Majipoor Chronicles m-2 Read online

  "We can cope with seaweed," Lavon said. "Let's move onward."

  Within an hour he was beginning to have doubts. From his pacing-place on the bridge he stared warily at the ever-thickening seaweed. It was forming little islands now, fifty or a hundred yards across, and the channels between were narrower. All the surface of the sea was in motion, quivering, trembling. Under the searing rays of an almost vertical sun the seaweed grew richer in color, sliding in a manic way from tone to tone as if pumped higher by the inrush of solar energy. He saw creatures moving about in the tight-packed strands: enormous crablike things, many-legged, spherical, with knobby green shells, and sinuous serpentine animals something like squid, harvesting other life-forms too small for Lavon to see.

  Vormecht said nervously, "Perhaps a change of course—"

  "Perhaps," Lavon said. "I'll send a lookout up to tell us how far this mess extends."

  Changing course, even by a few degrees, held no appeal for him. His course was set; his mind was fixed; he feared that any deviation would shatter his increasingly frail resolve. And yet he was no monomaniac, pressing ahead without regard to risk. It was only that he saw how easy it would be for the people of the Spurifon to lose what was left of their dedication to the immense enterprise on which they had embarked.

  This was a golden age for Majipoor, a time of heroic figures and mighty deeds. Explorers were going everywhere, into the desert barrens of Suvrael and the forests and marshes of Zimroel and the virgin outlands of Alhanroel, and into the archipelagoes and island clusters that bordered the three continents. The population was expanding rapidly, towns were turning into cities and cities into improbably great metropolises, non-human settlers were pouring in from the neighboring worlds to seek their fortunes, everything was excitement, change, growth. And Sinnabor Lavon had chosen for himself the craziest feat of all, to cross the Great Sea by ship. No one had ever attempted that. From space one could see that the giant planet was half water, that the continents, huge though they were, were cramped together in a single hemisphere and all the other face of the world was a blankness of ocean. And though it was some thousands of years since the human colonization of Majipoor had begun, there had been work aplenty to do on land, and the Great Sea had been left to itself and to the armadas of sea-dragons that untiringly crossed it from west to east in migrations lasting decades.

  But Lavon was in love with Majipoor and yearned to embrace it all. He had traversed it from Amblemorn at the foot of Castle Mount to Til-omon on the other shore of the Great Sea; and now, driven by the need to close the circle, he had poured all his resources and energies into outfitting this awesome vessel, as self-contained and self-sufficient as an island, aboard which he and a crew as crazy as himself intended to spend a decade or more exploring that unknown ocean. He knew, and probably they knew too, that they had sent themselves off on what might be an impossible task. But if they succeeded, and brought their argosy safely into harbor on Alhanroel's eastern coast where no ocean-faring ship had ever landed, their names would live forever.

  "Hoy!" cried the lookout suddenly. "Dragons ho! Hoy! Hoy!"

  "Weeks of boredom," Vormecht muttered, "and then everything at once!"

  Lavon saw the lookout, dark against the dazzling sky, pointing rigidly north-northwest. He shaded his eyes and followed the outstretched arm. Yes! Great humped shapes, gliding serenely toward them, flukes high, wings held close to their bodies or in a few cases magnificently outspread—

  "Dragons!" Galimoin called. "Dragons, look!" shouted a dozen other voices at once.

  The Spurifon had encountered two herds of sea-dragons earlier in the voyage: six months out, among the islands that they had named the Stiamot Archipelago, and then two years after that, in the part of the ocean that they had dubbed the Arioc Deep. Both times the herds had been large ones, hundreds of the huge creatures, with many pregnant cows, and they had stayed far away from the Spurifon. But these appeared to be only the outliers of their herd, no more than fifteen or twenty of them, a handful of giant males and the others adolescents hardly forty feet in length. The writhing seaweed now looked inconsequential as the dragons neared. Everyone seemed to be on deck at once, almost dancing with excitement.

