Wine of the Gods 4: Explorers (14 page)

"It's bettah
when the beans are fresh and crunchy, but in winter canned is all there is."

"You have canneries? I hadn't realized your civilization was advanced enough to can food."

"I hate to tell you this, but we can them ourselves, in t'kitchen. Aftah we pick them in t'garden."

He looked at her in horror. "Do you have the faintest idea what botulism is? How many of your people drop dead after eating canned goods?"

"I've heard that can happen if you don't get t'heat high enough when you can. Don't worry, we all do pressure canning, at higher temps than unpressurized boiling." She checked a few more of the spices and added some to the spinach.

"Sprinkle in a touch of cumin? Good Heavens! The last group I taught had lived all their lives
on a mixture of cow's blood and milk."

Never studied him, but saw no sign that he was joking. "I suppose you do get some odd cultures to deal with."

"Well, you medieval types are obviously going to be easier."

And to give the man credit, possibly a third of the women in the class had only the most basic of ideas about what was possible in a kitchen. The instructor reshuffled his lessons, and the third day they started on breakfast preparation. From the machines and by hand they covered the staples of the
Earthers' morning diet.

History continued to be fascinating, even though the strict one page at a time instruction was guaranteed to drive her to chewing her finger nails, she did slowly learn Earth history.

In math she explained logarithms to the teacher and tried her hand at trigonometry.

"We aren't actually behind these people by much." Never told Question. "We don't have the power gadgets, just a few steam engine driven factories in Karista. And Ash has magic. A good push at education and a slow spread of power factories, maybe electricity and gyps and we'd be their equals."

"I wonder how they treat people who are almost their equals? Do they see potential trading partners, allies? Or competition and enemies?" Question sighed. "Their medical treatment splits three ways. Drugs, surgery and huge expensive machines. We in Ash have the equivalent or better than their drugs, and we can stick injuries back together with magic. I need to find out what the machines do."

"Bet we can do better. Look at the Wine of the Gods."

Question snickered. "Yes, that could be really popular here, from what I hear."

The next day her side was worse. Never looked at her severe
ly. Then thoughtfully. "I can end it, but why don't we see what these people's medicine can do?" They skipped breakfast to find the Huspitale and then they waited. And waited. Question sent the worried Never off to classes. She poked and prodded the game machine. She could do all sorts of things without touching it. Could recharge the chemical power source. But all things considered, she'd rather play real cards with real human opponents. She slipped the game into a pocket and waited. Worried. Finally a girl from one of the laborer worlds led her through a series of hallways to a small room where she performed some odd tasks. Weight, height, listen to heart, fine, but what was the bladder they wrapped around her arm and filled with air until it cut her circulation off for? What did they need her blood and urine for?

Finally a local man walked in. Looked at everything written down, barely glanced at her. "You're pregnant. Congratulations."

Question shut her eyes in pain. "I have troubles. Tubal pregnancies. Twice."

That got his attention. "Lay down." He felt her tummy. Said something absolutely incomprehensible to the young woman, and she was led off again, into a small room that shook and rose and opened to another floor. This time she had to lay still in a tunnel, then she was told to sit and wait.

A woman in white, carrying a flat box walked up to her. "Christian Ash? Good, come with me."

She sat down behind a desk and gestured Question to a chair. "Well, you are quite a mess inside. There's a lot of abdominal scaring. The fallopian  tubes are pretty much non-functional," she frowned. "Do you speak enough Merican to understand?"

"Yes. I was very badly hurt, playing with lightning."

"Err, I think that didn't translate . . . Well, your uterus looks fine. We can terminate the pregnancy easily. There is an option, you've come to us early enough that we can transplant it to the upper part of your uterus. It might work, might not. Probably need an early delivery by caesarian so you don't tear those scars."

Question only understood one part of that. "Transplant . . . I can have a baby?"

"Yes, dear. Now, this is a bit of an emergency, so we'll admit you now, and do the procedure . . . did you eat this morning? No? Excellent. I'll see about scheduling surgery." She pushed a button on the desk and another labor girl popped in. "Take her to admitting, Jissi."

***

Face-to-face meetings with the Board were scheduled only for very good and very bad news. The faces turned t
oward Lon were fairly blank, braced for bad news, not wanting to look too eager for good news. New Carolina hadn't bought into this world, so they didn't have a representative handy.
So they can't send in Jefferson. Thank god.

Gerald McCamey was babbling a bit, about the
potential of all five worlds being what counted. Lon loaded the screens he needed, and on the Director's nod, stood up to address the whole table.

"There are three things you need to be made immediately aware of about
Twelve fifty-three.

