Trace the Stars

by Nancy Fulda

  He had to pass his stateroom to get to the nav tank. As he went by, he noticed he’d left the door open when he stumbled out, so many hours ago, to find the reset. He could see his bunk from the door, and on it his model canoe. Could he spare a few minutes?

  He settled on the soft blanket, resisting the almost overwhelming urge to curl up on it and sleep, and picked up the canoe. He had made it his last winter at home, when the seas were too rough to sail and he’d finished the overhaul on his big canoe. It was the sort of toy his parents, the “authentic folkways” advocates, loved. He’d twisted the coir twine from coconut husk fibers, carved the hull from a scrap of breadfruit wood, even woven the sail of pandanus. The breadfruit sap glue was still slightly sticky.

  The canoe trembled in his hands, and he stared down at the model, complete in every detail. He’d carved the tiny steering paddle, punched minute holes to lash the hull together, worked with twine as fine as the electrical wire for that cursed enviro card.

  He’d seen tiny replicas of starships—from the big liners he’d navigated for so long to the tiny nine-person courier “squids” like this one—built with loving care by spacers. Some spacers went so far with their passion for similitude that they’d carefully added dents and scratches where the real ships had them. Was it just a hobby, something to while away boring shipboard hours? Or was it a labor of love? When he held this model, checked its lashing, worried about a splitting seam, it was as if he worked on his own canoe back home, a tie to his home, his life.

  Winin was a navigator. No Puluwat navigator had lost a canoe in one hundred and fifty years. He might build a new one, trade his old one away, but he always had his canoe.

  He remembered Captain Teramoto’s face and voice when she said, “Poor Sally.” Was she just thinking of the artificial intelligence in the computer, or was she thinking of her ship? Could it be that spacers felt the same about these plastic and metal conveyances as he did about his canoe?

  He was a wayfinder and a starship navigator, but a navigator was nothing without a ship. And at this moment his ship was the Sally Ride, not a breadfruit-log canoe in Earth’s Pacific ocean. The enviro card he’d sweated over and hated was as much a part of the Sally Ride as the rigging and caulking and sail and mast of his canoe.

  He ran his fingers over the lashings of his model’s hull. Those holes were smaller than the components he tried to assemble on the board, and the lashing twine as fine as the gaily striped wire. Those big fingers had constructed this toy without feeling awkward and incompetent. What was the difference?

  The difference was in Winin. I’m a silly old man, he thought. I’m named for the navigator who discarded the old taboos and rituals, then sailed away—and came back again safe and sound. And yet I won’t accept the electronics that give my occupation new meaning in these days, when sailing a canoe on the oceans of Earth by dead reckoning is an outmoded art. Without starships, without VR and enviro, the art of navigating by the stars, by the feel of the waves and the current on the hull, would have been lost.

  This ship, this Sally Ride, is as much mine as my canoe at home. I must embrace her. Would I neglect the rigging on my canoe because I didn’t want to fix it? Never. But I don’t want to fix the enviro. Or didn’t. . . .

  Winin dropped the canoe on the blankets and hurried out the door, along the companionway, down the ladder. Garrity snored, collapsed against a wall, in the engineering bay. Winin wished he could fix the card without waking the man. Garrity’s skin was pale, his eyelids bruised-looking, his hair sweat-sticky and awry.

  “Engineer?” He shook Garrity’s shoulder gently, then with some urgency. “Garrity? I’m back. We’ve got to fix this card.”

  Garrity groaned, pushed himself up. “Is there any water around? My mouth tastes like . . . well, I’d rather not say.”

  Winin took a squeeze bottle from the tiny fridge built into the wall.

  “Oh, yes.” Garrity held the cold plastic to his forehead, his eyes. “Feels wonderful.” He squirted some into his mouth, then into his cupped palms and rubbed it over his grimy face.

  Without a word Winin handed him a towel.

  “Well, I may be back from the dead. Now, where were we?”

  “The faults on the board.”

  “Yes.” Garrity scowled. “What a disaster.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Garrity shrugged and studied the screen, chewing a ragged fingernail. “Okay, let’s try this again.”

