Harry Turtledove - End of the Beginning

This time, Cynthia Laanui threw back her head and chortled. “Well, Commander, that proves one thing for sure,” she said, and her voice suddenly held no mirth at all. “You’ve never been a queen, or a king, either.”

“No, your Majesty, I never have,” he said, and fled Iolani Palace faster than the American fleet had fled before the triumphant Japanese earlier in the year.

KENZO AND HIROSHI TAKAHASHI took the Oshima Maru out of Kewalo Basin by themselves. Their father had another radio talk scheduled. His words would go back to Japan and all over the world. Kenzo wished more than anything else in the world that he would just keep quiet.

Whatever Kenzo wished, he wasn’t going to get it. “Dad likes being a celebrity,” he said bitterly. He was at the rudder, Hiroshi trimming the sails. They would trade off later. By now, dealing with the sampan’s rigging and the way she went under sail was second nature to both of them, though neither had known anything about handling a sailboat before Oahu ran out of diesel fuel even for fishermen. Baptism by total immersion, Kenzo thought: not an idea that would have occurred to him had his father stayed in Yamaguchi Prefecture instead of coming to Hawaii.

His brother only shrugged. “Dad’s made his choices. We’ve made ours. Right this minute, I have to say his look better.”

Another measure of the choices he and Kenzo had made was that they both used English. Some men even of their father’s generation had become fluent in it, but Jiro Takahashi remained at home only in Japanese. In English, he understood yes and no and thank you and most obscenities. Except for throwing in an occasional Oh, Jesus Christ! and the like, he didn’t speak any, though.

“We’re getting away,” Kenzo said. “Only thing is, I wish to God we didn’t have to come back again.”

Hiroshi chuckled. “Can’t very well sail to San Francisco from here.”

“I know.” Kenzo sounded as mournful as he felt. “I’ve thought about it. We might be able to catch enough fish to keep us going-we probably could. But she wouldn’t carry enough water to get us there.”

Now Hiroshi stared at him. “You have thought about it.”

“I said so, didn’t I?” Kenzo looked back over his shoulder. The faster Oahu receded behind him, the better he liked it. “I even went to the library to dope out which way the winds blow between here and there. But I’ll tell you what really put the kibosh on things for me.”

“Yeah?” his brother said.

“Yeah.” Kenzo nodded. “You know what they’re doing with the Japanese on the mainland, right? They’re throwing ’em into camps.” How Imperial Japanese propaganda here in Hawaii thundered about that! At first, Kenzo had thought it was a lie. By now, he was only too sure it was true. “The U.S. Navy would probably sink us the minute they spotted us-we’re Japs, right? The Japanese don’t want Japs who think they’re Americans, and neither do the Americans.”

A fairy tern, white as snow with big black eyes, glided along with the Oshima Maru. After a while, the bird perched at the top of the mast. “Damn hitch-hiker,” Hiroshi said.

“Yeah.” Kenzo left it there. Hiroshi hadn’t tried to tell him he was crazy or to say the Navy would treat them fine if it found them sailing northeast. Kenzo wished his brother would have. In that case, he might have been wrong. The way things were, he knew damn well he was right.

Land slowly slid under the horizon. When you traveled under sail, nothing happened in a hurry. But for the slap of waves against the hull and the sound of the wind in the sails and the lines, the Oshima Maru was ghost-quiet. It was as if time itself had been yanked back to some earlier, more patient century-and which one mattered very little. Men had been sailing like this for three thousand years, probably longer.

The tern flew away. A frigatebird-by comparison, almost as big as a light plane-soared by overhead. Its red throat sac was small now, not full of air and big as a kid’s balloon: the bird was looking for lunch instead of a mate. Frigatebirds were pirates. If they had their druthers, they let other birds do the hard work of diving into the sea, then robbed them of their catch.

Hiroshi’s head followed the frigatebird across the sky. “Thought for a second it was an airplane,” he said sheepishly.

“Uh-huh.” Kenzo had made that same mistake himself a time or two. He almost let it go there. But he asked what he wanted to ask: “Whose?”

“If it was a plane, I figured it would be Japanese and hoped it wouldn’t,” his brother replied. “You?”

“Same thing. Not this time, though, ’cause I knew from the start it was just a bird.”

Talk of planes brought Kenzo back into the middle of the twentieth century, but not for long. There were no planes overhead, so he forgot about them. All he saw now, but for the sea and the occasional bird, were a few masts from other sampans with rigs as new as the Oshima Maru ’s-and as old as time.

On he went, farther from Oahu than he would have needed to go before the war turned everything upside down. Back then, fish had been part of what Oahu ate. Now they were a vital part of what the island ate, and the sampans skimmed every fish they could from the Pacific. Even the ocean couldn’t keep up with that kind of fishing forever.

What happens when we have to go so far out to sea that travel time really cuts into how much we can bring back? Kenzo wondered, not for the first time. As usual, only one answer occurred to him. We get even hungrier, that’s what.

As his father had taught him-something he preferred not to remember-he looked for lots of boobies and other birds diving into the sea. That would tell him where the fish were likely to be. If that frigatebird was still anywhere in the neighborhood, no doubt it was doing the same damn thing.

Hiroshi suddenly pointed to starboard. “What’s that?”

“Huh?” Kenzo’s head had been in the clouds-except there were no clouds. He looked to the right himself. Something floated on the Pacific there. Gauging distance wasn’t easy-nor was telling how big that thing was. “Just looks like a piece of junk to me,” he said doubtfully.

“I don’t think so.” Hiroshi shaded his eyes with the palm of his hand. “Steer over that way, will you?”

“Okay.” Kenzo did. The breeze, which had been remarkably strong and steady ever since they set out, didn’t fail now. He’d half expected it would, just from the innate perversity of the world. Hiroshi swung the boom to catch it to best advantage.

The approach didn’t happen in a hurry anyway. It was close to ten minutes later before Hiroshi said, “See?”

“Yeah,” Kenzo answered.

“That’s a life raft, or I’m a haole, ” his brother said.

“Yeah,” Kenzo repeated. He waited till they’d sailed a little closer, then cupped his hands in front of his mouth and yelled, “Ahoy, the raft! Anybody there?” God only knew how long it had floated, or where it had started out. It might hold a sun-shrunken corpse-or no one at all.

He felt like cheering when a head popped up into sight. It was, he saw, a blond head. An American head, he thought, excitement tingling through him. “Who’re you?” the fellow croaked.

“Fishermen out of Honolulu,” Kenzo answered. “We’ll do whatever we can for you.” He waited to see if Hiroshi would say anything different. Hiroshi said not a thing.

The American flier-he couldn’t be anything else-said, “Thank God.” He had several days’ growth of beard; the stubble glinted red-gold in the sunshine. As the Oshima Maru skimmed closer, Kenzo saw his eyes get wider and more avid. And then they widened again, in a different way. The man ducked back down into the raft. This time, he came up holding a.45. “You’re Japs!” he yelled.