CHAPTER 5
AS THE the boat sped over the water, leaving a churning wake behind it, Jack Odin remembered that first sea-voyage he had made on the seas of Opal. It was June-time then, and Maya had been with him. Perhaps they had thought that June would last forever. Perhaps they had thought that all of life would go by at five miles per hour. Remembering that slow, wonderful trip—almost like a voyage in a dream—he sighed as he held on to the skipping boat. They were now going well over sixty.
Gunnar seemed to sense his thoughts. “Wolden has ordered speed and more speed, my friend,” he called over the roar of the motor. “The governors are all gone from the old machines. The smiths are turning out newer and faster ones all the time. Sometimes I think even the hands of the clocks are going faster.”
Odin muttered a curse. What he had loved about this world was its leisure. What he had hated about his own world above was its constantly increasing speed. Like a squirrel caught in a cage, his world had gone faster and faster until reality had vanished into a mad blur of turning wheels and running feet. Oh, well, he thought, a man is like a pup. Contented enough until life takes him by the scruff of the neck and shakes him up and proves to him that things change and a pup’s world changes and he had better accustom himself to new standards or be shaken up again.
So they sped on through the low waves while the Tower loomed nearer and taller before them. Gunnar was guiding with one hand while he talked into a little square box of gleaming metal.
He turned his head, and the boat careened into a trough that set it to shaking. “I have contacted Wolden and Ato,” he called cheerfully. “They are meeting us at the dock. Not the old dock—it is still under water. The new one is farther up the street.”
As they neared Orthe-Gard, Gunnar slowed the boat. Looking down into the murky water, Jack Odin could detect, now and then, the faintly-traced shadow of a roof or tower. Once as he looked down at a finely-carved weather-vane, a huge fang-fish rolled between him and his view. A white belly gleamed through the water, and a serrated mouth opened wide. Its jaws bent out of proportion by the refraction of the water, it reminded Odin of the old story of the Monster of Chaos rushing with gaping mouth to swallow the works of men.
Then they were at the dock, which was scarcely a dock at all but a place where the waters ended halfway up the sloping streets of the city.