On the Oceans of Eternity

by S. M. Stirling

  "Glad of it, 'dapa. Gettin' old and creaky for riding in the rain like this, much less a God-damned week of it."

  She kept herself in shape as conscientiously as she worked at any other duty-a certain bleak inner honesty made her admit that compulsive would be a better description-but today creak and click and joint pain told of the teeth gnawing, quiet and relentless. The Event had sent thousands back through time, but every one of them still slid down the slippery slope of entropy at a minute per minute on their own personal world-line.

  Oh, hell, this is nothing compared to standing a quarterdeck watch in the Roaring Forties.

  Wet wool clung and chafed against her skin, and the raw clammy chill had sunken in toward her bones. The cleared fields grew and spread out to the edge of sight, muddy plowland and pasture with treelots, and then the terrain rose slightly, hills deep in forest once more. The road climbed with it, becoming broader and better-built as it did, then snaked down a dry gully toward the Severn, winding its way from the mountains of Snowdonia to the estuary far southward.

  She looked up to where the sun would have been, if the sky weren't the color of wet iron. It was getting on toward evening; somewhere a wolf called to its pack and the sobbing howl echoed through the gathering dusk. The crossbred Morgan-chariot pony mounts scarcely flicked an ear at it; their shaggy coats were wet and mud-streaked, and their heads drooped. One blew out its lips in a blubbery sigh, and Marian slapped her mount's neck in reassurance.

  "Warm stable and oats soon enough, boy. We all need it."

  "I'd rather have some roast pork and a bed, myself," Swindapa said, her urchin grin bright. "And a bath, nice and hot."

  Marian suppressed an involuntary groan at the thought of sulking into a steaming tub. Irondale's lights showed bright through the wavery murk ahead as they came down onto the road along the narrow riverside flat. By the roadside was a man-tall granite boundary-marker. On one side were Fiernan geometries; the other bore the Republic's eagle, with an olive branch in one claw and a bundle of arrows in the other.

  "It's grown," Swindapa went on thoughtfully, looking at the town's lights. They'd last visited in 04, when the new settlement was nothing but mud, stumps, tents, and construction-yard litter. "Three thousand four hundred residents, according to the latest report."

  Her slight singsong accent grew a little stronger, as it did when she used the mnemonic training she'd received as an apprentice to the Kurlelo Grandmothers at the Great Wisdom.

  "When I saw the numbers I thought that was many," she continued after a moment. "But I hadn't realized that three thousand four hundred was so many."

  Which was natural enough; the whole of Alba hadn't had a single town, before the Event. As near as they could tell, there were fewer than half a million people in the whole of the British Isles. Possibly many fewer. By the standards of this era that was a dense population; the best estimate the Republic's explorers and savants had been able to come up with counted around fifty million for the entire planet.

  "Halt! Who goes?"

  She nodded approval as the sentries stepped out from neatly camouflaged blinds on either side of the road and raised their rifles. One had a bull's-eye lantern as well, and snapped it open to shine the beam on their faces. Marian raised her right hand to halt the little column.

  "Commodore Marian Alston-Kurlelo and Lieutenant Commander Swindapa Kurlelo-Alston and party," she said.

  That flustered the militiaman a little, and he stammered and flushed before stepping back with a salute. "Pass, friend!"

  Marian returned the gesture; she could hear him chattering excitedly in Fiernan as they heeled unwilling horses into a walk again and passed on into Irondale. Fame, she thought. Her mouth twisted ironically as they rode into the scattering of buildings, several streets of them on either side of the main road. A few were round huts and wood shacks from the early days, more small brick cottages with tile roofs and chimneys, with a scattering of big houses in what she thought of as the Nantucket Georgian style.

  Half a mile up the S-shaped valley of the tributary stream a dam penned back the flow into an artificial lake, and sluicegates released it in a torrent of white foam onto the tops of half a dozen thirty-foot overshot waterwheels; they turned with a constant groaning rumble and splash, a querning undertone to the other noises. As the riders watched, a blade of fire lanced skyward from a blast furnace, white at its core and framed in red where it left the top of the sooty pyramid of brick, shedding a long plume of spark and cinder downwind. It was accompanied by an enormous shrill scream, like a wounded horse the size of a mountain. The living horses beneath them shied and skittered, then quieted as the sound stopped and their riders soothed them. A smell of hot iron and coal smoke drifted down through the wet along with the clangor of the works and multicolored volcanoes of sparks from the Bessemer converters.

