Island in the Sea of Time

by S. M. Stirling

  Alston shrugged. “What happens when you squeeze a drop of ink into a glass of milk and shake, Cadet? It mixes in and pretty soon it’s gone.” Alston spread her hands. “From now on, you’d do best to think of this island as home and everyone who lives here as your people. We really don’t have much choice.”

  Seahaven Engineering was getting more crowded by the day, even though Martins and his forge had been moved out to their own quarters, and the sound of metal on metal was deafening.

  Ronald Leaton and Cofflin stood in one corner, looking at the latest development, and occasionally moving aside as someone went through with a handcart of materials or parts. Sweat ran down their faces; the sun was bad enough, beating down on the sheet-metal roof, and the steam engines turning shafts and pumping compressors added to the heat and noise. The machine shop stank of hot metal, hot whale oil, sweat, and smoke. The big doors to the water were open, giving an occasional draft of welcome cool air, and you could see smudges of black woodsmoke drifting out over the smaragdine brightness of the harbor. Sails speckled it, and the ocean beyond; closer too a Guard officer was overseeing the loading of a large handcart, yelling out his checklist to the Seahaven clerk:

  “Breastplates, twenty-five, size All”

  “Check!”

  “Helmets, twenty-five, size All”

  “Check!”

  Cofflin shook his hea’d. Busy as bees, he thought. There was just so much to do, before winter set in-and never enough time or hands.

  “It’s a blow-drier for fish,” Leaton explained, kicking the frame and handing over a sample. “Desiccator, if you want to get technical. I figure it’ll cut down the spoilage rate to nearly nothing.”

  Cofflin nodded, turning the slab of dusty-white, rock-hard cod in his hands and looking at the wood-and-iron��� thingumabob, he decided. The rack for the fish wasn’t much different from the improvised ones they’d been using, looking a little like a giant bedstead, except that it had a mesh cover over the top to keep the flies off��� and they’d lost far more cod than he liked to think about to maggots.

  Off to one side of it was a contraption of sheet metal and wood, with a flat covered steel pan, a round metal chimney, and a shaft running down from that into a wooden box that underlay one edge of the drying rack. Leaton took pieces off the sides of each.

  “See, you light the fire in the pan here-ordinary wood fire, and there’s this grating underneath for the ashes.”

  Cofflin nodded solemnly. Wood ash was prime fertilizer, and it had half a dozen other major uses-you needed it to make soap, for instance, which wasn’t something he’d suspected before. There was a Town ordinance now that everyone had to keep ashes for collection.

  “Then some of the hot air goes up the chimney and turns this fan. That turns this metal shaft running down here, which turns this wooden fan, and that blows more of the hot dry air���”

  A ton of fish sounded like a lot, until you remembered how much seventy-two hundred people ate in a day. Every pound counted, and this would save a lot of spoilage.

  “Good work,” he said sincerely. “How many, how fast, and what do you need?”

  “Well, we can make up the metal parts here. Thornton’s can do the carpentry”-another new industry, working with the hand and simple power tools Seahaven turned out, and Macy’s shipments of timber from the mainland-“and I thought we’d take over another boathouse or something for the assembly work. It gets in the way here.”

  “Say another forty, maybe sixty people all up,” Cofflin said. “Damn, we’re running short-particularly of people who know which end of a hammer to pick up.”

  “It’ll save in the long run,” Leaton said earnestly. “You don’t need nearly so many watching the drying racks.”

  “A lot of those are kids,” Cofflin mused. “But yeah, I think so. Okay, go for it.”

  “And you can use it to make jerky, any kind, and dried sausage as well, or dry vegetables for keeping-”

  “Ayup. You’ve struck oil, Ron, you can stop drilling,” Cofflin said dryly.

  The problem with being the one who can bind or loose is that everyone keeps trying to convince you of things, he thought wryly.

  “Ah��� thanks, Chief.”

  “Thank you, Ron. What’s next?”

  “Well, the barrel-stave machine is working now, and the one for the hoops.” Cofflin grunted satisfaction; barrels for storage were a big bottleneck. “And we’ve got something here that’ll make us all a lot more comfortable,” the engineer went on.

