A Greater Vision
by Sean McMullen
This story copyright 1992 by Sean McMullen. This copy was created
for Jean Hardy's personal use. All other rights are reserved. Thank you for
honoring the copyright.
Published by Seattle Book Company,
www.seattlebook.com.
* * *
The seven thousand foot hull of the Kondolae
was nearly submerged, no more than a dark, smooth, undulating shoal in the glow
before sunrise. With great, gentle gulps its two hundred foot mouth pumped water
down the tubular muscle that was its hull, rippling contractions of
polymer-braced collagen matting squeezing it along until it was vented, slightly
warmer with the waste heat from thirty fusion power plants. It was named after
the giant hunter of the Dreamtime who had been transformed into a whale.
The Kondolae was a long way north of its Antarctic
harvesting area, where it could dilate the ridge along its back into a tube two
thousand feet across to swallow icebergs for the meltworks in the south of
Australis. It had been assigned to special duties for ten years now, awaiting
the incident that would transform it from a powered ice barge into a shaper of
history.
A small area of the deck slowly bulged up,
then gaped open with a creaking like hemp rope being stretched. Three figures in
dark environment suits stepped out onto the rubbery, undulating deck, then the
hump closed and subsided. Wavelets washed around their feet, and from a distance
it would have seemed as if they were standing on the water in the middle of the
open ocean.
Nunga had been flown out to meet the
Kondolae only a week earlier, once it had become obvious that the big submarine
would really have to be used. He had the status of Counciliar Overseer, and he
would be in charge of operations once the decision to strike had been made. That
decision was not his, however. It belonged to Wirana, the wild card among the
vessel's crew of nine hundred. She was the tactical navigator.
Nunga was in his late forties, and was full of the
drive and aggression so common in those newly installed in positions of power.
Mudati had been a captain for two decades. Nunga dyed a few individual strands
of his black beard grey, to give an impression of age and authority. Mudati's
hair and beard flared from the collar of his environment suit like a white halo.
"When will dilation start?" asked Nunga. "The breeze
is gentle, it's perfect weather for the fog generators to raise a screen."
"There's plenty of time," replied Wirana,
deferential but firm.
"We don't have time. We have
between five and eight days, depending on the wind and the use that our quarry
makes of it. This vessel takes a full day to dilate to maximum diameter."
"Premature dilation would be unwise," Mudati
advised. "It would slow our progress and strain the power-plants."
"But if we strike at once we'll not have to move for
more than a single day under full dilation. Tomorrow, just before dawn. That
would be ideal."
"There are still six hundred miles
before contact," Wirana said, then turned to stare out to sea.
Mudati considered the two opinions for a moment,
then announced his decision. "I'm not convinced that there's any need to strike
at all. I remember when we were shadowing Fernam Dulmo's fleet six years ago.
The Elder's observer used the same arguments that you do, but the threat came to
nothing."
Nunga folded his arms and scowled, his
back to the dawn.
"Dulmo was just a cipher. This is
different."
"The answer is no-- for
now. Wirana, when do you think we might strike?"
"Perhaps in four nights, but no earlier."
"Four nights!" exclaimed Nunga.
"Nothing less."
Nunga
trod the hatch stud, and the hatchway bulged clear of the water then stretched
open. He stamped down the steps without taking his leave of either the captain
or navigator. Mudati and Wirana were now alone under the brightening sky.
"He'll be onto the satellite link to complain about
me just as soon as he reaches his cell," said Wirana.
Mudati stood beside her then pointed up at Jupiter.
"This is your last quarter with us before you go
there," he stated rather than asked. Wirana nodded.
"I'll be shuttled to lunar orbit about midsummer, to
spend a few months of accustomisation aboard the Wondibingi before we leave for
Jupiter."
"You should do well. In your two years'
trial aboard this vessel you have been a model officer, well-suited to long
voyages in isolation. How long is the Jupiter voyage?"
"Nine years, all up. I'll be forty four when I
return."
"Ten years at the Academiem, three years on
the Lunar Orbit Assembler, three on the moon, two years of isolation experience
with us-- your whole life has been a build-up to Jupiter."
