Pacific Edge

10

For several nights running I barely slept, falling only into that shallow nap consciousness where part of the mind feels it is awake, while another part feels an hour passing between each thought. I would wake completely around three, feeling sick, unable to return even to the miserable half sleep. Toss and turn thinking, trying not to think, thinking.

At dawn I would get up and go to the canteen and drink coffee and try to write. All day I would sit there staring at the page, staring into the blank between my world and the world in my book. Until my hand would shake. Looking around me, looking at what my country was capable of when it was afraid. Seeing the headlines in the newspapers scattered around. Seeing my companions and the state they were in.

And one day I stood up with my notebooks and went outside, around the back of the canteen to the dumpsters. The book was in three thick spiral ring notebooks. I sat cross-legged on the concrete, and started ripping the pages away from the wire spiral, about ten at a time. I tore them up, first crossways, then lengthwise. When I had a little pile of paper I stood and threw the pieces into the dumpster. I did that until all the pages were gone. I tore the cardboard covers away from the spirals, and ripped them up too. The twisted wire spirals were the last things in.

No more utopia for me.

After that I returned to the canteen and sat just like before, feeling worse than ever. But there was no point in continuing, really there wasn’t. The time has passed when a utopia could do anybody any good, even me. Especially me. The discrepancy between it and reality was too much.

So I sat there drinking coffee and staring out the window. One of my dorm mates, he sleeps a couple beds down, came by with his lunch. Hey Barnyard, he said, where’s your book.

I threw it away.

Oh, no, he said, looking shocked. Hey, man. You can’t do that.

Yes I can.

Next day, same time, he came by with a ballpoint and a gray lab notebook. Something from the hospital no doubt.

Here, man, you start writing again. Deadly serious look on his face. You got to tell what happens here! If you don’t tell it, then who will? You got to, man. And he left the notebook and walked away.

So. I will not write that book. But here, now, I make these notes. To pass the time if nothing else. I observe: there is less desperation here than one would think. There is a refusal of despair. There is a state beyond panic. There is a courage that should shame the rest of us. There is a camp, an American internment camp, where every day people are taken to the hospital, where the others help them out, and carry on. There is a place where people on the edge of death make jokes, they help each other, they share what they have, they endure. In this hell they make their own “utopia.”

Life at sea suited Tom. Nadezhda and he had a tiny cabin to bump around in, a berth barely wide enough to fit the two of them. At night the rhythmic pitch over the groundswell translated to the roll and press of her body against him, so that she became an expression of the sea, an embrace of wind and wave. He had forgotten the simple pleasure of sharing a bed. At dawn, if she was still sleeping, he rose and went on deck. The raw morning light. There he was, on the wide ocean’s surface, where a few constants of light and color combined to create an infinity of blues. To sail on a blue salt world, ah, God, to think he had gone a lifetime without it, almost missed it! It made him laugh out loud.

At dawn he had the deck almost to himself. Those on watch were usually in the bridge, an enclosed glass-fronted compartment spanning the deck just before the mizzenmast. Once he came across a group that had stayed up all night, to see the green flash at sunrise.

The crew was about equally divided between men and women, and most of them were in their twenties. Their work, their play and their education all spilled into one another. Partying and romance kept them up late every night; they were the most high-spirited group of young people Tom had ever seen, and he could see why. Quite a life. The young women were especially rambunctious. That first rush into an independent life! All youth responds to it, but some are aware it wasn’t always like this, that even their parents didn’t have such opportunity. So these women cavorted like the dolphins that surfed in the bow wave during certain magic dusks and dawns, tall, dark, hair and eyebrows thick and intensely black. Tom watched them like Ingres in the baths, laughing at their sexiness. Perfect dark skin, rounded limbs, heavy breasts, wide hips, like women from the Kama Sutra who had stepped off the page and forgotten their purpose, become as free as dolphins.

Occasionally he went down to the ship’s communications room and called home. He talked to Kevin and learned of the latest developments there, and gave advice when he was asked. He also called Nylphonia and his other friends from time to time, and conferred with them about the search through Heartech’s records. There were tendrils of association between Heartech and the AAMT, but they were tenuous. “We’d probably have to bust AAMT to get Heartech, and that won’t be easy.”

“I know. But try.”

