John Gardner - October Light

With the growing rumble, he rose to something approaching full consciousness. The old bastard would strand all three of them without a second thought if he didn’t get Jane and Mr. Goodman to the Militant. He pulled at Mr. Goodman’s arms, and when the man neither came nor resisted, Peter Wagner turned around, crouched, and pulled him up onto his back. He squeezed through the cabin door with him and staggered down the bridge to the rail, then dropped him like a sandbag to the Militant’s deck.

“God damn you, Dusky, where are you?” Fist was calling.

Peter Wagner puffed as he would do when lifting weights, then went back to the cabin for Jane. When he reached the bridge with her he realized that the Indomitable was moving. He stood baffled, straining to understand. Then Captain Fist came hobbling onto the Militant’s deck. He was shouting “Eureka! Eureka!” Mr. Nit came out behind him, popping his knuckles. “Fantastic discovery,” Mr. Nit yelled up. “Fantastic!” Captain Fist, in his joy, threw his hat in the air. The breeze took it, and Mr. Nit went after it, two-thirds the length of the boat.

The discovery was an accident. They’d forgotten to unlash the Militant from the Indomitable, and they’d found that the Militant, small as she was, could haul the Indomitable like an oceangoing tug. They need not abandon the Indomitable’s cargo capacity after all.

“Help me up!” Captain Fist called. Why he insisted on riding in the larger boat, since they’d both be going pretty much the same place, was not clear. His dignity maybe; sense of theater, reality transcended. Peter Wagner ignored his appeal for help — hardly heard it, in fact. Mr. Nit bent over, Captain Fist scrambled up onto his back, grunting, and climbed back aboard the Indomitable. “What luck!” he said, smiling like a shark, “what luck!” Peter Wagner stood as before, with Jane in a fireman’s carry on his shoulder. Captain Fist limped past him, shaking his head at his good fortune. Inside his cabin he called back, “Somebody throw these people overboard.”

Down on the deck of the Militant, Mr. Goodman sat up, rubbing his head.

“Full Speed to Lost Souls’ Rock,” howled Captain Fist.

Mindlessly, robbed of will, Peter Wagner set the course. He was a man in a dream, his brain going over and over, as many times before in his life, the same unimportant facts. Tears streamed from his eyes, though he was aware of no emotion. He heard Santisillia’s elegant, theatrical voice; saw Dancer’s apocalyptic joy. He had lifted Dancer’s body from the floor to put it on the Captain’s bunk, and when the Captain said, “What are you doing? Get it out of here!” he had heard, had registered, and had immediately forgotten. It had seemed to him for an instant that Dancer was not dead after all, and the feeling was so strong that he’d leaned over to listen for a heartbeat. But then the Captain had shouted, and he’d forgotten what he was doing, moving from instant to instant like a drunk. The memory of his wife was smiling at him, her lip bleeding, her eyes rich with scorn. He felt, in brief panic, a need — like the desperate need for a cigarette — for some book, some tale of high adventure.

Now, in the wheelhouse, he concentrated on the tremor of the compass needle as if the place they were going were important. But even the compass was more than he could fix on. It came to him at last that Mr. Goodman was beside him.

“You should sleep,” Mr. Goodman said. He put his hand on Peter Wagner’s shoulder.

It was a difficult concept. He concentrated on the ring of brass, brooding on Ahead and Stop and Reverse. His chest filled with panic. “Is Jane all right?” But he was thinking: What of motion in all directions simultaneously?

“She’s coming around,” Mr. Goodman said. “Go on in and talk to her. And get something to eat. Here, I’ll take the wheel.” Though his chest was wide, his face was undeveloped, ministerial.

The pink dawn was brightening, false as stagelight. Captain Fist had gone back onto the Militant, too persnickety to sleep with the dead.

“Someone should move the Indian,” Peter Wagner said.

Mr. Goodman pushed his lower lip out and stared at the horizon. Then he nodded, turned with a shrug, and was gone. It would be dark and foul as a pit down there. There were still no lights on the Indomitable, and the leaks were still leaking. She was riding a foot and a half low. If he could remember he would have Mr. Nit rig a pump from the Militant’s engines, come daylight. (He could see Mr. Nit in the Militant’s wheelhouse, riding the course of the Indomitable’s steerage like the rear-end driver of a ladder truck.) The east was almost red. Red sky at morning. . He thought of Jane, who had a claim on him. She’d saved his life, and even though he hadn’t wanted it, it was a claim as powerful and burdensome as a parent’s, or a hangman’s. And also he had, of course, saved her life. So molecules are built, and ultimately the anguish of the stars.

Then, though no time whatever had seemed to pass, Mr. Goodman was once again beside him. “Go on in, let me take over.”

He nodded and stepped back from the wheel. The east was blood red. They were now heading south, far off the southern California coast. The breeze smelled of land. On the deck beyond the Indomitable’s radio cubicle he could see the form of the Indian, wrapped in a tarpaulin. Peter Wagner stood still, thinking, looking. He turned to say over his shoulder to Mr. Goodman, “I’ve been born again, you realize that?”

Mr. Goodman turned slightly, studying the deck.

“I’ve been given a new life, by pure chance — thanks to you and Jane.” His voice was level.

“Thank Jane, not me,” Mr. Goodman said. “I just happened to be near when you came flying down out of—” He pointed upward and laughed, then grew serious again, pulling his chin back, making it, once again, double.

“Just the same, here I am,” Peter Wagner said. He stretched out one arm as if giving a blessing, playing the part to the hilt, papal — and it was an accident that he happened to gesture toward the form of the dead Indian. “Here I am, an innocent newborn babe, with all the frontiers of the Indomitable before me.”

Mr. Goodman squinted.

He said no more. It was not, of course, Mr. Goodman’s fault, this coffin of frontiers, empty options, Time stopped dead. Through the open cabin door, as deep red with the light of sunrise as it had been last night with the light of the Militant, he glimpsed some movement, some shift that his tired mind identified as the head-toss of a seal. He pressed his eyelids with his fingertips and leaned through the door to look again. In the red light Jane was sitting on Dancer’s belly. He was lying on the floor. She was giving him, it seemed, artificial respiration, sometimes pausing and slapping his arms with her left hand, his face — knocking it from side to side — with her right. Not with his mind, it seemed, but with some older, quicker faculty — something from that relic of the First Age, the brainstem — Peter Wagner understood that disintegrating wires had dissipated the jolt: the eels had merely stunned, not killed. He’d been granted, incredibly, a reprieve. It was like a telegram from heaven: Rules all changed. Time clicked in, taking hold like a gear. Then he saw that the body of Santisillia was gone. The same instant, violent pain shot through his head, and sound like a hurricane: Jane’s scream. He must have been unconscious, and yet — one eye blinded by his own blood, his mind lit up as if by dynamite — he ran down the bridge, then staggered and fell and crawled on hands and knees to the tarpaulin and tore away the top to see the face.