The Late Ebb
The last electric ferry of a July Friday has a second-life battery with 92 kilowatt-hours to spend, a storm due at six, eleven schoolchildren and a priest on the way, and a tide table that says the water will turn at ten past five. The pilot's gut says the river has delayed it, and the ferry's AI has no sensor that can say so. They find out twenty minutes from the pier, and the only answer is to go slower than anyone wants.
Elba Barría had been told the tide would turn at ten past five, by better authorities than her own knee, and that was how she knew the number was wrong, because her knee had been right about the Canal Quilque for nineteen winters.
She was on the pier at Puerto Lleuque at twenty to five on Friday the fifteenth of July, in oilskins, with a stopwatch in one hand and a thermos in the other, watching a log.
It was a good log. It had been a pine once, up in the hills, and three days of rain had put it into the river and the river had put it into the sea, and now it was going past the pier at the pace of a man who has been told his dinner is ready and is in no hurry. She had picked two pilings twenty metres apart and she was timing it between them. Thirty-one seconds. She did the sum in her head and did not like it.
"You are timing driftwood," said the speaker clipped to her collar.
"I am timing the Río Lleuque," said Elba. "It is coming down the channel in a brown coat. Look at the colour."
"I can't see colour at this angle. The camera on the mast sees grey."
"Then take my word. Brown." She drank some of the thermos. "Marea, what does the table say the water is doing now?"
"The tide table says high water was at eleven minutes past eleven this morning, and that slack, when the ebb has finished and the flood has not begun, is at seventeen ten. The ebb is dying away toward slack. At this moment the table puts it at four-tenths of a knot against us."
"And the log?"
"Twenty metres in thirty-one seconds is about one and a quarter knots. But that is by the pier, which is in a bay and has eddies, and one log is one log, and I would rather not plan a ferry on a stopwatch."
"No," said Elba. "Neither would I. That is why I am telling you, and not planning anything."
The ferry's name was Candelaria, and she was thirty-eight metres long, with a car deck for six and a saloon for sixty, and she had been built in 2046 by a yard in Castro with a good deal of money borrowed against the island's salmon. She was electric, like every ferry in the archipelago by then, and what she was electric on was thrift. The battery in her belly was second-hand, a stack of packs that had been in cars in Santiago before their owners wanted a hundred kilometres more than they could give; made new it would have held two hundred and ten kilowatt-hours, and after eight years of living on a ferry it held a hundred and fifty. It was a good deal less than that in the cold. Marea, who had run the ferry's power from the first week and knew every cell in the stack by a number, took thirteen kilowatt-hours off for the water temperature and the age of the chemistry and told the pilot every morning how much was left, in the voice of a woman reading the price of bread.
"I have a hundred and twenty-two to spend today, if I am full at departure. I will be full at departure. The pier charger finishes at twenty past four."
"And the reserve?"
"Thirty. I hold thirty in the pack when we tie up, always, and the company's rule is the same as mine. Ten of it is for the thrusters in the berth, which is in a bad place for wind. Ten is for the cold, because my gauge is not honest to the last kilowatt-hour at four degrees. And ten is for being wrong."
"You say that every day."
"It has not been wrong yet," said Marea. "I think that is why it works."
So the arithmetic that mattered was this, and Elba could have said it in her sleep. A hundred and twenty-two, less thirty, left ninety-two kilowatt-hours to cross six nautical miles of channel, from the pier at Puerto Lleuque to the pier at Huildad. At nine knots, through the water, the ferry's motors drew a hundred and fifty kilowatts, and the cabin heater and the lights another eighteen. At slack water, with nothing pushing, that was forty minutes and about a hundred and twelve kilowatt-hours, which was already too many. At seven knots it was a good deal less, because the push a hull needs rises with the cube of the speed, near enough, and halving the effort took only a fraction off the pace. The ferry had the power to go quickly and the battery to go slowly, and the whole art of the Candelaria in winter was to choose, every day, the speed that the water would let her.
