Island in the Sea of Time Read online

  Island in the Sea of Time

  S.M. Stirling

  A cosmic disturbance transports the island of Nantucket and its inhabitants over three thousand years back in time to the shores of a Stone Age America. In addition to coping with the day-to-day problems of survival and the trauma of losing all connection with the modern world, the residents of the time-stranded island find their lives complicated by the presence of native tribes across the water. Stirling’s (The Ship Avenged, Baen, 1997) imaginative foray into time travel should also please fans of alternate history.

  S.M. Stirling

  Island in the Sea of Time

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Many thanks to the people of Nantucket, and none of the characters in this book are intended to represent any individuals living or dead! Thanks also to the United States Coast Guard, which responded nobly to the ignorant inquisitiveness of the author. All errors, mistakes, lapses of taste, and infelicities of expression are purely mine. Admiration and thanks also to the archaeologists and historians who piece together the past of our species from shards and the equivalent of landfill.

  Particular thanks on-island to Tracy and Swede Plaut; to Randy Lee of Windshadow Engineering; to Wendy and Randy Hudson of Cisco Brewers (who make a great pale ale); to Harvey Young, the friendly (common) native Nantucketer (less common) at Young’s Bicycles; to the Bartletts of Ocean View Farm; to Mimi Beman of Mitchell’s Book Corner; and to many, many others.

  Thanks also to Chief Petty Officer James for the tour and answering an afternoon of questions on his lovely ship!

  And to John Barnes for dialectical (in both senses of the word) help; to Poul Anderson for catching a couple of embarrassing errors; to Heather Alexander for the use of her beautiful Harvest Season; to Laura Anne Oilman, for really editing; and to Walter John Williams for the manuals.

  CHAPTER ONE

  March, 1998 A.D.

  Ian Arnstein stepped off the ferry gangway and hefted his bags. Nantucket on a foggy March evening was chilly enough to make him thankful he’d worn the heavier overcoat; Southern Californian habits could betray you, here on the coast of New England. Thirty-odd miles off the coast. The summer houses built out over the water were still shuttered, and most of the shops were closed-tourist season wouldn’t really start until Daffodil Weekend in late April, when the population began to climb from seven thousand to sixty. He was a tourist of sorts himself, even though he came here regularly; to the locals he was still a “coof,” of course, or “from away,” to use a less old-fashioned term. Everybody whose ancestors hadn’t arrived in the seventeenth century was a coof, to the core of old-time inhabitants, a “wash-ashore” even if he’d lived here for years. This was the sort of place where they talked about “going to America” when they took the ferry to the mainland.

  He trudged past Easy Street, which wasn’t, and turned onto Broad, which wasn’t either, up to the whaling magnate’s mansion that he stayed in every year. It had been converted to an inn back in the 1850s, when the magnate’s wife insisted on moving to Boston for the social life. Few buildings downtown were much more recent than that. The collapse of the whaling industry during the Civil War era had frozen Nantucket in time, down to the huge American elms along Main Street and the cobblestone alleys. The British travel writer Jan Morris had called it the most beautiful small town in the world, mellow brick and shingle in Federal or neoclassical style. A ferociously restrictive building code kept it that way, a place where Longfellow and Whittier would have felt at home and Melville would have taken a few minutes to notice the differences.

  Mind you, it probably smells a lot better these days. Must have reeked something fierce when the harborfront was lined with whale-oil renderies. It had its own memories for him, now. Still painful, but life was like that. People died, marriages too, and you went on.

  He hurried up Broad Street and hefted his bags up the brick stairs to the white neoclassical doors with their overhead fanlights flanked by white wooden pillars. The desk was just within, but the tantalizing smells came from downstairs. The whalers were long gone, but they still served a mean seafood dinner in the basement restaurant at the John Cofflin House.

