“Yes, sir,” he said.
Blake gave him a salute, and Telly, filled with pride, returned it. Then he climbed into the hoist and released the brakelatch. Just before it began to drop, Eppie swung around the frame at its top and climbed in. Telly was about to scold her for throwing off the balance, but she smiled and said: “I just whistled down to Ivan, and he’s hooking the stone on now.”
“I hope it’s not his,” Telly said. “I don’t want to have to pull us all the way down.”
“Just keep your foot on the brake and your hand on the windlass,” she said. “Or would you rather I handled it myself?”
“Damned Skeptic women,” Blake said with a wink. “They never give a man a chance.”
Telly agreed, but didn’t dare say anything. At least not until they were back on the ground. He just let the hoist drop below the deck of the bridge in sullen silence.
“I know what you’re hoping,” Eppie said before they descended more than a couple of meters. “You want to take that ship back to Bishop Anchorage and go to the Navigation School.”
Telly snarled something unintelligible and looked out through the heavy timbers that supported the bridge, trying to spot the schooner to the west.
“You can ignore me if you like, Telemachus McMahon, but I know the truth. You told Ivan, and Ivan told Helen, and Helen told me. But you’re afraid because you don’t think it’s God’s Plan.”
“Don’t be so sure of what people tell you,” Telly said.
“It’s true, isn’t it?”
Telly looked her in the eye, and instead of a callow, taunting girl, he saw a sympathetic soul. He realized that she wasn’t trying to tease him, but was genuinely concerned about his feelings. For a moment, he almost wished she was just the callow girl, but then he relented.
“Some of it,” he said. “But I don’t just think it isn’t God’s Plan. I know it isn’t.”
“And how do you know? Did God tell you?”
“No, He didn’t. And that’s how I know. Only I don’t even believe in that stuff, so I don’t know what difference it makes.”
“If you don’t believe in it, then why did you say I was lying earlier?”
“I didn’t say you were lying,” Telly replied. “I said you didn’t know what you were talking about. And you don’t.”
“Then tell me—do you believe or don’t you?”
“You want the honest truth?”
“Yes.”
“I guess I don’t. Because if I did, then I’d have to follow God’s Plan. And from what my mother says, that means staying right here on Schenker Float the rest of my life and doing the same thing people have been doing here for four side-years—having babies, working, getting old, and dying.”
Eppie frowned, letting her sympathy wash over him. She reached out and stroked his cheek with the back of her hand. “There’s nothing wrong with having babies,” she said.
“I guess not, but there’s something wrong with staying here if what you really want to do is be a navigator.”
“You can be a navigator without leaving Schenker Float,” she said. “Duncan Blake has been the navigator here for as long as I’ve been alive. Longer.”
“But that’s not the kind of navigator I want to be,” Telly said, a slight whine creeping into his voice. “I want to sail ships. I want to get loose from here and travel the great wide ocean. I want to leave Schenker Float forever.”
Now Eppie looked sad, not for him, it seemed, but for some other reason. As if what he wanted made a difference to her. Telly couldn’t figure it out, but then he never had been able to understand much of what girls said and did.
“You know what I think? I think you’re afraid of what your mother believes is God’s Plan. And if she doesn’t think it means you should be a navigator, she won’t let you go.”
Telly sighed. “It’s more than that, ” he said.
“More? Like what?”
“More than I can explain to you,” he said. He knew he was not just trying to avoid her questions. How could he explain his mother and her moods. She was one of those people who followed the rhythms of the Furnace—up for more than thirty hours when it was daylight and down for as many hours when side-night fell. And her moods matched the sky—bright as the Furnace and dark as the night.
That seemed to silence Eppie for a moment. Then she set her shoulders forward and forced out her breath. “You Determinists are all too complicated for me. You should have been born a Skeptic. You spend all your time trying to figure out God’s Plan, except there isn’t any plan. You should just live your life the way you have to, do what’s right, and never think twice about what it means. Simple as that.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” Telly said.
“Why is it any easier for me to say than you?” she asked.
“Because your mother isn’t a believer,” he replied.
And with that, the hoist hit the bottom of its track, Telly opened the door, and they both climbed out.
Two
Why did Noah bring piglets along on the arks after the Fall? So people wouldn’t have to eat their dogs.
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.