In the Wilderness

Link to article: In the Wilderness.

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Ye stand in the presence of Captain Ahab, and with him ye shall sail into fame and infamy, into legend and history.
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by [[[Koths Korner| Kothardarastrix]]]

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Approximately two thousand and three years after the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, two astronomers peered at images from the Hubble Telescope and discovered a previously-unknown moon of Uranus that //Voyager 2// had missed during its long, slow journey into the endless depths of space.

It was not an especially interesting moon; like most in that part of the solar system, it was little more than a clump of ice and inert organics burnt black by radiation. At a mere 12 kilometers across, this particular dirty snowball didn't even have enough mass to squash itself into a sphere. The moon had, at most, one claim to fame, that being its coexistence with one of the planet's rings, though Uranus's rings were not especially impressive either. This fact was noted, and things were occasionally re-measured as technology improved, but for the most part this little moon faded into the same obscurity shared by all the small and lifeless bodies of the outer solar system. But it still needed a name, and like all the moons of Uranus, its moniker was plucked from the pages of Shakespeare. It would not be clear to later astronomers how exactly this moon's discoverers settled upon the specific name they chose; out of Shakespeare's vast corpus, the being that now lent her name to the newfound moon was not even truly a character, just a fantastical vision imparted to a lovesick fool in a gregarious friend's meandering monologue. Perhaps their intent was to compare the moon's small size with a chariot made from a hollow hazelnut, and its ring with a trail of dreams and fairy dust left behind. Maybe it seemed fitting to name such an easily-missed moon for a similarly obscure character. It could have been a purely random choice, perhaps a drawing of Shakespearian names from a hat or some other equally meaningless exercise.

Or, perhaps, it is simply because names have power.

Power that resonates through two billion kilometers of empty space, power that echoes through two hundred thousand years of long-forgotten history, power that reverberates through the deepest ancestral memories of humankind, through the same foggy myths and dreams where dwell the gods and monsters. Power that, through no definable mechanism but the kind of pure random chance that superstitious men call fate, caused this far-off frozen crag to be given the same name as the one who conquered it long before the first human ever cast its bewildered eyes to the stars and thought itself worthy to name them.

The power of **Mab**.

----

The Sixth Isle of the Second Hytoth was the smallest bit of inhabited land in the whole Sea of Stars, much too small to generate any appreciable atmosphere or gravity. The first problem had been easy enough to solve, with the same vast magic the first Ortothans had used to turn the rest of that icy archipelago into a place worth living in, but gravity was a much trickier matter. There was magic for that, too, of course -- indeed, it was ubiquitous aboard the Ortothan star-ships -- but the smallest moon was still a great deal larger than even the biggest ship, and accordingly more difficult to enchant. However, that low gravity also meant that things like rocks, ice, metal, and mining equipment were a lot lighter there than in most places, and a lot easier to move out of the way. That's why, after perhaps a hundred millennia of habitation, the smallest isle had become just a hollow shell of dirty ice, floating in a black ring of its own ground innards, and housing the largest seaport in all the Hytoth.

That seaport, sometimes known as Spiderweb City, had well earned its moniker. It was a disorienting tangle of ropes, chains, and bridges, strung haphazardly between lopsided buildings built with no concept of up or down. Spiral streets wound through honeycombed districts, and endless towers looped into twisted rings. No accurate maps existed; the few who'd tried to make them often swore that the tangle was somehow bigger than the moon that housed it, perhaps because it was still connected to the lost pocket dimension created by the original Ortothan settlers.

It was all held unsteadily in place by heavy iron pillars driven into the icy crust, but the whole thing stayed in motion, slightly swaying as every tiny movement sent waves through an invisible sea of equal and opposite reactions. Visitors from other colonies would sometimes remark that being in that city still felt like being on the waves. That was how the Mabians liked it; this way, they'd never lose their sea legs.

Sea legs were something certainly needed, there on Mab, for sailing was its lifeblood. Nothing could grow on that thin shell of ice, and anything worth mining had long since been extracted or scattered into the ring. Mab had only one resource to export: the best sailors on the starry sea. If one needed a shipload of asteroid gold towed past a pirate blockade, Mabians were the ones for the job. If a ship needed to skip from one star system to the next in the smallest physically-possible interval of relative time, a Mabian navigator could do it. If some fractal Voruteuth slithered from the Maelstrom to menace the moons with its ravenous tentacles, Mabian hunters would be the ones to vanquish it. And, in the tumultuous decades since the Yeren took to the stars, the Mabians quickly became the ones most skilled at turning their carefully engineered whaleships into carcasses. This last profession, despite or because of its high danger and low legality, had acquired quite the aura of legend and adventure. And of all the ships that plied the starry seas with harpoon in hand and murder in mind, none was more legendary or adventurous than the //Pelkot//.

At any given time, there were dozens, perhaps hundreds of ships docked at Mab, anchored to the ice or tied to the web of the city itself. Many ships, once they became too old and worn-out for their original purposes, would be absorbed wholesale and converted into more buildings, but the //Pelkot// would not be one of them. It was a warrior's ship, and it would be given a warrior's burial, no doubt after earning a warrior's death. Though built of the same imported alien wood as most Fae ships, its flanks had been plated with thick slabs of bone, shell, and exoskeleton carved from the hides of slain whaleships, and the rail around its forecastle consisted of a single immense jawbone, still supported by posts of scrimshawed ivory that had once been fearsome teeth. She commanded respect from all other Fae ships, and inspired fear in all the Yeren space-whales that had heard her dark and bloody legend. Yet these emotional evocations of the ship were naught before the quantity of the same associated with her captain.

In those days, the man was scarcely seen ashore anymore; when not cruising the Uranian archipelago, slaying any whale he came across, that weathered warrior of the sky-beyond-the-sky would lay in his ship's cabin as a man sick or dying, as if the air of land, even a port so tenuously terrestrial as Mab's, was a choking miasma to his seagoing lungs. Even when the //Pelkot// set sail from the harbor, its captain was scarcely seen. He dealt with the crew through proxies, only trusting the mates in the gloom of his presence. Only once his ship had cleared the wide hole in the moon's icy exterior, passed beyond its shadowy ring, and filled its sky with the blue bulk of the seventh planet might he be glimpsed, pacing the deck like a sleepwalker, eyes always to the stars. When the ship set the planet firmly astern and sailed out into the vast gulfs between it and the other bodies of the solar system, where lurked the hated whaleships and fearsome Voruteuthis, he could be seen at the rails, hooded eyes straining through a complex and powerful spyglass for the faintest sign of the enemy. And once the ship crossed into interstellar seas, weaving through the belts and clouds of comets that ringed the eight solar continents like an icy reef, then he would truly come alive. Something about the rarified void of the endless sea would call to him, and breathe into him a greater vivacity and //solidity// than any mere man could hold. 