  “I have an idea,” said Winin. “Let’s start over, on the other damaged card, and have you explain this to me as if you never had before. I’m tired and cranky and so are you, and we may have been working at cross purposes before, despite ourselves.”

  “Ok-a-ay,” Garrity drew the word out in a long drawl.

  They plugged the other damaged card into the diagnostic console. Winin listened intently as Garrity explained what each fault code meant, how each component worked. Just as he had found analogies for the bizarre happenings of overspace, given each of them an analog his VR software could translate into something familiar, now he tried to do the same with the components on this board. And he repeated back to Garrity each concept as he understood it.

  “Now you’ve got it, man,” said the engineer. “Let’s go to, because that enviro card’s been workin’ overtime for hours now. Let’s start with that open.”

  As Winin worked, Captain Teramoto awoke. Garrity found her another water bottle and towel, and when Winin looked up for his next instructions she had scrubbed most of the soot from her face and hands.

  “Still at it? You’ve got a lot of stamina.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Does talking bother you while you’re working?”

  “No, at home we all sit in the canoe house, twining cord or working on the canoes, gossiping all the while. I like to talk while I work.” Winin hit the remove button on the microwelder and a bit of offending plastic disappeared.

  “Tell me about your island. I’ve never been out to the Pacific.”

  “Since we’re one of the ‘Living Past’ islands, there are very few modern structures. The apartment buildings and grocery stores erected there in the early 2000s were razed, and we built it all back up with traditional houses. The people who just can’t stand not having Coke and Vids, usually the teenagers, leave. I did. But we come back.”

  Teramoto said, “My ancestors were Japanese, but I’ve never been there. I grew up in America, in Arizona.”

  Winin asked, “Have you always wanted to go to space?” He squinted at the card, then remembered the magnifier and used it.

  “Since my earliest years. The stories we’d hear—they sounded so romantic. I toyed with the idea of becoming a navigator, but I wanted my own ship. Sally is my dream come true.” Winin looked up at her, saw her caress the cold metal wall and shake her head, smiling gently.

  “That’s how my canoe is. It’s part of me. I built it—with my apprentices, of course—but all the design, the new ideas for a swifter hull, all are mine. So I know its strengths, its weaknesses.”

  “Yes. It . . . it hurts to have Sally damaged like this. Especially the computer. She’s built up quite a personality.”

  The cheeky computer, thought Winin. Another facet of the captain’s mind.

  “Okay, Garrity, it’s done. Please look at it under the magnifier and see if it’s good.” This time he’d tried hard, seen it as part of an almost living organism, the Sally whom Captain Teramoto loved. With the disappearance of his reluctance, the job had flowed smoothly.

  Garrity leaned over the magnifier, nose almost touching its glass. “Good,” he grunted to himself, “clean one here, good connection, cut that bridge, yes.” He pulled back and studied the entire thing. “Looks like a nightmare, but this time should do it.”

  The diagnostics ran, and only one line of red type flickered across the screen. Card integrity breached.

  “Yo! Now we can plug her in and see if she really works.” Garrity’s face looked
more alive than it had since the overspace accident.

  “Here, let me,” said Teramoto. She took the card and crawled into the hole in the floor.

  “What if it doesn’t work? Will we lose our protection from overspace?” Winin was reluctant to experience that again; it would probably incapacitate the other two.

  “No,” answered Garrity, “The other circuit will kick back in immediately.” He crouched over the diagnostic screen, keying in responses to the overall diagnostics test. “I miss the computer. It’s easier to ask her to run the test. Good thing I remember how to do this myself.”

  Winin and Teramoto stood behind him, watching the screen. “Okay, here we are.” He pointed to one of the tiny images on the screen. “Here’s the dead main enviro—and some auxiliary damage we’ll have to sort out later. Here’s the aux—damn! Still running on one circuit.”

  “Is it the damaged or undamaged circuit?” asked Teramoto.

  “The undamaged. It tries to transfer—see, the other one flickers, but doesn’t come up, and it goes back to the undamaged one. This is even harder on it than running straight. What can be wrong that the diagnostics didn’t catch?”

  Winin had an idea. “There’s a lot of soot around, from the damaged systems. You two have it all over your faces and hands. If some of that got on the card, or in the slot, would it affect its performance?”

