On the Oceans of Eternity (5 page)

Not that I could have complained even if I’d disapproved,
she thought with an inner smile, glancing at her partner as she stroked the nose of her horse.
Seein’ as I did pretty much the same.

“How is Amentdwran, Wayne?” Swindapa asked.

’Dapa remembers him, too,
Alston thought. Not from any particular effort, but the Grandmothers made a science of memory; they’d had to, with an astronomy-based religion and no way to store information except in living brains.

“Fine, fine—expecting again, that’ll be number four, after the twins. But come on in out of the wet, for God’s sake! No, my people will take care of the horses.”

Two came at a run, agog at seeing the living legends; they bobbed heads and made the Fiernan gesture of reverence. touching brow and heart and groin, then led the horses around to a laneway at one side of the building. Alston cocked an eye at her escort, but the Marine noncom had her squad well in hand—they’d taken their rifles and gear first, and she was telling off one to go check that the stabling was all right. It would be, but you had to make sure. Horses were equipment, and if you took care of your equipment, it took care of you.

“The deer’s yours, Mr. Merrithew,” Alston said, indicating it with a lift of her chin. “Dumb beast walked right out in front of us yesterday and stood there in plain sight of God and radar.”

“Well, I’ll take that, but the rest is on the house,” he said, and raised a hand to forestall protest. “The skipper doesn’t pay in any place I own. And Pete!” An eight-year-old boy came up, face struggling between awe and delight; the café-au-lait skin and loose-curled hair left no doubt who
his
father was, in this world of palefaces. “Run up to the Manager’s house and tell them all who’s here!”

They walked through into the main room of the Eagle And Moon, shedding rain slickers in the hallway and feeling their bodies relax in the grateful warmth. That also brought out the odors of wet wool and leather and horse sweat and everything else that went with a week’s hard travel and camps too muddy and wet and cold to do much washing. Marian Alston-Kurlelo wrinkled her nose slightly; there was no point in being squeamish in the field, but she liked to be clean when she could, especially in civilized surroundings like these.

She looked around; the inn was whitewashed plaster on the inside, with flame-wrapped logs crackling and booming in an open fireplace, and a less decorative but more effective cast-iron heating stove burning coal in a corner. A long bar with a brass rail stood on one side, swinging doors let a clatter and the savory smell of roasting meat and onions and fresh-baked bread in from the kitchens, and a polished beechwood staircase with a fancifully carved balustrade led upward. Coal-oil lamps were hung from oak rafters, bright woven blankets on the walls along with knicknacks that included crossed bronze-headed spears over the mantel, and a sheathed short sword modeled on a Roman
gladius
and made from a car’s leaf spring. They hadn’t had many firearms, that first year ...

“Kept my ol’ Ginsu,” Merrithew said, slapping the sword affectionately. “Okay, Sergeant, you and your squad, the beds’re up the stairs thattaway, bedding, robes and towels, bathroom’s at the end of the corridor.”

“Very well, Sergeant; carry on,” Swindapa said; her responsibility, as Alston’s aide-de-camp.

All to the best,
Alston thought. Ritter’s air of hard competence tended to turn to blushes and stammering when addressing the commodore directly—there were drawbacks to being a living legend.

“Settle your people in, and then dismissed to quarters until reveille tomorrow,” Swindapa went on.

“Ma’am!”

“Sue, show ’em.” Another brown-skinned child, this one with enormous eyes of hazel-green; she grabbed the sergeant by the hand and led her away. “Commodore, Ms. Kurlelo-Alston, your room’s at the end of the corridor here. The bath’s ready, too, and we’ll have your kit unpacked by the time you’re finished, and hot robes. I recommend the roast pork tonight; it’s acorn-fed, and damned good.”

He bore them on, chattering, and thrust thick ceramic mugs of hot mulled cider into their hands. Alston closed grateful fingers around hers, and met the cerulean blue of Swindapa’s eyes. The Fiernan spoke her thought for her.

“We may live, after all.”

I
’m getting peopled out,
Lieutenant Vicki Cofflin thought.

