Climbing out of his bunk, Anthony picked a tiny grain of sand from his eye and rolled it between thumb and forefinger, then glanced around for his shoes. He was otherwise fully dressed, right down to his ratty pea jacket and canvas Mets cap. Ever since reaching zero-by-zero, he’d stripped his life of irrelevancies, eating sporadically, sleeping in his clothes, letting his beard grow wild. For seventy-two hours, his mind had known only the hunt.
He grabbed his Carpco mug, shoved his knobby feet into his tennis shoes, and, without bothering to lace them, sprinted to the elevator.
A soft glow lit the bridge: radar scopes, collision-avoidance system, Marisat terminal, clock. It was 0247. Spicer stood hunched over the twelve-mile radar, fiddling with the rain-snow clutter control. “Captain, I’ve seen my brother-in-law’s laserdisc of Deep Throat and just about every episode of Green Acres, and I swear to you” — he pointed to the target — “that’s gotta be the weirdest thing ever to show on a cathode-ray tube.”
“Fog bank?”
“That’s what it looked like on the fifty-mile scope, but no more. This sucker’s got bulk.”
“Sгo Tomй?”
“I checked our position three times. S гo Tomй’s fifteen miles in the opposite direction.”
“The asphalt?”
“Much too big.”
Anthony made a fist. His chest tightened. The mermaid on his forearm grew tense. “Steady,” he told the AB at the helm, the brawny Lakota Sioux, James Echohawk.
“Steady,” said Echohawk.
Anthony locked his bleary eyes on the scope. The screen displayed a long jagged blob, momentous as a shadow on a lung X-ray. Fuzzy, shapeless — and yet he knew exactly Whose electronically graven image he was beholding.
“So what is it?” asked Spicer.
“If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me.” Anthony grasped the throttles, dropping both screws to sixty-five rpm’s. He hadn’t pushed his ship past the recommended speeds and driven her through Hurricane Beatrice just so they could smash into their cargo and sink. “I’ll stand the rest of your watch for you, Joe. Go grab some sleep.”
The second mate looked into his captain’s eyes. Silent signals traveled between the men. The last time an officer had left the bridge of the Valparaíso, eleven million gallons of oil had poured into the Gulf of Mexico.
“Thanks, Captain,” said Spicer, joining Anthony at the console, “but I think I’ll stick around.”
“How’s Follingsbee’s coffee tonight?” Anthony asked the helmsman. “Strong enough?”
“You could prime a kingpost with it, sir,” said Echohawk.
“Let’s drop her another notch, Joe. Sixty rpm’s.”
“Aye. Sixty.”
Anthony seized the Exxon thermos, splashing jamoke into the stained interior of his Carpco mug. “Come left ten degrees,” he said, eyes locked on the radar. “Steady up on zero-seven-five.”
“Zero-seven-five,” Echohawk replied.
“Glass falling,” said Spicer, fixing on the barometer. “Down to nine-nine-six.”
Lifting the bridge binoculars from their bin, Anthony gazed through the grimy, rain-beaded windshield toward the horizon. Glass falling: quite so. Lightning flashed, dropping from heaven like a crooked gangway, illuminating a hundred thousand white-caps. Fat gray clouds hung in the northern sky like acromegalic sheep.
“Fifty-five rpm’s.”
“Fifty-five.”
Anthony gulped his coffee. Hot, marvelously hot, but not enough to thaw his bowels. “Joe, I want you to place a call to Father Ockham’s quarters,” he ordered, pulling back the door to the starboard wing. The storm rushed in, spattering his face, twisting the fringes of his beard. “Tell him to transport his ass up here on the double.”
“It’s three A.M., sir.”
“He wouldn’t miss this for the world,” said Anthony, starting out of the wheelhouse.
“Glass still falling!” the second mate shouted after him. “Nine-eight-seven!”