That is how it was on the fortieth day of the //Pelkot's// final voyage, as it hovered at the heliopause, and a crew of eager but unsuspecting space-whalers awaited their orders. Fae of every shape and size swabbed the deck, minded the sails, or meandered about other shipboard tasks, wondering why the //Pelkot// had made for the edge of the solar system in such a hurry, and why its prow pointed away from Alpha Centauri and all the other known systems where Fae had set foot. Some speculated quietly about the voyage to come, swapping half-serious jokes and half-joking worries, for none could quite predict just where the willful hand of their captain might next turn the tiller.

Suddenly, a loud bang snapped across the deck, slicing any budding conversations to bits and drawing all the sailors to an instinctive halt -- the newer crew because they stopped at their work to see the source of the sound, and the old hands because they knew whose approach it heralded.

The man was old, not in the way of a decrepit house or other ruined work of mortals, but in the way of the mightiest trees, grown far beyond the reach of axe or flame, far above the choking shade of lesser flora, and far larger than even a searing bolt from the heavens could fell, wide branches heavy with ecosystems all their own, whole worlds and lives built around and upon it but never restraining its Babel growth. His back was as straight as the mainmast, his face as lined and tanned as the hardwood deck, and his hair as gray and wild as a thunderhead. Below the knee, his left leg was a peg of polished ivory, carved top to bottom with inscrutable runes and elaborate scrimshaw that swam and shifted like something alive with every clunking step. Every strike of its metal-shod tip on the deck sent blue sparks crackling across the wood and accentuated the clumping footfall with a pop of exploding air. While the crew looked on in reverence and apprehension, he raised the artificial limb and smote the boards with a loud cry in the old Earthen tongue. As if he were still in the weightless interior of the moon, the strike sent him upwards, floating until only the man on the masthead could look down on him -- and, knowing his proper place, quickly scrambled down the rigging, lest he be tempted to do so.

As the captain surveyed his assembled crew from on high, it was easy to see in the stern set of his face, in the righteous clench of his callused fists, and in the stormy crackle of his imperious eyes, why it was whispered on the docks that, some hundred generations hence, his progenitor had been Queen Mab's greatest admiral, the mighty archfey who had first planted the flag of empire on the moons of Uranus in her name. Some even suggested that this mythic ancestor had been one of Mab's own bastard children, and that their captain was thus one fraction a god. Pound for pound, he had matched this legacy with legendry, a litany of great and terrible deeds too long to be recited. His crew could sense, in the same way that arthritic joints feel approaching storms, that he would soon be doing the greatest and most terrible yet -- and they would all be a part of it, whether they wished it or not.

"Hear me!" he bellowed. "Ye stand in the presence of Captain Ahab, and with him ye shall sail into fame and infamy, into legend and history. Together, we shall spread our reach farther than any before us and seize that which only gods may grasp."

Already anticipating his energy, the most experienced of his crew let out a brief cheer.

"Be ye sailors? Aye, ye be. So ye have no doubt heard the whispers, then, of that which I will now shout to ye: the blasted apes, in their monstrous white whale, have set a course for Sirius." With one crooked finger, he pointed behind himself, toward the brightest spot in the sky besides the Sun itself. The men below him booed and hissed.

"Perhaps this is impossible, ye might think. A path to an uncharted star? It can't be done, leastaways not in a lifetime, not without a single sea to name in the spaces between. But it can be done, and indeed it is being as we speak; the way I saw it in my scrying-pool, the white whale set sail from Ganymede not four turns of Oberon ago, and already it blights the aether with its passage. The apes have no respect for the invisible seas they cross, no sense of a space's spirit. They smash it, run over it, disregard it, sailing faster than any creature has a right to, and setting foot where none such as they belong. First they stole our ancient home from us; then they defiled the face of the moon with their big footprints. Now they rule the dunes of Mars, now they claim the moons of Jupiter, now they go planting their world trees on every comet from here to Pluto. Now they walk unopposed through the Second Hytoth, presuming to rub their shaggy shoulders with those of their betters, and those who might still be their betters had they not forsaken our Queen for blood and money. They smoke the gris like pleasure-den derelicts, and it propels their primate minds to madness, madness made real by their deviant technology, madness that carries them far across the sea of stars. Not even the far-flung colonies of Alpha Centauri are safe from their grasping paws. Every claim made by our Queen, the Yeren have refuted. Every conquest, they have defiled. Yet still that is not enough for them, for the savage ever hungers. In that, perhaps, I am less distinct from them as I might like, for I, too, am wracked with ravenousness. My line is that of kings and conquerors! I do not long to explore the stars; I hunger to seize them, and make them my own! To ensure that the bold legacy of our forebears is not sullied by time or temperance, that we shall live and die as destined by our blood." To punctuate this declaration, he slammed one fist into his cupped hand, raising another and louder round of cheers.

Slowly, he turned in the air, wheeling to face that bright, brilliant star. Quietly, he spoke: "We shall sail to Sirius."

This time, there were no whoops of enthusiasm, only looks of confusion as Ahab slowly drifted back down to the poop deck, where he leaned against the helm. He stood in silence for a moment, squinting at the brightest star, as if trying to spy the white whale across that impossible distance. Then, as suddenly as a sprung trap, he whirled again to face his crew, pivoting about his prosthesis.

"How, you ask? Ha! Has mad old Ahab forgotten the ways of the starry sea? Nay, I say. I have learned more of this black ocean than ye could ever guess. To me it is as the back of mine hand. I speak to the sea, and it listens. And sometimes, men, I tell ye, it speaks back! It tells old Ahab of what the Yeren hath done, and by what means they do it! Mates! Bring the bug!"

Startled from awed attention by Ahab's finger, pointing like the hand of doom, the first mate -- a tall, fair fellow with gleaming eyes and the abbreviated antlers of a yearling buck -- sprung into action. Seizing the bars of a hatch near the center of the deck, he gave a great heave and flung it open with a clatter. Or was the clatter that of wood on wood? It persisted long after the opened hatch had come to rest, and seemed to issue not from without, but within... the crew leaned closer, peering into the darkness belowdecks for the source of the clicking and scrabbling. They scarcely had time to crane their necks before it rushed forth and sent them recoiling.

The bug was immense, larger than any of the domestic animals that the Fae founders had brought to the Second Hytoth, and easily big enough to crush anyone but the hulking harpooners under its armored bulk. Fourteen legs skittered below its segmented shell, both the same pale pink as albinistic eyes. The bug's own eyes, huge and reflective, threw the crew's own shocked reflections back at them like funhouse mirrors. Before any could recover from their surprise, the beast chose a target and lunged, hoping to close its eight ravenous mandibles around some poor sailor's throat.

