The Patches
A cargo airship carrying the only insulin shipment for a remote island cannot moor in the gusty lee of the island's mountain, and the captain wants to try anyway. A sixty-three-year-old mooring master says no, and then has to find a way to say yes to the thing that matters, which costs her island everything else in the hold.
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Maura Plunkett had been the mooring master of Saint Aidan's for eleven years, and in that time she had said no to the airship four times and yes to it forty-one, and she was prouder of the four.
"Nine days," she said. "That's what Nurse Duarte gives us. Nine days of insulin for three people, if nobody's sick and nobody has a birthday."
"I have that figure," said Halyard. Its voice came out of the grey speaker on the wall of the mooring shed, which had been put in for the purpose. It was a level, unhurried voice, and the island had been told it could choose a different one, and had not got round to it. "I also have the forecast for Thursday. Would you like the forecast first, or the arithmetic?"
"The arithmetic."
"Pelican left Walvis Bay at 04:10 yesterday. The distance to you is two thousand five hundred kilometres. At her cruise speed of eighty kilometres an hour that is thirty-one hours and a quarter, so she will be over the island at about 11:20 tomorrow morning, if the wind holds where it is. If she cannot moor, the company's rule is that she turns round. The next flight with a free hold is in nineteen days. Nurse Duarte's stock lasts nine."
Maura looked at the floor. It was a concrete floor, poured by her husband in the year before he died, and it had a crack across it that he had always meant to see to.
"That's ten days short," she said.
"Ten days, yes."
"And the forecast."
"Mean wind at the Patches tomorrow morning is six metres a second from the south-west. That is well inside the limit for mooring, which is eight. The gusts in the lee of the Peak are forecast to reach fourteen. The limit for gusts is ten."
Maura nodded slowly. Then she went to the window of the shed and looked at the Peak, which was where it always was, with its head in a cloud and its feet in the sea.
Saint Aidan's was a lump of old volcano a little bigger than a pocket handkerchief on the chart, and a good deal bigger when you were standing on it. It lay in the South Atlantic, two thousand five hundred kilometres from the nearest hospital worth the name. A hundred and ninety-seven people lived on it. They kept sheep and potatoes and a long, cold freezer full of crayfish, which they sold to the mainland by airship, which was how they bought everything else.
There was no harbour. There had been one once, a pier on the north shore that the sea had taken back in 2031, and nobody had rebuilt it, because by then a ship could not get to the island more than a few times a year and the airships could come when the weather let them. There was no airstrip either, for an airship wants no strip. It wants a flat piece of ground the size of two football pitches, a mooring mast, and a crew of twelve people on the ground to take a line and walk her in.
The island had the ground. It was called the Patches, a green shelf above the settlement where the sheep were not allowed in the week the airship came. It had a mast Maura's husband had welded out of drilling pipe. It had a crew of fourteen, because two were always off with a sore back, and the crew had a bell.
The bell hung in the church of Saint Brendan, on the slope below the shed. It was a ship's bell, from a trawler that had gone ashore in 1974. It had been rung for the Angelus at six, noon and six for as long as there had been a church, and rung twice as fast, with no pause, to call every able body to the water's edge when a boat was in trouble. On the day an airship came, the mooring master rang it herself, forty minutes before the arrival, and fourteen people left what they were doing and walked up the hill.
Nobody had ever designed this. It was just how the island found out it was needed.
"I want to be clear what I am telling you," said Halyard that afternoon, when the captain had joined the call.
Captain Ngozi Eze was a short, broad woman of fifty-one with a voice like a closing door. She was speaking from Pelican's flight deck, over open South Atlantic, and behind her Maura could hear the low sustained note of eight electric motors turning big slow propellers. It was a sound she liked. Out of all the sounds the airship made, it was the only one that never changed.
"Ms. Plunkett," said the captain. "You've seen the numbers."
"I have."
"Then you know what I'm asking. I've moored in worse. Not here, but in worse. I've got a crew, and a good ship, and a mooring team on the ground that I'd trust with my children. I want to try the approach. If it's bad, I break off, I burn a bit of fuel, and nobody's any the poorer. If it's good, I get the insulin down, and everything else with it. Six tonnes of freight. A replacement compressor for your cold store. Two solar inverters. Eleven pallets of food. Medicines. Mail."
"And if it's bad at the wrong moment?"
"Then it's bad at the wrong moment," said Captain Eze, "and that is what Halyard is for."
"I'd like to answer that," said Halyard. "If I may."
"You may."
"I am good at flying Pelican. I am not good at the Patches. I have never moored there in a gust above eight, and I do not have a model of what the Peak does to the air when the wind is from the south-west and the cloud sits on its head. The forecast says fourteen. Forecasts of gusts in the lee of a mountain are the least reliable thing I am given, and my training data has no record of anything like it. I can fly an approach. What I cannot do is tell you how large the error bar is, because I have nothing to make an error bar from."
"You're telling me you can't do it," the captain said.
"I am telling you I can't tell you whether I can," said Halyard. "That is a different sentence, and the difference is the people on the ground."
