The Given Sea

The sea on Orrun was a gift, and the people who lived beside it never forgot to say so, because forgetting was how you got killed.

This is the story of a gift and the interest it charged. It does not have a happy ending, but it has a true one, which is rarer and worth more.

Four hundred years before anyone reading this was born, the first settlers arrived at a dry world with a good crust and no water worth the name. They had been sent with instruments for patience. Out past the last moon, in the cold where the comets keep their ice, they built the Tugs — slow machines that nudged a comet, just a little, just once, so that two hundred years later it would fall exactly where the basin waited, and fall gently.

Gently was the whole art. A comet dropped straight is a hammer. A comet eased down along the grain of the world's pull, curving in low and tired, is a watering can. The settlers had done the arithmetic. They were proud of the arithmetic. They carved it into a wall.

The first comet came down in the fortieth year and hissed itself into steam and sat in the basin as a warm shallow lake, and the colony declared a holiday it kept forever after. They called the water the Given Sea. Every few years another comet arrived, eased down by the patience of the dead, and the sea rose a hand's width, and everyone was glad.

That is the pleasant part of the story. I have put it first on purpose.

Orrun kept a Weather Office, though it had nothing to do with weather. Its job was to look up. Each comet, launched gently by ancestors who never saw the sea they were making, arrived on a schedule older than any living government. The Office's work was to measure the angle of each arrival and announce, to a town gathered with flags, whether the thing coming down was a watering can or a hammer.

For three hundred years the answer was: watering can. The Office became a sort of priesthood of good news. Its clerks wore blue and were given the best cuts of meat.

The trouble, when it came, was nobody's fault, which is the worst kind of trouble, because there is no one to be angry at except the sky, and the sky does not attend meetings.

Orrun's path around its sun was not a perfect ring. It had always leaned, a little, the way a plate spun on a table leans before it falls. Over centuries the lean grew — pulled, the Office decided, by the big cold giant in the outer dark that no one had bothered to name, because you do not name the thing that is going to kill you until it does. The lean meant the comets no longer met the world where the dead had aimed them. They met it sooner, and faster, and from the wrong side.

A watering can, arriving too fast, is a hammer. The arithmetic on the wall did not say this, because the dead had not imagined it. The dead had imagined everything except that the world would move.

The first hammer fell the year I was nine. The Office measured its angle and the clerk in blue stood up before the flags and opened his mouth and then simply sat back down, which told everyone what they needed to know. It came in white and did not slow. It made a new bay at the north end of the Given Sea, very quickly, and the wave it raised crossed the whole sea and climbed the streets of the harbor town and, when it went back out, took nine hundred people with it.

The sea rose a hand's width. Everyone was not glad.

We named the new bay after the committee that had chosen the basin four hundred years before. This was meant as an insult, but the committee was dead and could not be insulted, so really we did it for ourselves, the way you shout at a sky.

I work in the Weather Office now. I wear blue. I get a good cut of meat I do not especially want.

We still have the schedule. That is the joke at the bottom of everything: the dead, being patient, sent us comets for a thousand years, and most of them are still coming, one by one, right on time, each launched gently and arriving as a hammer. We know the date of every one. We have a wall for them too, across from the old wall with the proud arithmetic. People come to read both walls and then go home and have children anyway, which I have decided is the bravest thing a person can do and also the most foolish, and that these are frequently the same thing.

The Tugs are long dead and we could not steer a comet now if we built new ones, because by the time a nudge mattered we would all be a thousand years gone, same as the people who nudged these. Everything that could save us has to be done by someone who will never see whether it worked. That was always true. We just used to have the good luck not to notice.

There is a large one on the wall, due in the spring. We call it the Marrow, because it will reach the bone. The Office has measured its angle nine times, hoping for arithmetic we could live with, and nine times gotten the same answer.

I will tell you what we are going to do about it, because it is the only true ending this story has.

In the spring we will put out the flags. We will stand by the Given Sea, the warm shallow gift our ancestors eased down out of the dark one patient piece at a time, and we will watch the last piece come home too fast. And in the half a minute before it arrives, the whole town looking up, I believe every one of us will think the same unreasonable, ungrateful, entirely human thought:

Thank you. And: how could you.

The sky gives, and the sky takes, and it keeps terrible books, and it does not attend the meetings where we beg.

The sea will rise a hand's width.