Island in the Sea of Time

by S. M. Stirling

  “Put the royals in gear, fore and main. Jibs as well. The minute the anchors come free.”

  “Royals, fore and main, jibs, ma’am.”

  “Make it so, Mr. Hiller.”

  “Up and down!” The anchor chain was vertical.

  “Anchors aweigh.”

  “Anchors aweigh, aye!”

  White canvas-Dacron, really-blossomed a hundred and fifty feet above their heads. More sail spread down the stays to the bowsprit, the triangular swatches of the flying jib, the outer jib, the jib and the foremast staysail. Teams heaved them up the stay lines that reached to the foremast.

  The quartermaster’s whistle rang out again.

  “Shift colors!” Jack and ensign came down, and the steaming ensign went up the gaff over their heads.

  “House the anchor.”

  “Thus, thus,” Alston said, giving the course to the helmsmen. They strained at the triple wheels as the great square-rigger came about and settled her prow to the south. “Mr. Hiller, the mizzen, if you please.”

  Alston kept one ear on the smooth sequence of orders, the rest of her mind sketching the ship’s course. The fore-and-aft sails on the rearmost mast went up in a series of long surges as the deck crew heaved at the ropes and raised the gaff.

  A boatswain’s mate bellowed: “Now lower your butts, flangeheads, and haul away, haul away!”

  “Heave!”

  “Ho!”

  “Haul away and sheet her home!”

  “Heave!”

  “Ho!”

  The wind jerked the boom over their heads, swinging it out until it caught against the tackle that controlled its lunge. The green line of the shore wheeled and began to slide past, the cheering throng on the beach dwindling and falling astern. On the port, marshes slid by, ducks and geese and snipe rising thunderous. The air was heavy with the smell of silt and brackish water, a tang that blew away the odors of the Iraiina camp. Marian Alston smiled slightly and looked at the clinometer. Only a few degrees off vertical as yet.

  “She trims well, Mr. Hiller.”

  “She does, Skipper.”

  A bit of a surprise; the Eagle had never been designed to carry cargo as a regular thing, and it had taken days of sweating-hard labor to arrange it so that it didn’t throw the ship grossly off-balance. That could be crucial to her sailing performance, and as it was she rode four feet deeper. And the pigs were squealing and stinking in their improvised pens forward; she’d helped raise pigs as a girl, they were too smart by half, and could be downright dangerous. Her younger brother had toddled right into a pen once, and if her father hadn’t been nearby���

  Eating well is the best revenge, when it comes to pig.

  “Ms. Rapczewicz, what’s our status on fresh water?”

  “Fifty-one thousand gallons,” she replied.

  Also good; they didn’t want to waste fuel producing drinking water, either.

  “Five knots, ma’am. Ten feet under the keel.”

  “Five knots, ten feet, aye,” Alston said. “Mr. Hiller, we’ll keep her so for now.”

  She’d decided to be conservative and take what the old-timers had called the String, down south to just north of the Azores and then across the Atlantic on the edge of the trades. Longer, but you got consistent easterlies that way most of the year. You could work across on the Viking route way north, up around Greenland, there were intermittent easterlies and the East Greenland and Irminger currents��� she shuddered at the thought. There would be berg ice, this time of year-any time, actually, but worse just now.

  She waited, expressionless, as the land fell away astern and on either side. The ship’s motion changed as they came out of the estuary, a longer plunging roll as they came into waves that ran uninterrupted across three thousand miles of ocean; that always made her feel more alive, more free. The breeze stiffened out of the north, and a quiet order brought the yards braced around. She looked west. Odd. And in all that space, nothing but fish, birds, and whales. No other ship, until you got to within dugout-canoe range of the Americas��� would they be called the Americas here? Probably, if we live to do the naming. Not a submarine beneath the waves, not an aircraft over it, no lights to pass in the night or float by overhead.

  “Helm, south by southwest.”

  “South by southwest, aye.”

  “Mr. Hiller, make all plain sail.”

  “All plain sail, aye.”

