On the Oceans of Eternity

by S. M. Stirling

  The slave market where they stopped was bustling, a huge complex of linked two-story buildings and courtyards, with doors and corridors color-coded for convenience. Ian worked his shoulders against the prickling feeling that went over them as they entered through polished oak doors and merchants bustled over to greet them.

  "No, we will look ourselves. Do not trouble me more," Odikweos said, with an imperious gesture.

  This place gives me the creeps, Ian thought.

  Not least because it all seemed so ordinary. Sales were made in bulk and coffles marched off; men spat on their palms and slapped them together to mark a deal, as they might have for mules or sheep. Others looked at teeth or felt muscles, and some of the buyers had collars on their own necks, household stewards or workshop managers. Posters advertised skilled labor; stonemasons, bricklayers, seamstresses. Others offered to train raw slaves, and listed fees. There wasn't even much of a smell; Walker's hygiene regulations were in full force; otherwise, this crowded series of iron-barred pens would be a natural breeding ground for half a dozen different diseases. Fear and hopeless misery still sweated out of the dry whitewashed walls in a miasmic cloud he could taste.

  It isn't as if Walker invented slavery here, he told himself.

  That was true-every Achaean who could afford it had owned at least one to help around farm and house. In an economy without machinery, money, or a market for paid labor, it was the only alternative to doing everything yourself. And the palaces of the wannaxakes had imported hundreds of women from Asia Minor to make the fine cloth and perfumed oils that had been exported to pay for metals and grain. It wasn't any excuse for this, though.

  The Achaeans hadn't based their whole economy on this sort of robotized forced labor. Slavery was a common institution, but societies based on slavery were rare. You had to develop elaborate control mechanisms to hold so many adult males in bondage; it just didn't pay, usually, except to mobilize labor for new uses or new lands.

  A pair of green-uniformed guards went by, shotguns over their backs and billy clubs tapping against their boots; ex-slaves themselves. Walker had made it possible-not easy, but possible-for the ambitious to get manumission; that provided a safety valve and skimmed off natural leaders.

  So he's a smart sociopathic scumbag.

  He certainly hadn't expected John Martins to be here; all the reports agreed that he and his wife had been kidnapped by Walker back when he hijacked the Yare. They found the blacksmith telling two collarless men to lead away half a dozen with the iron rings around their necks.

  "Hey, Professor," Martins said, holding out his hand. "Good to see you, man-I mean, like, it's a bummer you got to be here, but it's, like, maximum coolness for me."

  Arnstein ignored the outstretched hand. Martins was in his late fifties and also tall and lanky, and balding on top. That was about the only point of resemblance; the other man's tie-dyed T-shirt and jeans and sandals, the tiny granny glasses on the end of his nose and the ponytail behind… they'd followed very different career paths in the sixties. His to San Diego and ancient history, Martins up into the hills of northern California. The hard ropy muscle that moved under his skin showed Martins kept up the trade he'd learned there.

  "I didn't expect to find you buying slaves, John," he said quietly.

  Martins's hand clenched, and the sad russet-brown eyes blinked. "You ain't been here in Mordor for ten years, man," he said, his voice equally soft. "I buy these guys so I can teach 'em and set 'em free, dude. And Barbs teaches the chicks. We've got a good hundred people between us might have been in the mines or the fucking arena without us, man!"

  Arnstein felt a rush of shame. "Sorry," he said, holding out his own hand. Martins's closed on it with careful strength. "People change, you know."

  "Yeah, man, I do," Martins said. He looked at Odikweos. The Achaean nodded.

  "These guards speak nothing but Achaean," he said. "They are my men, also."

  He turned and walked away.

  Oh, yeah, Arnstein thought Yup, I've got plenty of chances to escape-with six professional soldiers guarding me, and hundreds of miles of enemy territory between me and our forces, and Mittler's goons longing to start pulling my toenails out-or hold my head underwater, if they don't want marks. And me a sixty-something desk jockey. Yup.

  "C'mon, man," Martins said.

