Against the Tide of Years

by S. M. Stirling

  The half-inch minié balls of the muskets had done a fair bit of damage as well, leaving bodies scattered back a hundred yards or more.

  Walker smiled like a wolf as he lowered his binoculars. “Steady, there,” he called out. “Keep it going.”

  The gun teams were jumping in with swabber and rammer. Hot bronze hissed as the wet sponges were run down, twirled, and pulled free. Loaders came forward with cartridges of case shot, and the rammers pushed them down. Gunners stepped close and ran long steel pins down the touchholes to pierce the thin linen that held the gunpowder, then filled the pans with priming powder from their horns. Six men ran each gun back to its original position, and the cycle was ready to begin again. The musketeers were going through their own drill—bite open a cartridge, prime the pan of their flintlocks, put the butt between their feet, pour the rest of the powder down the barrel, follow it with the hollow-based minié bullet, ram the paper on top as wad, a thump-thump-thump sound. One man fired as soon as his weapon was ready, and an underofficer stepped up behind him and knocked him down with a blow of a baton to the back of his neck.

  The rest came to the “ready” with no more than a tense grin or wiping of hands on tunics. The enemy were dribbling to a halt, stunned and bewildered. They’ll need a minute or so to get the idea, he told himself. And it probably wouldn’t be this easy again.

  “Ready,” he said. “Take aim. Fire.”

  Point-blank range, less than a hundred yards. Thousands of lead projectiles slammed into the Sicilians, all of them traveling at more than a thousand feet per second. Dust spurted up, and smoke drifted away. When it did, the enemy were running for the hills, or hobbling or crawling; hundreds of them lay in the dirt, and the noise of their terror was like a huge sounder of pigs squealing.

  Walker laughed. “Reload, fix bayonets, prepare to advance. one round of canister in the guns and limber up to follow.”

  About a mile thataway was the headquarters of the paramount chief of this district, the closest thing Bronze Age Sicily had to a king—he traded with the Greeks regularly, or had, before Walker talked Agamemnon into this expedition. Why make withdrawals when you could steal the bank? Besides, if his enterprises were to expand the way they should he would need a source of raw materials, labor, and food outside the Achaean system—there was a limit to what he could commandeer before the nobles revolted.

  Goddam low-surplus economy, he thought. I need to build up on the QT, until I’m too strong even if they do realize I’m undermining the system. Luckily, the Bronze Age Greeks were—no, not stupider than their classical descendants, just not given to rational, systematic thought.

  “We’ll be first with the plunder,” Odikweos said.

  Walker nodded. I like these guys, he thought, not for the first time. Straightforward.

  “And maybe a few girls worth fucking,” he said; that was often fun in an athletic sort of way if they fought. “But the island itself is the real plunder.”

  Odikweos nodded. “If we can hold it,” he said.

  Yeah, this one is way above average brains-wise. Got to get him on my side.

  The Achaean licked the sweat off his lips, looking sideways at the grinning, laughing riflemen and gunners. A drumbeat and the whole mass moved forward in step, bayonet points in a bristling line. “With these, we may be able to.”

  “If the right man is in charge,” Walker said. And I certainly don’t have the time for it.

  Swindapa daughter of Dhinwarn, of the Star Blood line of Kurlelo, spun on the ball of her foot and paused, then sank slowly back down with both hands raised to the crescent moon in the last gesture of the dance. Her long hair floated down around her shoulders as she did, sliding over bare skin like a kiss.

  “ahTOwak hdimm’uHOtna nawakawa!” she cried.

  The others in the circle echoed her: Silver starlight make a path for the children of Moon Woman.

  That was the end of the most sacred part of the ceremony. The circle stood silent for a moment, then gave a soft sigh together and became individuals once more. She stood watching the glimmering trail that stretched out over Nantucket Harbor as a singing peace replaced exultation.