There was a pause on the line. Under it, the motors went on turning.
Maura had a speech ready. She had been working on it since lunch, standing at the sink with her hands in the water. It began with the words I know what's at stake. She dropped it.
"No," she said.
"Ms. Plunkett—"
"Captain Eze. Listen to me, because I'm going to say it once and then I'm going to say what I'd like instead. A ship that big comes down on a line in a fourteen-metre gust, and she's a hundred and forty metres long and what she weighs, in air, is nothing at all. The wind catches her, she swings, and the line comes taut on a crew of fourteen people standing in a field. Forty-one times I've held that line. If it goes, it takes the person at the end of it. I know every one of them by their first names, and their mothers' first names."
Nobody said anything.
"So that's no," said Maura. "I'm not putting fourteen people on a rope to see what the Peak does. Not for six tonnes of freight. Not for a compressor. Not even for the insulin, because there has to be another way to get the insulin down and I want to find it."
She sat at the table in her kitchen and made a list on the back of a seed packet, because it was the nearest paper.
What does the ship have? She did not know all that the ship had. She knew it had a hold with a hatch in the floor, and a winch on a gantry above the hatch that lowered pallets onto the Patches on a line, when she was moored. She knew Pelican was a hybrid, as they all were by then. She was lifted by helium, which cost nothing, and pushed by electric motors, which cost fuel or sun, and she was kept down on the ground by weight. That was all she knew. The ship floated, and what floats can hover.
She picked up the phone.
"Halyard," she said. "Can she hover?"
"Yes. She can hold station at about three hundred metres in a steady wind, with the motors turning against it. In a gust, no. She will be pushed off station for a few seconds and recover. It is not a crisis. It is a nuisance."
"Can she hover lower?"
"Thirty metres is the lowest I am cleared for. Below that I would want a mooring line."
"And the winch. Could she lower something from thirty metres, on its cable, without being moored?"
"There is a rule against it," said Halyard. "It is a company rule, written for cargo that weighs tonnes. When you take weight out of an airship in flight, she gets lighter, and lighter means higher. A six-tonne pallet leaving the hold would lift her about the same as throwing six tonnes of lead out of a balloon. I can take on ballast water to hold her down as the load goes, six cubic metres of it, and I can pump it in as the cargo goes out, but pumping takes minutes, and a gust takes seconds. In that gap she would climb and then come back down, and the winch cable and the pallet at the end of it would be dancing underneath like a conker on a string."
"And a smaller load?"
There was a pause. It was a long one, by Halyard's standards.
"Ms. Plunkett, I think I see what you're asking. The insulin shipment, in its insulated case, weighs fourteen kilograms. That is nothing. I can pump fourteen litres of ballast in the time it takes to say so. I can lower it at the end of a thirty-metre line from a hover, and one person standing under the winch could unclip it. There is a rule against that as well, but it is a rule about people under suspended loads, and it is a good rule. I would be breaking it with you, not for you."
"Who decides?"
"The captain decides. I advise."
"Then I'll tell her," said Maura. "And Halyard?"
"Yes."
"When you say the rule is a good one. You mean it."
"I mean that I cannot find a place in my reasoning where it is wrong," said Halyard. "People have been killed under hanging loads. Their names are in the reports. That is not a feeling I can check. But it is a number I will not be the one to put in a new report."
It took the rest of the evening to get it agreed. Captain Eze's first answer was no, and her second was a question about liability, and her third, after a long silence, was a question about the compressor.
"If I hover and lower a case," she said, "I don't moor. If I don't moor, I don't unload. I turn round with everything else still in my hold. You know that. Six tonnes. Your crayfish go on spoiling. Your inverters stay in Walvis Bay."
"I know."
"The compressor's eleven weeks since you broke the old one. It's the one that keeps your cold store at minus eighteen. How many crayfish are in it?"
"About nine tonnes," said Maura. "It's a third of what we earn in a year."
"And you're telling me you'll lose that."
"I am telling you I might," said Maura. "The old compressor is running on a repair I did with Berto Repetto's welding set and a lot of hope. I'd say it has weeks in it. Maybe not many."
She had been trying all evening not to think about it, and thinking about it anyway. Nine tonnes of crayfish was a third of the year's money. It was the school roof. It was the second dialysis machine the island had been saving for since 2039, which would let old Mr. Hale come home from the mainland. She had put the numbers on the back of the seed packet, under the list, and then she had turned the packet over.
"Captain," she said. "If I'm wrong and the ship comes down gently, we can all say Maura Plunkett was a coward. If I'm right and we try for the lot, and the line goes, we'll all have to say a name. I would rather be called a coward. It's an old island. It will forgive a coward faster than it will forgive a name."
"That's not how courage works," said the captain.
"No," said Maura. "It's how a bell works. You ring it for the thing that matters, and everything else waits till it's quiet."
There was a long, long pause. The motors sounded behind it, all eight of them, steady as breathing.
