The Navigator, page 37
Petal stared up at Quill from the water. She couldn't see her; the ship lights that backlit Quill were too bright.
"Petal! I'm going to throw you a rope – climb up it, okay!"
"No." Petal was still unable to see. "This is what I have to do, Quill! This is my purpose!"
"No! It isn't!" Quill charged across the deck, frantically searching for a rope. "Stop this right now! Come up here!"
"Quill! You have to let me go. I know that you love me and I love you too - but I have to go! You can't stop me!"
"No!" Quill couldn't find a rope anywhere. In her manic haste, she dropped the knife. It clanked across the deck. She ignored it, scrambling back to the railing. "Please Petal! Come up here. You'll die! YOU WILL DIE OUT THERE! You'll freeze!"
Petal shook her head. Her face looked pale in the dim light, yet determined.
"I'm sorry, Quill. I'm sorry."
"Please don't do this!"
Atalai eyed Giovanni. He looked paralyzed by fear. He walked up behind Quill, and went to grab her, but hesitated.
"I need to go into the fog." Petal looked straight up at Quill. She was just a black silhouette. "It's okay. I'll come back for you."
"I can't let you leave me!"
"You have to." Petal was crying now. "I have to go. I know you wanted to stay with me - always - but this – this is where you cannot follow."
Atalai slowly put his hands around Quill's waist. He interlaced his fingers at her navel and pulled her backwards, away from the railing.
Quill didn't react for a moment, entranced by what was happening. She watched Petal's craft drift out toward the fog. She writhed in Atalai's grasp.
Atalai tightened his grip, but Quill was now flailing violently, shouting and screaming. She stomped on his foot and elbowed him in the chin. He lost his balance and crashed down onto the deck, still clutching her.
A few dozen feet away, the port hatch, again, flew open. A trio of Syracusian crewmen ran out on deck.
"Get off me you psychotic fuck!" Quill was on her stomach, but could still see Petal's boat. It was drifting further and further away. She bit down as hard as she could on Atalai's wrist and he let go, crying out in pain.
"Ahhhh!"
Atalai rolled away, clutching his hand.
"Petal!"
Quill climbed the side rail. The dinghy had drifted twenty feet away. It still had about twenty more feet to go before it reached the fog.
"What's going on out here! Who's been screaming?" A Syracusian crewman drew his pistol and fired a shot into the air. "Everyone stop what you're doing! Calm down and get on your knees!"
Quill spun around. She watched Atalai kneel and raise his hands.
Giovanni, too, put his hands up.
The crewman leveled his pistol at Quill.
"You! Get away from the railing!"
Quill looked over the side of the ship. Petal was still staring up at her from the boat. She waved a final goodbye.
No!
Quill jumped over the railing.
"Oh my God!" Giovanni and Atalai ran over to the ship side.
"Quill!" Petal squealed. She furiously rowed her dinghy back to the Polar Wanderer.
Quill hit the sea with a splash. The ocean's surface was a mixture of slush and icy water. Her body went into shock from the cold. She began to convulse. Her heart almost stopped. After a second, her whole body went rigid. She lay still in the unimaginable cold, unable to move.
Petal reached into the icy sea and clawed at Quill's stiff body. Her hands went numb from the cold. Using every ounce of her strength, she pulled her into the dinghy.
"Are you okay?" Petal gasped. Each of her breaths formed an icy cloud. She punched Quill's chest, trying to give her CPR. "Wake up!"
Quill's face and lips were a dark, purplish pink. Petal piled every blanket and jacket she'd packed inside of the dinghy on top of Quill, until she began to shudder.
"P-P-P-Pe-Pe-Pet-te-te-te-al. I-I-I'm sorry."
Petal cradled Quill's head in her arms. Her hair had frozen into one congealed mass. It slowly melted into slush between her fingers.
"It's okay. You're going to be okay. You're alive."
Petal swaddled Quill in the blankets and jackets. She then looked up from her, out at the surrounding sea. The fog was only a few inches away.
"I – I couldn't leave you." Quill continued to shake. "I'm sorry. I couldn't."
"Shhh." Petal rocked Quill's head back and forth in her arms as the yellow fog swirled around them. Everything went dark. Petal couldn't see. She continued to stroke Quill's hair. "Shhhhhhh."
Atalai, Giovanni, and the three crewmen on deck watched in awe as the little dinghy was enveloped by the fog. After it was gone, they stood there for several minutes, staring at the reflection of the deck lights in the swirling, alien cloud.
Terra Australis Incognita
- 61-
Quill slowly opened her eyes. She felt disoriented and nauseous. The strange fog from the night before had passed by the dinghy without incident. She slept through the journey through the fog, the whole time shaking uncontrollably from hypothermia. She hadn't woken up until dawn.
Soft rays of morning light were beginning to poke through the canvas cover that stretched across the top of the little dinghy. Quill leaned forward and shambled over to the front of the boat, to where there was a small gap in the canvas.
