1
Mecca weighed anchor from Pittwater early in the morning on Tuesday, October 5, 2123. They did not need to wait for a breeze, or fire up the diesel, because they sailed by the power of gravity. Prior to leaving, Lloyd checked the wind generator and the solar panel next to it. They were both mounted out of the way on a custom, stainless bracket at the stern of the boat. Because he intended to not run the diesel very much, if at all, these were indispensable for charging Mecca’s two, solid-state, marine batteries. The batteries were used mainly for the instrumentation as well as the sound system. They kept Alex’s 128GB iPod, with his collection of 10,000 songs, charged up. Mecca’s radios were now redundant as there was no one to talk to. Also, the GPS was dead, however the depth sounder was still functional as was the tiller pilot. Very useful appliances were the small refrigerator and separate freezer. Eva filled them with oysters before they left Pittwater.
Once at sea she began fishing from the stern. The fish she caught were much larger than those she caught in the bays. Once caught, the fish were cleaned, filleted and stored in the freezer. Seafood became the main source of their protein.
2
It was just after sunrise on Wednesday, October 6, 2123. It was dead calm. To starboard there was no horizon. There was just blue space with twin suns, a real one and its perfect reflection beneath it. To port, some two miles away, a thin line of land marked a horizon that stretched and disappeared beyond the curvature of the Earth to the north and south. The air was cool, but not cold.
Mecca glided across the mirror surface at a respectable eight knots. Her sails were furled and her motor was turned off. Her folding propeller provided next to zero drag.
She made no sound except for the swishing of the bow wave as her streamlined hull cut through the water. She was being propelled solely by the power of gravity through the gravity sail attached to her stern. She was the first sea vessel on Earth, in the whole history of the planet, to be propelled by the vectored force of gravity.
They sailed all day, past the entrance to Port Stephens, some seventy nautical miles from their departure point, on through the sunset, ever northward.
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They spent the night in a deep sleep in their bunks as Mecca sailed through the darkness like a ghost ship guided solely by her automatic tiller pilot, which was set to a compass-heading paralleling the coastline about two miles out to sea. They slept without concern as they knew that in the post-apocalyptic year, 2123, there was zero chance of them being run down by a container ship, or any other type of vessel for that matter. They even figured that it was highly unlikely that any container, that might have been floating menacingly just beneath the surface, would have sunken to the bottom decades before.
At the first sign of morning light, they gradually, one by one, emerged on deck. Lloyd made the coffees. They sat in what seemed like a trance as their brains attempted to acclimatise to the surrealism of the moment.
‘It’s as if we are sailing on a ghost ship,’ said Sophia in a haunting voice.
‘It moves and steers itself with seemingly no power,’ added Alex.
This brief exchange was followed by a protracted silence as they all focussed on the ambient sounds of their surroundings.
Eventually, after taking a sip of his coffee, Alex enquired, ‘How is the Grange holding up, Lloyd?’ It wasn’t so much that he was concerned about the state of the wine stores, it was more to break the fifteen-minute lull in the conversation.
Lloyd snapped out of his daydream and answered, ‘Er, regretfully, a tad low. We have been indulging ourselves somewhat.’
‘We must save enough to celebrate our arrival in Noosa,’ suggested Eva.
‘My liver agrees with you,’ mumbled Sophia sitting leaning against Mecca’s mast.
Eva changed the subject. ‘You know,’ she said in a perplexed voice, ‘I’ve been trying to remember, but for the life of me, try as hard as I may, I can’t remember the day I’m supposed to die anymore.’
‘How positively discombobulating, my love,’ said Lloyd. ‘When do you think you forgot it?’
‘Hang on!’ exclaimed Alex. ‘I can’t remember mine either.’
‘I’m trying to think,’ said Eva. ‘I remember the conversation I had with Ambriel, I told her that we knew our death dates, and I remember her surprise. And I remember how you, Sophia, told us how you had already forgotten yours, and now I can’t remember mine.’
‘I have news for all of you,’ said Lloyd, ‘I seem to have forgotten mine as well.’
