By the time the Queen of the Sea sailed for Europe, Al Wiley was more concerned about the Tupky than the Koksy.
CHAPTER 19
Queen of the Sea
April 14
Sailing was put off one more day because they didn’t want to sail on Friday the thirteenth. That wasn’t just the Americans. When the locals heard of the superstition, they adopted it for their own. Lars Floden was thankful that there were no black cats on the Queen, but the winter in the tropics was used to good effect. The Queen had holds full of dried corn and frozen fish, tanks of live crabs, not to mention latex, steel blades, and all manner of other goods. There were twenty-two pounds of gold and over a hundred pounds of silver in coin form in the ship’s vaults, and the tanks were full of oil. It was crude oil, but it was enough to get to Europe and back here, if they didn’t spend more than a month or two in Europe.
“The Reliance is on the comm, Captain,” Doug said and Lars picked up the mike.
“Just calling to wish you good luck, Captain,” Adrian Scott said. “We’ll be along as soon as we can.”
“Right, Adrian. You get those tanks full. We’ll arrange docking and tankerage in Alexandria or, failing that, Rhodes.” The Reliance now had only two of its tanks filled with fuel oil. The rest were slowly filling with crude. They were going to need that fuel oil in Europe, because the lifeboats used it, and there weren’t a lot of places deep enough for the Queen to dock.
“I will.”
The Queen was underway and Fort Plymouth fired one of its cannons in salute.
Capitol Building, Fort Plymouth
April 14
President Wiley watched the Queen of the Sea leave with mixed feelings. The loss of Lars Floden and Roxane didn’t bother him at all. It was the loss of the behemoth in the harbor that worried him a bit. The natives were restless. Some of the locals, but mostly it was the pot people, the Tupky and their allies along the river. They were looking at the very wealthy, by local standards, colony with avarice in their eyes. Refrigeration was available in Fort Plymouth, and a cold drink on a hot day was a luxury that had proven to be very impressive. The Tupky were trying to buy refrigeration units…and trying to buy the ship people who could make them work.
“We’re going to have trouble, Mr. President,” Lacula said.
Allen turned around. “You think?” Lacula no longer wore the sides of his head shaved. His hair was cut and trimmed in the ship people style and he was wearing a pair of khaki pants and a polo shirt. He was even wearing shoes. Well, flipflops. He had brought his wives and family out in February, and had a decent account in the First New America Bank. Nor was he the only one. Many of the local tribesmen had jobs in Fort Plymouth, though most of them worked just long enough to get a payday, then took their money, bought the tools they needed, and disappeared.
By now the population of Fort Plymouth was about four thousand, with three thousand ship people and a constantly shifting population of locals. There were also a hundred or so farms that were owned by ship people and employed locals on a part-time or full-time basis. They weren’t producing much yet, and wouldn’t until the Queen got back with work animals. Like the Jones experimental farm, they were mostly preparing the ground for later planting and studying the needs of local agriculture. The farms accounted for another three hundred ship people and a like number of locals.
What they didn’t have was much in the way of electricity. The Queen of the Sea was a very integrated system, with just about all its electricity generated in the engine rooms, and the Reliance was the same way. Barge 14 had no electrical generation capacity. Instead, it had a battery pack to power its thrusters, and the batteries were charged by the Reliance. The Queen actually had two complete engine rooms, well separated in case of emergencies, but Floden wouldn’t agree to giving one to the colony on Trinidad. Allen Wiley understood the reasoning behind that decision, but that didn’t make it any easier for the colony.
They had spots of electricity and not very many of them, the capitol building, the hospital, a few industries that had to have electricity to function. And almost all of it had been built since The Event. Over the months that the Queen was in the Gulf of Paria, they had built some steam power plants—small ones with small generators. Only one of the doctors from the Queen stayed in Trinidad and there were only three among the passengers, two of them retired and in poor physical condition.
With the Queen gone and the Reliance getting ready to go, things were going to be much harder for a while.