She peered through the gap, sticking her head out.
Outside, the polar sky was pink. It was a bitterly, bitterly cold morning. The wind was raging. The sea surrounding her boat was a slurry of snow and cracked pack ice. A few hundred feet in front of the boat was a twinkling wall of ice and snow that looked like it might be the shore of the hidden continent.
Quill stared out at the ice and the snow as if she was looking at the face of death. The bleached, colorless emptiness ahead was mind numbing. She licked her lips which had instantly chapped from the wind and then leaned forward, over the boat, and vomited.
"Ewwoooooo."
There was very little left in Quill's stomach for her to throw up. The yellowish bile and stomach acid that dribbled out from her lips splashed onto the ice with the sound of falling raindrops.
Quill stared down at the drops of her bile. They froze the moment they hit the ice. She wondered if she and Petal were just like them on a much larger scale. Two tiny blobs of organic matter on an empty, frozen infinity.
"Are you okay?"
Petal had just woken up from a vivid dream. She'd been awake for most of the night, staring out at the dark sea and the alien fog. The fog had been invisible to her as she passed through it, indistinguishable from the surrounding darkness.
Now she was huddled in the back of the dinghy, buried under a pile of jackets and blankets. She looked feverish again; pale and sweating.
"I'm fine." Quill wiped her mouth with a shaky hand and collapsed into the boat. She looked up at the canvas roof and listened to the wind howl and flap the thin barrier. The temperature inside of the boat was hovering around zero. Her and Petal's faces were pink and dotted with ice crystals.
Petal crawled to the front of the boat. She huddled next to Quill for warmth and then lifted up her head, peering outside at the frozen sea and the distant ice wall.
"Is that it? Is that the hidden land?"
"I think so. What do you want to do? This boat can't go any further. The sea is frozen."
Petal looked down at the ice. It was broken and cracked but there was a smooth sheen of recently frozen water on top of its irregular surface. The whole ice sheet made creaking noises as the water under it continually bubbled up and froze. She leaned over the side of the boat and pressed her hands down onto the surface of the sea. The sea felt like snow, packed down hard as iron.
"Do you think we can walk across this?" She turned back to Quill.
Quill rested her head on Petal's bony shoulder. She looked out at the frozen sea and the wall of ice.
Quill saw nothing ahead but death. Their little dinghy had no food in it, no polar gear, and nothing from which to make heat or a fire. Whether they stayed in the boat or ventured out onto the ice, she knew they would die within hours.
"Maybe."
Petal could read the morbid stoicism on Quill's face. She bundled up as tightly as she could in layers of jackets and blankets and then slipped out of the boat, putting her feet down onto the pack ice.
The ice creaked but didn't buckle. It began to roll a little bit as the water below shifted from her weight. She stood in place and didn't move, praying it would support her.
"It's sturdy," Petal piped, now eye level with Quill, standing on the frozen ocean.
"Is it?"
The wind tugged at a few loose strands of Petal's hair. She was already starting to get frostbite. She pulled her hood down to her nose and tightened her scarf.
"Come on. We're almost there. I can feel it!"
Petal began to walk forward on the groaning ice. The wind gusts carried snow with them, which caked on her clothes, making her look like a snowman.
"Coming," Quill sighed. She stuffed herself into another jacket and made her way after Petal, across the frozen ocean.
Walking across the pack ice was similar to walking across a ship's deck during a storm. With every step the girls took, the ice would creak and warp. It sounded like it would give way if they lingered too long. Both girls tried to keep a quick, yet deliberate pace to prevent the liquid layer of the sea from seeping up to the surface.
As they made their way across the sea, the sky above them glowed orangish red. The ice and snow reflected and amplified the orange light until it looked like the ice beneath them was twinkling with millions of tiny fires.
After ten minutes of walking across the sea, the girls reached the low ice wall that made up the coast of the hidden continent.
The girls climbed their way up atop the three foot ice wall, jamming their hands into a large crack on its facade. Once they scaled it, they gawked out at the looming polar plateau.
The polar plateau, the interior of the hidden land, was an abysmally bland, frozen wasteland. All the girls could see ahead was white – a blinding, endless expanse of white. The loneliest, most unforgiving icescape either girl could've imagined.
Petal's teeth chattered. She and Quill were freezing in place, their bodies being devoured by frostbite. She shuddered, hunching over from the wind, before peering up at Quill.
"I – I don't understand. There's nothing here. Junk's not here. There's nothing here. Where's what I saw? Where's what I remember?"
Quill rubbed Petal's cheeks, trying to warm them from white to a more natural pink. She stared off into the nothingness with a feeling of disreality. She knew that her life was at its end, but for once, she didn't feel sad, or depressed, or even anxious about it.
"Maybe there's something here. Let's keep walking. Let's walk until we can't go on."
Quill and Petal plodded across the polar plateau, blinded by the snow, and numbed by the unfathomable cold. After a few minutes of shambling forward, Petal stopped, unable to move. Her legs locked up and felt stiff as ice cubes.
