by Nancy Fulda
How close to the whirlpool were they? And where was the reef? “Kurua, bring up the star map.” Nothing happened. Captain Teramoto had brought nav up, but the computer was still down. He’d have to do this blind, like his ancestors had, navigating with only his knowledge, memory and senses. He had just spent the last five years teaching young navigators wayfinding in his canoe in the Pacific; was this so different?
The feel of the rough water told him the ship was close to the whirlpool. The reef ran almost directly west to east, the whirlpool at its center. It was too late to skirt the whirlpool by moving southward; they were already being pulled, however gently at this point, toward its center. The Sally Ride was too small to be able to call up the massive amounts of power needed to break them free and send them straight out. Such a ploy, if it failed, could spin the ship straight into the whirlpool’s depths. He would have to use the whirlpool’s motion to give them momentum, then break the ship free as it headed northeast, over the reef to the west of the whirlpool, into uncharted waters.
Crossing over the reef would be dangerous, but less so than to risk discovering what lay at the center of a whirlpool. No one had ever learned if matter was the same in overspace as in realspace, but when a ship hit a reef—or a floaty, or any of a score of other hazards—the results were usually disastrous.
In the nav tank, the stars of Earth’s skies shone reassuring above him—Polaris, the Dippers, Cassiopeia. But now, though the stars could keep him on course, he must find his way by the feel of the waves generated by whirlpool and reef. “Teruo, come around, more to the north. This way.” He pointed to his left. “More, come on, there.”
Winin leaned left over the canoe’s side, watching the waves hit its hull. He looked right, noting the difference between when a wave hit the outrigger float and when it touched the hull. The canoe headed at an angle across the reef, the whirlpool to the northeast.
“Navigator Winin, can you hear me?” A woman’s voice—Captain Teramoto’s.
“Yes ma’am.”
“Will you be able to come give me a hand any time soon?” Maybe it was poor reception on the intercom, or maybe she was really as sick as she sounded.
“Ma’am, I’m trying to head us away from a whirlpool. Could take hours. I’ll come out as soon as sailing’s clear.”
Silence. Then, “Are you having problems?”
“No, but be prepared for some rough handling. I’ll have to take us straight over a nasty reef.”
“Can you cope?” It wasn’t just the intercom. She sounded more than weary.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“How’s Sanchez?”
He glanced at the limp form. “Still unconscious. I haven’t been able to take time to do anything for him. As soon as this heading’s stable I’ll give him the meds.”
Teramoto mumbled something, then said, “I don’t want to alarm you, Winin, but the main environmentals blew and we’re running on auxiliaries. They weren’t meant to hold this kind of load for long.” He heard her sigh. “Garrity’s up, too, but we’re both too shaky to fix much. We need you whenever you can come. Amy’s awake, but she’s in pretty bad shape. D’you think she could handle this?”
Winin closed his eyes and drew a deep breath—then regretted it, for the stench of Sanchez’s vomit was still very much present. “Ma’am, if we were anywhere but between a whirlpool and a reef I’d let Amy navigate and I’d come down immediately. But it’s too tricky for a novice.”
“Understood. I wanted you to know the situation. Garry and I will do what we can until you’re free. See you then.”
Twenty minutes passed. Winin fought the crosswaves, kept the course steady, and waited. He didn’t know exactly how wide the reef was, nor how close they were to the whirlpool. He wished he had Sanchez’s data, but when he slipped the other cartridge into the VR slot, nothing happened. Its matrix must have been scrambled when the VR went down.
He needed light to watch the waves and look for the reef, so he called the sun into the eastern sky. But his eyes did not find the reef first, his body did. The wave patterns changed, the interference becoming more and more obvious.
A floaty sailed past. His VR was programmed to picture them as big birds, of no Earth form. Were they overspace life forms? Starships? No one knew. It circled his canoe once, then flapped off away to the north.
