On the Oceans of Eternity

by S. M. Stirling

  Joseph, I happen to know you spent '44 climbing down boarding nets off very unwelcoming Pacific islands, Jared thought to himself. Not that he'd ever heard Starbuck talk about Okinawa. Or the fact that he'd lied about his age to enlist…

  The older man spread liver-spotted hands. "Here, though? We were already using every pair of hands, tool, and machine we had before the war started. We can't afford to divert more."

  "We can't afford to lose the war, either," Cofflin said.

  Starbuck sighed. "I'm not just being cheap, Jared," he said. "With productivity so low, taxes really hurt. Back up in the twentieth, rich countries could afford… sort of, for a while… to pay half their incomes to the government. Half of a great deal is still a fair amount. Half of just enough is not enough to live on."

  Cofflin ran exasperated fingers through his thinning, grizzled sandy hair; he'd been fighting this particular battle since the Event, off and on.

  "I know… but what'm I supposed to tell Marian and Ken Hollard, Joseph? When they say I'm trading the lives of their troops for money?"

  "That we can't do any more except as a temporary last-ditch, all-out burst. Oh, I can switch things around-selling interest-bearing war bonds, things like that-but the bottom line is that we're using all our surplus. If I fiddle the books, all we'll get is inflation."

  Cofflin sighed slightly again. "Well, I think we can get our new allies to contribute a bit more, but they can't do a lot of what we're doing; they don't have the industry."

  "If they do more of the basics, we can shift around and it'll lighten the overall burden," Starbuck said. "And you could cut down on nonessential projects, like that new settlement in Argentina." He snorted. "New 'Sconset, indeed!"

  Cofflin smiled, a slight curve of mouth. "Just planning so far, which is cheap. Got to think long-term." He held up a hand. "Not so much for the direct payoff, though we can always use more food and fiber. But when this war is over, we're going to be mustering out a lot of troops. A lot of them new citizens who'll stay here. A land grant is part of the enlistment package."

  "Hmmm." Starbuck rubbed his short, white beard. "Plenty of places in the Republic to homestead already, without annexing new territory."

  "Not as many as you might think. We're keeping half of Long Island in wilderness reserve. Mebbe three hundred more farms there. Besides, the Pampas aren't covered in hundred-foot-tall oak trees laced together with wild grapevines thicker than your leg. It's tall-grass prairie; Iowa by the sea, with a better climate."

  "Well, that sort of decision is your department, Jared," Star-buck said. "I'm here to take the punch bowl away when your parties are half-done. You run the war."

  Cofflin snorted. "At these distances? All I do is look over Marian's plans, keep the home fires burning, and go around shaking people down to pay for it all."

  He paused for a moment, looking out the door. -''Ever think how strange it is, Joseph, that we're giving orders here… and on the other side of the world, people we've never heard of are killing each other because of it?"

  Starbuck snorted. "They'd be going to war anyway, Jared. We're just giving them a different reason."

  The One in whose control are horses, cattle, all chariots;

  The One who has caused to be born the sun, the dawn;

  The One who is the leader of the waters;

  He, O people, is Indara Thunderer!

  Raupasha's voice rang out; first in the common Hurrian language, then in the ancient tongue of the ariammanu, the founders of the kingdom of Mitanni. Few here could speak it even in her stumbling, book-learned fashion, but holiness had ensured that the prayers survived in memory:

  The One without whom people do not conquer;

  The One to whom the warriors call for help;

  The One who shakes the unshakable;

  He, O people, is Indara Thunderer!

  Raupasha daughter of Shuttarna raised her hands to the sky as the ancient, ancient chant echoed across the upland plain; the smell of the sacrificial blood, the fire that consumed it, the oil and pinewood, lifted her with the smoke of sacrifice to the uttermost heavens. Dawn paled the stars, and she felt as one with them-a singing exultation, like that brought by the soma of the oldest tales. Reluctantly she descended from that eagle-aerie of the spirt, down to the common earth of day.

