He raised a brow. "Thought you did that as a middie," he said.

"Well, yeah, but that was… structured. Commodore Alston made a point of inviting groups of officer-candidates to dinner now and then."

"She doesn't bite," Cofflin said. "I read your report on the Emancipator's trials, too. Looked good."

"We did have that problem with longitudinal stability."

"Ayup. That's why they call it a test flight, girl," he replied, hiding a smile. "And she's going to give you good news, next time you see her in her official capacity," Cofflin went on. "You can take the second off the lieutenant-but you didn't hear it from me."

"Yes!" Vicki whopped, pumping a fist, then self-consciously calming when Martha looked back over her shoulder with a raised brow. Cofflin had noted that the younger generation were a bit more spontaneous than his; probably influence from all the Albans around nowadays.

"I was a little afraid somebody else would be put in to command the Emancipator when it was finished," she said, burbling a bit.

"Doubt keeps' you on your toes," Jared said, and then, "Evening, Ian, Doreen," when they met the Arnsteins outside the John Cofflin House.

"Evening all-hi, Vicki. Got the whole tribe with you, I see," Ian said. David was waving to the Cofflins' four from his father's shoulders, prompting a chorus of "Give me a ride. Daddy! "

"Ayup," Cofflin said. Then, "all right, Jenny, up you go."

He hoisted his adopted daughter to his shoulders; she wrapped her arms around his forehead and crowed gleefully. Cofflin gripped her feet, partly for stability and partly to keep her sharp little heels from drumming on his ribs. Marian went up on Vicki's shoulders, and Jared Junior on Doreen's; somehow, it didn't occur to anyone to ask Martha. She took a small hand in each of hers instead, smiling at the children's giggling and the mock horse noises coming from the other adults.

The bank and some of the shops were closing down, but the restaurants and bars on Main were full, spilling cheerful lantern light and noise and cooking smells onto the cobbles. He could see right through the Cappuccino Cafe to its little garden plaza beyond, hear the fiddle and guitar and flute from the trio performing there and the voices of the customers singing along, clapping and tapping their boots to the tune.

"That's a new one," he said.

We just lost sight of the Brandt Point light

Down lies the bay before us

And the wind has blown some cold today

With just a wee touch of snow.

Along the shore from Eel Point Head, hard a-beam Muskeget

Tonight we let the anchors go, down in Fogarty's Cove!

It had a nice swinging lilt to it. "Sounds different now, that sort of song," he said. One of the many small compensations of the Event was that with electricity a strictly rationed rarity, most of the types of music he hated with a passion were impossible. He wasn't alone in that, either. Marian had told him once that to get rid of gangsta rap she'd have been willing to be stranded in the Jurassic with a pack of velociraptors in white sheets.

My Sal has hair like a raven's wing,

But her tongue is like her mother's

With hands that make quick work of a chore

And eyes like the top of a stove

Come suppertime she'll walk the beach,

Wrapped in my old duffle

With her eyes upon the masthead reach

Down in Fogarty's Cove!

A girl was up on a table, dancing to the tune, but he'd give odds she wasn't American-born. Fiernan, from the wild, patterned grace of the movements-dancing was a big thing in their religion and they got a lot of practice.

She will walk the sandy shores so plain,

Watch the combers roll in

'Till I come to Wild Rose Chance again

Down in Fogarty's Cove!

"Certainly does have a different ring," Martha replied. "For one thing, half the people singing it really do make their living at sea."

Jared nodded a little wistfully. His job kept him ashore and pinned to his desk much of the time-although he did insist on getting away at this time of year, usually to harpoon bluefin tuna. He could easily afford to pay the Town tax straight up in money, but there was a satisfaction to doing something useful with your hands. Not to mention doing a hard, dangerous job well enough to gain the respect of youngsters.

He worked his big fisherman's hands. It got harder every year, and sometime he'd have to let nature take its course. There was always the Boojum, his little twenty-footer. Someday he'd teach his kids how to single-hand a ketch.

"Folkie stuff was always popular here," Ian said. "Like you said, it has more of a, hmmm, resonance now. I understood a lot more about Homer once I'd seen a real battle with chariots and spears… although that's something I could have lived with not knowing."

"Let 'em sing," Cofflin sighed. "Got a difficult couple of years coming, unless I miss my guess. They've all worked hard, they deserve a party."

It was the last evening of what some bureaucrat at the Town Building had named, with stunning originality, the Civic Harvest Festival. They still celebrated Thanksgiving in November, of course, but this marked that first harvest of rye and wheat and barley, the year of the Event.

The Councilors nodded and waved to friends and acquaintances as they turned south up Main; Jared returned a mounted policewoman's salute as she rode by with her double-barreled flintlock shotgun on one hip; the horseshoes beat a slow iron clangor on the stones with an occasional bright spark.

Have to think about putting down asphalt here, some note-taking mechanism in the back of his mind prompted. The tourists had liked authentic Ye Olde cobblestones, but they were as inconvenient as hell now, unlike the other features-lots of fireplaces, for instance-of Nantucket's mainly early-nineteenth-century downtown. The noise when a lot of iron-shod wagon wheels hit them had to be heard to be believed, for starters.

"I'll be damned," Ian said suddenly, craning his neck around so fast that his son whooped and buried his hands in the hair over Arnstein's ears.

"What?" Doreen said.

"I saw-"

"Saw what! Your jaw's dropping, Ian."

"I saw a tattooed Indian with a harpoon walking down toward the docks."

"Why not?" Cofflin asked. "There are a few of them working the tuna boats, they're good hands with a-"

Then he wheeled about himself. A barbed steel point glittered for a moment in the light from the streetlamp beside the Hub, but the bearer was quickly lost in the crowd.

"Gave me a bit of a chill," Ian said. Doreen nodded, and Martha gave a slight dry chuckle.

"Problem is," she said, "we've all had our sense of the impossible wrenched about, badly."

Cofflin nodded. He still woke up some days with that sense of dislocation, a feeling that the solid, tangible world he saw and smelled and tasted around him was just a veneer over chaos. Something that might spin away, dissolve like a mist at sea and leave… nothing? Or another exile beyond the world he knew. If once, why not again?

"What's wrong, Daddy?" Jenny said anxiously, feeling the moment of shivering tension in his shoulders.

"Nothing's wrong, Jenny," he said, reaching up with a reassuring pat and putting the same into his voice. Jenny'll grow up with that, he thought. The Event would seem quite reasonable, if you grew up with it. In a couple of generations they'd probably think of it as a myth, and 'way down the road some professorial pain in the ass would "prove" that it was a metaphor and hadn't happened at all.

They quieted the children and walked further up Main, past the Pacific Bank. Coast Guard House had been known as the East Brick back before the Event. A whaling skipper had built it and the two others beside it in the 1830s, red foursquare four-story mansions in the sober Federal style that rich Quakers had favored back then. All three and the Two Greeks, their neoclassical rivals across the street, had been owned by coofs, rich mainlanders who were not on the Island at the time of the Event.