  He turned and began to shout orders. White sail blossomed upward toward the tops of the Eagle’s masts, as if a huge sheet were being shaken out in the wind. As each sail came taut she could feel the ship lift and heel, moving more quickly as the vast horsepower of moving air was caught and channeled through the standing rigging into the hull. The yards were braced around at not quite right angles to the keel and the crew crept down off the yards and out of the rigging; others hauled and set lines across the deck. Slowly, slowly, the big ship leaned to port. The bow wave turned from a gentle swelling to white water, and that foamed higher and higher.

  In twenty minutes it was spouting out the hawser holes and along the forecastle decking, to drain out the lee scuppers around the feet of the inevitable seasickness cases. Isketerol of Tartessos looked well enough, holding on to a line and staring incredulously overside as he mentally estimated the speed. Swindapa had turned green, and blundered helplessly until a couple of cadets snapped a safety line to her belt and draped her over the leeside bulwarks just in time.

  The port rail was nearly under; Alston looked at the clinometer. Twenty degrees. “Speed,” she said.

  “Twelve knots and rising, ma’am.”

  “Twelve knots, aye. Ms. Rapczewicz, you have the deck; keep her thus, but reef if the wind freshens. I’ll be in my cabin.”

  And she should give Cofflin a call, let him know things had gone well. They probably needed some morale-boosting back home. She checked in midstride for an instant. Home? Well, our trip here was instructive, at least. Compared to anywhere else in the world of 1250 B.C., Nantucket was very homelike indeed.

  “Whazzit?”

  Ian Arnstein came awake with a violent start. The little cabin was dark except for a trickle of light through the closed porthole, and for a moment he was lost, torn from a dream of freeways and shopping malls and teenagers on Rollerblades. Fear made his heart race.

  Someone’s here, he thought. There shouldn’t be; he had the tiny room to himself. Captain Alston had left a fair number of her officers back on the island to oversee fishing and matters maritime, the ones who’d been there mainly as instructors for the cadets.

  “Who’s that?” he whispered.

  There was a rustling at the edge of the bunk, and a vague shape in the darkness. “Me,” Doreen’s voice said.

  “Oh.” His heart still beat faster, but it wasn’t quite the same sort of fear. “Why��� oh.”

  A hand took his and guided it to close on a full breast. “You’re an intelligent man, Ian. Don’t be silly. Why do you think I’m here?”

  I should be thinking, he knew through the hammering in his temples. We’ve only known each other for a few weeks��� I’m too old for her��� all this stress has got us acting in ways we wouldn’t��� His hands held the blankets up and slid down her back as she slid into the narrow bunk beside him, warm and smelling of clean woman and soap. Her first kiss landed on his nose in the dark, but the second was on target.

  “Oh, yeah,” she murmured. “The beard tickles nice.”

  “Yeah,” he echoed in the same breathy whisper.

  To hell with thinking. Before he’d expected it she had rolled underneath him and her legs were clamped along his flanks. He moved convulsively and bumped his head against the overhead.

  “Damn these bunks!” he hissed.

  Doreen chuckled and wrapped her legs around his waist instead, then gave a sigh that was half groan as he slipped into her. “Come on then,” she whispered into his ear as they began to rock together. “God, come on, then.”


  Some immeasurable time afterward they lay in a tangle of arms and legs and stray bits of sheet caught between and under them, amid a pleasant smell of sweat and sex.

  “It is cramped,” he said, and sighed. “For the first time since this whole thing started, I feel as if I’m really here.”

  “Why, thank you, sir,” Doreen purred into his ear. “The feeling’s mutual.”

  A thought jarred him. “Wait a minute-you’re protected, aren’t you?”

  “It’s a bit late to ask, but yes.”

  Ian sighed relief. “It’d be a shame to waste this waist.” He ran a hand down the damp smooth skin of her back. “Many happy returns of the night,” he said, then checked himself.

  “Mmmm-hmm,” Doreen said affirmatively, nuzzling into the curve of his neck. “Hoped you’d say that.”