  They walked out into the cool sunlight The men Martins had bought and an equal number of young women sat in a buckboard hitched to two mules; some of them looked stunned, some sullen, some wistfully hopeful. The wagon took them out of Walkeropolis to the northwest, up toward the harsh slopes of Taygelos, then into a steepish narrow valley.

  "Rivendell," Marlins said proudly.

  Rivendell, California, Arnstein thought. There are places like this up in the hills, or there were.

  He fought back the disorienting onset of post-Event-Syndrome once again; There were a half dozen low bungalow-style adobe buildings with wood-pillared porches, a barn, footpaths, a wooden water race turning a couple of small watermills, corrals and truck gardens… including one that looked very much like a patch of genuine weed. A smell of baking bread, hot iron, oil, and burning charcoal drifted down to them.

  "Walker only let me out from under a little while ago," Martins said. "Till then I was, you know, working for the Man mostly. But I've been building this up for a while. Gotta have your own space here, man, or your head can get completely fucked up."

  He pushed the small glasses back up his nose, a gesture that Arnstein copied without thinking of it, like a reflex yawn.

  "So I got this place going. Sort of, like, a commune, you know? A couple of the guys I've taught stay on, and some of the chicks and their kids. The others out working on their own mostly chip in to pay us back, so we can do right by some more poor types. Gotta have the bread to pay off the ores."

  The wagon pulled up, and a swarm of children came running out to meet it. Martins handed out candied figs and hugs, but attended to business first. One by one the slaves knelt beside a small anvil, and Martins split the soft-iron rivets that closed their collars. Some of them wept and tried to kiss his feet; the balding Californian lifted them up and exchanged extravagant embraces instead, before a brawny young man and a woman in a long granny dress and headscarf led them away.

  A hippie squire. Now I've seen everything, Arnstein thought, dazed, as he was brought inside to a big kitchen, all whitewashed walls, copper pots and pans, and scrubbed-oak boards. The floor was brown tile, and one wall held a hand-painted mandala, hypnotic and beautiful.

  "That's Barbs's work," Martins said, indicating it. "Groovy, hey?"

  A comfortable-looking woman in her forties wearing an Achaean gown and a complex of painted scarves gave Arnstein a motherly hug. "Good to see an American again," she said, and pushed him down on a bench. "Hey, you don't get into my kitchen without eating."

  She brought him a cup of hot herbal tea and a big bowl of…

  "Granola?" he said. "This is really granola?"

  "Sure, man-nuts, raisins, whole grains, natural sugars from honey," Martins said, blinking in surprise. "Keeps the minerals and fiber right. Ain't anyone making it on Nantucket? Hey, Barbs, we gotta lay on a big feed for the professor tonight. He's been having a pretty crappy trip; let's give him a good time before he has to go back to Sauronopolis."

  The matronly woman in the long colored scarves nodded. "I'll get the barbeque going," she said. "We'll have the welcome-home party for the new folks at the same time." She bustled out.

  Arnstein put a spoonful of the cereal in his mouth; the milk turned out to be fairly thick cream.

  "Ah… John," he said, after a moment. "It is good to see you again. But why did Odikweos leave us together?"

  "Oh, he ain't such a bad guy," Martins said. "You gotta take account of the state of the karmic evolutionary balance."

  "Huh?" Arnstein heard himself say. I will recover my mental balance. I really will.

  "Well, I mean, it stands to reason, man. S
ee, everyone's going up or down the ladder, right? So back here in this cycle, most of the people haven't had as much time to get up or down the scale-so you don't get many people as good as say, Martin Luther King or Christ or the Buddha, and you don't get many as bad as, like, Nixon. Or Walker," he added with a grimace.

  "Ah… that's logical," Arnstein said. "Ah… no offense, John, but you do realize you're still helping Walker?"

  Martins laughed. "Hey, Professor, what do you think me and my guys make? We put on horseshoes, man, and repair plows, and make harrows. And we make ornamental stuff, wrought-iron grilles and gates. And yeah, I make swords and knives, like I did for the SCA and collectors back home. We make good swords; but these Achaeans, they aren't going to conquer nobody with swords, man."

  Well, you've got a point, Arnstein thought, then felt something nudge his hand. He looked down.