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‘We have all forgotten something we best not know,’ said Sophia. ‘Perhaps someone helped us to forget, someone telepathic perhaps.’
‘Oooooo,’ said Alex.
‘Oooooo indeed,’ Lloyd agreed.
‘It’s for the best,’ said Sophia. ‘The future is something we do not need to know.’
‘I guess that I agree with Sophia,’ said Eva. ‘It couldn’t possibly be natural to know in advance the moment of one’s death.’
‘I think that I’m even forgetting that I ever knew,’ said Alex.
‘Knew what?’ Lloyd asked in a vague tone. He turned to Eva and asked, ‘Er, what was it that we were forgetting, scrumptious?’
‘Oh, I just had it,’ she responded somewhat puzzled. ‘What was it again, Sophia?’
‘What was what?’
3
Ambriel’s love for non-telepathic Earth humans was exceptionally strong. It was stronger than that of most other Rama. Her love was also different, difficult for an Earthling to understand. The best way it could be described was that it was a kind of hybrid love, like a cross between the kind of love one feels for a pet animal, like a cat or a dog, and the kind of love one feels for one of their own species. Both types of love are real.
Ambriel’s love was strong and true. In fact, it was so strong that she married an Earth man and had a son by him. Also, it was the hybrid nature of this love that caused her to selectively erase some memories from their minds. For example, the way she erased the dark memory of the underlying cause of Doyle’s bizarre death from Adam and Zeke’s minds. Similarly, she erased the memory of their death dates from the Mecca four’s minds. She did it because she loved Earth humans and because she knew how damaging such memories could be.
4
Breakfast was oats with powdered milk and dried fruit. During breakfast, they all swallowed a multivitamin capsule, a magnesium pill, 1000mg of vitamin C and a calcium pill.
It would be some time before they needed to worry about their cooking gas supplies. They hadn’t actually used much gas as they had been doing most of their cooking over open campfires.
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‘I was wondering, Lloyd,’ said Alex in a comical voice, ‘where the hell we were.’ He looked westward. ‘That coastline looks absolutely featureless. How are we supposed to know where we are?’
‘Well, Alex,’ said Lloyd after washing down a mouthful of oats with a sip of coffee,
‘you see, initially we’ll guess our general whereabouts by the old tried and true method of dead reckoning. If we have a chart, and we do, and we know our departure point and speed and direction of travel, we can calculate that at roughly the speed of eight knots, give or take allowing for currents and such, we may estimate that we are traversing more or less seventy nautical miles of the planet every twelve hours. That being so and it being just over twenty-four hours since our departure, we may estimate that we are in the region of 140 nautical miles north of our departure point. By measuring it out on the chart we are able to calculate our general vicinity.’
After breakfast, Lloyd spread the chart out on the dining table in the cabin. Alex sat opposite him. Lloyd retrieved an old-looking, long, narrow wooden box containing his navigation tools, which comprised of a set of dividers, a technical compass, a parallel ruler, a protractor, a number of well-sharpened pencils, a pencil sharpener and an eraser.
‘These belonged to my father,’ he said nostalgically. ‘It’s been a while since they’ve seen the light of day, ever since GPS came along.’ After taking some measurements on the chart, he estimated, ‘We are a couple of miles out to sea off Laureton is my best guess.’
‘Laureton? I’ve never heard of it,’ said Alex.
‘Well, then you haven’t spent much time up the coast, have you?’
‘No.’
‘Laureton is, or should I say, was a very pretty spot, although I doubt that there is anything left of the place now.’
‘The tidal wave you think?’ said Alex.
‘Yes, it swept the whole east coast of Australia down to bedrock.’ Lloyd tracked up the coast on the chart with his finger. ‘Another fifteen nautical miles north of here and we should be directly off where Port Macquarie used to be.’ He tracked further north on the chart. ‘About another sixty-five nautical miles north of Port is Coffs Harbour. That is where I would like to anchor tonight.’
‘I’ve been to Coffs Harbour,’ said Alex.
