Island in the Sea of Time (9 page)

“All right, we’ll send the
Yare
to Inagua. We send the
Eagle
east for grain. Everyone draw up your wish lists of things to get that might be there.” He paused and thought. “Professor, what should we take for trade goods?”

“Almost anything,” Arnstein said. “Cloth, ornaments—with the number of jewelry stores on the island, that should be no problem—metal tools, anything like that. Bits of glass would probably do, wire . . .”

“I’m putting you in charge of it,” Cofflin said. “Incidentally, you’re going.” Arnstein yelped. “You’re the closest thing to an expert on dealing with primitives we have.”

“But I won’t even be able to talk to them!” Arnstein protested.

“I thought you knew ancient languages?”

“I know Latin, which isn’t spoken yet, and
Greek
, classical Greek, and I’ve read Homer and looked at the Linear B stuff. But even the classical period’s seven hundred years in the future! Homeric Greek is to classical what Shakespeare’s English is to ours, and Mycenaean is five hundred years before
that,
call it Chaucerian. And they won’t be speaking Greek on the shores of the English Channel, anyway.”

“Neither will anyone else be able to talk to the locals, will they?” Cofflin said.

“Not unless we have a Lithuanian,” Arnstein admitted. The others looked at him. “Lithuanian is a very conservative language,” he said. “About like Sanskrit, which is being spoken in northwestern India at this date. Indo-European languages should be spreading through western Europe about now, defining
now
as being the last millennium and a half or so, unless you believe Colin Renfrew’s nonsense . . . sorry, academic squabble. But someone who spoke it would probably be able to pick up any of the early versions of Indo-European fairly quickly, other things being equal.” He shrugged. “But how likely are we to find—”

Doreen Rosenthal cleared her throat, twisting a lock of hair around a finger. “My mother came from Vilnus. I speak it,” she said.

Martha Stoddard looked up from her notepad. “There’s a fairly good languages section at the Athenaeum,” she noted. “And I know at least one retired linguist on island. Speaking of which, Jared, we’re going to be doing a fair bit of research on one thing and t’other. Old-style ways of doing, and such.” She frowned. “Plus we ought to print out some things on CD-ROM, right now, while we can.”

“Good idea, Martha. You’re in charge of research projects, of course.” Cofflin turned his head to the manager of the Nantucket Electric Company. “Fred, how are we fixed for energy?”

“I’ve got about one month’s fuel,” he said. “Fuel barge was tied up at the . . . Event, topping up to take us through to the switchover to the mainland cable. According to the gas stations and boating people, there’s enough gasoline for, say, two weeks at normal usage. After that, well, we might be able to get those windmills going again. Remember that wind-farm idea?” Everyone nodded. The tall frames of the wind generators still stuck up out of fields around the town. “That would give us, oh, five, eight percent of our usual output indefinitely.”

Cofflin nodded. “We’re closing down all private autos as of now,” he said. “Official use, ambulances, fire engines, and Angelica’s tractors only. The trawlers have first priority. How many bicycles do we have?”

“About thirty-five hundred, counting private, in the rental places, and in the stores.”

“Good, that’ll help.” One advantage of being a tourist trap. “Fred, you get together with Doc Coleman, and we’ll arrange an essential-uses-only electricity schedule. That ought to stretch the fuel oil. The rest of us will have to go to bed with the sun until we get whale-oil lanterns. Next . . .”

It was a relief to be finally
doing
something.

 

“We’re working like
slaves
!
”
the man complained.

He was thirty-something, and from the look of his jeans and plaid shirt, wealthy. Certainly coof—that New York accent was a dead giveaway. Not liking the work much, from the way he straightened and rubbed at his back and threw down his billhook.

I can’t blame him
, Angelica Brand thought.
This is something out of a made for-TV special.
She was a farmer from twelve generations of farmers, but
her
generation used tractors and genetic engineering.

Pictures of Nantucket from back in her great-grandfather’s day showed a landscape that looked like North Dakota, hardly a bush over knee-high, but most of the island was overgrown now with a thick head-high spiny growth of scrub oak, bayberry, beach plum, red cedar, honeysuckle, pitch pine, and God knew what, all laced together with wild grapevines and
Rosa rugosa.

