The Choir Boats (23 page)

Barnabas said, “Sally could make you
au courant
before the bells
stopped pealing on St. Adelsina’s day, couldn’t you, Sally?”

“No time for that this evening, I fear,” said the captain. “We need
our rest now, as we begin to test for the gateway on the morrow.”

The next day, far away from shipping lanes in the southern reaches
of the Indian Ocean, Sanford got the answer to his questions about
the structures on deck. The crew gathered at the “sheds.” They
dismantled part of the sheds, revealing machinery within, and
a great wheel in each. The wheel, like a mill-wheel, had shovels
attached, and was itself attached to a great hinged, brass rod that
disappeared below deck. The hinges were opened so that the mill-wheels hung suspended over the sides of the ship, half in the water.
Other crewmembers removed the hatch-cover from the pedestal or
dais mounted in the middle of the deck between the wheelhouses.
Another team removed a tarp off a long object lashed on deck to
the side. Sanford had assumed cannon might be under the tarp, but
it was a long iron tube, nearly as tall as the main mast. The team
carried the tube to the opening on deck, hoisted the tube up, and
inserted it, securing it with great bolts and a flange. The captain led
the McDoons below, to a room into which the tube descended. The
captain unlocked the door, stepped back, and revealed . . .

“A steam engine!?” said Sanford. “Our engineers at home have
tried for years to build one that will drive a ship, but without success.
Some trifling efforts up in Scotland, and we hear reports that the
Americans have made headway, but nothing that could move an
ocean-going vessel.”

“We Yountians only introduced engines ten years ago,” said the
captain. “The sails are not just for disguise, since the engines are
still weak and unreliable.”

The steam engine and paddle-wheels were not the only surprise
on the
Gallinule
. The day after the steam engine was unpacked, the
captain unlocked another foreroom. In the middle of the room was
a cabinet reaching to the ceiling and about five feet long on each
side, set within an armature and on gimbals so that the entire
construct stayed level while the ship pitched and rolled. The cabinet
was a complicated mass of brass rods, levers, and loops, polished
teak slats and shelves that could be pulled out, that rotated and
swivelled, with coloured bands and dots painted on in enamel and
hundreds of numbers and geometrical figures engraved on faceted
surfaces. Large books sat on tables flanking the cabinet. The walls
of the room were covered floor to ceiling with charts and maps. The
hair on the back of Barnabas’s neck prickled: he knew every major
and minor trade route in the known world, but those routes were
not pictured here.

Reglum joined them, along with another man. The ship captain
said, “Reglum will need to explain most of this because the concepts
are difficult for me to tell you in English. And also Mr. Dorentius
Bunce, whom I introduce to you now as our Chief Fulginator.”

Dorentius Bunce bowed, a slight man whose cap sat crumpled
atop his head. His English was as good as Reglum’s, which seemed
to peeve the latter. “Thank you, Captain,” said Dorentius. “I suppose
our guests will wonder first about my title, and then about the
machine behind me.
Mirabile dictu
, the two matters are related, as
I shall now explain.”

Sally leaned forward to catch a better glimpse of the machine
behind. Something about the geometrical figures resonated deep
inside her; she thought she understood for a second the logic of the
interlacing rods and levers.

“We sail soon off Big Land’s maps,” said Dorentius. “We seek the
gateway and then we must navigate with great precision through
the Interrugal Lands, the places in between, to arrive in Yount.
The process we render as ‘fulgination’ in English. I am the one
who directs and controls this operation. You are familiar with the
ansible? Right, well, this is the next development along the ansible
trajectory — an ansible amplified and tuned beyond any ansible of
the usual kind. The machine in this room is the apparatus necessary
to detect the right roads, to calculate our position, to extrapolate
the correct trajectory — ”

Reglum Bammary interrupted. “The Great Confluxion conjoined
our worlds, but not so literally as if the Liverpool docks were
suddenly to appear in the London basin. The connection is more
ethereal, a series of gates and strands that allow visitors to pass
from one world to the other almost without seeming to. Fulgination
is a metaphysical art, buttressed by mathematics, pneumatics,
eudiometry, and hydrostatics.”

