Chapter 2: Negotations
Queen of the Sea, Alexandria Harbor
November 12, 320 BCE
Menelaus looked around the small stateroom. There was a door to his left and next to it two drawings, each captioned in Greek, Punic, and Latin, as well as the ship people English. “Shower for Bathing,” and the picture was of a man with little lines coming down on him. The other said “Toilet for Elimination,” and the same man was seated on the toilet with his robe up. That one was obvious and the shower almost made sense. He opened the door and stepped inside. He looked at the shower and saw knobs with the words hot and cold. He turned the hot, and water came out in a fine spray, making sense of the drawing. Menelaus snorted. He much preferred a proper bath with a slave to oil him up and scrape his body down afterward.
After examining the “bathroom,” he walked across the room to another door and opened it. It led out to a balcony with a painted iron railing. He stepped out onto the balcony and looked down . . . and down, and down. The water was far below him. He’d never liked heights. He gripped the iron railing and squeezed his eyes shut.
Gradually, the world stopped spinning and his stomach settled a little. He tried to open his eyes and couldn’t do it. He knew what he would see. With an effort of will, he removed his right hand from the railing and reached behind him until he found the door. Found the handle, and grasped it, then he turned his head and, being very careful not to look at the water, he squinted his eyes open. He focused his attention on the door with all the concentrated will of a drowning man focusing on the log that might save him. He got the door opened and almost fell into his room.
It was a very nice room with a big bed and a desk and chair. It had a peculiar thick piece of glass that they called a “television” and even a closet of sorts. Compared to any ship he had ever been on, this was magical luxury. But it was luxury that was too many feet above the sea.
Finally, after his breathing was back under control, he looked out the window afraid that the terror would assault him again. But it didn’t, as long as he wasn’t close to the edge. As long as he didn’t look down, he was fine.
Menelaus took a deep breath and another, then he went back out the door of his stateroom. He took the lifting box up still farther, to the Royal Buffet restaurant. He would get something to eat and settle his stomach. After discussing the situation with Thaïs and Epicurus, Menelaus decided not to bring any of his slaves with him. On the upside, however, one of his favorite hetaera, Bethania, had booked passage. He didn’t have to be lonely, depending on her other engagements.
He reach the Royal Buffet on the deck with the swimming pools and went through the line. That was another irritating thing. He had to wait in line as though he were some minor scholar, not the brother of Ptolemy. There was a tuna steak, cooked rare, with a mustard sauce. It looked good and he took a plate to put it on the tray. Then he got a serving of the tuber that was labeled in Latin as well as Greek script as “nut potatoes.” And something called “squash in butter sauce.” He took it to a table away from the large window that looked out and down on the ocean, sat, and then realized that he had not gotten anything to drink.
He went back to the line and looked at the strange device that delivered liquids. It was interesting. There was a wire frame and when you set the plastic drinking vessels on the grate and pushed it against the frame, liquid came out and filled the drinking vessel. He read the labels as he watched a Carthaginian filling his drinking vessel. There was Egyptian beer, yerba maté, wine, and pasteurized milk.
The Carthaginian was getting the pasteurized milk. “What is that?” Menelaus asked.
“It’s processed cow’s milk,” the Carthaginian said. “They boil it in a special way to keep it from going bad. It’s quite good, but it doesn’t mix well with wine. I am Capot Barca. And you are?”
“Menelaus, brother of Ptolemy.”
“We have similar roles then. I am here to watch the ship people for Carthage and you are here to watch them for the satrapy of Egypt.”
Menelaus wasn’t convinced, by any means, that a Carthaginian merchant was of the same class as a Macedonian noble and the brother of the satrap of Egypt, but Thaïs warned him that he should not try to stand on social rank with the ship people, so he nodded as politely as he could.
It turned out to be a good choice. Capot was fairly knowledgeable about the ship and the ship people, and directed Menelaus to the carrot cake, a sweet breadlike substance that was made without yeast, yet wasn’t a flatbread, as well as offering other tidbits of knowledge and suggestions about food and drink.
Queen of the Sea, Carthage Harbor
November 16, 320 BCE
Standing back from the railing, Menelaus watched as Capot waved at Carthage Harbor. It was much the same shape as the images he remembered from the Queen of the Sea’s computers, but smaller, nowhere near the thousand feet across it was supposed to be. It had the circular inner harbor, but it was smaller, only about three hundred feet across, and the long comercial harbor was both shorter and narrower than it would be a hundred years from now.
