S. M. Stirling - Sea of Time 01 - Island in the Sea of Time

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Island in the Sea of
Time by SM Stirling
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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 Oilman, for really editing; and to Walter
John Williams for the manuals.
CHAPTER ONE
March, 1998 A.D.
Ian 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 Palo-mar. 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.
With a wry grin, he thought of a slogan someone had
suggested to the Chamber of Commerce once as a joke: We used
to kill a lot of whales. Come to Nantucket!
The little police station was in a building that had once
housed the fire department, and across a narrow road from a
restaurant-cum-nightspot. The buildings on both sides were two
stories of gray shingle with white trim, like virtually everything
on the island that wasn't red brick with white trim. About time
for supper, he thought. No point in going home; he hadn't gotten
any better at serious cooking since Betty passed on five years
ago. Better to step over and get a burger.
He sighed, stood, hitched at his gunbelt, and reached for his
hat, looking around at the white-painted concrete blocks, the
boxes of documents piled in corners and bursting out of their
cardboard prisons. Hell of a life. And he'd had to let the belt out
another notch recently; it seemed unfair, when the rest of him
was the same lanky beanpole it'd been when he graduated from
high school back around LBJ's inauguration.
The lights flickered. Nantucket was just about to switch over
to mainland power, via an underwater cable. For the next few
months they had to soldier along on the old diesel generators,
though.
"Christ," he said. "Not another power-out."
He walked out into the street and stopped, jarred as if he'd
walked into a wall. Stock-still, he stood for a full four minutes
staring upward. It was the screams from people around him that
brought him back to himself.
* * *
Nor'easter at twenty knots. Just what we needed, Captain
Marian Alston thought with satisfaction. She kept a critical eye
and ear on the mast captains' work as the royals and topgallants
were doused and struck.
"Clew up! Rise tacks and sheets!"
"Ease the royal sheets!"
The pinrail supervisor bellowed into the wind: "Haul around
on the clewlines, buntlines, and bunt-leechlines!"
The upper sails thuttered and cracked as the clewlines hauled
them up to the yards, spilling wind and letting the ship come a
little more upright, although the deck still sloped like the roof of
a house.
"Lay them to aloft," Alston said to the sailing master. "Sea
furl."
The crew swarmed up the ratlines and out along the yards
that bore the sails, hauling up armfuls of canvas as they bent
over the yards; doll-tiny shapes a hundred feet and more above
her head as they fought the mad flailing of the wet Dacron.
No sense in leaving that much sail up, on a night as dirty as
this looks to be. Too easy for the ship to be knocked down or
taken aback by a sudden shift of wind. The chill bit through the
thick yellow waterproof fabric of her foul-weather gear like cold
damp fingers poking and prodding.
She stood with legs braced against the roll and hands locked
behind her back by the ship's triple wheel, a tall slim woman
from the Sea Islands of South Carolina, ebony-black,
close-cropped wiry hair a little gray at the temples; her face was
handsome in a high-cheeked fashion like a Benin bronze. Spray
came over the quarterdeck railing like drops of salt rain, cold on
her face and down her neck. The sun was setting westward over a
heaving landscape of gray-black water streaked with foam, and
the ship plunged across the wind with the yards sharp-braced.
Her prow threw rooster tails every time the sharp cutwater
plowed into a swell, twin spouts jetting up over the forecastle
from the hawseholes where the anchor chains ran down through
the deck. Then the ship would heave free as if shrugging her
shoulders, water foaming across the forecastle deck and swirling
out the scuppers.
Alston smiled behind the expressionless mask of her face.
Now this, this is real sailing, she thought.
The Coast Guard training ship Eagle was a three-masted
steel-hulled windjammer. It had been built in 1936, and the
original incarnation was called the Horst Wessel before the
United States took it as war reparations. There were still
embarrassing swastikas buried under the layers of paint here
and there, but it was sound engineering, solid work from Blohm
& Voss, the firm that built the Bismarck. Three hundred feet
from prow to stern, a hundred and fifty to the tops of the main
and foremasts, eighteen hundred tons of splendid, lovely
anachronism. Good for another fifty years hard sailing, if the
Powers That Be didn't decide to scrap her.
