On the Oceans of Eternity

by S. M. Stirling

  "Looks good," Cofflin said. "For the buyer's needs."

  Martha gave a slight dry chuckle at the younger man's startlement. "It's not for us," she said. "Commodore Alston and her partner want it. For vacations, at first, and then as a retirement place. And to raise horses."

  Hollard blinked; then his face split in a grin that took years off his age. "The skipper for a neighbor?" he said in delight, then wiped away the smile with an effort. "Well, you realize I do have to see that Betty-Alonski's widow-gets what she can…"

  "Indeed you do," Martha said, touching him on the arm. "But we can discuss that tomorrow."

  They walked up the dirt lane with its wagon-wheel ruts, through a broad belt of uncleared timber where leaves lay in drifts like old gold and scraps of crimson velvet-some still floating from the passage of children and dogs. Squirrels went up the trunks in streaks of fire, or hung from branches ratchet-chattering anger at being disturbed; a raccoon eyed them dubiously and waddled off, fat with autumn bounty. Beyond the wood lay the imperfectly graveled surface of the Great West Road that ran along the northern shore of Long Island, finishing as a forest trail opposite the lonely little outpost on Manhattan. Right now it was far from empty.

  Been a while since I heard that sound, Cofflin thought. Booted feet moving in unison, crunching on gravel; his mind filled in the arms swinging, the whole like a great centipede built up of human beings. 'Bout a hundred, hundred-odd. Camp Grant, the Nantucket Marine Corps training enclave, was five miles or so west of here. They halted; the rest of their party had, too, on the other side of the road, probably at the children's insistence.

  They do love a parade, Jared thought grimly. Wish it was the Shriners or the Fourth of July.

  A mounted standard-bearer walked his horse around the curve to the eastward, Old Glory streaming out from the staff socketed in his right stirrup with a flutter and snap. Jared Cofflin removed his hat, holding it over his heart; the others did likewise, Hollard's wife and a few of the others making the Fiernan triple-touch gesture of respect to the Republic's banner first. The fifty states the stars represented might be far away on the oceans of eternity, but the ideas it stood symbol for were very much alive. Behind the mounted man came another leading a horse, the company commander.

  Walks where his troops do, Cofflin thought with an inward nod of approval.

  Behind him came the hundred and thirty-two Marines, in a khaki-clad column of fours with their Werder rifles slung over their shoulders and Fritz-style helmets strapped to their heavy marching packs. The faces under the floppy canvas campaign hats were young, sweating, and tired with the day's route-march out to Fogarty's Cove and back, the bodies hard and fit with good feeding and constant exercise. Shorter by a couple of inches than a corresponding group in the twentieth would have been, because nearly everyone except the officers and senior NCOs were native to this century, but all in all a good-looking group of young men and women. The Republic could do far worse for a source of future citizens.

  The company commander gave the group by the roadside a casual glance; then his eyes whipped back to Jared Cofflin's face. The chief felt himself flushing slightly, and made a slight gesture with his head, a wordless carry on. His: God, but I hate this sort of thing, he kept to himself.

  "Company!" the young Marine captain barked. "Eyes"-it ran down the chain of command-"right!" He saluted.

  The faces snapped toward the Republic's head of state, a few sets of eyes growing wide, and one luckless newly minted graduate of Camp Grant missed a step and had to skip-hop to get the rhythm back. Cofflin kept his face grave as he returned the gesture of respect, but there was a wry grin at the back of his eyes, remembering what one of his instructors would have done if he'd screwed up on parade when the president happened to be passing by. That rifleman was going to get one awesome ass-chewing, probably. Not that he hadn't hated square-bashing and close-order drill himself, but it had some relevance to actual fighting, here, and it maintained its immemorial usefulness in teaching solidarity.

  "Fine-looking bunch," Hollard said judiciously, when they'd passed and the last pack mule was turning small with distance. "And hungry, thank God."

  Cofflin raised a brow, and the farmer continued:

  "Amazing how much a couple of battalions of recruits can eat. The Coast Guard here feeds its Marines a lot better than the Navy ever did back up in the twentieth, if my father's stories are anything to go on. What with taxes and all, it's at least some help when they go shopping, Chief."

