Blue Mars (26 page)

A number of men greeted Ely—”Lovely day eh?” “Brilliant”—and began
to unload boxes from his hold.

Ely inquired about the Asian woman from Vlissingen, but the men
shook their heads. “The Jap? She ain’t here, mate.” “They’re saying in
Sheerness she and her group came to Southend.”

“Why would they say that?” “Because that’s what they think
happened.” “That’s what you get listening to people who live underwater.”

“The Paki grandma?” they said at the diesel fuel pump on the other
side of the pier. “She went over to Shoebury-ness, sometime back.”

Ely glanced at Nirgal. “It’s just a few miles east. If she were
here, these men would know.” “Let’s try it then,” Nirgal said.

So after refueling they left the pier, and puttered east through
the mist. From time to time the building-covered hillside was visible to their
left. They rounded a point, turned north. Ely brought them in to another
floating dock, with many fewer boats than had been moored at Southend pier.

“That Chinese gang?” a toothless old man cried. “Gone up to Pig’s
Bay they have! Gave us a greenhouse! Some kind of church.”

“Pig’s Bay’s just the next pier,” Ely said, looking thoughtful as
he wheeled them away from the dock.

So they motored north. The coastline here was entirely composed of
drowned buildings. They had built so close to the sea! Clearly there had been
no reason to fear any change in sea level. And then it had happened; and now
this strange amphibious zone, an intertidal civilization, wet and rocking in
the mist.

A cluster of buildings gleamed at their windows. They had been
filled by the clear bubble material, pumped out and occupied, their upstairs
just above the foamy waves, their downstairs just below. Ely brought the boat
in to a set of linked floating docks, greeted a group of women in smocks and
yellow rain slickers mending a big black net. He cut his engine: “Has the Asian
lady been to see you too then?”

“Oh yeah. She’s down inside, there in the building at the end.”

Nirgal felt his pulse jarring through him. His balance had left
him, he had to hold on to the rail. Over the side, onto the dock. Down to the last
building, a seafront boarding-house or something like, now much broken up and
glimmering in all the cracks; air inside; filled by a bubble. Green plants,
vague and blurry seen through sloshing gray water. He had a hand on Ely’s
shoulder. The little man led him in a door and down narrow stairs, into a room
with one whole wall exposed to the sea, like a dirty aquarium.

A diminutive woman in a rust-colored jumpsuit came through the far
door. White-haired, black-eyed, quick and precise; birdlike. Not Hiroko. She
stared at them.

“Are you the one came over from Vlissingen?” Ely asked, after
glancing up at Nirgal. “The one that’s been building these submariners?”

“Yes,” the woman said. “May I help you?” She had a high voice, a
British accent. She stared at Nirgal without expression. There were other
people in the room, more coming in. She looked like the face he had seen in the
cliffside, in Medusa Vallis. Perhaps there was another Hiroko, a different one,
wandering the two planets building things....

Nirgal shook his head. The air was like a greenhouse gone bad. The
light, so dim. He could barely get back up the stairs. Ely had made their
farewells. Back into the bright mist. Back onto the boat. Chasing wisps. A
ruse, to get him out of Bern. Or an honest mistake. Or a simple fool’s errand.

Ely sat him down in the boat’s cabin, next to a rail. “Ah well.”

Pitching and yawing, through the mist, which closed back down.
Dark dim day on the water, sloshing through the phase change where water and
mist turned into each other, sandwiched between them. Nirgal got a little
drowsy. No doubt she was back on Mars. Doing her work there in her usual
secrecy, yes. It had been absurd to think otherwise. When he got back he would
find her. Yes: it was a goal, a task he gave himself. He would find her and
make her come back out into the open. Make sure she had survived. It was the
only way to be sure, the only way to remove this horrible weight from his
heart. Yes: he would find her.

