West Of The Sun by Edgar Pangborn (children's ebooks free online TXT) 📕

[163]

Argo IV answered Dunin's brown hand at the tiller, sliding south under a following breeze. Her chief designer Paul Mason liked to call her a sloop, admitting that on no planet would any sloop have cared to be found dead with a pair of twelve-foot oars amidships. She was thirty-six feet fore and aft. Without a sawmill, shaping boards for her strakes had been harder than trimming and placing the single tree trunk that was her keel. Much of her joining was with wooden pegs; there was iron in her too, from the single deposit of ore on the island of Adelphi. Her building had started seventeen months ago in the Year Nine. One month ago Paul's daughter Helen had cracked across her bow an earthen flask of wine brought to maturity by Nisana and Argo IV had slipped out of the mouth of the Whitebeach River for a maiden voyage—a forty-mile circuit of the island, including the passage of a strait where a current from open ocean ran formidably between Adelphi and a small nameless island in the south. Since then she had journeyed short distances up and down the coast, learning her own fussy ways and teaching them to her makers.

Argo II had been a clumsy oared raft of heroic history. Nine Lucifer years ago, roughly the equivalent of twelve Earth years, Argo II had not only brought fifteen survivors of a war to the island, she had also, broadened and repaired, returned to the mainland over the ten-mile channel to pick up a sixteenth survivor, Abara, and the gentle white beasts he had refused to abandon. He had guided them south, through seventy miles of unknown terrors, and ten miles further along the beach, until it came to an end at sheer cliffs; here Argo II found him. One by one—probably no one but Abara could have[164] coaxed them aboard—Argo II had ferried all five of the olifants across. During the rains that came for a dark ending of Year Two, the swollen Whitebeach River had torn Argo II from her moorings and she had been swept away down the channel. Now she would be driftwood scattered over the infinity of the unexplored; she was remembered.

Argo III, still in existence and more often called Betsy, was only a boxed platform with outriggers and two pairs of oars. With four giants at the oars and a favorable current she could approximate three miles an hour and carry several tons. She had been built in the Year Four and was still busily bringing slabs of building stone from the base of the coastal range. The stone was red and black or sometimes purple, heavy, already smoother than marble without polishing; unlike any common stone of Earth, it was so hard that wind and sun and water over the centuries had done little with it. Wright believed that was why the coastal range could rise to such heights from a narrow base. While the years in their millions had turned other mountains to level ground, the glassy rock remained: it could be broken for use but defied erosion like a diamond.

Argo IV was unequivocally a ship; after her trial Paul had carved for her bow a figurehead with the dreaming face of Pakriaa.

"Maybe," Dunin said, "with a few more like this the first explorations could be around the coast instead of overland? If we had two or three more ships when Kris-Mijok is old enough to go?"

Paul knew Dorothy had winced, though her face was turned to the evening-reddened field of water. "If he still wants it, when he's old enough to go...."

Kris-Mijok Wright, her third-born child and only son, had been born in the Year Three; in Earth years he was only nine. His hunger for the long journeying might be mainly a reflection of his devotion to Dunin, herself full of visions and not yet a woman. A tentative half joke, a means of channeling a child's fantasy into patience, had somehow become a sober adult plan: that the first major explorations would begin when Kris-Mijok would have a man's strength to take part in them.[165]

"We might have such ships by then." Paul tried to sound judicial. "Say the Year Eighteen or Nineteen. Yes, a coastal exploration might be better than trying to cross the continent. Not a circumnavigation though, at first."

Dunin's big face blossomed in a grin. "Only about thirty-six thousand miles by the old map made from the air. Open water at north and south poles, plenty of it. Could do it in less than a year."

"More like fifty thousand, allowing for deflections, tacking, pull of currents we don't know. Storms, flat calms, contrary winds, repairs, expeditions ashore for provisions. You pull your horns in just a bit, my girl. Do you remember a desert plateau the map shows in the southern hemisphere? Solid cliff rising out of the sea for over seven hundred miles, and on top of it roasting sand all the way across the continent—and that plateau is only a small part of the coastal desolation down there. From the equator to the 30th parallel I don't think you'd have a chance to go ashore—and nothing to help you if you did."