  "I'm not amazed," Martha said in her dry business voice. "I have to draw up the budget statements."

  "We can talk about that later, too," her husband said neutrally, exchanging a glance with Hollard and seeing no surprise.

  Well, the man is a leader in the Meeting here, and a delegate.

  He'd know there was more to this visit than a favor for Marian Alston. Under the Republic's constitution, the outports handled local affairs with Town Meetings of their own. They also elected representatives to the central House of Delegates, entitled to debate and vote for those who couldn't make it to Nantucket Town. The chief had to keep close track of those their neighbors looked to for guidance, perhaps especially those in the outports.

  Tom Hollard was among the more successful of the farming settlers here on Long Island; if Jared hadn't read the files, it would still have been obvious as they crossed the road. Cultivated fields stretched to either side and southward to the crimson-yellow line of the woods, apples glowed red in the green of young orchards, and copper-leafed vineyards trained on T-shaped wooden stakes showed grapes in purple bunches.

  It showed too as they walked up the long tree-lined graveled drive to the farmhouse. Like most, that had started as a log box on a fieldstone cellar and foundation, sixty feet by thirty, the type built by the Agriculture Department's contractors as part of the initial settlement scheme. The thick scatter of tall trees left standing around it showed what the material had been like, white oaks and shagbark hickories and tulip poplars, chestnuts and maples, beeches and elms, most of them sixty feet to the lowest branch and showing the straight vertical growth of mature closed-canopy forest. For building they need only be squared by a portable steam-driven circular saw and deeply notched at the ends to be assembled into a thick strong structure; the Department's specialized teams could throw one up in an afternoon. Over the last decade Tom had added an upper story to his, clapboards of white-painted oak plank to the outside, and an extension to one end that turned the box into an L-shape; he could just see laundry flapping on a line in the kitchen yard. A two-story verandah spanned the long southwest face.

  Woodsmoke wafted from the two stone chimneys, and the mouth-watering smell of bread baking. Sheep kept the big fenced lawn smooth. A baseball diamond had been marked out in one corner of the enclosure-Tom Hollard was a founder of the local Little League, too-and there were swings and a sandbox and soccer goalposts. Quick-growing Babylonica willows drooped their branches into a pond where ducks and geese floated.

  The business side hadn't been neglected either. There was a large truck garden, green rows with wheat-straw mulch between them. Off a little to the eastward-hence usually downwind- were two big hip-roofed barns, one with twin wooden silos. More besides that: piggery, chicken coops, turkey house, dairy. A thick-timbered icehouse sank nearly to its eaves in the ground, corncribs with their slatted sides bulging yellow, sheds for equipment, a small winery, a carpenter's and a farrier's workshed, two big windmills filling a water tank and bored-log pipes leading about from that. Fenced paddocks held several score of black-coated cattle, plus a couple of Jersey crossbreeds, a flock of four-foot moas who pranced in agitated alarm, and six horses. Two were half-Morgans for riding and general work. Four were the precious offspring coaxed from the seed of the single elderly Clydesdale stallion who'd been on-Island at the time of the Event, big and hairy-footed and strong.

  "Two hundred twenty-five acres cleared," Hollard said with quiet satisfaction, noting the direction
of his guests' gaze. His hands opened and closed in unconscious reflex, the thick callus scritching. "We could get another twenty-five this winter, and pull the stumps on fifteen in the spring-more if I can get a steam-hauler and a winch in for a couple of weeks. Costs like blazes, and powder for blowing stumps isn't cheap either."

  Better than two hundred acres, with axes and two-man saws, Cofflin thought. That was reason enough for genuine pride. Cleared fields this size meant thousands of tons of hardwood removed.

