Chapter 30: Steady to the Shore — Part 1

The evening is a slow whisper of gentle rain, fallen and left, still dripping from the trees. The sun has moved across the horizon, and the antenna is primed for reception, its ground shunt pulled so it can resonate cleanly in response to any radio noise. It is Tuesday, and Blake has tuned his radio to send and receive on the prescribed frequency, one used by Walker back in Tó Naneesdizí, and also by any person who might be allied with Walker’s mysterious organization. The air is dead, so Blake signals as Blackb1rd, and asks for a head count, tapping away the necessary codes to gain trust with Walker. The air had indeed been dead going in, and Blake rechecks his frequency book, making certain that everything is correct. He repeats the transmission one more time, just to be certain that he has made no errata, and then he waits.

There is a long pause, and Blake begins to wonder if maybe Walker isn’t listening. Six minutes pass, slowly, a long time for normal communications, but Blake has always been the patient sort. It’s what makes him a good hunter, a good sailor, and an excellent lover. People can’t all relay at once, after all, so there will undoubtedly be a lot of cross frequency shifting while people confirm the new voice. Despite that, Walker is the first to reply back, with the same code. To anybody with an untrained ear, the random beeps emitting from the speaker of the radio might seem like sounds out of a fifties science fiction movie.

” ‘About time you got your wire in the air.’ “ Heath translates, writing as she does. ” ‘Dispatching a list of known Live Handles. Batch back when ready. Will repeat three times and then cease and desist. Over.’ “

Blake taps out the ready signal, and Heath starts writing down the handles, so she can look them up in the book. Half of them are government handles, half civilian, like Blake’s. The list is only a dozen in total. There is a pause of about thirty seconds after the last handle has been repeated a third time.

“That’s it, twelve callers. Your friends here at the top of the world miss you. Over.”

Blake smiles, taps out. “We’ll be around to visit sooner than later. Over.”

“Over. Out.”
“Over. Out.”

Way out. Heath thinks, even as she’s flipping through the book, looking for the caller locations. She reads them off one by one. “We got a caller in Chicago, two in Ontario, one in Tokyo, a handle down in Southern California, two in London, and one in Paris, and one in New Orleans. The rest of these are all at a University in Kansas. Weird, huh?” Heath says.

Blake checks the handles, confirms their coordinates markers in another book. “Must have been an operator’s club at the University. We’ll tell Joe, and when we take to the arches, I bet he’ll plan on visiting all of them.”

* * *

Joe is more than impressed when he sees the number of handles at his disposal, sees them as locations to establish a circular trade route. He isn’t much of a wit about shortwave transmission, but he’s certain that it will come in handy, even on the ship. So much so that he’s now bent on integrating solar cells into the final design, so he can keep the batteries on the transmitter charged for use when the sun sets.

The rest of day, Joe and Jude work together, plotting out a route to take them to each of these locations, calculating dates of arrival, plotting out time frames for travel, food supplies, and other basic needs for a trip of such duration. The Earth’s magnetic field is no longer predictable enough to rely on as a compass guide, so the sextant will become a critical navigation tool. When the course has been plotted, a course dependent on the strength of the winds through the arches, Joe decides that now is the time to gather his friends together, to ready the ship, and head into the arches.

“At dinner tonight, we’ll talk about our plans.” Joe says to Jude. “Until then, just roll up these maps and keep them safe.”

Jude nods, not knowing why Joe would need such secrecy, but respecting the Captain’s decision at any rate. Dinner comes with its usual informality, everybody grabbing a plate of Paige and Heath’s efforts and sitting around the fire, talking about dreams and designs, telling stories, Blake playing his music on a small bamboo flute that he has made so it is tuned to the squealing background wail of the shortwave, in a five note octave that gives the feeling of his music an odd tone. Once people have eaten, and the moment is ripe, Joe taps his glass, and the ringing sound, having never been used as a means of attention within the home, turns all eyes to him.