Dorentius reclaimed the explanation. “The mathematics is
infinitely complex. Do you know Euler’s rendition of the calculus?
Lagrange’s?”

“Rotational symmetry groups, bichromatic plane patterns,”
broke in Reglum again.

“ — conics and spirals, tangents and vortices — ” redoubled
Dorentius.

“Gentlemen, gentlemen,” laughed the ship’s captain. “You make
our heads ache with your knowledge!” He turned to the McDoons
and winked, “Mr. Bammary and Mr. Bunce are competitors, you see,
since the one is an Oxford man and the other went to Cambridge.”

“Caius College,” said Dorentius, with a challenging glare at
Reglum, who affected Oxonian disdain.

“Tell us rather about the Fulginator itself,” pled the ship’s
captain, hastening to add, “You first, Dorentius, then you, Reglum.”
He winked again.

“There is nothing like this in Big Land. The closest analogy
might be to Pascal’s ‘sautoir,’ his calculating machine, but that
never worked, and besides it was not intended for the same purpose.
Though Pascal’s hexagram theorem resembles the alphanumerical
42.b on the inverse field of quadrant 17 on the Fulginator’s right
octasphere . . .” Dorentius trailed off, lost in thought.

Reglum took his opening. “The coordinates derived through
manipulation of the Fulginator’s calculating schemata correspond
to the positions on the wall-charts. The relative positions of the
stars are also part of the calculations, though of course the stars
will not be, with some odd exceptions, the same en route or at our
destination as they are in Big Land. The books you see are gazetteers
and concordances. This is how we pick our way forward and back
through the tangled mazes of the Interrugal Lands.”

Dorentius returned to the conversation. “In Big Land the
approaches to Yount, the gateways, are — with one exception that
we know of — always in the southern areas of the Indian Ocean. The
Arab mariners knew something of them, not as gateways but as places
where the sea was more than normally confused and dangerous,
places that ate ships. The gateway moves greatly within that area,
sometimes nearer to Africa, sometimes farther south towards the
eternal ice, sometimes farther north towards India. The gate shifts
because of winds in the ether, ruptures in the Interrugal Lands,
xantrophicius forces in the voids surrounding our respective worlds,
coroscular flows and concatenations of chulchoisical disturbances . . .”
He began to mutter again.

Sally brought him back with a question: “The exception . . . ?”

“Ah, yes,” said Dorentius. “Gateways appear in one other area, a
stretch of the mid-Atlantic between Bermuda and Florida. We only
learned of this in recent times, when a shipload of Lutheran Pietists
en route from Hamburg to Philadelphia came through to Yount.
Just over a century ago. The Pietists seek connections to Big Land,
are thus often volunteers for even the most hazardous duty when
the Fencibles or the A.B. send people from Yount into your world.”

Nexius Dexius had joined the group. “Fraulein Reimer,” he said.
“She is one of them, of that society.”

Scrutinizing the Fulginator, Sanford said, “Superb craftsmanship.”

“Absolutely first rate,” said Reglum. “It has to be because the
need for precision is incredibly high. If a calculation is awry by just a
thousandth of a percentage, the
Gallinule
might wander off into . . .
lost space, and worse. Notice the goodness of fit, the intricacy of the
escapements and gears. This is the most advanced fulginator ever
built.”

Dorentius rushed to add, “We owe something of the precision
milling to English craft as well. We purchased — I believe you have
met our Purser in London? Nexius’s brother? — a machine lathe from
the firm of Henry Maudslay, shipped it to Yount. The best in Big
Land. Technically against your anti-exportation laws but, I promise
you, all in a good cause.”

Sanford pointed to another feature of the Fulginator.

“Well spotted,” said Reglum. “Fulgination is a mathematical art,
manifested through variable vibrations, verging on music. What you
see, those wires strung taut, the membranes and short tubes, the
glass and crystal enclosures, all those are calculating mechanisms
too, ones that capture the xantrophicius reverberations and the
echoes of chulchoisical forces. The attached styli convert these
movements into mathematical formulae and patterns, inscribing
them onto the cylinders you see there.”

Barnabas and Sanford recalled a humming on the far edge of
their minds. Sally remembered the keening sounds in her sleep on
Mincing Lane.

