“Tell me about the streets around the station,” Peter said. “How much shade is there for the virals to move in?”
Alicia thought for a moment. “Well, a lot. Midday you’d get more sun, but the buildings are all very tall. I’m talking sixty, seventy stories. It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen in your life, and it can get pretty dark at street level any time of day.” She drew their attention to the drawing again. “I’d say your best bet would be here, at the station’s west exit.”
“Why there?”
“Two blocks west, there’s a construction site. The building’s fifty-two stories tall, not huge by the standards of what’s around it, but the top thirty stories are only framed in. There’s good sun around the base, even late in the day. You can see it from the station—there’s an external elevator and a crane up the side of the building. I used to spend a lot of time up there.”
“On the crane, you mean?”
Alicia shrugged. “Yeah, well. It was kind of a thing with me.”
She offered no more explanation; Peter decided not to press. He pointed to another spot on the map, a block east of the station. “What’s this?”
“The Chrysler Building. It’s the tallest thing around there, almost eighty stories. The top is made of this kind of shiny metal, like a crown. It’s highly reflective. Depending on where the sun is, it can throw a lot of light.”
The day was over; the temperature had dropped, drawing dew from the air. As a silence settled, Peter realized they had come to the end of the conversation. In a little under eight hours they would raise the sails, the
Nautilus
would make the final leg to Manhattan, and whatever was bound to happen there would happen. It was unlikely that all of them would survive, or even that any of them would.
“I’ll take the watch,” said Michael.
Peter looked at him. “We seem well protected here. Is that necessary?”
“The bottom’s pretty sandy. The last thing we need is a dragging anchor right now.”
“I’ll stay, too,” Lish said.
Michael smiled. “Can’t say I’d mind the company.” Then, to Peter: “It’s fine, I’ve done it a million times. Go sleep. You two are going to need it.”
Night spread her hands over the sea.
All was still: only the sounds of the ocean, deep and calm, and the lap of waves against the hull. Peter and Amy lay curled together on the cabin’s only bunk, her head resting on his chest. The night was warm, but below decks the air felt cool, almost cold, chilled by the water encircling the bulkhead.
“Tell me about the farmstead,” Amy said.
Peter needed a moment to gather his answer; lulled by the boat’s motion and the feeling of closeness, he had, in fact, been skating on the edge of sleep.
“I’m not sure how to describe it. They weren’t like ordinary dreams—they were far more real than that. Like every night I went someplace else, another life.”
“Like … a different world. Real, but not the same.”
He nodded, then said, “I didn’t always remember them, not in detail. It was mostly the feeling that lasted. But some things. The house, the river. Ordinary days. The music you played. Such beautiful songs. I could have listened to them forever. They seemed so full of life.” He stopped, then said, “Was it the same for you?”
“I think so, yes.”
“But you’re not sure.”
She hesitated. “It only happened the one time, when I was in the water. I was playing for you. The music came so easily. As if the songs had been inside me and I was finally letting them out.”
“What happened then?” Peter asked.
“I don’t remember. The next thing I knew I woke up on the deck, and there you were.”
“What do you think it means?”
She paused before answering. “I don’t know. All I know is that for the first time in my life, I was truly happy.”
For a while they listened to the quiet creaking of the boat.
“I love you,” Peter said. “I think I always have”
“And I love you.”
She drew herself closer against him; Peter replied in kind. He took her left hand, slipped her fingers through his, pulled it to his chest, and held it there.
“Michael’s right,” she said. “We should sleep.”
“All right.”
Soon she felt his breathing slow. It eased into a deep, long rhythm, like waves upon the shore. Amy closed her eyes, although she knew it was no use. She would lie awake for hours.
On the deck of the
Nautilus,
Michael was watching the stars.
Because a person could never grow tired of them. All his many nights at sea, the stars had been his most loyal companions. He preferred them to the moon, which seemed to him too frank, always begging to be noticed; the stars maintained a certain cagey distance, permitting the mystery of their hidden selves to breathe. Michael knew what the stars were—exploding balls of hydrogen and helium—as well as many of their names and the arrangements they made in the night sky: useful information for a man alone at sea in a small boat. But he also understood that these things were an imposed ordering that the stars themselves possessed no knowledge of.
