Against the Tide of Years (53 page)

He bent over and caught her eye, his voice going cold. “And you will never,
never
do anything that might make people lose respect for us. Understand? ”

She flushed and looked down at her booted toes. “Okay, Dad,” she said in a small voice.

“Okay, then. Now go get yourself another horse.”

Walker ruffled the dog’s ears as his daughter trotted away. “Good kid,” he said, sighing with contentment.

 

“Well, that’s that,” Marian Alston said. She looked down at the paper and the totals of her prize money and Swindapa’s, neatly summed up and deposited to their account at the Pacific Bank. “It seems a little excessive.”

Jared Cofflin quirked the corner of his mouth. “So were the cargoes on those boats you captured excessive. The government’s share is enough to pay the repairs on the
Chamberlain
and a good chunk of the expedition’s costs as well. And where they found the gold dust and nuggets God alone knows.”

“She isn’t talking, but I suspect Australia, then back via the Sunda Strait,” Marian said. “And they were ships, not boats. Well, a schooner and a brig, if you want to get technical.”

“Now you’re sounding like Leaton,” Cofflin said.

“No,” Swindapa said, looking up from her seat by the fire across the room. “Not quite like Ronald.”

Her goddaughter Marian Cofflin and Heather and Lucy were curled up on the settee with her, and the rest of the Cofflins’ children sat on the rug at her feet as she read from a big leather-bound book. The rain had canceled the high school football game they’d originally planned to attend today. She marked her place with her thumb and went on:

“Marian just sounds like she loves ships. Leaton sounds like he wants to—” She visibly remembered Eagle People taboos about what could be said in front of children—“become very
intimate
with the machinery he loves.”

Martha chuckled from the other side of the dining-room table, and there was a chorus of giggles from the children.

“It looks like we’ll be getting that place in the country, sugar,” Marian said. Martha raised a brow and the commodore went on: “We were talking it over—retirement place, and ’dapa would like to raise horses. Somewhere with a pier for a boat.”

“We’re going to have
ponies
!” Heather said; Lucy nodded vigorously, and the Cofflins’ children looked at them with envy.

“That sounds nice. The question right now, though, is are we at war with Tartessos?” Martha said.

“I don’t think so,” Cofflin said. “I had Ian on the radio this morning, and he doesn’t think so either, and neither does Christa Beale, and she’s holding the fort as far as the Tartessos desk is concerned. Their assessment is that Isketerol wants to stay neutral for now and will claim—what did Ian say—plausible deniability and pay us a whonking great fine to get the men and ships back. Ayup, no war.”

“Not
yet,
” Alston said grimly. “It’s coming, though. So I’d advise you to keep the ships, at least—we have to give the crews back, of course, but I think Isketerol can afford losing silver more than he can two good hulls.”

“You think so?” Cofflin said. “Hmmm. You know, I’m not altogether sure that just having an alliance with Walker will push Isketerol into fighting us.”

“It wouldn’t, but there’s more than that. Walker is pushing Isketerol, but it’s a direction he wants to be pushed. Without us, Tartessos would be one of the two great powers—and the only one with access to the world ocean. With us, they’re frustrated everywhere they turn,
and
we’re helping the Albans catch up quickly. Walker will give him all the help he can; he’s probably realized what we’re doing in Babylonia by now.”

Cofflin scowled. “I don’t like fighting two wars at once.”

“I don’t like fighting any at all, but I also don’t think we’re going to have any choice,” Alston said, sipping at her lukewarm cocoa. The late-autumn rain was beating outside the windows of the Chief’s House, cold and on the verge of being slush.

Good old Gray Lady of the Northern Sea,
Alston thought.
Living up to her Yankee ways.
She loved her adopted home, but there was no denying that the climate was lousy six to eight months a year.
Eight months of winter, four months of bad skiing.

“We’ll have to consider what we’re going to do to convince Isketerol of the error of his ways,” Cofflin said.

Off on the other side of the big room Swindapa’s voice rose and fell musically:
“It was seven o’clock of a very warm evening in the Seeconee hills when Father Wolf woke up from his day’s rest, scratched himself, yawned, and spread out his paws one after the other to get rid of the sleepy feeling in their tips. Mother Wolf lay with her big gray nose dropped across four tumbling, squealing cubs—
like you little ones—
and the moon shone into the mouth of the cave where they all lived.”