Then, moving with the speed and force of an avalanche, Kikuwe the ogrish harpooner leapt into its path and, seizing the edges of its carapace with two huge hands, shoved it back towards the hatch. The other harpooners followed suit, closing around the creature with horns lowered and bulging arms ready to grapple the beast into submission. As the thwarted crustacean scrabbled backwards, wriggling antenna searching for a way out, the crewmen noticed for the first time that two thick iron rings had been pierced through the fringes of its carapace around the midsection, and that to each a long chain was affixed. These chains trailed off down the hatch from which it had emerged, and from which the second and third mates -- both short, Struck stout and bearded but Flak slight and shaven -- were now scrambling, with the other ends of the chains in hand. Both looked bruised and disoriented from the spill the bug must've given them when it slipped their leads.

"Blast ye!" Ahab bellowed, in a voice that rumbled with the power to make his curse literal. "Keep hold, ye dogs!"

Grumbling at the insult but knowing better than to back-talk the one men call Old Thunder, the mates reeled in their chains and yanked, steadying the bug between them. The harpooners loomed over them, and perhaps it was not the chains, but the shadow of those horned and muscled hulks that kept the creature from attacking again.

"Captain," shouted the first mate Stalu, "what manner of thing is this?" He knew full well the nature of the bug, of course, as did anyone who had ever gutted a whaleship and found such a thing still attached to the stump of the dead whale's tongue. What he did not know was why a living Yeren [[[SCP-074 |space-louse]]] had been brought aboard their ship.

"That," Ahab spat, "is how those dirty apes have beaten us about the star-sea, but in the duality of things, it is also how we shall beat them to Sirius." He punctuated this sentence with a loud, sparking stomp of his ivory leg, which continued into a slow, scraping, one-legged dance. One might have thought it strange, had they not seen the carvings thereupon glow with cyan light and known that intricately etched limb was just as much wand as leg. Ahab's evocation rippled through the deck and up the isopod's many legs. Flashes of blue leaked from the plates of its carapace, then settled on the mirrored eyes, now the same clouded blue as the seventh planet. 

Ahab dragged his leg slowly forward, and the bug seemed compelled by the motion. The crew parted for its passage toward the bow, save for the mates who rushed unsteadily after to keep their grip on the collar-chains. It scuttled deftly up onto the forecastle and quickly over the rail. It hung there for a moment, fourteen claws dug into the wood of the bow, before its probing antennae found the figurehead. As befit the queen of Fae ships, its figurehead likened the Queen of all Fae, as Mab had been represented in the various portraits, idols, and cameos that had persisted or been replicated ever since her fateful visit to the Second Hytoth. She was as beautiful as fierce, the perfect picture of royalty, divinity, and the power that both entailed. But now, as if instinctively sensing yet another bit of Fae dignity to defile, the wretched Yeren space-bug clambered onto it, onto //her//, and closed its disgusting jaws around her carven neck!

More than one crewman opened his mouth in protest, but their breaths were stolen by a sudden movement, or vibration, or duplication, or something else altogether indescribable. For a moment, it seemed that every star in the sky had been quadrupled, and each of their afterimages shifted and fractalized through a whole spectrum of alien colors. There was a sense of intense //motion//, but not the faintest inkling of //direction//. Several sailors, seasoned sea-dogs though they were, stumbled to their knees or emptied their breakfasts over the gunwales. Ahab alone stood unmoved, an anchor in a world of driftwood. With one last thundering stomp of his artificial foot, he halted the ship's unnatural wavering and fixed it once more to the traditional dimensions of motion and existence. Blue bolts crackled from the bug and up the chains, which Struck and Flak quickly flung 'round the capstans before the magic could touch their hurried hands. There they became affixed, and for a single disorienting instant the whole ship seemed to ever-slightly stretch and pull along them toward the bug beneath the bowsprit.

"Captain!" Stalu cried once more, "What has happened to us?"

"What has happened?" Ahab repeated. "What's happened is I have stolen from the Yeren what, like all things, is ours by right: the power to blaze a trail wherever I see fit. This beast's legs and mouthparts pick through probability, through every conceivable future and past, through states of confusion and contradiction that only a gris-grinder could understand. Into those futures I will reach, and through this ship I shall name the off-road seas and oceans that might exist only after we have sailed them, and on those waves of paradox and probability we shall ride to the brightest star!"

More cheers followed this proclamation, though they seemed markedly less certain than before.

"Pile!" Ahab barked, then knocked the deck below him with his false foot. In response, a long, lean shape shambled out of the shadows, rocking more unsteadily than even a landlubber should at sea. It was not hard to see why; the newcomer, no more than an adolescent by the look of him, had the gray, cracked lips of a gris-grinder, and a still-smoking pipe of the stuff in one hand. With uncommon care, Ahab stepped over the sterncastle rail and levitated himself down beside the boy.

"How feels ye, boy?" he asked, softly.

"Unclear as always, cap'n." The boy, Pile, chuckled and grinned. His teeth were black.

"And ye've been reading those tomes of Yeren space-science I got ye?"

"Aye," he snickered, nodding twitchily. "Back to front I read 'em, every night."

"Good, good," said Ahab. He wrapped one arm around the addict's skinny shoulders, then swept his other over the assembled crew. "This be our new navigator, Pile. He is young, aye, but he knows more of the gris and the fancy Yeren arithmetic than any of us. Through the gray haze, he spies the same rainbow of possible seas as that space-louse. He'll tell me what he sees, then I'll give that vision a name and sail us there. We won't get there without him, so ye'll treat him with the same respect as ye'd show me, understand?"

There were many murmurs amid the crew, but that respect -- though certainly damaged by this sudden parade of mad events -- was still strong enough to keep them as no more than murmurs. Ahab spoke, and though he no longer shouted, he could still be clearly heard over them.

"What sees ye now, lad?"

Pile blinked furiously for a moment. Then his wide, bloodshot eyes ranged wide from port to starboard until they finally settled on Sirius. He squinted intently. Then, with another black smile, he pointed.

"There, sir."

"Aye, there. Now sing it to me."

Pile's voice was as dry and rasping as any gris addict's, ravaged as his throat and tongue were by hot smoke. It was all the stranger, then, when he coughed out the Name of a possible sea in almost-perfect Old Speech.

Ahab nodded. "'Tis a good name, lad."

The captain raised his noble chin. Deeply, he inhaled through his nose. One arm rose, slowly, dramatically, to point at Sirius. Then, with great strength and sonority, he pronounced the Name.

"O, great expanse of starry waves, at whose nearest shore we once were moored, and whose furthest laps the beaches of Sirius, I call thee, and Name thee thus:"

The Name was neither long nor complex, but it was //true//. The power of it rippled out from Ahab, raising hairs and goosebumps all across the crew. He patted Pile once more on the shoulder, then returned to the cabin where the ship's voice lay.

