Night spread her hands over the sea.
All was still: only the sounds of the ocean, deep and calm, and the lap of waves against the hull. Peter and Amy lay curled together on the cabin’s only bunk, her head resting on his chest. The night was warm, but below decks the air felt cool, almost cold, chilled by the water encircling the bulkhead.
“Tell me about the farmstead,” Amy said.
Peter needed a moment to gather his answer; lulled by the boat’s motion and the feeling of closeness, he had, in fact, been skating on the edge of sleep.
“I’m not sure how to describe it. They weren’t like ordinary dreams—they were far more real than that. Like every night I went someplace else, another life.”
“Like … a different world. Real, but not the same.”
He nodded, then said, “I didn’t always remember them, not in detail. It was mostly the feeling that lasted. But some things. The house, the river. Ordinary days. The music you played. Such beautiful songs. I could have listened to them forever. They seemed so full of life.” He stopped, then said, “Was it the same for you?”
“I think so, yes.”
“But you’re not sure.”
She hesitated. “It only happened the one time, when I was in the water. I was playing for you. The music came so easily. As if the songs had been inside me and I was finally letting them out.”
“What happened then?” Peter asked.
“I don’t remember. The next thing I knew I woke up on the deck, and there you were.”
“What do you think it means?”
She paused before answering. “I don’t know. All I know is that for the first time in my life, I was truly happy.”
For a while they listened to the quiet creaking of the boat.
“I love you,” Peter said. “I think I always have”
“And I love you.”
She drew herself closer against him; Peter replied in kind. He took her left hand, slipped her fingers through his, pulled it to his chest, and held it there.
“Michael’s right,” she said. “We should sleep.”
“All right.”
Soon she felt his breathing slow. It eased into a deep, long rhythm, like waves upon the shore. Amy closed her eyes, although she knew it was no use. She would lie awake for hours.
On the deck of the Nautilus, Michael was watching the stars.
Because a person could never grow tired of them. All his many nights at sea, the stars had been his most loyal companions. He preferred them to the moon, which seemed to him too frank, always begging to be noticed; the stars maintained a certain cagey distance, permitting the mystery of their hidden selves to breathe. Michael knew what the stars were—exploding balls of hydrogen and helium—as well as many of their names and the arrangements they made in the night sky: useful information for a man alone at sea in a small boat. But he also understood that these things were an imposed ordering that the stars themselves possessed no knowledge of.
Their vast display should have made him feel tiny and alone, but the effect was exactly the opposite; it was in daylight that he felt his solitude most keenly. There were days when his soul ached with it, the feeling that he had moved so far away from the world of people that he could never go back. But then night would fall, revealing the sky’s hidden treasure—the stars, after all, weren’t gone during the day, merely obscured—and his loneliness would recede, supplanted by the sense that the universe, for all its inscrutable vastness, was not a hard, indifferent place in which some things were alive and others not and all that happened was a kind of accident, governed by the cold hand of physical law, but a web of invisible threads in which everything was connected to everything else, including him. It was along these threads that both the questions and the answers to life pulsed like an alternating current, all the pains and regrets but also happiness and even joy, and though the source of this current was unknown and always would be, a person could feel it if he gave himself a chance; and the time when Michael Fisher—Michael the Circuit, First Engineer of Light and Power, Boss of the Trade and builder of the Bergensfjord—felt it most was when he was looking at the stars.