Island in the Sea of Time

by S. M. Stirling

  “Ah��� ‘dapa, you have done this before, haven’t you?”

  “Of course. I told you about my boyfriend, didn’t I?”

  “Ah��� I meant with another woman.”

  “Oh.” Alston shivered as the other’s fingers traced up her spine and lips nibbled down her neck. That feels incredibly good. Involuntarily her thighs squeezed together with one of Swindapa’s between them.

  “Not really,” Swindapa whispered.

  Tickling fingers found the base of her spine. Alston shivered again and arched her back. The Bronze Age isn’t all backward.

  “Not-ah!-not really!?” she said. She hadn’t thought it was the sort of thing you could be uncertain of.

  “It was dark��� some friends, after a feast, lots of mead��� you know how it is. Does it matter?”

  “Not really,” Alston laughed. The Fiernan Bohuguli seemed a lot like Trobriand Islanders in some ways.

  “I like it better with these wonderful lamps,” Swindapa said. She looked down to where their breasts pressed together. “See how we go together, like the moon and the night sky. Isn’t it pretty?”

  “Yes,” Alston said throatily. It is also better to give than to receive. Or at least pleasantly excruciating to start with.

  She pressed the girl back and stroked her lightly with her fingertips, just touching the fine down-hairs. Lips touched breasts and tongue curled around a nipple. The other’s soft explosive sigh made her own skin tingle from head to toe, like being caressed with heated mink gloves. After a while she worked her way downward, caressing the other’s inner thighs and urging them apart. The hands that stroked her head trembled, and she smelled the delicious musky scent of desire. She slid down, stroked a hand onto either hip, and began. Swindapa gave a shocked cry of surprise and delight at the delicate caress; then a whimpering moan.

  Well, well, something new has been invented since the Bronze Age, Alston thought happily.

  “Yeah, it was a lot too much like hard work for my taste,” the man said.

  William Walker nodded, straddling the chair and resting his elbows on the back. “Over there in Europe, they’ve got peasants to do this sort of thing,” he said.

  They were watching the parade from a roadside cafe on Easy Street, before it turned west on Main and stopped in the upper section near the Pacific Bank. The floats were a little amateurish, made up with what was to hand. The commonest theme was sheaves of grain, appropriate considering this was a harvest festival; some of them were made up into big human figures, and everyone wore a wreath of it. Most of the floats were horse-drawn, apart from one pulled by a chuffing steam traction engine, a miniature model about the size of a Volkswagen. People milled along in the parade as well, carrying torches; the school band tootled away. At the front rode the Bronze Ager, Swindapa-wearing a wreath of wheat around her hair and carrying a sheaf, and a sash with “Best Reaper” on it over a white dress. She was laughing and waving, and the hair falling past her shoulders had the same wheat-blond color as the ripe grain she carried in the crook of one arm.

  What a fox, he thought. Wasted on the captain, although he couldn’t fault her taste, and it was the traditional reward for rescuing the beautiful princess, although the application was a little��� unorthodox in this case.

  Chief Cofflin was waiting up on Main; there would be a speech and a barbecue, patting everyone on the head for working hard. Suckers, Walker thought. The priests and pastors would be there too, to bless the fruits of the fields and invoke Big Juju. The oldest sucker racket in the world. He made a mental note to himself to become very pious, once the Plan was in place. Nothing like having the supernatural on your side. People who thought Big Juju was looking over their shoulders, why, that was better than all the secret police ever foaled.

  The man-Cuddy, he was called, Bill Cuddy-flexed his hands. “I can still feel my blisters,” he said.

  “Yeah, like I said, it’s ridiculous we should be doing this stuff, as if we were Stone Age wogs,” Walker went on. “I mean, think of what our technology and what we know could do over across the ocean. Those spear-chuckers would be glad to do the donkeywork.”

  Cuddy looked at Walker, his eyes narrowing thoughtfully. He was a nondescript-looking man a little older than the Coast Guard officer, brown of hair and beard, wary gray eyes in a tanned face.