‘Yes, well, as you can see on the chart here,’ Lloyd pointed at a separate detailed drawing of the actual boat harbour of Coffs Harbour, ‘there are natural shelters there, like
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Corambirra Point and Muttonbird Island to the north of it. I am sure that those are still the same however I doubt if the breakwaters and the man-made harbour within them survived the tidal wave. But even without the breakwaters there should be enough shelter there for us and we should more than likely be okay to go ashore on the beach and camp there overnight.’
5
After Lloyd and Alex finished plotting a course for the day they returned to the cockpit.
‘Have you determined our location?’ Eva asked.
‘Off Laureton, I’m pretty sure,’ Lloyd replied.
‘I loved Laureton when we were there in the Aston.’
‘Yes, so did I,’ Lloyd agreed. He announced, ‘I shall reset our course to bring us closer to the coast. I thought that we might aim at spending the night in Coffs Harbour. We ought to attempt to get there in time to make camp on the beach. I will try and extract a couple more knots out of the gravity sail to give us some leeway in time.’
Lloyd proceeded to narrow the angle between the ‘wings’ of the gravity sail, bringing them a few degrees closer to parallel, while Alex read out the boat’s speed from the impeller log.
As Mecca sailed northwards, at ten knots now, she drifted closer to land. They began to make out the coastal features much better and once Lloyd recognised one of them, he knew them all from that point on by referring to the chart.
By mid-morning, a moderate northwester sprang up. They were half a mile offshore, just north of Port Macquarie, pushing water off the bow, gravity thrusting at four knots above Mecca’s natural hull speed. Lloyd speculated,
‘We could be in for a southerly blow tomorrow. It may even arrive during the night.
We must seek good shelter for Mecca on the north side of Corumbirra Point. The swell will pick up from the south so we must make sure that we anchor in deep enough water.
We must also begin to take note of, and log, the tides.’
‘It sounds ominous,’ said Alex.
‘Well, Alex, we may be a century in the future, but, in reality, we may as well be a century in the past. We have no weather-forecasting technology, via satellite, so we are literally sailing blind.’ Lloyd’s voice expressed some atypical frustration. ‘We do not know when exactly to expect the southerly front, nor do we know how strong it will be.’
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‘We are very confident in your seamanship, sweetheart,’ said Eva.
‘Oh yes, certainly,’ added Sophia.
‘I shall have faith in you, Lloyd, even when I’m clinging to a piece of floating debris.’
Everyone broke up with laughter. It was the way Alex said it that was so funny. After the laughter subsided, Lloyd continued,
‘Thank you all for your confidence, even Alex, but I am certain that a shipwreck is not on our cards. We have too many things in our favour, like this ruddy gravity sail for example.’
6
Mecca gravity sailed all day in what could best be described as perfect conditions.
As the afternoon wore on, the warm northwester turned more westerly, then southwesterly, indicating to Lloyd that the southerly change would arrive sooner than expected, more than likely during the night. He kept a close eye on the conditions, particularly the southern horizon through his binoculars, looking for any visible signs of the coming front.
They made good time and arrived at their destination before sunset. They dropped anchor well in the lee of Corumbirra Point in water deep enough that should a southerly swell rise and bend into their anchorage, the waves would not break but would roll harmlessly beneath the boat.
The western twilight silhouetted the land as the crisp southwester blew offshore pointing Mecca towards the beach some fifty yards away. The surface of the ocean was crystalline glassy as is typical in such conditions. After weighing up the situation, Lloyd decided,
‘I think we should stay onboard tonight. There is no knowing how savage this southerly blow might be, and I for one would prefer for us all to remain with the boat ready for any sort of emergency. If, for example, she decides to drag anchor, or something, we do not want to be scrambling about on the beach trying to get to her in a gale.’
‘Also,’ added Alex, ‘I’d hate to be battling trying to keep a tent on the ground in a fifty mile per hour buster.’
‘Ditto to that,’ Eva agreed.
‘I shudder at the thought of Alex chasing our tent up the beach with me still in it,’
said Sophia.
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Alex declared heroically, ‘I would chase that tent all the way to Queensland, dearest, if the situation demanded it.’
…….
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