That was the basis of navigation.
If the world were as flat and Euclidean as Pastor Kline seemed to think, it would all be a lot simpler. Plane trigonometry was a lot easier than spherical trig. But life was much more complicated. Cosines of cosines, sines of sines, angles of angles, all turning in on themselves, all returning to themselves. Like Duncan Blake’s brother.
Telly wanted to tell Wayland what was special about this moment, but he could not. Not without leaving himself vulnerable to his scorn. Once again, he sought to avoid the other’s arguments.
“Stow it, navigator,” he said sharply.
“Don’t tell me you believe all this?” Wayland said. Eppie gave him a look that said the same thing.
“I’m not sure what I believe,” Telly said. “But I can do without your commentary.”
Wayland looked surprised at Telly’s brazenness and his refusal to suffer rudeness silently. He prepared to say something in reply, then stopped, seeming to think better of it.
Telly was glad. For once, he wanted to hear what Kline and the others had to say. For once, their words had a significance that Telly could not dismiss—at least not the way Wayland had just done.
He fell silent just as Kline was making another empty remark. Though to Telly’s ear, this time it rang true in a way that the pastor could not have known.
“Most times, the message and meaning are plain and clear to those who are willing to look at what is before them,” he said. Telly winced and wrestled with the contradictions of his faith once again.
Why was it Duncan whose brother had arrived? Why not the ship’s master or one of the doctors? They could just as easily have had relatives here from before the war. Enough families had been broken up by it.
Because they were both navigators, Telly realized. And the twining clearly had something to do with navigation. And who was there when the Relief was first spotted? Telly and Eppie and a few others. But Telly was the one who wanted to go to Navigation School—more than anyone on Schenker Float. It was true before the Relief arrived and it would be true long after it had gone back to Bishop Anchorage.
It was plain and clear to the eye. But if it was true, if it was part of God’s Plan, then what kind of a God did Telly’s world have? One that would strand Duncan Blake here for a side-year to teach Telly navigation just so he could be here when his brother arrived to make a twining? One that would give Telly a mother who wouldn’t let him go?
And if Telly couldn’t go to Bishop Anchorage, what kind of message was He sending? Was it just some cruel joke He was playing?
“What do you think, Telly?” Eppie asked. “What does the twining mean?”
“I don’t know if I want to talk about it with a couple of Skeptics,” Telly said, immediately regretting the wounded look in Eppie’s eyes. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have put it that way.”
“Just because I’m a Skeptic doesn’t mean I think like him,” she said, jerking her thumb sideways at Wayland. “There are different kinds of Skeptics. Some who don’t believe anything unless they have evidence—and some who just don’t believe anything. I’m the first kind, he’s the other.”
“I don’t know what to believe,” Telly said. Then he swallowed hard and took the risk of baring his soul to Eppie. “But if I was to take a guess at what the twining means, at least to me, it’s pretty easy to figure out. This is my chance to leave for Bishop Anchorage and Navigation School. At least, that’s what the pastor and everyone else seems to be saying. You’re supposed to look at the simplest, clearest, most obvious meaning to these things, and that’s what I come up with.”
Wayland snickered. “I don’t know which is funnier,” he said. “That you could believe you’re good enough to get into Navigation School or that you could believe it’s part of God’s Plan.”
“I told you, I don’t know what to believe,” Telly said, the impulse to lash out at Wayland’s insult nearly submerged in his own inner turmoil. “1 mean, think about it. What kind of God would send a message like this?”
“The kind that would strand thousands of colonists on a world without a landfall and then sink the ship that held their equipment,” Wayland said. “How’s that for a sick joke?”
“Then I don’t want to believe in Him,” Telly said. “And I don’t want to believe in His plan or His message.”
Telly jumped to his feet and twisted his hands together in frustration. The last thing he wanted to hear now was more pointless rambling by people who didn’t know what they were talking about.
He was so angry at the shallowness of the discussion that he stormed off from the assembly without even making a by-your-leave with Eppie or Wayland. He made his way into the woods, and took the path aft through Lagoon Village, cutting through to the edge of the sea on the far side of the settlement. It was a long walk, a few thousand meters, and took nearly half an hour—time that Telly spent rehashing the elements of his theological struggle to no particular effect.
By the time he reached the shore, the Furnace had set, bringing on darkness with tropical suddenness. The sky still maintained a burnished gold glow in the west, but the stars and planets and moons were already emerging.
Telly picked out the navigational stars quickly. Off to the north was red Antares, the pole star—or within a degree of the true pole. And to the east was the Navigator’s Star—Iris, messenger of the gods, which patrolled Okeanos’s Prime Meridian in a lazy figure-eight north and south of the equator.
Achernar, the brightest star in Telly’s sky, was rising out of the trees behind him. Aldeberan was high overhead, and Beta Centauris burned blue-white over the heart of Schenker Float.
Of the planets, only Hermes and Phoebe were visible, trailing after the Furnace as they descended into the western sea. And of the moons, only Calypso and Leucothie could be seen, one waxing full in the east and the other a slim crescent in the west.
Telly watched as the rest of the stars began to twinkle to life, naming those he could, casting about for the identities of those he could not.
And as he made his way through the sky, he lost his anger and frustration. There were still no answers, but the journey to the moons and planets and stars freed him from his float-bound troubles. He lost all sense of time and mass and social gravity, drifting upwards into the bottomless dark. His breathing slowed, his heart stopped its pounding, and his aching limbs relaxed.
He’d been there a long time when the skittering of a tree crab pulled his spirit back down into his body.
Then he saw that the tree crab had been disturbed by an intruder—Eppie. “Dr. Stoddard was a terrible bore, so I followed after you,” she said. “What’s wrong, Telly? You look terribly upset.”
Telly scowled. He didn’t want to talk to anyone right now. Then he saw the soft compassion in Eppie’s eyes and relented. She was only trying to help, he realized, and could not be criticized for that.
“It’s just me,” he said. “All of a sudden my life is a mess, and I don’t know what to do about it.”
“Your mother won’t let you go to Navigation School?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I haven’t asked her yet.”
“I’ll tell you what my grandfather would say, Telly. If you have to ask, you’re not ready to go.”
He felt suddenly sick at heart at that thought and snorted out a bitter laugh. “Thanks.”