“Well,” Capot asked, “what do you think of our harbor?”
“It’s impressive,” Menelaus said. And it was, sort of.
Capot laughed. “A bit of a let down after seeing the pictures in the computer, but we may be able to speed up the new harbor this time, since we have the designs.”
“Not if you’re going to have to dig it out to a depth of ten meters rather than two.”
“The steam engines will help.”
“How are you doing with those?”
Capot grimaced. “Not well. Another boiler blew up and there is talk of a large sacrifice to persuade the gods to be more generous.”
Menelaus looked at him and Capot shrugged. “I am not involved. I just got it over the radio.”
The city-state of Carthage had received a radio on the Queen’s last stop here, just under two months ago. Each radio station was a small team of ship people and at least one Greek who spoke some English, often a retiring Silver Shield. The Greek was there mostly as a translator and spoke Greek, some English, and the local language, whether it was Latin, Phoenician, Egyptian, or whatever. They also dropped a computer with a translator app and the ability to manage the band hopping necessary to bounce ham radio signals off the ionosphere consistently. It meant that as long as the team members were not molested, they could keep that city in touch with the other cities on and around the Mediterranean, and they could keep the city in touch with the Queen of the Sea, no matter where she was. Even in Trinidad. The translation app, combined with someone who spoke both Greek and the local tongue, meant that they could communicate even if it took some effort.
Alexandria had a station, as did Athens, Ashdod, Sardis, Rhodes, Tyre and more. Often the embassy was staffed by passengers from the Queen, usually older passengers. Carthage, for instance, was manned by Colonel James Godfrey, his wife Ila, and their widowed daughter, Tina Johnson. James was appointed colonel in the armed forces of New America before he and his family were seconded back to the Queen to be the radio operators for Carthage. James handled the computer, but he was hard of hearing and therefore spoke loudly. His wife and daughter handled most of the voice contact and were learning Phoenician, although their Alabama accents added some difficulty.
Capot’s smile developed a bitter twist. “Look over there.” He pointed and Menelaus, who was still standing back from the railing, followed his pointing finger. “That is where they made their demonstration.” As part of the procedure for dropping off the radio teams, the Queen of the Sea demonstrated the ship’s guns and made it clear that if anything happened to the radio team, the guns would be turned on the city that failed to protect them.
“I know how you feel, but be happy, my friend. I saw the Queen run over Gorgias’ fleet in Alexandria Harbor. Granted, it was a stupid thing for the general to do, to try and take this ship, but a whole fleet! And in some ways what they did at Rhodes was even worse. All that happened to you was a few grapevines got trashed and they paid for them.”
“Yes, but they were my family’s grapevines,” Capot said. “And last I heard, the government is still holding onto the money.”
Carthage
November 17, 320 BCE
Allison Gouch sat in the house of the Barca clan and sipped the wine. She looked over at Tina Johnson.
Who shrugged indifference. “I like margaritas, with lime and salt.”
Allison smiled. “This is actually quite good.” It was a red wine, fruity, with overtones of oak. Not quite like anything that she had tasted in the twenty-first century. Two thousand plus years had changed viniculture in a number of ways. The yeast was different, even the grapes were a little different. Most of all, the techniques were different. Mostly, from her experience in this century, worse.
But here in Carthage, she was tasting something that she hadn’t tasted before. There was a mix of flavors that was new. She swished the wine around in her mouth, then swallowed. This was not a twenty-first-century wine tasting, where she was trying five hundred wines. She would, today, try only sixteen wines, three from the Barca wineries, and two each from the Manipua wineries and some others. Capot was here to translate for his mother and sister.
One thing that she had learned about Carthage was that women had a distinct role from men, but it wasn’t a lesser role. The women owned virtually all of what a twenty-first- century person would call real property. At least in Carthage proper and those places under its direct control. So she sat here on an inlaid terrace, drinking some excellent wine from silver chalices, while chatting with three women in gowns that exposed their breasts. It was surreal, but not offensive. These women were not property. They were property owners.
Then the servant brought in the next amphora, and Allison hid a grimace. This woman was property. Quite literally property, a Gallic slave from what would in a future world be Spain. She had reddish-blond hair and a very self-effacing manner.