  “Look, Will,” he said. “You’ve been fan-dancing around this for days now, you and your friends there.” He nodded; Seaman Rodriguez and Cadet McAndrews sat behind Walker, lounging at their ease. “Gold and dancing girls, yeah, it sounds good. A lot better than shoveling shit for a living. How, though? Cut to the chase, man.”

  “Okay, Bill,” Walker said. “You want to stay here all your life?”

  “Not particularly,” Cuddy said. “Leaton’s a pretty good boss, but I don’t want to be a machinist, it’s just the best thing available. And I certainly don’t want to bust my ass cutting fucking wheat or chopping down trees. On the other hand, I don’t want to go live in a mud hut, either, even if it’s the biggest fucking hut in the village.”

  Walker nodded with a charming grin. “There’s a lot more than mud huts over there, in some places,” he said. “There’s my friend Isketerol’s hometown, for example, or Greece. Shit, they’ve even got running water in the Mycenean palaces-flush toilets. Which we don’t, anymore. Plus we can get the natives to build what we want. Plenty of places a bunch of us could pretty well write our own tickets.”

  “If the locals didn’t punch our tickets,” Cuddy said.

  “Timid?” Walker asked, a slight edge of mockery in his tone.

  “No, just cautious. We don’t have any fucking tanks, man.”

  “Yeah, that’s a point. That’s why it’d have to be done in a group, with some organization.”

  “And you to head up the organization?”

  He shrugged. “Somebody has to,” he said. “Why not me? I’ve got the training, I know some history, and I’ve learned the languages. There’ll be plenty for everyone when it comes time to share out.”

  Cuddy sipped at his drink. “Why me?” he said.

  “You don’t have any local ties, you’ve learned a lot of useful stuff from Leaton, and I think you’re the ambitious type��� but reasonable about it,” Walker said. “And hell, it’s not even illegal. The law’s back up in the twentieth. Nobody declared Cofflin’s goddam Town Meeting a sovereign state. The captain’s authority came from the Department of Transportation and the UCMJ; it ended when we got shoved here. They’ve got no right to tell us we have to stay here and make like farmers.”

  The other man put down his glass. “They’ve got the power, though. Most people are behind them. What if I go to the chief, or your captain, and tell them what you’ve told me?”

  “Then I’d be in deep shit, and you’d be back to blisters.”

  Walker said. The grin slipped off his face, leaving an expression more like something out of the deep woods. “For the rest of your life.”

  Cuddy looked slightly nervous for the first time. However long the rest of your life was ran unspoken between them. He nodded slowly.

  “Okay, I’ll think about it.” He looked around. “Even with things the way they are, this place still has some of the comforts of home. Doctors, for instance.”

  Walker flipped one palm up. “Give me credit for some brains, Cuddy.”

  “Ah, right, you’ll have gone looking for other people who know things you need. Like, I did a hitch in the Crotch, too.”

  Walker clapped. “Give the Marine a great big cigar!” he said dryly. “Semper Fi, mac. Now’s the time, Cuddy. Are you in, or are you out? Last chance to be out and just keep your mouth shut. Once you’re in, you do it my way.”

  Cuddy finished his drink and looked after the procession. The music and lights were fading into the darkness of the summer night, a little cool here near the waterfront even in this season. The road was littered, straw and flowers and fresh horse dung. Walker saw his face hard
en in decision.

  “Okay,” he said. “You’ve got the brains for it, if you’ve come this far without getting caught, and you’ve got the balls for it, looks like.” He nodded and offered his hand. “I’m in��� boss.”

  “Kemosabe, me think it too quiet,” Cofflin said.

  “That’s right up there with ‘What you mean we, white man?’ ” Marian Alston quoted. “What’s too quiet, Jared?”

  September was a good time for a civic holiday; the grain harvest was in, and everything else was well in hand, well enough for the school year to be starting up again soon.

  Not that there isn’t enough to do, Cofflin thought. He was beginning to see why socialism was impractical, something he’d simply taken on faith before; there just wasn’t a mind alive that could soak up all the information needed to make all the economic decisions, even for this miniature city-state. It was a profound relief to get the government-which had somehow turned out to be himself and his friends-out of more and more, after the desperate scramble of the first weeks after the Event.

