“It’s a blessed one,” the boy called excitedly. He almost tripped, splashing through the water.
“Beginner’s luck,” Matt said.
“Oh, it ain’t luck,” Mose said. “It’s fortune, for us, but it ain’t luck.”
The fish was thick and glittering black and had a precise silver cross on each gill plate. “You don’t know about these.”
“Never seen such a thing,” Matt said.
“Don’t get one ever’ day. Ruth!” He called to the woman, who was sitting at a picnic table reading the Bible. “It’s a blessed one!”
She hurried over, her eyes down. “Oh, my,” she said, and took fish and net over to a thick plank by the water’s edge. She held it down, still flopping, on the wood, and with a thick-bladed knife pressed down hard behind the gills and decapitated it. She kissed the cross on each gill plate and threw the head back into the shallows.
It wriggled away.
Abraham had brought a bucket of water. Ruth used a thin-bladed knife to slit the belly of the fish, and threw away a small mass of red-and-silver entrails. Then, with thumb and finger, she peeled the fish like a fruit.
“Almost all meat,” Mose said.
So it was. A bioengineered food machine. “You don’t catch them often?”
“This kind, maybe twice a week, praise God. This is a good sign for you.”
“Well. Good.” Matt was watching Ruth clean the fish. It didn’t seem to have any bones; basically a rectangular slab of meat. She rinsed it off and sliced it into eight thick steaks, which she arranged in a shallow bowl and covered with a red sauce from a Mason jar.
“Barbecue,” Mose said, pronouncing it “Bobby Q.” “Let’s get the fire goin’.”
“Good coals, Moses,” Ruth said. “We don’t need a big old fire.”
He rolled his eyes. “Good coals.” He led Matt to the barbecue pit, by the picnic tables. Abraham and the other two children, younger girls, had rounded up fuel—dry grass and thin sticks—and were arranging it in neat piles. From well-used plastic bags they sorted out larger sticks and a few large chunks of wood, some carbonized from earlier use.
“The girls sniff around and pick up wood in the morning, ” he said. “Gets harder to find.”
“You move into the city for heat? Later on.”
“Yeah, they got solar. Crowded, though.” He made a pile of the light grass and arranged a cone of twigs, teepee style, over it, then took a firestarting thing out of his pocket, like a fat nail file with a metal stick hanging from a chain. Striking the stick against the file made bright blue sparks. The grass started to smolder, and he blew it into flame. The twigs began to crackle, and with intense concentration he added slightly larger twigs in tripod threes, still blowing gently on the flame, with his hand cupped behind it.
Surely that action went back to the Stone Age. But the firestarter went back only to the twentieth or twenty-first century, as did the Mason jar with the “Bobby Q” sauce. To pour on the bioengineered fish.
“Where’d you get the spark maker?”
“Always had it,” Mose said, not looking up. “Took it outa my daddy’s pocket when he died.”
He built a loose house around the small blaze with twigs about as thick as his thumbs. “You did well, girls,” he told them, and they nodded gravely.
“This area must be pretty well picked over,” Matt said. “Lot of people live out here?”
“When it’s warm, yeah, gettin’ out of the city. Churches here expect almost two thousand today, plus some people go into town for the day. Maybe twenty-two hundred in Arlington, till October, November.”
“You know how many people live in Boston, the Boston area?”
“Huh-uh. Feels like a million in the winter.”
“No heat out here?”
“Only what you make.” He arranged the rest of the wood around the blaze and sat back. “How did it used to be?”
Matt pointed at the apartment building. “My mother used to live right here, on the lake, year-round. In the wintertime her place was usually so hot I couldn’t stand it.”
“She had electricity?”
“And a fireplace, too, for special occasions. That was in the 2050s.”
He shook his head. “No good with numbers.”
Matt added and subtracted in his head. “That would have been about 130 years before Jesus came back.”
“Long time.” His face pinched in concentration. “My gran’ther was born about twenty years before, B.S.C. So his grandfather …” He tried to do it on his fingers but shook his head again and let his breath out in a puff.
“Well, if you count twenty-five years per generation, that would be his grandfather’s father.”
Mose looked up, his eyes shining. “And you were around back then.”
“Yeah.” Something suddenly drained out of Matt. Energy, hope.
Mose saw it. “Will you get back?”
He cleared his throat. “I … I don’t know. I think so.” Someone had to make his bail 293 years ago.
Ruth came over carrying the fish and two metal grates, which looked like refrigerator shelves. She peered at the fire. “Ready in about ten minutes, Moses?”
“Ready when it’s ready, woman.” She shrugged and set the fish down on the table.
He placed a few small sticks in with the larger ones and blew gently until they were blazing. “If you don’t get back, stuck here, you want to join a church. I mean you have to. What were you back then?”
“You mean religion?” Mose nodded, not looking at him. Ex-Reform Jew atheist would probably be a bad answer. “Guess I’m sort of a Methodist. Church wasn’t so … central to our lives.”
“As it was written,” he said. “And so you were laid down low. We were, humanity.” Matt couldn’t think of a safe response to that. “Meth-o-dist,” Mose said softly. “That was like the old Catholics?”
“They split off from the Catholics long before I was born.” They were something else in between, he vaguely knew from his childhood friends. Lutherans or something.
“Hope they don’t give you trouble about that at MIT. They shouldn’t, since you were born before the Second Coming and then sort of hop-frogged over it. But those religious people are unreasonable sometimes, you know what I’m sayin’?”
“I should be careful what I say around them.”
“Say and do. Really careful.”
“I will, Mose. Thank you.”
“They’re scientific, so they might give you some room. Like any reasonable person would. But they’re all priests, too, or most of them.”
The fire was going well now, hot enough that both men moved a little away from it. “Let it burn down a bit.”
“So … there aren’t any Methodists anymore?”
“Not around here. Down south they still have Church-o’-Christs and Baptists and what all. Here we’re just Christians.”
“Everyone?”
“Oh yes.” He said that a little too quickly. “You would be about twenty-two?”
“I’m older than I look. Twenty-seven—or two hundred-some, if you count from date of birth.”
“They might make you spend some time in service.”
“In the military?”
“Military? No, just in service to the Lord. I was in service from eighteen to twenty, which is usual. But if you’re in school a grown-up, they wait till you’re out.”
“What do you do in service?”
“Whatever you’re best at. You’d probably be a mechanic or some scientist’s assistant.” He laughed, shaking his head. “Might just make you a scientist and give you an assistant. You probably have enough school to be a scientist.”
“Old-fashioned stuff, though. Science goes out of date.”