Again, Allison looked over at Tina and saw a carefully hidden headshake. One thing that Allison did know, because she was there when it was decided, was that Tina was the chief of station, the chief spy, for the ship people and New America here in Carthage.
Allison made notes on the vintage on her slate. The handwritten notes were translated to text and sent to the Queen even as she wrote. She would have a record when she got back.
Queen of the Sea, Carthage Harbor
November 20, 320 BCE
The supplies were loaded and the Queen left for Formentera Island, which would be the next stop on their itinerary. At Formentera Island, they stopped for several days while the owners of that island provided guided tours of the under-construction hotel complex. They also got goods from that set of tribal lands that wasn’t yet Gaul, much less France, Spain, or Germany: sturgeon and caviar, beef and barley, amber, and everything else anyone could think of that the ship people might want.
The ship people didn’t actually want most of these items, because they had better goods that were made cheaper. Things like combs and brushes were of great value and tremendous cost to make for the locals but not for the ship people. On the other hand, the concentration of goods was in itself a draw for other traders.
That was rapidly turning the small town on Formentera Island into a hub for international trade. It was nominally Carthaginian, but not in Carthage, so it traded with anyone that put in. That anyone probably included the occasional pirate. But then, in the fourth century BCE, almost any ship—military or civilian—would turn temporarily pirate if the opportunity arose.
Fort Plymouth, Trinidad
December 5, 320 BCE
“It’s good to have you back, Captain,” President Al Wiley said, shaking Lars Floden’s hand with all the appearance of genuine friendship.
Lars was not completely convinced. Not because President Wiley didn’t sound sincere. He did. Not even because they had had conflicts in the past. They had. But at the same time they had worked together well enough. No, the reason that Lars was less than confident was because Al was a twenty-first-century American politician, and such people made swindlers seem honest and straightforward in comparison.
“I really am, Captain,” Wiley assured him as he guided Lars to a chair in a corner of his office. It was hand-carved of native wood and the cushions were native-dyed llama wool. It was no doubt bought from one of the native tribes dotting the coast of northern Venezuela. They were good at woodworking because many of their houses were built on stilts. Wiley took another at right angles to it, with a coffee table between them. The table looked more modern. In fact, Lars was pretty sure it had been made in the Queen’s carpentry shop during the months that the Queen had sat in the harbor helping build the tools that Fort Plymouth was using to build the tools to build a twenty-first-century world out of a Stone Age starter kit.
President Wiley saw him looking and seemed to read his mind. “We’ve had to re-jigger our notion of what ‘Stone Age’ actually means quite a bit since we landed among them. And we have the whole range from hunter gatherers to not-quite-Mayans within a few hundred miles.”
Lars nodded. He got regular reports and the Queen visited Fort Plymouth monthly. The “not-quite-Mayans” were several tribes that failed to fully enter the archaeological record because they built their cities out of wood, not stone, and built them on stilts, often in floodplains.
Apparently this was going to be a friendly meeting. “For all sorts of practical reasons. The factories on the Queen have a new load of cylinders and steam piping. The presence of the Queen, even more than the Reliance, acts as a warning to the locals.”
That much was true. Even though it was the Reliance that had performed the punitive expedition against the Tupky alliance a few months ago, the Queen was larger and just more visually impressive.
“As well as a promise,” Wiley continued, “because we have been touting the university you are establishing on the Queen all up and down the Venezuelan coast. We have a group of young people anxious to board the Queen and begin their studies. And most important of all, Captain Floden, we need to talk. And we need to do it face to face, not over the radio.”
Lars felt a sudden apprehension that he was about to buy a lemon at an outlandish price. As well as a strong urge to retreat back to the Queen and never return to the port at Fort Plymouth.
Just then a native woman came in, pushing a cart of snacks and tea. The cart was wood with simple leather bearings made in Fort Plymouth. The rubber on the wooded wheels was locally produced, one of the products of the high-end Stone Age culture that existed in central and northern South America when they landed. The woman pushing it was dressed in a calf-length skirt, sandals, and not much else. Nothing at all covering her chest. Lars lifted an eyebrow at Wiley.
