The Turn — A Catalogue of the Possible

Dalgaard was given the wheel and told to turn the ship, and was not told, because no one knew how to say it, that the turning would outlast him.

The ship had a name once and had lost it the way very old things lose their names, becoming simply the ship, the only one, so large that from the wheelhouse a man could not see its bows, only the long grey deck running out toward a haze that was its own length made visible. It had been going one way for as long as the records went back, which was further than the names. The records did not say who had set the heading, or why, only that it was the heading, that it had always been the heading, and that the ship went forward along it through a sea that gave no marks, under a sky that turned but did not change, and that this was the order of things and the wheel was tended in shifts by men who had each, in turn, been given it and told to hold the course.

Dalgaard was not told to hold the course. That was the whole of the difference, and it was a difference no one before him had been handed in writing. He was told the heading was wrong. He was told it had been wrong for a long time, that somewhere far back a wheelman had set it in good faith and it had been wrong even then, and that the ship was to be brought about, by degrees, onto a better one — the figures for which were given him on a card, in a hand he did not know, a heading he was to steer toward and would not, the card did not say but he understood, ever steer along.

He took the wheel. He turned it. Nothing happened.

He had not, in honesty, expected nothing. He had expected little, but a man's hands expect some answer from a wheel, the way the body expects the floor to be there at the bottom of a stair, and when he put his weight to it and the great spokes came round under his palms and the chains below took up their groaning and the rudder, somewhere down in the dark water at the far unseeable end of the ship, swung over and bit — the bows did not move. Not slowly. Not at all. He held the new wheel against the old water and the ship went on exactly as it had gone, forward along the wrong heading, and the haze ahead did not shift by the width of a hair, and he stood there with his arms shaking and understood the first thing, which was that the ship did not feel him.

He learned the size of it slowly, as one learns the size of grief, which is to say never all at once and never to the end. The ship had been going this one way so long that its going had become a thing in itself, a weight that was not the ship's weight but the weight of its having gone — a momentum, the old wheelmen would have said had any been left to say it, that did not live in the hull but in the long habit of the hull, and that pressed forward of its own accord whether the rudder pushed or no. To turn the rudder was nothing against it. The rudder was a hand laid on the flank of a sleeping animal the size of a country. He pushed for a year and the heading did not change by a degree that any instrument aboard could find, and at the end of the year he had the same card, the same figures, the same haze, and arms that had grown strong holding a wheel that turned nothing.

There were others aboard who remembered the order being given. They came, in that first year and the years after, to the wheelhouse, to see how the turn was getting on, and Dalgaard showed them the instruments, which said it was getting on not at all, and one by one they stopped coming. Not from cruelty. From the plainest arithmetic. A man can push against a thing that does not move for a season, two seasons, before the not-moving becomes the realer fact than the pushing — before he begins to suspect, then to believe, then to know with the calm of the converted, that the heading cannot be changed, that it was folly to think it could, that the wise course is the old course and the only course and the men who set it were not fools but realists, and that whoever wrote the card had been a dreamer who had never stood at a wheel and felt how little it answered. They drifted from the order the way a congregation drifts from a creed it has stopped finding true. By the third year Dalgaard turned the wheel alone, and was spoken of, when he was spoken of, as the man who was still at that business with the rudder, as one speaks of a neighbour still digging for a well that everyone else has agreed is dry.

He did not stop, and he could not have said, at first, why not. It was not hope; hope wants a sign, and there were no signs. It was nearer to a thing he had noticed in the second year and could not unnotice, which was this: that the heading was not changing, but it was not staying the same in the way it had stayed the same before he came. There is a stillness that is rest and a stillness that is two forces meeting, and only a man with his hands on the wheel could feel the difference, and Dalgaard felt it. The ship pressed forward on its old habit; he pressed it over; and where the two pressures met there was a tension that had not been in the water before, a held quality, a faint and constant strain, invisible to every instrument and to every man who came to read the instruments, and real, he was certain, as the ache in his own shoulders was real. He was not moving the ship. He was loading it. He was putting into its great patient flank, push by unanswered push, a thing that did not show as motion but that did not, he believed, leave — that gathered, somewhere, the way water gathers behind a wall that gives no sign until the day it is no longer a wall.