"Secure the forward lookout," she said. It was getting a little
dangerous for someone to perch up in the bows.
"Come about, ma'am?" the sailing master asked.
"In a minute or two, Mr. Hiller," she said.
Nantucket was off to the northeast, fairly close, and it paid to
be careful in the dark; the sea between the island and Hyannis
on the mainland was shoal water, full of sandbars, and southeast
was worse. She'd been tacking into the teeth of the wind for
practice's sake; fairly soon she'd turn and let the Eagle run
southwestward. Cadets and crew-people were swarming up the
rigging; more stood by on deck, poised to haul on ropes. Archaic,
but the best training for sea duty there was—the Coast Guard
still taught stellar navigation, too, despite the fact that you could
push a button on a GPS unit and get your exact location from
the satellites. Lieutenant William Walker was taking a sight on
Arcturus from the edge of the quarterdeck, and Victor Ortiz was
running one of his pupils through the same procedure. Usually
they did the first cruise of the season without cadets, but this
year the Powers in their ineffable wisdom had changed the
schedules a little. Completely rearranged them, in fact, causing
everybody endless bother and inconvenience. It was a
considerable relief to get out to sea, where a captain was her own
master.
"The wind's southing, ma'am," Thomas Hiller, the sailing
master, hinted.
"Brace them sharp, then."
The centuries-old litany of repeated orders echoed across the
deck; Eagle had been built to operate the old-fashioned way, no
high-geared winches or powered haulage. It ended with a
boatswain's mate bellowing: "Ease starboard, haul port, lively
port!"
"Heave!" shouted the line leader in a trained scream that cut
through the moan of the wind.
"Ho!" chorused the twenty young men and women on the line,
surging back in unison.
"Heave!"
"Ho!"
"Ma'am." Alston looked up. Hiller looked a little lost, which
was a first. He'd been on the Eagle for eight years. "Ma'am…
there's something odd about the compass reading."
An old-fashioned magnetic card compass binnacle stood
before the wheels. She took a step and looked down into it; the
card was whirling, spinning in complete circles. Captain Alston
blinked in surprise. What on earth could cause that? The sky was
clear to the horizon, only a little high cloud boiling in on the
wind—unusually good weather for this time of year and these
latitudes, although there might be a storm riding in on the
nor'easter. No lightning, certainly. Then she noticed that the
gyro repeater compass was quivering too.
Marian Alston had been in the Coast Guard much of her
thirty-eight years, commanded the Eagle for four, and served on
search-and-rescue craft and armed cutters before that; she'd
joined up the year sea duty was opened to women. You learned
to trust your gut. And never, never to trust the sea.
"Finish up and get them down," she said.
Cadets and crew poured down the ratlines, the latter
sometimes helping the former along; for the first few weeks out,
there would always be the odd officer cadet who froze a hundred
and fifty feet up on a swaying rope.
A fat blue spark jumped from her hand to the metal housing
between the ship's three wheels. Alston bit back a startled
obscenity—you had to set an example—and shook her hand.
Something white-hot stretched for an instant from sky to sea off
to her left. More sparks flew; people were leaping and cursing all
across the deck. Not the four hands standing on the benchlike
platforms either side of the wheels, she noted with satisfaction.
They flinched, their eyes went wide, but they kept her steady on
the heading they'd been given.
Light flickered from left to right behind her, curving ahead of
the ship in a line only a few hundred yards away— curving from
east to west, in a line her navigator's eye could see was the arc of
a huge circle. St. Elmo's fire ran along the Eagle's rigging, blue
witch-flame. The curses were turning to screams as the lightning
reared up into a crawling dome of orange and white overhead.
Like being under the biggest, gaudiest salad bowl in the world,
ran through her mind as she stood paralyzed for a moment. Then
the noise on deck penetrated.