  “Yeah, probably. Okay, Garrity, pull that thing again. Winin, get an air can and some swabs from that workbox. Good. Here’s the contact cleaner. Blow the slot clean, then swab that sucker down.”

  Winin wedged his bulk into the passageway and carefully cleaned the slot from which Garrity had pulled the repaired card. The first swab came out black. He tossed it behind him, out of the hole.

  Garrity’s voice came, muffled, to his ears. “Look at that carbon—filthy.”

  Winin patiently ran damp swabs through the slot time after time until one came out clean. He felt a tap on his back, and backed out of the passageway. Teramoto handed him the card.

  “Here, I’ve cleaned the contacts. You wanna push it in, Winin? This is your baby, you know.”

  “If you think I wouldn’t damage it, ma’am.” Winin felt a thrill of accomplishment, silly for a man his age.

  “Just be sure none of those components you welded on touch anything. Hey, Garrity, you got anything nonconducting we can slip in there to shield those components?”

  Garrity handed Winin a fibrous sheet. “That can go in between.”

  Winin crawled back into the cramped passage, rounding his shoulders to fit. He guided the card into its slot, and slipped the sheet between his carefully constructed fix and the next card.

  “Do I need to apply pressure to make sure it’s seated?”

  “Might be a good idea. Don’t push too hard.”

  Winin did that, backed out of the passageway, and stood, suddenly feeling the tension in his shoulders, neck and back. He stretched, easily touching the ceiling, and rotated his shoulders.

  Garrity ran through diagnostics again, and this time the tiny pictures on the screen showed the two aux enviro systems alternating as they should. “We did it! Now we can get some sleep!”

  “But Winin, what about the navigation? You’re pretty far gone, and Amy didn’t look like she could take much more. Tevi’s drugged to the eyebrows, and Sanchez . . . ?” Teramoto turned her drawn, tired face to him in dismay.

  “Don’t worry. I told you, in the Pacific I’ve navigated canoes for weeks at a stretch. I’ve learned to sleep on the bench, snatch an hour here and an hour there. The nav couch is more comfortable than my canoe’s bench.” Winin did not feel tired. Exhilaration buoyed him. It was as if he had been in prison, and the doors had opened to free him. “You sleep, ma’am, sir. Don’t worry about the navigation—that’s what I do.”

  Sanchez stirred in his couch and muttered something when Winin stepped back into the nav tank. Winin bent over him, noted that his color was better and his body no longer twitched. “Are you awake, Sanchez?” he asked. No response.

  Amy looked terrible, her face gray, her hair sweat-soaked. But she was alert, holding the line to the sail taut and watching the waves and the horizon.

  The canoe was running into trouble. Luminous gray clouds filled the sky, boiling across the ocean with alarming speed. He didn’t have to ask if the whirlpool was still to the right; the choppy waves broke in a pattern that showed its presence.

  “Have you had any trouble?”

  “No, Winin. But had this storm got much worse, I would have called you.” Amy bit her lip and shook her head. “I can’t stay awake much longer.”

  “How long have we skirted the whirlpool?”

  “Forty-two minutes.”

  “Rest now. I’ll take over.”

  Amy saved her settings and dropped her cartridge into a coverall pocket. The corners of her mouth quirked in a smile as she slid out of the couch, and she saluted Winin from the doorway. He saluted back.

  Winin had never taught wayfinding to women—not because he didn’t think women could do it, but because it wasn’t traditional. Maybe it was time for one old navigator to break with another tradition.

  Winin turned his attention back to his surroundings. The Sally Ride sailed through unknown waters. Though he had memorized the hazards of the route south of the reef and the whirlpool, now they sailed on the northern side. His VR interpreted whatever lay ahead as a storm; it could be a real overspace “storm” or a permanent hazard that manifested in a similar way. No matter. He would note it, remember it—and deal with it.

  “What hit me?” A slurred voice broke his concentration. Sanchez was awake.

  “Enviro failed, and we spent some real time in overspace.” Winin turned to look at the other navigator. Sanchez stared around, wide-eyed, at the waves and the clouds.

