—Why would you do that? You said you knew enough, your curiosity’s satisfied.
—Perhaps because it’s all that’s left for me to do. And it would be pleasant to wake one morning and learn that Viator has vanished to another sea. That might reassure me as regards the nature of the voyage I’m soon to take. To tell the truth, I have so many reasons, you could likely construct a reason of your own and it would be at least partially correct.
—How much will you pay me?
—Twenty thousand.
—Fifty thousand, Wilander said. Put fifty thousand in my account by tomorrow, and I’ll consider staying.
—You’ll consider it? I would expect a guarantee.
—That’s a risk you’ll have to take. In fact, I can assure you the money will have minimal impact on my decision…though it may have sufficient weight to make a difference. Give some money to the others, too. Ten thousand each.
—Why less for them?
—If things don’t work out for us here, Wilander said, or they don’t work out for me in Kaliaska, if we end up with nowhere to go, alone on this filthy wreck, I don’t expect they’ll need as much as I will to drink themselves to death.
Nine
“…Come here…”
Had he given it the least thought, Wilander might have anticipated the reactions of his shipmates on hearing Lunde’s story. Arnsparger wanted to know if they would continue to be paid, and Halmus scoffed, saying, Why should I believe you? Or Lunde, for that matter? If that’s really the story he told, what proof can you give me that it’s the truth? I don’t know what you’re up to, either one of you, but I’m not buying it. Nygaard barely listened, sitting on the chair in Wilander’s cabin, his attention commanded by a faucet handle he was holding, admiring it as if it were a chrome daisy with four petals, and as for Mortensen…After giving up on finding him, Wilander was at the table in the officers’ mess, idly working on his maps, feeling listless each time he engaged the idea of walking into Kaliaska, worrying that Arlene might turn him away, when Mortensen appeared in the door that opened onto the passageway, gaunt and ghastly looking, his shoulder-length hair matted, his beard begrimed, yet uncustomarily cheerful—he smiled as Wilander retold Lunde’s story, ruining his image of revenant saintliness with a display of crooked brown teeth, looking instead as if he were the spiritual relic of an especially noisome odor or the astral guardian of a landfill, and once the story was complete, rather than responding to it, he poked at the maps with a bony, whitish-gray forefinger, like a parsnip in color, and praised Wilander for having devised so intriguing a destination (he had taken the liberty of studying the maps while Wilander was otherwise occupied), saying also that while he had doubted Wilander’s suitability for the captain’s cabin, he doubted it no longer. And when Wilander asked why he had used the word devised, Mortensen said, Didn’t you listen to Lunde? It should be clear what’s happened. The life force of Lunde and his officers fused with Viator during the storm. They were wedded to the instincts of the ship, her instinct to survive, to travel, just as the ship’s life was ultimately wedded to the life of the forest. Since Lunde proved to be most in accord with her instincts, the ship chose him to plot the course of her survival. Now that you’ve taken Lunde’s place, in union both with Viator and the forest, you’re creating not only maps of the land to which we’re traveling, but also the land itself, the (here he shuffled the maps about, peering at their legends)…the Iron Shore.
This astonishing recitation, so glibly delivered that it seemed practiced, left Wilander speechless.
—Arnsparger and Halmus view things somewhat differently, Mortensen went on. And yet I wouldn’t call their views contrary. They’re more complimentary, I’d say. Variant.
Still astonished, Wilander asked, You knew about the storm? And about Lunde?
—Not in so many words, but it was obvious something like that had happened. It’s happened to us, after all. Maybe you’ve been so wrapped up in your mapmaking, you haven’t had the opportunity to step back and view the situation, but…
—You believe the maps, my maps, are making this place real?
Mortensen gave a sweeping gesture, like one a preacher might employ when enthusing about promised glories, and said, There are worlds of possibility out there. Real as mist. Your mind, in alliance with Viator and the forest, with their power, their steadfastness, is influencing one of those worlds to harden into physical form. The signs of its three creators are present in your maps. The forest, the sea, the city. Surely you can see it? Even Nygaard sees it in his simple-minded way. Every reality is given form by means of a similar consensus.