Then as they motored on over the choppy water, the mist lifted.
Low gray clouds rushed overhead, dropping swirls of rain into the waves. The
tide was ebbing now, and as they crossed the great estuary the flow of the
Thames was released full force. The gray-brown surface of the water was broken
to mush, waves coming from all directions at once, a wild bouncing surface of
foamy dark water, all carried rapidly east, out into the North Sea. And then
the wind turned and poured over the tide, and all the waves were suddenly
rushing out to sea together. Among the long cakes of foam were floating objects
of all kinds: boxes, furniture, roofs, entire houses, capsized boats, pieces of
wood. Flotsam and jetsam. Ely’s crew stood on the deck, leaning over the rails
with grapnels and binoculars, calling back to him to avoid things or to try to
approach them. They were absorbed in the work. “What is all of this stuff?”
Nirgal asked Bly.

“It’s London,” Bly said. “It’s fucking London, washing out to
sea.”

The cloud bottoms rushed east over their heads. Looking around
Nirgal saw many other small boats on the tossing water of the great rivermouth,
salvaging the flotsam or just fishing. Bly waved to some as they passed
through, tooted at others. Horn blasts floated on the wind over the
gray-speckled estuary, apparently signaling messages, as Ely’s crews commented
on each.

Then Kev exclaimed, “Hey what’s that now!” pointing upstream.

Out of a fog bank covering the mouth of the Thames had emerged a
ship with sails, many sails, sails square-rigged on three masts in the
archetypal configuration, deeply familiar to Nirgal even though he had never
seen it before. A chorus of horn blasts greeted this apparition—mad toots, long
sustained blasts, all joining together and sustaining longer and longer, like a
neighborhood of dogs roused and baying at night, warming to their task. Above
them exploded the sharp penetrating blast of Ely’s air horn, joining the
chorus—Nirgal had never heard such a shattering sound, it hurt his ears!
Thicker air, denser sound—Ely was grinning, his fist shoved against the
air-horn button—the men of the crew all standing at the rail or on it, Nirgal’s
escorts as well, screaming soundlessly at the sudden vision.

Finally Ely let off. “What is it?” Nirgal shouted.

“It’s the Cutty Sarkl” Ely said, and threw his head back and
laughed. “It was bolted down in Greenwich! Stuck in a park! Some mad bastards
must have liberated it. What a brilliant idea. They must have towed it around
the flood barrier. Look at her sail!”

The old clipper ship had four or five sails unfurled on each of
the three masts, and a few triangular ones between the masts as well, and
extending forward to the bowsprit. It was sailing in the midst of the ebb flow,
and there was a strong wind behind it, so that it sliced through the foam and
flotsam, splitting water away from its sharp bow in a quick succession of white
waves. There were men standing in its rigging, Nirgal saw, most of them out
leaning over the yard-arms, waving one-armed at the ragged flotilla of
motorboats as they passed through it. Pennants extended from the mast tops, a
big blue flag with red crosses—when it ca’me abreast of Ely’s boat, Ely hit the
air-horn trigger again and again, and the men roared. A sailor out at the end
of the Cutty Sark’s mainsail yard waved at them with both hands, leaning his
chest forward against the big polished cylinder of wood. Then he lost his
balance, they all saw it happen, as if in slow motion; and with his mouth a
round little O the sailor fell backward, dropping into the white water that
foamed away from the ship’s side. The men on Ely’s boat shouted all together:
“NO!” Ely cursed loudly and gunned . his engine, which was suddenly loud in the
absence of the air horn. The rear of the boat dug deep into the water, and then
they were grumbling toward the man overboard, now one black dot among the rest,
a raised arm waving frantically.

Boats everywhere were tooting, honking, blasting their horns; but
the Cutty Sark never slowed. It sailed away at full speed, sails all
taut-bellied when seen from behind, a beautiful sight. By the time they reached
the fallen sailor, the stern of the clipper was low on the water to the east,
its masts a cluster of white sail and black rigging, until it disappeared
abruptly into another wall of mist.

“What a glorious sight,” one of the men was still repeating. “What
a glorious sight.”

“Yeah yeah, glorious, here fish this poor bastard in.”

Ely threw the engine in reverse, then idled. They threw a ladder
over the side, leaned over to help the wet sailor up the steps. Finally he made
it over the rail, stood bent over in his soaking clothes, holding on to the
rail, shivering. “Ah thanks,” he said between retches over the side. Kev and
the other crew members got his wet clothes off him, wrapped him in thick dirty
blankets.