  Doreen Rosenthal pecked at her computer and sneezed; there was a dry tickle in her throat she was dolorously certain was another spring cold. Behind her the motors whined, turning the telescope toward the sky. It wasn’t a very big reflector, just above the amateur level, but it was an instrument of sorts, and you could massage information out of the results. Sort of like 0.01 percent of Mount Palo-mar. Astronomy posts weren’t that easy to find for student interns, and the Margaret Milson Association had given her this one. It meant living on Nantucket, but that wasn’t so bad; she was the quiet sort even at U. Mass. She’d finally managed to lose some weight, having nothing better to do with her spare time than exercise. Well, a little weight, and it’s going to be more. Even in winter, the island was a good place to bike, or you could find somewhere private to do kata. When it wasn’t storming, of course; and there was a wild excitement to that, when the waves came crashing into the docks, spray flying higher than the roofs of the houses.

  And always, there were the stars. The rooms below the observatory held decades of observation, all stored in digital form now. Endless fascination.

  She took a bite out of a shrimp salad sandwich and frowned as the computer screen flickered. Not another glitch! She leaned forward, fingers unconsciously twisting a lock of her long black hair. No, the digital CCD camera was running continuous exposures���

  Stargazers didn’t actually look at the stars through an eyepiece anymore. It was ten minutes before she realized what was happening in the sky.

  Jared Cofflin sighed and leaned back in his office chair. There really wasn’t much for a police chief to do on Nantucket in the winter. An occasional drunk-and-disorderly, maybe some kids going on a joyride, now and then a domestic dispute; they’d gone seven straight years without a homicide. But April came ‘round again, and pretty soon the summer people would be flooding in. Summer was busy. Coofs were a rowdy lot. Not that the island could do without them, although sometimes he very much wished it could. Once it had been Nantucketers who traveled, from Greenland to Tahiti.

  With a wry grin, he thought of a slogan someone had suggested to the Chamber of Commerce once as a joke: We used to kill a lot of whales. Come to Nantucket!

  The little police station was in a building that had once housed the fire department, and across a narrow road from a restaurant-cum-nightspot. The buildings on both sides were two stories of gray shingle with white trim, like virtually everything on the island that wasn’t red brick with white trim. About time for supper, he thought. No point in going home; he hadn’t gotten any better at serious cooking since Betty passed on five years ago. Better to step over and get a burger.

  He sighed, stood, hitched at his gunbelt, and reached for his hat, looking around at the white-painted concrete blocks, the boxes of documents piled in corners and bursting out of their cardboard prisons. Hell of a life. And he’d had to let the belt out another notch recently; it seemed unfair, when the rest of him was the same lanky beanpole it’d been when he graduated from high school back around LBJ’s inauguration.

  The lights flickered. Nantucket was just about to switch over to mainland power, via an underwater cable. For the next few months they had to soldier along on the old diesel generators, though.

  “Christ,” he said. “Not another power-out.”

  He walked out into the street and stopped, jarred as if he’d walked into a wall. Stock-still, he stood for a full four minutes staring upward. It was the screams from people around him that brought him back to himself.

  *

  Nor’
easter at twenty knots. Just what we needed, Captain Marian Alston thought with satisfaction. She kept a critical eye and ear on the mast captains’ work as the royals and topgallants were doused and struck.

  “Clew up! Rise tacks and sheets!”

  “Ease the royal sheets!”

  The pinrail supervisor bellowed into the wind: “Haul around on the clewlines, buntlines, and bunt-leechlines!”

  The upper sails thuttered and cracked as the clewlines hauled them up to the yards, spilling wind and letting the ship come a little more upright, although the deck still sloped like the roof of a house.

  “Lay them to aloft,” Alston said to the sailing master. “Sea furl.”

  The crew swarmed up the ratlines and out along the yards that bore the sails, hauling up armfuls of canvas as they bent over the yards; doll-tiny shapes a hundred feet and more above her head as they fought the mad flailing of the wet Dacron.

  No sense in leaving that much sail up, on a night as dirty as this looks to be. Too easy for the ship to be knocked down or taken aback by a sudden shift of wind. The chill bit through the thick yellow waterproof fabric of her foul-weather gear like cold damp fingers poking and prodding.

