A father. Christ. He and Betty had never been able to have kids-something with the fallopian tubes-and had never got around to adopting. Doc Coleman said there shouldn't be any problems, but a first child at forty was always risky.

"That's my worry," he said, pushing at the stones. "She's stopped talking." The rocks slid into a thick red-white glowing mass, evenly spread across the pit. "All right, let's get the rockweed on."

The bags of damp weed were ready. They tossed it in a thick layer over the rocks, and clouds of fragrant steam rose, like the distilled essence of the sea. "Quick, now," he said.

The food went on top of the seaweed: clams in net bags, potatoes, young corn in the husk, a quartered turkey, lobsters still feebly waving their antennae in protest, and cheesecloth bags stuffed with homemade pork and venison sausage. Alston borrowed the rake and used it to add a thick closed clay pan with her contribution in it; more of her famous beaten biscuits. They threw another layer of weed on top, a tarpaulin over that, then spadefuls of sand.

Cofflin took up the thread again: "Lisketter's about as stubborn as… as you, by God, Martha. If she's given up speechifying at the Town Meeting, it's because she's got another angle."

They returned to the campfire and its thermos of sassafras tea and cooler of beer. "The other environmentalists are treating her like a leper," Martha said. "Dane and Terri and the rest."

"Yeah, but they're the sensible ones. Hell, they're some of our most useful people. They know things-marine biology, handicrafts, stuff like that. And they know I'll listen to them. But Lisketter… she's a True Believer."

Alston settled back on an elbow, the blanket dimpling into the sand and her full African features thoughtful. "You're the expert," she said; he couldn't tell if she meant on clambakes or political dissidents. Her eyes lifted.

Cofflin followed them. A group of youngsters in bathing suits-islanders and cadets-were throwing a football in an impromptu touch game. Swindapa leaped and caught it, ululated some ferocious-sounding warcry in her own language, and went pelting down the beach, fair hair flying in the wind. Doreen Rosenthal went after her, puffing. Marriage suits her, he thought. Or our Bronze Age health spa setup. From chunky the ex-astronomer had gone to a figure that turned heads in a bikini, particularly among men who liked the look of a woman with the promise of something to grab on to.

By contrast Swindapa had filled out a little, and gotten even more deer-graceful, if that was possible.

"Lisketter's been talking to me a good deal," Martha said. "Doing some research."

"Research on what?" Cofflin asked.

"Early Mesoamerican cultures," she said.

"Aztecs?"

"Oh, no, much earlier than that-Olmec and proto-Mayan, this century we're in. Really trying to learn something, too. Her brother's with her a fair amount of the time."

Cofflin frowned. Pamela Lisketter was odd, but functional. Her brother David, on the other hand…

Ian Arnstein stirred beside his copy of The Oxford Illustrated Prehistory of Europe. He yawned and woke fully when Doreen plopped down beside him, panting. "Dinner ready yet?" he said.

"Works up an appetite, snoozing does?" she said.

"You had me swimming for an implausibly long time earlier," Arnstein said. "Have mercy on an antique. Besides, I just finished harvesting an area equivalent to the state of Kansas."

Swindapa trotted up, throwing the football and a word over her shoulder. She settled down by Alston, giving her a quick brush of the lips and linking hands. Glad we haven't had any more trouble about that, he thought. The black woman hadn't flaunted it, but she hadn't made any secret of it either; they'd just quietly gone down to the Town Building and registered as domestic partners under the ordinance Nantucket had passed a year before the Event. And she'd been smiling a lot more. So had Swindapa. Very, very glad we haven't had any trouble.

The island depended too much on what Eagle and the Guard brought in; it had made the difference between bare survival at very best, and a sufficiency you could almost call comfortable. Of course, that was one reason why there hadn't been more than a fringe murmur among the more conservative; plus many Nantucketers had a Yankee respect for privacy. That and the fact that it would take a very bold man to stand up to the basilisk stare of Captain Alston in a cold rage; he'd seen it once or twice, and had no desire at all ever to experience it personally from the receiving end.

Oh, well, I'm in love myself. It made you feel sort of mellow and ready to think well of people, he found.

"Furthermore, I wasn't sleeping, I was thinking," Ian said virtuously. He turned his head toward Cofflin and Alston. "We've finally figured out something about the Earth Folk language-it's very distantly related to Basque."

"Ah, that's interesting," Cofflin said. "Should we try to find someone who speaks Basque?"

"Very distantly," Doreen said, sitting near her husband and combing out her hair. "The way we see it, the languages are about as close as English is to Sanskrit."

"Oh." One more factoid for the Useless Trivia File. He supposed there were people up in the twentieth who'd pay a fortune for information like that, to settle those perpetual feuds academics enjoyed.

"Tartessian is related to Basque too, we think, possibly ancestral to it," Ian said. "Or closely related to the ancestor of Basque, whatever that is and wherever it's spoken in this century. And therefore Tartessian is related to Fiernan. We think. And Iraiina, it's probably a bridge dialect between proto-Germanic and proto-Celtic. How's the clambake coming?"

"Dinner won't be ready for a while," Cofflin said. "Someone could hand around that bucket of oysters, though."

The boats brought them back by the hundred bushel; they were common as dirt over on the mainland coast, but you had to be careful about the size if you planned to eat them on the half shell-many were so big the only way to approach them was with a knife and fork. He began opening these with a knife and handing them around; there was no butter for the bread, of course, but somebody had managed to scavenge a half-bottle of Tabasco sauce.

Swindapa looked down at her oyster and blinked dubiously. Then she primed it with a drop of the Tabasco, slid it into her mouth, and swallowed, imitating the others. "These things are… interesting, you'd say?"

"You don't have them in Britain?" Ian asked, surprised.

"Not where I was live then-when-there-lived then, I mean, by the Great Wisdom. And I never visited the coast while they were in season."

She looked at the next he handed her. Her eyes went wide, and she began to giggle helplessly. Alston bent her head, and the Fiernan whispered in her ear.

"… better warm." He caught the last words; with the full message, Alston was fighting not to laugh.

Cofflin cut another slice from the loaf. Every couple's entitled to their own private jokes, he thought-slightly irked, because the Arnsteins had also caught the byplay, and they were laughing too. So was Martha…

"Later, dear," she said. "I'll tell you later."

The driftwood fire crackled, flames running blue and green, and the wind was full of the clean scent of the sea. Cofflin sank back on one elbow and watched the sun going down over the waves and headland to the west; Martha handed out blankets from the picnic hampers, and those in swimsuits wrapped them around their shoulders.

Pretty good day, Cofflin thought contentedly. It was amazing how much better all that wheat and rye and barley and beans and flax and dried fish in the warehouses made everyone feel. Maybe quiet isn't so bad, after all.