  They walked up a flagged path from the roadway and onto the verandah; there were roses to either side, lilac bushes, and a wisteria was making a determined effort to climb a trellis along the south wall. The ends of the rafter-beams overhead had been carved into snarling wolf-heads in the primitive, vigorous style of the charioteer tribes of Alba. Fangs from the real article grinned white in their mouths; the pelts doing rug-duty on the floor showed where they'd come from. The pillars that upheld the balcony and sloping roof above that were man-thick trunks of black walnut, polished and carved in abstract geometric designs like Fiernan spirit-poles. The work was about half-done; a basket of shavings stood by one, with a toolbox of mallets, chisels, and gouges beside it.

  "That's Tanaswada and Jane," Hollard said, running a hand over the dark beauty of the wood. "They've got a knack for it. Saucarn here did the wolf-heads."

  The farmworker shrugged. "It brings luck," he said, scuffing one foot against the flagstone floor. "Frightens off the gowalun. Easy enough, with good steel tools." Then he ducked inside and returned with a double-barreled shotgun and a leather bandolier of brass-and-cardboard shells across his chest. "Thought I'd better keep an eye on the grapes until sundown, Tom," he said, in an accent that mixed Yankee twang with Sun People choppiness.

  Several of the dogs walked over to him with waving tails and canine grins and a general air of: Hey, that's a great idea, let's go kill something, right this way, boss.

  "Yup," Hollard said. "If it has feathers or fur and comes near the vines, shoot it. Bill, you take a rifle and go with Saucarn. See the rest of you at suppertime."

  The farmworkers scattered to their tasks. The head of the household and his guests seated themselves around an outdoor table made from a single yard-wide plank of curly maple, waxed and polished. The verandah had a pleasant lived-in look, with balls of wool and knitting needles dropped in a willow-withe basket, a leather-bound book on a side table with a maple leaf to mark someone's place, and a yellow brindled cat napping on a cushion. It opened an eye to study the strangers, stretched, yawned, circled, and went back to sleep with its tail tucked over its black nose. One of the dogs who hadn't gone with the armed men came over to butt its head under Hollard's palm as he sat, thumping its tail on the flagstones. Tanaswada came out with a tray of cookies and a pot of coffee, then sat and opened her blouse, unselfconsciously setting her baby to nursing. That still took Cofflin a little aback-Martha had always insisted on privacy-but the Alban custom seemed to be winning out all over the Republic.

  Hollard poured, added Jersey cream and maple sugar for those who asked for it, and nodded in the direction of his vineyard. "Birds love ripe grapes," he said. "So do foxes and black bears and wolves, that's why I had Bill take the rifle." His foot nudged one of the wolf pelts that were scattered across the verandah's floor. "I don't really mind the bears, they're just a nuisance, but I'm going to by-God see every wolf on Long Island shot out, and Dane Sweet can lump it if he doesn't like it."

  "I don't understand why he gets so upset," Tanaswada said. "Back in Alba, we always killed every wolf we could, and they're still there and still eating our sheep. Sometimes in a really bad winter they eat humans-or did before we had guns. Children or old people caught alone, especially."

  "Mmmm, it's not that simple," Cofflin said. He held up a hand to forestall the farmer's answer: "Mind you, you're right about Long Island. Sheep and wolves don't go all that well together in a place this size. He's right about the continent overall-room for everybody, even the wolves."

  "As long as they aren't near my stock. I suppose you have to keep everyone happy," Hollard said, satisfied in a grumbling fashion. "Sweet repairs bicycles for a living. He doesn't have to worry about losing beasts he needs to make his loan payments to the Town."

  "Thought you'd paid out?" Martha said.

  Hollard nodded. "I have," he said. "Lots are still working on it. And I could use another loan myself-there're things the place needs, say a little steam compressor for some power tools and a chaff-cutter, and… There's the tax increases, too, just when most of us were starting to see the end of our settlement loans. It's frustrating."

  Cofflin nodded in turn. Land wasn't worth much to a homesteader without tools and stock, and it took a good long while to make a farm a paying proposition, the more so when you were learning by doing with only books and Angelica Brand's extension officers to fall back on. Some of the settlers had failed completely, some were flourishing like the Hollards, and many more were struggling along somewhere in between.

  "Good harvest this year?" he said.

  Hollard and his wife looked at each other and grinned.

