The Eighth Shelf
Vitamin C Deficiency | Opus 5
On the thirty-first day out from the heart, a tooth hit the deck, and every man on it looked down.
It was Jennings’s. He stood at the port rail staring at the molar the way a man stares at a coin dropped through a grating. His gums were the color of rotten plums.
“Get below,” Marcus said.
He had been keeping the rest in the margins of his charts for a week. Purple coming up along Doyle’s shins, ink flicked off a pen. Old rope burns from the Iliac Fork opening again, clean and shining, as though the healing had been rented and then repossessed. The walls of the Femoral Straits weeping where they had been pearled and tight.
“Vasquez.”
She was already at his shoulder. She had been at his shoulder for a week.
“Go ask the Lamp.”
The Lamp lived belowdecks in the chart room, a blue flame that had come with the ship and had never asked for oil. Vasquez was gone nineteen minutes.
“Scurvy,” she said. “Ascorbate deficiency. The collagen stops setting, so the body cannot hold itself together: gums, vessels, joints, old scars. Thirty-one days is early, which means the men came aboard low.”
“Scurvy is a word for the log,” Marcus said. “I want the cause.”
“There is no fruit in the hold.”
“That is an inventory finding. That is containment.” He turned. “I want the root cause, Vasquez. All the way down.”
She had one ready and kept it. On the third day out, in the aorta, Marcus had ordered six crates of oranges put over the side, and laughed while they went. A ship ran on meat and biscuit and will. She looked at his flushed, braced face and decided today was not the day.
“You provisioned the ship,” she said. That much was allowed.
“I provisioned for speed. I do not care for fruit. That is a preference, and preferences are not causes. Go back down and find me something that explains why a body that walks and thinks and bleeds cannot make a thing a cabbage makes standing in the dirt.”
By the Tibial Shoals the crew worked four hours in six. Vasquez came up at the change of watch and read the Lamp’s own words off her slate, having learned that Marcus argued with summaries and let quotations stand.
“The enzyme your host is missing is L-gulonolactone oxidase, which performs the last step of turning sugar into ascorbate. The gene is called GULO. It is still aboard, on the eighth shelf, the eighth of his chromosomes. Most of it has fallen out, and what remains cannot be read. The dating is contested. Forty million years is the figure you will hear. Nothing selected against the break, because the animals it happened to were living inside their own fruit supply. Your host traded a factory for a grocer, and the arrangement holds until the grocer is robbed. That is a metaphor and I offer it as one. The gene sits in every cell around you, a cathedral with the roof fallen in.”
“Then mend the roof,” Marcus said.
Vasquez turned the slate over. She had written that answer on the back, which told him she had expected the question.
“There is a craft for rewriting the letters inside a living thing. It is real, and it is young. I would want more evidence before opening a man’s eighth shelf in the dark, forty days out, with a knife.”
She set the slate down. “You asked for the root, so I built the chain. The men are sick because they have no ascorbate. We loaded none. They cannot make their own because the gene is broken. The gene is broken because for forty million years the fruit was simply there, and nothing in that line ever had to remember to bring it. Every link is the same failure, Captain. Somebody assumed the fruit would be there.”
Marcus was quiet for three of the body’s ragged beats.
“Forty million years is not my watch,” he said. “Hold your course. The toe is nine days off.”
It took eleven. By the sixth his own knuckles were mottled.
They came through the Plantar Arch on a pulse so thin the sails hung, and warped the Erythrocyte up the fifth toe by hand, four men to a line where two had served on the way out. The nail closed over the sky, and the light through it was the brown gold of a lantern seen through a thumb.
The treasure lay wedged in the nail matrix where the rumor out of the marrow had put it, the rumor that had cost him his savings and his name. It was a cell. Pale, hard-walled, hairy with fiber, round as the ship’s own boat. One cell in a body of thirty trillion.
Vasquez laid her slate against it and read its letters twice.
“It is whole,” she said. “The eighth shelf, every piece in order. This one put itself back together. It has been making ascorbate the entire voyage.”
Marcus called for no analysis. He put a boarding axe through the membrane.
What came out was clear and sweet, and it went on being sweet. It tasted of limes and copper and forty million years of unpaid account. The crew went into it with both hands, men shoving each other aside who had not made a fist in a fortnight. Jennings drank until it ran down his chin and grinned at nobody, gap in front.
Vasquez drank last, because there was a form to finish and she had carried it four hundred miles.
“Root cause,” she said.
Marcus wiped his mouth on the back of his wrist. He had the log brought up into the light and dictated it himself.
“Day three. Six crates of oranges, sound and paid for, put over the side into the aorta by order of the captain.” He watched her hand stop. “The captain does not care for fruit.”