The children yipped and growled, pretending to be wolf cubs, and then settled down for the rest of the story. Jared looked at his watch.

“Speaking of Ron, we ought to duck over to Seahaven; he wants to show us some of his newest toys,” the Chief said. “Swindapa? Martha?”

Swindapa shook her head. “I’m not back on duty until tomorrow, Doc Coleman says,” she said, looking up and holding her place with a finger while the children tugged at her. “I want to find out what happens in this story too.”

“And I’m going to go over these tax proposals for the Warrant,” Martha said. “See you two at dinner.”

“See you then,” Alston replied, “and next Friday it’s our turn to have y’all over.”

They took their sou’westers and slickers from pegs in the front hall and ducked out into the steady drizzle. The streets were fairly busy; Nantucket was a working town now and didn’t let a little water slow things down on a weekday afternoon. A hauler went by as they turned onto Center Street, and a string of horse-drawn wagons passed in the opposite direction. Cofflin nodded at them.

“New business,” he said. “Taking down spare houses, then shipping ’em out to Long Island or Providence Base and putting ’em back up.”

“Sensible,” Marian said.

Nantucket’s year-round population had increased, over ten thousand now, but there were still empty houses, and everything had to be built from scratch in the outports, as they were coming to be called.

They turned onto Main and waved to Joseph Starbuck, who was going into the Pacific Bank at the head of the street. Cofflin shook his head as they eeled through the dense crowds amid an odor of damp wool and fish from carts delivering to the eateries.

“Every time I see that place, I remember my first speech, up on the bank steps,” he said. “The night of the Event, when we had all those lights in the sky and everyone was panicking. I might have myself, if I hadn’t had to calm
them
down. And then the stars came back, and I thought everything was all right . . . until I noticed where the moon was.”

“Same with me,” Alston said. “It was the stars did it.”

They turned right at Candle Street where it led into Washington, running southeast parallel to the line of the harbor and back from the new dredged channels and solid-fill piers. A leafless forest of mast and spar and an occasional smokestack showed over the tops of the buildings to their left; pre-Event boutiques converted to sail-lofts and chandlers’ shops and warehouses, with a crowd dressed mostly in seagoing oilskins, with sweaters and rough pants and seaboots below that. They stopped for a moment while a dozen people manhandled a huge sausage of canvas onto a cart, and listened to a quartermaster dickering over the price of twenty-five barrels of salt beef.

“Salt whale, more like,” the quartermaster said, her face going red. “Sell it to the fucking Marines, Andy! Four-fifty is piracy, nothing but. Three seventy-five a cask, and I want a written warranty.”

“Three seventy-five? The
staves
are worth more than that. Have a heart, McAndrews, have I ever stiffed you before? Look, let’s—”

Cofflin grinned as they walked on. “You know, that’s something I don’t regret,” he said. “That we’re making our own history again, instead of living off selling the image of it. The way this town was put under glass for the tourists always sort of got me, before.”

“Not anymore,” Alston said. “Smelling’s believing.”

The Chief gave a small snort. It
was
a little thick down here, especially since the rendery and tanneries had been moved out to this part of town. Fish, the collecting tanks for the offal—useful for fertilizer—and half a dozen crafts added to the aroma.

The buildings on their right were mostly post-Event, factories and workships in big timber-built shingled boxes, many with tall brick smokestacks, their plumes of woodsmoke adding a thick tang to the air. They passed signs: WASHINGTON MILLS SAILCLOTH AND CORDAGE and ZERO MAIN SEWING MACHINES; that one had a cart at the loading bay, with crates of its treadle-powered wonders being moved onto it—they were turning into a major export. Through the open bay doors they caught a glimpse of belts and shafting and whirring, clattering lathes and drill presses.

EAGLE EYE KNITTING, DON’S MARINE STEAM ENGINES AND GEARING, smiths and carpenters and plumbers and more; merchants’ offices, SUN ISLAND SHIPPING, CHAPMAN AND CHARNES, TELENATRO AND FELDMAN . . . then the turnoff to the new shipyards on their left. That was where the
Chamberlain
was under repair in the spanking-new dry dock, and a second being was constructed.

