Against the Tide of Years Read online

  Little of it was a surprise to him. Contingency planning cost nothing, and he had a limited discretionary fund to work with for more concrete preparations. At least we could lay the groundwork, since the Alban War. The new Marine regiment was coming along fairly well, from the reports—young Hollard was a doer, and the Republic had grown enormously over the last eight years, in numbers and capacities.

  Cofflin wondered grimly what Walker and his renegades had been doing in those same years. Walker wasn’t the kind to let grass grow under his feet, damn him. If they didn’t do something about him, eventually he would do something about them.

  “Oh, sweet fucking Jesus Christ on a Harley,” William Walker muttered in English, before dropping back into archaic Greek. “Seventy alternative meanings?”

  Thick adobe walls kept the heat at bay, but light lanced in like spears of white through small, high windows. The room was a rectangle, whitewashed plaster on the walls and hard-packed earth covered in gypsum on the floor; it smelled of the damp clay in a tub, and of clay tablets drying in wicker baskets.

  The Achaean scribe sat patiently on his stool. “Yes, lord,” he said, humoring the newly-come stranger the High King had set him to serve. “There are seven tens of meanings for this sign.”

  His pen was a reed with a sharp thorn set in the tip, and his writing surface moist clay pressed on a board. The thorn scratched a circle divided by two straight lines, like a four-spoked wheel.

  “This is the sign ka,” he said. “Also the sign for ga, kha, kai, kas, kan. . . .”

  And you have to figure out which from context, Walker thought. What an abortion of a writing system.

  The real joker was that the script wasn’t even well suited to Greek. The main ancestors of these clowns had arrived in Greece as illiterate barbarian war bands from the north; they’d picked up writing from the Minoan Cretans, along with most of what other feeble claims to civilization they had. The original script had been designed for a completely different language; all the signs for sounds ended in a vowel, and there were a whole bunch of Greek sounds that didn’t have a sign at all.

  Pathetic. Which was all to the good, of course. Not a day went by that he didn’t bless Whoever or Whatever had caused the Event.

  “Thank you, Enkhelyawon,” he said to the scribe. No fucking wonder nearly everyone’s illiterate here. “Now, how have you progressed with my people’s script?”

  In the original history, if “original” meant anything here, Mycenaean civilization was going to go under in another fifty years or so in a chaos of civil war and barbarian invasion; this writing system would be completely lost, and when the Greeks became literate again after their Dark Age it would be by borrowing the ancestral alphabet from the Phoenicians. The Romans would get it from the Greeks and then pass their version down to Western civilization . . . and here he was, teaching it to the ancestors of the Greeks. More weird shit.

  “Lord, a child could master that script you showed me,” Enkhelyawon said tolerantly. “Twenty-six signs? That is nothing.”

  He picked up another slab of prepared clay and quickly wrote out the Roman alphabet. “It is interesting, lord—I have yet to find a word that cannot be written in it.”

  “You won’t,” Walker said dryly. “And it can be learned by a child—that’s the whole point.”

  The scribe was a middle-aged man, which meant mid-thirties here, with a few streaks of gray in his pointed black beard. Walker could watch the thought percolating through, and some of the implications popping up like lightbulbs. It was a look he’d become deeply familiar with since the Event. The locals weren’t necessarily stupid; show them a concept and they’d often grasp it PDQ—the smarter and less hidebound ones. Not all of them thought that So it was in the days of our fathers was the answer to every problem, when you showed them an alternative. The trick was finding the right ones.

  Enkhelyawon looked down at the clay tablet. “And . . . ah, I see. The sounds of the letters seldom change.”

  “Small need for us scribes, then,” the Achaean went on after a moment, his voice subdued.

  “No, more need for scribes,” Walker reassured him. “The more that can be written, the more will be written. And here you write on skins as well as clay, true?”

  “Of course, lord,” Enkhelyawon said. “Clay is for rough notes, for monthly tallies. We transfer to parchment for lasting use; parchment is costly, of course.”

  Because it was a by-product of the sheep-and-goat industry, the hide scraped and pumiced until it was thin and smooth. Meat was an upper-class luxury here, and leather had a hundred other uses.

  “Here is something we call paper.”