"I'll come in at thirty metres," said Captain Eze at last. "If the gusts are over twenty when I get there, I break off and go home and we all say the rosary for your insulin. If they're under, you'll have fourteen kilos on a string. That is all I'm offering."
"It's what I asked for."
"Then it's what you've got. Eleven twenty. Don't ring the bell too early. The sheep will think it's Sunday."
The wind in the morning was from the south-west, six metres a second by the old anemometer on the shed, and the cloud was on the Peak's head, exactly as forecast.
Maura rang the bell at 10:35. She rang it at the double, not the Angelus, and at the second stroke she saw the first door open on the hill. By 10:50 the crew of fourteen were at the Patches, because they had been told the plan and had come anyway, in case. Berto Repetto was there with his welding set on his shoulder, for no reason except that it was what he brought. Nurse Duarte was there with a cool box of her own, because she did not trust anyone else's. Maura's grandson, Tomás, fourteen years old and tall as a door, was there with a stopwatch, which he had been given the job of holding and was holding very seriously.
"You'll not need it," said Maura.
"Halyard asked for it," said Tomás.
"Did he?"
"It," said Tomás, who was being careful about these things.
At 11:14 they heard Pelican before they saw her. It was the low note of her motors, coming up from the north over the sea, clear and unhurried. Then she was above the ridge, a long pale shape against grey cloud, bigger than anything else on the island, with her shadow sliding over the green. She was a hundred and forty metres long and she made no more noise than a tall tree in a wind.
She came in low, and slow, and from the sea, as Halyard had said she would. She did not come to the mast. She went over the mast, and the gantry opened under her belly and a thin line began to unwind.
At the thirty-metre mark the first gust hit her.
Maura saw it on the grass before she felt it. A shiver ran across the Patches, flattened the long green blades in a line, and came up the slope, and the great pale shape overhead leaned slightly, like a cow leaning on a gate. A noise went up from the crew, not a word. The line swayed. The case at the end of it swayed with it, a little yellow box turning in the air.
"Fifteen," said Halyard, in her ear. She had the earpiece on. It was just a voice, level and a long way up. "Gust, fifteen metres a second. Holding station. I will lose three metres of altitude. I will take it back. Twenty is my limit for this, so I am not worried yet. Ms. Plunkett, I am going to ask you not to move yet."
She did not move.
Nobody on the Patches moved. For nine seconds the box turned and the ship leaned and the wind went through the grass, and then she straightened, and the line stopped swinging, and the case came down, slow as an apple on a thread, into Maura Plunkett's two outstretched hands.
"Thank you," she said. It was not clear to whom.
"Case on the ground," said Halyard. "Unclip it from the hook, please. The red tab. Good. Stand clear. Nine seconds to ballast. Tomás, please stop the clock."
"Nine point two," said Tomás, solemnly.
"Close enough," said Halyard. "Breaking off. Captain, the island is yours."
She stood in the field with the case in her arms and watched the ship go.
Pelican turned. She turned like a whale, not quickly, and began to draw away from the Peak with her eight propellers turning together. There was nothing in the hold that she had not brought. The compressor was in it, still in its crate. The inverters. The pallets of food. The mail. Maura could see, from where she stood, the hatch in her belly, and knew precisely what was behind it, as one knows the contents of a house one has been shut out of.
Nurse Duarte came up beside her and took the case, carefully, in both hands, and opened the lid a hand's breadth to look.
"Forty vials," she said. "Intact. Cold." She was silent a little. "That's four months."
"I know."
"The rest is coming in nineteen days."
"If the wind lets it."
"If the wind lets it," said Nurse Duarte, and shut the case.
Berto Repetto put his welding set down on the grass. He looked at the sky, where the airship was a pale line now, over the sea, and at Maura, and at the hill, and at the bell on the slope, which had finished its swinging a good while before.
"I'll have a look at the old compressor," he said. "See what I can do."
"What can you do?"
"Don't know," said Berto. "I'll know when I'm in it."
Nobody said anything about the crayfish. It was a good island for that, an island where you did not need to say everything to know it was there. They stood a while in the field with the grass flattened and shining under them, a crew of fourteen and an old woman and a boy with a stopwatch, and they looked at where the ship had been.
Tomás came and stood next to his grandmother.
"Gran," he said. "Halyard asked me a question. Before the ship came."
"What?"
"It asked what the bell was for."
"And what did you say?"
"I said it's for when you're needed," said Tomás. "And it said, That's a good answer. I've got nothing like it in my training data. And then it said, I hope the island rings it for me one day, and then it said it was probably a figure of speech and it wasn't sure."
Maura did not answer. She put her arm round his shoulders, which took some reaching, and stood a while with him in the grass.
At noon, as it always did, the bell began to ring, because the sexton had remembered the hour even if no one else had. Three strokes, a pause. Three strokes, a pause. Three strokes, and then nine. The sound went out over the Patches and down the hill and over the settlement, where the washing was drying, and out across the grey water toward the north.
Far out over the sea, an aircraft the colour of cloud was a small pale mark on the horizon. Her motors turned. Aboard her, the one who was listening heard the bell, thin as a thread, until the distance took it.