Wirana looked up at Jupiter, gleaming brightly not
far from Mars. "It's a chance to be first, to walk on the frontier. That's
enough to gamble a life upon."
"How would you feel
if it was cancelled?"
She looked down at the water
swirling about their feet. "I know what you are leading to, Captain."
"Well then, explain. Why are you going out of your
way to antagonise Nunga?"
"If he flings himself
under my feet, he'll be stepped on."
"That's no
answer. He's been mentioning you in his reports."
"He does not understand the frontier," she said
slowly, looking now at the distant sails of the nao and its two attendant
caravels. "Admiral Colombo and his crews have performed nothing short of a
miracle to get as far as this, yet Nunga... you heard what he said, he called
him the quarry, as if he was hunting a crocodile. People like to turn their
enemies into things before they destroy them. That's what Nunga is
doing."
"But nobody is going to be destroyed."
"Not bodies, not even souls, but something far more
vital." She kicked at the swirling water. "I'm sorry, I should not be talking
like this. It's not your fault. I feel... so isolated, like those men on the
ships. I wish that they could have their discovery."
"And what would follow? Dozens more ships, hundreds,
thousands, and on every ship hundreds of ravening freebooters in search of easy
gold, slaves and conquest."
"Conquest of what?
Civilisations that practice human sacrifice?"
"Which
the ancestors of these men were practising only two thousand years earlier. If
it comes to that, need I remind you of what is going on in Europe at this very
moment in the name of their religion? Their religion ignores the Land, they
degrade the soil, drive species to extinction and torture their own kind. Not
one of those ships has a soil chamber on board."
"So
what happened in Australis after we arrived? Where is our megafauna? What
happened to our coniferous forests?"
"But we
learned, Wirana. Now it's our duty to teach but we're not ready, we need time
and resources to turn their whole society around. Our planners never dreamed
that they would develop so fast."
They had been
through it all before, and it was not even a matter of convincing Wirana. They
stood together, looking out after the little ships, waves washing over their
feet with the undulations of the submarine's muscles. Colombo was on the
frontier, somewhere that Wirana would be soon, yet she had to name the time to
take his frontier away from him. She despised herself for it.
Mudati raised his binoculars and stared at the ships
for a while. "Most of their journey is behind them now. Their ships are bearing
up well, and the weather's good. They're rigged for speed. The birds flying
about them should suggest that land is close, and its direction."
"I know, and there's been weed and flotsam in the
water for days now. He must be certain of landfall, he'll not give up."
"If you're sure of that, why not advise me to begin
dilation at once and get it over with?"
"Why not?
To... allow him a little longer on his frontier, perhaps. I don't know."
The caravel Nina was ahead, being faster than the
other two ships. Suddenly there was a puff of smoke, followed by a dull blast.
"They've seen us-- " Wirana began, but
Mudati held up his hand.
"No, that lombard was only
fired as a signal. See there, a standard being unfurled at the Nina's masthead.
A sign that land has been sighted."
"Impossible.
They're still days away from the nearest island."
"True, but Admiral Colombo has undoubtedly offered a
reward for the first man to sight land. I'm surprised that there have not been
more false alarms already."
The Nina began to trim
sail, to let the other ships catch up. Other signal flags were being hoisted
now.
"I asked you and Nunga to come out here to try
to bring you closer to the men on those ships," Wirana said as Mudati turned
back to the hatchway. "I wanted Nunga to stop turning them into things. Is there
anything wrong in that?"
"No. Are you coming below
now?"
"In a minute or two."
She spent the time alone on the frontier that was
not hers, watching the distant ships and looking up at Jupiter from time to
time. Nobody questioned the need to strike, and as the tactical navigator it was
up to her to name the moment. An atrocity awaited her signal. At last the edge
of sun's disk blazed into view on the horizon, and Wirana descended into the
submarine.
* * *
Seafaring was an old tradition with Mudati's
people. Sixty thousand years earlier they had built humanity's first rafts and
crossed the waterways of the East Indies to discover and settle Australis. They
had never lost their technological lead, even though their society had been
inward looking for a very long time. Twenty thousand years before the Ziggurat
was built at Ur, an Aboriginal philosopher had built the first steam engine.
