On the Oceans of Eternity Read Free

much larger and faster than what you’ve seen, or—” He shrugged. “But not the skilled workers and special machines, or the machines that made the machines, or the smelters and forges to make the metal, or to find and refine the fuel, or the farmers to grow the food and the roads to bring it to us. What we were able to make and maintain was only a shadow of what our whole realm, the United States, was able to do.”
    A buzz of voices rose from city and palace, a snarling roar echoed from the sky, and a long teardrop shadow fell over them. They looked up, leaning out from beneath the awning and shading their eyes with a hand. The orca shape of the Republic of Nantucket Air Service’s Emancipator was passing over Babylon. Five hundred feet of canvas, birch plywood, and goldbeater’s skin, the dirigible droned along with six ex-Cessna engines pushing it through the warm Mesopotamian air, the Stars and Stripes on its cruciform tailfins and the Coast Guard’s red slash and anchor on its flank.
    Azzu-ena shuddered. “That is but a shadow of your arts?” she said.
    “A faint shadow,” Clemens said. “We have to hope it’s enough. It’s more than the rebel Walker has.”
    To himself he added: We think. So far.
    “Then how can he hope to stand before you?”
    “He’ll be fighting close to the lands he’s made his own, near to Ahhiyawa, Greece. The lands of our strength are far, far away from here.”
    “On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble;
His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves;
The gale, it plies the saplings double,
And thick on Severn snow the leaves.”
    “That’s Wenlock Edge,” Commodore Marian Alston-Kurlelo went on, pointing to a looming darkness in the south, an escarpment beyond the river they sought. Her hand swung westward toward a conical shape. “And we’re on the slopes of Wrekin hill. An English poet named Housman wrote that, a little before my time.”
    Adventure, bah, humbug, she thought. A Shropshire Lad I could read back home in front of the fire, with a cup of hot cocoa.
    She gripped the hairy warmth of her horse more tightly with her thighs, as rain hissed down through the tossing branches above. It ran around the edges of her sou’wester and rain slicker into the sodden blue wool of her uniform, leaching her body’s warmth. If you absolutely had to be out in weather like this, nine hundred pounds of hay-fueled heater were a comfort.
    Marian Alston had joined the Coast Guard at eighteen, a gawky bookish tomboy furiously determined to escape her beginnings on a hardscrabble farm in the tidewater country of South Carolina. She was in her forties now, a tall slender ebony-black woman going a little gray at the temples of her close-cropped wiry hair, with a face that might have come from a Benin bronze in its high-cheeked, broad-nosed comeliness.
    They paused at a slight rise, where a fold in the ridge gave them a view over swaying forest and the country that fell away before them. She went on:
    ‘Twould blow like this through holt and hanger
When Uricon the city stood:
’Tis the old wind in the old anger.
But then it threshed another wood
    “It’s a good poem,” the younger woman riding beside her said.
    Swindapa, Dhinwarn’s daughter, of the Kurlelo lineage, lifted her billed Coast Guard cap and shook her head. Droplets flew off the clubbed pigtail that held long wheat-blond hair in check, save for a few damp strands that clung to her oval, straight-nosed face. Her smile showed white even teeth, and her English-rose complexion was tanned by a decade of sun reflected off the ocean.
    She went on: “But why are so many Eagle People poems sad? Don’t you ever make poems about beer? Or roast venison and playing with babies and making love in new-mown hay on warm summer afternoons?”
    One of the Marines riding behind them chuckled, barely audible under the hiss of rain, the soughing and wind-creak of branches, and the slow clop-plock of hooves in wet earth. Alston smiled