The long gondola of the airship RNAS
Emancipator
had few places where privacy was possible, except the little cubicle that held the head. The great orca-shaped hull above was much larger, but the gasbags filled it.

And I’d like to see some stars,
she thought. Although the downward view from the commander’s chair at the nose of the gondola was grand, a huge sweep of moonlit plateau and mountains three thousand feet below, and she still felt a thrill sometimes when she realized
Emancipator
was
hers.
They were heading for the passes of the anti-Taurus now, and they’d be in Babylon by late afternoon. A routine voyage ... which was exactly what you wanted. Excitement meant adventure, and adventure meant bad luck or somebody screwing up.

“Take the com, Alex,” she said to her XO. “I’m going topside.” Then aloud—not too loud, most of the crew and passengers were asleep in the Pullman-style bunks behind her: “Mr. Stoddard has the deck.”

“Mr. Stoddard has the deck, aye.”

Wicker creaked as she unstrapped herself and rose, turning to let Alex Stoddard by in the narrow space. She took her sextant from the rack beside the ladder, although there wasn’t really any need for a navigational fix, with the Euphrates right there below them like a river of silver through the huge tawny spaces of Anatolia. It couldn’t hurt, though, and it gave her an excuse for taking a break topside. Besides, it was procedure, and if you made procedure a habit it was there when you really needed it.

She put hands and feet to the rungs, unsealing and resealing the flap-door on the roof of the gondola, then went up further through the creaking dimness of the hull, throbbing with the sound of the engines. A few of the duty watch were on their endless round of checking—for frame stresses, cracks, evidence of chafing that might lead to leaks as the bags surged about within their nets. The maintenance crew carried rechargeable flashlights, jerking and spearing through the gloom of the
Emancipator’s
interior. More pre-Event technology that couldn’t be replaced as yet, incongruous against the balsa-and-plywood frame of the airship.

We know how to do so much more than it’s possible to do, goddammit!
ran through her with a familiar frustration, like a toothache that had been with her since the Event had crashed into her world a few weeks past her eighteenth birthday.
The problem is all the things we know about and need but can’t make,
she thought.

Councilor Starbuck thought that the whole United States would have been just barely large enough to maintain one microchip factory. As it was, they could just barely maintain the recycled Cessna engines that pushed
Emancipator.

In her more pessimistic moods, she thought that they’d have done worse without Tartessos and Great Achaea to goose and terrify the Sovereign People into forgoing current consumption for investment. On good days, she concentrated on how much better the Republic could do this time around once those nuisances were put down.

Someday we’ll have everything they did in the twentieth, and more. We’ll hit the ground running and not stop this side of the stars, and we’ll do it without screwing the place up.
That would take generations, though. She’d planned on Colorado Springs, before the Event, and dreamed of eventually joining the astronaut program....

With a sigh she unlatched the rubber-rimmed wooden hatchway at the top of the ladder and stuck her head into the observation post.

“Oh,” she said.
Oh, damn. Must have come up here while I was in the head.
“Good very early morning, Colonel Hollard.”

“Couldn’t sleep, Captain Cofflin,” the other woman said. “Nice view up here, too.”

It would be impolite to duck right down. There was plenty of room for two; the observation bubble was domed with what had started life as a shopping-center Plexiglas skylight, and rimmed with a padded couch. It was cold, but not as draughty as the wickerwork-sided main gondola below, and, anyway, her generation had gotten used to a world where heating was often too cumbersome to be worth the trouble. You put on another layer of clothing or learned to live with being chilly, or both.

A continuous low drumming sound came from outside, under the whistle of cloven air, the sound of the taut fabric of
Emancipator’s
outer skin flexing under the 60 mph wind of her passage.

Well, you’ve got reason to be sleepless,
Vicki thought as she sat and looked at the other’s impassive face. She didn’t know all the details, but everyone had heard something—mainly that somehow the Mitannian princess Kenneth Hollard had saved from the Assyrians had managed to seriously torque off King Kashtiliash ... the local potentate Kathryn Hollard had married in a blaze of publicity and gossip that had them talking all the way back to Nantucket Town.

