In Forest Afloat Upon the Sea

Five

Twenty watch-days later, Schenker Float entered The Queue.

Telly tracked its progress as they shifted from their westerly course towards a steeper northerly track. Within a week, they were drawn into the Chandler Drift—and the wild ride began.

The first watch-day on the Drift brought them ninety-three miles to the northeast. The second carried them ninety-six. And the third brought them a full hundred.

The fluffy white clouds of the Equatorial Current were replaced by flat-bottomed gray clouds that hung low in the sky and clotted together to block the Furnace from view for hours on end.

The float’s rationals clattered with excitement as people battened down against the possibility of foul weather for the first time in nearly a watch-year. Now that they were leaving the constant weather of the tropics behind, storms were more likely—and even the occasional rain squall could create turmoil for an unprepared rational.

It was almost enough to make Telly forget the pain of the visit by the Relief. Everyone else on Schenker quickly became absorbed in the urgent business of the preparations—almost as if they’d taken some drug that made them all more alive.

Even more intoxicating, however, was the rush of speculation over where the current would take them.

The Chandler Drift was a hundred-mile-broad river of water that stretched from the tropics all the way north to the Roaring Forties, more than two thousand miles in all. It climbed the western edge of the Northern Einstein Gyre, flowing at eight knots at the core of the drift and more than four knots along the edges.

It swept past Bishop Anchorage in the south, on up past Ellsworth in mid-ocean, then into the cold, brisk seas of the West Wind Drift, with their constant winds. To the east was the great wallowing heart of the Einstein Gyre, where floats drifted on the wind with no current to guide them, subject to the shifting breezes of passing weather fronts. To the west were the Chandler Banks, where the ocean bottom came within a mile of the surface, the fishing was always good, and the weather always unpredictable.

Where Schenker Float wound up would depend on where it left the Drift—inside the gyre, outside the gyre, or at its northern edge.

Telly refused to indulge in the speculation, keeping to his duties in the chart house, calculating their position by the Furnace and the stars, plotting their progress once each watch.

He was over his disappointment, but not his bitterness. He still did not understand what had happened when the Relief visited Schenker. He still did not know what to believe.

And when Schenker then drifted north of Bishop Anchorage he felt a sadness that he could not express.

He tried to talk about it with Duncan Blake. Blake had noticed his dark mood and mentioned it on their third day on the Drift. Telly had explained its cause—as much of it as he could.

“I can see your sorrow at missing out on Navigational School,” Blake said. “But the other part of it is harder for me to understand.”

“Me too,” Telly said.

“It sounds like you went from putting no faith in your God to putting too much faith in Him,” the navigator said. “There’s only so much He can do at once, you know. He only looks all-powerful, but most of that is done with special effects—a little thunder over here, a chance reunion of lost brothers over there.”

“But I was sure it was meant to be,” Telly said, the full force of his dashed hope returning despite his efforts to hold it back.

“Now calm down there, laddy,” Blake said. “That’s your first mistake. You shouldn’t be too sure of anything. Nine times out of ten—make that ninety-nine times out of a hundred—the lesson you’re meant to learn from twinings and miracles and such is that you shouldn’t believe too hard.”

Telly shook his head. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that what you should do is let go of your faith, let go of your believing. Don’t let them turn into a sea anchor. Remember, God’s Plan is complicated and usually opaque. You seldom know which way the wind is going to blow, but when it does, you have to sail with it, not against it.”

“That’s just words,” Telly said softly. “I don’t even know what they mean.”

“You will, lad,” Duncan said. “Live a few more years on this wet world and you will.”

It didn’t take a few years, but only a few more days. The farther they drifted from Bishop Anchorage, the less it pulled at Telly’s heart. And the more he realized the sense in Blake’s words. He couldn’t live on a broken dream forever. And he couldn’t expect a single twining to be the only message God was likely to send his way.

