In Forest Afloat Upon the Sea

Two

A pack of small dogs raced out from under the shade of the central storehouse to greet Telly when he entered the rational. They were family dogs, some belonged to his cousins, some to the neighbors, and two were his.

Smokey was a short-haired black mix between a cocker spaniel and a beagle. He thought he was lead dog in the pack, but there were others that disputed that status. He’d been Telly’s for five watch-years now. He gained some distance on the rest of the pack to reach Telly first.

Close behind him was Harry, a black-and-tan terrier. Harry had no doubts about his status—he was bottom dog, with no aspirations to leadership. He was barely done being a puppy, but he was smart—a natural-born thief that stole food at every opportunity.

They circled him closely, leaped up to greet him, and barked and barked and barked.

Telly watched them bemusedly. They were so natural, never giving any indication that the absurdity of their situation—eternally afloat on a vast world-girdling ocean thousands of trillions of miles away from the world for which they were meant—made any difference for them. As long as they could run free and chase phibs, they were happy. None of them cared a bit for God’s Plan, Navigation School, or life beyond the limits of Schenker Float.

As if to prove the point, once they were done with their greeting, the dogs went back to their own peculiar social interactions, sniffing, pushing, and scolding one another, as they returned to the cool shade beneath the store house.

In the three side-years since the first Determinists came to Schenker Float, their numbers had tripled and their villages had spread across much of its available ground. Of the more than thirty big pontoons that made up the float, more than half were too young to be used for much more than hunting and fishing. The villages were clustered in the oldest pontoons where the ground was high, the trees tall, and ponds of fresh water had collected over the years.

Workshop Village was only a short distance from the chart house—and the geographic center of the float. It comprised more than two dozen rational, more than a thousand souls.

Telly’s rational sat near the edge of one the freshwater ponds within a two hundred-meter circle scattered through a stand of blackwood. The trunks of the trees were wrapped with orchid vines planted long ago by the float’s first families.

There were eight households bound together in the basic rationing unit of Okeanos, formed long ago when scarcity demanded a stricter accounting of ham, charcoal, and salt.

One household was quiet and dark—home to three women and two men who had passed on into their fourth side-year. Two of them were Schenker’s original settlers.

Two households shook with the screams and squawls of young families, with kids barely weaned and dressed.

Four of them bustled with mature broods: one or two grandparents, their children, and their grandchildren, all packed together under one roof, and nearly bristling with domestic tension. Two of the latter included his aunts, both his mother’s sisters.

And Telly’s own household consisted of himself, his parents, and his older brother—though Larry spent much of his time at the corral with the other Downies.

Aunt Cassie and Aunt Nickie were at the storehouse, breaking out charcoal, grain, and salt pork for tonight’s supper.

Telly’s home consisted of a raised platform a meter and a half off the ground, wrapped with braided wax wood, sporting woven sail-leaf shutters and a roof of blackwood shingles.

“Your mother’s not here yet,” Aunt Cassie called to Telly as he started for his front steps. “It’s her turn down at the corral.”

Cassie was the younger of his two aunts. Telly had never felt much affection for them—he heard their nasty remarks about his mother when they thought no one else was listening. They carried the tone of mocking sympathy, but always laced with a sense of smug superiority.

“I know she can’t help it, but I would never talk to my husband the way she talks to Pat,” Cassie would say.

“I don’t know why Mother always favored her,” Nickie would add. “It didn’t do any good in the end. And if I couldn’t control my moods, I’d at least keep them to myself.”

Years of that had taught Telly never to trust his aunts and to keep a healthy distance from them. He wondered sometimes what they must say about him. “He’s got his mother’s attitude, you know. He never gets close to anyone.”

Telly was worried that he’d missed his mother now. She’d be working with the Downies until supper time, and that was when the ship was due to dock. He’d hoped to find her home.

He knew of only a few times during each side-day that he could approach her and get a reasonable response. She was best in the hours after sunrise. But the Furnace had been up since the middle of the midwatch—more than twelve hours now—and his chances were getting slim.

By the time it made its seventy-six-hour circuit back to dawn, the ship might be gone. His heart sank at that thought.

His only other chance might be shortly after sunset. If he could catch her before her mood slipped from its daylight high to its dark night’s depression, he might have a chance of talking her into it. But only a slim chance. It was hard to predict her moods at night. Sometimes she would wind down slowly, other times she would crash precipitously. It made living with her difficult—and at times impossible.

He waved at his aunts, then turned away from the house. It would be best if he waited until later. First there was the strange and wonderful ship itself to see. He headed up the path through the center of the village towards the boatyard on Landfall Bay.

Telly hurried through the thick grove of polymer trees and covered his face with one hand as he did. The boles of the trees oozed thick liquid from countless taps into a network of lines and buckets. At the same time, they released hideous vapors into the air that collected at the back of Telly’s throat and threatened to make him gag.

His ordeal was brief, however, as he passed quickly into the boatyard.

