'Such choices you give me. I am not worthy,' Galtier said, and Leonard O'Doull snorted. Now Lucien did feel like dancing. He touched a woman on the shoulder. He smiled. 'Hello, Йloise. May I have this dance?'
'Mais certainement, Lucien.' Йloise Granche was a widow of about Nicole's age. She'd lost her husband in a train wreck a little before Lucien lost Marie. If he hadn't known her before, he would have thought that was what gave her an air of calm perhaps too firmly held. In fact, she'd always been like that. Philippe Granche had drunk like a fish; maybe that had more to do with it.
The music started again. Galtier took her in his arms. She was two or three inches shorter than Marie had been, and plumper, too, but not so much that she didn't make a pleasant armful. She danced well. Lucien had to remind himself he needed to say such things.
'And you,' she told him when he did. After a moment, she asked, 'Is this your first time since…?'
She let that hang, but Galtier understood perfectly well what she meant. 'No, not quite,' he answered, 'but it still seems very strange. How long have you been dancing now?'
'A couple of years,' Йloise said. 'Yes, it is strange, isn't it? With Philippe, I always knew just what he would do. Other people are surprises, one after another.'
'Yes!' He nodded. 'They certainly seem to be. And not only on the dance floor, either. The world is a different place now.'
'It certainly is for me,' she said. 'I wasn't so sure it would be for a man.'
'Oh, yes. For this man, anyhow.' Galtier didn't think he'd ever spoken of his love for Marie outside the bosom of his family. He didn't intend to start now. Even saying so much was more than he'd thought he would do.
Йloise Granche seemed to know what he meant even when he didn't say it. She said, 'You have to go on. It's very hard at first, but you have to.'
He nodded again. 'So I've seen. It was hard at first.' He hadn't spoken of that even with his family. There had been weeks-months-when he hadn't wanted to get out of bed, let alone get on with his life.
The music stopped. 'Thank you for asking me,' Йloise said. 'That was very pleasant.'
'I thought so, too.' Lucien hesitated. He hadn't talked with anyone who knew what he was talking about before. She'd traveled down the same road as he. After the hesitation, he plunged: 'Shall we also dance the next one?'
'I'd like to,' she said briskly. 'We've both made the same journey, haven't we?'
'I was just thinking that very thing!' he said in surprise. When he and Marie had the same thought at the same time, he'd taken it for granted. Why not? They'd spent forty years living in each other's pockets. When he did it with a near stranger… That was a surprise.
Йloise's shrug said it astonished her less than him. 'It springs from what we were talking about, I think.' The fiddlers began to play. She swayed forward. They started dancing again, this time without words.
Galtier wondered what Marie would say. Probably something like, Try not to step on her toes, the way you always did on mine. Йloise's eyes were closed as they spun around the barn. Her expression said she might have been listening to someone who wasn't there, too. But she was also very much with Lucien.
When the music stopped this time, they both walked over to the table to get some cider. They stood by the wall, talking of this and that, through the next dance-and the next. But Galtier didn't feel like a wallflower any more.
The USS Remembrance steamed south, accompanied by a couple of destroyers and a heavy cruiser. Lieutenant, Junior Grade, Sam Carsten smeared zinc-oxide ointment on his nose and the backs of his hands. He knew he would burn anyhow, but he wouldn't burn so badly this way.
Off to the east rose the bleak, almost lunar landscape of Baja California. The Remembrance and her companions sailed outside the three-mile limit the Empire of Mexico claimed, but not very far outside it. Their guns and the carrier's aeroplanes could have smashed up that coast or whatever little gunboats the Mexicans sent out to challenge them.
But the Mexicans sent out nothing. Cabo San Lucas wasn't much of a port. No, actually, that wasn't true. It had the makings of a fine harbor-or it would have, if only there were any fresh water close by. Since there wasn't, the protected bay went to waste except for an old gunboat or two and a few fishing trawlers.
Sam turned to Lieutenant Commander Harrison, the assistant officer of the deck. 'Sir, may I make a suggestion?'
'Go ahead, Carsten,' Roosevelt Harrison replied. The Annapolis ring on the younger officer's finger explained why he was where he was and Sam was where he was.
'Thank you, sir,' replied Sam, who'd never expected to become an officer at all when he joined the Navy a few years before the Great War started. 'The Confederates have a naval base at Guaymas, sir. Where we are and where we're headed, they might want to use us to give their submersible skippers some practice.'
'They aren't supposed to have any submersibles,' the assistant OOD said.
'Yes, sir. I know that, sir,' Carsten said, and said no more.
Harrison considered. After a few seconds, he said, 'You may have a point. I wouldn't trust those bastards as far as I could throw 'em.' He cupped his hands in front of his mouth and raised his voice to a shout: 'Attention on deck! All hands be alert for submarines in the neighborhood.' Sailors hurried to the edge of the deck and peered in all directions, shielding their eyes from the glare of the sun with their palms. Lieutenant Commander Harrison gave his attention back to Sam. 'A good thought. I don't believe they'd try anything even if they do have boats in the water, but you're right-stalking us would give them good practice.'
'What happens if somebody does spot a periscope?' Carsten asked. 'Do we drop ashcans on the submersible?'
'That's a damn good question, and I'm glad the skipper's the one who's got to answer it,' Harrison said. 'My guess would be no. The Confederates aren't allowed to have any submersibles, but how do we know whatever we spot isn't flying Maximilian's flag?' He and Sam exchanged wry grins; the Empire of Mexico could no more build submarines than it could aeroplane carriers. But where a boat was built had nothing to do with whose flag she flew.
'I don't suppose we can tell, sir,' Sam allowed. 'Still, if it looks like a boat's getting ready to fire something…'
'Then we're liable to have a war on our hands.' The assistant OOD shivered, though the day was fine and warm. 'Till I see a wake in the water, I won't order an attack on any submarine we spot. If the skipper has a different notion, that'll be up to him.'
Sometimes not having rank was a comfort. Sam knew that from his days as a petty officer. If you weren't important enough to give any really important orders, you couldn't get into really big trouble. When he was a petty officer, he would have figured a lieutenant commander had the clout to screw up in a big way. From Harrison's point of view, though, that exalted status belonged only to the skipper.
Of course, Harrison wasn't thinking small. He was talking about starting a war. Back in Sam's petty-officer days, he couldn't have imagined a decision with that much riding on it. Even though he'd clawed his way up to officer's rank, carrying that much responsibility still didn't seem real to him.
It must have to Lieutenant Commander Harrison, though. A little later, Sam saw him talking on a telephone line that led straight to the bridge. And, not too long after that, elevators started lifting aeroplanes from the hangars belowdecks. Pilots raced to the aeroplanes, some of them putting on goggles as they ran. The Remembrance turned into the wind, what there was of it. One after another, the aeroplanes roared off the flight deck.
Were they hunting submersibles, too? Carsten couldn't think of anything else they might have in mind. Maybe Captain Stein thought that, if the Confederates were getting in some training, he might as well do the same thing. Or maybe the skipper just believed in wearing both suspenders and belt. In his place, Sam knew he would have.
He wished he could hang around the wireless shack and find out what the aeroplanes were seeing, but the skipper chose that moment to sound general quarters. Maybe it was a drill. Undoubtedly, most of the crew would figure it was. But maybe, too, one of the pilots had spotted something that made him jumpy. The Remembrance had been a nervous ship going through the Straits of Florida a few years before, and for many of the reasons also relevant today.
Sam's general-quarters station was deep in the bowels of the ship. He sighed as he hurried down to it. He