The instant Anthony stepped into the turbulent night, the odor hit him, roiling across the bridge wing. Sharp and gravid, oddly sweet, not so much the stink of death as the fragrance of transformation: leaves festering in damp gutters, jack-o’-lanterns wrinkling on suburban doorsteps, bananas softening inside their leathery black peels. “Fifty rpm’s, Joe!” he screamed through the open door.
“Fifty, sir!”
Then came the sound, thick and layered, a kind of choral moan hovering above the drone of the engines and the roar of the Atlantic. Anthony raised the binoculars. A long, brilliant trident of electricity speared the sea. Another ten minutes, he figured, certainly no more than fifteen, and they’d have visual contact…
“That sound,” said Father Ockham, pulling on his Panama hat and buttoning his black vinyl raincoat as he hurried onto the wing.
“Odd, isn’t it?”
Sad.
“What do you suppose… ?”
“A dirge.”
“Huh?”
Even as Ockham repeated the word, a lightning bolt revealed the truth of it. Dirge, oh, yes. In the sudden brightness Anthony saw the mourners, flopping and rolling over the boiling sea, swarming across the churning sky. Pods of bereaved narwhals to starboard, herds of bereft rorquals to port, flocks of orphaned cormorants above. Flash, and more species still, herring gulls, great skuas, fulmars, shearwaters, petrels, prions, puffins, leopard seals, ringed seals, harbor seals, belugas, manatees — multitudes upon multitudes, most of them hundreds of miles from habitat and home, their voices rising in preternatural grief, a blend of every seaborne lung and aquatic larynx God had ever placed on earth.
“Come right ten degrees!”
“Right ten!”
“Forty-five rpm’s!”
“Forty-five!”
Miraculously, each tongue kept its identity even as it joined the general lament. Closing his eyes, Anthony grasped the rail and listened, awed by the bottlenose dolphins’ whistled elegies, the sea lions’ throaty orations, and the low coarse keening of a thousand frigate birds.
“The smell,” said the priest. “It’s rather…”
“Fruity?”
“Exactly. He hasn’t started to turn.”
Anthony opened his eyes. “Joe, forty rpm’s!”
“Forty, sir!”
Flash, a massive something, bearing zero-one-five.
Flash, a series of tall rounded forms, all aspiring to heaven.
Flash, the forms again, like mountains spread along a seacoast, each higher than the next.
“You saw that?”
“I saw,” said the priest.
“And… ?”
Ockharn, shivering, slipped a Sony Handicam from his raincoat pocket. “I think it’s the toes.”
“The what?”
“Toes. I just lost a small wager. Sister Miriam believed He’d be supine” — Ockham choked up — “whereas I assumed…”
“Supine,” Anthony echoed. “He’s smiling, Raphael told me. You in trouble, Thomas?”
The priest tried sighting through the Handicam’s viewfinder, but he was trembling too badly to connect eye with eyecup. Rain and tears spilled down his face in equal measure. “I’ll get over it.”
“You aren’t gonna faint, are you?”
“I said I’ll get over it.” On his second attempt, Ockham managed to elevate the Handicam and fire off a quick burst of tape. “It’s rather poetic, seeing the toes first. The word has special meaning in my field. T-O-E: Theory of Everything.”
“Everything?”
“We’re looking for one, we cosmologists.” The priest panned across the phalanxes of mourners. “At the moment, we’ve got TOE equations that work on the submicroscopic level, but nothing that” — his voice splintered — “handles gravity too. It’s so horrible.”
“Not having a TOE?”
“Not having a heavenly Father.”
Another celestial explosion. Yes, Anthony decided, no question: ten pale and craggy toes, stiff with rigor mortis, arching into the gloomy sky like onion domes crowning a Byzantine city.
“Dead slow!”
“Dead slow!”
“Wish I could help you,” said Anthony.
“Just try to understand.” The priest returned the Handicam to his raincoat pocket and pulled off his bifocals. “Try to understand,” he said again, wiping the lenses with his sleeve. “Try,” groaned Father Thomas Ockham, calling above the storm, the sea, and the mad, ragged music of the wake.