

“You have,” he said, over his retreating shoulder and with those words Bronwyn discovered that breathing water was no longer the soothing pleasure it had heretofore been.
Holy Musrum!
she thought, in sudden panic,
I’m thirty feet down!

Before she knew what had happened, she was thrashing on the surface, coughing, spitting and retching, her lungs on fire in spite of the water they had contained. She also realized belatedly that half of the thrashing was being accomplished by a pair of legs. As soon as she had managed to gulp down a few more quarts of oxygen her panic receded, even though all of her old distrust and disliking of being immersed in seawater returned. She had forgotten just how much she dis-liked the ocean. She brushed her hair, dark copper once again, from her eyes and glared bleakly at the horizon which, from her fish’s eye vantage, was only a few thousand feet distant and heaved like a blanket having lint shaken from it. There was a regular, heavy pounding that she assumed was the sound of her own heart.
This is fine,
she thought ruefully,
I’m a hundred miles from land.
She turned clumsily and saw, with considerable relief, that the land that she had labled Tudela’s Island was not more than a few hundred yards distant and that the pounding she had heard was the surf breaking against its cliffs. Its ragged black rocks looked not much less bleak than the remote and empty horizon. She gazed with some foreboding at crags that yawned at her like jagged, shattered teeth until she spied a tiny crescent of greyish sand between two basalt monoliths. She knew that she would be fortunate indeed to choose the proper wave from among those that were thundering against the shore, otherwise she would be smashed against the rocks like a pea against a molar. Bronwyn’s repugnance of drowning, however, easily overrode her fear of pulverization and she began paddling toward the forbidding coast, which, however forbidding it might appear was more attractive than open, bottomless sea. As a huge swell lifted her on its glassy crest, she aimed her body as best she could for the diminuitive target. As the bottom shelved, the swell began to experience drag and its crest overtook its trough, quickly turning into a mountainous, foaming breaker that rushed at the beach with much of the sound and inexorable fury of an express locomotive. It threw the princess toward the shore like a lancer heaving his weapon. For the briefest moment, Bronwyn saw the waterline sucked back from the beach, exposing yards of dark, wet sand, then there was a deafening explosion of water and foam, something slammed into her chest like a demolition ball swinging into a one-story stucco bungalow and she was bounced from one hard object to another like a bearing ball in a pachinko machine. Then she realized that she was breathing air for the second time that day and lying on firm, dry sand.

She scrambled further from the crashing breakers into a sheltering cleft between two huge rocks, before thinking to examine herself for completeness. Surprisingly, there seemed to be nothing broken, only enough bruises to make her look like an abused banana and bloody abrasions over her chest and thighs where she had hit the beach like a piece of wood on a belt sander. The beach, she discovered, was not sandy, but rather covered with a coarse, sintery material that resembled crumbled black glass. Still, even though her body had been scraped and bruised and bloodied, it was surprisingly pleasant to see it familiarly whole again, and she flexed her long legs luxuriously, enjoying as for the first time their hinged prolongations. Her feet looked perfect for the first time in her life and she wiggled her toes as she reintroduced herself to each individually.

There was an abundance of shellfish, she discovered, clinging to the glassy, black rocks, well above the level of the surging water, a fact that reminded her that the tide must be at the ebb and that the little beach must often be inundated. She pried several of the mussels from their homes using a blade-like sliver of obsidian and then used the same tool to pry open the shells so that she could consume the hapless bivalves they contained.

She now had to face two difficulties, in order of precedence: how to get up the wild-looking cliffs and onto the island proper, and once there how to find Professor Wittenoom. There would of course be a third problem, shelter, food and water, should the second problem remain unsolved for very long. The solution to the first problem, of course, was only a matter of exertion and a little caution and, in fact, required only an hour or two to accomplish. The climb was only made more difficult than it might have been due to the combination of her nudity and the sharpness of the broken lava, but on the other hand was easier because she discovered numerous natural, sand-paved paths winding upward through the cliffs.