  She stood with legs braced against the roll and hands locked behind her back by the ship’s triple wheel, a tall slim woman from the Sea Islands of South Carolina, ebony-black, close-cropped wiry hair a little gray at the temples; her face was handsome in a high-cheeked fashion like a Benin bronze. Spray came over the quarterdeck railing like drops of salt rain, cold on her face and down her neck. The sun was setting westward over a heaving landscape of gray-black water streaked with foam, and the ship plunged across the wind with the yards sharp-braced. Her prow threw rooster tails every time the sharp cutwater plowed into a swell, twin spouts jetting up over the forecastle from the hawseholes where the anchor chains ran down through the deck. Then the ship would heave free as if shrugging her shoulders, water foaming across the forecastle deck and swirling out the scuppers.

  Alston smiled behind the expressionless mask of her face. Now this, this is real sailing, she thought.

  The Coast Guard training ship Eagle was a three-masted steel-hulled windjammer. It had been built in 1936, and the original incarnation was called the Horst Wessel before the United States took it as war reparations. There were still embarrassing swastikas buried under the layers of paint here and there, but it was sound engineering, solid work from Blohm amp; Voss, the firm that built the Bismarck. Three hundred feet from prow to stern, a hundred and fifty to the tops of the main and foremasts, eighteen hundred tons of splendid, lovely anachronism. Good for another fifty years hard sailing, if the Powers That Be didn’t decide to scrap her.

  “Secure the forward lookout,” she said. It was getting a little dangerous for someone to perch up in the bows.

  “Come about, ma’am?” the sailing master asked.

  “In a minute or two, Mr. Hiller,” she said.

  Nantucket was off to the northeast, fairly close, and it paid to be careful in the dark; the sea between the island and Hyannis on the mainland was shoal water, full of sandbars, and southeast was worse. She’d been tacking into the teeth of the wind for practice’s sake; fairly soon she’d turn and let the Eagle run southwestward. Cadets and crew-people were swarming up the rigging; more stood by on deck, poised to haul on ropes. Archaic, but the best training for sea duty there was-the Coast Guard still taught stellar navigation, too, despite the fact that you could push a button on a GPS unit and get your exact location from the satellites. Lieutenant William Walker was taking a sight on Arcturus from the edge of the quarterdeck, and Victor Ortiz was running one of his pupils through the same procedure. Usually they did the first cruise of the season without cadets, but this year the Powers in their ineffable wisdom had changed the schedules a little. Completely rearranged them, in fact, causing everybody endless bother and inconvenience. It was a considerable relief to get out to sea, where a captain was her own master.

  “The wind’s southing, ma’am,” Thomas Hiller, the sailing master, hinted.

  “Brace them sharp, then.”

  The centuries-old litany of repeated orders echoed across the deck; Eagle had been built to operate the old-fashioned way, no high-geared winches or powered haulage. It ended with a boatswain’s mate bellowing: “Ease starboard, haul port, lively port!”

  “Heave!” shouted the line leader in a trained scream that cut through the moan of the wind.

  “Ho!” chorused the twenty young men and women on the line, surging back in unison.

  “Heave!”

  “Ho!”

  “Ma’am.” Alston looked up. Hiller looked a little lost, which was a first. He’d been on the Eagle for eight years. “Ma’am��� there’s something odd about the compass reading.”

  An old-fashioned magnetic card compass binnacle stood before the wheels. She took a step and looked down into it; the card was whirling, spinning in complete circles. Captain Alston blinked in surprise. What on earth could cause that? The sky was clear to the horizon, only a little high cloud boiling in on the wind-unusually good weather for this time of year and these latitudes, although there might be a storm riding in on the nor’easter. No lightning, certainly. Then she noticed that the gyro repeater compass was quivering too.

  Marian Alston had been in the Coast Guard much of her thirty-eight years, commanded the Eagle for four, and served on search-and-rescue craft and armed cutters before that; she’d joined up the year sea duty was opened to women. You learned to trust your gut. And never, never to trust the sea.

  “Finish up and get them down,” she said.

  Cadets and crew poured down the ratlines, the latter sometimes helping the former along; for the first few weeks out, there would always be the odd officer cadet who froze a hundred and fifty feet up on a swaying rope.