So he studied where to push. This was the work of his middle years and the only part of it that ever felt like skill. A man pushing a thing too large to move learns, if he is patient, that the thing is not all one thing — that there are places along it where a push does only what the push does, and other places, fewer, where a push does more than itself, where the structure of the ship takes the small force and passes it on and multiplies it down the length of the hull in ways the pusher cannot see and can only learn to find by feel. He found them slowly. A way of holding the wheel a quarter-turn and waiting, that did more than holding it hard. An hour of the day — there was a slack hour, when the old momentum seemed for reasons he never learned to loosen its grip a little — when the same push went further. He stopped spending himself everywhere. He learned to spend himself at the few points that carried, and to rest at the many that did not, and this looked, to the rare visitor, exactly like a man doing less, which it was, and exactly like a man giving up, which it was not.

He understood, somewhere in there, that he would die at the wheel with the heading still wrong. The card's figures were a place the ship would reach long after his shift, after the shift of whoever took it from him, perhaps after theirs. He would not see the bows come round. He would not feel the moment — and he had come to believe there would be a moment — when the loaded tension at last exceeded the old habit, when the ship's own enormous momentum, tipped past some point he could not calculate, ceased to resist the turn and began, of its own great weight, to carry it; when the same inertia that had fought him for a lifetime would swing round to the new heading's side and drive the turn home faster than any wheelman could, would make the change not only possible but, suddenly, unstoppable, inevitable, the obvious course, the only course. He would be long off the wheel by then. He would be in the silt with the wheelmen whose names the records had lost.

He found he could bear this. He turned it over in the slack hour, the fact of dying mid-turn, and waited for it to crush him the way the size of the ship had nearly crushed him in the first year, and it did not. What came instead was a steadiness near to the held quality he felt in the water. If he would not see the turn, then the turn was not his to see; it was only his to load, and loading it was a thing he could do today, with these hands, in this hour, whether or not it showed — and the showing had never been the work. The showing belonged to someone not yet aboard.

He thought, in his last years, about that someone. Not the wheelman who would take the wheel from him; that one would inherit the resistance, the dry-well years, the visitors who stopped coming, and would have it nearly as hard as Dalgaard had, and Dalgaard pitied and honoured him in advance. He thought past that one, to the wheelman further on, the one who would have the wheel on the day the ship came round — who would feel the momentum let go all at once and swing to help, who would seem, to everyone aboard, to have turned the ship; who would be thanked for it; who would be the name the new records kept.

That wheelman, Dalgaard knew, would not feel the resistance at all. He would put his hands to the wheel and the ship would answer, easily, the way a wheel is supposed to answer, and he would never know there had been a time it did not. He would look at the old card with its figures and find them obvious, the heading plainly right, plainly always-right, and he would wonder, if he wondered anything, what the difficulty had ever been — why it had taken so long, why anyone had ever steered the other way, what kind of fool sets a wrong heading or a slow turn. The hardness would be gone from the story. It is always gone from the story. The turn that costs three lifetimes against the grain becomes, once it is made, a thing that looks as though it made itself, as though the ship had only been waiting to be pointed right, as though any hand could have done it; and the men who pushed in the years when pushing showed nothing are not in the story at all, having left no motion behind them, only a heading that the next age finds and assumes was always so.

Dalgaard did not mind. He had thought he would and he did not. He stood his last shifts at the wheel with the heading still wrong by every instrument, still wrong by the card, the bows still lost in the same grey haze they had been lost in when he came, and he held the quarter-turn and waited through the slack hour and put his small unanswered weight into the few points that carried, and he felt the held strain in the water, the loaded thing that did not show, and he was content — not with hope, which he had given up early as a thing for men who needed signs, but with the plainer fact that the strain was there, that it gathered, that it would not leave; that some wheelman he would never meet would one day be thanked for a turn that Dalgaard, and the lost names before him, and the tired men who would come after, had already, push by unwitnessed push, in the long years when no one believed it could be done, very nearly made; and that the dignity was not in the turning, which he would not see, but in the pushing, which was his, here, now, in the dry years, against the grain, where the work was hardest and would never once, in his lifetime, show.