Now that Winin had found the reef, he slid from the navigator’s bench into the bottom of the canoe to look at Sanchez. The man’s skin was pale and waxy, his breathing harsh. Shock? Winin peeled back Sanchez’s sleeve and slapped the patches for shock and overspace exposure on the inside of the other navigator’s elbow. At the back of the canoe he relieved himself and brought back a wet towel to clean some of the foulness from Sanchez’s face and chest.
Winin dropped the disgusting towel overboard and climbed with difficulty, because the canoe pitched and rolled so, onto the navigator’s bench. All around the canoe he saw dark patches under the water, sharp rocks to catch his canoe and tear it open. This was the VR’s analog of matter not only below, but above and all around them in space.
“Winin?” Teramoto’s voice sounded even more tired. “Garrity has started to repair the main environmentals. But he’s in bad shape, can’t control the shaking. I’m afraid there’s nerve damage.” Winin remembered how the captain’s hands had trembled as she replaced the nav cards. “The computer won’t come up. Poor old Sally.” There was something tender in her voice—for a computer? For her ship?
“I’ll be there soon. Perhaps you should both rest until I can make it.” What good will I do? I can’t fix machines, electronics, unfeeling, unalive metal and plastic. Why can’t you just leave me to navigate?
Winin pushed hysteria down, hoping it was just an aftereffect of the exposure to overspace. He watched the waves break over sharp reef rocks. He couldn’t afford to lose concentration.
The chaos of waves beneath the canoe strengthened, and Winin could see Teruo gripping the steering paddle hard, putting all his strength into holding the heading. “A little this way. Hold it.” They needed to pull away from the whirlpool now, Winin knew with a sureness born of a lifetime of practice. A little to the west of the course they had been on. The canoe struggled, pitching and rolling. “More sail,” Winin ordered.
“Winin, are we all right?” Teramoto’s voice broke his concentration.
“Yes ma’am.” Winin’s voice betrayed the strain he was under. “Right between the reef and the whirlpool. With luck, we’ll survive them both.” So it wasn’t just his VR, wasn’t just the canoe. The starship was taking a battering.
Winin clutched the navigator’s bench and the line to the sail, while Teruo clung to the steering paddle. The canoe moved at full speed through the rocks, and there were so many of them. Floaties soared and dipped, circling, circling. Winin’s voice cracked as he called directions to Teruo and the rest of his crew, and his arms ached from his efforts in adjusting the sail. The canoe’s timbers creaked, but held. A scrape, just missed a rock.
And then there were fewer rocks, and the insidious pull of the whirlpool’s motion rippled the waves, but no longer tugged the canoe toward its center. The flock of floaties circling the canoe flapped into the sunset. They had crossed the reef and pulled free of the whirlpool.
“Winin to captain. We’re clear, ma’am.” It did seem clear, this side of the reef. So far.
“Thank God. Should I send Amy up?”
“Yes. I’ll give us a new setting, slow way down, and be down in a few minutes.”
“Thank you.”
Now Winin needed the stars again. “VR, nighttime.” The last of the sunset faded from the sky, and Polaris appeared, winking through light clouds at the horizon on their left. “Teruo, set our heading for the Big Dipper.” His arm swung right, pointing. “Easy, easy, hold it there. Now reef the sail and hold this heading.” Winin slid his VR data cartridge into the slot, recorded the new information, and retrieved the cartridge.
“Winin?” Amy
Lolohea said, behind him. The younger navigator’s face was greenish, her eyes dark-smudged, but she stood straight, shoulders back. “I’m ready to take over.”
“Just hold this course, and call me if anything comes up. Watch for rocks; we’ve just passed over the reef. And please, rest yourself.”
“Yes, sir.”
Captain Teramoto hunched over some kind of electronic card, turning it over and over in shaking hands. The stench of burnt plastic, metal, and paint nearly gagged Winin.
The captain looked up when Winin’s bare feet hit the floor at the bottom of the ladder. Her face was as waxy and drawn as Sanchez’s had been, and soot streaked her forehead. “Thank heaven you’re here, Winin. Whatever hit the ship fried the main enviro cards. There’s too much damage there. Until we get an overhaul we’ll have to run on the auxiliaries. One of the aux cards sizzled, it probably kicked in when the mains fried; good thing they’re redundant. You kicked the other aux in when you reset.”
