Looking out to sea, Neil had been astonished to behold a Persian Gulf tanker, gravid with cargo and lying at anchor in the very cove from which the Valparaíso had recently departed. An hour later, a Falstaffian man with bad skin appeared at the base of his tree, swathed in the island’s eternal mist.
“And who might you be?” demanded the intruder in a musical Italian accent. Terra-cotta sand clung to his vinyl cassock, muting the bright red silk.
“Able Seaman Weisinger of the United States Merchant Marine,” he mumbled, certain he was about to faint.
“Tullio Cardinal Di Luca of the Vatican. You may address me as Eminence. Are you with the Carpco Valparaíso?”
“Not anymore.” A wave of vertigo. Neil feared he might fall from the tree. “I’m marooned, Eminence. Last time I saw the Val, she was headed for the Arctic.”
“Strange. Your captain was ordered to return to this island. Evidently he’s following his own star.”
“Evidently.”
“Was it Van Horne who marooned you?”
“I marooned myself.”
“Oh?”
“To find God,” Neil explained. The holes in Cardinal Di Luca’s face suggested a child’s connect-the-dots puzzle. What constellation would emerge if you drew a line from pock to pock? Ophiuchus, Neil guessed. Serpent Bearer. “The God beyond God. The God of the four A.M. watch. En Sof.”
“You expect to find God in a tree?”
“Moses did, Eminence.”
“Do you want a job, Able Seaman Weisinger?”
“I want to find God.”
“Yes, but do you want a job? The Maracaibo departed before we could assemble a proper crew. I can offer you the position of quartermaster.”
Hunger clawed at Neil’s stomach. His gullet screamed for water. For all he knew, a few more hours of such suffering might be enough to inflame these branches with En Sof.
And yet…
“As far as the Maracaibo’s company is concerned,” Di Luca continued, “Van Horne’s cargo is a motion-picture prop. The Holy See aims to keep the film from getting made. Join us, Mr. Weisinger. Time-and-a-half for overtime.”
The Lord, Neil decided, worked through many media, not just burning bushes and stone trees. YHWH dispatched angels, wrote on walls, poured dreams into prophets’ heads. Perhaps He even used the Catholic Church from time to time. By sending Tullio Di Luca to this place, Neil realized with a surge of joy, the God of the four A.M. watch was almost certainly telling him to get on with his life…
“Right ten degrees.”
“Right ten,” echoed Neil.
“Steady.”
“Steady.”
Behind Neil a door squealed open. A pungent fragrance wafted across the bridge, the sourness of human sweat mixed with the woodsy scent of a burning cheroot.
“What’s your course, Katsakos?” A male voice, resonant and gruff.
The second mate stiffened. “Zero-one-four.”
Neil turned. With his broad shoulders, ramrod spine, and leonine head emerging from the hood of a brilliant purple parka, the master of the Maracaibo looked aristocratic if not royal. Though scored with age, his face was astonishingly handsome, dark brown eyes shining from beneath a lofty brow, strong cheekbones flanking an aquiline nose.
“Speed?”
“Fifteen knots,” said Katsakos.
“Bump her up to seventeen.”
“Is that safe, Captain Van Horne?”
“When I’m on the bridge, it’s safe.”
“He called you Van Horne,” Neil blurted out as Katsakos advanced the throttles.
“Quite so.” The master of the Maracaibo puffed on his cheroot. “Christopher Van Horne.”
“The last captain I shipped with was named Van Horne too. Anthony Van Horne.”
“I know,” said the old man. “Di Luca told me. My son’s a good sailor, but he lacks — what shall we call it? — gumption.”
“Anthony Van Horne … ,” mused the second mate. “Wasn’t he in charge when the Valparaíso spilled her cookies into the Gulf of Mexico?”
“I heard it was mostly Carpco’s fault,” said Neil. “An overworked crew, an understaffed ship…”
“Don’t defend the man. Know what he’s hauling now? A goddamn skin-flick prop, that’s what.” The captain stubbed out his cheroot on the twelve-mile radar. “Tell me, Mr. Weisinger, are you a sailor I can depend on?”
“I believe so.”
“Ever held the wheel in a storm?”
“Last Fourth of July, I steered the Val through the heart of Hurricane Beatrice.”
“Through the heart?”
“Your son wanted to get from Raritan Bay to the Gulf of Guinea in twelve days.”
“That’s insane,” said the captain. His indignation, Neil felt, was tempered by a certain parental pride. “You made the deadline?”
“We stopped to rescue a castaway.”
“But you would’ve made it?”
“Pretty likely.”
“In just twelve days?”
“Yep.”
Christopher Van Horne smiled, the wrinkled flesh rolling across his magnificent skull. “Listen, Seaman Weisinger, when we finally catch the Val, you’re the man I want at the wheel.” His voice dropped to a half whisper. “Unless I miss my guess, we’ll be making some pretty tricky turns.”
On the sixteenth of September, at 0915, as the Valparaíso hit the 71st parallel, Cassie Fowler realized that she was in love. Her discovery came during a moment of tranquility, as she and Anthony stood watching the tanker’s hatchetlike prow push through the passage formed by two colossal bergs. Had it happened in the heat of sex (and there’d been plenty of that lately, an itinerant orgy staged wherever their impulses took them, from Anthony’s cabin to the fo’c’sle locker to the bizarre garden Sam Follingsbee was cultivating below), she would have dismissed it as illusory, akin to the phenomenon that prompted dying people to mistake oxygen deprivation for the glow of heaven. But this emotion could be trusted. This felt real. Damn, it was confusing, loving the very man who’d been deputized to preserve the most malevolent counterfeminist artifact since Saint Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians.
“The Arctic’s a known quantity these days,” said Anthony, “but you can’t imagine all the grief and blood that went into mapping this part of the globe.”
While Cassie’s curiosity urged her to confess her passion then and there — would he laugh? panic? grow mute? say he was as crazy about her as she was about him? — her political convictions told her to wait. This morning, assuming she’d calculated correctly, Oliver would attack their cargo. She would be foolish to divide her loyalties by entertaining romantic protestations from Anthony at such an hour. If he did an effective job of conveying his love, she might even lose her nerve. Her worst-case scenario had her getting on the PW’s radio, contacting the Enterprise, and telling Oliver to scratch the mission.
“In the last century, your average armchair geographer believed there was an open, ice-free sea at the North Pole.”
“Where’d they get that idea?” asked Cassie.
“Here in the Atlantic we’ve got our Gulf Stream — right? — and meanwhile the Japanese have their Kuroshio, their great Black Tide. The geographers imagined both currents flowing all the way north, melting the bergs and floes, then joining to form a vast warm ocean.”
“There’s nothing quite so pernicious as wishful thinking.”
“Yeah, but such a beautiful wish. I mean, what captain wouldn’t fall in love with a fantasy like that? Piloting your ship up the Bering Strait, finding a secret gateway in the ice, sailing across the top of the world…”
A burst of static drew Anthony’s attention to the walkie-talkie clipped to his utility belt.
“Captain to the bridge!” screamed Marbles Rafferty. “We need you up here, sir!”
Anthony grabbed the radio, pressed SEND. “What’s the problem?”
“Airplanes!”
“Airplanes?”
“Airplanes, Captain — from goddamn World War Two!”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Just get up here!”
Airplanes, thought Cassie, following Anthony as he abandoned the lookout post and started down the icy catwalk. Glory be, dear Oliver had actually brought it off. Before the day was out, if all went well, the New Dark Ages would no longer be crouching at the edge of human history, poised to claim center stage.