“Wasn’t my idea.” Wiley shrugged. “The locals, from hunter-gatherer types to city dwellers, don’t have much of a nudity taboo and they took offense when some of our old biddies, of both sexes, suggested that their lack of attire was immoral. It became quite a political issue in our legislature. And even if we ship people have a prominent position in the new nation we are forging here, we are outnumbered by the locals by a large margin. And that’s only going to get worse as the proto-citizens of the coastal tribes get the vote over the next couple of years. A lot of our politicians recognized the demographics and flip-flopped on public nudity as soon as the backlash developed. Looking to the next election, when a lot of those nekkid people will be voters.” Wiley didn’t sound thrilled about the situation.
Lars had a relaxed Scandinavian view on the subject; nudity didn’t particularly bother him. He put that aside with a shake of his head. “What was it you wanted to speak to me in person about?”
“We want to buy two of your lifeboats, Captain Floden. The big ones. They will become the basis of our navy until we can get ships built.”
“I have a responsibility to my passengers and crew, Mr. President, and it’s not one I can or will abandon.”
“I know that, Captain, and I would never ask you to. But with the conversion, the Queen only carries three thousand passengers, including the factory workers who work in the Queen’s shops, and six hundred crew. I would never ask you to sell us more than you can do without. Two of the three-hundred-passenger mega-lifeboats would provide us with coastal defense and the ability to reach the coast of Venezuela in force, and not endanger your passengers at all. Especially when you consider that you have all the inflatable life rafts.”
“Those inflatables are a backup system. They have no engines and are not designed for long-term use.”
“True. But they can be towed by your lifeboats and they are covered against weather. They represent a real capacity that means you’re safe even if you lose some of the ‘real’ lifeboats. Besides, Captain, you’ve been using the lifeboats as ship’s boats since The Event put us all here.”
“That’s one of the problems, Mr. President. We are putting more strain on the engines than we ever intended. We are having to use the machine shops on the Queen to fabricate new parts for the engines just to keep them running. Should the worst happen, I don’t want my people stuck in the middle of the Atlantic with a busted engine and no way to get to shore.”
They kept arguing, but Lars knew that Al Wiley was correct. Besides, the Queen needed the silver and gold that Al Wiley was offering. Not everyone in Europe trusted ship money. There were gold and silver mines in Central and South America, and the locals were the precious metals to the ship people on Trinidad on a pound-for-pound basis in exchange for good steel knives and other tools.
The iron was mostly bought in Europe, transported to Trinidad by the Reliance, then remelted and converted to steel here in Trinidad, using oil-burning furnaces in a crucible process that was slow, tedious, and expensive, compared to back in the world, but produced good steel.
* * *
After lunch, they got back to it.
“I want to convince you to change the schedule of the Queen of the Sea,” Wiley told Lars bluntly. Almost belligerently. “We are working on steam sailing ships that will run to five hundred tons of carrying capacity. They will have a sailing rig and steam engines. The sailing rig will be the main power source, with the engine as a backup for when the winds are blowing the wrong way, or not blowing at all. But it’s going to take us upwards of two years, maybe three or four years, before the first ship comes off the quays. And that’s using all the steam-powered heavy equipment that we have been able to put together.”
“That seems a good reason for us to stay on the route we’re on now. With all respect, Mr. President, your colony here probably can’t survive if the Queen isn’t bringing goods and colonists from Europe on a regular basis,” Lars said. “We have a schedule that is quite profitable for the Queen, between the university and the paying passengers, not to mention the cargo we can manage. And it’s a capacity you desperately need if you are going to survive, much less prosper.”
Al Wiley shook his head. “Don’t you think I know that, Captain? I have nightmares about the Roanoke colony, and wake up to worse. I watched a man die yesterday, from complications due to the improperly purified bovine insulin we are using. I held the hand of a man who had actually built a homebuilt airplane back in the world. The only person on the Queen, so the only person in the world, to have actually built an airplane is dead. All his real-world experience is lost. Because we can’t make decent insulin yet. And he’s not the only one. Half the reason that Fort Plymouth is so crowded together is because we are desperately trying to keep walking distance down for our more elderly passengers. Every time one of them dies—and we’ve lost over five hundred of the over-sixty-five crowd since The Event—we lose a treasure trove of experience.