  That was well enough, for she liked the place of the encampment, though she had been born and raised far south of here, in the southern Mitannian borderlands. Yet still these Hittite uplands spoke to something in her soul, the vast clear spaces fringed with mountains, the spare beauty of the landscape and the thin pure upland air, even the unaccustomed chill of their early-winter nights. They went well with the sounds and sights and smells of war, barley porridge cooking over the campfires and pigmeat frying, leather, oil, horse sweat and man sweat and the leather of the tents.

  Those were being struck even as she watched, the men of her chariot squadrons-hers!-fanning out from where they'd gathered for the sacrifice. She would have preferred a horse, or at least an ox, but a sheep was what they had. Orders were to hoard food jealously.

  The Mitannian camp was a little away from the main Babylonian base, and that was half a day's journey southwest of Hattusas itself, for greater ease of gathering supplies. Both were laid out as the Nantukhtar had taught, in straight rows and streets; there was much digging involved in the Nantukhtar way of war, from field fortifications to latrines.

  Raupasha brought herself up to attention and saluted as riders from the main camp drew rein in a spurt of dust and a few pebbles shot from under the iron-shod hooves. It was the Seg Kallui; as second-in-command of the Babylonian expeditionary force under King Kashtiliash, Kathryn Hollard was also in charge of the Mitannian vassal troops. Her staff and bodyguards followed her, as the noble Tekhip-tilla and Gunnery Sergeant Connor and the chiefs of the four chariot squadrons did Raupasha.

  She spent a second to envy the older woman the neat uniforms of her soldiers, as the gesture was returned. The clothing was drab-khaki of a shade not much different from the Is-lander Marines-but uniforms were part of the New Learning. Symbols of the power of a King who could dress whole armies in his own livery.

  "The sacrifice went well, I hope?" Kathryn said.

  "Very well, thank you, Lady Ka"-Raupasha made a heroic effort and wrapped her mouth around the maddening th sound-"Kathryn."

  She and Kathryn had English and Akkadian in common; they spoke the latter because many of Raupasha's followers knew the Assyrian version of that tongue.

  As soon as this war is over, I must see that many of my people learn the English speech and writing, she thought. She herself worked doggedly every day at perfecting her command of it. Perhaps even send some to Nantucket for schooling.

  Tekhip-tilla tugged at his gray-shot black beard; he was a Mitannian noble of the old school, not afraid to speak truth before his sovereign; few such had lived through the Assyrian occupation.

  "Well enough," he said. "The omens were good and the smoke rose to heaven properly. Although the men might have felt better were it to a more familiar God, like Teshub of the Weather or the Ishtar of the Warriors."

  Raupasha knew that, but her foster father had raised her in the most ancient traditions.

  "Teshub and Indara are both among the Gods of our ancestors," she said. "Perhaps Indara is merely the older name for Teshub, since both command the storm and thunder. Yet when we worshiped Indara under that name, the kingdom was great."

  "A good point, my princess," Tekhip-tilla said. "Let it be as you wish."

  "To business," Kathryn Hollard said. She looked to the west. "You understand your mission?"

  "Yes, Lady Kathryn." They'd gone over it exhaustively, but it was good to remind the squadron commanders. "We are to fight as the wolf does-slashing and then running swiftly."

  "Good," Kathryn nodded. "Yours is not the least of tasks; the main force will be moving west behind you, and then making a fighting retreat back to the east. Eventually we'll have
to make a stand. Whether or not the enemy is too strong for us at the final battle may well depend on forces like yours."

  Raupasha nodded again, although she didn't altogether believe that; part of it was said to make her men's hearts strong, and to soothe their pride. These things were part of generalship and kingcraft, and she would learn all that the Hollards had to teach her. And…

  The two women walked off a little. "Lady Kat'ryn…"

  Kathryn laid a finger on her lips for an instant, and smiled. "Some things should not be asked. Not now," she said.

  Whether King Kashtiliash will ever let Kenneth be my lord, Raupasha thought. "If not now, when?"

  "Sometimes I have to make myself remember you're barely eighteen," she said, infuriatingly. "And other times it's obvious."

  "I am old enough to command and rule, you thought. And in this war I may die," Raupasha said. "I feel Yama put his hand on my shoulder, and say 'make haste.''

