Island in the Sea of Time (37 page)

“I wish Ms. Stoddard—I mean, Ms. Cofflin—could be here,” Tiffany said wistfully. “It was a lot of fun, being in the Scouts with her teaching us things.”

Not everything, by any manner of means.

A man pelted in. “Boss!” he called. “Chief!”

Cofflin looked around at the tone in his voice, and waited while he controlled his breathing.

“Chief, there’s an Indian up the track—just where we were cutting those black walnut. He’s just standing there, keeps putting his hand up empty and talking Indian at us.”

Cofflin and Sam Macy looked at each other. “Solve one problem . . .” Macy began.

“. . . get another,” Cofflin replied. “I’d better go take a look.”

 

“There!” Swindapa whispered close to her ear. “There, see?”

Marian Alston bent slowly and peered through the thorny scrub, squinting. It was a gray day, low cloud scudding by overhead like cavalry of the sky, with an occasional spatter of rain; the air was so moist it would have been fog, if the wind hadn’t been at twenty knots from the south. A flicker of brown ears . . . a deer, its lips and tongue cropping delicately at the new growth.

No harm there . . . but beyond this thicket was the rolling surface of one of Angelica Brand’s new grainfields. Shoots of wheat ran bluish-green over what had been thicket and moorland a few short months ago, rippling nearly calf-high in the wind. Except for some near the edge of the cleared zone, eaten down to the roots. There were a thousand deer on Nantucket, or had been when the island was covered in scrub and moorland. They had to go, now that it was to be farmland once more. Fencing was out of the question this year at least, and couldn’t be deer-proof anyway.

Besides
,
I
crave
red meat
, Alston thought. Hunting was useful recreation, in the intervals between taking the
Eagle
out, training, overseeing the militia, getting the fishing fleet built and maintained. She enjoyed it; Swindapa gloried in it.

The deer bent its head again. The crossbow came up to her shoulder with studied slowness. Snuggle your cheek into the stock. Curl finger on the trigger, stroking it.
Altogether too much like making out,
she gibed in some recess of her mind. Now. Bring the foresight down until it settled in the notch at the back. Distance . . . about thirty yards. Raise the angle a little, then. The crossbow bolt didn’t go anything like as fast a bullet. Exhale. Squeeze.

Whunnnng.
The butt kicked back against her shoulder. The short heavy arrow whipped out through the thinbranched scrub. And . . .

The deer leaped convulsively. Alston cursed and leaped up herself; the worst possible result, a wounded deer careering off. Swindapa drew her knife and bounced forward, eeling through the spiny growth. Alston followed more slowly, sharp thorns snagging at her jeans and denim jacket, wondering at the young woman’s skill. She’d said that she was an indifferent hunter, that being mainly men’s business among her people. Blood spattered the trail, drops and then thick gobbets of it, smelling of copper, salt, and iron. The deer was lying on its side a hundred steps farther in under a dwarf pine, with the crossbow bolt sunk past the fletching behind its shoulder. Its hind legs kicked a final time as she came up; the graceful shape laid itself limp. Swindapa trimmed a branch and dipped it in the blood. She stood and flicked it north, south, east, west, murmuring in her own language as she did so. Then she crouched by the deer and began breaking it, butchering with easy skill.

“Bad that we can’t hang it up,” she said, red to the elbows.

Her English still held a strange lilt and roll, but it was fully fluent.

“Easier that way . . .
unHUojx,
look, the liver.” The girl sliced off a bit and popped it in her mouth, chewing with relish. “Best part. Want to start a fire and grill it?”

“Nnno, I don’t think so,” Alston said.
For a number of reasons.
She squatted as well to help with the messy task; not unfamiliar, she’d helped butcher animals as a child. “I prefer it with onions, and we’ve got some back home. Besides, we don’t have much water here. Dried blood is sticky.”

Vegetables were more precious than gold—those Brand had planted back in the spring were watched like ailing firstborn children, or perhaps the ailing firstborn children of hungry cannibals—but red meat had scarcity value too. For an occasional haunch of venison, you could do wonders trading on the quiet. She didn’t feel that was cheating, not like using her official position; after all, she
did
kill the deer herself.