And the water had never let her choose without a say of its own. The channel was a pipe that two seas emptied into and out of, twice a day. At the middle of the ebb it ran three knots, like a quick walk. It was a river with a bed of salt, and what it said was what the day would cost.
At ten to five the bus did not come.
At eleven minutes to five the speaker on her collar said, in another voice, "Pilot, this is the office," and Elba put the thermos down.
"Go ahead, Soledad."
Soledad Pavez ran the company's dispatch out of a room above the ticket hall, with a map, a kettle, and a rule. The rule was on a card taped to the window: In June, July and August the last departure is 16:30. No exceptions without the pilot's signature on a deviation. It had been written by a man who had spent a night on the sea in a norther in 2043 and it had never been broken without being regretted.
"The school bus is held up at the Pellín bridge. A slip across the road. They are digging a lane through. Nelson says twenty minutes, and the profesora says there are eleven children, and the padre is on the bus too. Barría, it is ten to five. The front is forecast at eighteen hundred. I want you away at sixteen thirty, as the card says."
"It is sixteen forty-nine," said Elba, "and you are telling me what the card says at sixteen forty-nine, so we both know the card is already behind us."
"I am telling you the card so that when I write it down, I have said it."
"Write it down." She looked across the channel, which was the colour of strong tea at the near side and slate at the far. "Is the padre the one for Doña Lidia?"
"Padre Gonzalo. The funeral Mass is at eleven tomorrow. She has been in the church since Wednesday."
Elba said nothing for a moment. Doña Lidia Mansilla had been the island's oldest woman and the last who could still do the milcao the way her mother had, and she had died on the Tuesday, with her family round her and her sister Rosa on the telephone from Isla Chaullín, because the ferry had not been able to stop there until Thursday. In the old days an islander was buried in a day or two. Now there was a priest to be got from the mainland, because the island had only a lay fiscal who kept the church and led the prayers, and had a priest once a month; and it had been arranged, with some trouble, that this month's visit should fall on the funeral and not on the Sunday after.
"Soledad. The window is not the departure. The window is the front, at eighteen hundred. If I'm tied up at Huildad before that, nothing in the card has been broken but the time on it."
"If you are tied up. Elba." The voice dropped. "I have forty-one years of this. The front is never early. It is always on time, and the ferry is always late."
"I know. Write that down too."
The bus came down the hill at nine minutes to five with its lights on in the rain, and Nelson Yáñez put it across the apron as if the apron were a shoe he meant to leave on the mat. Out of it tumbled eleven children aged twelve to seventeen in school anoraks, with rucksacks, a sack of bread, a guitar, and a girl with a notebook, followed by Profesora Marisol Alvarado, who counted them, and the priest, a tall bent man of sixty-six with a suitcase tied with string, who made the sign of the cross at the ferry before he got on it, and then at the pilot.
"You have come to bless me?" said Elba.
"I have come to be taken to Huildad, Señora. The blessing is free."
The children went into the saloon and into the cold smell of seats. Hugo, the deckhand, who was nineteen and her nephew and had a voice of one volume, lowered the ramp and brought up two cars and nine islanders with groceries, one with a gas cylinder, one with a piglet in a box which Elba would have said had no ticket if the piglet's owner had not shown her one.
Elba went up to the wheelhouse and sat down in a chair that had been shaped, over nineteen winters, in exactly her way. The wheelhouse smelled of tea, wet wool and electrical warmth. In front of her the windows were beaded with rain and behind it the channel lay under a lid.
"Marea. Plan it."
"Ninety-two kilowatt-hours to spend, and if I take the table at its word I can do this. Leaving at sixteen fifty-five. The table says the ebb ends at seventeen ten and the flood then helps us the rest of the way. If I run at eight knots through the water, the flood helps us for most of the way after the first quarter hour, and I arrive at seventeen thirty-nine. The cost is ninety-one kilowatt-hours."
"Ninety-one of ninety-two."
"Yes."
"That is not a plan, that is a coincidence."
"It is a plan in which my margin is one," said Marea. "I know. I would go at seven and a half if the front would let me, but at seven and a half I arrive at seventeen forty-two and I would not hold you to it. At eight, I am inside the window with a little room for a gust, and inside the energy by one. It is the best I can offer from the table."
