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We cleared a space for him on deck and laid him down. I fetched a sheet for him from my cabin and brought clean shirts for the rest of us. On the ladder and the bulkhead and the floor of the tiny corridor in front of the cabin door, butterflies lay in heavy drifts: I had to brush them off the door handle to get in. As I did so, others immediately took off from the bulkhead to swarm into the new, unclaimed territory. Jim lay in the middle of the table just as I'd left him. They'd settled on his white hair, and it seemed, as they decked him with their beautiful wings, that they were paying some kind of tribute to him—though he was the one human here who could offer them nothing. But at least he was indifferent to their intrusion and didn't beat them off.

I left Jim and returned to the deck, where I rid myself of the new layer of butterflies that had settled on my face in the cabin. Then we—the captain and his crew—sat down together. We were all wearing shirts I'd taken from Lewis's drawers and my own sea chest.

We stayed on deck for the rest of the day and slept there the following night. The butterflies no longer stirred. There was no more water, and we'd eaten the last taro roots. The world was exhausted not just of wind, but of everything. There were only us and a million butterflies left. Everything else had died. The sea had stopped breathing, and we were resting our heads on its lifeless breast. Soon our hearts would stop too.

I'm not superstitious, and I don't know whether the Kanaks are. Most likely they are, though what they'd call faith, we'd call superstition. Yet I felt that the dead calm that smothered us was some kind of punishment—not for something Jack Lewis had done (because if there's a judge in the Hereafter, which I doubt, then Jack Lewis was now facing him) but for a crime that was mine.

Chance had made me captain of the Flying Scud. I was unprepared and I was young, but that was no excuse. A captain is a captain, and I'd failed as one.

I'd sat in the cabin with Jim and a bag full of pearls, thinking about myself rather than my crew. If the Kanaks even crossed my mind, it was only because I feared that they'd stand in the way of my plans.

But what should I have done? I couldn't command the wind and make it obey my orders. So how could I be responsible for the calm that had descended on us like a curse?

It must have been fever, and thirst, and the oppressive heat, and the dying butterflies, and the sight of the leaden lid of the sea, and the gas-flame blue of the sky by day, and the growing remoteness of the stars at night, that had affected my brain and driven my thoughts down this mad path.

Does anyone fully understand nature? Why does the wind suddenly stop blowing?

Could it be that nature doesn't care whether we live or die? It seems so much less frightening to blame yourself.

I stood up, went down to the cabin, grabbed the bag of pearls, returned to the deck, and hurled it as far out to sea as my diminished strength allowed.

I believed this was the only way I could atone for my guilt and finally free myself from Jack Lewis, because I knew he was still on board. I'd been traveling with shadows and living in a world of ghosts. Superstitious as it was, I feel to this day that my action made complete sense. When my hands were finally empty of something I'd never had any claim to, and my mind was liberated from frivolous dreams, I'd earned the right to call myself a captain. Now I remembered a captain's honor and his only duty: to bring his crew back alive.

I'd thrown all my dreams for the future overboard, and I had only one wish left: that a storm would come and tear us loose from the becalmment we sat trapped in as if in hardened lava.

I stayed at the rail, scouting across the sea, but its surface stayed unchanged. I turned to look at the Kanaks, slumped on the deck with their wounded friend prone between them. They gazed at their hands and dozed in the oppressive heat.

I don't know if they saw me throw the pearls