They occupied themselves in companionable silence for a moment. “I’ve been meaning to ask you,” she said. “What’s that mark?”

Swindapa was wearing a shirt, unbuttoned partway down in the warm weather with the tails tied off under her bosom. Just between the upper curve of her breasts was a small tattoo, shaped like an arrowhead.

“That?” she said, peering down. “That’s the . . .” She considered for a moment, her lips shaping words. “The Spear Mark. When I was fifteen . . . years, I think, we count by thirteens of the moon . . . I took the Spear Mark, nearly three years ago when I was young. I stalked a deer close enough to kill it with my spear, and came back with the antlers on my head and the hide wrapped around me, and jumped the fire trench, and they put the Spear Mark on my chest.”

“Everyone does that?” Alston said.

“Oh, no. Some-many boys every year, and some-few girls sometimes. My—the one I did the Moon Spring Rites with, you’d say, my boyfriend?”

“‘Lover’ might be more appropriate, I think.”

“My lover was a big—no, a great—hunter, didn’t study the stars even though he was part of the Egurnecio family. A warrior, too, a . . . Spear Chosen, someone who leads warriors. I wanted to be with him.” She looked bleak for a moment, then sighed and shook it off. “The Sun People hurt him, smashed his leg, he couldn’t run or hunt or fight anymore. He got angry all the time, got sick with too much mead, then he died.”

And I know the rest,
Alston thought.

They’d finished gralloching the deer; they left the entrails for the ants and birds, packed heart, liver, tongue, and kidneys back in the stomach hollow, and removed the head. Then they ran a pole between the bound legs, brushed the blood off their hands and arms with sand as best they could, and lifted it with an end of the carrying pole on each shoulder.

“Do some more sword work tonight?” Swindapa wheedled.

“If you don’t mind the others,” Alston replied. She’d started classes for some of her cadets and a few islanders who showed promise.
In our copious spare time.

They came out onto the road and dumped the deer carcass into the wire baggage holder at the rear of the twoseater tricycle; it was a fairly robust thing, one of many worked up since the Event by Leaton. Alston looked at the sky; not long to dinner. Deer liver and onions sounded more wonderful all the time.

“No problem, more fun with lots of people,” Swindapa said. She went on, “Good hunt today,” giving Alston a quick hug before jumping onto her seat.

I wish she wouldn’t do that
, the captain thought. Evidently Swindapa’s people embraced and touched at the slightest provocation, and she was gradually starting to do that again as her memories healed over a little.
She has no idea how . . . difficult that makes things
.

Well, life was difficult. They began pedaling in unison, enjoying the cooling effect of the breeze.

“We’ll stop at Smith’s,” Swindapa said happily.

Smith was an enterprising soul who’d put the hot-water shortage to work and opened an Oriental-style scrub-andsoak bathhouse; much more economical of fuel than trying to heat water and pour it into a tub in a single house, now that the electrical and gas heaters were useless. The Council had approved, since it was just the sort of thing that was needed to jump-start the island away from the emergency-collective setup that necessity had forced on them. Unfortunately, Smith didn’t run to individual tubs yet, just one big one for men and another for women.

“No, I’ll sponge down at home,” she replied.
And avoid all temptation. My own virtue sickens me at times.

 

“I
say the last thing we need is foreign entanglements!” Sam Macy said.

There was a rumble of agreement from here and there in the Town Meeting. Cofflin sighed inwardly. He could understand Sam’s position only too well; the problem was that while that sentiment
felt
right, the balance of facts was against it. Macy was a nice guy to sit down and have a beer with, he did his job well—hell, he’d turned out to be a genius at logging, sawmilling, anything to do with wood—and he kept his people over at Providence Base happy with their boss. The problem was that when Macy got onto politics, he had certain fixed opinions that couldn’t be shifted with plastique and bulldozers.