Thunderheads, slate below and blooming white above, showed how high the sky really was. A line of them lofted to the south like a stately row of galleons, and then the ship was underneath them. Ganesh rode waves like low hills, wind keening in the rigging. The sailors on watch wound the sails in on power reels, touching buttons on the bridge’s huge control board. The masts’ airfoil configurations shifted, metal parts squeaking together. Tom and Nadezhda sat in chairs behind and above the sailors, looking out the broad glass window. Their captain, Gurdial Behaguna, dropped by to look over the helmswoman’s shoulder at the compass readout. He nodded at them, left. “He’s pretty casual,” Tom said.

Nadezhda laughed. “This is a small blow, Tom. You should see it in the North Pacific.”

Tom watched spray explode away from the bow, then come whipping back on the wind and crash to invisibility against their window. “That’s the return route, right? So I suppose I will.”

She smiled, reached for his hand.

Another day later Tom went aloft with the bosun, Sonam Singh, who had on a tool belt and was going to do some repairs on a tackle block at the starboard end of the main moonsail yard—that is to say, the sixth and highest sail up the mainmast, above the main course, the topsail, the topgallant, the royal, and the skysail. It was as high on the ship as you could get, some two hundred and forty feet above the deck; to Tom it felt like a million. He looked down at the little mouse-sized people scurrying around the model ship down there, and felt his hands clutch at the halyard. They were climbing the weather side, so that the wind would blow them into the halyards rather than away from them. The mast’s movement was a slow figure eight, with a couple of quick catches in it. Glancing behind he saw the broad V of the wake, its edges a startling white against the sea’s brilliant blue. Fractal arabesques swirled away from the ship’s sleek sides. The horizon was a long way away; the patch of world he could see was as round as a plate, and blue everywhere.

“Clip yourself onto this line,” Singh told him, pointing to a cable bolted at intervals to the underside of the slender moonsail yard. “Now put your feet on the footrope”—which looped three or four feet under the yard—“and follow me out. And if you would please grab these handles on top of the yard. One step at a time. Okay? Okay.”

Tom was in a harness like a rock-climber’s, which was clipped to the line under the yard. Even if his foot slipped and his arm gave away, he would still be there, hanging by his chest, swinging far above the deck, but it beat the alternative. “I can’t believe sailors used to climb out here without these,” he said, shuffling down the footrope.

“Oh, yes, they were a dangerous bunch of men,” Singh said, looking back at him, “Are you okay? Are you sure you want to be doing this?”

“Yes.”

“Very good. Yes, they would be standing on the footrope and giving their hands to the sails, reefing them or letting them out, tying frozen gasket knots, and sometimes in most wicked weather. They were quite the athletes, there is no doubt of that. Rounding Cape Horn east to west, that would be a trial for anyone.”

“Some of them must have fallen.”

“Yes, they lost men overboard, no doubt of that. Once a ship lost every man aloft when it gusted hard south of Cape Horn—five men in all. Here we are, at the end. Look at this block, the little runner inside it has pulled itself away from the side. A case of poor manufacturing, if you ask me. Now the line is stuck, and if you tried to reel it in it would snap the line or short the reel. Here now, you can lean out in your harness if you are wanting, you don’t have to hold on like that.”

“Oh.” Tom let go and leaned back in his harness, felt the wind and groundswell swirl him about. Up here you could see the pattern the waves made on the sea’s surface, long curving swells rippling the reflected sunlight. Blue everywhere. He watched the bosun repair the tackle block, asked him questions about it. “This line allows you to bring down this side of the sail. It is called bunting. Without it you can’t use the sail at all.”

Singh concentrated on his screwdriver and the block, swaying about as he worked. He explained some of the network of lines matted below them. “They are beautiful patterns, aren’t they? A very pretty technology indeed. Free locomotion for major freight hauling. Hard to believe it was ever abandoned.”

“Wasn’t it dangerous? I mean, that last generation of sailing ships, the big ones with five and six masts, most of them came to grief, didn’t they?”

“Yes, they did. The Kopenhagen and the Karpfanger disappeared from the face of the sea. But so did a lot of diesel-driven tubs. As for that particular generation of sailing ships, it was a matter of insufficient materials, and poor weather forecasts, and carrying too much aloft. And some design flaws. It was yet another case of false economies of scale—they built them too big. Bigger as better, pah! When you’re burning fuel to transport fuel, then it might look true. Until the ship strikes a reef or catches fire. But if the fuel is the wind, if you’re interested in full employment, in safety, in a larger definition of efficiency, then there is nothing like this beauty here. It is big but not too big. Actually it is as big as those old six-masters were, but the design and the materials are much improved. And with radio, and sonar to look at the bottom, and radar to look at the surface, and satellite photos to look at the sky, and the computer to be putting it all together…. Ah, it is a beauty, isn’t it?”