I thought we had culture clash in our family,
Vicki Cofflin thought. Her father had come from the piney woods of east Texas.
I didn’t know the meaning of the
word,
back then.

“Cocoa?” Hollard asked, holding up a thermos. Those
were
within Nantucket’s capabilities, if you didn’t mind paying three weeks’ wages for it.

“Thanks, ma’am.” The cocoa was dark and strong, sweetened with actual cane sugar from Mauritius Base.

“You’re welcome ... let’s not be formal. I was just looking at the stars, and thinking about the Event.” Hollard went on meditatively.

“Oh? Nothing better to do?”

Vicki grinned, glancing up herself. Thinking about the Event had become a byword for useless speculation and idle day-dreaming; they just didn’t have any data to go on. There was also what amounted to an unspoken rule against talking about it at all, among the older generation.

The stars were enormous through the dry clear air, a frosted band across the sky.
Skyglow’s one thing I don’t miss about the twentieth, she thought.

“It occurred to me,” Hollard went on, looking up and sipping, “that we may be wrong about what happened up in the twentieth when we ... left. That they got the 1250 B.C. Nantucket swapped with us, that is. That’s what most people assume, but there’s no reason to believe it.”

“Oh?” Well, a fresh hypothesis, anyway. “What else could have happened?”

Everything uptime of us could have all vanished the moment we arrived here, like a stray dream.
She didn’t mention that; it was another unwritten courtesy rule. The thought that they’d unwittingly wiped out billions of people and their own country and kin was just too ghastly to contemplate. Those inclined to brood on it had made up a goodly portion of the rash of post-Event suicides.

“Well, I don’t think the Event was an accident,” Hollard said. “The transition was too neat—a perfect ellipse around the Island, for God’s sake!—and we arrived too smoothly. No earthquakes, no tremors even, no tidal wave.... I mean, there must have been differences in sea level, the temperature of the land underneath the wedge that got brought along with us, air pressure ... and despite a subsoil of saturated sand and gravel ready to turn to liquid jelly at the slightest quiver, every-damn-thing was so stable that nobody noticed until they checked the star patterns. That and the rest of the world being 1250 B.C.’s. Accidents just don’t happen like that.”

“Well, chunks of land just don’t get displaced three millennia, either,” Vicki said, but she nodded. That was the reasoning behind one of the major schools of thought about the Event. No way to check, of course. “Whoever or Whatever it was that did it could have integrated the ancient Nantucket into our slot just as easily,” she pointed out.

“Yes, but a technology
that
advanced—not just raw power, but subtlety—could as easily have not moved Nantucket at all.” At Vicki’s expression she grinned slyly. “They could have scanned Nantucket, right down to the positions of every atom, and then
re-created
it here and now. Then we’d get the two separate histories, the way Doreen Arnstein says—she’s the scientist, I never could get my head around that quantum mechanics stuff. And our doppelgangers—our original selves—would go on up in the twentieth without even noticing.”

Vicki gave a low whistle. “You know, that’s a really clever idea. And completely, utterly useless!”

“It beats thinking about my family problems,” Hollard said, with a wry twist of her mouth.

“Mmmmm, if you don’t mind me asking ...”

Hollard shrugged. “Everyone else is going to know, soon enough. You know Ken—Brigadier Hollard—rescued Raupasha while he was mopping up the Assyrians north along the Euphrates, just south of the Jebel Sinjar?”

Vicki nodded. “Way I heard it, she’d killed the Assyrian King.”

“Tukulti-Ninurta, yes. His father killed her father—that was when the Assyrians took over what was left of the Kingdom of Mitanni, which wasn’t much by then—and Raupasha was smuggled out by loyal retainers. In the original history, she probably married some local squire and vanished from sight.”

“Yeah. Then we came along and retumbled the bingo-balls.”

“Mmmm-hmmm. This time
around, Tukulti-Ninurta showed up there with some odds-and-sods of his guard and court, after we and the Babylonians smashed their army. Made her dance for him, then he was going to drag her off and rape her. She got him first, knife in her sleeve and slit his throat neat as you please when he grabbed her. Then Ken arrived, just before they lit the fire under her feet.”