Weissenbaum's Eye - Stetten

Weissenbaum's Eye - Stetten - Chapter 17

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

A vein of ivy squeezed out between the cracked halves of a brick. He had been walking. Eating raw algeast. He could not remember.

A hand came down firmly on his shoulder. He did not jump, because it was a kind hand. He turned and looked into my eyes. I spoke to him.

"So you are back. You look hungry."

Sand nodded and the earth tilted. I caught him as he fell, and carried him through the campus gate, along a dirt path that wound behind the buildings to the ocean. There I sat on the beach while he slept.

A long cloud hung before the sun, like a predator's shadow in some primitive sea. The surface might have been dimmed this way by an eclipse, or if the earth had fallen further from the sun.

I loaded Sand, still unconscious, into the boat we always kept fueled. Casting off, we skidded out past the harbor, where the giant robot tankers and trawlers rested at their floating piers. I turned the boat towards the open sea.

The water was not rough, but the little foil bumped and skimmed the peaks with an irregular pounding rush. Sand woke up and I gave him food and drink. He drank a little, but only stared at the food.

We headed straight out until the land was just at the horizon behind us. Then we turned in a sweeping circle to the left and headed north, keeping the coast just in sight until late afternoon. We didn't even try to talk over the engines.

Dusk descended all around us, and gradually I slowed the boat. The pitch of the engines relented. I released my grip on the control, and climbed into the stern. The boat idled along the same course I had been steering. I needed rest and a chance to check my bearings.

I pulled an old chart out of its plastic bag. Far ahead a buoy flashed green, and I found it on the chart. As night came down in a deep purple swirl, I returned to the helm to shut the engines down. The boat relaxed and settled in the water. Only then did the intensity of our solitude strike. One small rocking boat in the middle of nowhere, with nothing in sight but a single green beacon.

Sand spoke for the first time. "What makes it do that?"

It seemed a curious question. Following his gaze out to the buoy, I replied, "It's a transatlantic marker, powered by the sun. It's been out here a long time," I added, almost to myself. The night was overcast. It was quiet.

Seeing this, as I have now through the whale's eye, I can sense the real direction of his question. What makes a reflection trace its finger straight across the water? What makes the clouds decide to darken and dissolve? Why are there waves, if not to form the lines of some gigantic poem?

This is what Sand asked, being released from the couch onto the open sea, into reality. But I was thinking only of fuel and weather and was in no mood for poetry.

The boat was tipping recklessly as I turned it around and opened the engines. We leaned into one wave, balked, and then pressed on. Before us lay a shrouded invitation from the northern Atlantic. As we picked up speed, the clouds blanketed the stars from one invisible horizon to the other.

Sand was watching me. In the glow of the controls my bearded face must have been impossible to read. I had spoken only twice and now the engines made words once again impossible. To him, my face seemed cold and hostile, and the careless precision of my practiced movements at the helm made him look away, in fear of surrender.

Sand turned his head into the black wind, opening and closing his eyes until he forgot to mark the time. At some point I brought him a blanket, and told him to lie against the bulkhead, where he slept out of the wind.

When Sand awoke it was because something had changed. The sky was starless still. A new fog chilled his nostrils through an open fold in the blanket. But something else was different.

The boat was rocking. The engines were dead.

He sat up, pulling the blanket around himself, and saw my profile motionless in the light of the controls. I was staring somewhere out into the night. Sand quieted his own breathing and listened.

There was a ringing bell, faint and directionless in the dark. I started the engines, jerking the boat forward. The gentle chime was lost for a moment, but when the engines stopped we could hear it again, this time much closer.

I swung around, muttering, "Good enough."

Climbing to the bow, I cast a lure-buoy off the stern to find the whale. From where Sand lay, he saw me approach with a cloak in my hands. Something heavy was folded in the cloth. I dropped the collar around his shoulders and the metal balls of the simultron pressed up against his neck. His wordroots surfaced for him in a sea of images.

The time has come to stop performing for an audience. You have been waiting, walking in a gallery, too conscious of the eyes upon you. Every little thing you need, every little thing they judge. They cannot really care that much, and yet they do, more than you know. Realities are not identical, but they are symmetrical. People cannot be compared, and yet they must. We are dealers in guilt, we are dealers in joy, we are the gauges of each other's happiness.

Back at the campus I had asked Mara what to do if Sand returned with the smile of a thief. A secret ally of Benjamin Holly could not be tolerated where Sand was going. Backdoor had to be kept free.

Mara had replied there would be no forgiveness. If Sand were still trying to deceive us, the whales would surely destroy him. Their honesty could put a man so close to his own soul that to lie would be suicide. A horrible death indeed was in store for anyone trying to deceive a whale, within his own wordroots.

Thus, I dreaded seeing Sand open his eyes in guilt and horror, but his face was filled instead with wonder and peace, and I knew that he had passed the test.

But he was understandably exhausted.

"You need sleep," I said.

Making sure he was secure and warm, wrapped in his blanket by the bulkhead, I pushed the boat to full speed, so that we might cover the distance between us and our destination.

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