In Forest Afloat Upon the Sea

One

The ship arrived when Telly McMahon was two watch-years shy of his first side-year, late in adolescence when all things commonplace had created for him an oppressive prison.

Fortune, or fate, put him in the chart house when it first was sighted—the one place on Schenker Float where Telly felt free from the bonds of mundane life.

Duncan Blake was holding his class in celestial navigation. They had just completed taking the afternoon sighting of the Furnace, still a good thirty degrees shy of the zenith.

“Everyone still has their whiteboards and charcoal?” Blake asked, looking up from his charts and almanacs briefly with narrowed eyes. “Now I want you all to calculate the afternoon position. Work separately, no comparing notes until you’re done. And God’s Plan, McMahon, don’t you dare blurt out the answer before the rest of them are finished.”

Telly felt his face burn, but then saw the smile under Blake’s grey beard. They both knew he was the navigator’s best student.

Telly worked out the solution quickly. He was a master with the circular slide rule, and calculating positions was child’s play. The hard part was getting a good sextant reading when the horizon was lost in the haze and the Furnace was a tiny dot masked by the instrument’s thick screens.

While the others pored over their boards, scribbling with the charcoal, his gaze drifted towards the business end of the chart house.

The station’s three chronographs hung on the wall above the plotting table, mounted in a wooden frame with the two smaller clocks to mark the twenty-four-hour watch-day that tied them to old Earth flanking the oversized monster in the middle, which measured out the long sidereal day of Okeanos every seventy-six hours and forty-eight minutes.

Telly’s eyes lingered over the intricate markings on the big clock, but it was the plotting table that captured his imagination. It was there that the North Einstein Gyre lay before him in all its vast emptiness.

The currents were indicated with pale blue ink and labeled with a flowing hand, from the West Wind Drift in the north to the equatorials in the south, and from the Chandler Current in the west to the Webster in the east. And the long track of Schenker Float was marked in red with dates cribbed in cramped script alongside triangular plots.

For nearly three hundred watch-days they’d drifted slowly to the west along the North Equatorial Current—nearly a hundred side-days. Now they were heading into The Queue, the broad swirl of waters where the Equatorial Current merged with the Chandler Drift. In a few weeks, they’d be caught up in the Chandler and swept away to the north side of the gyre once again.

The anchorages were marked on the chart with green ink and outlined with blue. Bishop, Ellsworth, the Colts, Atwater, and the Vintons—the few fixed points in the endless swirl of air and water. He could almost imagine them in miniature in the virtual ocean beneath the glass—their long anchor chains taut against the pull of the sea floor and the press of current and wind.

Lacking from the chart, however, was the most flagrant feature of the Einstein Ocean and the Hawking and the Newton—of all Okeanos. There were no markings for the floats themselves, the thousands of masses of stone and salt and ferns and trees that gave the gyre its body and soul. There could be no markings for the floats, of course, any more than there were any for the winds.

Telly shot a guilty glance at one corner of the chart, however, where a much younger navigation student left alone in the chart house had tried to make such marks. A dozen pale green dots, as ghostly as the positions they marked, one for every square degree, had been inked at random intervals in a five-degree box in some part of the ocean that Telly hoped the Schenker would never come near. They’d made it easier for him to imagine what he could not see.

He looked up at the sound of an almanac slapping shut, its oilskin cover flopping loosely against the table. Blake was finished with his own calculations. Schenker’s chief navigator was beginning to show his age. He was more than fifty watch-years on his journey and a veteran of the Pirate Wars as well, but his eyes still burned with a youthful fire. At the moment, they burned for Telly, as Blake saw that he had long since worked out the equations that told them their position.

He waited a while before prodding the rest of the class into finishing their work. Telly looked them over himself. Ivan Hayes was a big boy with clumsy fingers. He had smeared charcoal all over his fleshy face, but he looked satisfied with himself. Ep-pie Borges also looked pleased with her results and tapped a foot impatiently while the others caught up.

“I swear, Telly McMahon, if God has a plan, it’s to make a navigator out of you,” Blake said softly.

“Telly doesn’t believe in God’s Plan,” said Eppie, a devilish look in her blue eyes. Telly shot her a stern glance, but it had little effect. She could get away with such heresy because she was not a Determinist herself, but came from the Skeptic village on the starboard quarter of Schenker. “He won’t admit it out loud, but I know,” she added.