Steam, sawdust, noxious fumes, and noise all spilled out of the workshops in equal measure as Telly made his way towards the waterfront.

The worst of the fumes came from the plastic works, where the gluepots extracted resins from the polymer trees to make polyesters, nylon, and the rest of their strange menagerie of materials. But the loudest noise came from the sawmills, where fallen trees were transformed into beams, posts, planks, shims, dowels, and all the rest.

The yard sat on the inboard shore of the bay on the forward side of Schenker float. The boundary between a young pontoon full of lush undergrowth sprouting from pumice and rootbind and the older pontoons of the float’s ancient core, split it down the middle. Worksheds filled the woods inboard, while hulls, masts, docks, and ways littered the outboard flats. Work crews caulked the seams of a single hull, a twenty-meter ketch with two masts, sitting in the ways, and sealed the wood with plastic.

When Telly reached the waterfront, the sails of the visitor from Bishop Anchorage were billowing with the wind.

The ship was a two-topsail schooner, and as she breached the mouth of the lagoon and came about, all her bright linen caught the northeast wind. Big gaff sails pulled on the masts, with double topsails and topgallant sails above—and a big red cross was emblazoned across each topsail. Four jibs helped bring the bow around smartly as she switched tacks.

As they approached the middle of the bay, the ship’s crew reefed in the topsails and drew down two of the jibs. The foresail came down next, the ship slowing as it made its final tack and steadied up on a course straight towards the shore.

“A fine ship. She handles like one of your father’s crankboxes.”

Telly looked over his shoulder to see Duncan Blake standing behind him, watching the ship make its final approach to the docks.

“She’s awfully big,” Telly said. “She didn’t look that big through the glass.”

“They never do,” Blake answered. “She looks new too, fresh sails and rigging.”

“What’s that on the foremast? Up near the masthead?” Telly pointed to a large circular housing containing a half-dozen blades resembling the shutters on a heliograph.

“Well, I’ll be damned if it isn’t a windmill generator,” Blake said. “They’ve got electricity on board her. Look at the searchlights forward. Those aren’t oil lamps, they’re electric arc lights.”

“Electricity,” Telly whispered reverentially, as if Blake had said that one of Homer’s Olympian gods was standing on the main deck.

“Here she comes,” Blake said as the ship glided across the last few meters of open water, the last few yards of sail spilling the air. A rocket hissed to life from the shore, trailing smoke and nylon line in a long graceful arc over the bow of the schooner. A deckhand ran to snag the light messenger and was joined by a shipmate who began hauling a heavier mooring line out to the ship.

Mooring crews ashore and the ship’s crew afloat worked the schooner up to the dock over the next few minutes. Now it was close enough for Telly to see the fine detail of the rigging, the bright-painted trim, the plastic and wooden fittings, the rare flash of brass and steel, all the special touches that showed the vessel to be the product of a wealthy anchorage and not a parsimonious float like his.

As soon as the ship was made fast to the dock, a gangway was pushed out from her gunwale. A moment later, a party of officers in white uniforms with stiff blue caps formed on the fantail.

“Come along, Telly,” Blake said. Telly pulled his jaw up and shook the stars from his eyes, then fell into step behind his teacher. Blake moved quickly to join up with Pastor Kline, Council Leader Henry Adorno, Councilman Horatio Cady, and Nestor Cohn, the pharmacist.

The entourage clomped loudly down the dock, then filed across the gangway onto the ship and assembled facing the schooner’s crew.

“Welcome aboard the Relief,” said a white-haired man at the center of the reception line, his face a mass of sunburned wrinkles that looked all the darker from the bleached white blouse that he wore. Telly ran his eyes over the elaborate insignia on the shoulderboards—the winged staff and serpents of the caduceus flanked by four gold stars. “I am Honor DuPage, master of the ship. These are our physicians—”

He indicated the three men and one woman to his right with a broad sweep of his hand.

“—And these are my officers.” Another broad gesture indicated the four men to his left.

He introduced them by name, medical staff first, but Telly was distracted by the sudden shaking beside him. It was Duncan Blake, his arm quivering as he sought to raise it against some invisible restraining force.

“Malcolm,” he whispered in a voice so soft and dry that Telly was sure no one else could hear him. Then he repeated it, more loudly. “Malcolm? Is that you?”

Heads turned in their direction, including that of the last officer in line to the left—a grey-haired man with sharp eyes and a beard that had long since gone white.

“And on the far end is our navigator,” DuPage continued, trying to exercise discretion and ignore Duncan’s interruption. “Malcolm Blake.”

Duncan Blake stepped forward and took the Reliefs navigator by the arm.

“Malcolm, it’s me—Duncan,” he said, his voice cracking with emotion. “Your brother.”

“Oh my God, Duncan. It’s you!”

Then, before the assembled crew, physicians, and local dignitaries, the two men threw their arms around each other, pounded each other on the back, and began to cry.