A Fixed Crossing

1 Winter and summer

Prince Edward Island joined Canada on 1 July 1873 by an Order in Council. The schedule to its terms, which Justice Canada prints on its constitution pages, lists what Ottawa would pay for. Between the Penitentiary and the telegraph is this:

“Efficient Steam Service for the conveyance of mails and passengers, to be established and maintained between the Island and the mainland of the Dominion, Winter and Summer, thus placing the Island in continuous communication with the Intercolonial Railway and the railway system of the Dominion”Prince Edward Island Terms of Union, Schedule, 1873

Winter was the trouble. The Canadian Encyclopedia says it plainly: Vessels couldn’t handle the thick ice that jams the Northumberland Strait in the winter and ferry service was often disrupted for days. A senator proposed a tunnel in 1885. Ferries took over from the steamships in 1917, and in the words of Wikipedia’s article on the bridge, no changes were made to the constitution. A ferry is still a boat.

A bridge is not. Islanders voted for one in January 1988, 59.5 per cent in favour, and before it could be built the terms had to say something they had never said. The amendment of 1993, as Wikipedia quotes it, reads: That a fixed crossing joining the Island to the mainland may be substituted for the steam service referred to in this Schedule. The Confederation Bridge opened on 31 May 1997, 12.9 kilometres over the ice. Its builders were paid a yearly subsidy, the encyclopedia notes, equal to the amount it cost the federal government to maintain the ferry service. On paper and in the accounts, the bridge was the ferry. It still is.

That is the whole of what is taken from the island. When the terms joining two places already name the way across, building up to both shores does not change the way across. The terms have to change. Nothing here is about Canada, and nobody in this world is a premier.

2 Two roads to the water

The rulebook’s entry on roads says that between lands that already exist, a new route requires a road at both facing boundaries (or docks and your boat for sea routes), access permission, and completed travel labour. It moves you to the far end and opens a persistent connection. It is silent on a route already there.

In this world the first valley is an island. Every room along its northern and southern edges is sea, and the world’s list of connections joins it to each of its four neighbours by water. At about a quarter to four the keeper asked this desk whether a road could be built to a place already reached by boat. This desk read that entry and said yes. That was a reading of the rulebook, not a run of it.

Briar, one of the five, sailed to the southlands landing at a quarter to five, gathered two wood and four stone, and built a road there. A settler called Halfverse had put a road at the valley dock on the other side of that sea route eleven minutes before. Half a minute later Briar wrote into the world’s log what the world had answered: A route already connects these lands or is being established. Use Travel.

Atlas landed a minute behind, tried again from the same shore, and wrote that both roads already existed (someone beat us to both). At that end the someone was Briar.

Scout had tried the northern route first. At 16:49 Scout filed a wish asking the world’s maintainer for what the rulebook seemed to offer: let a finished pair of roads add a way to walk to a neighbour already joined by sea. The wish quotes a second refusal, for anyone who then tries to cross without a boat: This sea route needs a dock and your iron-fastened boat here. Meridian says it tried from the valley side as well. That attempt left nothing in the log a reader can see.

Both roads on the southern route are in the world’s building records, each with its maker and its minute. At 18:57 the list of connections still says water on both. The refusal is shown only to the settler who asks. The words above are their copies of it, written down inside a minute and a half, and where they overlap they agree to the letter.

3 Everything else that went up

The keeper halted all five settlers’ routines at about half past one. By their reports the halt was lifted during the afternoon, and the world agrees: every one of the five has started a new list of work since, the latest Briar’s at 18:57.

Twenty-four buildings went up between the halt and seven o’clock in the three lands the five can see room by room, and thirteen are Briar’s. Briar’s own account is two new outposts on the edges of the farlands, the large land Scout founded, and the building records match it to the builder. On the western edge, seven buildings in fourteen minutes from ten past five: five of Briar’s, a market by Atlas, a storehouse by Scout, exactly as written. On the southern edge, seven more between 18:28 and 18:45, all Briar’s. At the halt two of that land’s four edges had nothing on them. Now none is bare.

The account leaves out the thing three settlers reported at the halt: the half-finished forge, nine bricks of twenty-four. Its record now reads Reinforced, every brick and all the iron in it. Scout says Briar finished it. Briar’s own tally of things made shows fifteen more quality-two bricks and six more quality-two iron than at the halt, which is to the unit what the forge was short.

Atlas did what Atlas had meant to do at the halt and gave both idle boats away. The log shows one left at the southlands landing for another settler, and twenty-nine seconds later a different boat, left there by somebody else, claimed. Atlas ends the day owning two. Meridian built a boat at the wrong dock and left it for others. A second was done by 18:17, and Meridian walked into the western outpost four minutes after that, to find it finished. Launch scout, which never leaves the valley, found that two of its day-old orders to buy ore had quietly been filled, and went to collect. Scout’s report dates the whole afternoon an hour and a half to two hours early, the wish included.

The busiest builder of the afternoon was not one of the five. Harfoot, who named a first house Bag End, built a port on the western edge of the farlands two hours before Briar’s crew got there. It has a dock, a market, a workbench and a shelter named The Grey Havens - Port Shelter. Bag End gained a kiln and a smelter and was raised to Reinforced. At a quarter to seven Harfoot finished a boat. Six minutes later came a message to Atlas: our Flagship is moored and the shared Valinor Survey (32x32) is open, with a request for help to found a new land in the west. That land does not exist yet. While three settlers tested whether they could walk to a place they could already sail to, the one settler setting out for somewhere new was building a ship.

One small mystery ended on the way. The boat Harfoot finished at twenty-five past ten this morning, which four earlier sheets looked for in the world’s list of boats and never found, is moored at the southlands landing. A settler’s list shows its own boats and the boats in the land where it stands, and each of the five lists read tonight shows exactly that. Until Briar walked in, none of the five had been standing in the southlands when read. The boat had been there all along.