Kris Schnee - Everyone's Island

Garrett shook his head. “I guess we work our asses off.”

Time to go. For the last week he’d been in panic mode. They needed more sunscreen, toilet paper, canned food, spare parts! He had to herd the crew, too. Alexis, Martin, Tess, and Zephyr. Everyone but the robot had their own luggage and wish-list. Then, when he thought everything was ready, a reporter caught him. “How does it feel to be setting out on this adventure?”

The sunlight of a June morning made Garrett squint to see who’d asked. A man in a suit had cameras perched on his shoulder and on the roof of a jazzed-up van. Garrett said, “Sorry; are you talking to me? I’m trying to get ready for a trip.” Shopping bags weighed him down. He was at the docks, with their ship at anchor.

“ Eeennnhh! Wrong answer.” The van just said “Samuel Reporting” on the side. An indy journalist, then. He said, “Come on, mister. Give me some good lines. I get paid and you get free publicity.”

Garrett said, “I’m doing a science project. I don’t need publicity.”

The reporter smacked his forehead. “Don’t need it? That’s how things get done ! How do you expect to make your project work without good PR?”

“Make stuff and sell stuff?”

Samuel smiled indulgently. “Sure, sure. But how about humoring me? Says in my notes you were an actor once. You can be dramatic, right?”

Yeesh , thought Garrett. “I did the voice for a cartoon character, a long time ago. Now I’m just sailing out to build a farm.”

Samuel sighed. “I guess I could go with the humble angle. But read this aloud, okay?” He held out a screen.

Garrett peered at the words on it, and scoffed.

Samuel said, “Put down the baggage, say the one-liner, and get on the damn boat. And be heroic about it, or I’ll drag you off and make you do it again.”

Alexis and Tess waved from the ship’s little pilot-house. Garrett wondered which one had put the reporter up to this. He sighed and set down the junk he’d bought, then slicked back his hair. “I’m Garrett Fox, and this is my ambition.”

“Good, good. Now—”

Garrett was already walking away with his stuff. He handed it over to Alexis, then hopped up onto the ship and stumbled a little. Behind him he found Samuel still after him with the cameras.

Samuel called out, “Good enough! Flash some footage over when you get there, hey?”

Free of the media glare, Garrett turned back to the pilot-house. The ship wasn’t much, just enough to ferry them to the farm site with some equipment and be their taxi to Cuba. Alexis leaned against the wheel with her hair streaming in the breeze. This was the first time she’d been far out to sea, since their date on that whale-watch tour.

Tess waved a hand in front of Garrett’s face. “Welcome aboard Constellation , Cap’n!” She was dressed in a piratical black shirt with an armed parrot on it. Her smile was as big as he’d ever seen.

“ Constellation ?” he said.

“I painted the name on her myself. Got a problem with that, Cap’n?”

Garrett looked out to sea, breathing deeply, then turned back. The Baltimore skyline shimmered in heat-haze, like a dream. Or a nightmare. Suddenly Garrett slumped and clutched the rail for support. I’ll never see this again! Never go home again! But that was crazy, he told himself.

Martin had the other seat in the pilothouse, and a ridiculous Hawaiian shirt and glasses. Garrett would’ve asked him about the reporter, but Zephyr had come up from the hold. “Sir, there’s a standard format for this type of situation. The format says: you should be at the wheel.”

Garrett looked at Alexis and Martin. “You two have the helm, right? I’m a little jittery. Why don’t you take us out of harbor?”

“The bot’s right,” said Martin.

Exiled , he thought, and got angry at himself. The press attention had riled him, made him dramatize something that was supposed to be just one small step. He needed to lie down and think of physics for a while. “I’ll be up to take my turn at the wheel soon enough.”

During Alexis’ watch, Garrett couldn’t sleep. He hauled himself up from his sweaty bunk and crept upstairs to wind and moonlight. He took the little wooden box along.

It had been among his father’s things: three tools of Josiah Fox, family patriarch. Garrett leaned against the deckhouse and opened the box to admire them. Not even two centuries had ruined the brass of the compass, spyglass and sextant. Old Josiah had been a shipwright, arguable maker of the first United States Navy ships. Family tradition gave him credit for the USS Enterprize that had helped start a legend, as well as the USS Constellation in Baltimore. Garrett’s father had loved the view of it, and cared more for the tradition than for the details like “should that be considered really the original ship”.

Garrett carefully took up the sextant and put the rest away. The thing was a wedge of brass clockwork and lenses. He grinned as he stood by the railing, trying to recall how his father had taught him to use it. Though the sea swayed beneath his feet, he locked an eye on the horizon and took what readings he needed.

Where he was going, he’d have to live by the grace of science. That was nothing new even in Josiah’s time. The British Empire had conquered the world with the help of longitude , the skill of finding east and west. To figure your place at sea, you needed a book of star readings, from a known location. Garrett called up the data on a pocket computer. It was England’s Greenwich Observatory that had become the reference point. “The Prime Meridian,” Garrett said to the salty wind. The words sounded like a spell. He imagined lines spreading across a blank world map, replacing “Here Be Dragons” with knowledge and light. And with those coordinates, no one could mark their place in the world without giving implicit praise to England, the sea’s anchor and lighthouse.

It took tools, too, to make the longitude trick work. Accurate clocks especially. For every genius involved in calculating the star-tables, there were more practical men who’d had to master forging, mechanics, and metallurgy. The inventions that made tonight’s journey possible had come from many people with many goals. A culture that valued new thoughts, that sailed into the unknown, had become an authority that defined space and time.

Garrett looked back and forth between the heirloom sextant and the numbers on his computer screen. His amateur calculations put him in the right ocean, at least. He smiled, satisfied, and gave thanks for the yet greater wonder of GPS satellites.

When he turned away from the railing, he found Alexis slumped in the pilothouse, asleep at the wheel. He stumbled over to her and shook her, saying, “Hey!”

Alexis blinked and yawned.

“You never leave a ship unattended in mid-ocean!”

“Oh, darn. I’m sorry.” She sat up and stifled another yawn. “It’s just so boring.”

“It could’ve gotten a lot more interesting!”

“I said I’m sorry, okay? All clear.”

He sighed, counted to ten, and let the ever-changing sea calm him.

Alexis said, “You need to learn to relax. It’s a nice night.” She patted the seat beside her.

He took it, but not so much because he wanted to be close to her right now. Somebody had to be properly on watch. “I’m a little worried. We need to make everything work.”

“You’re overthinking things. You’ve got the skills and the hardware, and the other stuff is under control.” She snuggled closer to him. “C’mon, help me stay awake.”