Джек Макдевитт - Cryptic - The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt

In the late spring of 1944, the datapak picked up a subspace transmission: RESCUE UNIT ENROUTE. SHOULD ARRIVE WITHIN THIRTY DAYS AFTER YOU RECEIVE THIS. HANG ON, ROD.

By then Martin had taken to getting away from home periodically on two- and three-day jaunts into the countryside. But he wanted to keep up with the war. He was on one of these trips, lying in the grass halfway up a mountain in the early afternoon when the response came, breaking into “Dawn Patrol.” He let it repeat several times, wondering why he wished they had been a little less prompt.

Eisenhower’s army gathered in Britain. Everyone knew what was coming; most of the speculation centered on timing and landing points. Martin waited with the rest of the nation for word of the invasion. Tension inside the Dome grew thick.

But the invasion did not happen. A few days later, while he was still caught up in speculation from Washington and London, the Eagle arrived. It was a sleek silver bullet-shaped cruiser, sailing majestically on its magnetics. (The Eagle was the same class vessel as Alexia , but his ship had never looked so good.) His datapak gave him a look at it, and an hour or so later its lander settled softly into the scrub. The hatch rotated, opened, and people spilled out. Martin hugged everybody.

They stayed two weeks, splashing in the surf, drinking at night, walking in the woods. Martin talked constantly, to anyone who would listen. He paired off with a young technician and rediscovered a few lost emotions.

Captain and crew gathered around his radio, and listened curiously to “Big Town” and Gabriel Heatter. But time was pressing. “You know how it is, Rod,” the captain said. “Got to be moving.”

Martin noticed that, with the arrival of the Eagle , the broadcasts lost some of their sense of immediacy. He no longer felt he was living through the second war. When, on the fourth day of his rescue, Allied troops stormed ashore on Omaha Beach, he was in a glade with his technician. He heard about it later, but it seemed like an historical event. Something far removed from Amity.

They dug up Patty’s body to be returned to New Hampshire. The medical officer and the captain each inquired after his health. One thought he seemed depressed; the other wondered if he was actually unhappy about being rescued. “Long time to be stuck in a place like this,” the captain said, looking around at the empty beaches and the silent woods.

Martin’s eyes dimmed. “Not stuck here,” he said. “I’ve been traveling.”

The medical officer frowned. “What do you mean, Rod?”

“I’m not sure I can explain it, Doc,” he said. “But I may be the world’s first time traveller.”

Ilyanda had always seemed haunted.

There is something that broods over its misty seas and broken archipelagos, that breathes within its forests. You can feel it in the curious ruins that may, or may not, have been left by men. Or in the pungent ozone of the thunderstorms that strike Point Edward each night with a clockwork regularity that no one has yet explained. It is no accident that so many modern writers of supernatural fiction have set their stories on Ilyanda, beneath its cluster of brilliant white rings and racing moons.

To the planet’s twenty thousand inhabitants, most of whom live at Point Edward on the northern tip of the smallest of that world’s three continents, such notions are exaggerated. But to those of us who have arrived from more mundane locations, it is a place of fragile beauty, of voices not quite heard, of dark rivers draining the unknown.

I was never more aware of its supernal qualities than during the weeks following Gage’s death. Against the advice of friends, I took the Meredith to sea, determined in the perverse way of people at such a time to touch once again a few of the things we’d shared in our first year, thereby sharpening the knife-edge of grief. And if, in some indefinable way, I expected to recapture a part of those lost days, it might have been from a sense that, in those phantom oceans, all things seemed possible.

I sailed into the southern hemisphere and quickly lost myself among the Ten Thousand Islands.

It didn’t help, of course. I curved round familiar coasts and anchored off rock formations that, silhouetted against other nights, had resembled freedivers and pensive women. But the images were gone now, driven to sea by relentless tides. I slept one evening on a sacrificial slab in a ruined temple that, on at least one occasion, had been put to far better use.

In the end, I realized he was not out there.

Point Edward is visible at sea from an extraordinary distance. Visitors to Ilyanda are struck by the phenomenon, and are usually told that the effect is due to an excess of water vapor. But I can tell you what it is: Point Edward is the only major source of artificial light in a world of dark seas and black coasts. In a sense, it is visible all over the planet.

On that last day at sea, I saw it in the eastern sky almost immediately after sundown. I adjusted course a few degrees to port and ran before the wind. The water was loud against the prow, and, I think, during those hours, I began to come to terms with my life. The broad avenues and glittering homes that commanded the series of ridges dominating the coastline gradually separated. And I poured myself a generous glass of brissie and raised a toast to the old town.

The constellations floated on black water, and the radio below decks murmured softly, a newscast, something about the Ashiyyur. Like my former life, the war with the Mutes was very far away, out in a nebula across the Arm somewhere. It was hard to believe, in the peaceful climate of Ilyanda, that people—well, humans and the only other technological creatures we’d found—were actually killing one another.

A bell clanged solemnly against the dull roar of the ocean. A white wake spread out behind the Meredith , and the sails filled with the night.

Point Edward had been built on the site of an ancient volcano. The cone, which had collapsed below the surrounding rock into the sea, provided an ideal harbor. A cruise along the coast, however, would quickly demonstrate there was no other place to land. The chain of peaks and escarpments ran almost the entire length of the continent. South of the city, they seemed preternaturally high, their snowcapped pinnacles lost in cumulus.

I approached from the north, steering under the security lights of the Marine Bank on Dixon Ridge and the Steel Mall, past the serene columns and arches of the municipal complex and the hanging gardens of the University of Ilyanda. The air was cool and I felt good for the first time in months. But as I drew near the shore, as the boulevards widened and the lighted marquees became legible (I could see that the California holo Flashpoint had arrived at the Blackwood), a sense of apprehension stole over me. The wind and the waves grew very loud, and nothing moved in the channel or along the waterfront. It was of course late, lacking only a bit more than an hour before midnight. Yet, there should have been something in the harbor, a skiff, a late steamer full of tourists, a patrol craft.

Something.

I tied up to my pier at the foot of Barbara Park. Yellow lights dangled over the planking, and the place looked bright and cheerful. It was good to be home.

I strolled casually toward the street, enjoying the loud clack of the boards underfoot. The boathouse was dark. I ducked behind it, came out on Seaway Boulevard, and hurried across against the traffic light. A large banner strung over the storefront window of Harbor Appliances announced an autumn sale. One of the appliances, a cleaner, lit up, started its routine, and shut off again as I passed. Across the street, a bank databoard flashed the weather: showers (of course), ending toward morning, a high of 19, and a low of 16. Another pleasant day coming up.