They stopped in Corinto, Nicaragua, and had to wait a day to get to the docks, anchored in a long line of ships like theirs. Tom and Nadezhda joined a group going ashore, and they spent the day in the markets behind the docks, buying fruit, an old-fashioned sextant, and clothing light enough to wear in the tropics. Tom sat for an hour in the bird market, fascinated by the vibrant coloration of the tropical birds on sale. “Can they be real?” he said to Nadezhda.

“The parrots and the mynah birds and the quetzals are real. The New Guinea lories are real, though they aren’t native to the area. The rest are not real, not in the way you mean. Haven’t you ever seen gene-engineered hummingbirds?”

Flashes of saffron, violet, pink, silk blue, scarlet, tangerine. “No, I don’t believe I have.”

“You need to travel more.” She laughed at the look on his face, kissed him, took his arm and pulled him along. “Come on, they make some fine bikes here, that’s something you know about.”

A day in a tropical market. Sharp smells of cinnamon and clove, the bleating of a pig, the clashing of amplified guitar riffs, the heat, dust, light, noise. Tom followed Nadezhda’s lead, dazed.

In the end they spent all the money they had brought ashore. The ship unloaded some microchips, titanium, manganese and wine, and took on coffee, stereo speakers, clothing and gene-engineered seeds.

The following evening, the last before they embarked, they went back ashore and danced the night away, sweating in the warm tropical air. Very late that night they stood on the dance floor swaying slightly, arms around each other, foreheads pressed together, bodies all around them.

They set sail, headed west across the wide Pacific. Endless days in the blue of water and sky. Tom became a connoisseur of clouds. He took more of the geriatric drugs. He spent time in the foretop, he spotted whales and dreamed great dreams. They passed a coral atoll and he dreamed a whole life there, Polynesian sensuousness in the peace of the lagoon.

One balmy evening Nadezhda’s class met on the foredeck, and Tom described his part in the struggle to make the international agreements curtailing corporations. “It was like trust busting in Teddy Roosevelt’s time. In those days people agreed monopolies were bad because they were bad for business, basically—they cut at the possibility of free trade, of competition. But multinational corporations were a similar thing in a new format—they were big enough to make tacit agreements among themselves, and so it was a cartel world. Governments hated multinationals because they were out of government control. People hated them because they made everyone cogs in machines, making money for someone else you never saw. That was the combination needed to take them on. And even then we nearly lost.”

“You talk like it was war,” Pravi said scornfully. She was one of the sharpest of Nadezhda’s students, well-read, quick-minded, skeptical of her teachers’ memories and biases.

“It was war,” Tom said, looking at her with interest. In the twilight the whites of her eyes looked phosphorescent, she seemed a dangerous young Hindu woman, a Kali. “They bought people, courts, newspapers—they killed people. And we really had to put the arm on the countries who decided that becoming a corporation haven would be a good source of revenue.”

“Put the arm on them,” Pravi said angrily. “You superpowers in your arrogance, ordering the world around again—what was it but another form of imperialism. Make the world do what you decide is right! A new kind of colonialism.”

Tom shrugged, trying to see her better in the dusk. “People said that when the colonial powers lost sovereignty over their colonies, but kept the power by way of economic arrangements. That was called neo-colonialism, and I see the point of it. But look, the mechanisms of control and exploitation in the neocolonialist set-up were precisely the corporations themselves. As home markets were saturated it became necessary to invest abroad to keep profits up, and so the underdeveloped world was subsumed.”

“Exactly.”

“All right, all right. But then to cut the corporations up, distribute their assets down through their systems to constituent businesses—this amounted to a massive downloading of capital, a redistribution of wealth. It was new, sure, but to call it neocolonialism is just to confuse things. It was actually the dismantling of neo-colonialism.”

“By fiat! By the command of the superpowers, telling the rest of the world what to do, in imperial style! Putting the arm on them, as you put it!”

“Well look, we haven’t always had the kind of international accords that now exist to take global action. The power of the United Nations is a fairly recent development in history. So some coercion by powerful countries working together was a political necessity. And at the time I’m speaking of capital was very mobile, it could move from country to country without restraint. If one country decided to become a haven, then the whole system would persist.”

“At that point third world countries would have been in power, and the superpowers would have become colonies. You couldn’t have had that.”

“But the haven countries wouldn’t have had the power. They might have skimmed away something in taxes, but in essence they would become functionaries of the corporations they hosted. That’s how powerful corporate capitalism was. You just have no idea nowadays.”

