1
_Argo IV_ answered Dunin's brown hand at the tiller, sliding south
under a following breeze. Her chief designer Paul Mason liked to call
her a sloop, admitting that on no planet would any sloop have cared to
be found dead with a pair of twelve-foot oars amidships. She was
thirty-six feet fore and aft. Without a sawmill, shaping boards for
her strakes had been harder than trimming and placing the single tree
trunk that was her keel. Much of her joining was with wooden pegs;
there was iron in her too, from the single deposit of ore on the
island of Adelphi. Her building had started seventeen months ago in
the Year Nine. One month ago Paul's daughter Helen had cracked across
her bow an earthen flask of wine brought to maturity by Nisana and
_Argo IV_ had slipped out of the mouth of the Whitebeach River for a
maiden voyage--a forty-mile circuit of the island, including the
passage of a strait where a current from open ocean ran formidably
between Adelphi and a small nameless island in the south. Since then
she had journeyed short distances up and down the coast, learning her
own fussy ways and teaching them to her makers.
_Argo II_ had been a clumsy oared raft of heroic history. Nine Lucifer
years ago, roughly the equivalent of twelve Earth years, _Argo II_ had
not only brought fifteen survivors of a war to the island, she had
also, broadened and repaired, returned to the mainland over the
ten-mile channel to pick up a sixteenth survivor, Abara, and the
gentle white beasts he had refused to abandon. He had guided them
south, through seventy miles of unknown terrors, and ten miles further
along the beach, until it came to an end at sheer cliffs; here _Argo
II_ found him. One by one--probably no one but Abara could have
coaxed them aboard--_Argo II_ had ferried all five of the olifants
across. During the rains that came for a dark ending of Year Two, the
swollen Whitebeach River had torn _Argo II_ from her moorings and she
had been swept away down the channel. Now she would be driftwood
scattered over the infinity of the unexplored; she was remembered.
_Argo III_, still in existence and more often called Betsy, was only a
boxed platform with outriggers and two pairs of oars. With four giants
at the oars and a favorable current she could approximate three miles
an hour and carry several tons. She had been built in the Year Four
and was still busily bringing slabs of building stone from the base of
the coastal range. The stone was red and black or sometimes purple,
heavy, already smoother than marble without polishing; unlike any
common stone of Earth, it was so hard that wind and sun and water over
the centuries had done little with it. Wright believed that was why
the coastal range could rise to such heights from a narrow base. While
the years in their millions had turned other mountains to level
ground, the glassy rock remained: it could be broken for use but
defied erosion like a diamond.
_Argo IV_ was unequivocally a ship; after her trial Paul had carved
for her bow a figurehead with the dreaming face of Pakriaa.
"Maybe," Dunin said, "with a few more like this the first explorations
could be around the coast instead of overland? If we had two or three
more ships when Kris-Mijok is old enough to go?"
Paul knew Dorothy had winced, though her face was turned to the
evening-reddened field of water. "If he still wants it, when he's old
enough to go...."
Kris-Mijok Wright, her third-born child and only son, had been born in
the Year Three; in Earth years he was only nine. His hunger for the
long journeying might be mainly a reflection of his devotion to Dunin,
herself full of visions and not yet a woman. A tentative half joke, a
means of channeling a child's fantasy into patience, had somehow
become a sober adult plan: that the first major explorations would
begin when Kris-Mijok would have a man's strength to take part in
them.
"We might have such ships by then." Paul tried to sound judicial. "Say
the Year Eighteen or Nineteen. Yes, a coastal exploration might be
better than trying to cross the continent. Not a circumnavigation
though, at first."
Dunin's big face blossomed in a grin. "Only about thirty-six thousand
miles by the old map made from the air. Open water at north and south
poles, plenty of it. Could do it in less than a year."
"More like fifty thousand, allowing for deflections, tacking, pull of
currents we don't know. Storms, flat calms, contrary winds, repairs,
expeditions ashore for provisions. You pull your horns in just a bit,
my girl. Do you remember a desert plateau the map shows in the
southern hemisphere? Solid cliff rising out of the sea for over seven
hundred miles, and on top of it roasting sand all the way across the
continent--and that plateau is only a small part of the coastal
desolation down there. From the equator to the 30th parallel I don't
think you'd have a chance to go ashore--and nothing to help you if you
did."