Cofflin’s face reflected a sober satisfaction at what his people had accomplished; this was prosperity, as the Year 9 defined it. Hard, demanding work, although God knew any sort of in-town labor was safer and softer than the fisheries. It all put food on the table and clothes on the back. Plus paying to keep civilization alive—schools and police and national defense . . .

“I’m worried about having Ian out so far,” he said. “Missed him more than I anticipated; the man’s right smart.”

Alston nodded. “But he’s doing a fine job where he is,” she said. “I couldn’t have negotiated that treaty with Babylon, and from the reports”—she’d spent several days reading the backlog as soon as the
Chamberlain
limped into Nantucket Harbor with her prizes at her heels—“he’s building something solid there.”

A spell of thoughtful silence, and then Cofflin spoke: “What are our chances, if it does come to an all-out fight?”

“Pretty good, but they’d be better in a few years,” Marian said. “Walker and Isketerol both have less technological depth than we do, but they’ve got more breadth—much bigger populations to draw on, which compensates for the lower productivity. We’re starting to pull ahead, though, and soon we’ll have stuff that will take them a lot longer to match. Speaking of which, here we are—the magician’s lair.”

Cofflin snorted. “Let’s see what rabbit Ron’s pulled out of the hat for us this time.”

Seahaven Engineering had started out its post-Event career in a big boat shed down by the end of Washington Street, near the shipyard. Much of the production had moved to a big new plant out by the Bessemer casting plant, but there was still a ceaseless bustle here. It smelled of hot metal, and whale-oil lubricant, and a little of the tingle of ozone from electric welders powered by the wind generators around town.

Jared Cofflin and Marian Alston created a bit of a stir when they walked in together and hung their dripping oilskins on pegs over a trough. A clerk showed them through the long showroom where Islanders and foreign merchants placed orders; through the great, hot, echoing brightness of the main machine shop, lit by sputtering, popping arc lamps high above.

The clerk opened a door, letting the noise of the shop floor into the wooden cubicle where Leaton had his office, and yelled their names over it. Cofflin hid a smile; he’d always liked Ron’s management style, too.

The office was as cluttered as ever but bigger—an extension had been added for more bookshelf space, a draftsman’s table with the rarity of an electric light. On a desk stood an even greater one—a working computer, under special license from the Town. It would be generations, if ever, before the Islanders could replace any of its components beyond the casing and the on-off switch, but Seahaven had need of it now.

The head of the firm was using the mouse to rotate a wire-drawing outline of some machine part; he clicked on Save and turned, sprang up from the littered table and advanced with outstretched hand.

“Jared, Marian!” he said eagerly. “Good to see you!”

“From the smile, I gather it must work, Ron,” Jared replied as he shook his hand; then his own lips quirked. Leaton’s enthusiasm was as infectious as a puppy’s.

“Yes, indeed!” Leaton said. “We’ve got it in Bay Number Two. It was the ammunition problem that was toughest, but we’re setting up a production-scale plant out of town by Casting Number One—closer to the powder mill, anyway.”

Cofflin nodded while Leaton rummaged in a drawer; gunpowder manufacture was one thing they’d zoned right out in the countryside by Gibbs Pond from the beginning, and convenience be damned. The thought of a couple of tons of the stuff going off around here . . .

“Here it is,” the machinist-turned-industrialist said, handing over a brass cartridge.

Jared Cofflin took it and turned it over in his hands. “Still .40?”

“Mmmm-hmmm. No reason to change it, and that way we don’t have to do up new jigs and bits for the rifling benches and boring machines. Priorities, again . . . we’re still short of tool steel, the high-carbon cutters work, but they wear out so damn fast. Okay, sorry. I’ll stop complaining. The bullet’s virtually the same as the Westley-Richards model too—a little more antimony and tin for hardening.”

“What’s this?” Cofflin said, flicking his thumbnail against the rim. Between it and the body of the shell was a thin rounded section.

“Miniature brass tube—we fabricate the base separately and then join it to the shell body with this. Makes it a hell of a lot easier to—well, not to get technical . . .”