Easily. The roaring wind had dropped away to nothing in the
space of a few seconds, and the drumhead-taut sails slackened
and thuttered limp. The motion of the ship lost its purposeful
rolling plunge, changed to a shuddering as the waves turned into
a formless chop, and then to a slow sway as they subsided.
Shouts and screams echoed through an eerie silence as the
rigging's moaning song of cloven air died.
"Silence there!" she snapped, quiet but carrying. "Mr.
Roysins, let's get some order here. Whatever's happening, panic
won't help."
But it would feel so good, part of her mind gibbered, looking
up at the dome of lights that turned night into shadowless day.
"On with engines," she said. Max the diesel hammered into
life and steerageway came on the ship. "Strike all sails. Give me a
depth-finder reading."
She clenched her hands behind her back and rose slightly on
her toes, ignoring the blasting arch of fire. "We've got a ship to
sail."
"Got the stores covered?" Chief Cofflin asked, as he pushed
through the crowd on Main Street.
"Right, liquor, grocery, and jewelry—just in case. We're
stretched pretty thin."
His assistant hesitated; he was a short thin young man named
George Swain, and a fourth cousin. Everyone on the island was a
cousin, except wash-ashores. It made for a certain lack of
formality. So did the fact that there were only twenty-five officers
on the force.
"Some of our own people are a mite shaky, Chief."
"Ayup. Don't blame 'em, George. Still, we've got a job to do."
He stopped to think for a moment, running through a list of
names in his head. "Get everyone who's off-duty back on. And
call Ed Geary, Dave Smith, Johnnie Scott, and Sean Mahoney.
Tell them to each pick six friends they can trust and come down
to the station. Deputize 'em."
George missed a step. "Chief, we can't do that on our own
say-so!"
"I can and I just did," Cofflin said. "Ed's a good man and he
knows an emergency when he sees one, and so are the rest. You
call them and get them posted. Meanwhile, let's see if I can talk
some sense into these people here." The selectmen or somebody
should be doing it; he was a policeman, not a politician. But they
were probably out there running around with the rest of the
crowd.
He mounted the steps of the bank at the head of Main Street
and looked down the cobbles toward the big planter at the foot of
the street. The lights on the cast-iron lampposts shone on a sea
of faces, on a street that should be mostly clear this time of
night. Overhead the ghastly, garish lights still crawled and
sparked, adding a weird touch to the upturned faces; all it
needed was torches and pitchforks to be something out of a
movie. He raised a battery-powered megaphone to his lips.
"Now, let's have some sense here," he said.
"What the fuck's going on?" someone yelled, and the crowd
roared with him.
"QUIET, DAMMIT!"
The bullhorn cut through the gathering madness, stopped it
feeding on itself.
"If I knew what was going on, I'd tell you," Cofflin said bluntly,
in the silence that followed. "I can tell you going hog-wild won't
help any. That—" he pointed upward toward the shimmering
dome of light—"hasn't hurt anyone yet. But we've had a dozen
accidents, a suicide, and two assaults-with-intent tonight. That
has hurt people."
It wasn't real easy to have a riot in a town of four thousand
people; particularly not when most of them were old-stock
Yankees and phlegmatic by inclination and raising… but
everyone was coming real close about now. He looked up. If he
thought it'd do any good, he'd be inclined to start screaming
himself. The dome of fire had been there all night, hanging over
the town, over the whole island, like the face of an angry God.
Every church on the island was jam-packed, but at least those
people weren't causing any harm and might be doing some good.
"The phone to the mainland's out," he went on. "Radio and TV
are nothing but static; the airport can't get through either. The
last planes from Hyannis and Boston didn't arrive. Now why
don't you all go home and get some sleep. If things aren't back to
normal in the morning, we'll—"
摘要：

ScannedbyanElfscanner.ProofedmoreorlessbyHighroller.MadeprettierbyuseofEBookDesignGroupStylesheet.IslandintheSeaofTimebySMStirlingACKNOWLEDGMENTSManythankstothepeopleofNantucket,andnoneofthecharactersinthisbookareintendedtorepresentanyindividualslivingordead!ThanksalsototheUnitedStatesCoastGuard,whi...

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