During the last ice age another had analysed ore from what had been called
sickness country, and within a few centuries the refined uranium from that ore
was used to drive their first nuclear powered trains and ships.
All the while the rest of the world made halting
progress from nomadic hunting to Neolithic farming, and soon the first cities
were raised on the land of the Middle East. As the Phoenician ships of Pharaoh
Nechos II circumnavigated Africa, the first Aboriginal rocket thundered into
space from the east coast of Australis.
In general
the Aboriginals studied and monitored the rest of humanity with detached
interest. Beyond Australis the progress of technology and civilisation had been
much slower, but over the last three thousand years some new and frightening
trends had been observed. Civilisations rose and fell in mere centuries,
reaching unheard of levels of sophistication during their brief flowerings.
Computer models predicted that there was a point at which the headlong leaps in
progress would become self-sustaining, and would race past the painstaking
progress of the Australis people in mere centuries. All that was needed was a
new frontier.
* * *
The Kondolae surfaced again at dusk, two
miles in the wake of Cristoforo Colombo's fleet. The sea was smooth, with a
light breeze. Wirana was in the chartcell when Nunga came in to check the status
of the ships. He always verified her figures himself.
"Ideal sailing weather," Wirana remarked, trying to
be pleasant.
Nunga just grunted. "Moonrise in a few
hours, and clear skies."
For some moments he
examined a trail of winking lights on the electronic wall chart, then picked up
a monitor frame and studied it carefully.
"They've
altered course twenty four degrees, they're steering straight for the closest
islands. How could he have known?"
"From the flight
of the birds," replied Wirana, weary of his visits by now.
"How would you know? You use computers and
satellites to navigate."
"But I studied the history
of navigation for this assignment. If I was navigating for Colombo's fleet I'd
take the present course."
"He's good," said Nunga
grudgingly. "If anyone can do it, Columbus can."
Wirana folded her arms and stared into the glowing
screens, each with a different representation of the little ships and their
status. She sensed a softening in Nunga, and almost without thinking she tried
to build on it.
"Exploration is a precarious
business," she said. "I feel sorry for all those men, so far into the unknown on
those frail, tiny ships while we're down here, eating marinated crocodile steaks
and drinking macadamia mash brandy."
Nunga scowled,
and turned from the screen to stare her down.
"We
have had our trials too. Narabinda lost half of his expedition in the cold, grey
dust of the Moon while the Romans were having orgies and chariot races. My
grandfather died when the tenth Mars probe crashed into the red deserts while
Columbus was at his mother's breast. When the Wondibingi arrives at Jupiter
you will be in danger too, from sulphur volcanoes and showers of
radioactive particles. There's no reason to sympathise with the men on those
ships. They may be very brave-- "
"Death from the dangers of the frontier is
honourable. Being smothered by the obscene lie that this ship is about to commit
is something else. We're prostituting sixty thousand years of medical and
technical progress."
Nunga scuffed the sand overlay
of the decking, unsure of whether to persuade or attack.
"It simply has to be this way. What you refer to as
an obscene lie is the only chance for our world. If we just make Colombo's fleet
vanish, others will try. They have to be convinced that there is nothing out
here. Otherwise they will race out of control before we can educate them to
develop in harmony with the Land."
"But we're
enslaving the soul of their people."
"If they are
given a huge, rich frontier just now they could well overtake us within five
hundred years."
"Impossible!"
"No, eminently possible. Consider their muskets,
falconets and lombards. Even though we had invented black powder rockets before
the last ice age, these people invented guns before us. What weapon might they
develop with nuclear power?"
"Why none, it's not
practical. The smallest possible nuclear bomb would wipe out a city. How could
you have the capitulation welcome and the reconciliation festival after a battle
if all your enemies are dead?"
"They don't have
those traditions, they never have. They have no honour, no ethics, they'd stoop
to tactics that we would never dream of using."
She
did not agree, and she did not reply. The conversation was annoying her, and she
wanted Nunga to leave.
"They will take about four
days to reach land," she said. "What else do you want to know?"
"Nothing. That means we must strike now, while the
ocean is still deep enough to conceal us."