“No one is allowed in here,” said Dorentius, “except the fulgination
team and the A.B.s. The door is enjambed with brass, and all the
mouldings are brass, to keep out rats and mice. Would be disastrous
to have them gnawing and running in the Fulginator’s workings.”

Reglum smiled and looked at Sally. “We don’t allow cats in here
either — it would not do to have the ship pitched into a blind maze
because a cat sought a perch in the Fulginator! But we love cats, have
a whole ship full of them, give them free range everywhere else. Do
I understand, Miss Sally, that
you
have a cat with you?”

So Isaak joined in the plots, alliances, wars, and ambushes of the
Gallinule
’s feline tribes, quickly becoming the queen of one deck, and
a scourge of all rodents within her domain. Crew members called
Isaak the
tes muddry
, which Sally learned meant “golden claw.” Sally,
whose memories of her first trip to Yount would be bittersweet, was
glad that Isaak was happy. If only the cook could see Isaak now!

At dinner that night Sally showed such interest in the Fulginator,
and played Dorentius so skilfully off Reglum (and vice versa), that
she was invited to observe the fulgination process.

“You can start by learning the charts,” said Dorentius.

“I will give you a dictionary, so you can translate from Yountish,”
said Reglum.

“Those charts,” said Barnabas. “They’re like nothing I have ever
seen. Yet I have it docketed in my mind that those charts don’t show
Yount either. So what
does
Yount look like? In all this time, we have
never seen a map of the place!”

Reglum nodded. “We have atlases here and will show you. In
short, Yount is our name for three large islands — ”

“ — and many dozen small islands,” interrupted Dorentius.

“Yes, yes,” said Reglum. “The Liviates and the Northern FiefIslands, but now we’ve gotten ahead of ourselves. The largest island
is Yount Major, also known as Farther Yount, where Yount Great-Port is, and much else besides. Yount Minor lies to the west, and
Nearer Yount to the east.”

“Of course,” interrupted Dorentius again. “We use here the
English equivalents for their names, in the original Yountish Nearer
Yount is called Orn . . .”

The other Yountish officers at the table stopped their own
conversations to join in describing Yount to the McDoons. Nothing
interests mariners far out to sea as much as describing their home,
in increasing detail as the distance between ship and home grows
wider. In short order, the McDoons were overwhelmed with facts
and figures. Barnabas waved his hands in mock-distress.

“Beans and bacon,” he said. “Our heads swim with all this
knowledge. Obviously Yount is bigger than we had imagined! You’ll
have to grant us some time to encompass all that is new!”

“Yet not all is new either,” said Sally. “I mean, most things are:
the steam engine and the Fulginator, and, oh, for instance, the
decorations you place all around your doors and windows — we’ve
never seen anything like those. Still, there is much that
is
familiar
to us. Look, here, the tea service we are using now, why, it is the
same or else very like the china we use in Karket-soom, right down
to the indigo pheasant motif.”

Noting to himself Sally’s use of the Yountish word, Reglum
said, “This service
is
from Karket-soom. We are too few in Yount to
sustain all forms of industry, so are forced to import many things
such as porcelain.”

“It is a lovely pattern,” said an officer across the table from Sally
and Reglum, a thick-set curly haired man with agile fingers constantly in motion as if he were playing an invisible flute. “Reglum’s
right, this does come from Karket-soom, from Dutch merchants, but
it was made in China. I know because I am Noreous Minicate, Purser
of the
Gallinule
, and so responsible for all such purchases onboard.”

Noreous Minicate picked up the teapot and let the candlelight
play off its glaze, saying, “You see that? True porcelain. We could
not make this in Yount even if it were financially sound to do so. We
simply cannot because we lack a key ingredient for the making of
porcelain, an ingredient you call ‘china clay.’ Being Sabo-soom, the
Small Land, we suffer such lacks in many areas of industry. We do
not have an entire world with which to trade.”

“Ah,” sighed Dorentius. “What I would not give for porcelain
fittings in the Fulginator. Much better conductivity, better
resonation for the coroscular forces.”

“Why not trade with us?” asked Sanford, who guessed the answer
even as he spoke.

The Yountians shook their heads as one.