—You’re quartered in the captain’s cabin. Surely that’s an indicator of what you should be doing?
—So I’m the captain? Captain of a ship that will never travel another inch? I suppose I should be studying charts, plotting a course.
Mortensen made a diffident gesture. You’re the one in charge, aren’t you? You can hardly do other than determine our course. And then you have your reports to make. How can you make them when you know nothing of what’s going on?
—I make the reports in a timely fashion.
—But what do you say?
—I tell Lunde the work goes well. Occasionally I throw a few numbers at him.
—In other words, you lie to him.
—It’s what Arnsparger told me to do.
—Arnsparger! When Arnsparger made the reports, there was nothing to report. It’s your job now and you need to redefine it. It’s you who were meant to have the job when things reached this stage. To do the job correctly, you must observe what’s going on.
—You’re suggesting that I tell Lunde what we’re doing? He’ll fire us. If I tell him Halmus stands around examining bits of glass like a jeweler inspecting diamonds, or that Arnsparger and Nygaard cut little holes in the hull, in pots, in bulkhead doors…he’ll have them committed.
—Those are the very things he wants to hear.
—How the hell would you know?
Mortensen’s eyelids drooped and he seemed to be gathering strength through prayer. I was the first to come, he said. Therefore I’m the first to know things.
An image from Wilander’s dream, the pale brown circle and the birdlike creatures rippling in the distance, floated up before his mind’s eye. Unnerved by this, he was impatient to have done with Mortensen. It was early to be thinking of heading for Kaliaska, but he intended to do exactly that.
—If you know things before I do, Wilander said, why don’t you tell me some of these things only you know?
Once again Mortensen paused before responding. You’ll learn them soon enough.
—But I’m not ready for such knowledge now? It’s too volatile, too alarming. I wouldn’t be able to understand?
—Ridiculing me will benefit no one.
Wilander might have argued the point. Should I report that to Lunde? he asked. That you have secret knowledge of the future?
—I see no reason why you should not.
—I’ve got a better idea. Since you’ve been here longest and know more than any of us, why don’t you make the reports?
—I have my own responsibilities, Mortensen said. They require all my energy.
—Yes, I can imagine.
—Your duties are not so challenging as mine, but nonetheless they’re crucial and you can’t perform them in Kaliaska.
Angry now, Wilander said, These responsibilities that require all your energy, that are so challenging—perhaps you could explain them to me.
—There’s a passage in the Bible that states one must be born again…
—I’ve had to pay for my dinner far too often by listening to that religious crap. I don’t have to listen to it here.
—It states that one must be born again to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, Mortensen said patiently. I believe that’s true of every significant passage.
—What are you talking about?
Mortensen shook his head ruefully. Perhaps we’ll speak later. I have things to do.
—What things? That’s all I’m asking you! What could be so pressing you can’t take a few seconds to tell me about it?
—It would take much longer than a few seconds, Mortensen said. And it would serve no purpose…not so long as you maintain your current attitude.
—Then convince me to change my attitude, Wilander said, but without another word, Mortensen stepped from view and did not answer when Wilander called to him.
A bird chittered somewhere above, a patterned call that had the sound of a warning. Wilander glanced up through the leaves, trying to locate it, and was captivated first by the architecture of the tree, the axle of the trunk and the irregular spokes of the limbs, making it seem as if the linden were a spindle designed to interact in some fashion with the ship, and then by the uppermost leaves, almost invisible against the glare of the sun, and those just below showing as half-sketched outlines and a hint of green, giving the impression that the tree had not sprouted from the soil but was materializing from the top down, spun into being from a formless golden-white dimension whose borders interpenetrated with the world of men.
Walking toward Kaliaska, Wilander’s frustration with Mortensen abated and he chided himself for having confronted the old fool. With every step, his mood was buoyed further by the prospect that in less than an hour he would be with Arlene, and by the beauty of the luxuriant growth, the sunlight filtering through the canopy to gild trembling leaves and nodding ferns, a feeling that peaked when, looking back, he saw Viator’s prow, black and made mysterious by ground fog, thrusting between two hills; but once he passed beyond sight of the ship, he was possessed by the feeling that the dream place into which he had gazed earlier that morning had a physical presence, a geography, and the ground whereon he walked was part of it, the firs, the mossy logs, and the carpeting of salvia and ferns, all of them were elements of an illusion that had taken root in the pale brown medium that enclosed the ship, growing there like fungus on a stump. The notion was, of course, irrational. He rejected it, he went at a measured pace, he fixed his thoughts on Arlene. But each step now seemed attached to mortal risk—at any second his foot might breach the apparent solidity of the trail and he would plunge into the pale brown void beneath and fall prey to the menacing undulant shapes that inhabited it. The certainty grew in him that a fatal step was imminent, that some dread trap he could neither anticipate nor characterize was about to be sprung. Before long, his uneasiness matured into panic, and, unable to restrain the impulse, he fled through the forest, soon forgetting what had so frightened him, afraid of everything now, of shadows and glints of light, of stillness and a surreptitious rustling among the bushes, stumbling, tripping over roots, scraping his hand on a stone, thorns pricking his arms, falling, scrambling up again, until he reached the rise overlooking Kaliaska and collapsed atop it.
He had intended to catch his breath, then proceed to the trading post, but the town looked vulgar and forbidding in its plainness, the color of the dirt on which it stood virtually the same as that of the sky in his dream, the movement of dogs and people and vehicles conveying an aimless, annoying rhythm. Under the strong sun, Inupiat men and women trudged along the streets, some stopping to exchange a few words; a red pickup pulled up next to the trading post; three children played clumsily on the shingle, while their fathers patched a net. Wilander felt defeated by circumstance, stranded between two inimical poles, and wished he were back in the comfort of his cabin. He sat on a flat rock, flanked on one side by a bush with dry yellow-green leaves and on the other by the remnants of a fire and some charred fish heads upon which flies were crawling, and watched the sluggish creep of commerce with an utter lack of interest. Something was wrong with him, he decided. The past few years must have cracked him in some central place. His behavior was becoming as eccentric as that of the men aboard Viator. Not as eccentric as Mortensen’s, but given what had just transpired, he doubted it would be long before he began collecting paint flakes or pressing linden leaves between the pages of his books. It seemed he had posed this—to his mind—overly dramatic self-diagnosis in order to provoke a denial, to energize himself, but it had entirely the opposite effect, weighing on him as would a criminal judgment; and, oppressed by the idea that he might be slipping, he sank into a fugue, staring at the town, seeing in its plodding regulation and drabness an articulation of his decline.