Nearly half of the captain's cabin was occupied by the mighty instrument known as the Pan Bass. If the simple Pan flute known today is a songbird, the Bass is its prehistoric, dinosaurian relative. A jungle of pipes and mechanisms fanned out from a complex sound box, carefully drilled with myriad tiny holes, each of which could be left open or plugged with a uniquely shaped wooden block. Collectively, this apparatus could pronounce any possible name allowed by the Telling Tides Standard of the stellar seas -- and thanks to some ingenious modifications by Ahab himself, this particular specimen could say three more syllables besides. With well-practiced deftness, he adjusted the vast instrument to a new configuration; three levers and two wooden clicks later, it was prepared.

The Captain stood ready, hands clasped round the last and largest lever like the hilt of a planted sword. The bass was a wild, powerful thing; even from Ahab, it took all its operator's might to move and control. His face twisted with strain, looking as wild and monstrous as that of the organ's namesake, as he drove the lever down, depressing the immense bellows that breathed life into the machine. Guided by wood and raster, the air coursed through the labyrinth of pipes, in and around every door and pore left open to it. Like the long-held breath of a deep-diving leviathan, it spouted from every opening, all the pipes crying the Name as one. It echoed through the sounding box, resonating through wood, and air, and wood again, through the walls of the cabin, through the boards of the deck, through every nail in the hull and along every rope of rigging, down into the bones of every man aboard and the twitching mandibles of the many-legged space louse. In this way, not only the Pan Bass, but the very ship itself cried out a Name to the void -- and the void replied.

With an almost whimsical //pop//, the great expanse of black void and white stars became a plane of blue water 'neath a dome of blue sky. Seawater, still uncertain in its newfound existence, splashed quietly away from the ship's sudden intrusion. For all its paradoxical quantum origins, this off-road sea looked much like any freshly-minted pocket dimension. The waters stretched off in every direction, undisturbed by air too new to have stirred itself a wind. The horizon was fuzzy and unreal, as if veiled by a thin fog. The sky was likewise vague; in places there were shifts in color or texture that might have suggested clouds, and there was certainly a region that seemed a bit brighter than the rest, but it would have been purely impossible to pin down a proper Sun or say how those clouds might be shaped. It was the //idea// of an ocean, and it would take some persuading to believe itself properly real.

That persuasion took many forms. The most formal of which, of course, was to plot the brand-new sea on the ship's charts, which traced the Ways from planet to planet and star to star with long, straight lines, crossed with a labeled tick mark for each off-road sea in between. The oldest and strongest of these ran from Sol to the triple stars of Alpha Centauri, the system where dwelt the great gris-worms that had made Yeren spaceflight -- and, now, Ahab's -- possible. More lines crossed from those two systems to a handful of small, red, flaring stars that ancient explorers had painstakingly blazed trails to by the slow path, trails that had only been ticked with pocket dimensions after a Named place was firmly established at both ends. So far as anyone knew, one such explorer was still on his way to Gliese, and might arrive there sometime before Uranus completed its current round of the sun -- though if Ahab's new technique truly worked as he claimed (and, the unspoken worry -- if anyone aboard the //Pelkot// lived to tell of it) that poor soul might find himself overtaken and greeted by a thriving colony the next time he sighted land. It was not a thought that could bear much dwelling.

However, there is more to a Name than just ink on parchment, pinned to the wall of a captain's cabin. If a place must be truly real, it must be unique. It must have memories. It must have personality. For a place as wide and featureless as the sea, such things can come only from its visitors. Fortunately, sailors are a poetic and imaginative bunch, when not busying themselves with booms and yardarms and whatnot. By each crew that passes through it, a new sea is given not just a name, but a story, and a song. Some become famed for the character of their winds or waves, which eagerly live up to the legends as they are further recorded and repeated. Strange skies are ascribed to some, while others become home to alien creatures -- though no proper sea monsters, not if a space-sailor wants to pass that way again. Great deeds are committed or invented on these seas, and drunken prophecies foretold. A liminal space, nothing more than a place between places, slowly becomes a place of its own.

All the while, the ship sails onward. Every crew includes a weather-wizard (of which Ahab, he they call Old Thunder, was by far the finest), one who can stir the half-real air of an off-road into a billowing breeze or sail-snapping gale that, after days or weeks or months, propels it clear across the hazy horizon and back into the outer ocean, the sea of stars, where it emerges millions, billions, or trillions of miles away from where it entered -- though rarely as far as its actual destination, for only the most real and powerful seas can stretch so far. And so the process begins anew, as it did for the //Pelkot//, over and over and over again. Pile's clouded, far-seeing eyes would glimpse a possibility, Ahab would Name it, and the ship would sing that Name across a brand-new horizon.

----

Unfortunately, those half-real seas between points A and B shared no common sun, and neither, therefore, a common day. This, together with the inevitable drift of imprecisely-wound clocks and inconsistently-cast light-spells, meant that days increasingly bled together, governed more by the rotation of duties on ship than anything outside. A sailor would rise to the sound of one bell, stagger out into the light or dark of some transient dimension, eat his meals, do his work, sing his songs, and eventually be sent back to his hammock by the bell again. The body and mind could never quite adapt to the inconsistency; often, a sailor's only source of wakefulness in his assigned "day" was a steady flow of hot stimulants, and his only recourse to sleep in the corresponding "night" was to work himself to an exhaustion that no amount of ill-timed light could disturb. Yet for most of that trip there was strangely little work to be done; the new seas were devoid of damaging storms that might make tasks for deckhands or repairmen, and there were certainly no other ships to gam with on that untrodden off-road. There would be no Voruteuthis to slay, nor any whales to hunt, not in those lifeless interstellar wastes. No sailor would wish such travails upon himself or his ship, of course -- at least, not one still fond of living -- but the monotony of its only alternative was maddening all the same. In those long hours of hurried waiting, there was little else to do but talk. To whit:

[[div class="filebox"]]

//The ship reappears in the Outer Ocean. The water still clinging to her hull instantly evaporates. Though the ship continues on, the sails go slack. With much running and pulling, all are soon furled. Their work now done, the men settle about the deck, sitting or leaning on rails, crates, and capstans. Pipes are lit and cups are filled. From the crowded forecastle, glances are cast at the unmanned helm.//

**Goblin:** I grow tired of still and empty seas.

**Hobgoblin:** Stop gamming and savor your break from them, then.

**Goblin:** Ha! Would that talking with you louts could be called a gam. What I wouldn't give for the sight of another ship... 

**Kobold:** Aye, and perhaps one that'd take us back the other way.

**Hobgoblin:** What says you?

**Kobold:** Er, only that I, uh, misses the comforts of home.

**Hobgoblin:** Then you shouldn't have taken to sea.

**Bugbear:** Aye, Hob, but can even you say that you don't miss it? The food, the music, the lovely ladies... 

**Powrie:** Aye, the ladies!

**Brownie:** Hush your lechery, Pow, haven't you got yourself a lover ashore already?

[laughter all around]

**Powrie:** I did when I left. Who can say if she'll still be waitin' at the other end of this fool errand.

**Bugbear:** She wouldn't be if I was still ashore, I can tell you that much!

[more laughter]

**Powrie:** Watch your wretched tongue, Bug, lest I cut it off with the rest of your ugly mug!

**Bugbear:** Bah. Not if your knife is as dull as your wits!

**Powrie:** Oi! You--

**Hobgoblin:** Oi yourself! What was that about a 'fool errand'?

**Powrie:** As if you don't know. Or are those pointy ears full of wax? Worried about space-sirens, are you?

**Hobgoblin:** Worried about the morale in you lot. A little longing for home, I'll excuse, Hell, I'll join on in. I've got a new son ashore, you know that. But I'll tolerate no talk of mutiny.