  “Ahh,” the scribe said again, handling the sheet. “Like the Egyptian papyrus?”

  “No. Notice it’s more flexible. And it’s made out of linen rags; this sample piece was made here in Mycenae. Nearly as cheap as clay, and it’s much easier to write on.”

  More lightbulbs went on. Walker nodded and rose; one thing he’d learned in Alba, before those interfering bastards from Nantucket upset his applecart, was that power was like an iceberg—nine-tenths of it was invisible, the unspectacular, organizational side of things. At least here he didn’t have to start from absolute ground zero with a bunch of savages who didn’t even have the concept of organization beyond family and clan.

  “Think about these things, Enkhelyawon,” Walkler said. “I will need a man who understands both the new and the old ways of writing and record keeping. Such a man could rise high, in my service. You must speak with my vassal Edward son of John.” Who had been a CPA, before the Event. Double-entry bookkeeping . . .

  He nodded to the Achaean’s bow and walked out into the main hallway of the house Agamemnon had granted him—his town house; there were also estates in the countryside down by Tiryns, and the land in the vale not yet called Sparta.

  This was a typical nobleman’s mansion for this day and age. The basement storerooms and the lower course of the wall were made from big blocks of stone, neatly fitted; above that were two stories of massive adobe walls and a flat roof. The outside was whitewashed, the walls inside covered in smooth plaster and then painted with vividly colored frescoes of fabulous beasts, war, and the hunt; the beams and stucco of the ceilings were painted too. In the center of the hall was a big circular hearth, sunken into the floor and stone-lined, surrounded with a coaming made of hard blue limestone blocks. Even in a summer a notional fire was kept going, the smoke wafting up to a hole in the ceiling; four big wooden pillars surrounded it, running through the second story and up to a little extra roof with a clay quasi chimney in it. A gallery surrounded the pillars with balconies from which you could look down into the great hall.

  It all sort of reminded him of Southwestern style, Pueblo-Spanish, like the old Governor’s palace in Santa Fe but gaudier. He’d been raised on a ranch in the Bitterroot country of Montana, but he’d been down that way competing in junior rodeos. It was a little gloomy, since most of the light came through the roof or from the antechamber at one end, but his followers were already putting up oil lamps. The local olive-squeezings weren’t as bright as whale oil, but the still should be operational in a couple of days. Alcohol gave a nice bright light, when you knew enough to use a woven wick and a glass chimney.

  Guards stood by the entranceway of bronze-bound wood, his own men from Alba. They wore equipment he’d made up there before the war, iron chain-mail hauberks and conical iron helmets with nasals; they carried steel-headed spears and round shields blazoned with his device, a wolfshead.

  Another came and bowed his head, his helmet tucked under one arm. His blond hair was cropped at his ears like Walker’s, and he sported a close-trimmed yellow beard.

  “Wehaxpothis,” he said—“Lord” in the tongue spoken by the Iraiina tribe in remote northwestern Europe, or “chief of he clan.” “The men are settled and we are unpacking the goods. The rahax here has sent slaves, with many loads of fine things—cloth, and furniture. The L
ady Hong and the Lady Ekhnonpa your wives are directing them.”

  “Good, Ohotolarix,” Walker said. “That’s Wannax Agamemnon, by the way. You and the others will have to learn Achaean, and quickly. It is needful.”

  It shouldn’t be too difficult, either. The proto-whatever that Ohotolarix’s people spoke was only about as different from this archaic Greek as French was from Italian.

  “And your handfast man Bill Cuddy wishes to speak with you on the setting up of his lathes and of Martins’s forge,” the young guard-captain went on.

  He managed the English words well; the twenty Americans among Walker’s followers still used the language a fair bit, though he doubted their grandchildren would. Probably there’ll be a lot of loan words. Even the civilized languages here lacked a lot of concepts.

  “Let’s go,” Walker said, settling the katana and pistol at this belt. “We’ll put in a forge, but the rest of the machinery’s going down to Sparta. Oh, and get Alice.”

