The Last Ship (60 page)

“D
o you believe there are people out there, Captain. Others?”

“There have to be, Father.”

We had left the settlement not long after first light, moving along the clear-running stream above the waterfall, to either side of it the tender early sunlight flashing down through the high trees, the island never more fresh than at this hour of awakening. The green that lay everywhere ranging from a deep emerald to an almost-white lime, all of it glistening, speaking of vigorous life, its uncontaminated exuberance washed daily by the island’s gentle one-o’clock shower. The soprano call of small birds heard down through the branches, now and then a swift tinkling of leaves as one of these, in a flash of red or yellow or bright blue, decided to move from one tree to another, or to skip down for a drink of water from the stream, feet away from us, absolutely unafraid. All of these presentations matters of pure delight but surely to none more so than to men of the sea to whom their immense and never-ceasing variegation struck almost childlike, intoxicant ravishments after the oneness of the sea. Not far in on either side the bush thick, impenetrable. Then a kind of break, unexplained, as though made by man but obviously not, appearing after a while, a steep grassy clearing that led upward and which we followed; for sailors the sheer novelty of land-climbing exhilarating, and as we moved, hearing from the N. by N.W. course we were making the first sounds of our former home; now came swelling on the air that amalgam of sea scent and the island’s fragrance, beginning sweetly to enfold us. Pushing upward then, coming out at last on the majestic cliffs that formed the entire western side of the island and on one of its highest points.

We stood a moment looking all around in the dazzling stillness that held everywhere. Here commanded across the dense green a circumferential view to all horizons of the Pacific, rolling endlessly away in the great solitude, holding fast the imprisoned island on all points of the compass, the island lying prone and serene in the grasp of the sea. Even the fact that you could see the entire island from here seemed to accentuate our loneliness, our incarceration. The settlement, or any other sign of man’s presence, hidden from where we stood. Straight down, the stately cliffs made an awesome free fall to great jagged rocks interposed here and there only by an apron of white beach. On the lee side the sun, still low on the horizon, turned into one gleaming, almost blinding immensity the sea spread out far below us, whispering to the shore the sole sound of any kind in a mute world. Suddenly the silence was broken by a flight of birds, cawing discordantly, sea birds not land birds, some species of white tern, taking flight not far down the cliff from some home of theirs, whether disturbed by us or simply heading out anyhow, as they did now, for their early morning fishing—just like Silva, I thought—we could not tell. We watched their long gliding flights as they caught an air current and swept in effortless, near-motionless flight down toward the blue.

“Let’s rest here,” I said.

“Amen,” the Jesuit said, though I was gasping more than himself from the steep climb, my calf muscles trembling. We sat on the rocky ledge, no more than feet away from its sheer drop. Looking southward and away and down the coastline and far below we could just make out the configuration of the
Nathan James,
double-anchored in her bay, alone on a shipless sea.

“Maybe I should take up boxing,” I said. “You’re hardly breathing.”

The Jesuit still worked out daily with one or more of the men who, principally through him, had become interested in this sport. No one kept in better shape—and yet of late there had been a certain wanness in his face that had begun to concern me, the fact of his effortlessness in the climb seeming to negate it.

“Anytime, Captain,” he said. “Be glad to instruct. No charge for lessons in your case.”

“On second thought, no thank you.” I had seen the way he had come home with his punches on men much larger than himself. He laughed quietly. We settled in on the rock, cross-legged, looking far out, trying to find a horizon. In this early morning it was hard to distinguish sea from sky; sat watching the limitless sheet of blue stretching away in the transcendent stillness, the very firmament seeming to stand before us in all its irredeemable blankness, emptiness. Gazing at the vast seascape, ominous in its self-confident might, its hauteur, impregnable, as if to say only I have survived; the timeless, the mocking, contemptuous sea.

“Do you think there’s any chance they’re alive, Tom?” I said. I thought of them now not so much as mutineers but as poor lost souls: lost shipmates. Nevertheless I sometimes wondered.