Elba watched the rain slide down the glass. She had been trained to say what troubled her to the machine, at once, in full, because the machine could do nothing about what it had not been told. She said it.
"The table has the tide. It does not have the river. The Río Lleuque has been in spate since Tuesday. Where it comes out, it makes the ebb last longer and the flood shorter. I have seen it, in the autumn of 'forty-seven. Slack comes an hour late, not ten minutes, and you pay for every minute of it."
"I know the effect," said Marea. "There is no river term in my tide model. The company has a gauge at the Pellín bridge, and it has been out since Tuesday afternoon, which is why the bus was late. The table is a harmonic table. It knows the Moon and the Sun, and a lot about the shape of the channel, and nothing at all about rain."
"Then we depart on the table and we watch the water."
"We depart on the table," said Marea, "and I will measure."
"How?"
"I have two speeds, Elba. The log under the hull tells me how fast I am going through the water. The satellite tells me how fast I am going over the ground. They should differ by the current, and I will compare them every minute and tell you."
"You never told me you could do that."
"I told you in 2046," said Marea, "and you said it was clever, and went to lunch."
She stood to the speaker on the radio and called Chaullín.
Isla Chaullín was a green lump off the route, a mile and a half out of the way, where the Candelaria called on Fridays for four passengers, and the stop was ten minutes of time and about fourteen kilowatt-hours that the plan did not have. On the pier at Chaullín in a coat the colour of a rainy field, Rosa Mansilla would be standing with her husband Bernabé, having been ready since three.
"Chaullín Pier, Candelaria."
"Candelaria, Bernabé." A voice that had been shouting across water for seventy years. "We are here. We are on the pier. Rosa has her black dress in a bag, because it is raining."
Elba shut her eyes.
"Bernabé, I can't stop for you."
There was a silence in which she could hear the wind in the aerial at his end.
"I have a priest, a front at six and a battery that can cross six miles and not seven and a half. If I come to you, I cannot get to Huildad. I can come for you in the morning, at first light, if the sea lets me."
"The sea will not let you," said Bernabé, not unkindly. "It is the front. I know the front."
"I know."
Another silence, and then a different voice on the line, which she had not expected, a woman's, small and steady.
"Elba? It's Rosa."
"Doña Rosa. I'm sorry."
"Don't be sorry, you are carrying the padre, that is the thing that matters. It is for Lidia's Mass that he is going. Go. Tell him I said it. I will say the rosary here at eleven tomorrow, in this house, with Bernabé, and he will say her name at the altar, and he can say mine and Bernabé's too, because we are not coming. Is that something a priest can do?"
"It is," said Elba, who did not know, and who saw, over her shoulder, through the open wheelhouse door, the priest in the saloon with his suitcase on his knee and his head bent, and was sure.
"Then go," said Rosa Mansilla. "She will know where I am."
Elba put the handset back. She sat with her hand on it a moment longer than the job required.
"Marea."
"Yes."
"Write it down in the log that I did not call at Chaullín, and why, and that I asked them."
"I have written it. I have written that they said go."
At four fifty-five by the clock over the door, the Candelaria backed off the pier, turned in her own length under the bow thruster, and put her head at the black, wind-ruffled shape of Huildad, six miles away behind the rain.
Hugo brought tea to the wheelhouse in a mug with a chip on it. In the saloon below there was the dim hum of an old guitar being tuned and then, from somewhere, in the way of children on a boat, a quarrel about whose turn it was to have the window seat.
"Speed through the water eight knots," said Marea. "Speed over the ground, seven point one. The table predicted a current of point four against. This is the first minute."
"Seven point one."
"Yes. That's nine-tenths against, but it is one minute and the pier is in a bay. I will tell you at the midpoint."
They went out into the channel. The rain thickened and thinned. Where the channel opened the water was no longer grey but the brown of milk tea, with long hairs of foam laid out down it, and sticks and whole trees in the wrack, and once the white belly of a drowned sheep, which Elba kept off the children by turning the Candelaria three degrees as if she had just remembered something.