“We only know that once again you decided our fate for us.”

“It took everyone to do it,” Tom said. “A consensus of world opinion, governments, the press. A revolution of all the people, using the power of government—laws, police, armies—against the very small executive class that owned and ran the multinationals.”

“What do you mean, a revolution?” another student asked.

“We changed the law so much, you see. We cut the corporate world apart. The ones that resisted and skipped to haven countries had their assets seized, and distributed to local parts. We left loose networks of association, but the actual profits of any unit company were kept within it in a collective fashion, nothing sucked away.”

“A quiet revolution,” Nadezhda said, trying to help out.

“Yes, certainly. All this took years, you understand. It was done in steps so that it didn’t look so radical—it took two working generations. But it was radical, because now there’s nothing but small businesses scattered everywhere. At least in the legal world. And that’s a radical change.”

Accusing, triumphant, Pravi pointed a finger at him. “So the United States went socialist!”

“No, not exactly. All we did was set limits on the more extreme forms of greed.”

“By nationalizing energy, water and land! What is that but socialism?”

“Yeah, sure. I mean, you’re right. But we used it as a way to give everyone the opportunity to get ahead! Basic resources were made common property, but in the service of a more long-distance self-interest—”

“Altruism for the sake of self-interest!” Pravi said, disgusted. Her aggression, her hatred of America—it irritated Tom, made him sad. Enemies everywhere, still, after all these years, even among the young. What you sow you will reap, he thought. Unto the seventh generation.

“Sociobiologists say it’s always that way,” he said. “Some doubt the existence of altruism, except as a convoluted form of self-interest.”

“Imperialism makes one cynical about human nature,” Pravi said. “And you know as well as I that the human sciences are based on philosophical beliefs.”

“No doubt.” He shrugged. “What do you want me to say? The economic system was a pyramid, and money ran up to the top. We chopped the pyramid off and left only the constituent parts down at the base, and gave the functions that higher parts of the pyramid served over to government, without siphoning off money, except for public works. This was either altruism on the largest scale ever seen in modern times, or else very enlightened self-interest, in that with wealth redistributed in this way, the wars and catastrophes that would have destroyed the pyramid were averted. I suppose it is a statement of one’s philosophy to say whether it was one or the other.”

Pravi waved him away. “You saw the end coming and you ran. Like the British from India.”

“You needn’t be angry at us for saving you the necessity of violent revolution,” Tom said, almost amused. “It might have been dramatic, but it wouldn’t have been fun. I knew revolutionaries, and their lives were warped, they were driven people. It’s not something to get romantic about.”

Insulted, Pravi walked away, down the deck. The class muttered, and Nadezhda gave them a long list of reading assignments, then called it off for the night.

Later, standing up near the bowsprit, looking at stars reflected on the water, Tom sighed. The air was humid, the tropical night cloaked them like a blanket. “I wonder when we will lose the stigma,” he said to Nadezhda softly.

“I don’t know. We’ll never see it.”

“No.” He shook his head, upset. “We did the best we could, didn’t we?”

“Yes. When they shoulder the responsibility themselves, they’ll understand.”

“Maybe.”

Another night he was called down to the communications room to receive a call from Nylphonia. She looked pleased, and said “I think you have Heartech and the AAMT in violation of Fazio-Matsui. Look here.”

The AAMT had put Heartech’s black account into a Hong Kong bank, but the funds were “washed but not dried,” as Nylphonia put it. Still traceable. Some information had been stolen from the bank, and it corresponded perfectly with electronic money orders that had been recorded in passage through the phone system, going from Heartech to the AAMT. It would not be enough to convict them in court, but it would convince most people that the connection existed—that the accusation had not been concocted out of thin air. So it was sufficient for their purposes.

Tom nodded. “Good. Send a copy of this along to me, will you? And thanks, Nylphonia.”

Well, he thought. Very interesting. Next time Kevin and Doris went into the council meeting, they could use this like a bomb. Make the accusation, present the evidence, show that the proposed development on Rattlesnake Hill had illegal funds behind it. End of that.

He thought of the little grove on the top of the hill, and grinned.

