Against the Tide of Years (18 page)

 

“Well, you brought that off fairly well,” Coleman said, as the two doctors pulled their bicycles out of the rack in front of the Chief’s House.

“Thanks, Henry,” Clemens said. “I felt a mite nervous, bearding the Chief in his den.”

“Jared doesn’t bite,” Coleman said dryly.

“Yes, but he’s the
Chief.
”

“You youngsters needn’t put the reverential tone into the word,” Coleman said. “He’s our Chief Executive, not a king. Ayup. You’ve got a good eye, youngster. Doubt I would have spotted those pocks for what they were.”

A shy grin. “I’m starting to feel like a real doctor.”

Coleman stopped with one foot on the pedal. “Dammit, don’t let me hear you say that again! You
are
a real doctor. Real as I am.”

“Sir . . . Henry, you know I don’t have everything a medical school up in the twentieth taught.”

“You know
more
than a lot of those overspecialized machine tenders,” Coleman snapped. “You’re a damned fine GP and general surgeon, and you know how to improvise. You can do anything I can do, you know what works and why, and you’re qualified to teach it. I’d call that being a real doctor, all right. I’m not immortal, Justin; none of us geezers are. If anyone’s going to keep the torch lit, it’s going to be
you,
and the others your age.”

They pushed out into the traffic, pedaling easily. Doctors rated the cherished Pre-Event bicycles, not the heavier solid-tire model that Seahaven’s spin-offs made. Gay Street had little afternoon traffic, only a delivery wagon pulled by a sleepy pony. Justin Clemens puffed a little as they wove among the heavier traffic on upper Main, dodging past a steam-hauler, a few of the well-to-do in one-horse buggies, and a stream of more prosaic wagons and cycles like their own.

The Cottage Hospital had picked up the name before it moved into its present gray-shingle quarters on South Prospect Street forty years before the Event. It had grown since the Event; new covered passages snaked out to neighboring buildings, tying them into the older block. Nineteen beds had grown to a hundred or so, not counting the out-stations at the mainland bases and in Alba, and this was now the only teaching hospital in the world, and the only center of medial research. The gardens were still lovely with trellised roses, though.

Those were Coleman’s hobby, the sweet-scented, old-fashioned type. A trellised vine was blooming under the white-painted windows as well, shaggy and bee-murmurous. The head of the hospital thought the sights and scents were good for convalescents and worthwhile just on general principles.

Clemens broke into a beaming grin as he saw Andrew and Kate Nelson helping their eight-year-old son into a street-tricycle—room for two passengers in the back—waving to him.

“Feeling a lot better, sprout?”he asked the boy.
Smoothest appendectomy I ever did,
he thought.

“Sure am, Doctor,” the boy said.

The smile slid away from Justin’s face as the parents completed their thanks and another bicycle drew up. The rider was a woman of his owns age, a trim figure in green shirt and slacks and bobbed yellow hair, with a satchel over her back.

“’lo, Ellen,” he said.

“Justin,” she replied. Her eyes went to Coleman, and she patted the knapsack. “Brand had the poppy extract,” she said. “I’m off to get it into the safe.”

Coleman nodded. They
needed
that white ooze; it was the base for morphine. “Production’s up?”

“Another quarter acre, and two more next spring, she says.”

All three of the doctors shared a silent moment of thanks that opium-poppy seed had been available on the Island after the Event, even if it
had
taken years to breed up enough for full-scale growing.

The elder medical man sighed when Ellen Clemens disappeared through the double doors. “I don’t suppose there’s any chance of keeping you here,” he said.

Justin shook his head. “That . . . wouldn’t work,” he said bleakly.

Coleman nodded with another sigh. A messy divorce was always bad news; in post-Event Nantucket, with nowhere to go, it could get very bad indeed.

“I suppose I could try Alba,” Clemens said. “Not as frustrating as the mainland, and they need extension officers.”

“Hmmmm,” Coleman said. “I think there may be another alternative, if you’ve the itch for travel.”

 

“Gorgeous damned thing, isn’t it?” Marian said quietly.

“She will dance with the waves like Moon Woman’s light on a waterfall,” Swindapa agreed.

Ian nodded.
Well, in the abstract, I agree.

The shipyard had started out as a boat-holding shed, where pleasure craft were stacked three layers high for the winter. The size had made it a natural for
building
ships, when the Islanders got around to it; the overhead cranes alone were an enormous convenience. Now the huge open-ended metal building was filled almost to its limit by the craft that lay in its cradle within.

“Two hundred and twelve feet long, beam thirty-six feet, depth deck-to-keel twenty-one feet,” Alston said, caressing the words. “Forty-six feet of raised quarterdeck. White oak, black oak, beechwood, white pine. Nine hundred twenty-seven net tons.”

He could barely hear the murmured terms of endearment under the racket.
Well, everyone has their own Grail.
His had always been to
know
. Before he met Doreen or held his son, it had been the strongest thing in his life, and it wasn’t the weakest even now, not by many a mile.

Scaffolding covered the sides of the great ship, swarming with workers. Outside, the boathouse was flanked by new timber sheds almost as large. From them came the sound of blacksmiths working,
tink-whang-tink,
the screeching moan of a drill press, the dentist-chair sound of metal-cutting lathes. Over it all was the whining roar of the band saws; Leaton had rigged up enormous equivalents of the little machines used to cut keys, ones that would take a small model and rip an equivalent shape out of balks of seasoned oak. Steam puffed from boilers and from the big pressure-cooker retorts where timber softened so it could be bent into shape.

The fall day was brisk, but the heat of forges and hearths and the steam engines that drove the pneumatic tools kept it comfortable in the shed. The air was full of the smell of hot metal, the vanilla odor of oak, sharp pine, and tar bubbling in vats. Sunlight fogged through floating sawdust.