She pushed straggling hair out of her face and further smeared the soot on her forehead. Her eyes were dull with exhaustion. “Problem is, when we put in a new aux card, it blew. And we’d already replaced one during the trip out. We’ve got no spares.”
“What can we do?” Away from the stress of navigating the ship past the whirlpool, Winin realized how weary he had become. Something within him cried just let me sleep now, we can worry about it all later.
“How steady are your hands? These things are LRUs, never designed to be repaired—and we’ll have to repair one.”
Winin looked at the cards in dismay. Electronics! Metal and plastic, unnatural. “I don’t know how to do it,” he said slowly, controlling his reaction. “I’ve never learned electronics.”
“I’ll tell you how,” Chief Engineer Garrity had wriggled out of the repair passageway and now stood behind them, pushing thinning blond hair away from his forehead with sooty fingers. “I’d do it myself, but . . .” He held up the other hand, shaking uncontrollably, to display. “It’s taken me nearly six hours to fix the connection that blew the other card. Too bad those Galaxy drive techs haven’t come around yet. So you’re it, Winin.”
I’ve got to do it, Winin told himself. Will I die here, and kill twelve other people, because I don’t understand electronics? He took a deep breath and turned to Garrity. “Okay. Tell me what to do. Be real specific, because I don’t know what anything is.” He squatted on the steel deck and peered at the bright-colored bits.
“There are actually two main and two auxiliary enviro setups,” explained Garrity. “The main is mostly slag. One aux is fine, the other . . . well, you see it before you. But they’re designed to switch back and forth, so one doesn’t have to take all the load. We want it to work that way; we’ve got days more before we reach the liner, and can’t chance running on just one. I don’t ever want to feel raw overspace again.” A whole body shudder joined the trembling.
“Luckily each card has redundancy, too, so the components on this whole side aren’t needed. It won’t be pretty, but we can rebuild the network outside the card, with wires and components rather than solid state.”
Winin blinked at him. It made sense when he heard it, but his retention wasn’t good. He could not have repeated it back. Redundancy? Rebuild the network?
“Use the microwelder to join the components. Press the button, once, when the components are placed correctly.” Garrity told him how to hold the tiny parts, under a portable magnifier, with tweezers and minuscule clamps, and patiently repeated himself when things fell out, or got in backward, or didn’t touch properly.
Winin looked down at his broad brown fingers. They were too big, too clumsy, meant for pulling ropes or clutching a steering paddle. These little colored insects of parts were too small. But he kept at it, though it took almost an hour.
“There. All together? Plug it into diagnostics.” Garrity rubbed his eyes with dirty hands.
The diagnostic board flashed with red and yellow warnings.
Garrity smothered an obscenity and bent over the screen. “That first warning’s okay. We know card integrity has been breached. What’s this? Short. Open here and here. Unknown factor? Never seen that before. Oh, man.” Disgust colored his voice.
So many errors! But these baffling items, these little pieces of plastic. How could he put them together to make one of these machines?
Winin’s chrono beeped. “Sir? Ma’am? I’d like to check on Amy. She looked pretty bad, and we’re sailing in unknown waters. We should be all right, but . . .”
“Go for it. We’ll rest,” said Teramoto. “We’re all on the ragged edge.” She and Garrity followed Winin up the ladder to the quarters deck.
In the nav tank, Amy’s canoe sailed through seas too peaceful to be true. “Amy, update me. What happened while I was gone?”
“Nothing, Winin. The sea is calm, we continue slowly on a northeasterly heading.” Amy huddled on the navigator’s bench, the sail’s line slack in her hand.
Winin closed his eyes, felt how the canoe rode gently over the waves. He could feel how the reef and the whirlpool, behind and to their right, affected the wave patterns. And, maybe, something up ahead. But too faint yet to tell what it could be, just a minor ripple in the waves. “Have you seen any floaties?”