  He led Cofflin over to where two more samples rested against the wall. One was a simple steel box with a hinged front door and a section of sheet-metal piping coming out the back.

  “Heating stove,” Leaton said, taking a rag out of the back pocket of his overalls and wiping his hands-futile, since grease and dirt were ground into the knuckles. “An outer box, an inner box, the intervals filled with sand-retains heat, the way thick cast iron would if we could cast iron, which we can’t yet-ashpan, grate, door for feeding wood, and an adjustable flue. It’s about airtight, and the thermal efficiency is seven, eight times the best fireplace. You just stick it in a fireplace, and the pipe here goes up the chimney a bit.”

  “Excellent,” Cofflin said. They’d all been chilly in the tag end of early spring. “We can start on these later in the year, though-after harvest.”

  Leaton nodded. “And there’s this.” The other stove was much larger, standing on legs. The top held what looked like solid-metal equivalents of heating elements on a normal stove, and there was a big oval tank welded to one side.

  “Wood-fired cooking stove,” he went on proudly. “We modeled it on the old style, with some improvements. That thing on the side is a hot-water tank-the exhaust flue goes right through it.”

  “Oh, that’s going to be popular!” Cofflin said.

  Not least with those who had to do dishes. People who couldn’t do anything else had taken to filling in with housework, for those who were otherwise occupied. It let them earn Town chits of their own, and freed up the able-bodied for essential tasks.

  “Wait a minute-you should put in a heating tray at the back. That done, you can put those into production right away, say twenty a week to start with?” he said.

  “Can do, but I’ll need more assembly space. They bolt together, and the parts are standardized.”

  “I’ll get you the people, at least until the harvest,” Cofflin said. “The Council will go along with it. Speaking of which, is the reaper working yet?”

  “Ah-” Leaton’s eyes shifted. “Well, we’re still getting some of the bugs out, Chief.”

  “Goddammit, Ron, we were counting on that���”

  “God,” Ian Arnstein wheezed, straightening up and rubbing at his back. “Now I know what ‘stoop labor’ really means.”

  Everyone had toughened up considerably since the spring, but reaping grain with a sickle and bagging hook evidently took muscles and degrees of flexibility they’d never called on before. Swindapa was proof positive, two people down from him in the row. She moved with an economical rhythm: stoop with leg advanced, sweep the wooden hook with the left hand to gather in a swatch of grain, bring the sickle up sharply head-high and slice downward and back, tip the hook to spill the cut rye in a neat row, step forward, stoop��� despite the T-shirt and cutoff jeans, moving like that she didn’t look at all American. She was well ahead of Alston and Doreen, and stopped occasionally to let them catch up, putting a better edge on her sickle now and then with a pull-through sharpener. Others were doing the same, punctuated with the odd yelp or curse as someone cut a hand. Ian had already, twice, and sweat stung like fire as it ran into the superficial gashes.

  The rye stretched before him, waving in the sun with an evil brown-gold beauty, starred here and there with wildflowers; he’d have admired those more if he hadn’t learned by painful, personal experience how much harder weeds made the work. It was a hot August day, sunny except for some high haze
and a few puffy white clouds. The field was fairly large, about twenty acres, part of Brand Farms’ winter cover crop let ripen. A hundred islanders were advancing across it in a staggered row, sickles flashing. As many more followed behind, gathering the ragged rows of grain into sheaves and tying them with a twist of straw. There was a buzz of crickets in the air, and a dusty smell of earth, cut stems, and sweat, mingled with the wilder scent of the weeds cut along with the stalks. According to the books they ought to be able to reap a third of an acre or so per day per worker. It was an hour past noon, and fairly obvious they’d be lucky to do a quarter of that.

  If we had a hundred Swindapas cutting this stuff, maybe, Ian thought, bending again with a groan. A bell rang behind him, and he felt like weeping with relief. The second shift.