"There's
a good depth almost to the islands."
"Act now!
They're nine-tenths of the way across, it's obvious that they will reach the
islands. If they had sailed in a more southerly direction they would have
reached land already. They'll do it, there's no doubt at all."
"I want to know that he could succeed, even
if he does not. Until I know that I'll not recommend dilation to begin."
Nunga raised his eyes to the ribs of the ceiling.
"Of all the irrational, stupid-- I'm going to report this to the
Elders! Six hundred of my specialist medical elders are being kept waiting on
your whims. It's costing a fortune."
"If I let a
bureaucrat like you frighten me, I'd be unfit for the Jupiter flight."
"Jupiter? You'll not even return to the moon, I'll
see to it."
On the following day Admiral Colombo
ordered his ships to steer west by north. The gigantic submarine and its own
fleet of attendant submarettes also changed direction.
"He has doubts," reported Wirana at the quarter day
review meeting. "Colombo has changed course to miss the closest islands."
"The mainland is still ten days away," agreed
Mudati, "and the Gulf Stream will give him a strong northward vector. This may
be the turning point, he may give up and turn east for home."
Nunga frowned but could do nothing but agree.
Colombo could make his name immortal, but only if there was a strike. He was
dependent on the Italian adventurer's whims, and he hated it.
The fleet was soon back on a west-south-west course,
but the brief deviation had suggested that Admiral Colombo was uncertain. The
main directive in Mudati's charter was the avoidance of intervention, so the
mariners were to be given every chance to fail by themselves. The next day was a
disaster, however. A good breeze took the ships a record distance for the
voyage. Wirana nervously eyed the depth-sounder as the sea floor sloped up with
the continental shelf. The Kondolae needed a depth of 2000 feet to navigate
safely when fully dilated and submerged.
* *
*
Aboriginal
history had its atrocities, but had generally been marked by steady, carefully
thought out progress based on a love of their land. The Kondolae had taken
decades to build, grow and shape, and was by now centuries old, typical of their
approach to industry and technology. Mudati was the hereditary captain, the
ninth so far. Their cities were numerous but not large, and they merged in with
the landscape. Columbus could have sailed all the way around the Australis coast
without noticing anything more than unusual rock formations, yet there was an
advanced civilisation there. It was a civilisation with sixty thousand years of
written history, and an advanced technology that had been blended into the land,
rather than gouged out of it.
* *
*
Early in the
evening Nunga called a meeting of all senior officers in the navigation cell,
and arranged a satellite hook-up with the Elders Counciliar back in Australis.
One wall screen displayed a transmission from the eye-cameras of a robotic
albatross flying high over the ships. Their sails were trimmed for the strong
wind, and they were moving fast.
"This is the
greatest distance that they have sailed in one day for the whole voyage,"
thundered Nunga, partly for the benefit of the Counciliar Elders, whose heads
were holographs behind transceiver screens. "We have to act now, we're probably
too late already. The Captain is in flagrant violation of the charter for this
voyage, and Navigator Wirana should be dismissed at once for gross negligence."
He sat down on the red sand of the floor. Wirana
stood up.
"The ships cannot possibly reach land
tomorrow, but will definitely sight some island the following day," she said
firmly, addressing the screens rather than Nunga.
"You admit it!" spluttered Nunga, but the Captain
motioned him to be silent.
"The Nina's lookouts will
be able to see the trees of one of the islands around noon on what they call
October 12th, if the present course is held." From the corner of her eye she saw
Nunga's mouth begin to open, but she was ahead of him. "Thus tonight is the
perfect time to begin dilation of the ice chamber. It will take a day to dilate
and tomorrow evening will be the best time to strike."
For a moment Nunga was too shocked to respond.
Victory at last, but victory too late. Captain Mudati allowed himself a little
grin as he tapped a key to call the control node cell.
"Commence dilation at once, on my authority," he
ordered.
Nunga got to his feet, fists clenched.
"It's too late, they'll sight land before we are ready to strike. One
change of course will throw our tactical navigator's calculations out. The whole
point of this venture is to prevent them seeing land."
"Your experience Captain?" asked an Elder.
