Chris McMahon’s eyes suddenly lit up as she realized what her son was asking. And just as suddenly they burned right back at him.
“Can you go?” she said, a harsh edge to her voice. “Of course not. What do you mean? You’re just a boy.”
Telly’s heart sank, down into the ground, then below, to the depths of the bottomless ocean itself. He heard the rest of his mother’s words, but he barely listened to what she was saying.
“You can’t leave me, not now,” she said. “I can’t bear to lose another child. Not after all the others. And we’re heading into the Chandler Drift. If you went to Bishop Anchorage now, you’d never find your way back to Schenker again.”
“But Mother, I’d be a navigator,” Telly protested. “I could find my way to any place.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. How would you know where to look? Who knows where the Chandler will send us? We could end up in the Newton Ocean or be caught in the West Wind Drift for a side-year.”
“I’d still find you,” Telly said defiantly.
His mother leaned back and looked him over. Telly studied her in return. This was no dark or manic mood. His mother was indeed as he’d hoped to find her—in full possession of herself. And it wasn’t enough. He knew that now. It never would be enough. Nothing he could say or do would change that. He could argue about God’s Plan, but to no avail. He could prove to his mother that there was no place on Okeanos that he could not find, given a sextant and a compass, but in vain.
He looked to his father, pleading with his eyes for support. But he knew there was no point.
“No,” she said. “And 1 won’t hear of it again.”
The words had the finality of death.
Telly’s parents turned and continued on towards home, leaving him standing on the path in his own darkness. And as they disappeared into the shadows of the forest, he remembered Eppie’s words: “If you have to ask, you aren’t ready to go.”
It was true, and he knew it. If he were truly ready, he would have left right now, marched right into the quarterdeck of the Relief and asked for passage to Bishop Anchorage. But he could not. If he were capable of that, he would never have feared what his mother would say.
If he were capable of that, he would have already done it.
And he had not.
Five
The Lord never moves in a straight line. He never follows the schedule we set for Him. He seldom arrives when you expect Him to. But He is always on time.
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.