  Lavon gripped the rail tightly. He had wanted risk for the sake of diversion: well, here was risk. An angry adult sea-dragon could cripple a ship, even one so well defended as the Spurifon, with a few mighty blows. Only rarely did they attack vessels that had not attacked them first, but it had been known to happen. Did these creatures imagine that the Spurifon was a dragon-hunting ship? Each year a new herd of sea-dragons passed through the waters between Piliplok and the Isle of Sleep, where hunting them was permitted, and fleets of dragon-ships greatly thinned their numbers then; these big ones, at least, must be survivors of that gamut, and who knew what resentments they harbored? The Spurifon's harpooners moved into readiness at a signal from Lavon.

  But no attack came. The dragons seemed to regard the ship as a curiosity, nothing more. They had come here to feed. When they reached the first clumps of seaweed they opened their immense mouths and began to gulp the stuff down by the bale, sucking in along with it the squid-things and the crab-things and all the rest. For several hours they grazed noisily amid the seaweed; and then, as if by common agreement, they slipped below the surface and within minutes were gone.

  A great ring of open sea now surrounded the Spurifon.

  'They must have eaten tons of it," Lavon murmured. "Tons!"

  "And now our way is clear," said Galimoin.

  Vormecht shook his head. "No. See, captain? The dragon-grass, farther out. Thicker and thicker and thicker!"

  Lavon stared into the distance. Wherever he looked there was a thin dark line along the horizon.

  "Land," Galimoin suggested. "Islands — atolls—"

  "On every side of us?" Vormecht said scornfully. "No, Galimoin. We've sailed into the middle of a continent of this dragon-grass stuff. The opening that the dragons ate for us is just a delusion. We're trapped!"

  "It's only seaweed," Galimoin said. "If we have to, we'll cut our way through it."

  Lavon eyed the horizon uneasily. He was beginning to share Vormecht's discomfort. A few hours ago the dragongrass had amounted to mere isolated strands, then scattered patches and clumps; but now, although the ship was for the moment in clear water, it did indeed look as if an unbroken ring of the seaweed had come to enclose them fore and aft. And yet could it possibly become thick enough to block their passage?

  Twilight was descending. The warm heavy air grew pink, then quickly gray. Darkness rushed down upon the voyagers out of the eastern sky.

  "We'll send out boats in the morning and see what there is to see," Lavon announced.

  That evening after dinner Joachil Noor reported on the dragon-grass: a giant alga, she said, with an intricate biochemistry, well worth detailed investigation. She spoke at length about its complex system of color-nodes, its powerful contractile capacity. Everyone on board, even some who had been lost in fogs of hopeless depresion for weeks, crowded around to peer at the specimens in the tub, to touch them, to speculate and comment. Sinnabor Lavon rejoiced to see such liveliness aboard the Spurifon once again after these weeks of doldrums.

  He dreamed that night that he was dancing on the water, performing a vigorous solo in some high-spirited ballet. The dragon-grass was firm and resilient beneath his flashing feet.

  An hour before dawn he was awakened by urgent knocking at his cabin door. A Skandar was there — -Skeen, standing third watch. "Come quickly — the dragon-grass, captain—"

  The extent of the disaster was evident even by the faint pearly gleams of the new day. All night the Spurifon had been on the, move and the dragon-grass had been on the move, and now the ship lay in the heart of a tight-woven fabric of seaweed that seemed to stretch to the ends of the universe. The landscape that presented itself as the first green streaks of morning tinted the sky was like something out of a dream: a single unbroken carpet of a t
rillion trillion knotted strands, its surface pulsing, twitching, throbbing, trembling, and its colors shifting everywhere through a restless spectrum of deep assertive tones. Here and there in this infinitely entangled webwork its inhabitants could be seen variously scuttling, creeping, slithering, crawling, clambering, and scampering. From the densely entwined masses of seaweed rose an odor so piercing it seemed to go straight past the nostrils to the back of the skull. No clear water was in sight. The Spurifon was becalmed, stalled, as motionless as if in the eight she had sailed a thousand miles overland into the heart of the Suvrae! desert.