Whatever good humor she might have regained evaporated like a drop of ether on a hot stovetop when she discovered the nature of the island.

Skupshtina Island, to give the proper name to what she had been terming Tudela’s Island, rested very nearly in the geographical center of the Great Sea and was something like six or seven thousand miles from significant land in any direction (a particularly dismal fact was that if one were to head due north or south the next land one would encounter, after traveling across some twenty-four thousand utterly empty miles, would be the opposite shore of Skupshtina Island). It squats toad-like astride the equator, so its perpetual summer is tempered neither by spring nor autumn. Bronwyn had seen nothing comparable to its bleak landscape since she had last seen the great cinderfields that surrounded the factories of the Transmoltus. Even the blasted and sterile landscape of the moon had not had the depressing countenance of Skupshtina Island; the satellite’s desolation was part and parcel with its character, the island was a lifeless anomaly in the midst of life. The island looked as though Musrum had used it to grind out a cigar as large as an ocean liner, as though the island were a kind of titanic ashtray.

Skupshtina Island is, as the princess eventually discovered, a desolate, whithered, used-up thing. It is emphatically uninhabitable. Only the outcasts of the animal kingdom find solace among its clinkers: spiders, lizards and snakes. Even the habitually unparticular seabirds shun the barren ashfields and the island’s cliffs are uninhabited by their nests. At night the sultry air is not disturbed by howl, chirp, bark, grunt, whine, or yowl, neither warble, tweet, honk, chirrup, peep nor chitter. A prolonged hiss is the only sound of life.

Skupshtina’s coast is bound by cliffs that are like the piles of slag found outside an ironworks; they reminded Bronwyn of the ruined ironworks themselves, whose abandoned and collapsing skeletons she had seen in the Transmoltus, like the complex carcasses of useless and discarded antedeluvian monsters. The sea beats incessantly and futilely at these vitreous and unyielding ramparts, so that a pall of grey, salty mist perpetually hangs over them, making them black and treacherous with a peculiarly slimy moss, and the lugubrious rumble of the waves is hollow and unconsolable.

The island’s soil is a sterile combination of black sand and a gritty lava ash not un-like ground glass and the only representatives of the vegetable kingdom were, as far as Bronwyn could see, a virtually unbroken tangle of wiry, grey-green trees, -like a military barricade of razor-barbed concertina wire, that grew nearly to the brink of the cliffs. Where these bristling shrubs were not growing there were stunted and belligerent cacti. Beyond the trees, near where she imagined the center of the island to be, a low, black cone rose, from the truncated crest of which billowed thick rolls of white vapor, as though it were the industrious factory upon whose waste heap the princess now found herself, like a lone seagull on a landfill. The landscape was as unprepossessing as steel wool, but, at least for a short time, she appreciated the warmth of the sun after the spray-chilled, shady path she had been climbing.

At the top of the path she found a wide brook that meandered from the woods to pour with froth and a kind of despairing gurgle into the tangles and grottoes of the moist cliffs, throwing itself over the brink in a kind of suicidal rush, and she drank from it thirstily. The water was warm and slightly sulfurous, but refreshing nevertheless. She decided, in lieu of any better idea, to follow the rivulet into the interior.

The carbonized terrain was flat and only slightly rolling, though broken by thousands of protruding black and red boulders that had evidently been thrown from the central volcano, or created when the ground she was now walking on had been a river of liquid rock, tortured as it cooled like a fracturing ice floe. The stream splashed and meandered its way over, under, around and through these obstacles, Bronwyn had to abandon its banks often in order to take a more circuitous but passable route. She had quickly grown to resent the sun she had so recently welcomed. There was little shade; only a few twisted boulders were large enough for her to sit beneath and these opportunities she welcomed at every presentation. The air was as dry as a furnace and she could feel her body’s moisture being drawn from her as though she were packed in salt. She was thankful for the presence of the stream, and she sucked up its tepid, sulfurous water greedily. She could feel her skin reddening under the incessant glare and was in a considerable quandary: she needed to locate the professor as quickly as possible (she was convinced for no rational reason that she would find him at the center of the island) yet needed water and shelter from the sun; but every halt delayed her arrival. The thought of waiting and traveling after dark occurred to her, but she was as afraid of trying to navigate the treacherous terrain in the night as a blind person would have feared a room full of scythes.

