make any guarantees.”
“Shannon?”
“The woodsy guy.”
Quait nodded. “You won’t get a guarantee, Silas, with a thing like this. Not ever. You know that as well as I do.”
“I know.” A candle burned in a globe on the table. Silas stared at it. “I wasn’t looking for a guarantee, Quait. You know that.”
Quait tried his wine, licked his lips, put it down. “Silas, may I speak frankly?”
“Of course.”
“What is it that frightens you? What is it that keeps you from going after the one thing in this life that has real meaning for you? You backed off nine years ago, and you’re backing off now.”
“And I was right nine years ago, wasn’t I?”
“I don’t know. Were you?”
“Nobody came back. Except Karik.”
Quait shrugged. “Maybe you would have made the difference.” He leaned forward. “Silas, I know you’d risk your reputation if you went. I know the odds for success aren’t good. But I think basing your decision on what someone else will think doesn’t sound like you.”
“Sure it does,” said Silas. “I’ve always been concerned about public opinion. I have to be. My livelihood depends on it.”
“Then maybe you’re right,’ he said. “Maybe, if it’s out there, you’re not the right person to find it. But however that may be, I think you’ve been asking the wrong question. I’m more inclined to wonder what might happen if Shannon is right? If the trail is complete. If Haven really is at the end of it.”
“That’s a lot of if’s.”
“Yes. Well, I think we’ve already agreed about the odds. But anybody can do stuff when the odds are in their favor. Or when there’s no risk. Right?”
Silas liked Bernard Shaw. He spent the evening in the Senate library. He was leafing through Mrs. Warren’s Profession, but it was the conversation with Quait that drove his mood. The illyrians also possessed Man and Superman, Major Barbara, and Too True to Be Good, in addition to a fragment of Saint Joan.
“I’m going after the prize, Silas,” Karik had said. “It’s all out there. Shakespeare and Dante and the Roadmaker histories. And their mathematics and science. It’s waiting for us. But we need you.”
Silas had rejected the offer, had turned away. It was nonsense. He’d so thoroughly convinced himself that now he suspected he wanted it to be nonsense. Does a man clasp old beliefs, and old fears, so desperately?
And it had come again.
A prize so vast that no risk was too great. But this time, there’d be no Karik Endine to plunge into the wilderness. Only a young woman whose passions were running away with her head, and his infatuated former student.
Idly, he turned the pages of Mrs. Warren’s Profession, staring at the script, not really reading. But one line jumped out at him. It was Vivie’s comment to Mrs. Warren, near the end of Act IV:
After a while, Silas put the book away.
He walked slowly home, up the curving road, past candlelit cottages and the bakeshop and Cape’s Apothecary. Tomorrow he would send a message to Chaka, and then he would ask the Board of Regents to finance the attempt.
Once it became official that a second expedition would be mounted, Silas became the center of attention at the Imperium. Close friends advised him against the foray; others, not so close, made no real effort to hide their amusement. Nevertheless, all his colleagues, regardless of their views, seemed to feel required to explain publicly why they were unable to join the hunt. After all, the masters were supposed to have invested their lives in the pursuit of wisdom and knowledge. But, as one mathematician pointed out, if his desire for knowledge suggested he should go, wisdom dictated he stay put.
Silas immediately announced his intention to accompany the mission, and argued that it should leave as soon as possible. The lirsi expedition had been gone more than six months, he-said. We know we’ll be heading north, and we wain to be back before winter sets in. Silas put himself at Chaka’s disposal, and they set February 16 as the date for departure.
Silas used his political connections to get Quait assigned as an ad hoc military escort, thereby saving his pay. In addition, he informed Chaka that Quait had been responsible for his change of heart. When she took him aside to thank him, Quait pretended to a degree of humility, but took care not to overdo it.
It appeared for a time there would be only three of them. Or four, if Chaka was right and Shannon eventually joined. That’s okay, Quait insisted. He argued that a smaller group might have a better chance to succeed. “We’ll be more able to function as a single person, and less likely to run into personality differences. And three people aren’t going to make the Tuks nervous.”
Chaka spent much of the time leading up to departure reading every scrap of information she could find relating to Haven and Abraham Polk.
Most of the tales agreed that Polk had been captain of the Quebec, a warship that could sail at high speed against the wind. (Modern authorities thought there might have been a kernel of truth in the legend, that there might have been such a ship, and that it may have been named the Quebec. But no one knew who the name referred to, and of course they dismissed the more fanciful details, e,g., that it had been a submersible.) Folk’s naval efforts, traditionally, had consisted of salvage and rescue.
The Travels maintained that, after the Plague subsided, the Quebec prowled the seas under Polk’s direction for seventy-seven years (surely a mystic number), gathering survivors and returning them to Haven, which was designed to survive the general collapse. He also collected as much as he could of the art, science, literature, and history of the dead civilization, storing it against the ages. The names of his comrades are almost as famous as his: Casey Winckelhaus, his female second-in-command; Harry Schroeder, a tough, iconoclastic shoemaker’s son who gave his life for his commander off Copenhagen; Jennifer Whitlaw, whose account of the voyages, ironically now lost, gave them the name by which they are best known: the October Patrol.
Polk himself vanished at sea, called home by the Goddess when his work was done. Haven then shut its doors against the general dissolution and embarked on an effort to preserve what it had saved. Generations of scholars devoted themselves to maintaining and, as the texts yellowed and began to crumble, copying the great works in their care. And they waited for a new civilization to rise. If the legend is correct, they are still waiting.
Chaka dug out every illustration she could find of the Quebec and of Haven. The ship was commonly depicted as a schooner without sails, but with its bridge and forecastle enclosed inside a metal shell.
Haven itself, seen from the outside, revealed an aspect that was not greatly unlike the cliff and sea in the thirteenth sketch. She found more illustrations of the mountain car, which was alleged to have traveled the cliffs between Haven and Folk’s supply base.
The Quebec operated out of a chamber that had direct access to the sea. It was said the vessel could pass from its nest into the ocean without ever being seen. It was all so imaginative that she could not look at the material without dismissing it out of hand.
Midway through the final week of preparations, Flojian showed up at the Imperium and took Silas aside. He looked haggard and red-eyed, as if he had not been sleeping well. “I want to go with you,” he said.
Flojian had never shown any interest in academic pursuits. Moreover, he seemed to be the sort of man whose idea of hardship was having to go outside for fresh water. “Why?” asked Silas. The consensus now was to keep the group small. Furthermore, the regents favored a strategy that would restrain expenses.
“The stories about my father.”
Silas squirmed. “Don’t pay any attention to them. People like to talk.” He shook his head.
Flojian tried to straighten his shoulders. “I have a right to be with you. I can pay my own way. Whether you want me to or not, I’m coming.”
Silas opposed the proposal. “Plans have already been made,” he explained. “Anyway, it’ll be a difficult trip. This won’t be any pot of tulips.” He winced after that phrase, but he was struggling. Flojian was after all a rather useless individual, whose life had always been circumscribed by money and comfort.
