Jack McDevitt - Eternity Road

Chaka had met only Tori, who had been a friend of her brother’s. And Mira. Other than Karik, the others were just names.

“Endine’s the one who sticks in the mind,” said Knobby. “He was hostile.” She saw that he wondered whether he’d gone over a line. “He wasn’t your father or anything, was he?”

“No.” She smiled encouragingly. “I knew him, but not well.” I’m beginning to think no one knew him well.

“He didn’t seem to want to talk to anybody. On a boat the size of the Mindar, that isn’t easy.”

It was early. The entertainment wouldn’t start for an hour or so, and the dining room hadn’t begun to fill up. They were seated at a corner table. Knobby drank more of his wine, wiped his lips, and leaned forward confidentially, although there was no one close enough to overhear. His breath was strong, and he spoke with a wheeze.

“I was second officer on the Mindar at the time. We hauled mostly coal, iron, wheat, and liquor into Brockett, and manufactures out. And whatever else needed to be moved. We were commanded by Captain Dolbur. Dead now these three years.

“The first time I heard of Karik Endine was when the captain called me and Jed Raulin into his quarters. led was the first officer. We were dockside, between jobs, and the captain explained that there were some people in town, foreigners who wanted to lease the boat, wanted him to take it down the Hudson and out into the Atlantic.

“You’ve seen the boats around here. The Mindar’s downriver right now so I guess maybe you haven’t seen her. But she’s no bigger than any of the others, and none of these has any business going near the sea. But there was a lot of money in it, he said. And we’d stay within sight of land the whole way. Endine had shown him a pouch of gold coins. Anybody who went along would collect almost a year’s pay for a couple weeks’ work. If the captain said yes to Endine, would Jed and me go along?

“Jed had a family. He said he’d want to talk it over with his wife. In the end, she gave him a lot of trouble and he stayed out. So I got a promotion. Two of our crew also backed off.

“The visitors wanted to go north. Up the coast. There were seven of them, counting Endine. It would be a six-hundred-mile run from the mouth of the Hudson, give or take a couple hundred. These people didn’t seem quite sure where they were going. We were to help them look around, deliver them, and wait for three weeks to provide whatever support they needed. After that, we’d bring them back or, if they decided not to come, we’d be free to return.

“It was blistering hot while we got the boat ready. We leased a dinghy and installed a housing and a system of pulleys for it on the afterdeck. Nobody knew a damned thing about the kind of country we were headed into, so we loaded up with as much wood as we could. We also put on plenty of food and water. The captain went over every inch of the hull, replaced a couple of the spars, added some pitch. We got a new anchor too.

“Altogether, the Mindar needed about three weeks’ work. Then Karik and his people came aboard, and we cleared Brockett on a humid July morning and headed downriver. Afterward, after all that happened, some of the boys said they’d felt premonitions about that voyage right from the start. But I can tell you true, there was nothing to it. We were feeling okay. We knew we were a good boat with a good crew, and we knew we could handle her in blue water. And we knew we were making more money than we ever had before. Or likely ever would again. So there was nobody on that boat thinking we should turn back.

“On the second day out, we passed Manhattan and turned north up the coast. There’s a long peninsula down there. We rounded it in good shape and stood out to sea. It was a gray, rainy day, and a lot of the stories that got started later about omens and such, they always mentioned how the weather looked when we started. But nobody thought anything about it at the time.

“The coastline going north is wild. Lot of rocks, shoals, riptides. We anchored every night at sunset, and you could look forever and not see a light anywhere.

“The boat was lower in the water than we’d have liked. That was because of all the wood and supplies on board. Everybody knew that if we ran into rough seas, especially outbound, we’d be in trouble.

“Like I said, Endine was unfriendly.” Knobby wrinkled his brow and let Chaka see his yellow teeth. “No, actually, it’s fairer to say he just kept to himself. He spent most of his time on deck, staring out to sea. He had cold, blue-gray eyes, and he just didn’t look like he gave a damn about anybody. His own people didn’t like him much.

“I got to know the others pretty well. Can’t help it when you’re all on a boat together for a week. They’d lost some people on the road. A couple got shot, a couple to fever.

“One of them, Tori, the youngest one, told me what they were after. I hoped the captain had been paid up front because I knew they weren’t going to find this la-la land they were looking for.

“The nights were cool, and the boat didn’t have much in the way of accommodations, so we used the dinghy to take the passengers and some of the crew ashore every evening. I remember somebody shot at us one night. Nobody got hit and we never found the son of a bitch and it’s lucky for him we didn’t. But that was the only incident.

“Early in our second week, land appeared on the east. We thought it was an island but I’m not so sure now. It might have been an arm of the continent, just sticking out a long way. I don’t know. It was mountainous and pretty far off, but Endine got excited and announced we were ‘in the bay.’ We saw a couple of whales at about the same time and everybody took that to be a good omen. I’d never seen a whale before. But we saw a few more before we got home.

“After a while the land on the east closed in and we saw that Endine was right and we were in a bay or channel. Whatever it was, it kept getting narrower. The first night, we made anchor near the eastern side and went ashore. We’d been setting watches since the shooting incident and I had the two-hour shift from midnight. Endine was awake the whole time, sitting on a rock down at the waterline. I asked him if he was okay, and he didn’t even hear me until I poked him.

“The sea’s loud up there. It’s a constant roar. In the morning we went down to the beach, and the Mindar, which had been anchored in twenty feet of water, was high and dry. The tide was out. Way out.

“Endine was furious. The captain had been on board, had seen it happening, and had tried to get clear but he wasn’t quick enough. Wouldn’t have mattered anyhow, because we were stranded on the beach. You understand, Chaka, we were just riverboat sailors. Nobody knew anything about those waters. The captain tried to explain, but Endine called him all kinds of an idiot, in front of everybody. I’ll never forget it. Later his people apologized. But Captain Dolbur had a long memory for things like that.

“When the tide turned, it came back pretty quick. I mean this wasn’t like any tide any of us had seen before. The channel just swelled up and roared in. We were afloat again by midmorning. There was some confusion in the currents, and we had trouble at first making way, but once we got back out into the channel we moved north like a son of a bitch. The farther we got, the narrower the channel got; and the narrower the channel got, the faster we went.

“That was rough country, wild, mountainous, not many signs there’d ever been towns. But we saw a few, ruins centered around harbors, and sometimes sitting up on rocky shelves or in prime locations along the coast. A couple of roads. Bridges crossing coastal rivers.

“Toward the end of that second day, the channel split in two. After some uncertainty, Endine directed us to starboard. Later that afternoon we sighted a cape sticking out from the eastern shore, and our passengers got excited.