The next dawn he slipped out of their berth, dressed and went on deck. They were tacking close-hauled to a strong east wind, and rode over the swells at an angle, corkscrewing with the pitch and yaw. The bow was getting soaked with spray, so Tom went to the midships rail, on the windward side. He wrapped an arm through the bottom of the mainmast halyards to steady himself. The cables were vibrating. Time after time Ganesh ran down the back of one swell and thumped its port bow into the steep side of the next, and white spray flew up from the bow, then was caught by the wind and blown over the bowsprit in a big, glittering fan. The sky was a pale limpid blue, and the sun caught the fans of bow spray in such a way that for a second or two each of them was transformed into a broad, intense rainbow. Giddy slide down a swell, dark blue sea, the jolt as they ran into the next swell, blast of spray out, up, caught in the wind and dashed to droplets, and then a still moment, the ship led by a pouring arch of vibrant color, red orange yellow green blue purple.

Captain Bahaguna was on the other side of the deck, helping a couple of crew members secure metal boxes over the rigging reels. It was tricky crossing the deck in such a swell. “What’s up, Captain?”

“Storm coming.” He looked disgruntled. “I’ve been trying to get around to the north of it for two days now, but it’s swerving like a drunk.”

Tom toed the box. “We’ll need these?”

“Never can tell. I do it if we have the time. Ever been in a big storm?”

“That one off Baja.”

Bahanguna looked up at Tom, smiled.

Below decks Sonam Singh was showing a group of sailors how to secure bulkheads. “Tom, go check out the bridge, you’re in the way.” The young sailors laughed as they worked, excited. Immersion in the world’s violence, Tom thought, the primal thrill of being out in the wind. In the tempest of the world’s great spin through space.

In the comm room Pravi was studying a satellite photo of the mid-Pacific. Pressure isobars overlaid on it contoured the mishmash of cloud patterns, drew attention to a small classic whirlpool shape. “Is it a hurricane?” Tom asked.

“Only a tropical storm,” Pravi said. “It might get upgraded, though.”

“Where are we?”

She jabbed at the map. Not far away from the storm.

“And which direction is it moving?”

“Depends on when you ask. It’s coming our way now.”

“Uh oh.”

She laughed. “I love these storms.”

“How many have you seen?”

“Two so far. But it’s going to be three in a couple of hours.”

Another thrill seeker. Revolution of the elements.

Tom returned to the deck, holding on to every rail. Things had changed in his brief stay below; the sea was running larger, and the horizon seemed to have extended away, as if they were now on a larger planet. Ganesh seemed smaller. It sledded down the long backs of the swells like a toboggan, shouldering deep into the trough and then rising like a cork to crash through the crest and hang in space. Then a free fall, until the bow crashed down onto the water, and they began another exuberant run on the back of the next swell. Except for this moment of skating, it felt like the ship’s whole motion was up and down.

The wind still drove spray to the side in fanned white torrents, but the rainbows were gone, the sun too high and obscured by a high white film, which dulled the color of the sea. Off to the south the horizon was a black bar.

A bit dizzy, and fearful of seasickness, Tom found he felt best when he was facing the wind, and looking at the horizon. Seeing was important. He went to the mizzenmast halyards, wrapped his arms around a thick cable, and watched the sea get torn to tatters.

The wind picked up. Spray struck his face like needle pricks. It was loud. The swells had crest-to-trough whitecaps, which hissed and roared. The wind keened in the rigging at a score of pitches, across several octaves, from the bass thrum of the mast stays to the screaming of the bunting. Behind these noises was a kind of background rumble, which seemed to be the sound of the storm itself, disconnected from any source in wind or water: a dull low roar, like an immense submarine locomotive. Perhaps it was the wind in his ears, but it sounded more like the entire atmosphere, trying to leave the vicinity all at once.

Nadezhda appeared at his side, holding an orange rain jacket. “Put this on. Aren’t you going below?”

“It made me dizzy!” They were shouting.

“We had one of these on the way over from Tokyo,” Nadezhda said, looking at the long hog-backed hills of water surging by. “Lasted three days! You’ll have to get used to being below.”

“Not yet.” He pointed to the black line on the southern horizon. “I’ll have to when that arrives.”

Nadezhda nodded. “Big squall.”

“Pravi said it was almost a hurricane.”

“I believe it.” She laughed, licked salt off her upper lip. Face flushed and wet, eyes bright and watering. Fingers digging into his upper arm. “So wild, the sea! The place we can never ever tame.”

Above them narrow rectangles of sail got even narrower. Most of the ship’s sails were furled, and the ones out were down to their last reef. Still the ship was pushing well onto its side. They hung from the halyards as the ship plunged up and down. “Can you imagine having to go aloft!” Tom cried.

“No.”