  Their horses' hooves clopped hollow on asphalt pavement; they passed schools, Ecumenical Christian church, public baths, library in a corner of the town hall, medical clinic where a pair of doctors from the Cottage Hospital healed and taught. Then the inn, a rambling brick structure two stories high, wings added on to an original modest core, with yellow lamplight showing behind its windows. That brought an inner groan of relief. She threw up her right arm, hand palm-forward.

  "Halt and dismount!" Swindapa called crisply beside her, and the hoof-clatter died.

  Alston swung down out of the saddle with a creak of leather, conscious of a little more stiffness than she would have felt a few years earlier. Despite the rain and raw chill, people were thick on the sidewalks here, under the bright gaslights of the cast-iron streetlamps. It was a mixed crowd, Nantucketers born and naturalized, Fiernan Bohulugi and Sun People from scores of lineages and tribes, plus little dark hillmen from the mountains to the west who were neither. Plenty from beyond Alba, too; a burly redhead covered in swirling tattoos from the Summer Isle-Ireland-to-be-a pale giant from the Baltic in a shaggy bearskin cloak, gawking about him in wonder… More and more, in wildly varying costume although sensible Islander-inspired overalls and jackets and boots predominated; many wore miner's helmets with lamps, or hard hats; there were even umbrellas. A round score of languages sounded, with weirdly accented lingua franca varieties of English the most common and the smooth pleasant singsong of Fiernan a close second.

  If clotted cream could speak, it'd sound like Fiernan, Alston thought as she arched her back and stretched muscles stiffened by a long day in the saddle. Too bad a commodore can't rub her ass in public… Alder-wood clogs rattled on the brick, almost as loud as the clop of shod hooves and the rumble of steel-rimmed wheels.

  "Stand easy, Corporal," Swindapa said.

  "Ma'am! Squad, stand easy. Unload," Sergeant Ritter echoed.

  The Marines raised the muzzles of their rifles, thumbed the cocking levers on the right side to the safety position; then came a chink-ting as the triggers were pulled. The grooved blocks that closed the breeches snapped down and the shells in the chambers ejected, to be neatly caught and returned to bandoliers.

  The inn's sign creaked above her. She could make out a gilt low-relief eagle-modeled on the figurehead of her Eagle, the Coast Guard training windjammer she'd sailed a little too close to Nantucket the night of the Event. Beside it was the crescent Moon that had become the Fiernan national sigil. An open door swung a waft of warm air and light and cooking smells in their faces.

  "Commodore Alston-Kurlelo!" the innkeeper said. He walked with a limp, and snapped off a salute to her as he came, then advanced with the hand extended and a wide white grin.

  The name and face popped up out of the officer's retrieval system at the back of her brain; he'd been a first-year cadet on the Eagle at the time of the Event, and with the expeditionary force in the Alban War, the year after. Badly wounded at the Battle of the Downs, when they broke Walker and the Sun People war-host. Plus blacks were rare enough in the Republic to be notable.

  "Cadet Merrithew," she said, shaking his hand. "Wayne Merr
ithew." He was a stocky man in his late twenties now, his dark-brown skin a few shades lighter than hers, wearing an apron and holding a towel and a glass he'd been polishing.

  "I thought you were working over in Fogarty's Cove on Long Island, back the other side of the pond?"

  He shook his head, still grinning. "Not since 05. Decided to get my savings and gratuity out of the Pacific Bank and set up here, ma'am, once my in-laws sent word how well things were going in Irondale," he said.

  He'd married an Alban, as had many of her original cadets- they'd been over two-thirds male, which had upset the gender balance back on Nantucket considerably, in the beginning. She'd been relieved when so many war brides turned up.

  Not that I could have complained even if I'd disapproved, she thought with an inner smile, glancing at her partner as she stroked the nose of her horse. Seein' as I did pretty much the same.

  "How is Amentdwran, Wayne?" Swindapa asked.

