Daniel Hatch - In Forest Afloat Upon the Sea

Illustration by Christopher Bing

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.