  They were rotating people through the harvesting gangs, so as many as possible would have experience before the much larger fields of spring-planted grain came ripe. A thousand acres of barley alone, Christ on a crutch, I’ll never make it. He looked at the sky again. When the time came, they’d have to go all-out. You couldn’t count on the weather here, and rain at the wrong time could be a disaster-literally a disaster; it would mean the difference between eating well and going hungry. With the planting so late it would be touch and go, first to harvest, and then to get all the grain under cover.

  Then we get to pull the flax and dig up the potatoes. And harvest and shuck the corn. And cut the buckwheat. And cut the last hay and turn it and dig the Jerusalem artichokes and harvest the sunflowers and��� Oh, joy, oh, my aching back.

  “And I thought ‘bust your ass’ was a metaphor,” he said.

  “Come and get it!” the cook at the wagon over by the pines shouted.

  “About time,” Doreen said.

  She was wearing a T-shirt around her head like a headdress, with strands of her long black hair escaping, and a bikini top and shorts. Her skin was tanned to a deep olive brown, flesh firmed up and trimmed down and turned to something more like the opulent shape of a Levantine fertility goddess; even the sweat on neck and breasts and the bits of straw stuck in it merely completed the picture. At the moment he was too tired to really appreciate the sight, except in an abstract way. He trudged over to the wagon and the blessed shade of the trees, dropping his sickle and hook into the racks. Plastic trash barrels full of water stood there. He drank four mugfuls one after the other, almost shuddering with ecstasy as the cool water cut through the gummy saliva and dust in his mouth and throat. Then he poured more over his head; it felt icy as it cut runnels through the sweat. The towel he used to wipe his face and hands was limp and damp, but afterward he felt halfway human-as if he’d been dead for days, rather than months. Human enough that the smell of the stew penetrated and set his stomach rumbling like a wolf trying to claw its way out.

  “Surf ‘n’ Swine, folks! Come and get it!” the cook said again. “Surf ‘n’ Swine! Come and get it!”

  He got in line and took a big red plastic bowl of thick brown pork and lobster stew. The helper added half a loaf of rough dark bread, and Ian filled his mug again. The shade beneath the stubby pines where he and Doreen spread their blanket was infinitely welcome, but he could feel his muscles stiffen further as they cooled. He sank down with a groan.

  “The chief is carrying this egalitarianism to extremes,” he grumbled. “I notice he’s not here.”

  “He’s out harpooning bluefin tuna,” Alston said from a few feet farther along the line of shade. “Those things go up to a ton weight; it’s hard, dangerous work.” She raised herself on one elbow; she wasn’t looking particularly tired, although the singlet was plastered to her torso with sweat.

  But then, she’s an athlete and younger than I am, he thought.

  “I know, I know, I’m being unfair,” Ian said ruefully. “I’m also being a middle-aged man with blisters and a crick in my back.”

  “Easy work,” Swindapa said, laying down her food and stretching on tiptoe with her fingers pointed at the sky.

  Woof, woof, Ian thought. Even gaunt and terrified, the Fiernan had been pretty. Filled out, glowing with health and youth, tanned a light toast-brown that made even more vivid her blue eyes and the sun-bleached hair falling down her bare back��� He looked back at his wife. Damn, the view is good here all ‘round. Then: I must be recovering. He looked down at himself; he’d never been anything but lanky, but the middle-aged pot he’d added had about vanished. He was fitter than he’d been. He just wished it didn’t hurt so much.

  “Not what I’d call easy,” he said.

  “Try doing it with a wooden sickle with flint blades, Ian, or even a bronze one,” Swindapa said. She frowned when he moved and then winced. “Lie down on your front.”

  Curious, he obeyed. The blond woman walked over and knelt beside him. “You Eagle People do some wonderful things, but you aren’t much as farmers,” she said, beginning to knead along his spine with strong skilled fingers. She sang under her breath in her own language as she worked, timing the motions of her hands to the slow chant.

  He gave a small whimper of mixed pain and pleasure. “We had machines to do this sort of thing,” he said. “With any luck, we will again-next year.”