Queen of the Sea, Mid-Atlantic
April 17
Dag kicked the pipe and coughed as the dust filled the compartment. It was true that the flex fuel engines would burn anything, but that didn’t mean that the level of maintenance work was the same for crude oil as it was for refined fuel oil. Crude left more soot and the pipes needed more cleaning.
Romi Clarke looked down the compartment at Dag, grinning like a demon.
“What are you grinning—cough, cough—about? You’re going to have to come down here and clean out these pipes.”
Romi lifted the filter mask into place, hiding his grin, but Dag could still see the laughter in the little man’s eyes. Romi seemed to like the third century before the birth of Christ. He was studying Greek and Tupky and doing pretty well at both. Which made sense. He was multilingual before The Event, just like Dag. Most of the crew had at least two languages, their own and English, and more weren’t uncommon.
Dag climbed up the ladder and shot Romi the finger. Discipline and rank were still there and still important, but since The Event the crew had gotten closer. They were all ship people. The ones unable to accept that mostly got off in Trinidad. Mostly, but not entirely. Rabbi Horse’s Ass and Reverend Jackass and their followers insisted on going back.
And Wiley—the bastard—supported them on the basis of individual liberty and religious freedom. Dag was pretty sure that Wiley was mostly happy to see the troublemakers out of New America. Dag pulled up his breath mask and got to work.
☆ ☆ ☆
Alexander IV was not, he felt, being given the respect he was due. This wasn’t because he was the king of Macedonia. Alexander had no real idea what king meant. It was just part of his name. No, the lèse-majesté was because he was two and a half now and Dorothy Miller was only two and a quarter and had just had the temerity to dispute with him on which hole the plastic peg fit in. She insisted that it was the round hole and then laughed at him when he failed to insert the round peg into a square hole, something that clearly had to be tried. So Alexander of Macedonia called her “Poopy head!” and hit her with the peg, at which point the silly girl started crying and Alexander was sent to the dreaded time-out.
The world is an unfair place when you’re two and a half, king of Macedonia or not.
☆ ☆ ☆
Berenike was of two minds about time-out. Berenike was very much a “spare the rod, spoil the child” caregiver. But Alexander was royalty and you didn’t spank royalty. Berenike was the woman of a Silver Shield. She was forty and he was sixty, and they had been together twenty-two years, ever since the Shields had taken her home, back when Philip II was king of Macedonia. Being nanny to the next king of the Macedonians was a step up, and the quarters that she and her family now enjoyed were positively palatial. But it all felt wrong somehow. Too much change, too fast. She tried to talk to the daycare workers of the ship’s crew and the new hires from Trinidad.
“I know what you mean,” said Sally Chin. “Before The Event, I was saving up to go to college to study education. Now I’m an expert in early child care, and I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“At least you admit it,” complained Gupatok, a new hire from Trinidad. “It’s the ones who think they know it all that I can’t stomach.”
Gupatok was wearing a white T-shirt and black bikini bottoms. Even that was a concession to the rules of the ship. The normal mode of dress of her tribe was a loincloth and even that was discarded casually. She found th
e whole notion of a nudity taboo to be foolishness.
And that was Berenike’s problem. There were all sorts of people on the ship, most of them not even Greek, much less Macedonian. They came in every shade of hair, from the ones with pale hair like Dag, to black-haired people like Sally Chin, and none of them seemed to think it mattered at all. Sally Chin’s eyes were different from any eyes Berenike had ever seen, and Gupatok had a facial structure that was almost as strange. And no one seemed to care. Well, some did, but they cared about the most ridiculous things. Like skin color.
Berenike was experiencing culture shock and her life hadn’t taught her that change was a good thing. It left her waiting for the disaster that all the strangeness presaged. Her phone rang, and Berenike answered.