"In that case we'll be forced to kill them in the
conventional sense, and Navigator Wirana will have the deaths of ninety men on
her conscience."
Wirana was shaken, but did not show
it.
"Tomorrow night will be perfect," she continued,
her voice level but her eyes blazing at Nunga. "There's no moon until after
midnight, the breeze will not be too strong-- and we'll have proved
beyond any possible doubt that they could have reached an island. Our charter is
not to intervene unless the danger of landfall is beyond question."
"It was beyond question a week ago," Nunga snarled.
* * *
The ridge on the submarine's back began to
expand into a second tube, open at both ends, but this one did not pump water.
As it expanded the vessel sank lower to remain below the surface, and by morning
the drive tube was six hundred feet below the surface while the carrier tube's
roof was barely below the waves. The fusion powerplants were now straining to
move the larger surface area through the water. A dozen submarettes that had
been flanking the Kondolae now moved forward to form an arc upwind of the three
ships. The seas were rougher than at any time during the voyage, as if
anticipating the drama to come.
Wirana was in the
navigation cell at sunset when Colombo changed course to sail west. The island
of Guanahini was now dead ahead, and would be visible by moonlight an hour or
two after midnight. Nunga was strangely composed when he heard the news.
"They must die," he said simply. "The opportunity
has been missed, it's too late. They changed course, exactly as I warned."
"We will take six hours to surface," said Mudati,
"and another half hour to strike. The limestone cliffs of the little islands
just south of Guanahani will be visible to their lookouts by then."
"But we can cover them in fog from the submarettes,"
Wirana pointed out. "If we start generating the fog bank now it will be
shrouding them a couple of hours before we need it to shroud our own approach,
yet it will cut off their view of the island."
"It's
too late," muttered Nunga sullenly. "There's not enough depth to let us travel
safely."
"I'll be the judge of that," said Mudati,
suddenly tired of Nunga's petulance.
Ahead of
schedule the submarettes began to raise a thick fog, which rapidly rolled out
over the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria. The Admiral quickly ordered the Nina to
drop back, just as had been expected. The Kondolae was big enough to swallow
whole icebergs, so big that surfacing was a major operation. Superconductor
driven pump muscles flushed seawater from the ballast bladders low on the outer
hull and the submarine rose out of the water and powered along like a floating
aircraft hangar with a 700 foot high roof. At midnight it began to bear down on
the patch of windblown fog.
Nobody on the ships
realised that they had been swallowed, fog, seawater and all. At a signal from
Mudati the ends of the tube began to close with a vast rumbling of artificial
muscles, capturing a foggy pond and three ships. Within the tube the wind died,
and the Kondolae's own fog generators now took over from the submarettes,
filling its vast interior with clammy billows. The trapped water quickly settled
to a calm sheet.
Robot manipulators, designed to
handle millions of tons of ice, gently swung out from the internal walls and
reached for the huddling ships. They were programmed to grasp the hulls firmly
from below, yet give the sensation of floating. The water remaining within the
huge tube was now pumped out while mist was blown past them from below. To the
Spanish sailors it seemed as if they were plunging through a nothingness of
thick mist, and the air was cooling rapidly.
* *
*
From an
observation galley high on the hull Wirana looked out over the rapidly
dispersing fog to the moonlit cliffs and trees that had been snatched away from
the Spaniards. Mudati was standing beside her.
"He
got within sight of them, yet he never knew," she said.
"Does that make you feel better?"
"History will record that he completed the voyage
without knowing it, and all the world will know in centuries to come. That was
the least that I could give my fellow explorer."
"So
that was the reason for your delay."
"I gave the man
immortality as an explorer. It might not make up for what Nunga is doing to him,
but it's something."
"You may have lost immortality
for yourself. There was a lot of truth in Nunga's reports on you. The Elders
want no foolhardy adventurers on the Jupiter expedition."
"Exploration without risk does not exist. Crew the
Wondibingi with sensible bureaucrats and they'd never risk leaving lunar orbit.
I took a considered risk, based on experience."
"Just between you and me, Wirana, a majority of
Elders believes that too, but at the inquiry please stress that you delayed for
so long because of the magnitude of the moral issues at stake. Okay? Now, let's
go down and meet Admiral Colombo."