**Brownie:** Mutiny? Ha! Only a fool would set himself against Ahab.

**Goblin:** And a short-lived one, at that.

**Hobgoblin:** Well, and be you fools?

**Bugbear:** Not I.

**Powrie:** Nor I, though sometimes I feel it. Speeding headlong to a match with the king of whales, and for what? A flag on a barren planet? Methinks it not worth the trouble.

**Bugbear:** 'Twasn't thinkin' that bought your shares on the voyage, lad. 'Twas workin'.

**Powrie:** Aye, and work I will, lest I be a lazy sod like you, though my heart's not in it.

**Kobold:** Aye, nor mine.

**Hobgoblin:** So you, too, are a fool?

**Kobold:** I am no philosopher, it's true. But still methinks it would be wiser to use yonder space-louse for a quicker trip to Centauri. Find us some coal and oil the apes ain't discovered yet. What we need is what we can't get from Earth and they can, not some claim to territory we'll lose before Uranus comes 'round again.

**Powrie:** The Kobold is bold indeed! And true he speaks. This is about resources, not claims. And it's not a race, neither -- it's a war. Or at least it should be.

**Hobgoblin:** Bah! And think you that anyone wants war more than Captain Ahab? He was the first to strike down a whale, if you'll recall. And if anyone can lay that white whale low, it's him.

**Powrie:** I know not what Ahab wants. His eyes are as clouded as that cabin-boy's.

**Pile:** Is it so?

[The sailors startle. They look down at Pile, who stands amidships and grins blackly up at them.]

**Powrie:** Say, Pile, I speak only in jest, of course, only as a matter of--

**Pile:** Hush, Pow, 'tis alright. I shan't tattle to the captain what I've heard. Only what I've seen, ha! Though lately he scarcely hears even that.

[The sailors exchange uneasy glances.]

**Hobgoblin:** What mean you, Pile?

[Pile giggles. He places one yellow-nailed finger on his gray, grinning lips.]

**Pile:** I'll tell ye not. Not yet, haha! But I have seen it. Do you understand? I have //seen// it.

[Pile gestures, a broad, spiraling gesture like a spell. It would be more comical than frightening, if it came not from him. Brownie extends two fingers from his fist, a gesture of protection, just in case. Still chuckling, Pile saunters away. The sailors sit in silence.]

**Goblin:** Seen too much gris, methinks.

[No one laughs.]

**Brownie:** Look, lads, at his hair. Was it not brown when we boarded, yet now is going gray? And his face, was it not smooth and unwrinkled? Even his gait is like a man's twice his age.

**Bugbear:** Too much gris, indeed.

**Powrie:** Should he not be in the cabin, plotting our next step for Old Thunder?

**Hobgoblin:** Nay, not yet. Ahab's at his tracking.

**Goblin:** Tracking? Tracking what?

**Kobold:** His white whale, of course. He's got to know if we're ahead of it yet.

**Powrie:** Ahead of it?! How could we not be, after what, a year of riding this damned louse?

**Kobold:** I expect he thought the same, and now his mood's all the worse for thinking wrong.

**Hobgoblin:** Hush your naysaying. I know we yet gain on it, even if we've yet to pass. His leg-staff was cut from a tooth of that very whale, the very same that severed its original, or so I hear. It tracks that whale like a spider tracks a snared fly.

**Goblin:** Ought it be tracking Sirius?

**Powrie:** Can't ye see they're one and the same to him?! This is as much about beating the whale to Sirius as it is getting there in the first place, if not more! And there can be no doubt what he plans to do to it, with the ambush so set.

**Kobold:** In short, 'tis more vengeance than pride.

**Hobgoblin:** So what if it is! Can ye blame the godly man for recompensing his lost leg?

**Kobold:** Indeed I can! What ungodly man would squander himself on spite when a truer victory would be better won?

**Kikuwe:** Then you have never been wounded like he.

[The sailors turn to Kikuwe, the hulking harpooner. He has been sitting, silently until now, atop the ladder, with his legs dangling off the forecastle. Now he faces them, red eyes glowering from a gray-skinned brow.]

**Kikuwe:** Ahab is a warrior. Nay, an admiral. He is bigger than you, or me, or any mortal conflict of resources or territory. Godly indeed he is, and a god must tolerate no blasphemy.

[Powrie and Kobold both shift a bit further away. Kikuwe smiles faintly around his scrimshawed tusks.]

**Kikuwe:** Ahab must answer this challenge, for it is his nature. You could no sooner dissuade him than convince a storm to change course. And you can no more criticize him for hunting than you would a planet for spinning. It is his way. It is his //being//.

[Now finished, Kikuwe turns away. Kobold and Powrie wisely retreat belowdecks, where a restless sleep awaits them. Cautiously, Goblin eyes Kikuwe's back, wickedly scarred by barb and tentacle.]

**Goblin:** You are a soldier, yes? You have fought the things from the Maelstrom?

**Kikuwe:** See you it not all across my back?

**Goblin:** Aye, I see it, but 'tis not why I ask.

**Kikuwe:** Why, then?

**Goblin:** Deep in the hold, I have heard... noises.

**Bugbear:** As have I. A sort of... whispering.

**Hobgoblin:** A sort of... hum.

**Goblin:** I hear that is the sound of... the sound that-

**Kikuwe:** Indeed it is, runt.

**Goblin:** You mean-

**Kikuwe:** Yes. A Voruteuth.

[Brownie seizes the good-luck charm around his neck. With the other hand, he makes again a gesture of protection.]

**Brownie:** By Mab's arms! Surely no such thing could have stowed away with us for so long! It has been, what, a year at least? Nothing could go hungry for that long, and certainly no crew have gone missing.

**Kikuwe:** A Voruteuth does not //need// to eat. It //likes// to.

**Goblin:** Th-then why has it not?!

**Kikuwe:** I do not know. But if we have all heard it slithering in the depths, then the captain has as well. 

**Brownie:** Then why has he not slain it?!

**Kikuwer:** Why indeed.

**Goblin:** W-well we should do something, go down there and-

**Kikuwe:** Hush, runt. I am not afraid.

**Goblin:** How can you say that, with such a beast not fifty feet from us?! 

[Kikuwe does not answer; instead, he returns to sharpening his harpoon, razor-edged and the size of a small tree. Eventually, Hobgoblin speaks, but softly.]