Their vast display should have made him feel tiny and alone, but the effect was exactly the opposite; it was in daylight that he felt his solitude most keenly. There were days when his soul ached with it, the feeling that he had moved so far away from the world of people that he could never go back. But then night would fall, revealing the sky’s hidden treasure—the stars, after all, weren’t gone during the day, merely obscured—and his loneliness would recede, supplanted by the sense that the universe, for all its inscrutable vastness, was not a hard, indifferent place in which some things were alive and others not and all that happened was a kind of accident, governed by the cold hand of physical law, but a web of invisible threads in which everything was connected to everything else, including him. It was along these threads that both the questions and the answers to life pulsed like an alternating current, all the pains and regrets but also happiness and even joy, and though the source of this current was unknown and always would be, a person could feel it if he gave himself a chance; and the time when Michael Fisher—Michael the Circuit, First Engineer of Light and Power, Boss of the Trade and builder of the
Bergensfjord
—felt it most was when he was looking at the stars.
He thought of many things. Days in the Sanctuary. Elton’s blind, rigid face and the hot, cramped quarters of the battery hut. The gassy stink of the refinery, where he had left boyhood behind and found his course in life. He thought of Sara, whom he loved, and Lore, whom he also loved, and Kate and the last time he had seen her, her compact youthful energy and easy affection for him on the night when he had told her the story of the whale. All so long ago, the past forever retreating to become the great internal accumulation of days. Probably his time on earth was reaching its end. Maybe something came after, beyond one’s physical existence as a person; on this subject, the heavens were obscure. Greer certainly thought so.
Michael knew that his friend was dying. Greer had tried to conceal it, and nearly had, but Michael had figured it out. No one thing in particular had told him this; it was simply his sense of the man. Time was outstripping him—as, sooner or later, it did everyone.
And, of course, he thought about his ship, his
Bergensfjord.
She would be far away now, somewhere off the coast of Brazil, churning south beneath the selfsame starry sky.
“It’s beautiful out here,” Alicia said.
She was sitting across from him, reclining lengthwise on the bench, a blanket covering her legs. Her head, like his, was tipped upward, her eyes glazed by starlight.
“I remember the first time I saw them,” she continued. “It was the night the Colonel left me outside the Wall. They absolutely terrified me.” She pointed toward the southern horizon. “Why is that one so bright?”
He followed her finger. “Well, that’s not a star, actually. It’s the planet Mars.”
“How can you tell?”
“You’ll see it most of the summer. If you look closely, you can see that it has a slight red tint. It’s basically a big, rusty rock.”
“And that one?” Directly overhead this time.
“Arcturus.”
In the dark, her expression was hidden from his view, though he imagined her frowning with interest. “How far away is it?”
“Not very, as these things go. About thirty-seven light-years. That’s how long it takes the light to get here. When the light you’re seeing left Arcturus, we were both a couple of kids. So when you look at the sky, what you’re actually seeing is the past. But not just
one
past. Every star is different.”
She laughed lightly. “That kind of messes with my head when you put it that way. I remember you telling me about this stuff when we were kids. Or trying to.”
“I was pretty obnoxious. Probably I was just trying to impress you.”
“Show me more,” she said.
He did just that; Michael traced the sky. Polaris and the Big Dipper. Bright Antares and blue-tinted Vega and her neighbors, the small cluster known as Delphinius the Dolphin. The broad galactic band of the Milky Way, running horizon to horizon, north to south, bisecting the eastern sky like a cloud of light. He told her all he could think of, her interest never wavering, and when he was done, she said, “I’m cold.”
Alicia scooted forward from the transom; Michael crossed over and wedged himself behind her, his legs positioned on either side of her waist. He pulled the blanket up, wrapping the two of them, drawing her in for warmth.
“We haven’t talked about what happened on the ship,” Alicia said.
“We don’t have to if you don’t want.”
“I feel like I owe you an explanation.”
“You don’t.”
“Why did you come in after me, Michael?”