  Martins had pushed a small scrap of paper across to him. On it were a string of numbers and letters intermixed. He held it there long enough for the other man to read, then picked it up, produced a leather pouch, tapped out a brownish-green mass and rolled a cigarette with swift, deft fingers. That he lit from a candle on the table and took a long deep breath, holding it.

  The acrid odor had been familiar enough once-Ian Arnstein had been on a California campus for thirty years by the late-nineties date of the Event, starting when the Vietnam War was just getting seriously under way. It had been a long time since he smelled it; or saw someone smoking anything, for that matter.

  "Want a hit, boss?" Martins said.

  "Ah… no, thanks. It reduces my IQ and makes me sleepy," Arnstein said. Then the complete sentence struck home. "Boss?"

  Martins's eyes were almost the same shade as the remaining russet-brown in his graying mustache. "Well, you've been running the Nantucket CIA, right, man?"

  "Foreign Affairs Department," Arnstein said automatically. Then: "Wait a minute, you mean-

  "Like, totally. I've been working for you for years, man, years. Wow, outtasight-you're doing that secrecy shit so, like, you don't know I'm working for you, or even my code? Far out, man, like, fantastic!"

  "Need to know," Ian said dazedly.

  Doreen must be running him, he thought. Wait a minute, that means he can tell her I'm alive? How does he get information out… no, I do not need to know that.

  "Well, a lot of people tell me stuff," Martins said proudly. "I mean, like heavy industrial shit, man-smiths stick together, and I trained a lot of the hot-pounders Walker used right back in the beginning. I got some compadres in Tartessos, too; worked with 'em back in Alba, or they came over here back when-we're pretty tight, some of 'em and me. We shed a lot of righteous sweat together, and you don't forget that."

  "Wait a minute," Arnstein said slowly. "You mean to tell me that Odikweos knows you're an agent for Nantucket?"

  Martins's long sheeplike face blushed under the weathered tan. "He, like, sort of figured it out," he said. "I don't know how-Mittler, Walker's tame Nasty-

  "Nazi," Arnstein correct absently.

  "No, he's more like a Stalin type, seriously heavy authoritarian power trip, but he's plenty nasty, you know? Anyway, he's sniffed around, but he couldn't pin anything on me that the Man would listen to. He wanted to off me a long time ago, that guy."

  Suddenly Martins's vague good humor collapsed; his face fell in on itself, looking every year of his age for once.

  "Oh, man, you don't know what it's like, living here, you got no idea. I want out, man, I want to get Barbs and the kids and blow this place. Rilly, rilly bad. It's, like, Mordor here, just don't look as bad on the surface, but it's worse down deep. Rivendell, it's like an island in a sea of shit, man. I want to go home."

  "I don't blame you," Arnstein said. "But…" His mind worked furiously. "I think we've got things to do first."

  Well, keeping fit is a duty, Marian Alston thought, as she stripped off the armor and the sweat-sodden padding underneath. I need the endurance and ability to think clearly under stress. Plus the ability to use a sword with skill was a real military asset here and now. No law saying I can't enjoy it.

  The practice yard bustled, shouts and kia and the thump and clatter of practice with bokken or the Empty Hand, personnel- mostly officers-getting in the time before the camp fully woke to the day's labor. It was just dawn, the light a twilit purple across the uneven ground and rocks and stumps; she'd never approved of getting too used to good footing and level ground. A steady firecracker ripple from the firing ranges told of others at work; a group of auxiliaries came by on the eastern beach, shambling exhausted beside their Marine instructors after a night exercise further down the long sandspit island.

  McClintock says they're about as ready as they'll be without going through Camp Grant, she mused. Oh, well, needs must when the devil drives.

  A lot of them had also stood around green with envy as the raiding party lined up to take the first installment of their prize money off the drumheads-part simple greed, part the prestige, status, keuthes of victory and plunder. Many of the Marines and Guard crewfolk felt that way, too; she'd seen one in line in a wheelchair with his leg in a cast, pushed by a friend with her arm in a sling, and they'd both been grinning ear to ear.