The ship shuddered through a thick crest. White water coursed down the lee rail of the deck. “We’d better get below,” Nadezhda said. And indeed Sonam Singh was in the hatchway gesturing fiercely at them. As the ship skated down a swell they dashed for the hatchway, were pulled roughly down it.

“Keep inside,” Singh ordered. “Go to the bridge if you want to see, but stay out of the way.”

Crew members rushed by, dripping wet and bright with exhilaration. “They’re going on deck?” Tom asked.

“Setting the sea anchor,” Singh replied, and followed them out.

The passageways seemed narrower. You had to use the wall for support, or be banged against it. Up broad steps to the bridge, which was split into two rooms, one above the other. The top room was the cockpit of action; Captain Bahaguna and the helmsman were standing before the window watching the ship and waves through crazy patterns of water dashed against the glass. The fourth mast stood before them like a white tree. The lee railing, to starboard, was running just above the water, and crests boiled right over it and coursed back to the stern. That gave Tom a shock—the ship, buoyant as it was, still shouldered through the water like a submarine coming to the surface. The sky was a very dark gray now, and the broken white sea glowed strangely under it.

The captain watched the control terminal. It had a red light blinking among the greens. “We’ll probably lose that sail,” Bahaguna said, then saw Tom. “That block is stuck again. Here, get into the room below and get strapped into a seat. The real squall is about to hit.”

The horizon had disappeared, replaced by a gray wall. They got to the room below holding onto rails with both hands, sat in empty chairs and fastened the seat belts.

They were headed straight into the waves. The bowsprit spiked an onrushing white hill of boiling water, lifted up a big mess of it that rushed down the deck, sluicing off both sides, until a wave some four feet high smashed into their window and erased the view. The light had a greenish cast in these blinded intervals. The ship moved sluggishly under the weight. Then the wave fell to the sides, and they could see gray clouds flying by just over the mast. Irregular thickets of water flew by, rain or spray, it was impossible to tell.

“The sea anchor’s out,” Nadezhda said. “That’s what got us head on.”

Soon Sonam Singh and part of the sea anchor detail came through, utterly drenched, moving as if in an acrobat’s game. “We did it. Glad the storm lines are rigged on deck, I’ll tell you.”

So they were moving backwards in the storm, pulling a sea anchor. It was a tube of thick fabric, shaped like a wind sock, with its larger end connected to a cable that ran back to the ship’s bow. As waves thrust the ship sternwards the sea anchor dragged before them, insuring that the bow faced into every wave, which was the only safe angle in seas like this. It was an ancient method, and still the most reliable.

The squall struck. The roar redoubled, the glass blurred completely. Nothing but patterns of gray on white. The sailors left the bridge like dancers on trampolines.

Bursts of wind stripped the water from the glass like a squeegee, and Tom saw a world transformed, no longer a place of air over water, atmosphere over ocean. Now the two were mixed in a bubbling white mass, and whole swells of foamy salt water were torn off the ocean surface and dashed through the air. The wind was trying to tear the surface of the ocean flat.

The bare masts themselves functioned as sails in a wind like this. All the rigging that extended forward was tauter than bowstrings, straight as theoretical lines of geometry; they gave off a thrumming that could be heard inside the bridge. On the other hand many of the lines supporting spars from the stern were slack, whipped back and forth so rapidly that they blurred in the middle. The masts and yards flexed in bows that were visible to the eye.

Another wave buried the window and it was back to the aquarium view, the murky green-black light.

Up and down the ship rode. They felt more than saw the bow shouldering through hills of water. The noise was unbelievable, like several jets taking off at once. Up and down, up and down, up and down. Tom got used to the motion, he was no longer dizzy, even in the weightless sweeps downward. Time passed. He fell into a bit of a trance, induced by the weird submarine light, interspersed with sudden glimpses of night-in-day chaos, seen with a strange clarity broken by lightning lines of water streaming over the glass. He was not getting used to the storm so much as being overwhelmed by it—making a psychic retreat from the infinity of watery assaults. The mind had to retreat from such mindless intensity.

A long time passed that way, with only occasional snatches of a view, always the same: flying mix of wind and water, under a black sky. Tom’s hands and wrists were tired, weary from holding his chair arms. He needed to pee. Could he make it to the head?

Suddenly the noise dropped, the light grew. The motion of the ship eased, and when the window next cleared he saw white clouds scudding overhead. “The eye,” Sonam Singh said, passing through on his way to the captain.

“I’m going to go to our berth and lie down,” Nadezhda said. “I’m exhausted.”

“Be careful getting there.”

