Now came the answer. An island: a six-mile sprawl of ragged coves and crimson cliffs pushing free of the Gibraltar Sea like a breaching whale, carrying the tanker with it. Huge waves poured from the ascending mass, spewing foam and flotsam as, flowing south, they broke against the divine cranium.
“Oh, hell,” said Miriam. “Oh, bloody, bloody hell.”
A sudden crack echoed across the Portugal Current, like the hatching of some gigantic egg: God’s earbones snapping, Thomas realized, a sound no human being had ever heard before.
When at last the newborn island halted — leaving the Valparaíso beached, the corpse adrift, and every chart of the Gibraltar Sea obsolete — Miriam took the priest’s knobby, trembling hand. “Jesus, Tom, we lost Him.”
“We lost Him,” he agreed.
“We found Him, and now we’ve lost Him. What does it mean? Is it our fault?”
“Our fault? I hardly think so.”
“But we sinned,” said the nun.
“Not on this scale,” he said, pointing toward the errant land mass.
Whereupon Thomas Wickliff Ockham, S.J., his God gone, his self-respect shattered, threw himself against the steering wheel and wept.
ISLAND
ANTHONY COULDN’T STOP laughing. Ever since they’d steamed out of New York Harbor, he realized, the universe had been casting about for some particularly cruel and elaborate joke to play on him, and now it had finally found one. Thrust an absurd little island out of the Gibraltar Sea. Beach Van Horne’s ship. Steal his cargo.
Hilarious.
The bridge was buzzing. Upon deducing that the Val was aground, nearly everyone above the rank of AB had instinctively gone looking for his captain, demanding that he explain this bizarre upwelling, though the tanker’s master was as mystified as his crew. Now they all stood amid the control consoles and radar scopes — officers, engineers, chief steward, pumpman — fidgeting like a congregation of millennialists awaiting the end of the world. Anthony could feel their hostility. He sensed their disgust. He knew what they were thinking. Never again, each mariner was promising himself. Never again shall I sail with Anthony Van Horne.
“I’m assumin’ I should kill the engines,” said Dolores Haycox, the mate on duty, leaning toward the joysticks.
Until that moment, Anthony hadn’t realized the propellers were still moving, spinning ineffectually in space. “Kill ’em,” he said, snickering.
“No need to hold the wheel, right?” asked James Echohawk, the AB at the helm.
“Right,” said the captain, giggling.
“What’s so fuckin’ funny?” asked Bud Ramsey.
“You wouldn’t get it.”
“Try me.”
“The universe.”
“Huh?”
Choking down his laughter, Anthony grabbed the PA mike. “Now hear this! Now hear this! As you can see, sailors, we’re in quite a jam!” His amplified words boomed across the weather deck and vanished into the mist-shrouded dunes beyond. “It’ll take at least three days, maybe four, to dig ourselves out of here, after which we’ll find the body, reconnect” — he struggled to believe himself — “and get this show on the road again!”
The immediate problem, he realized, was not freeing the Val but simply climbing down and inspecting the damage. They were imprisoned in their own ship, cut off like the plastic Constitution his father had sealed up in the water-cooler bottle. On all sides, the tanker’s stranded hull plunged toward the wet sands, a drop no mere gangway or Jacob’s ladder could begin to plumb.
“Hey, any of you guys ever hear of such a thing?” moaned Charlie Horrocks. “An island comin’ outta nowhere like this, any of you ever even hear of it?”
“Not me,” said Bud Ramsey.
“It’s unprecedented,” said Big Joe Spicer. “Even on a weird-ass voyage like this, it’s totally unprecedented.”
“Maybe Father Thomas could give us an explanation,” said Lianne Bliss. “He’s a genius, right? Where’s Father Thomas?”
“Any more shit happens on this trip,” said Sam Follingsbee, “I’m gonna go outta my mind.”
“You really think we’ll be able to dig ourselves free?” asked Crock O’Connor, rubbing the ancient steam burn that covered his brow.
Good question, Anthony decided. “Of course I do.” The captain ran his index finger along the apex of his broken nose. “Faith can move mountains, and so can the United States Merchant Marine.”
“Want my opinion?” asked Marbles Rafferty. “Our only hope is for this damn thing to go sliding back down where it came from, suddenly, in a great big whoosh, exactly the way it arrived.”
“Yeah? Well, I wouldn’t count on that,” said Dolores Haycox. “If you ask me, it’s here to stay, and we are too, stuck on our own private paradise.”
“Private paradise,” Anthony repeated. “Then we’ve got the right to name it.” He curled his palm around Echohawk’s beefy arm. “The next entry in the quartermaster’s log goes like this: ‘At 1645 hours, the Valparaíso ran aground on Van Horne Island.’ ”
“How modest of you,” said Rafferty.
“I’m not naming it after me. My father spent his entire life trying to find an uncharted island. A major asshole, dear old Dad, but he deserves this.”
Anthony lifted his angel feather from the breast pocket of his pea jacket and scratched his itching forehead with the quill. Chains, he thought. Yes. Chains. The tow chains were impossibly fat, but an anchor lead would make a perfect ladder. Flipping on the intercom, he raised the engine flat and instructed Lou Chickering to send somebody forward with instructions to drop the port kedge.
“Crock told me we’re high and dry,” Chickering protested. “Fetched up on an atoll, right?”
“Something like that.”
“’Fraid we’ll drift?”
“Just lower the goddamn anchor, Lou.”
Rafferty inserted a Pall Mall between his lips. “If you like, Captain, I’d be happy to head up an exploration party.”
It was the logical next step, but Anthony knew that he himself must be the first man to take the measure of his father’s world. “Thanks, Marbles, but I’m reserving that particular job for yours truly. It’s a personal matter. Expect me back late tonight.”
“Maintain present course?” asked the chief mate, deadpan.
“Maintain present course,” said Anthony without batting an eye.
He rode the elevator to level three, visiting first his cabin and then the main galley as he provisioned himself for the conquest of Van Horne Island: food, water, compass, flashlight, bottle of Monte Alban mescal complete with pickled Oaxacan worm. Descending to the weather deck, he pedaled O’Connor’s trail bike along the catwalk, entered the fo’c’sle, and crawled into the damp, sewery reaches of the hawsepipe.
The climb down the anchor chain was treacherous and painful — the links were slippery, the coarse metal scraped his palms — but within fifteen minutes Anthony stood on the island’s spongy surface.
Scaly and gritty, red as claret, the stuff composing the surrounding dunes looked more like flecks of rust than like the brown-sugar sands one normally encountered along the 35th parallel. The deadness of the place unnerved him. It seemed not so much an island in the Gibraltar Sea as a meteor hewn from the crust of some singularly inert and sterile planet.
The Val’s wounds were ugly and deep. The lower half of her rudder was bent about ten degrees. Her keel was serrated like a carving knife. Her port shaft had sprung loose, and the propeller itself stood upright in a dune like the blades of a sinking windmill. Heavy damage, no question, but not so heavy that a smart skipper couldn’t compensate through some astute maneuvers and a few tricks of the trade. It all came down to the hull, the ship’s one truly vital organ. Anthony stared at the barnacle-encrusted plates; he rubbed them with his fingers, brushed them with his feather. A ragged seam ran for sixty yards along the starboard side like a surgical scar, evidence of her fateful encounter with Bolivar Reef, but the weld looked unscathed — indeed, the entire hull looked whole. Assuming they could in fact manage to dig the tanker loose, she would almost certainly float.