“Still, Captain, if we are going to spread civilization—and even more, if we are going to develop trading partners—we need to get started on it sooner rather than later. Also, to be blunt, the Queen of the Sea is the most impressive thing on the oceans of this world and will remain so for the foreseeable future. We are going to need that sense of awe and the tacit threat it represents to keep our trade ships safe.”
Lars considered. Wiley wasn’t the first person to suggest that they run a more flexible route. Eumenes wanted them in the Persian Gulf. Any number of ship people wanted them to go find coffee plants. Others wanted them to go find real tea and other goods in China, like silk, and cotton from India, Peru, or Mexico. No one was really sure which, though Wikipedia said there was wild cotton in Peru.
In truth, there was a very great deal that improved trade around the world would do for the world, and Lars was inclined to do it. But he wasn’t going to do it for nothing. He started negotiating.
214–216 12th Street, Fort Plymouth, Trinidad
December 7, 320 BCE
Carthalo sat on the wooden bench with a cloth in his hand and a bowl of emery mud next to him. He dipped the cloth in the mud and started rubbing the lens that was locked into the wood-and-wire rack. It was slow, tedious work. The finer the finish, the better the lens. But while he had to get rid of the rough bits, he couldn’t change the shape without distorting the lens. So it was rub, rinse clean, check, rub, rinse clean, check. Over and over and over again.
Stella Matthews was working on a machine to grind lenses, but Carthalo was doing it the way his people and the Greeks had been doing it for the last century and more. It was a slow process, but you could make a lens that would start a fire, and as he had learned since his arrival in this strange land, a lens that would project an image on a screen or, in combination with other lenses, make a telescope.
Queen of the Sea, off Fort Plymouth
December 10, 320 BCE
“We’ll be going to Mexico first,” Eleanor Kinney said. “Or at least that part of the world that will become Mexico in a few hundred more years.” She lifted a spoon full of chocolate ice cream. “It’s this that ultimately decided the matter. We can get chocolate here, but we think we will be able to get it cheaper up north.”
Roxane nodded. She didn’t have chocolate ice cream. She was eating apple pie with whipped cream for dessert. They were in the Royal Buffet. “After that?”
“It depends on how long it takes, but back here, then if we can be sure that Ptolemy will have oil for us, we may head directly for the Horn of Africa and up to the Red Sea.”
“What’s the rush?”
“Sugar cane. It’s probably to be found in India or New Guinea, and a load of cuttings that we could plant here or in the Caribbean could develop into a lucrative industry.”
Roxane looked at Eleanor with a raised eyebrow, and Eleanor tried not to bristle. “The production of sugar doesn’t need to involve slavery. We can create processing machines. And if cutting cane is going to be a labor intensive chore, it can be done by sugarcane farmers who own their own land.”
“But will it?” Roxane asked, then held up a hand that was still holding a fork full of apple pie to stop Eleanor’s response. “I’m not condemning you.” Then, with a sardonic twist of her lips, she added, “I’m honestly starting to think you are right about slavery, at least in the long term. But the circumstances that led to your history’s extensive use of slavery in sugar production are present in the here and now.”
Eleanor nodded, even as she noted the strange accent that Roxane’s English had developed through her extensive use of text-to-speech software. She sounded a bit mechanical and mispronounced certain words. Roxane spent at least an hour every day on the exercise machines in the gym, and for all of that time she was listening to Wikipedia articles that Dag had used text-to-speech software to turn into audio files. It wasn’t that Roxane couldn’t read. She could get by quite well reading Greek, but reading English in Latin script was going to take a bit longer. However, she did have an excellent ear for languages and in the past months had learned to understand English quite well. Even to speak it well, if with a computer accent. The computer accent wasn’t unique to Roxane. It was becoming quite common among the people from this time.
“It’s not only sugar,” Eleanor said. “There is also Indian cotton, which may be different in fiber length or color, as well as a host of other products.” Eleanor stopped, because cotton, like sugar, had made extensive use of slavery in its history. “Darn it. Is there anything that didn’t use slavery to produce?”
Roxane laughed. “Well, furs from hunters, but other than that, I can’t think of anything off the top of my head. What honestly concerns me more is that these delays mean that Eumenes, as well as Eurydice and Philip, are going to be on their own longer.”
“What have you heard?”
“Not much. It takes time to set up the radio and Eumenes seems to be moving fast.”