“I’ll be wrapped to the rail.”

“I’ll come down later and see how you are.”

“Fine.” Off she went, balancing skillfully.

Up on the bridge they were discussing damage to the rigging. Tom stood carefully, staggered to the head. Peed with his shoulders banging wall to wall. The water in the bowl surged up and down. He felt battered, as if the little balancing mechanisms in his ears were still rattling about. Better to be seated, to have something to look at.

He got back to his seat and clipped in gratefully. Captain Bahaguna was giving rapid orders. “When it hits again it’ll be from the southeast. We’ll come about now.” Crew members ran through. Pravi stopped to see how he was, said, “Don’t you think the water surface is higher, like we’re on a kind of hill? A kind of big, low waterspout under the low pressure, don’t you think?”

Tom saw nothing of the sort. Green swells covered with white foam, white clouds stuffed with green rain. Off to the south was a black island: “Is that land!” Tom cried, frightened.

“Other side of the storm,” she said. “We’ve got about twenty minutes.”

The captain shouted at Singh about the sail that wouldn’t furl. “It’ll break the yard off and probably the pole too!”

“Nothing we can do about it, sir.”

Then the explosive roar of the wind hit again. The ship heeled far to starboard; Tom thought they were going to turn turtle. It seemed a bomb was going off continuously. The window cleared and he saw the waves grown huge again, iron flecked with ivory, tops torn off, but still thirty, forty, perhaps fifty feet tall! When they were in a trough the next crest dwarfed the ship, it struggled up the side of the wave like a toy boat. “My God,” Tom said, appalled. A wave engulfed them, and the glass showed only rushing darkness. The roar was muffled. They were underwater.

The ship shouldered up, broke to the surface and the howling wind.

Before them another wave as big as the one before, or bigger. Extending off to left and right as far as he could see. He was holding his breath, willing the ship to rise faster. The bowsprit seemed bent at a higher angle than before. The wave, a liquid hillside, a ridge collapsing on them, was dotted with a flurry of black dots.

“What are those!” he shouted, but no one heard him. Then they were flying up like the bob on a fishing line yanked from the water, up the wave hillside to the avalanching crest, inundated as if the wave were a broken dam, and Tom felt it through the chair: whump.

The ship was struggling in a different way. Sluggishly. The bow slewed off to port. Shouts came from above. Long minutes passed. Sonam Singh staggered by on hands and knees. “We hit something!” he cried at Tom.

“I saw it!” Tom said. “Wreckage—lumber, maybe.”

He couldn’t tell if Singh had heard, he was shouting something about the sea anchor.

Then the room rolled onto its side. Tom found himself hanging by his seatbelt. Only his hipbones saved him from being cut in half. Muffled roar, underwater again. In the gloom people shouted. Singh was over on one wall. The ship shuddered violently, turned, righted itself. Some noise and light returned. Tom glanced through the window as he freed himself from the seat. Another white mountain smoking toward them, in the mind-numbing howl. Mainmast and second mast were both bent, held in a tangle of alloy and rope rigging. The deck around the foremast was twisted, perhaps buckled. The ship listed to port.

He got the seatbelt undone and hung from the chair back. Time passed. People behind him were shouting, but he couldn’t turn his head to see. Then Sonam Singh grabbed him. Captain Bahaguna was crawling down the ladder from the bridge, followed by Pravi and the helmsman.

They had a shouted conference: “—lifeboats!” Singh said into the captain’s ear. Then mouth collided with ear, hard, and they both cried out, held their heads.

“No lifeboat could survive in this!” Tom shouted loudly, suddenly afraid.

Singh shook his head. “They’re submarine, remember? We go under. Then wait.”

“The ship won’t sink,” Bahaguna said. He didn’t like the idea.

“No, but we don’t know what compartments might flood. The bows are breached, and the other masts might go. More dangerous here than in the boats. While the launch bay is still clear perhaps we should be getting out. We can come back when the storm has passed.”

Inundated again. The ship listed far to port. Slowly water washed away from the glass. White foam, a moving hill of water. Under again. There were red lights all over the panel. The glass cleared and was instantly covered with water again.

A few more swells, sluggish response of the ship. Getting worse. A few more.

Finally the captain nodded, looking grim. “Okay. Abandon ship.”

