Harry Turtledove - Days of Infamy

For as long as anyone but the oldest residents could remember, Americans had ruled the roost and called the shots in Hawaii. The sight of those prisoners-and the smell of them, for they hadn’t bathed any time lately, which became only too clear as they went by-said one era had passed here and another was beginning. The handful of Japanese guards who herded the Americans along seemed a different and superior species.

Still more Japanese soldiers followed the prisoners. “Not bad,” Okamoto said. “Funny watching all those haoles go by like so many sheep.”

“I was thinking the same thing,” Jiro answered. “They didn’t let Japanese join their divisions here. Now they’re paying the price.”

“That’s the truth.” But Okamoto lowered his voice and added, “We’re all paying the price now. It’s going to be a hungry time.”

Takahashi nodded. “I’ve got to get that Doi fellow to put a mast on my sampan. That’s not going to wait any more. If I can catch fish, I won’t starve.” Soup kitchens fed the refugees in the botanical garden. There wasn’t enough to go around, and what there was wasn’t very good.

“Bound to be a good idea for you. Nobody knows where fuel’s going to come from now,” Okamoto said. He nudged Jiro. “Nobody will know what you eat that you don’t bring in, either. You’re lucky.”

“Some luck,” Jiro said. No home, his wife missing and probably dead…

No matter what he thought, old man Okamoto nodded this time. “Yes, lucky. Your children are alive, and fishermen don’t starve any more than cooks do.”

“I won’t be a fisherman any more if Doi can’t rig the sampan.” As always, saying that frightened Jiro. He’d been a fisherman as long as he could remember. His father had started taking him out on the Inland Sea when he was a very little boy. If he couldn’t be a fisherman, what could he be? Anything at all?

Okamoto shrugged. “He’ll manage. He’d better manage. If we don’t get boats out there, nobody eats.”

Jiro grunted. That was too likely to be true. As stocks of everything got shorter, prices went on soaring. But if Okamoto or anybody else thought the sampan fleet could feed Oahu by itself… Jiro knew what a dream that was. There weren’t enough sampans. There probably weren’t enough fish, either. And the sampans wouldn’t be able to go out nearly so far with sails as they could with their diesels. Or if they did go out as far, they wouldn’t be able to do it so often.

“Japan can’t want us to starve,” Jiro said.

Another shrug from Okamoto. “Why should she care? As long as she’s got soldiers and airplanes here, what difference do we make? We’re just a nuisance.”

Shaking his head, Jiro said, “That can’t be so. You and I, we’re Japanese, too.” Old man Okamoto only shrugged again.

AT OHIO STATE, Jane Armitage had read Candide. The advice the naive hero had got could be boiled down to one phrase: tend your garden. While Jane was in college, she’d never understood what important advice it could be. She did now. Now she had a garden of her own.

Her little plot of turnips and potatoes had sprouted. With luck, they would grow fast. She eyed the turnip greens. The only people she’d ever heard of who ate such things were niggers. She shrugged. If you got hungry enough, you’d eat almost anything.

A mynah bird fluttered down and landed in her plot. It pecked at something: a bug. “Good for you,” Jane said. “Eat lots of bugs. Get fat.” Were mynahs good to eat? She wouldn’t have been surprised if, somewhere on the island, some people were already finding out.

And then there were zebra doves. The blue-faced birds were so tame, you could grab them with your bare hands. They made pigeons seem smart by comparison. They weren’t very big, but they were meat. And they were all over the place. They ate anything that wasn’t nailed down. She’d shooed them out of the plot more times than she could count. If she didn’t shoo them… If she grabbed them or netted them…

Could I wring their necks? Could I pluck them and gut them? She wasn’t a farm girl. She’d never dealt with chickens or hogs or anything like that. She suspected that gutting a zebra dove might make her lose her lunch. But if she had no lunch to lose, if she was empty in there… And after she’d done it a few times, wouldn’t she get used to it?

Something brown and low to the ground skittered toward the mynah bird, which fluttered away. The mongoose reared up in almost palpable frustration. Jane didn’t worry about him. He didn’t care about turnips or potatoes or any of the other crops different people were growing. He might assassinate some zebra doves, but that was as far as he went toward being a pest.

Jane wished he would have gone as far as assassinating rats. That was why people had brought mongooses here in the first place. But the mongooses preferred eating birds that were out and about during the day, as they were. Rats came out at night. Traps didn’t do much to discourage them. Jane had known about rats back in Columbus. Nothing did much to discourage them.

A Japanese soldier tramped by. Jane bent and dug out a weed with her trowel. She didn’t want the Jap paying any special attention to her, either because he thought she was lazy or because he liked her looks. Bad things could happen both ways.

He kept going. She breathed a silent sigh of relief. Some of the local Japanese women had got friendly, or more than friendly, with the new occupiers. And, to Jane’s shame, so had a few of the local white women. If you can’t join ’em, lick ’em, she thought scornfully. The heat that rose to her cheeks after that had nothing to do with the warm sun in the sky. That was the sort of thing Fletch would have said.

As she got rid of another weed, she wondered how Fletch was doing. However much she wanted not to, she couldn’t help herself. They’d been together most of her adult life, and apart for not very long. She was used to worrying about what was going on with him. She didn’t want him dead, just out of her life. She’d got that. For all she knew, he was dead, whether she wanted him that way or not.

A shadow made her look up. There stood Yosh Nakayama, watching her. Major Hirabayashi’s local go-between nodded. “You do well,” he said in his slow, careful English. “Plot looks good.”

“Thanks,” Jane said. She didn’t want to collaborate with the Japs and their quislings, but she didn’t want to get them angry at her, either. Very bad things happened if the Japs got mad at you.

“Hope everything grows fast,” Nakayama said. “Hope food we have lasts till it does.”

“Aren’t the Japanese”-Jane was careful not to say Japs to a Jap-“ bringing in supplies?”

“For their own men, yes. For anybody else…” Nakayama shrugged. “They don’t have a lot of ships to spare.” By the way he said it, that was liable to be an understatement.

“What do we do if… if things run out?”

The Hawaiian Japanese man shrugged again. “Eat sugarcane. Eat pineapple. Eat whatever birds and fruit we can. Then we start to starve.” He didn’t wait for any more questions. With a curt nod, he walked away to inspect the work of some other involuntary gardener.

Jane eyed the zebra doves even more thoughtfully than she had before.

She worked till almost sundown. Her hands had blistered at first. Now they were starting to callus. Her nails were short, and had dirt under them. Her face was sunburned, her hair a sweaty mess. She didn’t worry as much about that as she’d thought she would. All her neighbors were in the same boat. And if that boat happened to be the Titanic … She shoved the thought aside.