  A fat blue spark jumped from her hand to the metal housing between the ship’s three wheels. Alston bit back a startled obscenity-you had to set an example-and shook her hand. Something white-hot stretched for an instant from sky to sea off to her left. More sparks flew; people were leaping and cursing all across the deck. Not the four hands standing on the benchlike platforms either side of the wheels, she noted with satisfaction. They flinched, their eyes went wide, but they kept her steady on the heading they’d been given.

  Light flickered from left to right behind her, curving ahead of the ship in a line only a few hundred yards away-curving from east to west, in a line her navigator’s eye could see was the arc of a huge circle. St. Elmo’s fire ran along the Eagle’s rigging, blue witch-flame. The curses were turning to screams as the lightning reared up into a crawling dome of orange and white overhead. Like being under the biggest, gaudiest salad bowl in the world, ran through her mind as she stood paralyzed for a moment. Then the noise on deck penetrated.

  Easily. The roaring wind had dropped away to nothing in the space of a few seconds, and the drumhead-taut sails slackened and thuttered limp. The motion of the ship lost its purposeful rolling plunge, changed to a shuddering as the waves turned into a formless chop, and then to a slow sway as they subsided. Shouts and screams echoed through an eerie silence as the rigging’s moaning song of cloven air died.

  “Silence there!” she snapped, quiet but carrying. “Mr. Roysins, let’s get some order here. Whatever’s happening, panic won’t help.”

  But it would feel so good, part of her mind gibbered, looking up at the dome of lights that turned night into shadowless day.

  “On with engines,” she said. Max the diesel hammered into life and steerageway came on the ship. “Strike all sails. Give me a depthfinder reading.”

  She clenched her hands behind her back and rose slightly on her toes, ignoring the blasting arch of fire. “We’ve got a ship to sail.”

  “Got the stores covered?” Chief Cofflin asked, as he pushed through the crowd on Main Street.

  “Right, liquor, grocery, and jewelry-just in case. We’re stretched pretty thin.”
<
br />   His assistant hesitated; he was a short thin young man named George Swain, and a fourth cousin. Everyone on the island was a cousin, except wash-ashores. It made for a certain lack of formality. So did the fact that there were only twenty-five officers on the force.

  “Some of our own people are a mite shaky, Chief.”

  “Ayup. Don’t blame ‘em, George. Still, we’ve got a job to do.” He stopped to think for a moment, running through a list of names in his head. “Get everyone who’s off-duty back on. And call Ed Geary, Dave Smith, Johnnie Scott, and Sean Mahoney. Tell them to each pick six friends they can trust and come down to the station. Deputize ‘em.”

  George missed a step. “Chief, we can’t do that on our own say-so!”

  “I can and I just did,” Cofflin said. “Ed’s a good man and he knows an emergency when he sees one, and so are the rest. You call them and get them posted. Meanwhile, let’s see if I can talk some sense into these people here.” The selectmen or somebody should be doing it; he was a policeman, not a politician. But they were probably out there running around with the rest of the crowd.

  He mounted the steps of the bank at the head of Main Street and looked down the cobbles toward the big planter at the foot of the street. The lights on the cast-iron lampposts shone on a sea of faces, on a street that should be mostly clear this time of night. Overhead the ghastly, garish lights still crawled and sparked, adding a weird touch to the upturned faces; all it needed was torches and pitchforks to be something out of a movie. He raised a battery-powered megaphone to his lips.

  “Now, let’s have some sense here,” he said.

  “What the fuck’s going on?” someone yelled, and the crowd roared with him.

  “QUIET, DAMMIT!”

  The bullhorn cut through the gathering madness, stopped it feeding on itself.

  “If I knew what was going on, I’d tell you,” Cofflin said bluntly, in the silence that followed. “I can tell you going hog-wild won’t help any. That-” he pointed upward toward the shimmering dome of light-“hasn’t hurt anyone yet. But we’ve had a dozen accidents, a suicide, and two assaults-with-intent tonight. That has hurt people.”