  Private schemes were bubbling up on all sides: to make iceboxes to replace refrigerators; to cut and store ice in underground pits; to start a manufactory to weave sailcloth, once the flax was cut; another to put up a ropeworks-Eagle alone had five miles of running rigging.

  Now at least he could deal with priority projects, like the schooners Marian wanted built, and public policy��� and one policy was that everyone not superessential had to take a few days off after the harvest party.

  The beach wasn’t crowded, there was too much of it and too few people for that, but there were parties clumped along it as far as he could see. Flying kites or playing volleyball, throwing Frisbees, playing the guitar and singing, or just sitting around talking. More out in the water swimming; Nantucket’s offshore water got fairly warm in the late summer, up in the seventies, in vivid contrast to most of the New England coast. From what he’d heard, there were even a few hardy souls surfing today, over on the south shore. Rod-fishermen were casting in the waves for bluefish, and families with rakes were gathering scallops. It might have been an evening some year back before the Event��� except that everything was different. Even the way people looked; they’d acquired the roughened, weathered patina of outdoor workers.

  Bonfires cast sparks into the sunset, down the long curve to the point. The evening was warm enough for his T-shirt and jeans to be comfortable, or Martha’s single-piece bathing suit and sunrobe, or Marian Alston’s cycle shorts and muscle shirt. A rummage of children went by shrieking down at the water’s edge, chasing a soccer ball and kicking up spray. Their noise was soon lost in the vastness of sea and sky.

  “Ah, the hell with it,” he said. “The only thing that really worries me is that Pamela Lisketter has shut up.”

  He got up and went over to the pit. There was an art to a successful clambake. First you had to have lots of rockweed, and after all the soul-butter he had to hand out in this damned politician’s job they’d saddled him with, wading out to collect it-Polpis Harbor was the best spot-was a relief. You couldn’t soft-talk a wave; go at it wrong and it dunked you, and that was that. The pit he’d dug in the sand behind a dune was properly shallow. He’d lined it with wood-driftwood was best-and then carefully packed the stones and surrounded them with a mound of more wood.

  “That’s the tricky part,” he said to Alston as she came up, beer in hand. “You’ve got to build the rocks up so there’s room for air to filter around every rock, but not too much.”

  “Looks hot enough,” Alston said. The rocks were beginning to flake, glowing and cracking with dangerous popping sounds.

  “Ayup.” Cofflin cast a critical eye on them, then picked up a long-handled rake.

  “I thought you’d be glad that Lisketter stopped talking about walking lightly and petitioning to stop all the trips to the mainland,” Martha said, bringing up the baskets of food. She was just beginning to show, a rounding out of the stomach.

  A father. Christ. He and Betty had never been able to have kids-something with the fallopian tubes-and had never got around to adopting. Doc Coleman said there shouldn’t be any problems, but a first child at forty was always risky.

  “That’s my worry,” he said, pushing at the stones. “She’s stopped talking.” The rocks slid into a thick red-white glowing mass, evenly spread across the pit. “All right, let’s get the rockweed on.”

  The bags of damp weed were ready. They tossed it in a thick layer over the rocks, and clouds of fragrant steam rose, like the distilled essence of the sea. “Quick, now,” he said.

  The food went on top of the seaweed: clams in net bags, potatoes, young corn in the husk, a quartered turkey, lobsters still feebly waving their antennae in protest, and cheesecloth bags stuffed with homemade pork and venison sausage. Alston borrowed the rake and used it to add a thick closed clay pan with her contribution in it; more of her famous beaten biscuits. They threw another layer of weed on top, a tarpaulin over that, then spadefuls of sand.

  Cofflin took up the thread again: “Lisketter’s about as stubborn as��� as you, by God, Martha. If she’s given up speechifying at the Town Meeting, it’s because she’s got another angle.”

  They returned to the campfire and its thermos of sassafras tea and cooler of beer. “The other environmentalists are treating her like a leper,” Martha said. “Dane and Terri and the rest.”

  “Yeah, but they’re the sensible ones. Hell, they’re some of our most useful people. They know things-marine biology, handicrafts, stuff like that. And they know I’ll listen to them. But Lisketter��� she’s a True Believer.”

