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Melville thought back, <
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Still, it was sad. Was there anything in the universe quite so sad as a beached sailing ship? Especially a Ship of two-space, looking like two old-time wooden sailing ships joined at the waterline, with masts protruding out from both top and bottom. They were majestic and grand, with their sails spread as they sped from star to star, across the shoreless seas of Flatland. But even a one-masted cutter like his lively little Swish-tail was pathetic and sad the instant you cut the contacts to the Keel and beached it in three-space.
Immediately after their crash landing, Melville and his small crew pulled out the precious Keel and lovingly planted it in the living earth like a mast, or a flagpole at the top of the hill. The rest of Melville’s company came down the Keel from the Kestrel and their mothership left them, never to return. Or at least not yet.
Many of the pure white Nimbrell timbers were stripped from Swish-tail’s hull to form a platform around the Keel, which now became a Pier. Melville was here to “talk” with Swish-tail after their battle. She was his friend, and a commander needed someone outside the chain of command to visit with. She seemed to be happy there, planted in the living earth. A Ship died and a world was born. Soon, she would merge with this world, becoming its gateway to Two-Space.
They paused in companionable silence as Melville leaned back against the Keel and watched little Midshipman Aquinar make another trip from the bowels of the old cutter. Again he reached lovingly up and put a hand on the white Moss coating the Keel and asked, <
Early in their forays into Flatland, humans had discovered the remarkable white fungus they’d named Lady Elbereth’s Gift or Elbereth Moss. Like everything in Two-Space, Elbereth Moss existed only in two dimensions. But it was also capable of growing on the portion of a Pier that extended into normal, three-dimensional space, like the encrusted sea creatures on the pilings of a dock at low tide.
In two-space it just appeared, like a fungus, adhering to and eventually coating Nimbrell wood and Keels in two-space. It was white and impossibly thin. It also provided oxygen and light. Most of all, across time, it became sentient, giving life to the white Ships of two-space. The men of Westerness communicated their awe and respect by making proper nouns out of terms like Keel, Pier, and Ship, when referring to a sentient life-form.
Melville felt the Ship respond to his idle question. <
But he wasn’t really thinking about the boy. Melville was thinking about Kestrel, their mothership. Wondering if it would ever return to take them home to Westerness and Evereven, where “softly silver fountains fall.” Most of all, at this moment, Melville wondered if he would ever again take a long cold drink of water. To distract himself from his thirst and exhaustion, he watched the boy’s trips with detached bemusement. The little barefoot midshipman had taken off his blue jacket, and was dressed now in a dirty white shirt and sailcloth trousers, like some crawling worm or moth flitting back and forth.
This was the boy’s fourth journey. He couldn’t be after the water barrel; the tap to the barrel was on the other end, and the area where the little midshipman was crawling was considerably lower than that.
Each time, Aquinar crawled over the bodies of the creatures they had just killed, cut down in windrows, with rifled musket, pistol and sword, as their little company defended the tiny perimeter. This was Melville’s miniature world. A grove of trees with their precious shade atop a grassy hill, the bones of their cutter with its precious water barrel, and the Pier where he sat.
Within the bowels of the cutter, and spread out on the west side, the far side from the little midshipman’s approach, was the aid station. Here, under the shade of sailcloth tarps, were many marines and sailors, and one dog, all seriously wounded in their recent battle. They were tended by Lady Elphinstone, their Sylvan surgeon. She’d been attached to their ship as a part of this cooperative effort between Westerness and Osgil. She was fair of face, with her golden hair pulled back behind her head in a bun. She wore a buttercup yellow gown, with a grass green sash about her waist. Both were now stained and smeared with the leaking lifeblood of many men. The surgeon was assisted by Petreckski, their monkish purser, his brown robe well concealing the blood of their wounded. Their two buckskin-clad rangers, bone weary after their long chase and fierce battle, were also contributing their extensive healing skills.
Deep in the shade of the trees were their dead. Six men, two ship’s dogs, and one cat were lovingly laid out under careful guard, lest their bodies be defiled by local creatures. They rested amidst the trees they’d died to defend. Soon they would be buried there.
Melville had no idea what the boy thought he was doing, going back and forth from the bowels of their cutter to the depths of the woods. But he knew just exactly what these dead aliens were doing here.
Several of the strange, six-legged, dingy white “apes” had died up here on the Pier as they tried to work their way around the left flank. There was one close to him. Close enough to prod with his foot.
In books, the writers often talk of people voiding their bowels when they die. You could get the impression from these gritty, realistic writers that this always happened. But the truth was that it only happened if you had a “load” in the lower intestines. Thus, Melville could tell which creatures had fed well last night, and which hadn’t. This fellow, with the local equivalent of flies crawling in and out of his mouth and across the facets of his compound eyes, had eaten very well last night.
The mouth was located at the top of the creature’s skull, the vertical nose slits below that, and the compound eyes were low in the skull. Except for when the head launched forward on its accordion neck (mouth first, teeth first, in violent attack), it remained nestled back into the creature’s . . . chest? . . . thorax? The end result was that the mouth (a very respectable mouth, full of very nasty and creditable teeth) was at the top of the skull, with the compound eyes protected, barely peeking out from where they crouched in the chest cavity. Now, relaxed in death, the head protruded from the body and the ape’s eyes seemed to look reproachfully up at him, ignoring the intruding flies.
An orphan’s curse would drag to hell
A spirit from on high;
But oh! more horrible than that
Is the curse in a dead man’s eye!
Well, this was no “man” thought Melville, it probably wasn’t even sentient, but it was a living creature that he’d helped to kill. “Your fault,” he muttered, looking his accuser in the eye. “Don’t blame me. You were the ones that had to go and attack us, with all that howling and screeching. What did you expect?”
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The thing that the “realistic, gritty” genre of writers generally didn’t write about was the fact that, in the intensity of battle, many of the living combatants also voided their bowels. Again, it generally happened to those with a “load” in the lower intestines.
All energy was redirected toward survival. “We need more power, Captain! Bladder control? I don’t think so. Sphincter control? We don’t need no stinking sphincter control! Ye laddies get that energy down in the legs where we need it!”