  She doubted that any of the native-born Islanders would have been that cheerful. It's not that they're any braver than Americans, Alston thought. They're… tougher? Harder-grained? They're certainly less likely to be… shocked… when bad things happen to them. Maybe fatalistic is the word I'm looking for.

  "What's on the agenda?" she asked Swindapa as the exercise-yard orderlies collected their armor, bokken, and sodden undergarments, handing them towels and harsh gray ration-issue bars of soap.

  "It's 0545 now," the Fiernan said. "At 0700 you're supposed to meet those people Captain Reedy got out of the swamp. Then-

  "Fill me in while we walk, sugar."

  The beach was blinding-white sand; it and the small wavelets were tinged pink by the sun rising over the water to the east, and the pine forest and marshland of the mainland beyond. The air smelled chill, damp, salt, and very fresh despite the thousands encamped near here. The doctors said the deep wells were producing abundant fresh water, and the composting latrines wouldn't contaminate it. More than enough water for freshwater showers, and some had been rigged here.

  Not far away a long U-shape of prefabricated timbers ran down into the water, with smooth steel rollers inset. The Farragut was hauled out on it, kept upright with tree trunks braced against her upper sides, swarming with workers the way a dropped banana would with ants. Most of the copper sheathing had come off her planks. Caulking hammers rang as oakum was pounded between her seams; new sections of planks showed yellow-brown against the weathered gray paint of the rest; tar heated pungent in buckets.

  Gary Trudeau was there himself with his officers and chief engineer and the Seahaven people, directing the crews that had the damaged paddle bared to the bright new sun. With the protecting frame of timbers and metal gone you could see what the point-blank cannon shot could do; also how rod and cam angled each blade as it came down to strike the water or rise out of it. She remembered how proud Leaton had been of that…

  "What's the word, Commander?"

  "Well, the slipway works-no shifting now that the cradle arms are braced on the piles," Trudeau said. "Be a real calisse de tabernac if they moved with that much weight on 'em!"

  Alston nodded soberly. The Merrimac was a lot heavier, and it was good in a way that they had a trial run first. A vagrant thought struck her: did the younger man swear in patois because it felt better, or to remind himself of the lost world of Aroostock County, Maine, and its expatriate Quebecoisl There probably weren't a dozen other people in this whole world who'd grown up speaking French, and in another generation there wouldn't be a single one.

  "The good news," the young officer went on, "is that there's nothing major wrong with her. No hull frames cracked, the diagonal bracing held. The bedding for the boilers and furnace is
a lot better than I thought it might be."

  He pointed to where a clangor of hammers sounded, like a legion of dwarves in a steel bucket.

  "The funnel will be easy, and then she'll draw okay again. Best of all, we can arc-weld the sprung seams on the boiler pretty easy, once the generator's up."

  "The bad news?"

  "Ma'am, there are a lot of medium and small things wrong- we're going to have to replace all the blades on the port paddle, retrue the cams and rods, patch a quarter of the hull… a week."

  "Fast as you can," Alston said. "I want that cannon and ram to discourage any adventurous thoughts they have over in Tartessos City. And we'll need that slipway as soon as the Merrimac gets here."

  She looked at her watch. "Now I've got to get on to those maroons."

  "Maroons, ma'am?" Trudeau asked curiously.

  She smiled, a slight baring of teeth. "Common phenomenon in slave societies, Mr. Trudeau. People who run away and form communities in swamps and forests and mountains, usually striking back at their former masters in raids."

  "Ah," Trudeau said, his blue eyes lighting up in the long face, the Huron tinge in his ancestry showing in swarthy skin and high cheekbones. "Sort of instant, ready-mix, prefabricated guerillas, from our point of view."

  "Exactly. And they can be very useful. Our good friend King Isketerol has been making himself a lot of enemies in his haste to build. An illustration of why slow and careful is better, sometimes."

  Hetkdar, Zaumin's son, crouched behind a rock. It was cold, and he wore only a tunic of goatskin and rough hide shoes of the same material. He ignored the chill, as he ignored the lice in his bush of stiff black hair and the hunger that gnawed at his middle. If what the returned captive said was true-it sounded wild, but so many impossible things had happened in the years since he was a youngling. All of them had been bad, that was the problem…