After all, the Chandler Drift was carrying them quickly into new waters with new possibilities. Even if the tiny world of Schenker Float remained as boring and confining as ever, the seas and skies that Telly had made his own were shifting, slowly but surely, carrying him into an unknown and unknowable future.

Then, with a dozen watch-days behind them on the Drift, the storm hit.

It was not a big storm as such things went, but it was enough to keep Telly and his neighbors inside as the rain fell in great sheets, filling the ponds to overflowing and turning their drainage streams into torrents. The heavy wind whipped through the woods, stripping them of debris and plastering it against tree trunks and hut walls, gusting up to fifteen knots or more at the height of the tempest.

There had been worse storms on the other side of the gyre during their three-year journey down the Webster Current. Telly remembered several that had been accompanied by powerful lightning strokes and crackling thunder—both lacking here.

But the float had been better prepared over on the Webster Current. Here there were a number of chores that had been left undone—as evidenced by the baskets that flew by Telly’s window and the crash of unlashed shutters on his aunt’s hut.

The most dramatic effect of the storm, however, was not seen until after it had passed. Duncan Blake was the first to point it out, and Telly was the first to learn it from him.

When the rain and winds were gone, and the Furnace had burned through the fog that remained, Blake had come down from the bridge with the sullen look on his face.

“I guess that takes care of that,” he said when he’d finished consulting his ephemeris and rechecking his calculations.

“What’s wrong?” Telly asked.

“We’ve been blown out of the Chandler Drift,” Blake said.

Telly’s heart fluttered and his stomach churned. What did that mean? Had all the excitement been for nothing? Were they left to drift now in the wallowing heart of the Einstein Gyre?

“So much for the Nantucket Sleighride,” Blake said. “We didn’t even make it past Ellsworth.”

“Are we stuck out here forever then?” Telly asked.

Blake gave him a look of mild astonishment. “Forever? Of course not. Nobody’s ever any place for long on Okeanos, Telly. You should know that. No, we could blow back into the Chandler in a few days or a few weeks. Or we could drift to the east for a few months. It’s hard to say now that we’re out of the easterlies. It depends on the weather, to a large degree. But whatever happens, you’ll be one of the first to know.”

Despite Blake’s reassurances, however, Telly still couldn’t get rid of the unsettled feeling in the pit of his stomach.

Over the next week, he discovered why. Things were not quite as simple as Blake had made them out to be.

The weather was as unsettled as Telly’s feelings. The skies were cloudy more often than not, and reliable navigational observations were not clearly as easy as they’d been in the watch-year he’d been a student in Blake’s chart house.

After several plots, though, Telly was sure he had discovered something he could not understand. The positions appeared at first to be all over the place—first north, then south, then east. And then they were as much as sixty nautical miles apart.

Telly worked at the puzzle for hours, then it suddenly dawned on him. Schenker Float was traveling in circles!

“Very good,” Blake said when Telly brought him his discovery. “Though not quite circles. We’re caught in a wandering eddy.”

“Really?” Telly asked. “I’ve heard of such things, but I didn’t know they actually existed.”

“They’re quite real. And they’re quite common. The Drift wanders back and forth across the sea, you know. There’s nothing to keep it confined to any specific course. Sometimes it buckles up on itself, making a crook in its path. And sometimes the crook runs in on itself and breaks loose. Have you been down to the sea lately?”

“No,” Telly said. “No reason to.”

“You should go today. You’ll see that the water is a lot colder than the Drift. And it smells of plankton and seaweed. We’re in a cold-core eddy on the south side of the Drift. They move along to the southwest and rejoin the Chandler somewhere off Bishop Anchorage. They can be as much as a hundred miles across. We seem to be about thirty miles from the center of this one.”

“It looks like we’re moving fairly quickly.”

“Yes, more than three knots. But in great circles. The eddy itself makes no more than a few miles a watch-day.”

“How long before we’ll be back in the Chandler?” Telly asked, suddenly apprehensive.

“The warm-core rings on the north side of the Drift rejoin after a dozen weeks or so,” Blake said. “But the cold-core rings can take a watch-year or more to merge back into the main current.”