  “Get me outta this mess. This crazy canoe bouncing around like this is gonna make me barf. Again.” Sanchez started unfastening the couch restraints.

  “I’ll need your help. Go to the head, clean yourself up, take more meds if you need them, but return to the other couch.”

  “Hey, I’m sick. I need to lie down in my quarters. I can’t help anyway—I never learned navigation in a canoe.” He went to the sink in the head, splashed water on his face.

  “If you ever want to navigate again, you’ll return to your post once you’ve cleaned up.”

  Something in Winin’s voice—the voice of a Master Navigator to a student—must have got through to Sanchez; he paused in his toweling of his hair and clothing to stare up at Winin. “Yes, sir.” His tone was actually respectful.

  Winin returned to his problem; finding out where they were, keeping on some kind of course, and weathering the storm. As long as the canoe came around the whirlpool and paralleled the reef, he could figure out where they were, but if the storm dashed them onto either of them. . . .

  The canoe responded sluggishly to Winin’s commands. “Teruo, more to the north, a little more, there.” He could still sense the reef, a perturbation in the waves to one side, but it was less of a danger at this distance.

  “How’n’hell can you tell where you are? Where’s your star map?” Sanchez had returned to his seat in the canoe and swabbed it, and the deck, with a towel.

  “The computer’s down—damaged by the enviro failure.”

  “Then how do you know where to go?”

  “I have the VR’s output, converted from the raw overspace input by the nav computer. I have wind, and sea, and stars. I know roughly where we were before the AI was disabled, and I’ve seen the star map. What more do I need?”

  Sanchez shook his head, mouthing, “Crazy wayfinder,” and slid into his couch.

  “Did your master never teach you to navigate without the star map?”

  “Why should I? If the star map’s there, use it. No reason to deprive myself of a tool.”

  Winin thought, for a long moment. The man was insolent, perhaps incompetent. But he was all Winin had. “I will t
each you wayfinding.”

  Winin began as he did for his students, reciting the coordinates from Earth to the Maelstrom. “Under the rising of the Big Dipper to Beck’s Star, follow the Eridani reef, keeping to the west side, under the rising of Cassiopeia to Epsilon Eridani. Then, still under the rising of Cassiopeia, keep to the east of Elliot’s Pool until you sight Timani, then steer west of Timani, east of Little Blight, to Michuk. Then a long run under the rising of Cassiopeia to Kappa Reticuli, with Sarat Reef to the west halfway through the route. From Kappa, under the rising of Gamma Aquilae to the outskirts of the Maelstrom, then south of the Great Reef, well out so as to miss the Whirlpool. This is the route we have traveled thus far in this canoe. We have been thrown off our route, but we still have coordinates. This reef is an excellent landmark. Dangerous, but useful.”

  “Reef?” Sanchez seemed to be trying to understand Winin’s explanation. “How can you tell we’re near the reef?”

  “Look to your right. The waves are choppy, there is a darkness beneath them.”

  “Is that what we hit? It happened so fast, I never saw anything.” Sanchez sounded uneasy, but perhaps that was the pitching of the boat.

  “One of the rocks in the reef, or perhaps a floaty. Flocks of them circled the ship as we crossed the reef to escape the whirlpool.” Winin returned his attention from the other navigator to the waves and sky.

  “Crossed the reef to escape the whirlpool? Oh, man, I’m glad I slept through it.” His voice shook.

  For the next two days Winin taught wayfinding to Sanchez. Teaching came naturally to him. As in his canoe in the Pacific, he ate when he was hungry, slept when he could, always feeling the waves beneath the canoe and watching the stars. Amy came to relieve him but he sent her away to watch Tevita.

  Sanchez seemed content to lie in his couch, watching and listening. He slept, ate. Sometimes he asked questions, which Winin answered in detail. He seemed fascinated, no longer surly and belligerent.

  “You can see how the storm behind us agitates the waves. But we don’t need those waves. Look to the reef, how it spreads out here. It’s dangerous, even though the rocks are farther apart, for there are more of them. We skirt it, head north until the dark places no longer show under the waves. Can you do that?” There comes a time when a student has to navigate for himself.