Martha's back in Nantucket Town… Pulakis is farming on Long Island, Alonski drowned on that fishing boat, poor bastard, and Greta's been in charge here since the Alban War. Hasn't been back to the Island more than a couple of times.
She'd done well, though; it was a post that suited a lover of schedules and lists and procedures. Her husband was a civil engineer of like outlook, out since the crack of dawn supervising the laying of a new water main.
"In fact, you've been doing a damned good job here overall," Alston went on, and Hendricksson glowed. The commodore didn't give praise lightly.
They were breakfasting in the commandant's residence. Fort Pentagon was garrison and civil headquarters here in Westhaven. The commander's house was inside it, built around a courtyard of its own, mostly cobbled, but with a small rose garden and a wooden jungle gym set amid grass with trampled bare spots here and there. A groom led a horse by, sparrows hopped about picking oats from the cracks between stones, someone went through the courtyard gate with a basket of laundry on her hip and laughed with a Marine who'd leaned his rifle against a wall to offer her a hand. This kitchen looked over the yard, flooded with light from the big south-facing windows; it had a pleasant austerity of flagstones and scrubbed oak, stone countertops and big cast-iron stove from Irondale. Pans and dishes were racked on the walls, sacks of onions hung from the rafters with bundles of herbs, and the ham stood in carved pink glory near the big black frying pan. The air smelled of sea and cooking.
Swindapa looked up from where she'd been dandling the commandant's youngest. "I'll go see about getting our dunnage and files down to the ship, then," she said, handing the toddler back to the housekeeper; it gurgled and stretched chubby arms at her, and she paused to give it a kiss on the nose. "It won't be in the way, now. And I can check that the briefing papers are ready, and get the requisition chits from the Pacific Bank people."
"Thanks, "dapa," Marian said. "I had some stuff with the armorer, too-see to it, would you, sugar?"
Her Python, specifically; her katana and wasikashi she looked after herself, but something had been rattling in the pistol last time she had it on the firing range. Coin' to need that, she thought, with grim resignation. You wanted your tools in good shape when your life depended on them, and Westhaven had a first-rate firearms man, trained at Seahaven Engineering back on the Island.
"Let's go take a look at things in general," she went on, throwing down her napkin.
She and Hendricksson went out the front, returning the salutes of the Marine sentries, then up the brick staircase to the gateside bastions and above that to the grass-grown roof of the gun gallery and the small paved stand around the flagpole; the Stars and Stripes flapped above them in the brisk onshore breeze. Fort Pentagon's walls were sloping turf above a brick retaining wall and dry moat, and the fall wildflowers that starred them contrasted oddly with the black snouts of the cannon. She'd put the fort in on the highest ground available on the south bank, and it gave a good view.
From here she could see the whole stretch of the docks along the Avon's south bank, a dozen long rectangles stretching out into the river. Low tide left a stretch of smelly black mud between the corniche roadway with its log seawall and the deeper water where the ships rested. It also left the great timbers of the wharf exposed, black with pitch and trailing disconsolate green weed, overgrown with mussels and barnacles. Gull-wings made a white storm out over the blue-green water, stooping and diving; one let an oyster fall not far away, then flapped down to plunder the broken shell. Some of the ships were only the tips of masts over the oak planking of the warehouses stretching upstream; the wood was weathered brown near here, rawly fresh further away. Oats poured in a yellow-white stream from a grain elevator into the hold of an Islander barque as they watched, and workers with kerchiefs across their faces toiled knee-deep in the flood to spread it evenly with long-handled rakes.
"It's like watching a stop-motion film, every time we visit here," Alston said quietly.
"Damned right, Commodore," Greta said. "Even living here, it's almost like that for me-like waking up in the woods and finding a fairy ring of mushrooms."
Out in the blue-green waters was a lighthouse on a rocky little island, built of concrete at vast expense. A big metal windmill whirled atop it, doing duty as a wind sock and charging banks of lead-acid batteries in the structure below, handmade copies of pre-Event models from trucks. Inland from the docks was a checkerboard of tree-lined streets and squares with small green parks, shading out quickly into truck gardens and farms and round huts; she'd based the design on the original street plan of Savannah, Georgia. The public buildings were grouped around a larger central square, mostly in reddish sandstone or brick; a modest Ecumenical Christian cathedral-this had been the first bishopric off the Island-the Town Hall, half a dozen others. Between there and the docks were workshops, small factories, sailors' doss-houses and a tangle of service trades.
Form followed function; between them Bronze Age peasants and late-twentieth-century Americans had managed to spontaneously re-create most of the features of a classic North Atlantic port town.
Alston chuckled quietly at a memory; those functional features included a fair number of hookers. Until she actually went up and asked one of them, Swindapa had thought her partner was pulling her leg about that. Like most Fiernans, she found the whole concept of prostitution weirdly funny in a creepy sort of way; as she put it, it was like paying someone to have dinner with you.
All in all Marian Alston-Kurlelo liked Westhaven, though, more than any of the other outports of the Republic. Fogarty's Cove, for instance, tended to be a little too consciously the haunt of bold pioneers, given to hitching their belts, spitting, and noting the crops look purty good this year, ayup. The older ones were probably modeling themselves on secondhand memories of Last of the Mohicans and Frontierland, and it was contagious.
"How's morale?" she said. "The civilian population, particularly." Westhaven was under Islander law and had a Town Meeting of its own, but the situation was a bit irregular, constitutionally speaking.
"Excellent, so far," Hendricksson replied. "Those posters Arnstein's Foreign Affairs people sent over really whipped up feeling. I had to have our resident Tartessians put under guard for their own protection."
Alston nodded impassively, hiding an inward wince. There were times when she felt… not exactly guilty… more like uneasy… about some of the things they'd been forced to introduce to this era.
Potatoes are fine, antiseptic childbirth is wonderful, democracy and womens' rights are excellent. I'm not so sure about the levee en masse, the Supreme General Staff and systematic propaganda, she thought.
"I'm surprised they were quite so effective," Hendricksson mused. "I mean, yah, yah, they were all true, but it was pretty blatant stuff. Maybe because they didn't grow up with TV commercials?"
"Mmmm-hmmmm. People here aren't… immunized," Alston said.
It wasn't that the folk of this era were inherently gentler than those of the twentieth; what they didn't have was the accumulated experience and examples and recorded thought of…