Telly wanted to do something to make her take back her words, true as they were. But he knew better than to try something like that while in class.

“All right students, settle down,” Blake said, waving his whiteboard. “Everyone done? Very well, did you all come up with at least 14 degrees north latitude and 16 degrees west longitude? Good. That means you’re within 70 nautical miles of being right. Let’s see how close you were.” He went through the nine student navigators one by one, saving Telly for last. “Well McMahon, you came within a half mile of my position. Pretty good for the day.”

“I had trouble getting a clear shot at the horizon,” Telly said.

“No you didn’t,” Blake told him. “I did. Given a choice, I’d take your numbers. But don’t let that give you a swelled head.”

Telly held back a smile, afraid that it would only give the others a reason to taunt him. And he was getting too old to be able to deal with that the way he once did—by wrestling the taunters to the ground and forcing them to take back their words.

“Now the rest of you, where did you go wrong? How many had problems with calculations? How many with observations?”

They raised their hands dutifully at each question, but before Blake could continue, the enunciator tube at the front of the room whistled softly. He hurried over to the tube with surprisingly sudden grace.

“Halloo above,” he said.

“Halloo below,” came the miniature voice of the student on watch up on the bridge. “Ship ahoy, due south, two-masted schooner.”

Everyone in the chart house drew in a breath at once. They all knew what a ship meant these days. While in Blake’s youth, it had meant the threat of battle and pain, now it meant the likelihood of celebration.

Their eyes lit up, and they chattered with excitement until Blake cast a surly eye at them. Even Telly could feel his heart beat faster.

But he had a private reason to celebrate the arrival of a ship. This close to the Queue, there was a good chance that it came from Bishop Anchorage. There was a navigation school at Bishop—and the promise of liberation from his lifelong captivity aboard Schenker Float.

Blake was clearly concerned with more immediate problems.

“All right, let’s get organized. Miriam, light off down the path and find Pastor Kline, let him know there’s a ship coming. Telly and Eppie, you’re coming up to the bridge with me. Ivan, you stay down here and man the plotting board—you’re quick enough to help up topside, but you’re just too big to take up in the hoist with the rest of us.”

Ivan frowned, but it wasn’t serious. Telly knew he was nervous atop the bridge and was just as happy to remain below.

The navigator collected his equipment—a whiteboard, his own sextant, a battle-scarred long glass from the Pirate Wars—and whistled up to the bridge. “Three on the hoist,” he reported.

They entered the cramped box while the watchstander shifted ballast weights up above. A moment later, Blake and Telly began cranking the windlass.

It was a difficult and sweaty job to get them up the tall tower to the bridge—even with the counterweights taking off most of the load. When they reached the top, Blake opened the hoist door, and they all spilled out onto the bridge wing. Telly felt quick relief as the wind hit him square on—here on the North Equatorial the trades blew unceasingly, pushing the waters and the floats along day after long day.

He looked over the rail briefly at the forest floor seventy meters below. It made him feel more than a little dizzy, so he shifted his attention to the tops of the steelwoods and mast trees that danced in the breeze only a few meters beneath the bridge.

Schenker Float was almost ten kilometers across, but from up here, it looked so small—and to Telly almost as confining as it felt. Down there were all the boringly familiar landmarks of his life. The hog farm spread off to the east—a barren patch in the otherwise rich greenery of the float where the poisons from the livestock dissolved the native vegetation. Villages were barely visible through the woods on the float’s port side. The Great Lagoon to the south and the smaller lagoons around the compass seemed to glow with a turquoise light.

The paths connecting them were more than tracks through the trees, they were lines burned into Telly’s mind and impressed onto his memory. Their unchanging constancy, like everything else about Schenker, formed the chains that bound him to its ground.

But from up here, Telly could also see all that made him feel free and alive—the sea and the sky. The endless sea that wrapped Okeanos with waves without end was dotted with countless bergs—some large enough to sprout spar trees and yardwoods. To Telly, they looked like dozens of miniature floats—the ocean made small enough to see all Schenker’s distant neighbors at once.

