Viator

Two nights passed before she entered the mess again, and two nights after that, a particularly cold night, with the temperature hovering near zero, a thousand glittering daggers of ice hung like trophies about Viator’s deck, a half moon whose light at meridian was so strong that a portion of the ice-sheathed railing at the stern looked to be a curve of gemmy fire suspended against the less focused brightness of the sea beyond, it was then that Aralyn—this the name Wilander had given the whistler, the name of a cousin in Goteborg whom he had never met—crouched in a corner of the mess while she ate the chicken breast he had set out for her; and the night after that she balked at returning to the linden tree. Not only was the cold affecting her (she had been trembling when she entered, making her seem even younger, frailer, like the little match girl), but the leaves of the linden had thinned out over the past days to such a degree, it no longer served as an effective hiding place, and this provided a clue to the size of the qwazil, who continued to call from the uppermost branches, secreted behind a smallish spray of leaves, marking itself as a tiny bird with a big voice…or else, like the wiccara, it was invisible. With both gesture and word, Wilander encouraged Aralyn to leave, but she curled up on the floor under the table as if she planned to sleep there; though it was unlikely that any of the crew would have reason to enter the mess during the night, it was nevertheless a possibility, and Wilander did not trust that they would have as protective an attitude toward her as he—she hadn’t filled the hole in his life that Arlene had left, nothing could, but her presence cut the loneliness to a more tolerable level, and he was coming to dote on her, to think of her as something of a cross between a niece and a pet; he made notes on her height and weight (a shade over five feet, slightly less than a hundred pounds) and physical condition (healthily sinewed; skin unmarred except for a pink two-inch-long scar shaped like a smile under her right breast; large eyes with dark irises and clear whites), and also noted how clean she was aside from her snarled hair and wondered if she washed herself like a cat or, as with certain breeds of dog, Samoyeds and Akitas, if she had a naturally pleasing odor. He indulged in a serial daydream in which, after reaching the Iron Shore, leaving Viator to sail unknown seas alone and un-captained, a living ship bent upon her own fulfillment, he became the great protector of the whistlers, a figure part Moses, part Che Guevara, part Martin Luther King, and pictured himself standing with Aralyn at the forefront of a host of whistlers, all dressed in homespun robes, freshly civilized, the forest ranked behind them, gazing with ennobled mien across a vista rife with promise. Okay, he told her. But you can’t stay here. And again with word and gesture, he urged her into the passageway and along it to his cabin, where, after displaying some signs of anxiety, she finally settled on the floor and slept. Wilander lay awake, listening to her breath, recognizing that he was establishing a dangerous precedent—she couldn’t stay in the cabin, or maybe she could, maybe it would be for the best; and if Viator was, indeed, on her way to the ultimate elsewhere, another plane of existence, a world he may have created, then she wouldn’t have to stay for long, no more than a week if the nearness of the lights and the increased volume of the groaning were indicators; and in the midst of these considerations, he fell asleep, a sleep undisturbed by dreams, unless waking to find himself enveloped in sweetness, a complex perfume, and Aralyn’s fingers stroking him, making him hard, unless all that were a dream, and he came up from the fog of sleep, meaning to push her away, but when he touched her, his disgust—a flicker—was subsumed by desire, his hands clamped to her flesh, and then she was rising above him, a shadow in the dark, fitting herself to him, just the way Arlene liked, only Arlene enjoyed sitting astride him and touching herself, whereas this one, Aralyn, was erratic in her movements, clawing at his chest, and that was his last clinical thought until after he had spilled into her and lay stiff with self-loathing, bothered by the weight of her head on his chest, her hand on his stomach, but unwilling now to push her away, to treat her roughly, because it wasn’t her fault, she had merely been trying to protect herself after having wandered into this unfamiliar place through a cosmic rip in the walls of her world made by Viator’s push to survive, acting on instinct…though it was possible, he realized, that he had assumed incorrectly, that he underestimated the whistlers and they were not sub-humans, not creatures of animal instinct, but fully human, a variant form of the species. In an effort to validate this thesis, he managed to teach Aralyn to say Tom and food, but since she banged on the floor with the candy bar he had used to illustrate food (mimicking the frustration he had displayed while teaching her) whenever she said the word, he couldn’t be sure she understood its meaning, nor was he sure—if she understood, if her intellect was more advanced than he had thought—whether this would put him in the clear ethically speaking. He doubted it would. Ethics had not been a strong point of his for many years.