Island in the Sea of Time

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

 

ROC

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First published by Roc, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

 

First Printing. March 1998

Copyright © Steven M. Stirling, 1998

All rights reserved

 

Lyrics to “A Girl Needs a Knife” by Neil Gaiman are copyright © Neil Gaiman 1995, and used by his kind permission. They are taken from the Flash Girls CD
Maurice and I
.

 

REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

 

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

 

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

 

eISBN : 978-1-101-12791-9

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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 Gilman, for really
editing
; and to Walter John Williams for the manuals.

 

I
an 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 Palomar
. 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.