  Silence ticked away. “I’m a bit, well, old, middle-aged really, and-”

  “I’m not a teenager either, I’m nearly thirty,” she said. “Well into spinsterhood, by Bronze Age standards, I suppose.” A chuckle fluttered across his skin, cool on the dampness. “Besides, you’re certainly the most eligible Jewish man around. Even if you’re not a medical doctor. Unless I sail east and put the make on Moses.”

  “We’ll see how it goes, then,” he said drowsily, feeling an enormous peace. A minute later he tugged his eyelids open. “God, we can’t go to sleep, or she’ll tow us at the end of a rope at dawn!” Captain Alston had impressed him as the type who enforced regulations with an old-fashioned absolutism.

  “Mmmm, no. I asked. She said as civilians all we had to be was discreet.”

  They rearranged themselves with some effort, smoothing the sheets a little and drawing up the blanket, then settling down spoon fashion. It was a long while since he’d slept-in the go-to-sleep sense of the term-with a woman, and never in a bed so narrow. After a half hour his drowsiness faded.

  “My, for a middle-aged man���”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  April, Year 1 A.E.

  “Well, people, we have a problem,” Jared Cofflin said. He looked out over the crowd. Attendance at Town Meeting was certainly up from the days before the Event; of course, the stakes were a lot higher now. But I don’t like the look in their eyes, he thought. They’re still scared. Deubel’s crazed arson plot had put the fear of death into them, like nothing since the Event. He could smell it in their sweat, and hear the shrill undertone in the murmurs as they adjusted their folding chairs. A few young children cried in their mothers’ arms, ignoring the patting and shushing.

  “The trial’s over,” he went on. “Judge Gardner can testify it was fair.”

  The judge nodded. “However, under the circumstances, sentencing is a problem. Arson generally carries a fairly long term of imprisonment.”

  “It’s time we faced some facts. Look, we want a government of laws, don’t we?” There were nods throughout the crowd. Cofflin felt sweat running down his collar, and was extremely glad that Martha Stoddard was sitting next to him at the table on the dais, spare and precise in a gray dress and single string of pearls.

  “But let’s face it, the laws of the United States don’t run here any more. There isn’t any United States, no Congress, no president, no Supreme Court. Sure, we want the same sort of laws-”

  “Like hell,” someone said from the ranks of townspeople. “The IRS can stay lost for all I care.”

  That brought a gust of laughter; Cofflin joined in for an instant. “Generally speaking, I mean. In the end, though, this-this Town Meeting here-is the source of law on this island. You are. You’re the Congress, you’re the Senate. You can make peace and declare war; you decide what the penalties for crimes are. You bind and loose.”

  That brought silence for a long moment, except for the angry hiccupping of a fretful baby. “All right, then. Here we’ve got eighteen men and women who tried to burn down the town, which would probably have killed us all, one way or another.” There had been twenty to start with, but two had managed to follow their ex-pastor into suicide.

  “We’ve given them a fair trial, and they’ve mostly confessed anyway. The question is, what do we do with them?”

  “Hang ‘em!” someone shouted, and there was a menacing snarl from the crowd. Together on a bench before the dais the prisoners shrank together.

  Cofflin hammered his gavel. “That’s one solution,” he said calmly. “And you’re the ultimate authority here. If you vote for it, it’ll be carried out. Now, I just want you to think about that. Eighteen nooses. Eighteen people with broken necks hanging there-if we don’t botch it and just strangle them slowly. I’ll insist that it be done publicly; people should see the results of what they order. And then I’ll resign.”

  There was an uproar at that. Cofflin gaveled it into silence. He recognized the woman with the crying baby. She stood, anger crackling off her:

  “I’m not going to let those��� those lunatics loose to threaten my baby again.” A growl rose from the crowd.

  Cofflin nodded. “Ms. Saunders, I agree completely. I’m not against the death penalty as such in the ordinary course of events. This is a little different. We need to come up with a way to keep ourselves safe from these people here, without killing them. You’re also right; they were acting like lunatics. Haven’t most of us felt like running mad lately, now and then? Hell, a couple of us have run mad.”

  With a Glock, in one case.

  Saunders blinked. “What do you think we should do?”

