“Nuh uh,” said Kidney. “It’s a big boat. I can see the smokestack.”
“Iceberg,” said Jarvis.
“It’s not moving the same,” said Josh.
Jemma squinted, too. She could see the boat-shape moving among a herd of hill-sized icebergs, but she wasn’t convinced. “Let’s get back to the game,” she said, but they all ignored her. Josh went to a replicator and politely asked the angel for a pair of binoculars. She gave him an old-fashioned spyglass of polished brass. He raised it to his eye and said, “Hot damn.”
“Wait a minute,” Jemma said. “We should make sure before you all go running off and…” But they were already all running off to shout “A boat! A boat!” throughout the hospital. Soon it was just she and Pickie there.
He looked through the little telescope and said, “Another angel, Mama. As if we didn’t have enough already.” She asked what he meant, but he sat down to consider the Scrabble board again and handed the glass to Jemma. She looked through it and saw what the children had seen: a big boat, a cruise liner, floating backward between two icebergs, as if they were escorting it someplace.
There was another swarming to the roof, and people called out “Hello!” as the boat drifted nearer, even though it was still over a mile away, and the huge crowd grew entirely silent while they waited for a reply. Jemma went right to the Council chamber, swimming against the current on the ramp. Dr. Tiller was already there, sitting on a table and tapping one booted foot on a chair as she watched the boat getting bigger and bigger outside the window.
“What do you think, Dr. Claflin?” she asked. Jemma shrugged and sat down. When the other Friends and the rest of the Council had arrived they declared an emergency session and began to babble furiously, asking and answering questions like What does it mean, and What do you think, and What should we do, and Does anyone else think it looks like the Queen Elizabeth Two? The boat loomed behind them as they had their wild, excited discussions; Jemma turned to look over her shoulder every ten minutes and found it had gotten a little bigger. She called for order but no one could hear her, and she would not use the gavel. When she turned to Vivian she could hardly make herself heard until the four of them pushed their chairs together and huddled their heads.
“How will we get over to the boat?” asked Ishmael.
“What precautions should we take?” asked Vivian.
“How soon can we go?” asked Jemma.
“It is no place for you,” said Monserrat. “What if there are cannibals?”
“Why would there be cannibals?”
“Because,” Monserrat said. “There is always something bad on boats like that.”
“If I say I go, I go. Who’s in charge here?”
“We are,” said Ishmael.
“You are,” said Vivian, “but with qualifications.”
“Can anyone stop me from going over there?”
“Probably not,” said Ishmael. “But wouldn’t it be a better idea—”
“No,” Jemma said.
“Very well,” said Monserrat. “The four of us will go, though I saw the movie, Cannibal Cruise, and it was a boat just like that one which came drifting out of the mist to lure and destroy the curious.”
“The question remains,” said Ishmael. “How to travel?”
Vivian drew a picture of a boat on Jemma’s big yellow pad, and Ishmael, carefully taking the pen from her, broke it down into sections small enough to come out of a replicator. They traded the pen back and forth, clarifying and embellishing the sketch — sails, solar-powered propeller, hydrofoil, boarding crane — while the Council chamber continued in bedlam. Dr. Snood took off his shoe, finally, and pounded it on the table. “Order!” he shouted. “Order! Madame Friend, will you bring us to order?”
Jemma opened her mouth, but before she could speak the ship, which had disappeared as the hospital made one of its usual midday rotations, drifted into view again not a hundred yards away. Jemma stood up, and now she did like everyone else — she hurried to the window and pressed her face against the glass.
Dr. Snood lobbied vigorously to be appointed an ambassador, but the only thing worse than cannibals were cannibals encountered in the company of a snide fussbudget — Jemma had her absolute way. They appeased Dr. Snood by appointing him and the lift team as backups.
It was ten o’clock in the morning when Kidney spotted the boat. By five Jemma and the three lesser Friends were gathered at the head of the crowd on the roof. The boat had sidled up within twenty yards of them, close enough to read the name, the Celebration, and to see how utterly empty the decks and windows were. It was huge — the center of the hospital floated at a point about fifty yards from the bow, but the boat stretched out for hundreds of yards behind them.
They tested their phones one more time, and then Rob aimed the bazooka-sized launcher the angel had made for them and fired a rope and a hook across the water. It punched into a wall on the far side of a section of promenade deck and stuck fast. He sent another one over to strike four feet above the first, and he and Ishmael secured the lines to new hooks in the sycamore tree, stretching them tight with a crank. Rob tested them, tightening them both three times before he was satisfied, bouncing on the bottom one and launching himself over the first one, releasing one hand and doing a half twist before swinging down on the other side.
“Okay,” he said. “Are you sure you don’t want a fifth person?” He had sounded like Dr. Snood, when he had Jemma alone, arguing that it wasn’t safe for her to go.
“We’ll call if we need help,” Vivian said, and dialed her phone in demonstration. Back in the crowd, Dr. Snood answered his.
“Hello?” he said.
“See you later,” Vivian said. She hung up and climbed on the ropes. Jemma pulled at the neck of her maternity wetsuit — they were all wearing wetsuits — and went after her, looking down, like she wasn’t supposed to, as soon as she cleared the edge of the roof. A section of the eighth floor stuck out protectively underneath her, and then she cleared that. Emma waved at her from out of a fourth-floor window, part of an extraction team waiting with hooks and life preservers in the PICU, in case any of them fell in. Jemma put one black rubber bootie in front of the other and in five steps was over the green water. It made her feel cold just to look at it. She imagined the penguins again, streaming below the clear surface in a horde, and breaking the surface to jump up and perform stupid and amazing tricks on the rope.
Vivian shook the top line, and broke her reverie. “Come on, Poky,” she said.
On the other side, the four Friends arranged themselves in a line and began to explore. Ishmael went first, carrying the weapon. “The angel gave you that?” Jemma had asked him on the roof, when she saw that he was carrying a gun.
“It’s not what you think,” he said, turning and firing it at a bush. It shot something that looked like a stream of ink — not very fast, either. Jemma thought it was just a squirt gun until the coherent beam of ink suddenly broke apart into a net that wrapped around the bush. “That bush is neutralized,” Ishmael said.
They had landed on the third deck from the top of the ship. It was empty except for a row of lounge chairs. “They’re filthy,” said Monserrat, bending down to run her finger along the arm of a chair. It was covered with a layer of thick black dust, her finger left a glaring white mark. Vivian said, “Don’t touch that stuff.” She cupped her hand around her mouth and shouted out, “Hello!”