It was nevertheless growing dark before she reached the center of the island and found what lay there.

She had arrived at the brink of a crater, though one that was not at all like the one whose creation involved the vaporization of Rykkla’s circus. This crater, or caldera rather, was shallow in proportion to its breadth, which must have been at least a mile and a half or more; a relatively flat plain surrounded by a steep cliff, not at all un-like the proportions of a frying pan. Not far beyond the opposite rim was the smoldering cinder cone that had served Bronwyn as a guide, which apparently was not as large as it had first appeared. Its perpetual cloud was illuminated by a dull red glow from the crater.

On the level floor of the caldera were perhaps a dozen buildings, ranging in size and elaborateness from wooden shacks to a single large cubical structure made of black volcanic rock and two or three stories high. She saw only a very few people, perhaps only half a dozen or so after diligently watching for more than two hours, she finally concluded that there were no more than that. In none of them did she recognize either the professor or the doctor. It was also obvious, just from its appearance, that the big stone building was Tudela’s headquarters or main laboratory, a conclusion she felt was justified because of the squat tower of steel latticework that rose behind the building that supported a huge black icosidodecahedron (or so she thought; it was actually a rhombitruncated icosidodecahedron). The remaining structures radiated in more or less regular concentric arcs around the central building.

For the first time in hours she remembered that she was naked, unarmed and unequipped with even so much as a notion of what she was going to do. More consumed by hunger and the growing chill of approaching night than by either curiosity or satisfaction, she found shelter in a cleft that overlooked the caldera.

Dusk swept over the island like a sheet of indigo silk and lights began blinking on in the buildings. The air became cooler, though it was fortunately too muggy to be cold. As the sun set, like an orange Musrum had just lobbed at the horizon, the larger moon simultaneously rose above the opposite horizon. Its light flooded the caldera like a cup being filled with pink lemonade. In an hour or so, Bronwyn realized, there would be sufficient illumination to attempt a surreptitious descent. Meanwhile, she curled into as a tight a ball as she could within her sheltering cleft, hugging her legs and resting her chin on her knees, breasts pressed against thighs, feeling her skin bristling with goosebumps, her scabs and sunburn itching, trying her best to think of almost anything but her empty stomach. She nestled nascently within her dark recess like the reticent and contemplative oyster.

As was so often her wont when tired, or when feeling hopeless or depressed, Bronwyn’s thoughts became introspective and morbid. A few stars appeared but were quickly obliterated by the rising moon. She could feel the woods crouched like a beast behind her back. The darkening sky was laced with meteors.

She sighed and tried to think of other things but, to her suprise, the only alternative she could conjure was the realization that she should be missing Gyven very much, but wasn’t. She sighed again and hugged her knees more closely. Overhead, a meteor’s pink trail sizzled. It reminded her of a rocket and that in turn inspired a Thought. She had learned from Professor Wittenoom of the many practical uses that Londeacan engineers and inventors had devised for the newly-developed machine. One of these that fascinated her was the life-saving rocket. A ship in distress, grounded on the rocks off some hazardous coast during a storm, would in the past have been lost because of the impossibility of reaching her. With a life-saving rocket, however, a very light cord could be sent to the shipwrecked crew by tying one end to a large rocket. This light cord would in turn have attached to its nether end another, heavier rope and to the end of this would be attached a substantial cable. Securing this to the ship’s superstructure, a firm link with the shore would be accomplished by means of which the foundering vessel could be evacuated. The ship’s crew would have to restrain their panic when the rocket arrived, however, and resist the temptation to pull the cord on board too quickly. If it snapped, the whole process would have to begin anew, perhaps too late.