  “Well, we can’t just keep them in jail. For one thing, it’d cost too much-we’d have to feed them. What I had in mind was a productive form of exile.”

  Martha leaned forward and spoke into the microphone. “You’d better listen carefully,” she said. “Jared Cofflin’s the best man to head our Council, and you’d be well advised to keep him.”

  “You’re partial, Martha,” someone said from the crowd. “You’re engaged to him, after all.”

  Cofflin felt a small glow at the thought, even then. He’d enjoyed the engagement, too; all three days of it, so far.

  “John Detterson, if you think I’d flatter a man just because I’m going to be married to him, you’re more of a fool than I thought you,” Martha said tartly.

  The tension he could feel in the air crackled a little lower; there was not quite a laugh, but a relaxation.

  “Everyone hates the salt-gathering detail,” Cofflin went on. “We’ve been drawing lots for it. What I’m saying is that we should send these people down there, for a year at least and then further until they’re safe to have back among us. We can send a boat down to pick up the salt and drop off supplies every month or so. It’s a hard sentence, yes, but we don’t have to kill any of our own, and we don’t have to waste time and resources we can’t spare on them.”

  More murmurs. Cofflin pointed the gavel. “Winnie McKenzie.”

  “That’s an indefinite sentence, Chief,” she said. “How are we going to tell if they’re really safe? What’s to prevent them lying about it and getting up to the same tricks when they get back?”

  “I’ll let Father Gomez answer that,” Cofflin said.

  “These poor people were deluded by a man who was deluded himself,” the priest said, rising from his seat in the middle of the meeting. “I have volunteered to go with them to Inagua and help them. Father Connor can run the affairs of the Catholic parish here while I’m gone. With God’s help, I think I can bring these unfortunate people back to reason, or at least tell if they haven’t changed their thinking.”

  “And I have full confidence in Father Gomez’s judgment,” Cofflin said. Since he suggested this whole scheme in the first place, he added to himself. “What’s more, I think a year spent shoveling salt and eating flamingo down on Inagua is at least equivalent to ten in a mainland jail. No way to escape, either.” No way to escape and live, he amended. If they chose to drown themselves, that was their problem and a solution to his.

  “Anyone second the motion?” he asked. A double do
zen of hands went up. “Let’s put it to the vote. All in favor, raise their hands. Now, all opposed.” He swung his head from one end of the crowd to the other. “Joseph?”

  “Carried,” the town clerk said. Nobody objected; the ayes had outnumbered the nays by at least five to one.

  Cofflin looked down at the prisoners; one or two defiant, a woman weeping softly, most of them simply stunned. “By vote of the Town Meeting of the island of Nantucket, you are hereby sentenced to exile on the island of Inagua for a period of not less than one year. Your exile will continue until Father Gomez, as authorized by the Meeting, determines that you are safe to live here again. You’ll have one day to say your farewells, and the Yare will leave with the evening tide tomorrow. That’s all.”

  The police officers shepherded the prisoners out. Well, that’s a hell of a lot simpler than it used to be, Cofflin thought. Aloud: “All right, let’s get on with it.” He pointed the gavel. “Sam Macy.”

  Sam Macy was a house carpenter, and a very good one, island-born. “Chief, it’s the way we’re running things,” he began, setting himself stubbornly. “This telling everyone where they have to work and such. It’s too much like communism for my liking.”

  “Sam, you’re one hundred percent right about that,” Cofflin said. “The problem is, it had to be done-still will, for a while. Joseph”-he pointed at the town clerk-“and a couple of our potato-planting bankers-”

  That did get a laugh, a rueful one.

  “-are working on getting a money system going. After we’ve got the crops planted and the fishing steady, we can start swapping things around more as we please. People will still have to work or contribute stuff to the Town, though-otherwise we just can’t pull through. Next year we can loosen up some more, and more still the year after that. Believe me, the last thing I want is to be a tin-pot Mao. If anyone can come up with a better way of doing it, they’re welcome to ask the Meeting to give them this job��� more than welcome,” he added sincerely, running a hand over his hair.