  Lavon looked toward Vormecht — the first mate, so querulous and edgy all yesterday, now bore a calm look of vindication — and toward Chief Navigator Galimoin, whose boisterous confidence had given way to a tense and volatile frame of mind, obvious from his fixed, rigid stare and the grim clamping of his lips.

  "I've shut the engines down," Vormecht said. "We were sucking in dragon-grass by the barrel. The rotors were completely clogged almost at once."

  "Can they be cleared?" Lavon asked.

  "We're clearing them," said Vormecht. "But the moment we start up again, we'll be eating seaweed through every intake."

  Scowling, Lavon looked to Galimoin and said, "Have you been able to measure the area of the seaweed mass?"

  "We can't see beyond it, captain."

  "And have you sounded its depth?"

  "It's like a lawn. We can't push our plumbs through it."

  Lavon let his breath out slowly. "Get boats out right away. We need to survey what we're up against. Vormecht, send two divers down to find out how deep the seaweed goes, and whether there's some way we can screen our intakes against it. And ask Joachil Noor to come up here."

  The little biologist appeared promptly, looking weary but perversely cheerful. Before Lavon could speak she said, "I've been up all night studying the algae. They're metal-fixers, with a heavy concentration of rhenium and vanadium in their—"

  "Have you noticed that we're stopped?"

  She seemed indifferent to that. "So I see."

  "We find ourselves living out an ancient fable, in which ships are caught by impenetrable weeds and become derelicts. We may be here a long while."

  "It will give us a chance to study this unique ecological province, captain."

  "The rest of our lives, perhaps."

  "Do you think so?" asked Joachil Noor, startled at last.

  "I have no idea. But I want you to shift the aim of your studies, for the time being. Find out what kills these weeds, aside from exposure to the air. We may have to wage biological warfare against them if we're ever going to get out of here. I want some chemical, some method, some scheme, that'll clear them away from our rotors."

  "Trap a pair of sea-dragons," Joachil Noor said at once, "and chain one to each side of the bow, and let them eat us free."

  Sinnabor Lavon did not smile. "Think about it more seriously," he said, "and report to me later."

  He watched as two boats were lowered, each bearing a crew of four. Lavon hoped that the outboard motors would be able to keep clear of the dragon-grass, but there was no chance of that: almost immediately the blades were snarled, and it became necessary for the boatmen to unship the oars and beat a slow, grueling course through the weeds, while pausing occasionally to drive off with clubs the fearless giant crustaceans that wandered over the face of the choked sea. In fifteen minutes the boats were no more than a hundred yards from the ship. Meanwhile a pair of divers clad in breathing-masks had gone down, one Hjort, one human, hacking openings in the dragon-grass alongside the ship and vanishing into the clotted depths. When they failed to return after half an hour Lavon said to the first mate, "Vormecht, how long can men stay underwater wearing those masks?"

  "About this long, captain. Perhaps a little longer for a Hjort, but not much."

  "So I thought."

  "We can hardly send more divers after them, can we?"

  "Hardly," said Lavon bleakly. "Do you imagine the submersible would be able to penetrate the weeds?"

  "Probably not."

  "I doubt it too. But we'll have to try it. Call for volunteers."

  The Spurifon carried a small underwater vessel that it employed in its scientific research. It had not been used in months, and by the time it could be readied for descent more than an hour had passed; the fate of the two divers was certain; and Lavon felt the awareness of their deaths settling about his spirit like a skin of cold metal. He had never known anyone to die except from extreme old age, and the strangeness of accidental mortality was a hard thing for him to comprehend, nearly as hard as the knowledge that he was responsible for what had happened.

  Three volunteers climbed into the submersible and it was winched overside. It rested a moment on the surface of the water; then its operators thrust out the retractible claws with which it was equipped, and like some fat glossy crab it began to dig its way under. It was a slow business, for the dragon-grass clung close to it, reweaving its sundered web almost as fast as the claws could rip it apart. But gradually the little vessel slipped from sight.

