Island in the Sea of Time (11 page)

“I’m in the minority,” she said ruefully. “I comprehend the vastness of my own ignorance. I’m morally certain that whatever caused the Event was deliberate, at least in the sense that a chemical plant blowing up is deliberate. The whole thing was too . . . too artificial not to be the result of intent, even if it was an accident, some machine somewhen going off half cocked, or whatever, somewhere and somewhen. The precise ellipse around the island, for instance. But apart from that I’ve got no earthly inkling what happened. I did have a wild idea . . .”

“What?” he said eagerly. “Tell me.”

She rubbed a hand across the cover of the book. “I thought . . . well, how do we know this is the same universe, exactly, as the one we left? I decided to try to remeasure the physical constants, to see if anything had changed.”

“And?”

“And everything’s exactly the same, as far as I can determine—I don’t have much in the way of equipment, you understand. Gravity, electrical resistance, they’re all the same. For that matter, solid-state electronics wouldn’t work here if the constants were
very
different.” She sighed. “As I said, I’m beginning to comprehend how much I don’t know.”

“Socrates thought that was the beginning of wisdom,” Ian said.

Doreen’s mouth twisted wryly. “It’s the beginning of uselessness,” she said. “I mean,
you
know a lot of things that
are
useful. History’s your specialty. What earthly use is my degree here?” She propped her head on a palm. “I suppose I could teach school, or something of that nature. Maybe a self-defense course, if I can get back in the swing—I used to do that sort of thing. The only really useful thing I’ve done since the Event is figure out exactly when we were.”

“You’ve come up with a number of good ideas,” Ian said stoutly, patting her hand. “Which is more than most of the selectmen. The only thing they did was manage to acquire some popularity before the Event, totally irrelevant now. You helped with the navigation tables and saved invaluable time.”

“What is relevant?” Doreen said moodily, sipping at her coffee. “Certainly not my plans for an academic career. Did you know, I wanted to be a ballet dancer once?” She looked down at herself and sighed. “When I was six. But even then it was obvious I’d never have legs up to my armpits.”

Ian shrugged. “I’ve had an academic career,” he said. “Not the same field, of course. At least you don’t have to worry about cutbacks now.”

She looked up at him. “You don’t seem as . . . disoriented as most of us.”

“Cofflin and the captain aren’t, much,” Ian said. “Which is fortunate, because it’s keeping us alive. As for me, well, I’m a historian, and here we are in capital-H History. I didn’t have any close ties at home, so . . .”

He stirred the coffee and looked at the rear of the spoon.
Made in Japan
. Nothing much made in Japan right now except pots . . . Jomon? No, that was thousands of years before
this
. He shivered slightly. It could awe you, the sense of years before years, lives before lives, the sheer
depth
of history, even at the best of times. Right now . . .

He cast off the feeling. “I wanted to be a science fiction writer myself,” he said. “I even wrote a few books—fantasy really, under a pen name. Then there was this car accident, my wife was killed . . .”

“I’m sorry,” Doreen said. It seemed to be genuine. She patted his hand.

“Frankly, we were about to get divorced. Then I got a teaching position, which was an incredible stroke of luck when you consider the market for classical-era historians, and never had time for the writing. Not fiction, at least. But I always kept up reading it. Time travel’s a fairly common theme in science fiction, and some of it’s surprisingly well thought out.” He shrugged. “Could have been worse; at one point, I was thinking of specializing in the Byzantine period, and there’s something recondite for you.”

“Ian . . .” she paused. “What do you think’s going to happen to us?”

He spread his hands, palms out. “How should I know? We might all be turned into turnips tomorrow or carried off to Alpha Centauri, or thrown back into the Jurassic and eaten by velociraptors, or . . . hell, my sense of the orderly and predictable course of nature has taken a severe knock! If we’re left here? We might make it. I’m more hopeful than I was right after the Event. But it’ll be close. This voyage is important.”

