III
234 years earlier
The wind in the sails of the ship blew in unsteady gusts. He could hear it beating against the black canvas and sensed that the wind was annoyed with the arbitrary man-made obstruction. The deck of the Pearl creaked below his feet as he walked toward the prow. The sea was still and flat. Overhead, the sun threatened to rise even nearer the meridian. It was not yet noon, but for weeks they had been slipping lower and lower on the face of the earth until at last they found themselves in the equatorial horse doldrums.
"Gibbs!" he shouted, swaying from side to side with the ship. "Gibbs!"
His arms were brown and creased to the elbow, and the dark hairs on his wrists had been bleached by the sunlight. His eyelashes and eyebrows were thick and black; and his long hair, knotted by the wind and conditioned by the salt of seawater, fell in dark, swirling braids past his shoulder blades. His eyelids were heavy and dark, and not even the sharp, shrewd quality of his aquiline nose and mouth could give the impression of alertness. His eyes were too clouded and unfocused, and beneath their heavy lids, they looked perpetually lulled to sleep or stupor.
"Gibbs!" he shouted again. He balanced his body against the starboard side of the vessel, and it occurred to him that he was drunk. "Where are we? Gibbs! Where are we?"
The deck was empty apart from a few idle, drunken members of the crew. Jack wondered what had happened to them, though he was clever enough to realize that they must have been feeling something similar to his sailor's vertigo. The sun was too hot and there was no more fresh water. The water in the barrels below deck was tepid and foul. Soon, they would have to find land.
"Gibbs! Why is the sun so high?" he asked. "How did we get here?"
Idly, he lifted his closed fist to the horizon and counted from sea level to the sun in the sky. At this point in the year, halfway through the season, he imagined that the celestial equator and the ecliptic must intersect with one another. The sun was nearly ninety degrees above the horizon. There was no mistaking it: they were in the equatorial doldrums, rocking to and fro over still, listless waters. The wind belched into the sails in erratic gusts that were useless and teasing. They were at the mercy of the tides.
Gibbs poked his head from below deck. His round face tipped side to side in time with the rocking of the ship, like a pink, furry ball rolling back and forth. Jack walked toward him, squinting his eyes to distinguish the expression on his sunburned face. Gibbs looked frightened and noticeably hesitated before speaking.
"We might try to land in Bermuda," he said. "But it'll take at least a week with wind like this."
"Maybe we'll catch a ship," said Jack. "We're not really pirates without ships to ransack, are we? But then I s'pose we've at least got rum to drink. We can count ourselves one half pirate—the other half, our latent piracy."
His indifference to the news was deliberate, but thirst and starvation were not truly disconcerting, nor was death. Mutiny, more than either of those things, was most upsetting. He had died before, and he had thirsted and hungered. But worse still, he had once been mutinied, and it was mutiny that he feared more than anything else. He gripped the side of the ship, willing himself a part of her. They would reach Bermuda in a matter of days, and from there matters would improve.
The sea spread out indefinitely in each of the cardinal directions. It was flat and uncooperative, and he resented the weak wind, the hesitant way it teased the sails of the Pearl. He drew his left hand close to his face to protect his eyes from the formidable glare of the equatorial sunlight. The weight of his head burdened the rest of his body and he dropped down to the deck to rest in the short, precious shade of the mast. In less than a moment, he was asleep.
Not long afterward
When Jack awoke, the crew was gone. He imagined they must have fled below deck to shelter themselves from the sudden, decisive change in the weather. On a windless day, the sky achingly barren from east to west, a storm ought to have been easy to predict. In fact, it ought to have been unthinkable. The weather would have lingered days and days without arriving. Clouds, like sails, relied on wind to give them momentum. Yet now there was nothing he could see apart from the clouds. They were dark overhead, and in the west they were ripe and red with the setting sun behind them.
Fat raindrops pooled at the edges of the ship where the deck met the hull. Jack clasped his hands and caught the water as it poured down in heavy sheets. He opened his mouth skyward and took great, big gulps of rain.
The strange wind, which ought not to have existed at all, rocked the ship to and fro with upsetting violence. Everything seemed strangely and frighteningly out of place—most remarkably, he noted, the great, swirling vortex forming in the rain clouds overhead. It took the distinct shape of a funnel, and the hiss of the rainwater attracted by its alien gravity grew louder and louder as it approached the Pearl.
He dropped to his knees, squinting at the dark and powerful cloud. Its phalanx shape and its unnatural flexibility astounded him. He felt hypnotized by its ponderous dimensions, the way it seemed to unfold the closer it came to him, exposing little by little the true nature of its awesome enormity. Flashes of lightning, which had at first appeared only as innocuous electrical discharges, on closer inspection contained images of a strange, unforeseen reality—a future, and perhaps the future. He studied them with the drunken, idle indifference of a pirate's detached fascination. When at last the tip of the funnel reached him, he had already slipped into a kind of nonsensical delirium, supposing himself in a dark tunnel guided by a distant white light.
When suddenly he snapped back to attention, he noticed the face of a stern man dressed in a strange, futuristic conception of a deerstalker and morning coat. Without quite considering why, he felt a great deal of pity for this alarmingly mundane individual, stifled by an evident respect for taste and propriety. He smoked tobacco from a pipe in an obvious appeal to the refined dignity of the aristocracy, and his hair was neatly combed in such a way that was so precise it was nearly sinister.
"Welcome to the future, Mr. Sparrow," he said, though Jack neither saw nor felt aware of being anyplace at all, and least of all the future. He noticed that the gentleman had extended one dreadfully white, manicured hand toward him, and he took it reluctantly, as if uncertain whether or not it was the shrewdest and most advantageous thing to do. The time-traveler smiled and soon afterward introduced himself: "This is The Landlord's Daugther, Jack. And my name is Pythagoras."