Aurora Quest

The boat drifted gently while they both considered the idea. In the gloom to the west, there was a sonorous splashing sound, as if a whale had breached.

“So we’d best keep rowing, but head north, as well as east, you reckon?” said Jim Hilton.

“Don’t ask me, Captain. You know I’m only the second fucking navigator. Not some fucking oracle on small boats on the fucking Pacific.”

They both laughed and bent their aching muscles to the task.

Sly woke shortly after that and took his turn on the oars. He was so eager to please that he had to be gentled down, or he’d have rowed at a hundred miles per hour for three minutes and then collapsed exhausted. As it was, he kept a steady tempo on the bow thwart, while the other three took turns at keeping him company on the stern oars.

Dawn came up slowly behind a bank of pewter cloud that lay across the eastern horizon like an unwanted guest.

“Storms,” said Carrie.

“Snow, likely,” Jim agreed.

“What do we do when we reach land, Dad?” asked Heather. “How do we move on?”

“Steal transport, I guess.”

Sly was chanting to himself as he rowed. “In and out and thin and fat and bin and bat and tin and tat…”

Jim steered a course that brought them back toward the land that should have been.

Heather was sitting in the bow, head over the side, commenting on how clean and clear the water was below them. “Saw a big sort of eel thing. And there’s… I can see… I can see a gas-station sign!”

“Stop rowing, Sly, and hang on to the oars. Don’t drop them over the side.”

Jim leaned to his left, trying to squint past the dawn light that was glinting off the dappled surface of the ocean. For a few moments he could see nothing at all, then a shoal of tiny silver fish went skittering past only inches beneath him.

And then he saw it.

It was a semicircular sign, red lettering on white. It was smeared over with bright green algae, a sure sign that the planet was picking its way back from the brink of the Earthblood extinction. The white pole ghosted down to vanish from sight into the deeps below them. Jim could just make out the dim, shimmering block of what might have been the buildings of the gas station.

“Land,” he breathed.

Now they had to be more cautious.

If they tried to go too fast, they might spike the boat on a pylon or submerged antenna. But now they knew that their suspicion was correct, everyone was happier.

Carrie spotted the first true sight of land, about two miles to the north, a low gray shape emerging from the misty cloud of a rain squall.

“There,” she breathed, pointing to what Jim reckoned to be close to true north, maybe even a little west.

It proved that they were in a monstrous new bay created by the earthquakes. Even in the murky daylight, they couldn’t see any sign of land away to their east, though there was a vague smudge on the horizon that could have been higher ground. Jim was appalled at the extent of the devastation.

“Must be a hundred miles wide and about the same from north to south,” he said.

“Are we going over there?” asked Heather. “Up ahead?”

Her father nodded. “If my back doesn’t break first with all this rowing.”

Sly stopped at Jim’s word, squeaking with alarm, nearly letting one of the oars drop into the ocean. “Don’t want t’break my back, Jim.”

“Just a way of talking, Sly,” said Jim, leaning over to pat the boy reassuringly on the shoulder.

“Listen, we couldn’t have done this trip without your help and strength, Sly. You’ve done real good. Real, real good.”

“You tell Dad that, Jim?”

“How can he?” said Heather, quickly. “You know that…”

“That your father’s gone on ahead to a different place, Sly,” said Carrie loudly to override what the girl started to say. “But he can see what you do and he’s going to be terribly proud of you.”

Sly beamed at her and clapped his hands together. “Then double good for me,” he crowed.

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