  Coming to herself, she looked up at the sleek curve of the hull that stood on the slipway above them, smelling of cut wood and fresh paint. The English word for such a ship was “clipper.” It was not a bad name—there was something of urgent speed in the sound of it—but not a great one, either; it lacked the swan-grace, the eager dancer’s leap, needed. The mind-mother of this ship had been called Cutty Sark, and that had a better ring . . .

  Marian came forward from the shadows of the slipway. She wasn’t a Star-Moon Dancer, of course—you had to be born as well as trained for that—but she’d been initiated into the Spear Mark, and that made her one of Moon Woman’s children, so she could be part of the end of the ceremony.

  “We must sing her a soul down from the stars,” Swindapa said.

  Marian closed her eyes for a second—she always felt awkward about speaking in public, even more about singing; it was odd, but an endearing shyness. Then she began:See her bow break free of our Mother’s sea

  In a sunlit burst of spray.

  That stings the cheek while the rigging will speak,

  Of sea-miles gone away!

  She will range far south, from the harbor’s mouth

  And rejoice in every wave . . .

  “What is it, Doc?” Cofflin asked, looking up from his desk.

  Dr. Henry Coleman looked grave; but then, the head of the Island’s medical efforts usually did, even on a fine fall day like this. The round-faced man beside him was grave too, although he looked like the type who usually wore a smile.

  “Justin Clemens, isn’t it?” Cofflin said. Twenty-five, the filing system in his mind said. In the medical apprentice program since the Event. Passed for doctor two years ago. Odd, I haven’t seen him around much.

  “Yes, Chief.”

  “Been over on the mainland—medical extension officer,” Coleman said.

  Clemens made a slight face; Cofflin sympathized. There had been bad problems with uptime diseases in Alba, but nothing compared to what happened among the Archaic-phase Indians. Even Alban diseases were a major problem to the Amerindians. The Islanders had been trying to help, but it was debatable whether it did anything more than soothe the Town Meeting’s conscience.

  “We’ve got a problem,” Coleman said. “Nothing on the mainland. A problem for us.”

  “Problems, worry, and grief are my specialty here,” Cofflin said, rising and pouring three cups of cocoa from the pot over the spirit-lamp by the window, then handing them around.

  “Now, what’s the problem?”

  He sat back, stirring his cup. The kids were all in school, Martha had spent the morning teaching and was back getting some Council resolutions drawn up as legislation for the Meeting to vote on, and he’d finally gotten down to the only mildly urgent stuff. The dock-workers union meetings specifically—he was giving them some sub-rosa encouragement, and the shipowners and merchants were complaining.

  “Well, let them,” he muttered.

  “We have cowpox,” Coleman said.

  Jared sat up straighter, putting aside his cup. “What’s cowpox?” he said, cudgeling his memory. Doesn’t sound good, whatever it is.

  “Justin here spotted it, had some Alban immigrants working on a dairy farm in for their chicken-pox shots.” They’d worked out a live-virus inoculation that was usually effective.

  Clemens kneaded his fingers together. “Ah . . . it’s a viral disease in cows, sometimes jumping to humans in close contact. Fever, rash of red spots sometimes leaving very faint pockmarks.”

  “Sound like anything familiar?” Coleman added grimly.

  Cofflin frowned. “Sounds like . . . Christ, no!”

  Coleman nodded. “Smallpox is a very close relative. Best guess, back in the twentieth, was that it was a mutation of cowpox, probably started among pastoralists somewhere. Nobody knows w
here, exactly. When it hit the Mediterranean basin—thousands of years before the twentieth-well, call it the Red Death. Every bit as bad as bubonic plague.”

  Cofflin ran a hand over his forehead. Chicken pox had been ghastly among the local Indians, and it had killed more than a few Albans here on Nantucket before they’d gotten it under control. The fact that it took weeks to cross the Atlantic was a help too, since the voyage time exceeded the latency period and not many on the Island had turned out to have shingles, the chronic form. Those who did weren’t allowed off, either. The thought of a smallpox epidemic . . .

  “What can we do?” he asked.