Dunin still grinned. "Just sail past it."

"Yes—well out to sea, with the equatorial sun at work on you. Very few islands in that region, some of them bare rock." And he thought: If I might go myself...! I am fifty now, in Earth years, a young fifty....

He knew also that Dorothy would not prevent him. She would not go herself: she would remain at Adelphi, faithful to the daily things, undramatic labors and loyalties that make civilization something more than a vision. She was a young thirty-eight, though she had already borne five children. If he went away, she would mind the watch fires on the beaches, as she had done nine years ago; she would work in the school, the house, the gardens, stand by Christopher Wright during the depressions that sometimes overcame him. She would grow old waiting. Therefore, Paul knew, he would never leave her. "The explorations will come in good time, Dunin," he said. "You'll have 150 years to watch and take part. I think you'll live to see the other continent too, and the great islands in the southwest. In the meantime—there's so much exploring to be done right here!" He watched the water too, aware of Dorothy's face turned to him, sober[166] and appraising. "You know, Dunin—that island we visited today—that could hold a community of a thousand between its two little hills. And I'm remembering the one forty miles north of us. Argo II was swept ashore there: get Doc to tell you that story sometime. I was sick for a week and laid up in one of the limestone caves while the others repaired the raft. A round island less than five miles across. We might sail there next trip."

"The other continent," Dunin murmured, and she watched the rising blue-green mound of Adelphi in the south. "The islands of the southwest...."

Dorothy leaned against the hand-hewn rail, looking northeast, saying lightly, "There he is...." The stone figure in the coastal range grew visible as the channel current pressed them a little too far eastward. The vast features were not clear; one could find the line of shoulder. "And Sears said, 'He looks west of the sun.' Was it long ago you told me that, Paul?"

"In a way it was.... Penny for 'em, Dorothy?"

"Oh——" Her brown face crinkled in the way he hoped for. "I was climbing down off philosophy with my usual bump—wondering what hell the twins have been raising while we're away. Brodaa's patience with them passes belief. With her own three sets of twins she's had practice. I wish Pak could have had children. Twenty-nine—late middle age for her people.... Helen's going to make a better med student than ever I was—don't you think, Paul? Seems like more than just a kid's enthusiasm."

"I think so." And Sears' plump daughter Teddy (Theodora-Pakriaa) would no doubt find herself too, sometime: there was no hurry. Even Christopher Wright no longer seemed to feel that time was hounding him, though his years by the Earth calendar were sixty-five, his hair and beard were white, his wiry thinness moved deliberately to save the strength he had once been able to spend like unconsidered gold.... "Look!"

Dorothy said carefully, "But that is impossible." A column of smoke on the flank of the coastal range, above one of the beaches where building stone was found. Blue-gray against the red and black, it rose straight in untroubled air. "They weren't taking Betsy out till we got back."[167]

"Too high anyway," Dunin said. "No need to climb so high for the stone."

Dorothy whispered, "I have never quite believed that Ed and Ann——"

"Oh, Dorothy! Well, we——"

"Yes, I saw the lifeboat go down on the channel. It didn't sink." She shut her eyes. "It was a misty evening, lover, more ways than one. Remember, Dunin?"

"I'll always remember."

"Paul, I know that when the open-sea current below the island took the lifeboat it must have been smashed against the cliffs—oh, of course—and for nine years the sea spiders will have used the pieces of it for their little castles and hideaways. All the same—Ed and Ann could have managed to swim ashore. Cross the range somehow or go around it."

"Nothing to eat. Barren rock straight up from the beaches, where there are any beaches, for ninety miles south of the only place where they could have landed and for twenty miles north of it."

"But no kaksmas in the coast range either; no omasha, this side. There are beaches here and there. They might have found—shellfish—blue seaweed."

"Nine years——"

"It is smoke. Our people wouldn't be up there...."

"You've never wanted to talk much about that day."

"No, I—haven't. I didn't behave too well myself.