  Galimoin was shouting something over a bullhorn from another deck. Lavon looked up and saw the two boats he had sent out, struggling through the weeds perhaps half a mile away. By now it was mid-morning and in the glare it was hard to tell which way they were headed, but it seemed they were returning.

  Alone and silent Lavon waited on the bridge. No one dared approach him. He stared down at the floating carpet of dragon-grass, heaving here and there with strange and terrible life-forms, and thought of the two drowned men and the others in the submersible and the ones in the boats, and of those still safe aboard the Spurifon, all enmeshed in the same grotesque plight. How easy it would have been to avoid this, he thought; and how easy to think such thoughts. And how futile.

  He held his post, motionless, well past noon, in the silence and the haze and the heat and the stench. Then he went to his cabin. Later in the day Vormecht came to him with the news that the crew of the submersible had found the divers hanging near the stilled rotors, shrouded in tight windings of dragon-grass, as though the weeds had deliberately set upon and engulfed them. Lavon was skeptical of that; they must merely have become tangled in it, he insisted, but without conviction. The submersible itself had had a hard time of it and had nearly burned out its engines in the effort to sink fifty feet. The weeds, Vormecht said, formed a virtually solid layer for a dozen feet below the surface. "What about the boats?" Lavon asked, and the first mate told him that they had returned safely, their crews exhausted by the work of rowing through the knotted weeds. In the entire morning they had managed to get no more than a mile from the ship, and they had seen no end to the dragon-grass, not even an opening in its unbroken weave. One of the boatmen had been attacked by a crab-creature on the way back, but had escaped with only minor cuts.

  During the day there was no change in the situation. No change seemed possible. The dragon-grass had seized the Spurifon and there was no reason for it to release the ship, unless the voyagers compelled it to, which Lavon did not at present see how to accomplish.

  He asked the chronicler Mikdal Hasz to go among the people of the Spurifon and ascertain their mood. "Mainly calm," Hasz reported. "Some are troubled. Most find our predicament strangely refreshing: a challenge, a deviation from the monotony of recent months."

  "And you?"

  "I have no fears, captain. But I want to believe we will find a way out. And I respond to the beauty of this weird landscape with unexpected pleasure."

  Beauty? Lavon had not thought to see beauty in it. Darkly he stared at the miles of dragon-grass, bronze-red under the bloody sunset sky. A red mist was rising from the water, and in that thick vapor the creatures of the algae were moving about in great numbers, so that the enormous raftlike weed-structures were constantly in tremor. Beauty? A sort of beauty indeed, Lavon conceded. He felt as if the Spurifon had become stranded in the midst of some painting, a vast scroll of soft fluid sh
apes, depicting a dreamlike disorienting world without landmarks, on whose liquid surface there was unending change of pattern and color. So long as he could keep himself from regarding the dragon-grass as the enemy and destroyer of all he had worked to achieve, he could to some degree admire the shifting glints and forms all about him.

  He lay awake much of the night searching without success for a tactic to use against this vegetable adversary.

  Morning brought new colors in the weed, pale greens and streaky yellows under a discouraging sky burdened with thin clouds. Five or six colossal sea-dragons were visible a long way off, slowly eating a path for themselves through the water. How convenient it would be, Lavon reflected, if the Spurifon could do as much!

  He met with his officers. They too had noticed last night's mood of general tranquillity, even fascination. But they detected tensions beginning to rise this morning. "They were already frustrated and homesick," said Vormecht, "and now they see a new delay here of days or even weeks."

  "Or months or years or forever," snapped Galimoin. "What makes you think we'll ever get out?"

  The navigator's voice was ragged with strain and cords stood out along the sides of his thick neck. Lavon had long ago sensed an instability somewhere within Galimoin, but even so he was not prepared for the swiftness with which Galimoin had been undone by the onset of the dragon-grass.

  Vormecht seemed amazed by it also. The first mate said in surprise, "You told us yourself the day before yesterday, 'It's only seaweed. We'll cut ourway through it.' Remember?"