The mud-colored water around them sloshed this way and that. It was lined by long curving trails of yellowing foam. On the horizon the water grayed. Bly spun the wheel and they slapped over short steep waves. The boat rocked, and in its entirety moved up and down, up and down. Nirgal had never been in one before. Gray clouds hung over them, there was only a wedge of air between the cloud bottoms and the choppy water. The boat jostled this way and that, bobbing corklike. A liquid world.

“It’s a lot shorter around than it used to be,” Captain Bly said from the wheel. “If the water were clearer you could see Sayes Court, underneath us.”

“How deep is it?” Nirgal asked.

“Depends on the tide. This whole island was about an inch above sea level before the flood, so however much sea level has gone up, that’s how deep it is. What are they saying now, twenty-five feet? More than this old girl needs, that’s sure. She’s got a very shallow draft.”

He spun the wheel left, and the swells hit the boat from the side, so that it rolled in quick uneven jerks. He pointed at one gauge: “There, five meters. Harty Marsh. See that potato patch, the rough water there? That’ll come up at midtide, looks like a drowned giant buried in the mud.”

“What’s the tide now?”

“Near full. It’ll turn in half an hour.”

“It’s hard to believe Luna can pull the ocean around that much.”

“What, you don’t believe in gravity?”

“Oh, I believe in it— it’s crushing me right now. It’s just hard to believe something so far away has that much pull.”

“Hmm,” the captain said, looking out into a bank of mist blocking the view ahead. “I’ll tell you what’s hard to believe, it’s hard to believe that a bunch of icebergs can displace so much water that all the oceans of the world have gone up this far.”

“That is hard to believe.”

“It’s amazing it is. But the proof’s right here floating us. Ah, the mist has arrived.”

“Do you get more bad weather than you used to?”

The captain laughed. “That’d be comparing absolutes, I’d say.”

The mist blew past them in wet long veils, and the choppy waves smoked and hissed. It was dim. Suddenly Nirgal felt happy, despite the unease in his stomach during the deceleration at the bottom of every wave trough. He was boating on a water world, and the light was at a tolerable level at last. He could stop squinting for the first time since he had arrived on Earth.