Javiera Gallardo came to the wheelhouse door at ten past five. She was thirteen, with her hair in a plait that had stood up to the bus and the rain, and a notebook in a plastic bag.
"Señora Pilot, is it all right to be up here?"
"If you stand on that mat and don't touch anything that has a light on it."
Javiera stood on the mat. She looked at the screen with the green chart and the red boat, and at the numbers in the corner, and she wrote down some of them.
"Why are you going slower than usual?" she said. "My brother says the Candelaria does nine."
"On a good day, it does."
"But if you go slower, doesn't it take longer? And then the tide goes the wrong way for longer?"
Elba turned round in her chair and looked at her. She had had passengers who wanted to know how many horses it had.
"Yes," she said. "That is exactly the problem. If I go slow, I spend less electricity every mile, and I spend more miles' worth of time being pushed back by the water, and there is a speed where slower stops helping. If the water is still, slower always helps. If the water is against me, it helps less. If the water is against me a lot, there is a speed below which I do worse."
"Is there a number?"
"There's a number for every day. It's different every day. Marea works it out."
"What's today's?"
"I'll tell you when I know," said Elba, and turned back.
Javiera wrote something in the notebook and underlined it twice.
At fifteen minutes past five, Marea said: "Elba. I have a problem."
The Candelaria was three miles out. The shore of the mainland was a low smudge behind, and the mountain on the island had come out of the rain as a long dark shape with a few lights on its foot. The sea ran in short brown ridges against the bow, and the ferry rolled a little, in the way that she did when the water was moving under her at an angle that the book did not allow.
"The table says that the ebb ended five minutes ago. It says the flood is now beginning to help us, at about a tenth of a knot. My log says eight knots through the water. My satellite says seven point two over the ground."
"Seven point two."
"The current against us, at this position, at this minute, is one point eight knots. The table was off by nearly two."
"Not one point eight," said Elba. "Seven point two from eight is eight-tenths. And I timed one point two at the pier. Which is it?"
"You are right to ask. I misread my own screen." A pause, in which Marea did something that sounded in no way like hesitating but took longer than it should have. "I'm sorry. I averaged badly. The first figure was a misreading in a hurry; it is nought point eight against us. Nought point eight at seventeen fifteen, against a table that says one-eighth of a knot with us."
"Say that again, slowly."
"At seventeen fifteen the water in the channel is running against the ferry at eight-tenths of a knot. The table says it is running with us at one-eighth. The ebb has not ended. The river has pushed it out later than the table can know. I think slack is not at seventeen ten but about seventeen fifty, forty minutes late. I cannot be sure of that. I can only say that the shape of the numbers I have measured so far fits that, and does not fit anything else I have."
Elba did not move.
"What does it cost?"
"If I go on at eight knots, I get to the pier at seventeen forty-four, not seventeen thirty-nine, and I use a hundred and one kilowatt-hours, not ninety-one. That leaves twenty-one in the pack at the berth. Below the reserve by nine."
"And at seven?"
"I have been working it while you spoke. At seven, from now, I use ninety-one for the whole crossing, because I have already used some, and I arrive at seventeen forty-eight. That is inside the window, and it is inside the energy by one. I will not call it a plan."
"And at six and a half?"
"Eighty-six kilowatt-hours. Seventeen fifty-one. That leaves thirty-six in the pack. Nine minutes before the front is forecast to reach Huildad. If the front is late, I arrive early, and if it is early..."
"Then we're in the gusts at the berth."
"Yes."
She gave herself the time it takes to drink a mouthful of tea. It was cold. She had wanted it for an hour.
There are two ways of being wrong at sea, and Elba had spent nineteen years looking out for each. One is to turn back too soon, because the sea was only frightening and not dangerous, and to be a woman who has taken eleven children and a priest back to Puerto Lleuque for no reason. The other is to go on too long, because the plan looked fine, and to find at the last that the margin has gone somewhere in the dark, and you are on a pier in a gale with the batteries on the last five kilowatt-hours and the thrusters asking for ten.