  "And I might die, or Kash… King Kashtiliash might die, or Ken might die. Or the horse may learn to sing."

  That startled a giggle out of Raupasha, and Kathryn grinned back, making the years between them seem to vanish.

  "But after the war," Kenneth's sister said. "Then we'll either be defeated, hence dead, or the King's heart may be changed. Who knows?"

  "I know," Raupasha said vehemently. "I know that it will- King Kashtiliash will see the loyalty and courage of Mitanni's troops fighting beside the men of Kar-Duniash, and his heart will be softened toward me."

  "I certainly hope so. Vaya con Dios." At Raupasha's curious look, she went on: "A saying. It means go with God."

  "And may your God be with you, Lady Kathryn."

  She turned and jumped into her chariot. Her driver Iridmi and Gunnery Sergeant Connor waited there. Connor handed her the rocket launcher, and she slung the blunt flare-ended tube over her shoulder-for show's sake, to hearten the others.

  "Forward!" she shouted, and Iridmi flicked the reins.

  "See you later, Councilor," Jared Cofflin concluded.

  " 'day, Chief," Starbuck replied; he was already turning back to his work.

  Cofflin gathered up hat and jacket and ambled through the bank, nodding greetings to the clerks settling in to their jobs- there was already a click of abacus beads, a rattle of adding machines, the tapping of a manual typewriter, a scritching of quill pens on coarse paper and an occasional muttered curse as they blotted. The latest steel nibs modeled on ones found in antique shops did better… slightly… but the government made do with what the birds gave for free.

  Would the extra efficiency and saving some sheets of foolscap justify springing for better pens, or would the bureaucrats just have better weapons in their campaign to drown him in paper?

  The thought went into the files, along with an infinity of others. Yesterday Doc Coleman had notified him that the last Islander with AIDS had died; they didn't have protease inhibitors to keep the virus in check here and now.

  Poor bastard, he thought. Smallpox they had to worry about, evidently, but at least not HIV anymore. You could do something about smallpox…

  If only we could spare the people to go looking for the source of that smallpox outbreak in Babylon. Damn the war!

  He went out the doors and stood for a moment on the stone steps that led down to the cobbles of Main Street. They were densely crowded, but it wasn't very much like the mob scenes the Summer People had made, back before the Event.

  For one thing, there are a hell of a lot more kids, he thought.

  Better than half the people on-Island were under fourteen, the Census people told him. A population explosion, and set to get more so when the big post-Event generation, born and adopted, came adult and started having litters of their own. In the meantime…

  Swarms of towheaded rugrats. That still stood out, even more so on a school holiday.

  Although school holidays didn't mean playtime, nowadays; all the older kids were working. The board tables along the street were piled with boxes of radishes, turnips, sacks of potatoes, stacks of sweet corn, tomatoes glowing like piles of rubies, lettuce, cabbage, onions, cucumbers, melons, apples, peaches- the post-Event orchards were really starting to bear-and pies, jars of pickles and jam, cheeses, butter, homemade sausages and smoked hams, hen- and moa-eggs, baskets of live chickens or the plucked, gutted end product on ice.

  The stalls stretched all the way down Main toward the harbor and into the covered market where the old A amp;P and its parking lot and the oil-storage tanks had once stood.

  Good harvest this year. He'd read Angelica Brand's reports, but it was nice to see it firsthand as well as in the Councilor for Agriculture's antiseptic prose and columns of figures. Everyone was just a little paranoid about food supplies now.

  And everything tastes so much better in season. No more wooden tomatoes bred tough for shipment. On the other hand, nothing's available except when it is in season.

  The crowd was dense along the sidewalks, down to the big clot around the Hub halfway down Main; that had gone from being a news-and-magazine store to an information exchange with rows of slate-and-chalk notice boards, and from there to a hiring hall. The usual desperate harvest-season farmers were there, bargaining for extra hands. One finally reached an agreement with an immigrant family, mother and father and four working-age children, loaded them into his buckboard and flicked the ponies into motion; his wife stood swaying in the back hefting a shovel, glaring around at anyone thinking of poaching. Cofflin snorted, eyes crinkling with hidden laughter as they rattled up the cobbles of Main and disappeared, heading westward along Orange toward the Siaconset Road and the farming country there.