Quill carried Petal forward for a few more steps, but soon her legs, too, gave way and buckled.
The girls collapsed in a stiff embrace. For a moment, they lay still.
Petal shivered in the snow. She rolled onto her back, gazing up at the orange, polar sky and the twinkling ice with a profound sense of déjà vu.
"I've been here before," she whispered, mesmerized. "This - this is my vision."
Quill pulled Petal closer, comforting her till the very end. Her body went cold and limp, but Quill continued to hug her, rubbing her clothing, until she felt her slip away.
Once Petal was gone, Quill looked up at the sky. As her consciousness faded, she stared off into the orange glow for what seemed like an eternity.
- 62-
Sentry licked the snow. Its taste made him see flecks of metallic yellow – a bit of synesthesia from some odd cross-linkage between what was left of his natural brain and his synthetic neural programming. He liked seeing the yellow specks. They made the snow taste slightly like lemon. He continued to lap up the snowflakes eagerly as his jowls dripped a blue, viscous, antifreeze fluid down onto the snow bank.
After a few moments, Sentry began to paw at the snow, crunching the frozen powder between his claws. Each claw was four inches long and made of solid steel. A fine coating of chrome kept them razor sharp. One atom thick at their edges.
Many parts of Sentry's massive, muscular body had been replaced with silicon and steel. His eyes were six, spider-like, black orbs that could see in infrared and ultraviolet as well as the visible spectrum. His canine teeth were two steel-alloy spikes which were long and serrated like a pair of steak knives. The bones and tendons that lay under his thick synthetic fur were a fusion of plastics, tungsten-steel-alloys, and nano-engineered sinew.
Sentry looked up from the snow and sniffed the subzero polar air. Reams of numerical data flashed across his mind's eye as his CPU and olfactory bulb took turns analyzing the ambient odors.
There was something out there in the snow that smelled and tasted unfamiliar.
Sentry crouched. He curled his blue lips into a snarl and began to taste the wind with his tongue like a snake. He slowly crept forward with long, deliberate steps, until he saw two dark figures lying near the frozen shoreline.
Sentry licked his eyes with his long, raspy tongue, coating them with a fresh film of antifreeze. His eyes focused on the two warm blobs. For a minute, he thought they might be seals that had beached themselves to warm up and sunbathe.
Seal hunting was Sentry's favorite distraction. Even though it went against his programming, the instinct to stalk, track, and kill prey was deeply ingrained in what was left of his animal brain. Because of this instinctual drive, he would invariably choose to ignore his synthetic inhibitors, and hunt down any prey he could find.
Sentry approached the two warm blobs cautiously, trying to stay low and keep out of sight. The blobs were warm, but his infrared eyes showed they were rapidly cooling. He picked up his pace to reach them while they still had life signs.
As he got closer to the blobs, he was able to discern their form. They were not seals. They had the shape of land animals with defined legs, heads, arms, hands, and feet. One of the two creatures was slightly smaller than the other. Both were cuddled up into each other's arms, nearly dead from the extreme temperature.
Sentry walked up next to the two creatures, examining their faces and their anatomical structure. One of the creatures was a human woman. The other was a Khoi girl. The human woman's eyes were open and were beginning to freeze over. He licked the human woman's eyes, smearing his blue, antifreeze saliva across them while uploading all of his accumulated data of the encounter to Cynax-8172's mainframe.
- 63-
For a moment, all Quill could see was white – the endless, piercing white of snow blindness. She tried to move. Her body felt weird, anesthetized and numb. All of her limbs were heavy, almost too heavy to lift. She twitched and then lay still, trying to remember what happened.
Am I dead? Is this what death looks like?
The last thing Quill remembered was staring off into the endless ice. She felt the polar cold soak into her bones and everything went dark.
Now she was lying in a large, white, circular room. She blinked and looked around.
Quill was lying on a cot. It had a white metal frame overlaid with some kind of foam padding. Above the cot was a white, domed roof. Soft light radiated out from a thin groove that wrapped around the circumference of the dome, halfway up to the top of the ceiling. She turned her head to the side and stared over at Petal.
Petal was lying on a cot on the other side of the room, about ten feet away. She was pale and asleep; not moving.
Quill sat up. It was sickeningly hot in the dome. She could feel sweat beading up on her forehead, just below her hairline. She rubbed it off and began to stand. Before she got to her feet, she noticed something else in the room with her.
It looked like a monster.
The monster was the size of a cow with four thick legs, a single head, and a long, metallic tail. Its body was covered in white fur and metal bristles. Its face looked ghastly – a wolf's face with six, empty, black eyes, a gaping mouth full of jagged, metal teeth, and a snout covered with long, copper whiskers.
The hideous creature was sitting on the floor like a massive cat, its metallic tail causally rocking back and forth. It licked its eyes like a frog and then yawned, revealing a purple throat lined with bony protrusions.