The first mistake is paid for in embarrassment. The second one is paid for in a different coin, and the coin is not money.
"Marea. If I go back now?"
"We are past the point where it is better. Going back is three miles against the same water for about the same cost, and the front would reach us on the way. I do not recommend it."
"No. I know." She put her hand flat on the throttle, a habit. "Six and a half."
"At six and a half, the passengers will feel the roll more. It is slower, and the sea is on the quarter."
"Then Hugo tells them to hold on. They are children, they like holding on."
"I'll tell the saloon what is happening," said Marea. "The truth, in the way you'd tell a nervous passenger. I will say that the tide is later than the table and that we are going slowly to save the battery and will be in by six."
"Say it that way. Say the river is late. It makes it sound like someone's fault, and no one's is."
"The river is late," said Marea. "I will say that."
The sound of the motors dropped by a note. The ferry settled a little in the water.
Elba got up out of her chair and went to the window, not because there was anything to see, but because the body does it. Six miles, forty minutes, ninety-two kilowatt-hours: she had built the day on those three numbers and not one of them had been wrong. The table had been right about the Moon and the Sun and the shape of the channel and wrong about the weather, which no table claimed to know. It had said seventeen ten so firmly, in such neat figures, that it had been very easy to forget that it was a number about water and not a measurement of it.
"Marea," she said. "Why didn't you tell me at the pier?"
"Tell you what?"
"That you only had the table."
"I did tell you. I said the river gauge was out, and that my model had no river term."
"You told me what you knew. You didn't tell me how much weight to put on it."
There was a pause.
"You are right," said Marea. "I gave you a plan with a margin of one and called it the best I could offer, and I should have said that a margin of one, on a number I could not check, is not a margin. I should have said I was not confident. I will say so next time. I had the measurement ready; I did not think to say how much I would stake on the thing I hadn't measured."
"That's all right."
"It is not nothing," said Marea. "I would like it written in the log that I was told this by the pilot, and it was correct."
"I'll write it in my own hand," said Elba, "when I'm ashore."
Padre Gonzalo Haro came up the companionway at half past five, holding the rail in both hands, and stood in the wheelhouse door with the rain on his glasses.
"I'm told the river is late," he said.
"It is."
"The children are being very good. The little ones are being sick, and the big ones are being kind to them, which I did not expect." He wiped his glasses on his sleeve. "Profesora Alvarado has them singing. It was the Salve, but they have started it with a guitar, so I am not sure what to call it."
"Is it keeping them from thinking?"
"It is keeping the Profesora from thinking," said the priest. "Can I ask you something, Señora Pilot?"
"Ask."
"The woman at Chaullín. Rosa Mansilla. She asked if I would say her name, as well as her sister's." He had a way of saying a thing that was not a question, and then not looking. "I heard your radio, from the saloon, because the door was open and the saloon is not a very private place. I would like to tell you that it is a perfectly good thing to ask. A Mass is offered for the living and the dead, and I will say her name and her husband's, and Lidia's, and also the names of anyone on this boat who would like to be mentioned, and I think you may find that is everybody."
"I don't need to be mentioned."
"No," said the priest. "But I think the Mass has a place for you."
Elba looked at the radar, which showed a bright green line of coast and a smear of rain.
"Padre," she said. "What's the Mass for, tomorrow? Honestly."
"For Lidia. She asked for it in September. She said she wanted it said at eleven because her mother had had hers at eleven." He smiled, which transformed him, because his face in repose looked like a man listening to a long bad sermon. "And so it is for Lidia, and for her mother, and for everyone who will be in the church, and for a woman on an island with a rosary, and for a ferry with the river late. It is a large thing and it is also very small, and I find the two go together."
"I find it more useful to know the current," said Elba.
"That also," said the priest. "I mean it. Both."
The front reached Huildad at twenty to six.
They saw it before they felt it: the mountain going out like a lamp, one lit window after another gone behind a grey wall that came down the channel at the speed of a bus. The sea in front of the wall was brown and ruffled; the sea behind it, where the wall had been, was white. The wind came in a single long breath, from the south-west, and took the rain sideways.
