“If there are any such. And our planks don’t split. Continents?—I’d give my soul for one small isle.”
“The first to reach Nehwon’s south pole!” Fafhrd daydreamed on. “The first to climb the southern Stardocks! The first to loot the treasures of the south! The first to find what land lies at antipodes from Shadowland, realm of Death! The first—”
The Mouser quietly removed himself to the other side of the shortened sail from Fafhrd and cautiously made his way to the prow, where he wearily threw himself down in a narrow angle of shadow. He was dazed by wind, spray, exertion, the needling sun, and sheer velocity. He dully watched the coppery pinkish shimmer-sprights, which were holding position with remarkable steadiness for them at mast height a ship’s length ahead.
After a while he slept and dreamed that one of them detached itself from the other, and came down and hovered above him like a long rosy spectrum and then became a fond- and narrow-visaged green-eyed girl in his arms, who loosened his clothing with slim fingers cool as milk kept in a well, so that looking down closely he saw the nipples of her dainty breasts pressing like fresh-scoured copper thimbles into the curly dark hair on his chest. And she was saying softly and sweetly, head bent forward like his, lips and tongue brushing his ear, “Press on, press on. This is the only way to Life and immortality and paradise.” And he replied, “My dearest love, I will.”
He woke to Fafhrd’s shout and to a fugitive but clear, though almost blinding, vision of a female face that was narrow and beautiful, but otherwise totally unlike that of the douce girl of his dream. A sharp, imperious face, wildly alive, made all of red-gold light, the irises of her wide eyes vermilion.
He lifted up sluggishly. His jerkin was unlaced to his waist and pushed back off his shoulders.
“Mouser,” Fafhrd said urgently, “when I first glimpsed you but now, you were all bathed in fire!” Gazing stupidly down, the Mouser saw twin threads of smoke rising from his matted chest where the nipples of his dream had pressed into it. And as he stared at the gray threads, they died. He smelled the stink of burning hair.
He shook his head, blinked, and pushed himself to his feet. “What a strange fancy,” he said to Fafhrd. “The sun must have got in your eye. Say, look there!”
The five waterspouts had drawn far ahead and had been replaced by two groups (of three and four respectively) swiftly overtaking Black Racer from astern, the four rather distant, the three appallingly close, so that they could see clearly the structure of each: pillars of wild gray water almost a ship’s length thick and towering up to thrice mast height, where each broke off abruptly.
And in the farther distance they could now see still more groups of speeding spouts, and most distant-dim yet speediest of all a gigantic single one that looked leagues thick. A-prow the twin shimmer-sprights led on.
“’Tis passing strange,” Fafhrd averred.
“Does one speak of a covey of waterspouts?” the Mouser wanted to know. “Or a pride? A congeries? A fountain? Or—yes!—a tower! A tower of waterspouts!”
The day passed and half the night, and their weird situation of eastward speeding held—and Black Racer held together. The sea was slick and moving in long low swells across which blew thin, long, pale lines of foam. The wind was hurricane force at very least, but the velocity of the Great Equatorial Current had increased to match it.
Overhead, nearly at mast-top, the full moon shone down, scantily scattered about with stars. Her White Huntress light showed the smooth surface of the racing sea to be outdinted near and far by towers of waterspouts racing by in majestical array and yet with fantastical celerity, as if they somehow profited far more from the speed of the current than did Black Racer. At mast height and ship’s length ahead, the twin shimmer-sprights flew on like flags of silver lace against the dark. All almost silently.
“Fafhrd,” the Gray Mouser spoke very softly, as if reluctant to break the silver moonlight’s spectral spell, “Tonight I clearly see that Nehwon is a vast bubble rising through waters of eternity, with continents and isles afloat inside.”
“Yes, and they’d move around—the continents, I mean—and bump each other,” Fafhrd said, softly too, albeit a little gruffly. “That is, providing they’d float at all. Which I most strongly doubt.”
“They move all orderly, in pre-established harmony,” the Mouser replied. “And as for buoyancy, think of the Sinking Land.”