  'Dapa remembers him, too, Alston thought. Not from any particular effort, but the Grandmothers made a science of memory; they'd had to, with an astronomy-based religion and no way to store information except in living brains.

  "Fine, fine-expecting again, that'll be number four, after the twins. But come on in out of the wet, for God's sake! No, my people will take care of the horses."

  Two came at a run, agog at seeing the living legends; they bobbed heads and made the Fiernan gesture of reverence, touching brow and heart and groin, then led the horses around to a laneway at one side of the building. Alston cocked an eye at her escort, but the Marine noncom had her squad well in hand-they'd taken their rifles and gear first, and she was telling off one to go check that the stabling was all right. It would be, but you had to make sure. Horses were equipment, and if you took care of your equipment, it took care of you.

  "The deer's yours, Mr. Merrithew," Alston said, indicating it with a lift of her chin. "Dumb beast walked right out in front of us yesterday and stood there in plain sight of God and radar."

  "Well, I'll take that, but the rest is on the house," he said, and raised a hand to forestall protest. "The skipper doesn't pay in any place I own. And Pete!" An eight-year-old boy came up, face struggling between awe and delight; the cafe-au-lait skin and loose-curled hair left no doubt who his father was, in this world of palefaces. "Run up to the Manager's house and tell them all who's here!"

  They walked through into the main room of the Eagle And Moon, shedding rain slickers in the hallway and feeling their bodies relax in the grateful warmth. That also brought out the odors of wet wool and leather and horse sweat and everything else that went with a week's hard travel and camps too muddy and wet and cold to do much washing. Marian Alston-Kurlelo wrinkled her nose slightly; there was no point in being squeamish in the field, but she liked to be clean when she could, especially in civilized surroundings like these.

  She looked around; the inn was whitewashed plaster on the inside, with flame-wrapped logs crackling and booming in an open fireplace, and a less decorative but more effective cast-iron heating stove burning coal in a corner. A long bar with a brass rail stood on one side, swinging doors let a clatter and the savory smell of roasting meat and onions and fresh-baked bread in from the kitchens, and a polished beechwood staircase with a fancifully carved balustrade led upward. Coal-oil lamps were hung from oak rafters, bright woven blankets on the walls along with knicknacks that included crossed bronze-headed spears over the mantel, and a sheathed short sword modeled on a Roman gladius and made from a car's leaf spring. They hadn't had many firearms, that first year…

  "Kept my ol' Ginsu," Merrithew said, slapping the sword affectionately. "Okay, Sergeant, you and your squad, the beds're up the stairs thattaway, bedding, robes and towels, bathroom's at the end of the corridor."

  "Very well, Sergeant; carry on," Swindapa said; her responsibility, as Alston's aide-de-camp.

  All to the best, Alston thought. Ritter's air of hard competence tended to turn to blushes and stammering when addressing the commodore directly-there were drawbacks to being a living legend.

  "Settle your people in, and then dismissed to quarters until reveille tomorrow," Swindapa went on.

  "Ma'am!"

  "Sue, show 'em." Another brown-skinned child, this one with enormous eyes of hazel-green; she grabbed the sergeant by the hand and led her away. "Commodore, Ms. Kurlelo-Alston, your room's at the end of the corridor here. The bath's ready, too, and we'll have your kit unpacked by the time you're finished, and hot robes. I recommend the roast pork tonight; it's acorn-fed, and damned good."

  He bore them on, chattering, and thrust thick ceramic mugs of hot mulled cider into their hands. Alston closed grateful fingers around hers, and met the cerulean blue of Swindapa's eyes. The Fiernan spoke her thought for her.

  "We may live, after all."

  CHAPTER TWO

  September, 10 A.E.-Upper Euphrates, 3000 ft.

  October, 10 A.E.-Irondale, Alba

  I’m getting peopled out, Lieutenant Vicki Cofflin thought. The long gondola of the airship RNAS Emancipator had few places where privacy was possible, except the little cubicle that held the head. The great orca-shaped hull above was much larger, but the gasbags filled it.

