Chapter 3: Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay

Nine months later.

Time: Saturday, February 29, 2048 10:00 AM, the docks of Porto Santo

Megan O'Connor sat dangling her legs off a wharf, relaxing and enjoying the cries of the sea birds. She was by a large artificial harbor near the southeastern end of Porto Santo, waiting for the monthly transport ship from the main island to dock, and she was expecting to see the ship in a few minutes. A short distance away her horse Feathers was tied up peacefully, alongside an additional mount for Alvaro when he arrived.

She sat quietly and admired the beauty of the ocean and wildlife around her. Megan's arms and legs were bare and tan. She had put on a few kilos since coming to the islands, but it was all due to the excellent quality and availability of both food and exercise. The extra weight was all sleek muscle, and she knew she was in the best physical shape of her life.

The sun was shining brightly now from due southeast, a pleasant change from the drenching rains of yesterday. This was the wet season and the rains were plentiful. The overnight low had been 16C, and currently the temperature was halfway to its expected high of 20C. It was an arch typical winter day, and Megan knew from experience that if you bumped up the numbers by 6C, it would be the typical range for a summer day in August. The numbers represented a mere 1C increase from what they were fifty years ago. The coldness of the surrounding deep ocean had so far spared Madeira of much of the world's global warming. Megan had a private joke with herself that if paradise had a climate, it would be that of Madeira.

Porto Santo with its 42 sq km of land was 5.7% of the size of main island of Madeira, and with 1200 residents held 1% of the country's population. Once a plush vacation getaway for Europe's elite, the tiny island was now a fabulously successful year-round agricultural community, for reasons Megan still did not fully understand.

She had first arrived at these docks by hitching a ride on a fishing boat on a sunny afternoon in mid May of 2047, one brief day after being dazzled by the richness and power of Funchal. The trip on the fishing boat had fascinated her almost as much as her jet flight two days previously. The boat was powered both by sails and a powerful hydrogen engine, and the nets were operated with battery-driven winches. Megan was amazed at first at the rich and varied harvest the crew delivered to the people of Porto Santo at the end of the day. But then an elder crewmember told her they had caught in five hours of work what his grandparent would have caught in one. The deep sea around Madeira was not nearly as fished out as the Caribbean, but it was still in sad shape.

As she waited now for Alvaro's ferry, her mind drifted back to her first days on the island. Everything was so novel then! But now the small island was her home. She felt as if she knew almost every square meter, and each one was a treasure. Playing on the beaches, hiking on the short mountains or on the rough rocky coastlines, riding absolutely everywhere, it was one picture-postcard day after another. As in Texas, she had a challenging job that she loved. But unlike Texas, she also had lots of free time for recreation and reflection. And her soul had responded to the gentle beauty and the kindness around her, growing in ways she never realized were possible.

Love! Twelve hundred people, and they as dear to her now as one large family. Her first day at Madeira, Megan remembered feeling shocked when Alvaro told her the position reserved for her was that of Lead Veterinarian of Porto Santo. Alvaro would continue to live and work on the main island. Megan was asked to commit to the job on Porto Santo for one year. She did, and for the first few weeks felt somewhat abandoned.

But as the spring of 2047 turned to summer, she began to see Alvaro's point and the thoughtfulness behind her placement. Portuguese and English were both in common use on Madeira. Here on Porto Santo, almost everybody knew a little English but by tradition it wasn't used. It was full immersion for Megan into the new language, and she picked it up far more easily than if she had been at the capital. By the fall, she felt comfortable speaking in the language, before winter she realized she had switched to thinking in Portuguese, and on Alvaro's last visit at the end of January, he had paid her the ultimate compliment of saying she was speaking without an accent. Megan wasn't sure, but she suspected her dreams now were in Portuguese too.

Beautiful and free. That's what Alvaro said he wanted her to be. And it had come to pass. She had a true and permanent place in the society around her, and it was totally independent of her relationship with Alvaro. In their dating now, when they would meet as the transport made its round trips on the last weekend of each month, they met as equals.

Porto Santo! Her home! She knew it so intimately well, and yet her island still presented her some deep mysteries. Such dichotomy! Sometimes reality is just as it appears, and sometimes appearances can be deceiving. The dilemma that Megan faced when she first arrived was how to tell the difference.

A smile crossed her face as she spotted the ship heading for the harbor. She had never known the modified naval frigate to be late, though on one month its service between Madeira and Porto Santo had been cancelled due to an extended 14,000 km round-trip trading expedition to Scandinavia and Russia.

Megan knew the ship was used extensively for trading besides its month-end ferry service between the two home islands. A dock hand once told her the ship usually paid a monthly visit to Dar-el-Beida of the Islamic West African Union, the city once called Casablanca. The I.W.A.U. was Madeira's number one trading partner, and its port was only 800 km due east of Porto Santo. Over Christmas the ship made a more extensive excursion, traveling 2500 km to the north and east to trade with Ireland and the UK.

The ship was named Discovery and with a length of 134 meters was rather small for its mission of deep-sea merchant. It had an unloaded displacement weight of 4800 tons and was a former Halifax-class military frigate. The ship was converted to a corvette transport in 2040, retaining almost all of its original firepower with the exception of the helicopter landing deck in the stern area which was converted to additional cargo and passenger space.

The extensive missile, torpedo, and gun armament of Discovery had saved it more than once from pirates. Its high firepower to cargo ratio made it very unappealing for pirates to attack. It was the flagship of Madeira's tiny navy, which consisted of Discovery and twelve high-speed armed patrol boats that were hydrogen powered and used for local coastal defense. Discovery with its boats and land-based attack helicopters was a formidable weapon. The flagship had state-of-the-art battle control systems, and could coordinate the mini sea and air fleet into one integrated multi-point firing system.

Megan pushed out her bare arms into the warm sunlight and stretched. What was her previous thought? Oh yes, dichotomy! She thought of the obvious facts of her first days here, and what an obvious fit her placement was.

The tiny island of Porto Santo had a compact community hospital at the airport terminal complex near the center of the island. It had first-class facilities and staff. Adjacent to the human hospital was the animal clinic, equally well equipped but staffed by local farmers. They had a huge amount of practical experience but none the advanced training that Megan could offer. She immersed herself in farm-animal care and treatment, horses and goats, dogs and cats, ducks and chickens. There were even a few pigs and sheep and incredibly, a dozen milk-producing cows and three bulls. She would often partner with the human surgeons in the treatment of injured animals.

And then there was the not so obvious, in fact, the incredible. Power! Electricity existed here in abundance, both at Madeira and even at tiny Porto Santo. In her nine months here, Megan had never known it to fail. Impossible! Like a dream from her childhood bedtime stories in Portland. Her Irish father would tell young Megan fables of a fast world bright with its power, in the times before the cruelty took the brightness away.

Security about the abundance of power was a concern for everybody. There were strict standards against exposing electric lights to the outdoors, especially at night. The island was isolated, but such displays might arouse the puzzlement of ships passing on the horizon or people analyzing satellite photos. Occasional accidents would of course happen, but the island tried to emit no more light than what would be typical for 1,200 people using lamp-oil.

On the main island of Madeira, the standards were considerably more relaxed. It was public knowledge that the high mountains provided hydroelectric power, and there was an extensive farm of twelve 2.0 MW wind turbines on Die Ilhas Desertas, the thin narrow island chain 35 km southeast of Madeira. It was power that had saved the society in 2036. But at Porto Santo, where was the power coming from?