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had recorded -- a remarkable lapse on the immigrant's part, or an oversight on
Redhill's, I thought.
What I could see between the clouds, by eye alone, was tantalizing. Just a few
degrees east of the main skysail yard shone one very bright bluish point
surrounded by smaller points just outside its concentrated light: Pacifica, a
gas giant with many moons that seemed to move as the minutes passed. High
above the western horizon gleamed a yellowish point that I was fairly sure
must be another planet, probably Aurum. All around shimmered the volumes and
volumes of stars, including the double oxbow -- part of the encompassing
galaxy, analogous to the Milky Way seen from Earth. Randall's few books on
astronomy called this blurred twin loop by several names: the
Hills, the Kraken, or the Tetons. No astronomical authorities had authorized a
final name, apparently. I preferred the Tetons myself. I hoped to find out
more by examining the ship's chartroom.
I left my mates in their bunks in the forecastle when all seemed to sleep
soundly. William
French the navigator was snoring in his pupcastle cabin. The contents of the
deserted chartroom, books and maps opened or drawn down quietly, lighted only
by a single dim lantern, added much to what I needed to know about the
immigrants' present state of knowledge.
There were no complete and accurate charts of Lamarckia. No one had ever seen
the planet from space; no satellites had ever been put into orbit, and the
immigrants had much left to explore, including the entire hemisphere opposite
Elizabeth's Land, called the Deep West by some cartographers, the Far East by
others.
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The star charts were fairly thorough, and some improvements had been made by
the immigrants on the surveyor's originals. Ephemeris data was kept in several
thick volumes in the chartroom, much amended by French's hand, and probably on
the captain's slate as well. (Nkwanno's had no such data.) The sailors on
Lamarckia did not lack knowledge of how to find their way around, and how to
calculate latitudes and longitudes. Working with the planet's magnetic field
was relatively simple: there were few compass deviations in this hemisphere,
and those well understood.
Still, any sailor on Earth at the time of Thistledown's launch -- or even by
the close of the twentieth century -- would have been appalled at the prospect
of using such limited and inaccurate means. What little of Lamarckia had been
charted in detail, had been explored by brave men and women indeed.
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Lenk's first Captain of Voyages, Alphonse Jiddermeyer, with two sailing ships,
had set off from new-founded Calcutta five years after the immigrants'
arrival. His two-year journey took him along the Sumner Coast, named after his
first mate, to the northeast point of Elizabeth's Land, then south,
discovering the violently volcanic Agni Islands that lay four hundred miles
from the continent's eastern coast. (Those islands did not figure on later
charts. Some of the histories mentioned enormous blasts heard fifteen years
ago, and clouds of ash settling across southeastern
Elizabeth's Land, the Darwin Sea, and even Hsia. Enormous waves had struck the
eastern Cheng Ho
Coast and Jakarta, causing considerable damage to the human settlement, and
the islands were not seen again by merchant ships or later explorers. Penciled
on the _Vigilant_'s charts were specks in that general region, and question
marks.)
After leaving these islands, Jiddermeyer's ships were relentlessly blown south
by southwest, back to the southern extremities of Elizabeth's Land.
Jiddermeyer and his researchers charted the visible boundaries of what later
became known as zones five and six, Petain and
Magellan. They sailed around Cape Magellan, depending in a drawn-up curve from
the main body of
Elizabeth like a giant fang in the upper jaw of a sabertooth cat, and found
the Kupe Islands.
Here, a storm sank one boat, and the second -- with Jiddermeyer and two thirds
of both crews --
continued south. They found two long strips of land, named them the Alicias
after the sailor who first sighted them, and then were blown swiftly west to
the environs of the southern polar continent, La Perouse Land, seen only as a
distant blue coast backed by huge mountains and glaciers.
Here, they had encountered vicious westerly winds they called the Ice Knives.
The winds blew them east along La Perouse Land, the cold, stormy bottom of the
world. This ended
Jiddermeyer's plans of circumnavigating Lamarckia. Exhausted, Jiddermeyer
slipped free of the Ice
Knives, repaired his ship on Southern Alicia, and sailed due north,
close-hauled against the seasonal northerlies. Their last discovery, all by
chance, was Martha's Island, with its sterile surrounding sea and fertile,
varied lone ecos. Thereafter, they turned southwest and put into port at
Jakarta.
Jiddermeyer had taken an awful chance. No one knew whether edible scions
existed in any of the zones away from Tasman or Elizabeth's Land. Indeed, no
one was quite sure that the basic biology of these two continents would also
be replicated in other territories. Jiddermeyer's head researcher, Kia Ry Lenk
-- Jaime Carr Lenk's sister -- believed they would find only ecoi on
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Lamarckia. Others disagreed.
But she had been correct, and no other scheme of life had been discovered. And
wherever they went, they found no scions willing to eat _them_ -- but
sufficient edible forms to sustain the crew. The voyage had been horrific,
nonetheless -- improper nutritional balances and immune challenges had played
havoc with the health of the expedition.
In the end, out of two ships and two hundred and five men and women, one ship
and sixty-
five had returned to Jakarta. The sinking of the second ship had drowned many
of the crew, including Kia Ry Lenk and her husband and two sons.
Exploration lost its charms for Able Lenk. He never quite recovered from the
death of his sister. He departed from Jakarta, sailing north to the smaller
continent of Tasman, discovered three years earlier by merchant ships. There,
he founded what was now Lamarckia's second largest city, Athenai. He had not
since returned to Jakarta or Calcutta. This had left Elizabeth's Land to an
uneasy kind of independence.
Shortly after, Hoagland and her splinter group had sailed for Hsia and founded
Godwin, later Naderville.
Only one other expedition -- led by Dassin Ry Baker and Lucius Shulago -- had [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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