“None.”
“Continue as you are, then. Call me on Engineering Deck A if anything—I mean anything—happens.” Winin checked Sanchez, who still slept under medication. He breathed more easily and his color was better, so the meds must have helped. Winin left the nav tank again.
He joined the captain and engineer in the galley, where they sipped drinks—alcoholic, by the smell—in tense silence. “We’re okay so far,” Winin told them. “This side of the reef is much calmer; if nothing else comes up I’ll suggest it as a possible route. I’d have to go back and find out what’s on the western end, though. . . .”
Teramoto offered him a drink. “Kick back, Winin, relax. You’ve been through two whole shifts, or more, and overspace besides. Where do you get your energy?”
Winin politely declined the drink, pulling chilled fruit juice from the fridge. “At home, on the ocean in a canoe like those my ancestors sailed, the trips between islands may take weeks. The navigator owns and guides the canoe. I have learned to get by without much sleep for long periods of time. At home, they say you can tell a master navigator by his bloodshot eyes.”
“You people—navigators—amaze me,” said Garrity, his words a little slurred. “Doing something for a starship that even a computer can’t do, a job that requires human reasoning, logic, and decision-making. I could never learn it.”
“And I don’t know electronics. We all have our talents. My ancestors on my mother’s side have been navigators for millennia.” Winin finished his juice and leaned against the cartoon-covered wall of the galley, closing his eyes and pressing the heels of his hands against the lids.
“How’re Amy and Sanchez?” asked Teramoto.
“Amy’s doing fine, and Sanchez looks better,” Winin answered without opening his eyes. “The meds seem to be doing their job. How about the rest of your crew?”
“I had the few who were up drug the rest of ‘em to the eyebrows. Maybe by the time we’re burnt to a frazzle they’ll be feeling well enough to take over from us. But it’ll be a long time until they come around. We’ve got to get the enviro up to speed before that; I doubt we could take another bout with overspace, as fried as we are now.” She swirled the liquid in her glass, then swallowed the last of it.
“Let’s get back to it, then,” said Garrity, gnawing a ragged fingernail. “There are at least five faults we need to correct before we plug the card in and see if the fixes hold under use.”
The repairs were not going well. Winin held the microwelder to a bad connection, then peered at it through a magnifier. “How do you know what to do?” he asked. “You flash this and scrape that, and it works.” He wielded the tiny knife blade clumsily.
“Hey, don�
��t cut that trace on the side. How do I know? Practice. Study. Years of work. You said you handmade your canoe? How do you know how to do that? I wouldn’t have any idea where to begin. There. Done? Plug ‘er in and see how we did.”
The diagnostic board lit again. “That’s the breach of card integrity red, but here’s another open—a different one. How could that be?”
Winin looked at the screen himself. Seven flashing lights—all red. He just wasn’t doing it, had no talent or aptitude for this finicky work. But he had to. If the one remaining enviro card blew, the only buffer between them and raw overspace would be gone. Winin wanted to die at home, on Puluwat, not screaming in a sea of chaos.
He had to do something—but what? “I’d like to check on Amy before we go on. I need a break. My hands . . .” His big, brown hands, usually so steady, were starting to shake with fatigue and frustration.
“Go for it. Wake me up when you come back down. But don’t take too long.” Garrity leaned against a wall and closed his eyes. Teramoto slept curled in the corner.
Winin climbed the ladder slowly, feeling every rung carefully with his feet. What could he do? Every minute he delayed might mean death for himself and twelve others. But he knew what those new mistakes on the diagnostics were. He’d cut too far, or unflashed the wrong connection, or . . . stupid things. Beginner things. Things he’d done in that basic electronics class he had to take so long ago. It was required for anyone wanting a license, but he must have received the lowest grade ever. It had been humiliating. They probably passed him because they looked at his record and said, “Oh, navigator, he’ll never need this.”
But I’m a good navigator, he thought, one of the best, I’ve been told. I love the sea, and even the far different sea of overspace. I just . . . can’t . . . do . . . electronics.