And the sky was filled with countless fluffy white clouds, chains and columns, trailing off upwind and downwind, making barricades around the horizon. Gray clouds were piling up on the southwest side of the float, trailing gauzy rain across Fishing Village. To the southeast the bright white dot of the Furnace burned painfully bright in a deep azure sky.

Also to the south, near the horizon, Telly saw the sparkling white triangles of a ship’s sails emerging from the distant haze.

“Eppie, you uncover the heliograph,” Blake said. “They’ll be in range in a little while. Telly, I want you to help me track them. Maybe we can even get some good triangulation bearings to figure their distance.”

Telly’s moment of inspiration at the grand view of the world was swept away by the needs of the moment. He went to one end of the bridge and unlimbered the peloris while Blake did the same at the other end.

It took them several minutes to get bearings that were accurate enough to calculate the distance—more than eleven miles.

“If you were sailing master, how would you approach us?” Blake asked as they put their heads together over the whiteboard.

Telly looked upwind, then off to the south. “I guess I’d have to come up on the west side of the float and tack in from the northwest to get to the docks.”

“Good guess,” Blake said. “How long do you think it’ll take them?”

Telly shrugged. “I don’t know. I’d need a plotting board to work it out.”

“You shouldn’t. Not if you know your sailing. I give them four hours if they’ve got a clean hull.”

“I’m ready with the heliograph,” Eppie called.

Blake hustled down the platform to where she stood next to the vaned shutters. Telly put his eye to the peloris to get a better view of the sailing vessel. It had two masts and three sails—two big ones on the masts and a jib rigged out front. It had to be more than thirty meters long.

“Go ahead,” Blake said. Eppie slapped the shutters open and shut rapidly three times, waited, then repeated the signal. A minute later she did it again. A third try produced a response—three flashes from the main deck of the schooner.

“All right!” Eppie shouted.

“Send this message,” Blake ordered. “Welcome to Schenker Float. Mooring and docks bearing 330 true from here.”

The shutters clapped quickly. Eppie was good at working the heliograph, even better than he was.

A couple minutes after she’d finished the message the reply began to flash across the sea. Telly started reading the code, but had trouble keeping track as Blake spoke it aloud. “Ahoy… Schenker… Hospital… Ship… Relief… Nine… Days… Out… Of… Bishop… Anchorage… break.”

Telly’s heart leapt skywards at the news. Bishop Anchorage. Sacred words that were inscribed in the navigation manuals and almanacs in the chart house below. Words he had memorized as a child, when he first had dreamed of fixing the position of the float against the sea and stars. “Published by the Navigation School, Bishop Anchorage.”

From that moment on, as far as Telly was concerned, no one afloat on Okeanos was as important as a navigator. They were the link between the inhabitants of thousands of isolated floats. Fishermen could not venture beyond sight of home, merchants could not trade, pastors could not communicate, and physicians could not visit the sick and injured without a navigator to find the way.

Long before his first lessons with Duncan Blake, Telly had imagined himself a student in the school at Bishop Anchorage, learning the secrets of the craft. Before he knew what the calling involved—long weeks at sea far from anchorages or floats, through fair weather and foul, in crowded quarters aboard leaking ships. But as he grew and learned, the burdens never seemed to outweigh the romance.

Graduates from a navigation school could write their own tickets. You could work your way around the world, sailing from anchorage to anchorage on a merchant ship or man-of-war. Blake had studied in the school at Crawford Anchorage in the South Einstein, but Telly had always set his sights on Bishop—for no other reason than that it was known to him.

Now it was less than nine days’ sail away.

And it might as well have been on the other side of the world, he realized suddenly. His heart dropped like a wounded bird as he thought of what he would have to do next.

There was no chance he could leave for Bishop Anchorage without the permission of his parents. He wasn’t of age yet—and when he would be, in two more watch-years, Bishop would be far behind them.

But the thought of asking his mother if he could leave Schenker Float for the wider world made him shiver. His hopes fluttered, dying on the wind while barely out of the nest.

They tracked the ship for two hours, watching it make its way along the course Blake had described. It worked its way up the west side of the float until it was a few points north of due west, then it came about and headed straight back towards them on its southeasterly tack.

“Meet me at the docks when she comes in,” Blake said when Telly made his leave. “I’ll get you aboard her.”