“Something makes me believe so. I don’t know why. It doesn’t make sense. Even if they made it in open boats across that great distance, what was waiting for them on the shore . . . The level of the contamination . . . Yes, I know how desire can cloak reason; listening to the heart, not the mind: One is trained not to do so. And yet . . . And yet . . . somehow that feeling that they came to some safe harbor, somewhere.”

“God knows I hope you are right. But I cannot share your belief.”

We both, as if that was enough for the dreadful memory, the forever unburied thoughts, came away from it. I looked across the sea as if trying to see through its very horizon.

“But . . . aside from them. There have to be others.”

Every time I sat and looked out at those great waters, it did not fail to happen. Pervading everything, a terrible and brooding enigma; what was really out there, beyond them . . . did we really know? If alone, one stopped this manner of thinking before it got too far, knowing somehow the infinite peril of too much of it. With another, the Jesuit most particularly, one felt safe in pursuing the matter, at least for a while.

“Why have to be?” he asked.

“A feeling part of the mind: It doesn’t make sense that we should be the only ones. Part of the spirit: There simply have to be people somewhere besides ourselves. Also a sailor’s instinct. Maybe a sea captain’s instinct. The emptiness of that sea doesn’t seem right.”

It was remarkable how one subconsciously kept looking for a ship to appear from over the horizon, hull down she would be from this great height, a sailor’s sense of absolute unnaturalness that that immensity of waters—to a sailor existing for that sole purpose, to carry ships—should be forever blank, a void. I murmured something of the sort now.

“No ships. That’s the one thing I can’t get used to. I never will. Someday a ship will come over that horizon.”

“One may well do so,” he said quietly, feeling my emotion, himself a sailor, too.

“I don’t really think so,” I said. “But I prefer to. I have an idea the sea feels unnatural herself without them; misses them.” I laughed shortly. “Feels it’s been deserted, abandoned; asks, where are the ships?”

He waited, then I heard as though an exhalation, a question, as were most of these, as much to himself as to me.

“If they’re out there at all . . . where?”

“From what the Russian submarine captain told us—and from Selmon’s deductions—they all shape up about equally. Equally bad. Maybe a few unreachable pockets . . . South America . . . home.” The pain any articulation of the last word carried had come mercifully to be dulled somewhat though not perhaps ever to be fully obliterated. “Short of those . . . possibilities . . . the Russian’s reports had that finality about them.”

I remembered that I had told no one, not even the Jesuit—no one save Girard and Thurlow—of that deal with the Russian captain. His quest to find us fuel in the wastes of Siberia seeming now increasingly hopeless from the first. We had heard from him quite regularly up to the time he was approaching the depot at Karsavina. That had been five months ago. Then the messages had ceased—just like that. All our efforts to raise him on the agreed frequency fruitless: We had sent him repeated messages that we had found a habitable island, were building thereon, awaiting his coming, and had received no reply. Nevertheless I had included in the settlement plans an extra dormitory, explaining it away by mentioning that we would doubtless need it ourselves in the future. The possibilities of what had happened to the
Pushkin
were endless: ship’s company run out of food, starvation, mutiny from these, other deteriorating conditions aboard the submarine . . . One’s mind could go on. I had all but given up expecting ever to see her again. Not an unmixed failure. The absorption of her crew into our community, as substantially promised by me in return for the fuel, part of the deal, would surely have been a staggering undertaking, fraught with peril and pitfalls every step of the way. On the other hand, her not coming meant that we would never leave this island. Once I had speculated with myself whether I wished more than all else for her to come or, equally, not to do so; that long deep-black shape to appear against the blue horizon, representing whether menace or salvation I knew not; with the long cessation of any reports, some time since even this exercise dissolved as entirely hypothetical. I heard my own mirthless laugh.

“Except the penguins,” I said.

“The penguins?”

“Antarctica. Selmon still thinks it may have got away. Complete uncontamination. Proceeding as if nothing ever happened. Bliss all around. Odd to think there may be more penguins now than anything else on earth.”