  And I'd like to see some stars, she thought. Although the downward view from the commander's chair at the nose of the gondola was grand, a huge sweep of moonlit plateau and mountains three thousand feet below, and she still felt a thrill sometimes when she realized Emancipator was hers. They were heading for the passes of the anti-Taurus now, and they'd be in Babylon by late afternoon. A routine voyage… which was exactly what you wanted. Excitement meant adventure, and adventure meant bad luck or somebody screwing up.

  "Take the com, Alex," she said to her XO. "I'm going topside." Then aloud-not too loud, most of the crew and passengers were asleep in the Pullman-style bunks behind her: "Mr. Stoddard has the deck."

  "Mr. Stoddard has the deck, aye."

  Wicker creaked as she unstrapped herself and rose, turning to let Alex Stoddard by in the narrow space. She took her sextant from the rack beside the ladder, although there wasn't really any need for a navigational fix, with the Euphrates right there below them like a river of silver through the huge tawny spaces of Anatolia. It couldn't hurt, though, and it gave her an excuse for taking a break topside. Besides, it was procedure, and if you made procedure a habit it was there when you really needed it.

  She put hands and feet to the rungs, unsealing and resealing the flap-door on the roof of the gondola, then went up further through the creaking dimness of the hull, throbbing with the sound of the engines. A few of the duty watch were on their endless round of checking-for frame stresses, cracks, evidence of chafing that might lead to leaks as the bags surged about within their nets. The maintenance crew carried rechargeable flashlights, jerking and spearing through the gloom of the Emancipator's interior. More pre-Event technology that couldn't be replaced as yet, incongruous against the balsa-and-plywood frame of the airship.

  We know how to do so much more than it's possible to do, goddammit! ran through her with a familiar frustration, like a toothache that had been with her since the Event had crashed into her world a few weeks past her eighteenth birthday. The problem is all the things we know about and need but can't make, she thought.

  Councilor Starbuck thought that the whole United States would have been just barely large enough to maintain one microchip factory. As it was, they could just barely maintain the recycled Cessna engines that pushed Emancipator.

  In her more pessimistic moods, she thought that they'd have done worse without Tartessos and Great Achaea to goose and terrify the Sovereign People into forgoing current consumption for investment. On good days, she concentrated on how much better the Republic could do this time around once those nuisances were put down.

  Someday we'll have everything they did in the twentieth, and more. We'll hit the ground running and not stop this side of the stars, and we'll do it without screwing the place up. That would t
ake generations, though. She'd planned on Colorado Springs, before the Event, and dreamed of eventually joining the astronaut program…

  With a sigh she unlatched the rubber-rimmed wooden hatchway at the top of the ladder and stuck her head into the observation post.

  "Oh," she said. Oh, damn. Must have come up here while I was in the head. "Good very early morning, Colonel Hollard."

  "Couldn't sleep, Captain Cofflin," the other woman said. "Nice view up here, too."

  It would be impolite to duck right down. There was plenty of room for two; the observation bubble was domed with what had started life as a shopping-center Plexiglas skylight, and rimmed with a padded couch. It was cold, but not as draughty as the wickerwork-sided main gondola below, and, anyway, her generation had gotten used to a world where heating was often too cumbersome to be worth the trouble. You put on another layer of clothing or learned to live with being chilly, or both.

  A continuous low drumming sound came from outside, under the whistle of cloven air, the sound of the taut fabric of Emancipator"?, outer skin flexing under the 60 mph wind of her passage.

  Well, you've got reason to be sleepless, Vicki thought as she sat and looked at the other's impassive face. She didn't know all the details, but everyone had heard something-mainly that somehow the Mitannian princess Kenneth Hollard had saved from the Assyrians had managed to seriously torque off King Kashtiliash… the local potentate Kathryn Hollard had married in a blaze of publicity and gossip that had them talking all the way back to Nantucket Town.

  I thought we had culture clash in our family, Vicki Cofflin thought. Her father had come from the piney woods of east Texas. I didn't know the meaning of the word, back then.

  "Cocoa?" Hollard asked, holding up a thermos. Those were within Nantucket's capabilities, if you didn't mind paying three weeks' wages for it.

  "Thanks, ma'am." The cocoa was dark and strong, sweetened with actual cane sugar from Mauritius Base.