“We’re just getting things going right,” Macy went on, flushing as eyes turned to him all across the big room. The microphones were long gone, and his voice came out in an untrained foghorn roar. “We’ve got plenty to eat, it looks like the harvest will be good—” he knocked on wood—“and we’ve got plenty to keep us warm this winter—”

“Good job, Sam!” someone said. Macy stuttered and then went on:

“—and we’re learning how to do lots of stuff. We all saw the pictures and video Captain Alston brought back. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have sent the
Eagle
over to Britain, but those aren’t the sort of people we want to get involved with. Why should we risk the lives of good American boys and girls for those dirty savages? It’s worse than Bosnia.”

Another mutter of agreement, louder this time. Swindapa’s hand went up. She stood as Cofflin pointed the gavel.

“My people are not savages like the Iraiina,” she said simply. “They come to take our land for no better reason than they want it, and to make us slaves because they would rather take our crops than work to grow their own.” Her face was flushed, but she spoke firmly under the lilting singsong accent her birth tongue gave to her English. “We don’t ask them to walk the stars with Moon Woman. All we want is that the Sun People leave us
alone.
”

Silence fell after she sat, crossing her arms on the dark-blue sweater with
Nantucket
woven on it in yellow cord.

Poor kid,
Cofflin thought.
Still comes up and bites her when she thinks about it.
Post-traumatic stress disorder, a fancy name for very bad memories that wouldn’t leave you alone.

“Pamela Lisketter,” Cofflin said.

“That’s all very well,” the thin woman said. On most people the results of hard work and a fish diet were an improvement, but she’d started out gaunt; that made her yellow-green eyes seem enormous by contrast. “But isn’t it true that the real reason you want to interfere in the affairs of these people is to
exploit
them?”

“Nope,” Cofflin said. “Fair exchange is what we’ve got in mind. Professor?”

Arnstein stood and stroked his bushy reddish-brown beard. “This island can’t produce enough to do more than keep us alive,” he said. “It doesn’t even have much timber, much less metals or fuel. Seven thousand-odd people—call it five thousand working adults and teenagers—that just isn’t enough to keep civilization going, if most of us have to spend all our time producing food. We can’t have teachers and engineers and clerks and, oh, silversmiths and everything else, all the specialists, because there won’t be enough food or enough raw materials or enough markets. But if we can trade widely, we
can
have those specialists, and exchange what they make for what we need. The question is, do you want your grandchildren to have something like a decent life, or do you want them to be illiterate peasants?”

A thoughtful silence fell. “Ms. Lisketter.”

“There’s nothing wrong with a simple life! We should all learn to lower our expectations and walk lightly on the earth, not kill its whales and cut down its trees and . . . We’ve got an opportunity to
escape
from a culture dominated by machines, and cultivate our skills and the spiritual—”

A chorus of whistles, catcalls, and boos shouted her down. “I’ve had all the fucking simple-life blisters I want or need!” someone shouted, and there was a roar of approval.

Cofflin kept his face impassive as he hammered for order. Inwardly he was grinning; Lisketter had a hard core of supporters, but the numbers had dropped off drastically. Imagining a world without internal combustion engines and electricity and actually living in one were two entirely different things.

“Let’s keep it polite here. This is a Town Meeting, not a football game. Ms. Lisketter has a right to say what she believes whether anyone else likes it or not.”

Lisketter was quivering, but the tears in her eyes were rage, not chagrin. “You’re making exactly the same mistakes that people back home did, wrecking the earth and any chance of living in peace with each other!” she said. “Please,
please
don’t be so blind! There aren’t very many of us now, but if you start the same cycle all over again that won’t matter. The real frontier isn’t out there.” She waved at the world beyond the darkened windows. “It’s in ourselves. If we’re not at peace with ourselves and the earth, what does it matter if we have material wealth?”

“Dane Sweet?”

The manager of the bicycle shop—nowadays he was more like assistant secretary for transportation—stood. “Pamela, you and I go back a long way. We agree on a lot of things. But can’t you understand that we’re not back home any more?”

“This isn’t Kansas anymore, Toto,”
someone said.

Sweet waved them to silence and went on: “If you want to preserve the environment and the Native Americans, and I do too, you’re not going to do it by making the people here want to lynch you. It’s one thing to tell people who’ve got too much to cut back, but you may not have noticed we’re not exactly living in the lap of postindustrial luxury here.”