“But then where’d be the sun and moon and stars and planets nine?” Fafhrd objected. “All in a jumble in the bubble’s midst? That’s quite impossible—and ridiculous.”
“I’m getting to the stars,” the Mouser said. “They’re all afloat in even stricter pre-established harmony in the Great Equatorial Ocean, which as we’ve seen this day and night, speeds around Nehwon’s waist once each day—that is, in its effects on the waterspouts, not on Racer. Why else, I ask you, is it also called the Sea of Stars?”
Fafhrd blinked, momentarily impressed against his will. Then he grinned. “But if this ocean’s all afloat with stars,” he demanded, “why can’t we see ‘em all about our ship? Riddle me that, O Sage!”
The Mouser smiled back at him, very composedly.
“They’re all of ‘em inside the waterspouts,” he said, “which are gray tubes of water pointing toward heaven—by which I mean, of course, the antipodes of Nehwon. Look up, bold comrade mine, at arching sky and heaven’s top. You’re looking at the same Great Equatorial Ocean we’re afloat in, only halfway around Nehwon from Black Racer. You’re looking down (or up, what skills it?) the tubes of the waterspouts there, so you can see the star at bottom of each.”
“I’m looking at the full moon too,” Fafhrd said. “Don’t try to tell me that’s at the bottom of a waterspout!”
“But I will,” the Mouser responded gently. “Recall the gigantic spout like speeding mesa we briefly saw far south of us last noon? That was the moonspout, to invent a word. And now it’s raced to sky ahead of us, in half day since.”
“Fry me for a sardine!” Fafhrd said with great feeling. Then he sought to collect his comprehension. “And those folk on Nehwon’s other side—up there—they’re seeing a star at the bottom of each waterspout now around us here?”
“Of course not,” the Mouser said patiently. “Sunlight drowns out their twinkles for those folk. It’s day up there, you see.” He pointed at the dark near the moon. “Up there, you see, they’re bathed in highest noon, drenched in the light of sun, which now is somewhere near us, but hid from us by the thick walls of his sunspout, to coin a word wholly analogous to moonspout.”
“Oh, monstrous!” Fafhrd cried. “For if it’s day up there, you little fool, why can’t we see it here? Why can’t we see up there Nehwon lands bathed in light with bright blue sea around ‘em? Answer me that!”
“Because there are two different kinds of light,” the Mouser said with an almost celestial tranquillity. “Seeming the same by every local test, yet utterly diverse. First, there’s direct light, such as we’re getting now from moon and stars up there. Second, there is reflected light, which cannot make the really longer journeys, and certainly can’t recross—not one faint ray of it—Nehwon’s central space to reach us here.”
“Mouser,” Fafhrd said in a very small voice, but with great certainty, “you’re not just inventing words, you’re inventing the whole business—on the spur of the moment as you go along.”
“Invent the Laws of Nature?” the Mouser asked with a certain horror. “That were far worse than darkest blasphemy.”
“Then in the name of all the gods at once!” Fafhrd demanded in a very large voice, “how can the sun be in a waterspout and not boil it all away in an instant in an explosion vast? Tell me at once.”
“There are some things man was not meant to know,” the Mouser said in a most portentous voice. Then, swiftly switching to the familiar, “or rather, since I am in no way superstitious, there are some things which have not yielded yet to our philosophy. An omission which in this instance I will remedy at once. There are, you see, two different kinds of energy, the one pure heat, the other purest light, which cannot boil the tiniest water-drop—the direct light I’ve already told you of, which changes almost entirely to heat where e’er it hits, which in turn tells us why reflected light can’t make the long trip back through Nehwon’s midst. There, have I answered you?”
“Oh damn, damn, damn,” Fafhrd said weakly. Then managing to rally himself, if only desperately for a last time, he asked somewhat sardonically, “All right, all right! But just where then is this floating sun you keep invoking, tucked in his vast adamantine-walled waterspout?”