The conversation evolved into a lecture, a dissertation upon the topic of Viator, Whence, Whither, and Wherefore, Mortensen pointing out the resonances between Lunde’s story and their experiences, and pointing out distinctions as well. He declared that the storm’s fury and the power of the sea had served as a battery that enabled the forging of a bond between Viator and its previous crew, essentially the same that had been forged between Viator and themselves, yet it had taken longer to complete that second bond because there had been no crucible moment of wind and enormous waves, only the battery of slow time, and the union produced by this gradual process was stronger than the original, and necessarily so, for it was no simple passage that lay ahead, no few days of wind and sea, and great strength and endurance would be demanded of them. But the primary focus of his disquisition was upon the link between Lunde’s charts and Wilander’s maps, those acts of the imagination that had created and were creating an appropriate landfall for Viator. In response to Wilander’s comment that, as far as he knew, the forest adjoining Kaliaska was not Lunde’s creation, it had existed for centuries prior to Lunde’s birth, Mortensen said, Yes, yet not in its current form; Lunde had authored a change that prepared the forest for Viator s advent, a small thing when compared to Wilander’s creation, to be sure, but Lunde’s forest was the precursor of the Iron Shore, a stage in the journey, perhaps the first of many stages, and wasn’t Wilander aware of the innumerable theories deployed about a single fundamental idea, that the observer creates reality?, my God, it was a basic tenet of philosophy, implicit in every philosophical paradigm, every religion, even Christianity, at least it had been part of the Christian belief system before the Council of Nicaea scrubbed the doctrine clean of its Asiatic influences; and both the most primitive conceptions of universal order (sympathetic magic, for instance, the notion that a voodoo priest could heal a sick man by feeding a bull meal in which a drop or two of the patient’s blood was mixed, forming a bond between animal and man that would permit the bull’s vigor to subdue the disease) and the most sophisticated insights of physics (fractals, the behaviors of subatomic particles, etc.) gave evidence of the interconnectivity of all matter, and it was this interconnection that had permitted Lunde and Wilander to channel their energies with such efficacy; then Mortensen, with a triumphant expression, his point having been firmly established (to his own mind, at any rate), proceeded to embellish his theory, his estimation of the event that surrounded them, that had closed them in, by linking the concept of an observer-created reality with the phenomenon of crop circles, with the casting of spells, and thence with the summoning of demons, exorcisms, séances, the hierarchies of the angels, astrological conjunctions, with top-secret scientific breakthroughs known to nine anonymous men in the government and the Satanic strategies codified by the webs of certain South American spiders, with the entire catalogue of lunacy from which middle-class neurotics the world over selected the crutches that allowed them to walk the earth without crumbling beneath the merciless stare and brutal radiations of a god who was nothing like the images in the catalogue variously depicting him to be a gentle dreamy shepherd, a mighty bearded apparition, an architect of fate (God’s Blueprint For YOUR Heavenly Mansion by Dr. Carter P. Zaslow, $22.95 plus shipping), a universe-sized vessel of love; and after Mortensen ended his discourse and returned to the shadowy places of Viator, Wilander, who had been halfway convinced by the initial portion of his remarks, realized that Mortensen’s mad-prophet pose masked a pitiful, ordinary madness, the madness that had doubtless afflicted him while abusing himself with fortified wine on the streets of several Alaskan cities; and, recognizing that he could trust not a word that had been said by either Mortensen or Lunde, he made a rashly considered call to Arlene, told Lunde’s story yet again, and asked her to check out the details on the Internet. She replied frostily that she would if she could find the time (she called back a day later, at an hour when he typically shut off his phone, and left a message saying that she had substantiated the basics of the story—the survival of the crew, Lunde’s dismissal, and so on—and that she had asked a hacker friend in the Forty-Eight to do a more thorough search) and said she didn’t believe this qualified as an emergency, she did not want him calling whenever he got nervous, did he understand?, okay then, goodbye. And Wilander, feeling isolated to an unparalleled degree—even sleeping alone beneath a cardboard sheet in an alley, he had heard voices, traffic, and known himself to be still part of the human sphere, but here there was only the silence and inhuman vibration of the ship—stepped out onto the deck and discovered that an inch of snow had fallen and more was coming down, big wet flakes that promised a heavy accumulation, yet vanished when they touched his palm, and he was so affected by this consolation of nature, by the whiteness of the deck, by the soft hiss of the snowfall, by the smell of heaven it brought, he stood with his face turned to the sky, watching with childish fascination as the flakes came spinning out of the incomprehensible dark, letting them melt and trickle down his cheeks like the tears of a vast immaterial entity who—eyeless and full of sorrows—had seen fit to use a lesser being to manifest its weeping.