“You’re a stupid fucking idiot,” Ely shouted down from the
wheelhouse. “There you were about to sail the world on the Cutty Sark, and now
here you are on The Bride ofFaver-sham. You’re a stupid fucking idiot.”

“I know,” the man said between retches.

The men threw jackets over his back, laughing. “Silly fool, waving
at us like that!” All the way back to Sheerness they proclaimed his ineptitude,
while getting the bereft man dried and into the wind protection of the
wheelhouse, dressed in spare clothes much too small for him. He laughed with
them, cursed his luck, described the fall, reenacted coming loose. Back in
Sheerness they helped him down into the submerged warehouse, and fed him hot
stew, and pint after pint of bitter beer, meanwhile telling the people inside,
and everyone who came down the ladder, all about his fall from grace. “Look
here, this silly wanker fell off the Cutty Sark this afternoon, the clumsy
bastard, when it was running down the tide under full sail to Tahiti!”

“To Pitcairn,” Ely corrected.

The sailor himself, extremely drunk, told his tale as often as his
rescuers. “Just took me hands off for a second, and it gave a little lurch and
I was flying. Flying in space. Didn’t think it would matter, I didn’t. Took me
hands off all the time up the Thames. Oh one mo here, ‘scuse me, I’ve got to go
spew.”

“Ah God she was a glorious sight she was, brilliant, really. More
sail than they needed of course, it was just to go out in style, but God bless
‘em for that. Such a sight.”

Nirgal felt dizzy and bleak. The whole big room had gone a glossy
dark, except in the exact spots where there were streaks of bright glare.
Everything a chiaroscuro of jumbled objects, Brueghel in black-and-white, and
so loud. “I remember the spring flood of thirteen, the North Sea in me living
room—” “Ah no, not the flood of thirteen again, will you not go on about that
again!”

He went to a partitioned room at one corner of the chamber, the
men’s room, thinking he would feel better if he relieved himself. Inside the
rescued sailor was on the floor of one of the stalls, retching violently.
Nirgal retreated, sat down on the nearest bench to wait. A young woman passed
him by, and reached out to touch him on the top of the head. “You’re hot!”

Nirgal held a palm to his forehead, tried to think about it.
“Three hundred ten K,” he ventured. “Shit.” “You’ve caught a fever,” she said.
One of his bodyguards sat beside him. Nirgal told him about his temperature,
and the man said, “Will you ask your wristpad?”

Nirgal nodded, asked for a readout. 309 K. “Shit.” “How do you
feel?” “Hot. Heavy.”

“We’d better get you to see someone.” Nirgal shook his head, but a
wave of dizziness came over him as he did. He watched the bodyguards calling to
make arrangements. Ely came over, and they asked him questions.

“At night?” Bly said. More quiet talk. Ely shrugged; not a good
idea, the shrug said, but possible. The bodyguards went on, and Bly tossed down
the last of his pint and stood. His head was still at the same level as
Nirgal’s, although Nirgal had slid down to rest his back against the table. A
different species, a squat powerful amphibian. Had they known that, before the
flood? Did they know it now?

People said good-bye, crushed or coddled his hand. Climbing the
conning-tower ladder was painful work. Then they were out in the cool wet
night, fog shrouding everything. Without a word Bly led them onto his boat, and
he remained silent as he started the engines and unmoored the boat. Off they
puttered over a low swell. For the first time the rocking over the waves made Nirgal
really queasy. Nausea was worse than pain. He sat down beside Bly on a stool,
and watched the gray cone of illuminated water and fog before their bow. When
dark objects loomed out of the fog Bly would slow, even shove the engines into
reverse. Once he hissed. This went on for a long time. By the time they docked
in the streets of Faversham, Nirgal was too sick to say good-bye properly; he
could only grasp Ely’s hand and look down briefly into the man’s blue eyes.
Such faces. You could see people’s souls right there in their faces. Had they
known that before? Then Bly was gone and they were in a car, humming through
the night. Nirgal’s weight was increasing as it had during the descent in the
elevator. Onto a plane, ascending in darkness, descending in darkness, ears
popping painfully, nausea; they were in Berne and Sax was there by his side, a
great comfort.