**Hobgoblin:** Get below, men. Our shift be over.

**Goblin:** But--

**Hobgoblin:** Go.

[Goblin scurries belowdecks, swiftly followed by Brownie and, eventually, Bugbear. Hobgoblin eyes Kikuwe, who stares back.]

[Hobgoblin adjusts his jacket, nods, then hurries below himself.]

[[/div]]

And so it went, for a year or more, Ahab growing ever angrier, and his crew growing ever more restless. Though he never said as much to them, it was nonetheless clear that the white whale was also growing ever more distant. The growing gap burdened the captain most grievously, and it was perhaps inevitable that he soon chose to burden the rest of the ship with it as well.

"Men!" he bellowed one meaningless morning, while the ship floated lazily in a sea of turquoise 'neath cerulean skies. "Get thine salty arses on deck!" With a thunderous stomp of his magic leg, he shivered the ship's timbers enough to wake even the deepest sleeper. Once woken, the crew knew better than to dilly-dally; in a matter of minutes, all had assembled, some still wearing their nightclothes and scrubbing sand from their eyes.

"Blast ye sluggards! 'Tis no wonder the whale outpaces us."

"Why have ye summoned us?" Flak groaned.

"To tell ye the nature of the new work ye'll now be doing. I've grown tired of our snail's pace, and I've decided to speed us up. Henceforth, we'll be leavin' these damnable slow seas through the bottom, not the side."

Flak blinked and rubbed his eyes, as if the rheum there might've blocked his ears as well. "Cap'n?"

"Ye heard me. These off-roads are liars; though they look as deep as any ocean, there's naught below this vessel's keel than another and closer horizon."

Now convinced that his senses did not deceive, Flak had no choice but to voice his astonishment. "So ye want to sink the ship?!"

Ahab laughed. "Aye, Flak! She shall sink, again and again, until we have caught that wretched whale. And ye, and Struck, and Stalu shall help me do it! To the port, starboard, and bow, me mates! The rest of ye dogs, prepare to brace!"

Still unsure what madness the captain intended, but very much certain of what he'd do if they failed to take part in it, the crew scrambled after his commands. While Ahab floated up to the helm, the mates took their positions at the ship's other cardinal points, and all the rest seized ropes, battened hatches, or rushed belowdecks to seal and secure whatever they could.

"Now!" Ahab roared, "together with me, mates! Raise the mightiest wave that ye can!" He raised his hands, long fingers crackling with lightning, as if in desperate prayer. Then, bending nearly double, he swept them forward, as if straining to lift some huge invisible burden. And straining he was, it seemed, by the snarl of his face and bulge of his arms. At every stage, the mates mirrored him -- Struck and Flak amidships to either side, and Stalu at the prow, scooping arms stretched out over the clasping space-louse. Together they prevailed against the unseen weight, pushed to their feet, and finally heaved it up and away with ensorcelled fingers.

As if hoisted by the same hands but a hundred times the size, the waters all around rushed upward, into a towering wall of waves. The ship dropped as the waters swept away... then loomed overhead, like the sides of a bubble about to collapse.

"Mab's bones!" someone swore in tensing terror. Then the water fell upon them, and the //Pelkot// plunged beneath the waves... and out into space.

It took most of the men a few moments to recover, to rise from the positions the wave had knocked them into and clear its brine from the eyes and nose. Ahab alone stood ever unmoved, hands on the helm and grim concentration on his face.

"That's it, lads! Fine work, fine work indeed. Now let's see if it paid." Stepping back now, Ahab tapped his ivory leg five times on the deck, muttering incantations all the while. Then, holding fast to the rail for support, he lifted it up and began to sweep the limb side to side, like a dowsing rod. After but a second, he settled on a direction -- straight ahead -- and his stern countenance was split by a mad grin.

"Aha! It is as I had hoped, men -- we've saved much time, and lost no distance. Ready again, mates!"

"Captain!" Flak protested. "I-"

"Ye nothing! These waves are no different than the stormwaters that break 'cross that bow in realer seas, and unless ye've all gone soft on this long and dreary voyage, ye know perfectly well how to sail through such."

"But Sir," Stalu insisted, "the seas! Do we not neglect them like this, passing through scarcely long enough to name the thing?"

"Aye, Stalu, we do. But now is not the time for honors, but for haste! We will pay these paths double heed when we return, with that white whale's head towed behind us! Now, prepare thyselves for the next wave. I must go below to name it."

Ahab vaulted the rail like a man half his age, landed with magical ease on his mismatched feet, and clumped back into his cabin, where grinning Pile and the wailing soundbox awaited. There was little time to hesitate; Pile's yellow eyes had already sighted the next sea, and the haunting howls of its name were more than enough to drown discussion. As the ship met water once more, the mates readied another wave, and the rest prepared to brace.

So it continued, for hours or days, for as long as the men could stand it. All was wet and cold, and all were cold and tired, all but Ahab himself. His own speed seemed to match the ship's, now that she was gaining on the whale again. It seemed that he could have gone on that way for the rest of the voyage, blasting Pile's Names from his cabin and plunging the ship through wave after wave, if not for the limits of his merely mortal crew. When they could go no further through that speeding storm of Ahab's design, the //Pelkot// would return to its usual course of strictly above-water sailing, or -- more rarely -- brief interludes of blessed rest in the still, starry, Outer Ocean.

----

It was during such an interlude -- many monotonous months of wild waves and disrespected dimensions after Ahab's adoption of the hasty practice -- that he next addressed his crew collectively. They stood in their customary places and he in his, they dripping with the cold brine of a dozen off-roads and he virtually ablaze with fury and fervor. Seeing the exhaustion in their eyes, Ahab might have softened, had he been a lesser captain. But he, like the titan blacksharks that prowl the under-ice oceans of Io, knew no direction but forward, and no progress but bloody bites against the water and the world.

"I see ye men are run dry, though wet as drowned rats ye be. 'Tis just as well; I shan't have much use for thee on this next and final leg of our race."

Ahab watched the alarm ripple through the crowd, scowling as their minds ran with fears of plank-walking and keel-hauling. Before things could boil to thoughts of mutiny, he assuaged them -- or, perhaps, simply further unnerved them -- with a hearty laugh.

"At ease, men! I plan not to do away with ye. Indeed, you'll be earning a break well-deserved. This sink-sailing business, though it now be moving us faster than the whale, shan't get us to Sirius before the beast; we lost too much ground in the beginning! But fortunate for ye, Ahab knows yet one more way to speed this quest, one that needs only his sound-box and the gris-gray eyes of a cabin boy." Dramatically, he looked to port, to starboard, and finally to the mastheads above, sneering all the while at the Outer Ocean all around. Then his sneer curled into a smile. With arms upraised, he proclaimed as much to the crew as to the stubborn space itself:

"Hence forward, we shall skip this slowing Outer Ocean entirely! From one sea to the other we shall skip, breaking from the bonds of speed and distance to soar across the gulf and land SMACK," he shouted, accentuating the word with one clap of his hands and another of thunder, "in the system of Sirius."

