Majipoor Chronicles

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 shapes, 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?'

'I didn't know then what we were up against,' Galimoin growled.

Lavon looked toward Joachil Noor. 'What about the possibility that this stuff is migratory, that the whole formation will sooner or later break up and let us go?'

The biologist shook her head. 'It could happen. But I see no reason to count on it. More likely this is a quasi-permanent ecosystem. Currents might carry it to other parts of the Great Sea, but in that case they'd carry us right along with it.'

'You see?' Galimoin said glumly. 'Hopeless!'

'Not yet,' said Lavon. 'Vormecht, what can we do about using the submersible to mount screens over the intakes?'

'Possibly. Possibly.'

'Try it. Get the fabricators going on some sort of screens right away. Joachil Noor, what are your thoughts on a chemical counterattack against the seaweed?'

'We're running tests,' she said. 'I can't promise anything.'

No one could promise anything. They could only think and work and wait and hope.

Designing screens for the intakes took a couple of days; building them took five more. Meanwhile Joachil Noor experimented with methods of killing the grass around the ship, without apparent result.

In those days not only the Spurifon but time itself seemed to stand still. Daily Lavon took his sightings and made his log entries; the ship was actually traveling a few miles a day, moving steadily south-southwest, but it was going nowhere in relation to the entire mass of algae: to provide a reference point they marked the dragon-grass around the ship with dyes, and there was no movement in the great yellow and scarlet stains as the days went by. And in this ocean they could drift forever with the currents and not come within reach of land.