Balance of Power. Brian Stableford
rapturous about it.
“How big?” I asked.
“Sixty footer,” he replied.
“That’s not big,” said Nieland. “Not by comparison with the New Hope.”
There was a certain proprietary pride in this expostulation. But I knew what Ogburn meant. It was big by comparison with a canoe. And the sail design was really quite sophisticated. From the canoe to the dhow in two hundred years? It didn’t seem likely. The survey team must have missed the sailing boats. Unless....
“The other expeditions,” I mused, speaking aloud. “They never got back. But that’s not to say that they never got here....”
“We should go after it,” said Ogburn.
“It’s going away from us,” said Nieland. “It’s already out of sight. There’s no point in chasing it all day. Let’s make landfall first and worry about it later.”
He was very impatient. To him, the only thing that mattered was getting there. I sympathized—and Ogburn didn’t really want to press his case.
Behind us, a couple of the crewmen were muttering. I knew them as Roach and Thayer. They were making unkind and ominous remarks about the sail and about us. Ogburn ignored them. He didn’t even tell them to get back to work. Instead, he signaled to the mate—a man named Malpighi—and gave him the binoculars, which he plucked from Nieland’s hand without asking.
“Send a man up top,” he grunted. “Keep a lookout.”
Malpighi selected Thayer. While he was beginning the long climb up the mainmast Roach slouched away. He glanced at me, and said: “Gone to fetch the fleet, I shouldn’t wonder. Blow us out of the water. Probably what happened to Verheyden.”
It looked like the beginning of a rumor which, if not exactly ugly, could hardly contribute to the morale of the ship’s personnel. But there was nothing I could do except give him a dirty look. He scowled back.
I glanced at Ogburn. “If I were a fisherman and I saw something like the New Hope,” I said, “I’d run for home and tell them I saw one this big. And they wouldn’t believe me.”
He didn’t laugh.
I couldn’t blame him.
The party broke up. Nieland began setting the position of the sun on his sextant—his regular ritual of position-finding. We were still cutting through the weed without any trouble, and the wind was blowing from the southwest, which was about as favorable as we were likely to get. It was brisk enough to be turned to our advantage. I decided to do some fishing, and went below to get some line and a few hooks. I didn’t really care whether I caught anything or not.
The day wore on at its customary turgid pace—it was about two hours longer than an Earthly day, but there were a few less of them in the planetary year, which was only a couple percent longer than standard. By now I was an expert at letting the time pass unheeded, and I managed to occupy myself while retreating into the privacy of my contemplation. I always did fancy myself a spiritual descendent of Newton: “A mind forever voyaging through strange seas of thought—alone.”
I thought mainly about the aliens, wondering why a dhow was sailing so far south. The most civilized region of Delta was a long way north of here—we’d deliberately set out to sail across the ocean the shortest way, which brought us to the bulge of the lower part of the small-case delta. There was nothing but forest here, and the aliens in the forest—according to the two-hundred-year-old survey reports—were Iron Age swidden farmers without much iron. Not the type of people who’d suddenly take to the sea.
Did that mean that the aliens had come on a fair bit and were sallying forth on exploratory odysseys? Or did it mean that the colony—unknown to itself—had fathered a little colony here on the alien shore, whose inhabitants were (for reasons best known to themselves) minding their own business instead of letting the prevailing wind carry the good news back home?
I was tempted to toss a coin, but I was never a great believer in oracles.
Three fish and a lot of drifting on strange seas of thought later, my attention was once again snatched back to matters close at hand.
Thayer, from his lonely station aloft, called out in tones as stentorian as they were portentous: “I can see the shore!”
My first thought, idiotically, was one of disappointment. The fool hadn’t read his script. Everyone knows you’re supposed to shout “Land ho!” Then you add something about the port bow.
I wished that I had my binoculars, but I’ve no head for heights and it didn’t seem to be a good idea to go fetch them. I waited for Ogburn to wave Thayer down and commandeer them himself, and then I joined him on the roof of the wheelhouse, from which we both craned our necks to get a glimpse of the promised land.
For a while, I thought that Thayer’s optimism had over-reached itself. Because of the weed the surface of the sea was mostly green with lacunae of gray and brown—from above it might have looked much like marshy land—and it wasn’t easy to spot a change of color or texture in the line of the horizon. But it was there all right—eventually I could pick out the silvery foam of waves breaking on rocks, and then the lighter green of foliage extending beyond.
Nieland came up on deck, and promptly got out his sextant. I was glad to be able to laugh. Even Ogburn came to life a little more than usual as he began handing out orders in some profusion. Nieland proved that he wasn’t just wasting his time by demonstrating that we were very close to the mouth of a major river, which ought to prove navigable for quite some distance as it wound inland through the forest. Ogburn agreed to make for the river, and we found our way into its estuary late that afternoon. We proceeded slowly, with a man taking soundings every yard of the way, but the bottom was a long way down and the river was wide.
There were mud banks on the north bank, caused not by tidal effects (Attica’s moon was only a fifth the size of Earth’s) but by the fact that the river’s dimensions varied according to season. The rainy season was well behind us for this year, and the river had shrunk somewhat. We didn’t go far upriver—hardly a mile—before we anchored. We lowered the larger of the ship’s boats, and held an informal debate as to who would join the party which—at the cost of muddy boots—would be the first human beings (so far as we knew) to set foot on the new continent. There were ten of us in all—the four passengers, Malpighi and five of the crew. We let Nieland step out first. After all, it was his ship.
The day was warm, but hardly tropical. Nevertheless, the forest beyond the mudbar did have a suggestion of jungle about it. It was extremely wet, because the ground had a tendency to bogginess, and the branches of the trees were festooned with creepers. There was a preponderance of long, spatulate leaves and languorous drapes. The tree trunks were gnarled—quite a lot were hairy or scaled like fir cones. There was a smell of staleness. There were a great many small birds moving along the branches and I saw several green snakes coiling round the stems of the creepers. Midges clustered in vaporous clouds around the shallow pools of brackish water, and the mud seemed to be alive—though much of the movement was caused by tiny bubbles of marsh gas rising to the surface rather than by the small invertebrates and amphibians which inhabited it.
I shook the branches of a particularly wizened tree, and inspected the shower of insects that inevitably resulted with some enthusiasm. Two of the crewmen, standing nearby, left me in no doubt as to their opinion of this eccentric behavior.
I found a lizard with spade-like suckered feet clinging to the bark of a tree pretending to be an excrescence of its trunk, and plucked it off. It wriggled furiously, and let its long black tongue loll out of its mouth. It was toothless, but the upper palate was ridged with rough bone contours that would be quite adequate for crushing the insects on which it fed. I let it go.
There was a constant chatter which—though most of it was made by the birds and other flying creatures—could by no means be described as “song.” It was all clicks and rattles, clucks and croaks, with only the occasional half-strangled whistle.
The