"Captain?" Stalu asked, eyes wide. "You don't mean... from off-road to off-road?"

"Aye, Stalu, 'tis exactly what I mean. From off-road to off-road, so far off that we shall be cutting cross-country! A shortcut, ha! A shortcut at sea!"

Stalu, who had stood at the middle of the crowd, suddenly found himself borne forward, half by his own indignant legs and half by the accumulated outrage and astonishment of all the others not too tired to feel it, which seemed to pour into him like a wave as it pushed him to the front of the crew, where he stood at the base of the sterncastle and gazed up at Ahab with a challenge in his starry eyes.

"Captain Ahab!" he shouted, all trace of fear and hesitation gone from his voice, replaced by resolve -- yet underneath there was still a foundation of respect, and through that foundation there ran a crack of pleading desperation. "What you propose is taboo, nay, blasphemous, and certain death besides! Is not such bold and careless voyaging what opened Mab's Maelstrom and set its Voruteuthis upon us? We mustn't do this! Let the whale reach the star first; if we die in the going, we shan't reach the star at all!"

Struck by his first mate's challenge, Ahab only seemed to grow higher and mightier. His eyes widened, his nostrils flared, and his knuckles clenched white around the rail. When he bellowed his response, his voice howled with the bitter wind of the seventh planet.

"Back, Stalu, I rebuke thee! There be no gods to blaspheme on Ahab's ship, none but Ahab, and ye have defied me most gravely. I fear not the Voru, nor the wrath of distant gods, nor the sacred seven ye pay your blood-tithe to. I fear not at all! But you, Stalu, you, ye defiant mortal -- all ye defiant mortals, who gaze upon me with such judgement and cowardice in thine eyes! -- shall know the terror of Ahab, should ye dare to challenge me again! How can ye shrink from victory when it is so close at hand? Would ye rest in the histories of thy descendants as mere second-placers, failures and cowards outdone by Yeren on some long and pointless errand? Or would ye last as legends, arms of great Ahab, reaching 'cross the gulfs of space to seize the stars and constellations as a birthright, to grasp that seven-times-damned white whale in hands of death and rend it to naught but blood, blubber and bone, to crown thy race victors in this race of races? Aye! Better it would be, to die in flame and horror on the path of such a grand destiny, than to live in shame and ignoble defeat. If ye be martys, then men ye shall also be; but if ye be mice, then ye shall have no part of Ahab's legacy, save as ballast he shed on the way. Plague me no more, mutinous Stalu, but breathe deep the wind of my heart, and let it light in thine a fire like mine. All of ye sailors, breathe deep! Breathe, and burn! We shall outshine Sirius with the fury of our hearts!"

At this, he gave a thunderous and incoherent yell, the force of which shook the very mainmasts as only a storm-wind ever could. The crew cried out in unison, with loud and drowning howls of rage, of glory, of madness. It was as if Ahab had infused his own frenzied soul to them, into the very ship itself, and all were now one immortal instrument of vengeance. Even Stalu found himself swallowed by the cry, though tears ran from his sparkling eyes even as the cheer tore from his lips. The cacophony ran back and forth along the deck, which now shook with the stomps of heavy feet, pounding in time with a chant of that name, now one and the same with its bearer, "Ahab!"

Grinning, red-faced, wild-eyed, Ahab surveyed his frenzy-whipped fanatics. His loyal instruments of destruction. A tear might have glittered in one blazing eye, or perhaps it was but a drop of sweat from his lined and glowering brow. Leaving the men to their madness, he floated back down to the quarterdeck and ducked once more to his cabin, where the bedrugged cabin-boy awaited, seated and slouched on the floor beside the Pan Bass, looking gray and shadowed despite the light.

"Well, Pile? Have ye seen our next sea, and those beyond it?"

"Aye, captain," he coughed, spitting on his glassy gris-pipe, "I have seen our whole path from here to there, and everywhere."

"Excellent, now tell it to me!"

"But that is not all I see, captain," Pile warned. He grinned, then, revealing gaps as black as the teeth that had once filled them, and cracking lifeless lips with dark blood.

"What, what then? Out with it, boy!"

"Through space I see, with the power of the gris and that louse up front. But now, as my body crumbles and my mind bends, I see through time too." His yellow eyes wheeled in his tight-skinned skull, seemingly seeing nothing at all.

"Ye speak of time, and yet ye wastes it! Theatre enough I have for the both of us; draw not this dialogue longer than needs must."

"Aye, captain, aye. I shall give it to thee thusly, in three sharp knocks, like a hammer on a nail, like the bony fist of Death on the doorstep."

At Ahab, he leveled one trembling finger. Anyone else would have been struck -- perhaps dead, and quite possibly with lightning -- for directing such a gesture at such a man as he, but Ahab seemed -- for merely a moment -- rebuked.

"Thou art doomed, Ahab, and in these ways shall ye know thyself slain:"

"First, as I among this crew was the latest to enter this world, so shall I be the earliest to leave it." And then he tapped the bass with long and filthy nails.

"Second, ye shall not die in space, nor off-road, nor ashore." And then he rapped the wood with bony, bulging knuckles.

"Third, it shall be the very air that kills ye." And then he smote the surface with a clenched fist.

"Enough!" Ahab bellowed, and seizing the aged boy, dragged him upright. Into his face, he spat. "It is nonsense that ye speak! Killed by the air, but not on space, sea, or shore? 'Tis nowhere left! Ye promised me death, but have foretold me immortal!" Ahab laughed then, mad and cackling. Pile joined him, as if it had indeed been but a joke. For whole minutes, they did this, laughing and shaking and staring into each other's insane eyes.

Then, as quickly as the fit had come, it subsided. Ahab placed the boy back on his feet, then stepped up to the mighty bass. The pipes loomed behind him like the back of a throne, like the chitinous tubes of the bloodred worms that feed on underwater fire.

"Now," he whispered, insistently, "tell me the name."

Pile whispered it to him, and Ahab smiled, because it was a great and terrible name, an omen of things to come. As he heaved at the levers, and the heated air of the bellows down below surged through the pipes and out into the extinguishing silence of space, shaking the ship with its rumblings and piercing the ear with the screeching of the Name, Ahab laughed.

With a faint splash of water, the ship was gone. Had there been a single soul, living or dead, within a light-year of that Nameless space, and had it been facing precisely the right way with precisely the right telescope at precisely the right time, it might have seen, in the fleeting milliseconds before that displaced brine boiled out into the void, that the water had run red.