Doreen nodded thoughtfully, one hand touching the smooth oak staff beside her. “I’ll do my best.”

“If you don’t mind me saying so, you’re doing better than a lot of people too. Adjusting, that is,” Arnstein said.

“My father’s dead, I’m an only child, and my mother . . . well, we’re not close,” she said. “I could
almost
wish to see her face when she gets the news. No husband, no kids, no time for it yet. There are friends I’m going to miss, but it’s not like they’re dead. They’re just not here.”

Of course, we could have wiped them all out by landing here
, Ian thought. He kept that firmly to himself. Nobody wanted to think about that hypothesis. Better to believe the more comforting one, that they had simply started another branch on the tree of time.

“It’s fortunate that it’s Nantucket, in a way,” he said. “Most of the islanders were born here, and they’re pretty clannish anyway.”

“Yeah, I get the idea some of them have hardly noticed the outside world vanishing,” Doreen laughed.

“Why don’t we take a turn on deck?” he said. “The stars may be different, but they’re pretty.”

The shy smile returned. “Don’t mind if I do.”

 

“There’s a certain irony involved here,” Captain Alston said next morning, looking over the bales and boxes that her ship would be taking east.

Most of the cargo was from the boutiques and souvenir shops of the town—costume jewelry and colored beads, packed in green plastic garbage bags. Ditto for the cloth, the more colorful the better. There was a fair sampling of liquor, some tools, knives, the spears . . .

Booze, beads, and trinkets for the bare-arsed spear-chuckers of England,
she thought.

Her father would have loved this. For a moment she smiled at the memory of a big soft-spoken figure with a workingman’s hard hands, swinging her up toward the ceiling. Later he’d encouraged the reading habit in a girl, and that in a dirt-poor rural setting where it was unusual for anyone. The only time he’d ever really lost his temper with her was when her marks fell off.
White man wants a dumb
nigger
, he’d shouted.
Smart black folk scare ‘em. You scare ’em, girl, you scare the
shit
out of every one, or you’ll feel my hand.

The smile died. Her family had been farmers on Prince Island since slavery days. After emancipation that had meant owning their own land, not sharecropping; her great-great-grandfather had used his back pay to buy the farm when he mustered out of the Union Army’s black regiments in 1865. Not much of a farm, but it had fed them and paid their tax for generations, and they’d hung on to it through Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the Depression. Through times when being too prosperous or too independent could get a black man hung from a tree, doused in kerosene, and burned alive while he was still kicking. When the real-estate taxes went through the roof, her father had lost the land to a consortium building a resort. Nothing much had gone right for him after that, until the cancer came and ended it.

But he
would
have enjoyed seeing this.

Ian Arnstein nodded. “I wish we had a specialist in the European Bronze Age,” he said, rubbing at his reddish-brown beard. “I wish anyone
knew
anything useful about the European Bronze Age.”

“You’ve been doing a lot of research,” Alston said. She liked seeing someone who took their work seriously. “You and Ms. Rosenthal and the librarian.”

“Ms. Stoddard, yes. And not finding out much. I can tell you that Stonehenge has been up for a long time, and I can tell you that the Wessex Culture buried its chieftains with gold and amber and worked bronze. I can’t tell you what language they spoke, or how they were organized, or whether they were peaceful or the equivalent of Comanches.”

“You’re a hell of a lot better than nothing,” Alston said.

They were standing on the docks, as townsfolk-turned-stevedores carried bundles up the gangways and nets full of bales and boxes swung by on pulleys rigged from a cargo boom pivoting on the mainmast. The captain of the Eagle looked eastward, and smiled.

“We’ll go see.”

Words welled up, from a poet who’d touched something in her; she stood looking out to sea and let them roll through her mind:

Martha Stoddard stood and watched the departure. Last night’s fog had lifted, leaving only a few patches drifting silver-gray against the darker wolf-gray of the ocean. Engines throbbed, sacrificing precious fuel to take the ship through the narrow channel, around Brant Point and its lighthouse, past the breakwaters and into the open sea. She supposed that next time it would be boats with human beings sweating at the oars. . . .