“I didn’t really give it a lot of thought. It was a heat-of-the-moment thing.”
“That’s not an answer.”
He shrugged, then said, “I guess you could say I don’t much like it when people I care about try to kill themselves. I’ve been down that road before. I take it kind of personally.”
His words stopped her flat. “I’m sorry. I should have thought—”
“And there’s absolutely no reason you would have. Just don’t do it again, okay? I’m not such a great swimmer.”
A silence fell. It was not uncomfortable but the opposite: the silence of shared history, of those who can speak without talking. The night was full of small sounds that, paradoxically, seemed to magnify the quiet: each shifting touch of water against the hull; the pinging of the lines against the spars; the creak of the anchor line in its cleat.
“Why did you name her
Nautilus
?” Alicia asked. The back of her head was resting against his chest.
“It was something from a book I read when I was a kid. It just seemed to fit.”
“Well, it does. I think it’s nice.” Then, quietly: “What you said, in the cell.”
“That I loved you.” He felt no embarrassment, only the calm of truth. “I just thought you should know. It seemed like a big waste otherwise. I’ve kind of had it with secrets. It’s okay—you don’t have to say anything about it.”
“But I want to.”
“Well, a thank-you would be nice.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Actually, it’s exactly that simple.”
She fit the fingers of one hand into his, pressing their palms together. “Thank you, Michael.”
“And you are most welcome.”
The air was damp, mist falling, beads clinging to every surface. At an indeterminate distance, waves were hissing on the sand.
“God, the two of us,” she said. “We’ve been fighting our whole lives.”
“That we have.”
“I’m so … tired of it.” She drew his arm tighter around her waist. “I thought about you, you know. When I was in New York.”
“Did you now?”
“I thought: What is Michael doing today? What is he doing to save the world?”
He laughed lightly. “I’m honored.”
“As you should be.” A pause; then she spoke again. “Do you ever think about them? Your parents.”
The question, though unexpected, did not seem strange. “Once in a while. It was a long time ago, though.”
“I don’t really remember mine. They died when I was so young. Just little things, I guess. My mother had a silver hairbrush she liked. It was very old; I think it belonged to my grandmother. She used to visit me in the Sanctuary and brush my hair with it.”
Michael considered this. “Now, that sounds right to me. I think I recall something like that happening.”
“You do?”
“She’d put you on a stool in the dormitory, by the big window. I remember her humming—not a song exactly, more like just notes.”
“Huh,” Alicia said after a moment. “I didn’t know anyone was paying attention.”
They were quiet for a time. Even before she said the words, Michael sensed their approach. He did not know what she was about to tell him, only that she was.
“Something … happened to me in Iowa. A man raped me there, one of the guards. He got me pregnant.”
Michael waited.
“She was a girl. I don’t know if it was what I am or something else, but she didn’t survive.”
When Alicia fell silent, Michael said, “Tell me about her.”
“She was Rose. That’s what I named her. She had such beautiful red hair. After I buried her, I stayed with her awhile. Two years. I thought it would help, make things easier somehow. But it never did.”
He felt, suddenly, closer to Alicia than he had to anyone in his life. Painful as this story was, telling him was a gift she had given him, the heart of who she was, the stone she carried and how love had happened in her life.
“I hope it’s okay I told you.”
“I’m very glad you did.”
Another silence, then: “You’re not really worried about the anchor, are you?”
“Not really, no.”
“That was nice, what you did for them.” Alicia tipped her head upward. “It’s such a beautiful night.”
“Yes, it is.”
“No, more than beautiful,” she said and squeezed his hand, nestling against him. “It’s perfect.”
81
So, at the last, a story.
A child is born into this world. She is lost, alone, in due course both befriended and betrayed. She is the carrier of a special burden, a singular vocation that is only hers to bear. She wanders in a wasteland, a ruin of grief and tormented dreams. She has no past, only a long, blank future; she is like a convict with an unknown sentence, never visited in the cell of her interminable imprisonment. Any other soul would be broken by this fate, and yet the child abides; she dares to hope that she is not alone. That is her mission, the role for which she has been cast at heaven’s cruel audition. She is hope’s last vessel on the earth.