“Take a look,” Swindapa said. “It’s like being inside some great beast, a whale.”

The Arnsteins scrambled up a long board stair built into the side of the scaffolding, splintery wood rough under their hands. It led into the ship through a section not yet planked, and they stood precariously on a piece of temporary decking.

“It
is
like being inside a whale,” Doreen said into Ian’s ear. “And it looks a lot bigger than you’d expect.”

Ian nodded. This was a cockleshell compared to an aircraft carrier or an oil tanker back up in the twentieth, but close up it felt
big.
His eyes followed the long, graceful cure of the keelson and the sharp bow, and the way the ribs flowed up from them. She was right about it being like the inside of a whale, too—there was an
organic
feel to the ship, as if it were something that had grown naturally.

“What surprises me,” he said to Alston, as she stood with legs braced and a roll of plans tapping on her palm, “is that this one is taking so much less time.
Lincoln
took more than a year—eighteen months.”

Swindapa said something in her own language, then translated, “We have danced the play of numbers into wood.”

Ian blinked.
Well, every once in a while you remember she’s not an American,
he thought. Then she went on:

“I think you would say . . . learning curve?”

Alston nodded. “Everyone knows what to do. Besides that, we’ve got the jigs and such—we’re buildin’ these like cars with identical parts.”

“That does give us an advantage,” Ian said a little smugly. “Twentieth-century concept.”

“Not really,” Alston said, half turning, her eyes sardonic. “The Venetian Republic’s navy did it with their war-galleys in Renaissance times.”

“That’s taken you down a peg, mate,” Doreen whispered in his ear. “Clapped a stopper over your capers—brought you by the lee.”

“You’ve been reading those damned historical novels she likes again, haven’t you?” Ian said, grinning.
Actually they’re not bad.
And they’d helped him understand Alston better.

One of the overhead trolleys that had once shifted sailboats lowered a great oak beam through the open space over their head and into the interior. An ironic cheer went up when it was found to fit exactly into the slot prepared, and a man with an adze stepped ostentatiously back. Figures in overalls and hard hats moved forward and there was a rhythmic slamming as the big deck beam was fastened home, spanning the whole width of the ship where her main deck would be.

“Heavy scantlings so she can bear a gun deck, but she’s not really a specialist warship,” Alston noted. “Good deep hold under there . . . had to modify the design a little, of course, because the
Sark
was a composite ship. We
could
do that, but maintenance far abroad would be too difficult, and besides, we’ve got more good timber than metal. Altered the sail plan, too; all those stuns’ls and studding sails took a lot of crew to work them, and we don’t have the sort of competition they had, no need to squeeze out every half knot. And clippers have too little reserve buoyancy for my taste, so we—”

“Commodore,” Ian interrupted—this
was
a semiformal occasion, in public—“as long as it gets us where we’re going, I should care?”

“Councilor, you’re a philistine,” she said, with a tilt of eyebrow and a quirk of full lips.

“Hebrew, actually.”

“Is either of them around yet?”

“Not the Philistines; they were probably mostly Greeks, with odds and sods from everywhere, part of the Sea Peoples—due to invade Egypt and get thrown back in the next couple of generations. Hebrews . . .” He shrugged and flung up his hands. “If Exodus records any real events, the Pharaoh that Moses dealt with could be either Ramses II, who’s ruling Egypt now, or somebody a century either way. I doubt that real Judaism—Yahwehistic monotheism—exists right now.”

“Yahweh probably still has that embarrassing female consort they discovered in those early inscriptions,” Doreen said. “Good for her.”

“Another month,” Alston said, looking around the ship again. “Finish up, launch her, step her masts and rigging, get her guns aboard—and the
Lincoln
’s, too—then we load up
Lincoln
and
Chamberlain,
plus
Eagle,
of course, and at least one of the schooners, and we’re on our way.”

“You’re going to be commanding personally?” Ian said, relieved.

“As far as the Gulf. I talked Jared into it. I need cadre who’re used to these ships, we’ll have four at least by the time we run the Straits, and a good long voyage is the way to train them.”

Marian looked up at the ship and began to speak softly, under her breath. Ian recognized the words; he wasn’t surprised anymore, either—there was more to Marian than she let on. In Alba he’d heard her recite from the same poet on a field where dead men lay in windrows. This time it was happier words as her eyes caressed the hull. He caught the surge and hiss of the sea in it, and the longing for places new and strange that he’d always suspected lurked under Alston’s iron pragmatism:

 

 

“L
ordy, but I hate giving speeches,” Alston muttered under her breath as she stepped down from the podium on the steps of the Pacific National Bank at the head of Main Street.

“Tell me about it,” Jared said.

“Maybe that’s why you always give the same one, Marian,” Ian said out of the side of his mouth, grinning as he applauded with the crowd.
“Thank you for your support. We’ll get the job done. Good-bye.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Doreen said. “back in Alba, she threatened defaulters with having their ice cream ration reduced.”

“To hell with the lot of you,” Marian said, seating herself and looking suitably grave. She cocked an eye at the sky; it was a bright, chilly morning, but there was a hint of mare’s tail cloud in the northwest, and the wind was about seven knots, brisk up from the harbor.

Prelate Gomez rose to conduct the blessing service. Hats went off among the dense crowd that packed Main Street Square and the streets leading off it; expeditionary regiment Marines and townsfolk mingled. Alston kept her hat on her knees and listened respectfully. Gomez bore the red robes with dignity, despite looking to be exactly what he was, the stocky middle-aged son of a Portuguese fisherman from New Bedford. The Sun People among the regiment and ships’ crews had had their ritual yesterday, sacrificing a couple of sheep to Sky Father and the Horned Man and the Lady of the Horses . . .
and at least you get to eat the sheep,
she thought.