“Berenike,” Roxane’s voice came over the phone, “I’m going to be tied up with the rabbi for a while longer.” Roxane, Berenike knew, had been raised in the Zoroastrian faith, which was, in a way, the precursor of the later monotheistic faiths, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. But Alexander was in no way a respecter of Zoroastrianism. It didn’t leave room for him in the pantheon. He had trashed the library in Bactria, or at least his troops had, and he hadn’t tried to stop it.
“Yes, Your Majesty. The king is in a time-out.”
“What did he do now?”
“He hit Dorothy Miller with a plastic peg and called her a poopy head,” Berenike said and Roxane laughed.
☆ ☆ ☆
“Rabbi,” Roxane said as she put away the phone, “I can’t guarantee you much of anything in Judea. Not won’t, can’t. Unless I miss my guess, Ptolemy and Laomedon of Mytilene will be at war in short order. And while Ptolemy may not have declared himself pharaoh yet, I think he will, and sooner in this timeline than in the other one. In the meantime, he is the satrap of Egypt, and Judaea in the satrapy of Syria is territory in dispute. He might invade at any moment.”
“But we must have protection, and Captain Floden refuses to see reason.”
“All I can suggest is that you appeal to Ptolemy. Or, if he is still in charge, Laomedon.”
It went on like that with Rabbi Benyamin Abrahamson and Reverend Laurence Hewell trying to gain her support, and Hewell being insulting of her religion in the process. He knew little of Zoroastrianism and almost as little of the Greek pantheon, so he condemned both as superstitious twaddle while proclaiming the fables about his carpenter’s son being the king of heaven as absolute truth. Roxane was raised at court and schooled in diplomacy and keeping her own counsel from an early age. She declined to dispute with him on the subject and let him believe her overawed by his arguments. All the while, she wondered what Ptolemy or Laomedon would do with him should they get control of him.
That was a serious concern. Hewell had what the ship people called a BS degree in Pastoral Ministries. It had not apparently focused on electronics or steam power generation, but it was a college-level education, so the man had to have learned something, even if Roxane hadn’t yet seen any evidence of it. No, that wasn’t true. The man could move a crowd and he could be very persuasive among his followers. His church had twenty-three members, most of whom were in their forties or fifties, generally with some education and quite a bit of experience at jobs like plumber or electrician. Those followers, and perhaps even Hewell himself, would be a valuable source of ship people knowledge. Whoever got control of them.
Roxane was convinced that if they continued on “their mission,” they would all be slaves within a few months, whether their master would be Laomedon, Ptolemy or some Jewish merchant or priest. And that thought didn’t bother her. Not at all.
Jerusalem
April 17
Laomedon looked across the floor at Ptolemy’s agent and felt rage and caution at war within his heart. He had read the butterfly book. He knew that in that other history, after he refused to sell the satrapy to Ptolemy, the bastard just stole it. Laomedon was caught, and he knew it. And what was worse, he was almost certain that Ptolemy was offering less this time around than he had in that other history.
Forcing himself, he nodded stiffly.
“A wise decision, Satrap,” said the envoy, and then went into details of how the money was going to be delivered.
Ptolemy now owned Syria, a Syria that included the two kingdoms of Judea and Israel. And, just as in that other history, he got it without spilling a drop of blood. Laomedon proved cheaper to bribe than the Pharisees of the Second Temple.
Alexandria
April 20
Ptolemy read the report and called for Eudemus. Ptolemy was quite sure that Judea and Israel were important to the ship people, even if he couldn’t keep track of their ridiculous beliefs.
When Eudemus arrived, he waved the man to a chair and said, “Tell me about the ship people’s religion.”
“Actually it’s religions, Satrap. There are three major ones, all of them related. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. We think that Judaism is the most important of them, but that could be the bias of the priest of that religion who was doing most of the questioning about our religions. He was a Jew, and was asking one of Atum’s guards about Judaism. According to the guard they are all—even the ship people’s Judaism—nothing more than heresies of true Judaism. Aside from those big three, there are Buddhist, Wiccan, Hindu, Baha’i—which may be another heresy of Judaism.”