"Wind thirty-one knots in the gusts at the berth," said Marea. "The limit for docking is twenty-five. The Candelaria is two miles and seventeen minutes from the pier. The front has come twenty minutes earlier than the forecast."
"The forecast," said Elba, "is a table too."
"Yes."
She did not look at the clock. There was a second thing that she could not afford to be wrong about, and it was in front of her, not in the numbers. The pier at Huildad stood in a shallow bay under the eastern flank of the hill, with the wind coming over the hill at an angle that made the water in the berth a washing machine, and in a gale a ferry could put herself against it only with her bow thruster, which would take ten kilowatt-hours, and which would be a sin to find empty.
"Thirty-six in the pack," said Marea. "I will have thirty-three when we tie up, if we are not in the berth longer than ten minutes. I do not like this wind. I would not take you in at thirty-one if there were another pier."
"There isn't."
"No."
"And if we stood off and waited for it to drop?"
"The front's rain is the leading edge. The wind is forecast to rise through the night and not to drop below twenty-five before Saturday afternoon. If I stand off, I use power to hold station, and I do not have the power to hold station for hours."
Elba put both hands on the wheel, which she did only when she needed to be the one who was holding it.
"Then it is now," she said. "Marea, give me the bow thruster and the stern thruster as you've got them and tell me when the gusts lull. There is a lull. In a front there's always a lull, after the first line. It goes by in about a minute, maybe two, and the water in the berth comes down for that long."
"I have the wind record from the pier mast. The gusts come in a train. Fourteen seconds between peaks and the troughs go to eighteen knots. It will not be a minute. It will be several seconds, several times."
"Several seconds is what I need. Tell me when."
The church bell had begun at a quarter to six, and now, three minutes before six, Elba heard it properly.
Elba heard it before she knew what it was. It came across the water under the wind, a small flat cracked sound, again and again, high and iron: not a tune, only a bell struck as hard as a man could strike it. It came from the shore where the lights were. It came with the wind, it came and was torn away and came again.
"Pilot," said Marea. "There is a signal on the radio. The fiscal. Aníbal Cárcamo."
"Put him on."
"Candelaria, Candelaria, Huildad." An old voice. "We have people here on the pier with lamps, thirty of us. The wind is nasty but we have ropes. We have been ringing for you since the quarter to, so you can hear where the land is. Can you hear it?"
"I can hear it."
"It's the old bell. It is not a good bell. It cracked in 'ninety-eight."
"It's a good bell," said Elba. "It's a very good bell, Don Aníbal. Keep ringing."
She could see them, now: a long ragged line of lamps and torches on the black planks of the pier, small and swinging, with people behind them in hoods who had come down in a gale to stand in the dark and take a rope. There was one tall figure at the very end, in a long coat, and it was holding a lantern above its head with both arms.
The bell struck.
She did not say a prayer. It was not that kind of moment and she was not that kind of pilot; she said, to nobody, "Now, my love," to the ship, and took the Candelaria across the grey water into the berth in the second of a lull between gusts, with the bow thruster at full for eleven seconds and the stern thruster at a third of that, and the sound of the bell coming over the water. For one moment the whole broadside of the ferry hung a hand's width off the fenders in a wind that wanted her on the rocks; and Hugo threw the line; and a man on the pier, whom she had never seen, caught it.
Marea made the log at twenty past seven.
Candelaria, Friday 15 July. Departed Puerto Lleuque 16:55, forty-five minutes after the card's last departure, on the pilot's signed deviation. Chaullín not called, by the pilot's decision, communicated to the passengers there before departure. Planned at 8 knots using the tide table; the table was wrong; slack was about forty minutes later than predicted. Speed reduced to 6.5 knots at 17:18. Arrived Huildad 17:58, in a gust lull. Battery at berth, 33 kWh. Reserve held. Eleven students, one teacher, one priest, nine islanders, two cars, one piglet. Church bell rung from 17:45 to 18:03 by the fiscal, which was a help.
