Viator by Lucius Shepard

Author:Lucius Shepard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-12-04T05:00:00+00:00

Seven

“…Cape Lorraine and environs…”

Wilander lost track of the fog’s duration (days, certainly) because he wanted to lose track, to muffle his fears, to blunt his every understanding, and, toward this end, channeled his energies into the creation of maps: terrain maps of the hills that built inland from the coastal city; a street map of the southernmost quarter of the city; maps of the island grouping, rudimentary except for that of the largest island, shaped like a tail-less stingray and supporting a town on its seaward end; maps of the coastline to the north, recently revealed by images emerged from the walls of the bridge; maps roughed out in pencil and, once he was sure of their accuracy, painstakingly redrawn in ink and shaded with pastels, as he once had done for extra credit in his fourth grade geography class, attempting to curry favor with Mrs. Louise Gatch—a gaunt, fiftyish, deathshead Marine colonel trapped in a teacher’s body, she still patrolled the halls of Wilander’s memory, ready to pounce at the slightest sign of smudged lines or bad penmanship. He strayed from his station in the officers’ mess to cook and piss and sleep, but for no other reason, pausing often to phone Arlene, who was probably screening her calls and refusing to pick up; however, he could not bring himself to phone Lunde—he dreaded what the old man might say and decided to wait until he was well away from Viator, when the information, whatever it might be, would have no power to menace him. Soon the desire to talk with Lunde left him and the maps came to occupy him to the exclusion of all else and he began to add details that were not shown on the walls, making these additions surehandedly, swiftly, as if he were remembering things about the city and the shore, and, as this apparent familiarity deepened, he took to naming portions of his imagined landscape. The names bubbled forth from the depths of his mind, solitary words and random syllables, sounds that aligned with other sounds: Sirkasso Beach, a sandy crescent along the inner edge of the lagoon; Cotaliri Bay, a notch in the coastline to the south; Mutikelio, one of the islands, and the islands themselves, the group he named the Six Tears, a reference to the legend that, millennia ago, tears had spilled from the eyes of a giant as he died and these were the seeds about which the islands had grown, whereas his bones had petrified and now constituted a section of the coast, the waters of the lagoon being enclosed by an orbital socket, and it was claimed that threads of protein from the giant’s humor still drifted at the bottom of the lagoon and swimmers there were thus prone to see things that he had seen in life, relic visions of the barbarous world in which he had thrived, and occasionally some feature of those visions would become real, a predatory fish or a moasaur or

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.