Telly’s chest filled with excitement. He hadn’t expected that. When the last ship that had come by—a merchantman from the Colts several weeks back—he’d been lucky to get away from duties and classes long enough to look at it from the pier. But that was before he’d moved up to Blake’s class section.

“Yes, sir,” he said.

Blake gave him a salute, and Telly, filled with pride, returned it. Then he climbed into the hoist and released the brakelatch. Just before it began to drop, Eppie swung around the frame at its top and climbed in. Telly was about to scold her for throwing off the balance, but she smiled and said: “I just whistled down to Ivan, and he’s hooking the stone on now.”

“I hope it’s not his,” Telly said. “I don’t want to have to pull us all the way down.”

“Just keep your foot on the brake and your hand on the windlass,” she said. “Or would you rather I handled it myself?”

“Damned Skeptic women,” Blake said with a wink. “They never give a man a chance.”

Telly agreed, but didn’t dare say anything. At least not until they were back on the ground. He just let the hoist drop below the deck of the bridge in sullen silence.

“I know what you’re hoping,” Eppie said before they descended more than a couple of meters. “You want to take that ship back to Bishop Anchorage and go to the Navigation School.”

Telly snarled something unintelligible and looked out through the heavy timbers that supported the bridge, trying to spot the schooner to the west.

“You can ignore me if you like, Telemachus McMahon, but I know the truth. You told Ivan, and Ivan told Helen, and Helen told me. But you’re afraid because you don’t think it’s God’s Plan.”

“Don’t be so sure of what people tell you,” Telly said.

“It’s true, isn’t it?”

Telly looked her in the eye, and instead of a callow, taunting girl, he saw a sympathetic soul. He realized that she wasn’t trying to tease him, but was genuinely concerned about his feelings. For a moment, he almost wished she was just the callow girl, but then he relented.

“Some of it,” he said. “But I don’t just think it isn’t God’s Plan. I know it isn’t.”

“And how do you know? Did God tell you?”

“No, He didn’t. And that’s how I know. Only I don’t even believe in that stuff, so I don’t know what difference it makes.”

“If you don’t believe in it, then why did you say I was lying earlier?”

“I didn’t say you were lying,” Telly replied. “I said you didn’t know what you were talking about. And you don’t.”

“Then tell me—do you believe or don’t you?”

“You want the honest truth?”

“Yes.”

“I guess I don’t. Because if I did, then I’d have to follow God’s Plan. And from what my mother says, that means staying right here on Schenker Float the rest of my life and doing the same thing people have been doing here for four side-years—having babies, working, getting old, and dying.”

Eppie frowned, letting her sympathy wash over him. She reached out and stroked his cheek with the back of her hand. “There’s nothing wrong with having babies,” she said.

“I guess not, but there’s something wrong with staying here if what you really want to do is be a navigator.”

“You can be a navigator without leaving Schenker Float,” she said. “Duncan Blake has been the navigator here for as long as I’ve been alive. Longer.”

“But that’s not the kind of navigator I want to be,” Telly said, a slight whine creeping into his voice. “I want to sail ships. I want to get loose from here and travel the great wide ocean. I want to leave Schenker Float forever.”

Now Eppie looked sad, not for him, it seemed, but for some other reason. As if what he wanted made a difference to her. Telly couldn’t figure it out, but then he never had been able to understand much of what girls said and did.

“You know what I think? I think you’re afraid of what your mother believes is God’s Plan. And if she doesn’t think it means you should be a navigator, she won’t let you go.”

Telly sighed. “It’s more than that, ” he said.

“More? Like what?”

“More than I can explain to you,” he said. He knew he was not just trying to avoid her questions. How could he explain his mother and her moods. She was one of those people who followed the rhythms of the Furnace—up for more than thirty hours when it was daylight and down for as many hours when side-night fell. And her moods matched the sky—bright as the Furnace and dark as the night.

That seemed to silence Eppie for a moment. Then she set her shoulders forward and forced out her breath. “You Determinists are all too complicated for me. You should have been born a Skeptic. You spend all your time trying to figure out God’s Plan, except there isn’t any plan. You should just live your life the way you have to, do what’s right, and never think twice about what it means. Simple as that.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” Telly said.

“Why is it any easier for me to say than you?” she asked.

“Because your mother isn’t a believer,” he replied.

And with that, the hoist hit the bottom of its track, Telly opened the door, and they both climbed out.