  Leaton’s attempt at a horse-drawn reaping machine had been a spectacular failure, jamming itself every second step. He swore that he could perfect it now that he had fields to test adjustments on, but the crop wouldn’t wait. Cradle scythes would have been more efficient than the sickles and easier to make than the McCormick-style reaper, but it turned out that they required both unusual strength and a lot of practice to use. They’d have to solve the grain problem this first year by simple brute force and massive ignorance, throwing every pair of hands not catching fish into the fields for a brace of weeks. At least the threshing machine looked like it would work, so they wouldn’t have to spend the winter beating this stuff with flails in the intervals between digging potatoes.

  Swindapa finished the massage on the muscles of his neck, then drummed the heels of her hands down from the nape of his neck to the base of his spine. The knots loosened, and he gave a groaning sigh of relief. She moved over to Doreen and began to repeat the process; Ian sat up and spooned down the stew. He was beginning to understand why farmers usually ate their main meal at midday; it seemed like a long time since breakfast. A few dozen feet away another bunch of resting harvesters was singing to a flute and guitar:

  Corn ricks and barley sheaves—

  And garlands of holly;

  No, I’ll ne’re forget the nights I spent

  Among the sheaves, with Mollie���

  He wasn’t surprised at the plaintive-cheerful Old English tune. Nantucket was just the sort of place for acoustic-guitar folkie enthusiasts who drank home-brewed beer and did Morris dancing.

  Come gather golden honey

  Come reap the tender corn;

  And with me lay in new-mown hay

  Before the winter’s bourne���

  It was the fact that they had the energy to sing that astonished him.

  He mopped the bowl with a heel of the bread, and belched with something approaching contentment.

  Swindapa shook out her hands and moved back to Alston’s blanket. “You next, Captain,” she said cheerfully.

  There was a moment’s silence; Ian looked over at the sudden tension in the air. After a long instant Alston nodded and laid her head facedown in her folded arms. Swindapa moved beside her and crooned the same minor-key chant under her breath; she was smiling as she began to work, a slow dreamy expression.

  “No rest for the wicked,” he said to the air, rising and helping Doreen fold the blanket. As they walked toward their bicycles he inclined his head slightly back and raised an eyebrow.

  “No, I don’t think so,” Doreen said. “The captain has a��� highly developed sense of scruples. Almost as hyper-thyroid as her sense of duty.”

  They picked up their cycles and began walking them down the dirt road out toward the pavement.
Nantucket had had a system of bicycle trails before the Event, but the whole road system belonged to it now. The thickets along the path were mostly uncleared, and they had a wild sweet smell of feral roses. The blossoms starred the green undergrowth with red, with a few clusters of blushing-pink phlox for contrast. The main road had a narrow strip of brush and trees along it, and on the far side of that was a broad field of flax already eight feet tall, its blue flowers only a memory. Ian looked at it and winced in prospect. You harvested flax by pulling it up by the roots.

  “Positively superhuman self-control,” Ian said dryly. “And Swindapa has a powerful crush.”

  Doreen frowned. “I wouldn’t exactly put it that way. She’s not a kid, you know, not by the standards of her own culture.”

  Ian shrugged. “I don’t want to let this sweat dry,” he said, changing the subject. He liked them both as well, they were good people, but there were certain things that individuals just had to work out for themselves.

  “Smith’s?” she said.

  “How about Quigley’s?” he asked.

  “You’re not as tired as you looked,” Doreen laughed. Quigley’s was a new place, giving Smith fierce competition; it had individual cubicles for soaking after you scrubbed down.

  “Let’s see when we get there,” he grinned.

  They reached the pavement and swung into the seats of their cycles. I may not have the captain’s nobility of character, he thought, looking at Doreen’s hair flying in the wind. On the other hand, my life’s a good deal less complicated, and there’s something to be said for that.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  August-October, Year 1 A.E.

  “She’s a fine ship,” Isketerol said. “What does this name mean, Yare?”

  William Walker thought. He’d heard the word in a movie once��� yeah, HBO Classics. The one with Katharine Hepburn? What a fox, he thought irrelevantly, then concentrated. “Yare means��� fit, ready, eager,” he said.