“They may have company. Just possibly. You knew about the Antarctica Pact, of course? Twelve nations, I believe, all agreeing not to exploit the place—just explore it. Altogether about 1,500 men, a few women, down there, scientific types, during their summer season—which was when things went. Matter of fact I had a friend from Georgetown a part of it, a fellow priest though down there as something else. A geologist specializing in ice formations. I’d hear from him. I’ve wondered a time or two—if the continent is in fact habitable—whether he’s still alive.”

“Yes, I’m familiar with that project. God knows what happened to those people.”

That continent of cold seemed another planet as we looked out over this tropical infinity of turquoise, appearing to render our voices soft so as not to disturb the world lying in radiant silence; this and the great emptiness filling one with an overpowering, almost unbearable sense of loneliness, relieved in each only by the shipmate presence of the other; remaining, a sense of solipsism, as if we were the only two on earth.

“Still . . . I find the idea settling in more every day, Tom,” I said. “The idea that we are the only ones, nothing beyond that horizon there. As I say, I don’t believe it, not intellectually. But the longer I’m on this island, the more it seems to be so in my heart. It’s probably that even if there are other people, we’ll never see them. Actually that—acceptance, is it?—makes it easier. That old blessing of finality, nothing you can do about something so you turn to what you have and say to yourself, ‘Let’s have a look here and see what we can make of it.’ We’ve got a lot to start with. The Farm working out so well—what the island itself adds to that. All those fish out there. No shortage of food. A damned healthy, helpful place, this island we’ve come to. When I think what far worse places we could have come out on . . . We’ve been blessed. So my mind now runs this way: This island will most likely be our home for the remainder of our lives—all one hundred and seventy-eight of us. We’ll never step foot off it. So let’s get on with life here. Do the very best we can with it. Who knows—if we’re up to it, we might make something pretty good of it.”

“If we’re up to it,” his voice came in a soft echo; then another tone of his I knew, of firmness, of resolve. “Well, we’ll just have to make damned certain we are.”

A plaintive silence, a stillness of unspoken and unspeakable thoughts, palpable and merciless, something irremediable . . . suddenly as if vaulted from it one felt a lift out of all this, a surge of possibilities bursting into the mind, of great expectations . . .

“We have a chance to start over,” I said simply. “And not to fuck it up this time.”

“Aye, that’s it,” the Jesuit said, a tinge of high excitement, rare for him, coming through; not short of a kind of fervent zeal. “How many collections of—men, women—have ever been given that chance? Starting over . . . even the very words. It may be God’s greatest gift to man.”

I could hear my own voice, a gentleness of tone as quiet as the reiterative whisper of the sea far below.

“We’ve got every shot, God knows. Mainly this ship’s company. Not just their skills, though we would never have made it without those. But the kind of men and women they are. The way they’ve turned to, from the beginning. The Farm. Building the settlement: I feel a sense of accomplishment in the men—they feel it too. When I think what they’ve been through. My love for them—it is like a pain sometimes.” I opened the door a bit. “The only love I have ever had. Whatever happens, there is nothing in life I would have traded it for.”

He respected that with his silence. We were quiet a moment, the sea now seeming sweet stretching before us, its voice on the shore itself somehow a reassuring, healing thing.

“So fine a company of men, so good a place we’ve come to . . . we have every chance men could ask for. If we can make it through this one thing . . .”

From long habit I could sense his waiting, his sure sense not to interrupt. He was simply standing by, with no sense of impatience or hurry, to see where he might help—even if it were to disagree, oppose a thought, a plan, a policy I had in mind. His absolute unhesitation in doing so a major part of the gift he brought a ship’s captain. But directed always to the good of ship’s company as well, with all of my own intensity, my sole star guide: their safety, their well-being. That common devotion binding us; sometimes not agreeing as to where the star pointed . . . A slight fear at the reminding myself of this fact moving through me now; fore-feeling his probable opposition as to some of the matters I was about to spring on him; perhaps overanticipating this in the light of that undertaking that had come so to torment me, now that it was right on top of us. I gazed out into the immense solitude of the waters.