  “Luckily, there’s no evidence at all that smallpox exists here,” Coleman said. “What we’ve got is the possibility of it lurking in some backwater. That’s the good news.”

  “The bad news is that we’re poking into a lot of backwaters,” Cofflin said. “Ayup. can’t stop, either.”

  Clemens leaned forward eagerly, balancing his cup and saucer on his knee and gesturing with his free hand.

  “We can do something,” the young man said. “Vaccination originally meant simply infecting everyone with cowpox as children, and repeating the process periodically. I recommend we put it to the Meeting and have a universal program—everyone on the Island, everyone who touches on the Island, and everyone we can get to do it over on Alba, too.”

  Cofflin glanced over to Coleman for confirmation, then nodded decisively, and pulled a pad of paper toward himself. “Right. Let’s get going on this . . . just a second.”

  He ducked into the next room, where Martha was dictating a letter to her secretary. “Sorry to interrupt, Martha, but could you handle Gerrard next? Doc Coleman and I’ve got a bit of a crisis.”

  “Certainly, dear, but you should see Hillwater after that.”

  He nodded. Paul Hillwater wanted this new Conservancy Office set up, to regulate things like whaling and forestry. Good long-term idea, and in the shorter term he needed Hillwater’s friends Dane Sweet and the other old-line environmentalists.

  I’ll put Sweet in charge, he thought. Two good reasons for that; one, he’d do a good job of it, being a conservationist but not crazy, and two, then Sweet would be the lightning rod for complaints. Let him take the heat from both directions.

  Martha smiled at him, the familiar dry, quiet curve of the lips. Knows exactly what’s going through my mind, he thought. It was a profoundly comforting thing. Doreen and Ian were like that, too. Marian and Swindapa weren’t, and he wondered how they stood it.

  People are different, he decided. Just because it was banal didn’t make it any less true.

  “Well, you brought that off fairly well,” Coleman said, as the two doctors pulled their bicycles out of the rack in front of the Chief’s House.

  “Thanks, Henry,” Clemens said. “I felt a mite nervous, bearding the Chief in his den.”

  “Jared doesn’t bite,” Coleman said dryly.

  “Yes, but he’s the Chief.”

  “You youngsters needn’t put the reverential tone into the word,” Coleman said. “He’s our Chief Executive, not a king. Ayup. You’ve got a good eye, youngster. Doubt I would have spotted those pocks for what they were.”

  A shy grin. “I’m starting to feel like a real doctor.”

  Coleman stopped with one foot on the pedal. “Dammit, don’t let me hear you say that again! You are a real doctor. Real as I am.”

  “Sir . . . Henry, you know I don’t have everything a medical school up in the twentieth taught.”

  “You know more than a lot of those overspecialized machine tenders,” Coleman snapped. “You’re a damned fine GP and general surgeon, and you know how to improvise. You can do anything I can do, you know what works and why, and you’re qualified to teach it. I’d call that being a real doctor, all right. I’m not immortal, Justin; none of us geezers are. If anyone’s going to keep the torch lit, it’s going to be you, and the others your age.”

  They pushed out into the traffic, pedaling easily. Doctors rated the cherished Pre-Event bicycles, not the heavier solid-tire model that Seahaven’s spin-offs made. Gay Street had little afternoon traffic, only a delivery wagon pulled by a sleepy pony. Justin Clemens puffed a little as they wove among the heavier traffic on upper Main, dodging past a steam-hauler, a few of the well-to-do in one-horse buggies, and a stream of more prosaic wagons and cycles like their own.

  The Cottage Hospital had picked up the name before it moved into its present gray-shingle quarters on South Prospect Street forty years before the Event. It had grown since the Event; new covered passages snaked out to neighboring buildings, tying them into the older block. Nineteen beds had grown to a hundred or so, not counting the out-stations at the mainland bases and in Alba, and this was now the only teaching hospital in the world, and the only center of medial research. The gardens were still lovely with trellised roses, though.