The tractors, bulldozers, and earthmoving equipment from construction sites had knocked down much of the aboveground brush.The machines left the scrub still chest-high to head-high, many of the main stems still unbroken. The clumsy untrained labor of hundreds was scarcely sufficient to cut the brush loose and drag it into windrows for burning, especially when most of them had never lifted anything heavier than a computer mouse or a squash racket in their lives. The smell of it was acrid in her nostrils, but the ash would be useful. Clumps of men and women were scattered through the scraggly-looking wreckage she was supposed to turn into a field, hacking and levering and dragging at the roots. Tools were in short supply, too.

Other squads were slumped resting near the truck with the water, hardly even bothering to lie in its shade despite the unseasonable heat. A few were putting a better edge on their tools at the portable grindstone someone had dug out of an attic. It was the foot-powered type, and worth its weight in gold.

The man thrust his hands under her nose.
“Look
at this!”

Shreds of skin hung down from broken blisters, and bits of the cloth he’d used to wrap his hands clung, sticky with the lymph. Angelica Brand nodded sympathetically. “We’ve got a tub of ointment back at the house,” she said. “When your shift’s off, come on up. There’s some cider, too.”

“I’m a certified public accountant!” the man half screamed. Spittle flung from his lips. “I’m
finished
with this!”

He’d picked up the billhook again. It had a wooden shaft five feet long, with a steel blade socketed onto the end, like an arm-long single-edged knife with an inward-curving tip at the end.

“You can take this fucking thing and ram it up your
ass,
bitch!”

Angelica planted her hands on her hips and glared back. “Don’t you use language like that to me, mister!” she snapped, fatigue and irritation flaring. “I don’t care if you were a rocket scientist. We have to
eat
this winter. Or do you think somebody’s going to dock with a ship full of bananas and Big Macs?”

“I’m an accountant, not a farmer!”

“We don’t
need
accountants right now. And if you don’t work, you don’t get any rations. No exceptions for the able-bodied.”

A woman’s voice shouted: “
Don! No!”

The accountant ignored it. Brand’s anger turned to a yell of fear as the man swung at her with the billhook. If he hadn’t been staggering with exhaustion he might have hit her. A root caught at her boot and she went over backward, staring at the sunlight breaking off the edge of the heavy tool as he swung it upward.

Thunk.
The butt end of another billhook drove into the berserker’s back. He screamed and whirled, but a third tripped him. Men and women piled on, wrestling him to the ground and holding him despite his thrashings.

“Obliged, Ted,” Angelica said shakily, getting to her feet and dusting herself off. The man nodded silently, which was like Theodore Corby; she’d known him since she was a girl, and he never used a word where an economical movement of the chin would do. “Much obliged.”

She looked around. “Well, nobody said to stop working!” she called. “Come on, everyone, there’s a job to be done!”

“What’ll we do with this guy?”

The man had stopped roaring and heaving. Now he was lying prone in the dirt and ash, crying noisily.

“I . . . ” She hesitated.
I run a vegetable farm!
she thought. Five to fifty people worked on it, according to season, and this had
never
happened before. “Bring him along. We’d better call the Chief.”

 

“Ooooh, gross. Totally, totally
gross
.”

Ned Shaw turned. The girl was looking at the yard-long cod she’d just pulled in; the lines were arranged over a rollbar around the boat, to make hauling easier. The big fish swayed, flapping, thirty-odd pounds of bad temper on the end of a heavy hook and line.

“Tie it off, tie it off!” he barked, pushing down the crowded deck. He’d been a scalloper most of his life, done some other fishing, but he’d never seen anything like that fish.

The girl made a face, but she swung the line inboard and paid out, letting the cod drop to the boards of the deck. It flopped and jumped, and she skittered backward.

“Like this,” Shaw said.

He put a boot on the fish—it must weigh thirty-five pounds and it wasn’t happy at all—and swung a length of stick with a heavy steel nut on the end. Two crunching blows and the fish was still.