----

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No. An eternity. Or an instant. The stretched and contorted seconds of a waking nightmare, pinned to the bed by sleeping paralysis and tormented by looming shadows and ghostly shades. A time without clocks or hourglasses, without day or night, without the slow and steady spin of a planet or the regular wheel of a sun. Skies and seas that flickered blue, green, black, red... shapes that were not clouds or moons... islands, reefs, and archipelagos of rock and metal and bone... things neither animal nor plant that swam and heaved and slithered in seas too thick to be water... an ocean run dry, a boundless basin of parched sand and eroded tors that prodded the sky like numb fingers... a river of molten rock, oozing down a yellow canyon like blood from a clotting wound... a forest that rose and fell like waves... a galaxy that stretched and smeared... a protoplasmic colossus whose ribboning pseudopods swallowed stars, and a crimson nucleus that burned like a dying sun, like a wrathful eye... worlds without color, worlds without life... worlds where the only sound was a deafening discordance, a nightmare of strings and throats that chanted and screamed in patterns incomprehensible... red and green, green and pink, pink and yellow, yellow and orange, orange and blue, blue and black, black and blacker-than-black... 

//Hands slick with sweat, arms trembling with exertion, throat raw with the power of unsayable Names, bloodshot eyes watering with kaleidoscopic madness, Captain Ahab loses his grip on the bellows. He stumbles, the blunt foot of his ivory leg skidding out from under him. With terrible slowness, he falls. With instinctual speed, he scrabbles for purchase. His hands find the lever again, just as his body strikes it, at precisely the wrong angle. The lever breaks off beneath him. The instrument's song cuts off in a cry of pain, a Name mispronounced, unfinished, **incorrect**.//

{{An infinite plane. An endless horizon. Hills and waves of red spinning endlessly. Above the unreal landscape, seven shifting polyhedrons, each line blazing with light, each face hollow, each a hole to forever, each full of stars. A crew that once cowered belowdecks, aware of the phantasmagoria all around only by the colors it forces them to see, crawls from the hatches like supplicants before a merciless god. They raise their arms and bleeding eyes to the screaming shapes in the sky, begging for something, anything, everything. Their light pierces the boards and cracks the windows. Their song rattles the teeth in Ahab's jaw. He reaches for Pile, shouting silently over the discordance, but the cabin boy abandons his captain. Laughter spills from his bleeding lips as he rushes onto the deck, arms wide and eyes wider. The polyhedrons see him, and he cries out their names, forever deafening the men nearby.}}

{{Arm outstretched, Ahab calls his shadow to him, that bound demon of the Voru that he calls Fetateuthis, and it appears, writhing between the atoms of the floorboards. It is the only thing that looks}} normal {{in this place. With the same outstretched hand, Ahab points out the cabin door, out onto the deck where Pile dances in a vortex of lines, where seven angular gods loom ever closer, ever larger, ever deeper. The beast rockets across the deck, trailing blue streaks of Cherenkov radiation as it plunges through the spinning grid that wraps Pile like a bird's nest, and seizes him in its squirming arms. With a whiplike crack, the Voruteuth extends, bends, and snaps shut, reaching midway up the mainmast and flinging Pile beyond it, and beyond the ship's air and gravity, with the force of its recoil. He rockets overboard like a shooting star, weaving the lines like the tail of a painted comet. Two hundred feet overhead, an unseen intersection nails him to the screaming sky. The polyhedrons are pleased. They are distracted.}}

{{Ahab staggers onto the deck, leg knocked loose and wobbling. He shuts his eyes, but still he sees. He raises arms numb with pain and seizes the air with clenched and bloody fists. For the next moment, he, his ship, and his crew are all of one mind, one purpose, and one path -- DOWN. The //Pelkot// falls like a rock, away from the polyhedrons, away from what used to Pile, down through the spinning not-land below, and is swallowed whole.}}

//Grids... lines... shapes and patterns... coursing colors and shooting shapes... the plane-between-planes, the gap-between-gaps... the stars...//

Space. The blessed blackness, the sacred silence, the holy stability of the Outer Ocean, which no longer felt very Outer at all to the men who lay shocked, stunned, and half-dead across the once more motionless and properly-colored deck of the miraculously intact //Pelkot//. Fetateuthis hummed quietly. Gently, it lifted Ahab back to his feet.

Though his eyes had only just stopped vibrating in his skull, they remained as sharp as ever. A quick flick across the skies gave Ahab an inkling of where he was, and that was enough to restore his strength and senses.

"Up, up Fetateuthis! To the masthead!"

In reluctant obedience, the Voruteuth rose above the deck, some hundred feet along that artificial tree called the mainmast, and anchored one tentacle around the iron ring at its peak. Ahab fished a spyglass from his pocket, saw that it had been shattered in his fall, and pitched it over the side in a cloud of profanity. Turning in the bound demon's grip, he surveyed the endless skies in all directions. A vast dark tapestry of distant stars, displaced only a little from the same constellations they formed when seen from Sol. Off to port, a bright speck, bigger and brighter than the lights that studded the firmament, like a planet or a small star. Far astern, the brightest star in the alien sky, the same that the //Pelkot// had so long ago sailed from. But Ahab cared not for the distant gleam of Sol, for in the other direction, dead ahead from the bow, there it was: another sun. Huge and brilliant, so much that it burned the eye to see. A beacon of white light, slicing through the fog of bad magic and dead dimensions like a lighthouse. The end of the journey.

"Sirius!" Ahab called. "Sirius!" The men down below heard his cry, and some gave weak whoops of relief.

"Down, Fetateuthis!" Ahab commanded, and the thing wasted only a moment of hesitation. It set him carefully back on deck, where the crew were now hauling each other to their feet. They clustered at the bow, where they squinted up at the long-sought destination with teary eyes and embraced in mutual congratulations, as much for reaching the journey's end as for surviving it. Even the demon was fascinated, and the crew too overjoyed to mind as its dark form floated past them to stare at the unfamiliar star with organs that were not eyes.

Even Ahab was something close to happy, though one who looked closely at his deep-lined face would have seen that his smile -- in the second before it melted back into fixed determination -- was more of amusement or anticipation than elation. He wasted no time in celebration; instead, he immediately set about tapping and scraping with his ivory leg, calling once more on the connection it had with the dreaded white whale. Bracing one hand on the mast, Ahab raised the leg and slowly turned, hopping awkwardly about until his back was against the mast and the leg pointed straight out, straight back, straight towards the light of Sol. Only then did Ahab allow himself to lower his leg and let out a laugh.

"We've done it, lads! We've beaten the apes! We've won the race!"

A loud cheer went up, delirious in its enthusiasm. So it had all been worth it, in the end! Ahab, mad though he was, had led them all to victory, to history, to legend! Now they would find some planet or asteroid to plant a flag upon, and by doing so claim and Name it for themselves. Now they could rest easy, knowing that the return journey would be less than half as harrowing as what they'd already endured. Now-

"Now," said Ahab, grinning viciously, "we hunt the white whale."

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In the Wilderness

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