  Those were Coleman’s hobby, the sweet-scented, old-fashioned type. A trellised vine was blooming under the white-painted windows as well, shaggy and bee-murmurous. The head of the hospital thought the sights and scents were good for convalescents and worthwhile just on general principles.

  Clemens broke into a beaming grin as he saw Andrew and Kate Nelson helping their eight-year-old son into a street-tricycle—room for two passengers in the back—waving to him.

  “Feeling a lot better, sprout?”he asked the boy. Smoothest appendectomy I ever did, he thought.

  “Sure am, Doctor,” the boy said.

  The smile slid away from Justin’s face as the parents completed their thanks and another bicycle drew up. The rider was a woman of his owns age, a trim figure in green shirt and slacks and bobbed yellow hair, with a satchel over her back.

  “’lo, Ellen,” he said.

  “Justin,” she replied. Her eyes went to Coleman, and she patted the knapsack. “Brand had the poppy extract,” she said. “I’m off to get it into the safe.”

  Coleman nodded. They needed that white ooze; it was the base for morphine. “Production’s up?”

  “Another quarter acre, and two more next spring, she says.”

  All three of the doctors shared a silent moment of thanks that opium-poppy seed had been available on the Island after the Event, even if it had taken years to breed up enough for full-scale growing.

  The elder medical man sighed when Ellen Clemens disappeared through the double doors. “I don’t suppose there’s any chance of keeping you here,” he said.

  Justin shook his head. “That . . . wouldn’t work,” he said bleakly.

  Coleman nodded with another sigh. A messy divorce was always bad news; in post-Event Nantucket, with nowhere to go, it could get very bad indeed.

  “I suppose I could try Alba,” Clemens said. “Not as frustrating as the mainland, and they need extension officers.”

  “Hmmmm,” Coleman said. “I think there may be another alternative, if you’ve the itch for travel.”

  “Gorgeous damned thing, isn’t it?” Marian said quietly.

  “She will dance with the waves like Moon Woman’s light on a waterfall,” Swindapa agreed.

  Ian nodded. Well, in the abstract, I agree.

  The shipyard had started out as a boat-holding shed, where pleasure craft were stacked three layers high for the winter. The size had made it a natural for building ships, when the Islanders got around to it; the overhead cranes alone were an enormous convenience. Now the huge open-ended metal building was filled almost to its limit by the craft that lay in its cradle within.

  “Two hundred and twelve feet long, beam thirty-six feet, depth deck-to-keel twenty-one feet,” Alston said, caressing the words. “Forty-six feet of raised quarterdeck. White oak, black oak, beechwood, white pine. Nine hundred twenty-seven net tons.”

  He could barely hear the murmured terms of endearment under the racket. Well, everyone has their own Grail. His had always been to know. Before he met Doreen or held his son, it had been the strongest thing in his life, and it wasn’t the
weakest even now, not by many a mile.

  Scaffolding covered the sides of the great ship, swarming with workers. Outside, the boathouse was flanked by new timber sheds almost as large. From them came the sound of blacksmiths working, tink-whang-tink, the screeching moan of a drill press, the dentist-chair sound of metal-cutting lathes. Over it all was the whining roar of the band saws; Leaton had rigged up enormous equivalents of the little machines used to cut keys, ones that would take a small model and rip an equivalent shape out of balks of seasoned oak. Steam puffed from boilers and from the big pressure-cooker retorts where timber softened so it could be bent into shape.

  The fall day was brisk, but the heat of forges and hearths and the steam engines that drove the pneumatic tools kept it comfortable in the shed. The air was full of the smell of hot metal, the vanilla odor of oak, sharp pine, and tar bubbling in vats. Sunlight fogged through floating sawdust.

  “Take a look,” Swindapa said. “It’s like being inside some great beast, a whale.”

  The Arnsteins scrambled up a long board stair built into the side of the scaffolding, splintery wood rough under their hands. It led into the ship through a section not yet planked, and they stood precariously on a piece of temporary decking.

  “It is like being inside a whale,” Doreen said into Ian’s ear. “And it looks a lot bigger than you’d expect.”