Maya nodded. “That would be great, Nirgal. That’s the level we need to reach anyway.”
Sax cleared his throat. “Nirgal, have you ever met the mathematician Bao?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Ah.”
Sax slumped back into his reverie. Maya talked for a while about the problems she and Michel had discussed that day— how immigration worked as a time machine, bringing up little islands of the past into the present. “That was John’s worry too, and now it’s happening.”
Nirgal nodded. “We have to have faith in the areophany. And in the constitution. They have to live by it once they’re here, the government should insist on that.”
“Yes. But the people, the natives I mean. . . .”
“Some kind of assimilationist ethic. We need to draw everyone in.”
“Yes.”
“Okay, Maya. I’ll see what I can do.” He smiled at her; then suddenly he was falling asleep, right before their eyes. “Maybe we can pull it off one more time, eh?”
“Maybe.”
“I’ve got to get flat. Good night. I love you.”
• • •
They sailed northwest from Minus One, and the island slipped under the horizon like a dream of ancient Greece, and they were on the open sea again, with its high broad sloppy groundswell. Hard trade winds poured out of the northeast for every hour of their passage, tearing off whitecaps that made the dark purple water look even darker. Wind and water made a continuous roar; it was hard to hear, everything had to be shouted. The crew gave up speech entirely, and worked on setting the maximum amount of sail possible, forcing the ship’s AI to deal with their enthusiasm; the mast sails stretched or tightened with each gust like bird’s wings, so that the wind had a visual component to match the invisible kinetics of Maya’s buffeted skin, and she stood in the bow looking up and back, taking it all in.
On the third day the wind blew even harder, and the boat got up to its hydroplaning speed, the hull lifting up onto a flat section at the stern and then skipping over the waves, knocking up far more spray than was comfortable for anyone on deck; Maya retreated to the first cabin, where she could look out the bow windows and witness the spectacle. Such speed! Occasionally crew members would come in sopping, to catch their breath and suck down some java. One of them told Maya that they were adjusting their course to take account of the Hellas current; “this sea’s the biggest example ever of the Coriolis force on a bathtub drain, it being round, and in the latitudes where trade winds push it the same way as the Coriolis force, so it’s swirling clockwise around Minus One Island like a great big whirlpool. We have to adjust for it big time or we’ll make landfall halfway to Hell’s Gate.”
The strong winds held, and flying along like they were, hydroplaning for most of the day, it took them only four days to sail across their radius of the Hellas Sea. On the fourth afternoon the mast sails feathered in, and the hull fell back into the water, rolling in the whitecaps. To the north land appeared over all the horizon at once: the rim of the great basin, like a mountain range without any peaks: a giant berm of a slope, looking like the inner wall of a crater, which of course it was, but so much bigger than any normal crater that one could only barely see the arcing of the circle— exactly that big— which struck Maya as beautiful, somehow. And as they closed on the land, and then coasted westward toward Odessa (their landfall had still been east of the town, despite their adjustment for the clockwise current) she could, by climbing up the shrouds into the wind, see the beach that the sea had created: a wide strand, backed by grass-covered dunes, with creek mouths cutting through here and there. A handsome coast, and near the outskirts of Odessa; part of Odessa’s handsomeness then, part of her town.
Off to the west, the rugged peaks of the Hellespontus Montes began to poke over the waves, distant and small, very different in character from the smooth northern rise. So they had to be close. Maya climbed up farther in the shrouds. And there it was, on the rise of the northern slope— the topmost rows of parks and buildings, all green and white, turquoise and terra-cotta. And then the big bowed middle of town, like an enormous amphitheater looking down on the stage of the harbor, which came over the horizon white lighthouse first, then the statue of Arkady, then the breakwater, then the thousand masts of the marina, and the jumble of roofs and trees behind the stained concrete of the corniche seawall. Odessa.
She scampered down the shroud like a crew member, almost, and hugged a few of them and Michel, feeling herself grin, feeling the wind pour over them. They came into the harbor and the sails furled into their masts like touched snails. They puttered into a slip, and walked down a gang-plank, and along the dock, up through the marina and into the corniche park. And there they were. The blue trolley still clang-clanged on the street behind the park.