Orders rang out, faint across the waters. The figures of the crew were ant-tiny on the yards, their feet resting on the rope rests below. Canvas dropped, fluttered, filled out in graceful curves. The yards braced around, and slowly, slowly, the great ship moved; water rippled smoothly back from either side of her sharp cutwater. Then she seemed to bow, rose again in a burst of spray, gathered speed toward the rising sun, and left a wake creamy white across the long blue swells. The crowd on the docks cheered themselves hoarse, then gradually fell silent and began to disperse, off to the work that awaited. A few lingered until the hull of the ship disappeared behind the curve of the world.

That’s that
, she thought.

Oh, the ship would be in radio contact, but she was getting a new appreciation of what distance meant. Martha Stoddard had lived on Nantucket most of her life, nearly all of it except for her university days. You could feel very isolated here, especially in the winter when a storm closed down the ferry and airport and sent waves crashing up to the base of Main Street. Loneliness had never been a problem with her; she was content enough with her books and music—and oh, how she missed the music, there at a touch—and unwilling to tolerate much of the compromise that having other people in your life meant. It was only now that she realized what isolated really meant.

Jared Cofflin was among the last to turn away from the dock. Martha had a nodding acquaintance with him for many years, but they’d never really talked much before the . . . Event. He looked a little lost in civilian clothes, but he’d insisted that if they wanted to call him chief executive officer of the island instead of police chief, he wasn’t going to wear a badge and gun. Another facet of the man revealed by the Event.

Odd that we’re
calling
it that, she thought. Although she supposed they had to have some name for whatever it was that had happened.
And don’t think too much about it, don’t wonder how or why or who as you lie waiting for sleep, or it will drive you mad and Doc Coleman will have to come with the needle and the soothing words. . . .

“Wish you were off with them, then, Jared?” she said.

He started, taken out of his brown study. A rueful smile lit his bony middle-aged face, and he smoothed a hand over the thinning blond hair on his scalp. “Ayup. Looks to be interesting over there.”

“You’re working too hard,” she said suddenly.

“Everyone’s working too hard,” he answered. “We have to.”

“You’re doing the type that keeps you from sleeping, too. Not a good thing. What did you have planned?”

“Spending the morning doing paperwork, and the afternoon going ’round and seeing how things are developing.”

“Going to and fro in the world, eh?”

He smiled, a chuckle of genuine humor this time. “Well, Pastor Deubel has been hinting that I’m inspired from that direction,” he said.

“Man’s a fool,” she snorted.
And attracting more attention than is healthy.

“A natural-born damned fool,” he said, nodding agreement.

“Well, if you’re going to be inspecting this afternoon, come inspect my Girl Scout troop. They’re doing good work—”

“They are at that.”

“—and they deserve to get a word for it.”

He nodded, relaxing a little. “I think I’ll do that, Martha.”

“They’re also making a picnic lunch of the edible greens,” she said. “You’re welcome to share it.”

He smiled. “Bribery?” Fresh vegetables were already running out, the frozen were tightly rationed, and the canned were being saved for winter.

“Consider it research.”

They stood on the dock, acknowledging the greetings of the crews of the fishing boats; the first loads would be coming in soon, to add to the malodorous vats of fish offal that stood waiting to be dragged out to the fields.

“Be seeing you, then,” Jared said, hitching at his belt and settling his shoulders like a man contemplating a hard day’s work.

She stood for a moment more, looking eastward. History and archaeology were her hobby; one thing that had always impressed her was how thin the record of the past was, a thing assembled out of rubbish and broken pots and the chance survival of a few words. Whatever they found east over the sea, it would be surprising.

Martha smiled to herself. Life had ceased to be dull, at any rate. On the other hand, there was that old Chinese saying. . . .

“Interesting times,” she murmured to herself, drawing the jacket closer around herself against the chill spring morning. “Extremely interesting.”