  Alice Hong was a doctor; he’d need to see to sanitation and water supply with her, here and at their other locations. Bad water was dangerous. He’d nearly crapped himself to death more than once since the Event. And she could get a start on modernizing the royal textile plant, too. The palace had hundreds of slave women spinning and weaving, but he had models and drawings for spinning jennies and kickpedal looms with flying shuttles; back in Alba they’d gotten them working well. After a lot of experiment, but it was all basic Early Industrial stuff, well within the capacities of a local carpenter. The machines would free up a lot of labor for other work and make the king properly grateful for all the extra wealth.

  Hmmm, he wondered, how long before we give the King of Men the heave-ho?

  Not for quite a while, he decided reluctantly. He’d have to thoroughly understand the politics here and make some allies first.

  Walker laughed aloud and slapped his henchman on the shoulder. “Let’s get to work,” he said. “I want to be ready before we meet my old skipper again.”

  Ohotolarix was a hardy man, born to a warrior people. Nevertheless, he shivered slightly at the sound of his lord’s laughter.

  “Got it,” Lieutenant Vicki Cofflin said, giving the bolt a final turn.

  The new carburetor stood out against the pre-Event machining of the aircraft engine. It looked . . . clunkier, somehow. Just make it easy to replace, make a couple of dozen, and switch as they wear out.

  She wiped her hands on a rag and then turned to Ronald Leaton. “You want to do the honors, Ron?”

  The tall, lanky engineer shook his head, stepping back. “It’s a Coast Guard project,” he said. “Seahaven’s just the prime contractor. All yours, Lieutenant.”

  Vicki nodded. “All right, then,”

  She took a deep breath. The converted hangar near Nantucket’s little airport was always cluttered, with parts and workbenches and machine tools. Right now it was even more so, with a big bag of gold-beater’s skin—scraped whale intestine—hanging from the ceiling. A tube ran down from that to the Cessna engine mounted on a timber framework in the middle of the concrete floor. The rest of the team gathered around, in stained blue Coast Guard coveralls or the equally greasy unbleached gray cotton that Seahaven Engineering favored. The hangar smelled of hot whale-oil lubricant, and other things less familiar these days—gasoline fumes and a faint, nose-rasping hint of ozone.

  Another deep breath, and she pushed the ignition button. The engine coughed, sputtered, blatted . . . and then settled down to a steady roar. Some of the watchers covered their ears, unused to something Nantucket had heard little of since the Event—an internal combustion engine at full throttle.

  “Great!” Vicki shouted. “Let’s take her up and down, and vary the mix. Stand by!”

  The engine snarled, coughed again as the mixture of hydrogen from the gasbag and methanol altered. Four hundred fifty horsepower, or thereabouts. About what it had put out in its first incarnation as half the engines on a Cessna puddle jumper.

  “Get that adjusted!” Vicki said. The tests continued, sweating-hot work on a summer’s day, until at last she tripped the switch and wiped her hands again, smiling fondly as the engine sputtered into silence.

  “Damn, you know, I think this is going to work,” she said.

  “No reason why it shouldn’t,” Leaton said. “Methanol, hydrogen, gasoline—it’s all an inflammable gas by the time it reaches the piston.”

  Vicki chuckled indulgently; she was twenty-seven, nearly two decades younger than Leaton, and she still felt motherly toward him sometimes. One reason was the otherworldly way he had of forgetting everything but the task at hand.

  “I meant the whole Emancipator program, not just the engine,” she said.

  “Oh. Oh, yes, that too. All right, people, break for lunch!”

  He and Vicki and a young man in Guard fatigues walked over to a sloping table by the concrete-block wall. Plans were pinned to it, showing a tapering teardrop shape five hundred feet long and a hundred and ten wide at its broadest point, with a cruciform set of fins at the rear that looked like, and were, wings from light aircraft. Along the bottom of the forward one-third was a gondola curving down from the hull, with three engines in pods mounted along either side of it. Those looked like cut-down sections of aircraft wing too, and were.

  “Never thought I’d be piloting a dirigible, of all things,” she muttered to herself, feeling a rush of excitement. It would be her first command in the Guard, period, unless you counted a harbor tug. If I get it, she thought. That hadn’t been decided yet.

  The younger man—his name was Alex Stoddard, a fourth cousin once removed of the Chief’s wife—looked up from examining the blueprints.

  “If you don’t mind me asking, Lieutenant Cofflin, what did you think you’d be piloting?” he said.

  “F-16s,” she said. “I was going to go to Colorado Springs, the year the Event happened.” At his blank look, she went on: “The Air Force Academy, in Colorado. Up in the twentieth.”

  “Oh,” he nodded, polite but somehow . . . not indifferent. Just as if I was talking about flying to the moon. Real, but not really real.

  It was amazing what an effect it had—exactly how old you’d been at the Event. Even a couple of years, and the outlook was entirely different.

  I was on the cusp, she thought. Eighteen. Not quite an adult but not a kid either. Alex had been sixteen on that memorable day; not a little kid, she judged, but unambiguously a kid. He had grown up in a world where steam engines were high tech, and schooners and flintlocks everyday realities. He probably didn’t get that occasional feeling of alienation, as if a glass wall had dropped between him and the world.

  Vicki ran a hand over her close-cropped reddish-brown hair and turned her attention back to the drawings. The frame of the airship was made up of two long strips that curled from bow to stern, crisscrossing each other in an endless series of elongated diamonds like a stretched-out geodesic dome. Inside that framework was a series of strengthening rings, each braced with spokes reaching in to a central metal hub.

  “That wire’s the only metal,” Leaton said, his finger tapping a horizontal view of one of the rings. “Everything else is laminated birchwood and balsa and wicker.” He cleared his throat. “Only steel, rather. The clamps will have to be aluminum.”

  Everyone winced slightly. The Republic’s new industries, here on the Island and the mainland and Alba, could turn out steel of a sort, iron, copper, bronze, and brass, but aluminum had to come from pre-Event stockpiles. Leaton had a plan for a small hydropower plant on the mainland to convert Jamaican bauxite; the only unworkable thing about it was it would take the entire national labor force ten years to get it going, in which time they’d all starve to death. Like so much else, it would simply have to wait a generation, or two or three.

  “Good thing we can get the engines burning that liquid fuel-hydrogen mix,” Alex said.

  “Ayup,” Leaton replied.

  Vicki nodded. That way, the reducti
on in lift would precisely match the lesser weight as the methanol or gasoline or whatever burned, meaning you wouldn’t have to dump gallast or valve gas, which extended range. So did the middle cell of the five cylindrical gasbags inside the hull. The forward and the rear two would be inflated with hydrogen, cracked out of water with a portable generator wherever the airship was based, to give the ship pretty well neutral buoyancy. The middle one was a hot-air balloon. That would provide the variable lift, again reducing the need to dump water ballast or release precious hydrogen to rise or fall.

  Leaton rested one hand on Vicki’s shoulder and the other on the younger Guard officer’s. “Damned fine piece of work, if I say so myself—couldn’t have done it without you. It’s going to work.” He cleared his throat again; it was a gesture of his, like knocking on wood. “Once we’ve got the bugs out of it, of course.”

  “Of course,” Vicki said dryly. Then she snorted. “Commodore Alston was . . . impressed . . . too, when she saw the plans on Monday.”

  “She was?” Leaton said, brightening; Alex looked eager as well. “What did she say?”

  “She said . . .” Vicki stretched her Yankee vowels to try and match the sea-island Gullah of the Republic’s military leader. “Do Jesus, ah’m glaaayd ah ain’ goin’ up on that -theah!”

  They shared a laugh. “Got to go,” Leaton said. “Washington Street Mills is having problems with their new powerloom, and if they don’t get it fixed the Commodore will flay me—they’ve got a big sailcloth order in for the new frigates.”

  The two Guard officers took their boxed lunches and bottles of sassafras tea to a bench outside. It was a warm day, for springtime in Nantucket—seventy-two degrees, according to the thermometer—and the wind in from the south smelled of turned earth from the spring plowing, a rich, not unpleasant odor of fertilizer, and a tang of sea salt under that. The airport no longer looked abandoned, what with the new projects; one huge shed was going up, the frames like giant croquet hoops spanning a stretch of unused runway that furnished a ready-made floor. Besides that, the scout balloon hung high overhead, looking like a miniature inflated version of the Emancipator’s plans with a two-person gondola slung underneath, toy-tiny at the top of a thousand feet of cable.