Samuel Florman - The Aftermath

For the moment, however, there was nothing more to be told. The other crew members added a few details, but essentially corroborated McIntosh’s fantastic story. The men seemed a capable, experienced group, but it was clear that they had been shaken by their encounter with Queen Ranavolana. It wasn’t the danger that seemed to bother them as much as the eeriness of it all.

Captain Nordstrom dismissed the crew. “And thank you, gentlemen, for your clear, detailed report and your behavior under such pressure. You are a credit to all of us. Please keep this information to yourselves, as much as possible. I understand that it is a wonderful sea tale that you probably want to share with others… but I would prefer—and I believe I speak for Dr. Hardy and the other leaders—that you characterize the incident as simply an encounter with a few hungry people in a boat.”

“Understood, Captain,” McIntosh volunteered, with a significant glance at the bedraggled, still-excited crew. “We’ll do our best.” The men shrugged and shuffled and mumbled their agreement.

Dr. Hardy spoke up: “And our thanks to the Frosts for their erudite briefing.”

When the Frosts and McIntosh’s group left, Nordstrom, Hardy Senior, and Hardy Junior sat quietly for several long minutes. The seasoned engineer was the first to break the silence. “We could spend many hours speculating about this bizarre situation,” he said; “but I suggest we defer that to another day and direct our attention to practical planning and action.”

The captain agreed. He turned to the younger man. “It is important that you keep an accurate, complete record of all of this—very important.”

“I understand, sir,” Wil Hardy said.

“This incident will require us to call a special meeting of the Governing Council, followed by a session with the Coordinating Committee,” Dr. Hardy said. “And we will need a clear, focused agenda. Well, there’s no time like the present.”

With that, Hardy and Nordstrom set to work preparing such an agenda, along with specific recommendations. Abruptly, they started to dictate, taking turns, and editing each other’s comments in a remarkable display of cooperative composition. The younger Hardy turned to a clean page in his notebook and began to write as rapidly as he could:

First, we recommend that there be no change in the operations of the fishing fleet. We are not prepared to embark on a naval war, nor to put what few arms we have into the hands of our fishermen. If we have to forfeit an occasional boatload of fish, so be it. At the moment, there does not seem to be any great peril to the crews. If the raids persist and become more worrisome, or if it turns out that there are more pirate ships sailing the seas, this policy should be immediately reviewed.

Wil Hardy wrote quickly, grateful that the two leaders spoke in more or less complete sentences. But there was a gnawing feeling of doubt and fear in his gut.

Second, this incident compels us to address without delay a matter we had hoped to defer: national defense—or, since we have no formal nation to speak of, let us say military security. We suggest that Deck Officer Carl Gustafsson, representing our Governing Council, and Stephen Healey, representing the Ulundi Indaba, be designated to co-chair a Defense Committee. There are military people among both the Inlanders and the Newcomers, and a small number of them should be convened to make preliminary strategic plans.

Obviously, from what we have heard, we must consider the possibility of attack from the sea. But it is only prudent also to consider potential invasion by land. We have been assuming that outside of the Ulundi Circle there is nothing but death and devastation. Yet we seem to have forgotten about Madagascar, even though we were told it was partly within the safety zone. And there may well be other pockets of survival about which we know nothing. Not that we should expect other survivors to be hostile. But it would be folly to make no preparations at all.

Sensible, Wil thought, although far from reassuring.

The Defense Committee should make plans for armed forces—probably in the form of militia, since we cannot afford to assign people full time to military service. And the Committee must make recommendations concerning armaments—the use of such guns as we have, and the manufacture of ammunition and new weapons. This manufacture will naturally have to be processed through the Joint Planning Subcommittee. Difficult trade-offs will be entailed, since we cannot let the production of armaments constrain vital industrial development. In this domain, final decisions should be authorized by the entire Coordinating Committee.

The enterprise is inherently complex and dangerous. It is crucial that any armed forces we establish must be completely under control of the communal authorities. We do not want military juntas in a position to usurp authority. Yet to do nothing is to leave ourselves helpless in the face of potential aggression.

Wil Hardy felt a cold chill grip his spine and he tried to shake off a feeling of impending doom. No… it couldn’t be, after all that the group had so far endured… He and Sarah and the rest of them were destined to survive, to meet any challenge or danger. Weren’t they?

Later, when Wil crawled under the blanket next to Sarah, he was relieved that she stirred but did not awaken. Time enough the next day to talk about the strange new turn of events. Happily, compared to what the survivors had lived through since Christmas, this new encounter had to be considered a relatively minor threat. In the telling, Hardy planned to emphasize the fanciful drama of the incident while downplaying the element of danger.

Yet it was a long time before he fell asleep. Once he had started to think about pirates, it was difficult to stop. It wasn’t only the existence of Queen Ranavalona that disturbed him; there was the phenomenon of piracy itself. Captain Kidd is commissioned by the British government to protect merchant ships, and he decides instead to prey upon them. Greed? Simple perversity? So be it. There had been few human societies in history without buccaneers of some kind. The aggressive impulse is as old as Homo sapiens, and even older. We must simply cope with this phenomenon, he thought, the way we do with the many other difficulties that fate—or Providence, or God, or bad luck—puts in our path.

Having reached this rational, dispassionate conclusion, he slept.

But even as he slept, he dreamed. Deep in his subconscious, and concurrently far off in the distant reaches of the universe, a sloop with red sails sliced through foam-topped waves, a pirate queen at the wheel… mysterious, romantic, ominous, and ultimately beyond the reach of logic.

Alf Richards gaveled the meeting to order with a wooden mallet designed to crack shellfish, an item he had appropriated from the ship’s galley. He glowered at latecomers and proceeded immediately to the business at hand.

The opening presentation at this, the second meeting of the Joint Planning Subcommittee, was scheduled to be given by Ichiro Nagasaka, the group’s most eminent authority on iron and steel. Nagasaka was a compact man, narrow-shouldered, with a large head and a shock of black hair combed in a stiff pompadour. His dark eyebrows flicked as he spoke. Because of his specialty, everyone expected that he would be talking about metals. But he had a surprise in store.

“I wish to introduce an important topic,” he said. “Kilns.”

“What?” “Huh?” Several people had not understood the word.

“Kilns,” Ichiro Nagasaka repeated, “furnaces, ovens, places in which to build fires.”

This seemed like a strange detour on the way to restoring an industrial society, and several subcommittee members snorted as if to say as much.