  "Well, the wheat, rye, barley, and oats came in all right," he said. "We're finally getting a clue. Lord, the mistakes we made the first couple of years! Come Monday we're getting some seasonal people in to start on the apples, then the grape harvest. Corn's been good, so far, and the canola. We didn't get the apples all in last year, and had to let the pigs eat the windfalls, and you heard about the birds, bears, and grapes-every God-damned bird in creation passes this way twice a year, all hungry from their travels. Bloody migratory welfare fowl-and what those…" he stopped and left out a word "passenger pigeons do to a grainfield doesn't bear thinking about, thank God the kids're getting old enough to handle bird-scaring. Then there are the rest of the potatoes."

  He reached out to touch wood, and Tanaswada made a geometric gesture of propitiation. "Assuming the weather holds and assuming we get everything in timely, not too bad. Prices have been reasonable this year, despite all that Alban wheat coming in."

  "Then you get your easy season," Cofflin said, chuckling slightly to show sympathy. Hollard's laugh was full-throated.

  "Oh, right. Nothing but the fall plowing and planting, muck-spreading, shucking and shelling the corn, ring-barking trees and rolling logs and burning 'em and teaming the prime ones out for the timberyard hauler to pick up-

  Tanaswada put a cloth over her shoulder, followed it with the baby, and began patting its back. "I've never had it so easy as here," she said. "There, little one, that feels better, doesn't it? Tom, dear, you sit on a machine, the horses pull it, and it cuts the hay… I drive another machine and it turns and rakes it… all that's left to do is pitch it onto the wagon and take it to the barn. Can you call that work?"

  "Yes," her husband said.

  When the general chuckle had died down, he went on: "I was afraid you had bad news about Ken."

  Cofflin shook his head. "Far as I know, he's doing his job well enough." He cocked an eyebrow. "Ever wish you had it, Tom?"

  "Never," Hollard said promptly. "Alba was enough fighting for me, unless someone comes here." He looked at his wife and child, around at home and land. "Then we'll fight. Meantime, I'll leave it to Ken and Kathyrn and the others. I've got my family and a good farm and I'm easy with my neighbors. That's enough for me; I'm content to be a… what's the old word?"

  "Yeoman?" Martha said.

  "Ayup."

  Jared Cofflin sipped at the bitter-tasting coffee, pouring in more of the thick Jersey cream and wishing for the ten-thousandth time that they'd had something more than ornamental coffee plants to plant out down in the Caribbean. Or that they had time to send an expedition to Ethiopia; the books said the wild coffee there was a lot better than this. Which was drinkable, if you added some chicory, but only just.

  "Well, the whole purpose of this war is to make sure we won't have to fight on our own doorsteps again," he pointed out. "Surely your bro
ther's made that clear to you."

  "Oh, it's clear enough to me," Tom Hollard said. "Not everyone looks that far ahead, though. And like I said, the war taxes're hitting a lot of us just when we were finally getting out from under."

  "Then it's up to us to convince 'em," Jared said, settling down to work.

  A song came from the forecastle of the Chamberlain after the commodore's officer-guests had departed; voices in soft harmony with a flute and the strum of a guitar:

  There is much that life withholds

  There is much that life denies-

  I am content… and most content…

  With seaward-gazing eyes.

  Marian Alston smiled up through the sloping windows at the frosted stars. A lot of songs had been pulled out of books and record collections that first year after the Event because there was no other way to have music besides making it yourself… but the old words made more sense these days.

  "Well, that went off well," she said aloud.

  She kicked off her boots, threw her jacket over the back of one chair, and sank back onto the broad semicircle of cushioned bench that ran around the rear of the cabin below the slanting windows, stretching her arms behind her head. Nothing came through the open panes but a little cool sea air; nothing showed save campfires ashore and the riding lights of the ships on the calm sea, and the crescent moon above casting a westward glimmerpath toward Nantucket and home. A single lantern turned the big room into a place of shadows, gleams from polished wood and metal, from the black-lacquered surfaces of the two sets of katana and wazikashi racked on the wall, from the glass that covered the family portraits of them with the girls. It was quiet outside, and the music came plain: