On the Oceans of Eternity Page 4

  "You're welcome… let's not be formal. I was just looking at the stars, and thinking about the Event," Hollard went on meditatively.

  "Oh? Nothing better to do?"

  Vicki grinned, glancing up herself. Thinking about the Event had become a byword for useless speculation and idle daydreaming: they just didn't have any data to go on. There was also what amounted to an unspoken rule against talking about it at all, among the older generation.

  The stars were enormous through the dry clear air, a frosted band across the sky. Sky glow's one thing I don't miss about the twentieth, she thought.

  "It occurred to me," Hollard went on, looking up and sipping, "that we may be wrong about what happened up in the twentieth when we… left. That they got the 1250 B.C. Nantucket swapped with us, that is. That's what most people assume, but there's no reason to believe it."

  "Oh?" Well, a fresh hypothesis, anyway. "What else could have happened?"

  Everything uptime of us could have all vanished the moment we arrived here, like a stray dream. She didn't mention that; it was another unwritten courtesy rule. The thought that they'd unwittingly wiped out billions of people and their own country and kin was just too ghastly to contemplate. Those inclined to brood on it had made up a goodly portion of the rash of post-Event suicides.

  "Well, I don't think the Event was an accident," Hollard said. "The transition was too neat-a perfect ellipse around the Island, for God's sake!-and we arrived too smoothly. No earthquakes, no tremors even, no tidal wave… I mean, there must have been differences in sea level, the temperature of the land underneath the wedge that got brought along with us, air pressure… and despite a subsoil of saturated sand and gravel ready to turn to liquid jelly at the slightest quiver, every-damn-thing was so stable that nobody noticed until they checked the star patterns. That and the rest of the world being 1250 B.C.'s. Accidents just don't happen like that."

  "Well, chunks of land just don't get displaced three millennia, either," Vicki said, but she nodded. That was the reasoning behind one of the major schools of thought about the Event. No way to check, of course. "Whoever or Whatever it was that did it could have integrated the ancient Nantucket into our slot just as easily," she pointed out.

  "Yes, but a technology that advanced-not just raw power, but subtlety-could as easily have not moved Nantucket at all." At Vicki's expression she grinned slyly. "They could have scanned Nantucket, right down to the positions of every atom, and then re-created it here and now. Then we'd get the two separate histories, the way Doreen Arnstein says-she's the scientist, I never could get my head around that quantum mechanics stuff. And our doppelgangers-our original selves- would go on up in the twentieth without even noticing."

  Vicki gave a low whistle. "You know, that's a really clever idea. And completely, utterly useless!"

  "It beats thinking about my family problems," Hollard said, with a wry twist of her mouth.

  "Mmmmm, if you don't mind me asking…"

  Hollard shrugged. "Everyone else is going to know, soon enough. You know Ken-Brigadier Hollard-rescued Rau-pasha while he was mopping up the Assyrians north along the Euphrates, just south of the Jebel Sinjar?"

  Vicki nodded. "Way I heard it, she'd killed the Assyrian King."

  "Tukulti-Ninurta, yes. His father killed her father-that was when the Assyrians took over what was left of the Kingdom of Mitanni, which wasn't much by then-and Raupasha was smuggled out by loyal retainers. In the original history, she probably married some local squire and vanished from sight."

  "Yeah. Then we came along and retumbled the bingo-balls."

  "Mmmm-hmmm. This time around, Tukulti-Ninurta showed up there with some odds-and-sods of his guard and court, after we and the Babylonians smashed their army. Made her dance for him, then he was going to drag her off and rape her. She got him first, knife in her sleeve and slit his throat neat as you please when he grabbed her. Then Ken arrived, just before they lit the fire under her feet."

  Vicki nodded. Even by the ungentle standards of the ancient Orient, the Assyrians were first-order swine; the locals all hated them. That didn't make the memory of bombing runs over Asshur much more comfortable, though. She went on, pushing aside the thought of burning rubble collapsing on kids like her Uncle Jared's:

  "Yeah, I've seen the princess a couple of times. Smart girl, charismatic as all hell. Asked a lot of questions the time we had her up in Emancipator, and I got the feeling she really understood about atmospheric pressure and buoyancy."

  "Mmmm-hmmm," Hollard said. It was a verbal trick Vicki had noticed Commodore Alston use. "Learned English fast, and all the rest of it-well, she had a pretty good education by local standards, already spoke and wrote four languages."

  "Was it the Babylonians' idea to make her queen of Mitanni, or ours?" Vicki asked curiously.

  Officially, it had been Kashtiliash's father's notion all the way, but that was diplomacy for you. Limp as an official explanation wasn't a proverb for nothing.

  "Oh, ours, but Kash and his father liked it. As a vassal kingdom, they'd get tribute and troops from Mitanni and without the bother of garrisons and officials. It was Princess Raupasha who shoveled the manure into the winnowing fan, right after the battle with those Hittites, the ones Walker talked into rebelling against their King."

  Vicki nodded. She'd ferried wounded from that fight back to Ur Base. "Offered your brother the crown, or something, wasn't it?" she said.

  "Damn, I knew we couldn't keep it under wraps for long. No, not quite that bad," Kathryn said, and gave the details of Raupasha's offer. "She is only seventeen, still…"

  "Ouch," Vicki Cofflin said. Local politics weren't her department, thank God, but-"Ouch, ouch, ouch."

  "Mega-ouchies," Hollard agreed. "Yeah, Kashtiliash hit the God-damned roof. Akkadian is a great language for swearing in, and he nearly blew out the circuits on the radio set we were using… I don't blame him for that, or for suspecting that Ken or the Arnsteins put her up to it."

  "Yeah. My sympathies." She hesitated. "How does your brother feel about it?" Kenneth Hollard wasn't married, except to the Marine Corps. She'd had the odd daydream about him herself…

  This time Kathryn Hollard's laugh was long and loud. "Oh, he thinks he's horrified, and he thinks she's a sort of unofficial kid sister," she said. "You know how men are."

  "Ayup. Emotional idiots."

  A nod. "Well, with some exceptions, some of the time. Kash, for instance."

  Vicki hesitated again. Damn, but I've got a bump of curiosity bigger than the Elephant's Child, she thought. You couldn't pick up a copy of People magazine these days to find out details, either. The monthly Ur Base Gazette was a feeble substitute.

  "He's not exactly what I'd have expected, for the son of one of these absolute monarchs," she said cautiously. "Of course, I've only met him a couple of times. Lots of… ah… presence." They both knew what she meant; a maleness that blazed.

  Kathryn grinned. "Oh, yes indeed; smart, too, and likes new ideas. Did you know that his family have run Babylonia for nearly four hundred years? They foster their kids out with their kinfolk who stayed in the highlands, and then put them in the House of Succession-sort of like a strict boarding school, with other grandees' kids, where they get used to hard work and people saying 'no.' Not a bad system."

  Vicki nodded. She couldn't imagine marrying a local herself, King or no King, but tastes differed. "What about your kids, if you don't mind me asking?"

  "Oh, we agreed on a Nantucket tutor, and a spell on the Island with my relatives." She sighed. "Not that I'm going to have time to be pregnant until this damned war is over, probably."

  "Yeah, it is inconvenient," Vicki said. She'd been thinking about a family of her own… False dawn showed in the east; time to get back to work. "Best of luck, then."

  "It's all such a monumental distraction from the real war," Hollard said.

  "Or at least our part of it," Vicki replied.

  Hollard chuckled. "Yeah. At least we don't hav
e the chief's worries, or the commodore's."

  "Good to find you on this side of the pond, Ron," Marian Alston-Kurlelo said.

  It was also good to be full, dry, dressed in a warm kaftan and slippers instead of a sopping uniform and wet boots, eating something because of the way it tasted, not because you were so hungry that hardtack and jerky went down easy.

  "That's why I dropped by," she went on. "Didn't want to pass up a chance of settling some details with you in person."

  She looked down at her half-finished dessert and pushed it away with a sudden memory of what her older sisters had looked like after forty-odd years of chitterlings, ham hocks, and sweet-potato pie. Swindapa snagged the dish and began to finish it off; it was baked apples with honey and cream, one of her favorites. They were sitting in the snug, a booth by the fire, with Councilor Ron Leaton and the manager of the Irondale Works, Erica Stark. She was a competent-looking woman in her late thirties, with the pale bony face and faded blue eyes of an old-stock Nantucketer. Leaton was as abstracted as ever, despite more gray in his light-brown hair and beard. The long pianist's fingers with their ground-in patina of machine grease toyed with a cup as he spoke.

  "I was up on Anglesy, some problems with the drainage engines in the copper mines, then dropped down to troubleshoot the Merrimac project with Erica. I was surprised to hear you were coming," he said. "I expected you and the fleet to be off by now."

  Alston nodded and glanced over her shoulder. Over at one of the long common tables the Marine escort were enjoying themselves with food, drink, and local company caught by the glamor of the uniform. She caught Swindapa conscientiously checking in that direction occasionally as well. They were good troops, but young, and only Ritter was actually something approaching a native Islander-she'd been a ten-year-old orphan adopted by an elderly couple in Nantucket Town, right after the Alban War. The rest of her squad were foreigners enlisted for pay, adventure, and the promise of citizenship at the end of their hitch, like much of the Coast Guard proper and most of the Marine Corps these days. Four of them linked arms over shoulders and sang, fairly tunefully:

  "When you see the Southern Cross for the first time,

  You'll understand why you came this way-'

  Nobody was getting too loud, and nobody minded. OK, that's well in hand, Alston thought, then sighed as she replied to the engineer-entrepreneur. "I expected to be away by now myself, but the first casualty in any war is your battle plan," she said. "Sometimes even before the war starts… Two clans of the Uarwasoru teuatha started another round of one of their Goddamned blood feuds on their way to the muster point."

  "And none but Marian could deal with it," Swindapa said pridefully.

  Alston smiled a crooked smile. "I do have the baraka, the keuthes, they call it," she said. "Or the Sun People think I do, which is 'bout the same thing."

  "So they could surrender to you without losing too much face," Stark said shrewdly.

  To the Sun People, keuthes was rather like having Fate putting a finger on your side of the scales, or a big spiritual battery pack full of capital-L Luck. The way the charioteer tribes looked at it, she, Alston, had a monstrously unfair amount of war-keuthes, giving her an unbeatable edge in anything involving fighting, raiding, or plundering. They called her the Midnight Mare, and it was a title of high respect and fear, which were much the same thing in their terms, invoking both the feared black-hued demons of the night and the wild power of Hepkonwsa, the Lady of the Horses.

  Ron Leaton nodded. "You're the one who beat their war-host and wizard chief on the Downs. They believe in legends and heroes, not institutions and governments."

  Marian shrugged. What I'm needed for here is to keep our local allies together, and convince them we'll win. Luckily, I've got a good general staff, who can handle things at home under Jared. A moment of worry: Do the enemy? It wouldn't necessarily be obvious to our agents. She didn't think so. Walker would be too suspicious of possible rivals, and the concept would be alien to Isketerol of Tartessos.

  Instead she went on: " 'Dapa and I had to take a company of Marines from Portsmouth Base up north to kick ass and take names. We had a radio along, heard Ron was here, sent most of the party back, and dropped over ourselves to consult after the shouting was done."

  The actual slaying that started the whole mess had been a fair enough fight, which helped.

  Alston was glad they hadn't had to actually open fire; she'd gone armed and in uniform all her adult life, but not from any love of combat. I leave that to maniacs and Sun People warriors, which is much of a muchness. Killing human beings was a disgusting incident of her real job, which was winning safety for her children, partner, friends, people.

  Now, William Walker and Alice Hong, a few of their collaborators, I'll make an exception for them, yes. I'll have to repress an impulse to swing on the bastard's ankles when we hang him.

  "Short form"-leaving out days of knife-edge tension amid hair-trigger barbarian tempers and alien weirdness of belief and custom-"it went fairly smoothly, but somebody with less keuthes might have had to kill some of them, and that might have screwed up the whole muster, so it was worthwhile doing it myself, even at the cost of some delay."

  Everyone nodded; that sort of thing could get very ugly very quickly. Every clan of the eastern tribes had a feud with somebody waiting to flare up again, and everyone was related to everyone else by descent or marriage or blood brotherhood, so a single killing could sprawl out into an uncontrollable free-for-all of ambushes and lethal brawls like a sweater unraveling from a single tug. When things got to that stage you had to send in a punitive expedition, which nobody liked.

  "Swan-eating savages," Swindapa said, in her own language; that was a vile insult, to a Fiernan.

  Stark nodded agreement. "We get a fair bit of that sort of trouble," she said. "There are a lot of migrant laborers from the Sun People tribes working here." A grimace of distaste. "Had to hang a couple for this and that."

  "Mmmm, this is extraterritorial, isn't it?" Marian said. Places like Irondale were usually under the Republic's legal system. Fiernan law and custom had no provisions for towns, for any settlements of individuals who weren't related to each other; or any real conception of government or the State, come to that.

  "We bargained for a perpetual lease on the land from the Telukuo lineage," Leaton said. "They got a lump sum and a one-fifth stockholding in the Irondale Company, and a lot of them got in on the ground floor as employees, so they're foremen and skilled workers now-we've trained some really good machinists-they're getting rich, hardly bother to farm anymore." He grinned and rubbed his hands. "Everyone concerned with this little baby is getting rich."

  "I hear Sam Macy is complaining about that," Alston said.

  She and Swindapa had gotten a fair bit of cash last year; prize money from some ships taken in a skirmish with the Tartessians before open war was declared, and they'd put much of it into Irondale Company stock. Money wasn't extremely important to her, but she'd been born ain't-no-doubt-'bout-it-grits-every-day poor, and disliked it. And there were the children to think of.

  "Cheap-labor competition undercutting Nantucket industries, Sam says," she went on.

  Leaton flushed. "I talked to him just before I came over, two weeks ago. Don't get me started!"

  "Oh, by the milk of Moon Woman's flowing breasts, don't get him started," Swindapa said-in Fiernan-and rolled her eyes.

  "Macy's not so bad," Alston said. "A representative government has to have an opposition party-better him than, say, Emma Carson."

  The engineer snorted. "Nantucket's an island, for Christ's sake, and not a very big island, either-fifty square miles of sandbank, and the water supply's limited to shallow wells. Way things are going, Nantucket Town alone will have twenty thousand people in another decade and we'll be running out of space to live, much less for factories. Whereas this place… it was the Silicon Valley of the Industrial Revolution."

  Alston raised her eyebrows; she'd read a good de
al of history, but mostly in the military and maritime fields. Leaton had run a computer store before the Event; more importantly, he'd operated a machine shop out of his basement and studied the history of technology as an obsessive hobby. The hobby had turned into Seahaven Engineering, and those lathes and milling machines and gauges, the library of technical works and hard-won personal skills, had saved them all and gone on to grow and multiply and mutate in the years since. Making Leaton the most powerful of the Republic's new merchant princes along the way. if also the least worldly.

  I like him. Usually do, with someone who really knows their work and is proud of it.

  He continued: "Well, if you want to get technical, this"-he tapped his boot on the stone floor-"is where they first used, would have used, coal to smelt iron, and where the first iron steam-engine cylinders were cast, and where the first iron bridge was built-Coalbrookdale and Ironbridge Gorge. First railroad, first iron boat… Not by accident, any of it! The seams in these hillsides, they've got iron ore, coal, and fireclay in the same strata-some of the hills around here ooze bitumen. It's finest low-sulfur coking coal, too, no impurities, sweet enough to eat with a spoon. Plus abundant waterpower that's easy to tap and a navigable river at our doorstep and plenty of good timber, limestone, big area of farmland upriver to supply food, lead mines… If I were doing it over again, I wouldn't have built a Bessemer plant back on the Island at all, we should concentrate on high-value-added stuff there-Alston saw Erica Stark put an affectionate hand on the engineer's arm. Well, well, perhaps the inveterate bachelor has met his match. Or at least someone who could stop one of his lectures in its tracks. When Leaton said "if you want to get technical," strong men blanched.

  "You don't have to convince me, Ron," the Guard commander said. "Save it for the Council sessions, or the Town Meetin'. Just tell me about what I ordered."

  "Oh." Leaton cleared his throat. "Well, yes, it's about ready. All the plating, three-point-five inch and ready for assembly, edges milled and holes for bolts drilled. That"-he nodded northwards, toward the faint muffled sound of the forging hammer-"is the crankshaft being finished off; we turned the propeller shaft last week. Erica did, rather."