“Why are there so many versions of Judaism running around? Did the Jews rise up and conquer the world the way they are always claiming they will?”
“Rather the opposite, if I have put it together right. What happened was they were totally defeated and scattered to the winds, but kept to their beliefs. Then those beliefs were picked up by others and adopted. There is something appealing about having one great and powerful god that you can blame everything on. Apparently, they think that after you die, he judges you and the ones that believe in him have wine, women, and song for all eternity. The ones that don’t believe are thrown into a fiery pit, also for all eternity.”
Ptolemy snorted, and Eudemus shrugged. “For whatever reason, it became accepted. Or they became accepted, I should say. Some of the reports claim that one sect—I think it’s the Christians—insist on blowing themselves up to punish the unbelievers. But why the sudden interest?”
“I have just gained Syria, and I understand that Jerusalem is of importance to them.”
“Yes, important, but I think the Christians revere Mecca even more.”
“Where’s Mecca?”
“I have no idea. Maybe near Jerusalem or Bethlehem.”
“Bethlehem?”
“The birthplace of Muhammad.”
Ptolemy shook his head. “Never mind for now. But we are going to need to understand the ship people’s superstitions if we are to deal effectively with them. Try and get a clearer understanding. The reason I asked was that we made a deal with Laomedon, so we own Syria, and that means we control the Jews and their temple. Can we use that to tempt some of the ship people to our service?”
“It might well work,” Eudemus said. “And that could be vitally important. You know that they don’t have slaves?” Eudemus’ voice had taken on a cautious note, as though he knew what he said sounded ridiculous, and Ptolemy nodded.
It was ridiculous, but from everything that Ptolemy had seen it was also true. “They have machines that are magical in their effect. That was how they explained it, and it appears to be true.”
“Yes. They can wind thread and do unimaginable things without human labor, or at least with very limited labor. The nation that gains that knowledge will be the richest nation on Earth. And some of that knowledge is in the minds of the most menial of their sailors.”
“Find me a way to acquire some ship people. But under no circumstances anger the ship people on the ship in the doing of it. I saw those steam cannons in action. That ship could destroy Alexandria and never come within range of our most powerful ballista.”
“We can make a steam cannon,” Eudemus said. Then visibly stopp
ed himself. “That is, we are fairly sure that we will be able to soon.” More hesitation. “Soon means within a few years, not a few days.”
“Fine. Then all we need concern ourselves with is what the Queen of the Sea will do between now and a few years from now.”
Queen of the Sea, Straits of Gibraltar
April 20
Dag sat down in Roxane’s suite and a waiter brought a tray of rock crab from Trinidad. There was also fresh baked bread and tubers that were clearly relatives of potatoes, but different. They had a brown flesh and an almost nutty taste, almost sweet, but not quite. It was a variety that the Tupky grew on their river.
“How goes the conversion?” Roxane asked.
“It’s ongoing,” Dag groused, then tried to clarify. “The forges and machine shops have been moved to decks five and six inboard, but we are keeping the outboard cabins.”
They’d started even before heading for Trinidad, and in the months spent in Trinidad they had converted about a quarter of the staterooms on the Queen into factories for the production of all sorts of stuff. And the process was ongoing.
The Queen was actually a decent industrial base. It had lots of electricity and lots of wiring to get that electricity to wherever it was needed. They could run saws, induction furnaces, centrifuges and electrolytic conversion plants all perfectly well. What they couldn’t do was export any of those industries to the rest of the world.
“And you can’t install the factories in Bactria?” Roxane asked again.
Dag grimaced. “I’m not dissembling. Yes, we can make a saw or a spinning wheel, even a spinning jenny or a carding machine. But those are eighteenth-century industries. Sometimes sixteenth- or fifteenth-century industries. They aren’t the twenty-first-century industries that we can do on the Queen. Even on the Queen, we can’t make integrated circuits or microelectronics in general. And a bunch of the really high-end stuff, like artificial materials and genetic engineering, is beyond us.”