“That’s good eating, that cod,” the fisherman said, heaving it into the well in the center of the boat with a grunt of effort.
Mebbe forty, forty-five.

His crew--clerks, salesgirls, high school students, shopkeepers, computer operators—looked at the fish and swallowed. They were all hungry, but . . .

Then the lines began to jerk all around him. “Get to it!” he yelled.

Lines whirred. Cod came up them; sometimes two or three of the crew would have to pull on a single line, and once a six-foot monster came over the side with people yelling and dancing to get out of its way. That one Shaw pinned to the deck with a boathook, and it took half a dozen two-handed blows of the club to kill it. He looked up, panting. The well in the center of the twenty-foot boat was full of fish, a slippery blue-gray mound of them. The deck was slimy underfoot, covered in scales; the crew were equally smeared, the hair of the women hanging in rattails. They grinned back at him.

“Good day’s work,” he said. “Get the tarpaulin over them and we’ll head in. Lucky we don’t have to clean them.”

The girl who’d caught the first fish of the day daubed at herself. “Gross,” she muttered.

 

“
C
loser. Slow, slow.”

Lieutenant Walker squatted in the prow of the longboat and broke open the harpoon gun. It was shaped like an outsized shotgun. He slid the long steel harpoon down the barrel, cushioned in its wooden sabot. Its mechanism gave a smooth oiled
snick
as he closed it and swung the simple post-and-groove sights onto the side of the whale, aiming six feet behind the eye. His helper leaned forward and clipped the end of the line to a ring welded onto the shaft just behind the folding barbs and the bulge that held a charge of bursting powder.

Whoever ran this up knew his way around a machine shop
, Walker thought. He’d always liked hunting, and a good weapon doubled the pleasure.

Spray lapped into his face like the tongue of a salty dog. Behind him the crew of sailors and cadets stroked at their oars again. The day was an enormous bowl of blue, only the tiny dot of the
Eagle
to break the watery horizon, and scarcely a cloud in the sky. It was hot enough to make him sweat, despite the droplets of seawater striking cold on his T-shirt. Ahead the whale lay basking like a flexible black reef; a right whale, with a huge head that made up a third of its sixty feet. Blackfish, the type that had been the staple of inshore whaling in New England before they were hunted out and the big whalers began to sail to Hawaii and Kamchatka. A white patch of barnacles marked its snout; when it raised a flipper he could see white skin beneath, vivid in contrast to the dark-blue water and the coal color of the animal. Close enough to see the eyes, like golf balls set into the sides of a submarine. It blew, a tall double plume that turned into a mist of spray falling across them. Whales were spouting all around, hundreds of them, pod after pod.

“Feels like murder,” one of the cadets muttered. The whales had never been hunted, evidently not even by Indians in canoes. You could get within touching distance sometimes.

“Looks like dinner,” Walker said cheerfully. “Ready for it . . .
now.”
He squeezed the trigger.

Tump.
The harpoon blasted out of the barrel, blurring through the air. Line whipped out from the improvised tub beside the harpoon gun. It began to smoke with friction, and Cadet Simpson tossed seawater from her bucket on it.
Whack.
A flat, wet sound as the steel hit the whale’s side.

“Hang on!” Walker yelled.

The whale dove with a smash of its tail that left Walker drenched and dripping, grinning as he clung to the harpoon gun’s mount. The longboat lurched forward, and the crew fell over one another in a tangle of oars punctuated by yells. Water fountained up from either side of the bows as the line jerked forward and down, pulling them along like an outboard motor gone berserk. The Nantucket sleigh ride, they’d called it in the old days. The Coast Guard officer counted the seconds:

. . .
five . . . six . . . hope the fucking fuse works this time . . . seven . . .
He wouldn’t be able to hear the blast underwater, but the whale would surely feel it.

The line went slack as the whale broached, half its length out of the water. Blood streamed from the hole gouged by the grenade, but the four barbs held fast. The great animal lay on the surface and threshed in its death agony, nearly swamping the boat that had killed it. All around, other whales were fleeing the sound of its distress, blowing and diving. At last it slumped into stillness, floating quietly as the crew of the longboat bailed out the water.