Harry Turtledove - End of the Beginning

“Since when don’t you like to eat?” Oscar said.

“Eating is fine. Fishing is work. Would be worse if I didn’t get to surf-ride there and back again.” That qualifier was as far as Charlie would go. Oscar knew the native Hawaiians had fished with nets and spears. If that hadn’t taken the patience of Job, he didn’t know what would. But Charlie, like too many Hawaiians and hapa -Hawaiians these days, was willing to work only on what he enjoyed, and was convinced haoles would run rings around him everywhere else.

They sailed past Diamond Head. These days, an enormous Rising Sun floated from the dead volcano. So much for the Kingdom of Hawaii, Oscar thought. He didn’t say anything about that. Charlie Kaapu had no use at all for King Stanley Laanui, though he thought the redheaded Queen Cynthia was a knockout. From the pictures Oscar had seen of her, he did, too.

The empty road struck Oscar like a blow. There was still traffic in Honolulu, even if it was foot traffic instead of automobiles. Here, there was just-nobody. No tourists heading up to see the Mormon temple near Laie. No Japanese dentist off to visit his mom and dad at the little general store they ran. No nothing, not hardly.

Charlie saw the same thing. “Whole island seems dead,” he said, and spat into the Pacific.

“Yeah.” Oscar nodded. The otherworldly pace at which things happened when you were under sail only added to the impression. The landscape changed only very slowly. The emptiness didn’t seem to change at all. And then it did: Oscar and Charlie passed a long column of Japanese troops marching east. They passed them slowly, too, for the Japs marched almost as fast as they sailed. A couple of Japs pointed out to sea as the sailboards went by. Oscar said, “I’m almost even glad to see those guys, you know what I mean?”

“I know what you mean,” Charlie said. “I ain’t glad to see them any which way. We’re lucky the bastards aren’t shooting at us.”

Oscar’s head whipped back toward the coast. If he saw Japs dropping to one knee or even raising their rifles, he was going to jump in the water. They’d been known to kill people for the fun of it. But the soldiers in the funny-colored khaki uniforms just kept trudging along. After another moment, Oscar figured out what made the Japanese uniforms seem funny: they were of a shade different from the U.S.

Army khaki he was used to. That was all.

Slowly-but not slowly enough after Charlie’s comment-the soldiers fell astern of the sailboards. “We don’t want to go ashore where they can catch up with us,” Charlie said, and Oscar nodded once more.

When they rounded Makapu Point, Oscar saw that the lighthouse there had been bombed. That pained him. The light had been welcoming and warning ships for a long time. To see it ruined… was another sign of how things had changed.

Oahu itself changed on the windward coast. Oscar and Charlie got spatters of rain almost at once, and then more than spatters. It rained all the time here. The air felt thick and hot and wet, the way it did back East on the mainland. The sea began heaving erratically, like a restless beast.

Everything he could see on the shore was lush and green. The Koolau Range rose steeply from the sea. The volcanic rocks would have been jagged, but jungle softened their outlines; they might almost have been covered in emerald velvet. Remembering a paleontology class, he pointed to the mountains and said, “They look like giant teeth from an Iguanodon. ”

Charlie Kaapu looked not at the Koolau Range but at him. “What the hell you talkin’ ’bout?” he asked. Oscar decided the world could live without his similes.

He quickly rediscovered why they called this the Windward Coast: the wind kept trying to blow him and Charlie ashore. Long stretches of the coastline were rocky, not sandy. He had to keep fighting to claw his way out to sea.

Kaneohe Peninsula was the last obstacle he and Charlie got by before putting in for the evening. They barely got by it, too. If they had to put in there, they could have, at least as far as the beach went. But what had been a Marine base was manned these days by Japanese soldiers. Oscar had no desire to get to know them better.

Wrecked American flying boats still lay along the beach like so many unburied bodies. None of them had engines on their wings. Various other bits were missing from this machine or that one. As the Japs had all over Hawaii, they’d taken whatever they could use.

Light was fading when Charlie pointed to a small stretch of sand beyond Kaneohe. Oscar nodded. They both guided their sailboards up onto the beach. “Whew!” Oscar said, sprawling on the sand. “I’m whipped.”

“Hard work,” Charlie agreed; the phrase, translated literally from the Japanese, had become part of the local language. “Don’t have much in the way of fish, either.”

Before, he’d grumbled about the indignities of fishing. Oscar saw no point in reminding him of that. He just said, “We won’t starve.” He checked his match safe. “Matches are still dry. We can make a fire and cook what we’ve got.”

They gathered driftwood for fuel. The rain had stopped, which made things easier. Charlie Kaapu walked along the edge of the beach. Every so often, he would bend down. He came back with some clams. “Here,” he said. “We do these, too.”

The clams weren’t very big-only a bite or so apiece-but anything was better than nothing. After that, Oscar and Charlie lay down on the sand. That would have been comfortable enough if it hadn’t rained several times. Whenever it did, it woke Oscar up. He thought about taking shelter, but there was no shelter to take. The night seemed endless.

“Some fun,” Charlie Kaapu said as they put their sailboards back into the water.

Oscar couldn’t help rising to that. “Whose idea was this?” he inquired sweetly. Charlie sent him a dirty look.

They spent all day beating their way northwest along the beautiful but often forbidding coast. But they didn’t worry about food for long: Charlie caught a big ahi less than an hour after they raised their sails.

“How hungry are you?” he asked Oscar.

“What do you mean?”

“Want some raw, the way the Japs eat it?”

“Sure. Why not? I’ve done that a few times.” Carefully, because the water was still rough, Oscar guided his sailboard alongside Charlie’s. The hapa -Hawaiian passed him a good-sized chunk of pink flesh. He haggled bite-sized pieces off with a knife. They weren’t neat and elegant, the way they would have been in a fancy Japanese restaurant. He didn’t care. The flesh was firm and rich and hardly fishy at all. “Might almost be beef,” he remarked.

“It’s okay, but it ain’t that good,” Charlie said. The Hawaiian side of his family would never have seen a cow till whites brought them to the islands some time in the nineteenth century. Charlie no doubt didn’t worry about that one bit. He just knew what he liked. Locally born Japanese often preferred hamburgers and steaks to raw fish, too. Nowadays, a lot of them were probably pretending to a love of sushi and sashimi they didn’t really have.

Because the surfers had to tack so much, they made slow progress. They needed two and a half days to round Kahuku Point near Opana, Oahu’s northernmost projection. Oscar whooped when they finally did. “All downhill from here!” he said. And so it was, as far as the wind went. But getting back to the shore to sleep that night was an adventure all by itself. Big waves pounded the beaches. Oscar and Charlie took down their masts and sails before surf-riding in. Oscar would have liked to go in with the sail up, but if something went wrong it would have cost him his rigging in surf like that. He would have been stuck with no way to get back to Waikiki but lugging his surfboard down the Kamehameha Highway-a distinctly unappetizing prospect.