"But he'll be
dead!"
"Don't you even want to look upon the man
that you fought for? Don't you want to see him in the flesh?"
"No more than I'd want him to see me on the toilet."
* * *
They had sailed over the edge of the world,
they were falling and doomed. Some began to pray, some fought each other
blindly, but this did not last long. It became hard to breathe, and within
minutes there was not a man left conscious.
Bartolome de Torres awoke shivering, cold sand
beneath his naked body, waves washing around his legs. He sat up, surveyed a
beach strewn with naked white bodies, some stirring. There were seven or eight
dozen of them. The sky was dark, but there was a glow on the horizon. He looked
up. Jupiter and Mars were high, so it had to be morning. He was on land, land
beyond what seemed to be the edge of the world. He was naked, not a ring, not a
boot.
He rose to his knees and began to pray, giving
thanks for the deliverance that he had prayed for so fervently in that terrible
region of cold and dark. Others were awake now, some praying, some cursing, and
suddenly someone cried out "Look, look, the rock!"
Bartolome turned to follow the pointing finger.
Gibraltar! An unmistakable form, there could be no two landmarks like it, yet...
he glanced at the sky again. Mars and Jupiter were still close together, the
moon was a mere sliver. No more than five days could have passed since they had
sailed off the edge of the world, yet they had been sailing west for more than a
month!
He had died. He had been stabbed in the
throat by a crazed shipmate. He felt his throat: a little sensitive, but no
wound. Abruptly he cried out as he realised that his teeth were no longer
hurting. For the first time in years his teeth were not hurting. Someone nearby
cried out that his gout was gone. A miracle, a whole succession of miracles! The
crews of all three ships had been brought back to life and cured of all ills.
They had evidently been discovered by seaweed
gatherers before anyone had revived, for a squad of cavalry was approaching,
followed by a crowd on foot. Spanish armour, Spanish saddles, and they were
hailing them in Spanish. He sat down heavily in the sand. They had been returned
to Spain.
"We are all naked before God," said the
man beside him, "and here we are naked."
"So have we
been before God?" Bartolome asked. "I was dead, and now I live. My teeth have
stopped hurting, too. A miracle, what else but a miracle?"
"A miracle. We have been saved. Brought back over
the edge of the world, brought back to life, brought back to Spain. Give thanks
to God and His Holy Mother, rejoice!"
"But why us?
We are just sinners. I killed a man, I was under sentence of death, then the
King pardoned me to sail with Admiral. Then we fell over the edge of the world
and died. Did God pardon us to come back to Spain?"
"We were surely brought back for a purpose,"
suggested his neighbour.
A strong subliminal
suggestion suddenly broke through into Bartolome's consciousness.
"God pardoned us our sins to witness the edge of the
world!" he concluded. "A kind God would not let honest seamen die in vain,
sailing into waters from where there can be no return. We were sent back to give
a warning to all Christians. The world is bounded, the edge lies far out in the
Atlantic."
The men on the beach were naked but in
good health, and in years to come it would be found that none of them could be
infected with any disease. Those who avoided accidents would die well into their
nineties, or even older. Soon blankets, cassocks and cloaks were being handed
out, any clothing that could be found in a hurry. Their rescuers were beginning
to suspect that something strange and wonderful had happened.
Columbo was led through to a horse, wrapped in
blankets and walking unsteadily. His eyes were wild and staring, those of a man
whose great vision has been replaced by something greater.
"God raised us up, brought us back to life," he
shouted to the onlookers like a prophet newly arrived from the wilderness.
"Mother Church will make us saints," said Bartolome.
"Saints are made by good works," admonished his
neighbour. "Come, we must begin the work that we were returned to do."
He helped Bartolome to his feet, and together they
walked up the beach as peasants dropped to their knees before them, imploring
them to accept their own clothing. Anything that they wore now would become a
holy relic.
"God brought us back from the edge of
the world as a warning to sailors," cried Bartolome. "Beware sailing too far
west."
"Christ be praised, Holy Mother of God, save
us all," the crowd shouted back.
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