They all crawled to the passageway leading aft. Suddenly they were in the muffled dark again, crawling on the wall. Sonam Singh was cursing. “Damned lumber ships, they lose their deck loads—” He saw a group of tumbling bodies ahead, raised his voice to a bellow: “Slow down up there! Slow down! Everyone to launch bays!” But the bodies rushed on. The lifeboats were near the stern, Tom had remembered all about them. They would be fired out like ejection seats in an old jet fighter. He and Nadezhda had been given a tour—oh my God, he thought. Nadezhda!

Their cabin was just below and behind the second mast.

He turned down the steps to the tweendecks, ran forward on the meeting of wall and floor. He had been a sprinter most of his life, and now it all came back to him. A real scramble. He had done something to his left wrist, the hand wouldn’t move well and the wrist hurt with a stabbing pain that went up his arm. He came to the passageway that led to their cabin. Several inches of water slopped over deck or wall, whichever was down. Thrown down, and on that hand again. He yanked open their door. The cabin was empty. Good. Water sloshed at knee height. The ship was permanently on its port side, but he needed to get starboard and aft, where the launch bays were. Storm muffled, ship underwater, he could hear his breath surging in and out of him in big gasps. Nadezhda must already be back there. This intersection of passageways didn’t look familiar. Shit, he thought. Not a time to get lost! He held a railing, tried to recover his breath. Up steps, water sloshing, the compartment had been breached, or not sealed off from breached compartments further forward. Around a corner, down another passageway, up steps. Water followed him. Shocking to have water inside the ship. He cracked his forehead, a nice hard spot that, no harm done. Needed to get starboard, water at thigh level and his left hand didn’t work. He was tired, arms and legs like blocks of wood, they didn’t want to move. Okay, a long passageway fore and aft, hustle down it aft, almost there. Sonam Singh would be mad at him, but he had had to check.

The passageway turned and ended in a closed hatchway. Good enough, beyond that would be an unbreached compartment. But he had to get it open and get through. Warmish salt water foamed up around his waist as he worked the dogs of the hatch one-handed, left arm thrust under a railing to hold him. So many locks on these bulkhead doors! He was in danger of getting knocked over, drowned while inside the ship. Had to go under foam to get to the bottom dogs, and they were stiff as hell. Okay, last one. Flash of triumph as he put his weight on the handle and pushed out. The door was snatched from his good hand and the water behind him shoved him over the coping and right out the door—onto the open deck of the ship. Wrong hatch! He dug with his feet, trying to get a purchase and get back inside. Then water surged up around him and he was off and away, swept away helplessly. His leg hit something and he grasped for it. Caught it, had his grip torn away. Then he was tumbling underwater, thrashed in a soup as if body surfing. Instinctively he clawed upward, broke the surface with lungs bursting, took in a big gasp of air and foam, choked and was rolled under again.

Free of the ship, he thought. Probably so. Fear took all the air out of his lungs. Desperately he swam, up and up and up. He got to the surface and trod the boiling surface furiously. Yes, free of the ship. Couldn’t see it anywhere. Overboard in a hurricane, “No!” he cried out, the word wrenched from him. Then under again and reeling, lungs burning as he held on. Drowned for sure, just a matter of time. He clawed madly to the surface, too frightened to let go. Another breath, another. He looked around for the ship, saw nothing. Too tired to move, and at the bottom of a trough with a wave forty feet high over his head. Hell.

Under again and somersaulting. Punched in the stomach. No way to tell up from down. This had happened to him body surfing as a kid, he had almost drowned three or four times. Swim to shore. He forced his eyes open. Green white black. He had to breathe, he couldn’t breathe, he had to breathe and it was water he breathed; feeling it he choked in panic and thrashed upward and held his breath again, and then breathed in and out and in and out and in and out; and all of it water. Helpless to stop himself. He felt the water heavy inside him, lungs and stomach both, and marveled that he was still conscious, still thinking. You really do get a last moment, he thought. What do you know.

And indeed he felt an enormous liquid clarity growing in him, like a flash of something or other. It was quiet and blue black white, a riot of bubbles flying in every direction around him, glowing. Blue capture plate, white quarks. Done for. Relax. Concentrate. He cast his mind deliberately back to his wife, her face, his baby held easily in his hands, and then the images tumbled, a forested cliff over ocean, a window filled with blue sky and clouds, swirling like bubbles of nothing in the rich blue field of the life he had lived, every day of it his and Pamela’s, and the crying out of his cells for oxygen felt like the pain of all that love given and lost, nothing of it saved, nothing but the implosion of drowning, the euphoria of release—and all the blue world and its blue beauty tumbled around him, flashed white and he snapped alert, wanting to speak, pregnant with a thought that would never be born.