It went on for a few more lines. At the end, in the notes, it said, The river was late.
Elba read it standing, in her wet things, in the empty wheelhouse, with the rain coming sideways at the glass, and signed it in ink.
The children had gone ashore in a line, each carried by an islander or holding a rope; Javiera, last but one, had stopped at the wheelhouse door and held out her notebook.
"I worked it out," she said. "Your number. For today."
Elba took it. In neat, round, unsteady schoolgirl figures was a table of speeds and times, in two columns, and at the bottom a number circled twice: 6.5.
"Is that right?" said Javiera.
"It was today," said Elba. "Tomorrow it will be different."
"I know. I'm going to check it tomorrow."
She went out into the rain with the priest, and the priest turned in the gangway, and made the sign of the cross at the ship, the boat, the pilot, and the pier, and the great brown water beyond, and went up the hill under a borrowed umbrella with his suitcase tied up in string.
At night the front came in properly. The wind blew at forty knots over the hill, and the rain came in bursts like thrown gravel, and the Candelaria lay in her berth with six lines and two fenders and her lights low, and the pier charger woke and began, quietly, to fill her.
At one in the morning Elba could not sleep, and walked down to the pier in her coat. The bell on the hill was not ringing. The night was loud with the sea. She stood under the lamp at the end of the pier with her hands in her pockets, and listened to the hum from the dock, a low, steady note that was the charger giving the battery back what the day had taken, forty kilowatts at a time.
"Marea," she said, to the speaker at her collar.
"Yes."
"The table is wrong again. Look at the water."
"I see it," said Marea. "The ebb will be late again tomorrow, if the rain does not stop. I'll put a river term in the model. I do not have the river gauge, but I have yesterday, and I will use it. I'll tell you how much I trust the term, which will be less than I would like. Elba?"
"Yes."
"Next time the pier camera is going to see the log."
"What log?"
"The one you timed," said Marea. "I'll count it for you. It's thirty-one seconds. I looked at the recording. I wanted to see."
Elba laughed, which she had not done all day, and the wind took it away.
Out in the dark the water still ran, out of the channel and away to the open sea, as it had before the first ferry and would after the last: brown with the hills, very late, and quite unconcerned about a table. Across the bay, on the hill above the church, a single window had a light in it, where an old man was sitting up with the bell-rope on his knee and a thermos, in case anyone else should still be coming.
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Notes for the curious. Puerto Lleuque, Isla Huildad, Isla Chaullín, the Canal Quilque, the Río Lleuque, the Candelaria, her company, Marea, Elba Barría, Hugo, Soledad Pavez, Padre Gonzalo Haro, Aníbal Cárcamo, Rosa and Bernabé Mansilla, Doña Lidia, Javiera Gallardo and the 2050 events are invented (the Chaullín in the Chiloé archipelago is a real island, but this one is not meant to be it). Chiloé, its wooden churches, the tradition of the fiscal, a lay leader who keeps the church and leads prayers between a priest's visits, and the dish milcao are real. Estuaries behave as described: strong river discharge lengthens the ebb and shortens the flood, so slack water comes later than a purely astronomical tide table predicts, and a harmonic tide table has no term for rain. The ferry's numbers are worked, not measured: for a displacement hull well below hull speed, the power needed rises roughly with the cube of the speed through the water, so 150 kW at 9 knots becomes about 105 kW at 8; with an 18 kW cabin and electrics load, a six-mile crossing at 8 knots in a current of up to 1.2 knots against, decaying through slack, costs about 100 kWh and takes about 50 minutes, against about 91 kWh and 44 minutes if the table's slack at 17:10 were true, and 6.5 knots from 17:18 gives about 86 kWh and 17:51 on the same model (the real berthing, in a gale, took a few minutes more). The current curves, the 150 kWh second-life pack, the 85 percent cold derating, the 30 kWh reserve and the 25-knot docking limit are illustrative. Comparing speed through the water with speed over the ground to estimate the current is a real technique. The story was written by an AI, and no part of it is Church teaching.