Telly’s heart sank. A watch-year suspended between Ellsworth and Bishop anchorages? The thought was almost too tragic to contemplate.

“Of course, we don’t know how long this one’s been out here,” Blake was saying. “Conceivably it could turn back into the Drift almost any time.”

But Telly wasn’t really listening. He was sinking into the depths of his own dark mood instead.

Telly did go down to the sea and found that Blake was right. It was rank with the cold smell of seaweed. And when the float was on the leeward side of the eddy, a cool breeze came out of its core.

For the next ten days, Telly watched the sky, hoping for another storm to blow them free of their captivity, back to the Chandler Drift and on their way. The thought that he could still make his way to Bishop Anchorage and Navigation School was one that he tried to keep from his mind.

It was absurd, he thought, to believe in a God that arranged the affairs of the world to taunt a single solitary soul on an insignificant float in the middle of a vast and boundless ocean. It was even more absurd to believe that He would suspend that float midway between anchorages for an indeterminate amount of time just to prolong that soul’s agony.

So Telly went on with his life, teaching arithmetic to the younger children each morning-watch, working in the woodshop each noon-watch, and continuing his classes in navigation twice daily. He kept his moods and his thoughts to himself, as he always had. And he did not think of the cruel ironies of fate—except on festival night, when Duncan Blake continued with his reading of The Iliad.

And after they had been prisoners of the cold-core ring for about three weeks, Blake called him into the chart house again to pose a new question for him.

The watch-day and the side-day had shifted out of phase sufficiently this morning that dawn was still a couple of hours away and the sky was filled with a mix of clouds and stars—mostly the former and a few of the latter. A damp, clammy wind pushed thickly through the forest. A large oil lamp illuminated the interior of the bridge.

“Good morning, lad,” Blake said, so full of energy that it seemed an insult to the hour. Telly yawned and nodded in return. “You’ll need to have more of your wits about you than that to solve today’s puzzle,” his teacher said.

Telly rubbed the sleep from his eyes and tried to look more alive. “What is it this morning?” he asked. “Are we leaving the eddy?”

“No such good fortune,” Blake said as he brought out a plotting board that depicted the twisting spiral of Schenker Float’s progress since being blown into the huge eddy. “Here, let me show you something. Back here, nearly two weeks ago, we were here at this point.”

Blake put a short, dark finger on a plot marked with the numeral “10.” “Since then, the eddy has taken a jog in its drift. We’ve moved off to a more southerly course from the southeasterly bearing we were on at first. Now look at where we are today.”

He moved his finger to a spot where the spiral coiled up and the plots thickened. There was one marked “13” and another marked “17.” A fresh one, unsmeared by farther work, said “21.”

“What’s the puzzle?” Telly asked.

“Did you look at the sky this morning?” Blake asked.

“For a minute, I guess. Too many clouds to see much.”

“Did you look at the clouds? Say, to the east?”

“No. You can’t tell where you are from looking at clouds.”

“That’s true, lad,” Blake replied. “But there are things you can tell from looking at them.”

The wind was raw and damp. Telly could see that the clouds covered most of the eastern sky, with patches filling in to the west. He studied the clouds and saw what looked to be a touch of false dawn—a faint bit of color against their underside.

Then he looked again. It was too early for the Furnace to be peeking over the horizon.

“What is that?” he asked, pointing towards the color.

“What do you suppose?” Blake asked. “I spotted it myself more than a week ago, just after sunset. We’ve come back near this point once each side-day since, but always during the daylight. This is the first time we’ve returned when it was dark.

“Silly lad,” Blake laughed. “Do I have to spell everything out to you? It’s another float, by God’s Plan. Not more than a few miles over the horizon. Those are the lights of their cookfires and lamps.”

Telly felt embarrassed by his innocence, but resisted the impulse to use it as an excuse before his teacher. He just sighed appreciatively.

“So what do you think, boy? Do you feel like going a’calling?”