  His own course went in the opposite direction, over a few blocks to the John Cofflin House-an inn that'd taken over the house of a collateral relative back (or ahead) in the 1840s.

  Jared's lips tightened slightly. Ian's place was just across the street in back; he'd been staying in one of the outbuildings the night of the Event, and it had become the Foreign Affairs office as well as his residence by the usual sort of happenstance.

  Damn, I'm worried about them, he thought, adding a short prayer to a God he didn't think should be bothered with unimportant things. Ian dead or in the hands of William Walker and his bitch, that was important.

  Broad Street, which wasn't particularly broad, ran down from there to the old Steamship Wharf, between buildings in the soberly elegant Nantucket Federal style plus a few plain Puritan saltboxes from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

  Meet me at the gray shingle house with white trim, he grinned to himself, remembering a pre-Event joke.

  Not totally accurate; there were a few redbrick buildings with white trim. Nantucket's downtown was almost all pre-1860; the town had been too poor to rebuild after the whaling industry collapsed.

  Broad was also crowded, as usual. Not quite as much so as it had been before the new channels and piers were opened up down the harbor, but densely enough; horse-drawn wagons nose to tailboard, a half dozen steam-haulers pulling two or three carts each. It was amazing how much noise a town of only ten thousand people could make, when shod hooves hit pavement en masse. This being rush hour, it also had a fair share of commuter traffic-bicycles, mainly, with the odd steam-hauler-and the sidewalks were thronged.

  The breeze flickered the leaves of the big elms overhead, letting down stabs of light that flickered off brass fittings on a horse's harness, polished metal on a steamer's frame. Businesses were opening on both sides of the street; mostly trading firms here, dealing in anything from spices to shelled corn, barrel staves, and salt beef. It paid to be near the docks, if your living depended on the sea.

  Martha was waiting under the sign of the Brotherhood of Thieves. That had been a restaurant before the Event, and still was. Heating large quantities of water was a lot easier in big batches at a central location, with the equipment available; that helped account for all the bathhouses and steam laundries, too.

  Everything was so much mo
re convenient with electricity, Jared thought, not for the first time; all the alternatives were messy, dangerous, or involved far too much hard work.

  The Brotherhood's carved and painted sign showed a man in antique clothing, short devil horns on his forehead; a bag of money rested on one palm and a small chained black woman on the other. Nantucket had been big in the Abolitionist movement and Underground Railroad, back before the Civil War.

  Cofflin's long bony face went bleak for a moment, with an expression Robert E. Lee's men might have recognized. At Gettysburg, on the faces of the blue-clad New Englanders storming down from the Little Round Top through a hail of bone-smashing rifle fire and grapeshot to break the Confederacy's last hope at the point of their bayonets. Slavery was all too alive in the Year 10…

  "Morning, dear," Martha said, giving him a quick peck on the cheek. "I paahked Sam and Jenny with the Macys."

  That left Heather and Lucy, and his own eldest two, Marian and Jared Jr. They weren't quite jumping with excitement, but close.

  A young man in a blue Guard sailor suit and flat cap with RNCGS Chamberlain on its ribbon came up, slight and swarthy and impeccably neat, cutlass and revolver at his belt. He threw off a crackling salute, then stood there at ease, looking wiry and toughly competent and so damned young…

  Marian's idea of course, but there wasn't much point in putting someone in charge of security matters and then refusing to listen to them.

  "I'm Petty Officer Martinelli, sir," the young man said. "Madam Councilor."

  The chief stuck out his hand; the sailor's was strong and dry, rough with callus. "This is Jared Jr.," he said. "And Marian Deer Dancer Cofflin. And.

  Martinelli gravely shook hands with Jared Jr. and Marian, then exchanged hugs with Heather and Lucy.

  "These two have been getting me in trouble for years, sir," Martinelli said. "Imps of Satan, as the commodore puts it."