  Alston settled back on an elbow, the blanket dimpling into the sand and her full African features thoughtful. “You’re the expert,” she said; he couldn’t tell if she meant on clambakes or political dissidents. Her eyes lifted.

  Cofflin followed them. A group of youngsters in bathing suits-islanders and cadets-were throwing a football in an impromptu touch game. Swindapa leaped and caught it, ululated some ferocious-sounding warcry in her own language, and went pelting down the beach, fair hair flying in the wind. Doreen Rosenthal went after her, puffing. Marriage suits her, he thought. Or our Bronze Age health spa setup. From chunky the ex-astronomer had gone to a figure that turned heads in a bikini, particularly among men who liked the look of a woman with the promise of something to grab on to.

  By contrast Swindapa had filled out a little, and gotten even more deer-graceful, if that was possible.

  “Lisketter’s been talking to me a good deal,” Martha said. “Doing some research.”

  “Research on what?” Cofflin asked.

  “Early Mesoamerican cultures,” she said.

  “Aztecs?”

  “Oh, no, much earlier than that-Olmec and proto-Mayan, this century we’re in. Really trying to learn something, too. Her brother’s with her a fair amount of the time.”

  Cofflin frowned. Pamela Lisketter was odd, but functional. Her brother David, on the other hand���

  Ian Arnstein stirred beside his copy of The Oxford Illustrated Prehistory of Europe. He yawned and woke fully when Doreen plopped down beside him, panting. “Dinner ready yet?” he said.

  “Works up an appetite, snoozing does?” she said.

  “You had me swimming for an implausibly long time earlier,” Arnstein said. “Have mercy on an antique. Besides, I just finished harvesting an area equivalent to the state of Kansas.”

  Swindapa trotted up, throwing the football and a word over her shoulder. She settled down by Alston, giving her a quick brush of the lips and linking hands. Glad we haven’t had any more trouble about that, he thought. The black woman hadn’t flaunted it, but she hadn’t made any secret of it either; they’d just quietly gone down to the Town Building and registered as domestic partners under the ordinance Nantucket had passed a year before the Event. And she’d been smiling a lot more. So had Swindapa. Very, very glad we haven’t had any trouble.

  The i
sland depended too much on what Eagle and the Guard brought in; it had made the difference between bare survival at very best, and a sufficiency you could almost call comfortable. Of course, that was one reason why there hadn’t been more than a fringe murmur among the more conservative; plus many Nantucketers had a Yankee respect for privacy. That and the fact that it would take a very bold man to stand up to the basilisk stare of Captain Alston in a cold rage; he’d seen it once or twice, and had no desire at all ever to experience it personally from the receiving end.

  Oh, well, I’m in love myself. It made you feel sort of mellow and ready to think well of people, he found.

  “Furthermore, I wasn’t sleeping, I was thinking,” Ian said virtuously. He turned his head toward Cofflin and Alston. “We’ve finally figured out something about the Earth Folk language-it’s very distantly related to Basque.”

  “Ah, that’s interesting,” Cofflin said. “Should we try to find someone who speaks Basque?”

  “Very distantly,” Doreen said, sitting near her husband and combing out her hair. “The way we see it, the languages are about as close as English is to Sanskrit.”

  “Oh.” One more factoid for the Useless Trivia File. He supposed there were people up in the twentieth who’d pay a fortune for information like that, to settle those perpetual feuds academics enjoyed.

  “Tartessian is related to Basque too, we think, possibly ancestral to it,” Ian said. “Or closely related to the ancestor of Basque, whatever that is and wherever it’s spoken in this century. And therefore Tartessian is related to Fiernan. We think. And Iraiina, it’s probably a bridge dialect between proto-Germanic and proto-Celtic. How’s the clambake coming?”

  “Dinner won’t be ready for a while,” Cofflin said. “Someone could hand around that bucket of oysters, though.”

  The boats brought them back by the hundred bushel; they were common as dirt over on the mainland coast, but you had to be careful about the size if you planned to eat them on the half shell-many were so big the only way to approach them was with a knife and fork. He began opening these with a knife and handing them around; there was no butter for the bread, of course, but somebody had managed to scavenge a half-bottle of Tabasco sauce.