"Fi
rst, a comet hit the planet a thousand years ago. This is the analysis of the first sample from the crater bottom." Side-by-side, the aerial view of the crater and the stark list of elements. Every person in the room stirred. "We'll need an engineering assessment of the crater lake, how best to drain it, for mining.

"Second, the impact killed most, but not all of the Native population." A picture of the horse drawn wagon, and Lefty and Dydit talking with Nelson Manrique. The board members shifted a bit.
The aerial photographs of the city on the bay had them sitting up and taking notice.

"Third,
there are some unusual phenomenon, possibly dangerous. There are a large number of visual comets. Three, at the moment. We need to assess the danger of more impacts. Then there are some very odd gravitational fluctuations. We need to find out what the cause of these are. The possibility exists that they are caused by dangerous tectonic activity."

Clinton Thronson snorted faintly. "
Something to do with this recent—geologically speaking—impact, perhaps."

"We're hoping it's just an odd groundwater system, possibly geothermal, with periodic fluid movement.

Simon Meese leaned back, eyes narrowed. "We're going to have to take a good look at it, in any case. Otherwise we'll have the Safety Board all over us. The comets as well.  And natives. We'll have to contact the Department of Native Affairs. What's their population look like?"

Lon hesitated, then plunged in. "The two
men we've spoken to say the region was depopulated by 'the comet fall' as they refer to it. They are just now starting to explore the area again. There are no settlements at all around the crater, our aerial surveys will no doubt find out how close any actual settlements are. We may be able to carry on our operations without regard to the natives. We'll need an approved treaty, but that may be the limit of our interactions."

McCamey leaned his elbows on the table. "A
ll right. I think our first move is going to have to be to get the Department of Native Affairs involved."

"If we do, will we be able to get them uninvolved again?" Thronson drummed his fingers and then nodded. "We have to. Might as well do it before we invest more money, and before anyone learns about the crater. It will simplify everything enormously if no one realizes how much this
world is worth while we're negotiating."

Meese looked around the table. "Are we in agreement? Notify the government that we have found
natives? Keep the mineral potential in house for now? Do I have a motion? Thank you Michael. Seconded by Olgilve. All in favor? Passed unanimously. Dr. Hackathorn, we'll contact the government, and no doubt they'll want further details from you."

Lon removed himself from the meeting.

McCamey followed him out. "Thank God you had basically good news. Jefferson is having some terrain problems on Seventeen. He hadn't even started unloading as of the supposed return gate. The Driver's Union is pissed. Temporary drivers don't bring stuff along for sleeping in their trucks for two months. And the Gyp driver who brought the report says he won't go back. He doesn't know what's worse, the idiot in charge or the bugs, but since that world has both, he's not going back."

Lon squeezed the bridge of his nose. "Three weeks and he couldn't off load? Do you need the gate on the 28th?"

"No. He said the sixteenth would be perfect." MacCamey cleared his throat. "I had the warehouse prepare a duplicate of what you call a month's worth of stuff, and sent it through. So they won't starve."

"I can only hope they lynch JJ. I'll check the gate schedule and make sure he's got something sensible set up."

"Thanks, Lon."

They'd call if they wanted him again. He headed for the underground.
He could take a few days off with Carol, and still get back in time for the government to do whatever they were going to do. Hell, at government speeds, maybe he'd be back in the field before they moved.

By the time he woke in the morning, the news of the
natives in the new band had gone public and depressed the stocks of every company that had won bids last fall. And the stocks of the established labor worlds, because of possible competition. Bloody hell.

13 April 3477

Dallas
Twelve fifty-three

Seeing the gate in action had really upset the natives. Nelson touched his tender nose. Dudit had been especially violent, yelling "Never!" and "Don't you dare!" or something like that. He'd decked three scouts in a thoroughly professional fashion before his friend had grabbed him and yelled at him until he'd calmed down.

Rae Galina had put it down to superstition, and Dr. Odessa had wondered if they could actually have religious beliefs based on an oral tradition
that included something like a gate.

Dudit had stalked off into the grass la
nds, and sat and stared at the gate building for the rest of the day. The kids had gone out and hugged him and sat by him. It would have been touching if Nelson's nose wasn't so sore. He grumbled about how the man would probably hit the kids too.

Levty had wandered back and forth, looking worried. Finally he had corralled Nelson, with his new g
uard. "Where? When come back?" pointing at the gate building.

"
Dr. Hackathorn will be back in two weeks. Seven days is a week, see?" He held up seven fingers, and mimed the sun crossing the sky. "Then one more week, seven more days."

Levty had taken that information back to Dudit.

"Fourteen days! Do you realize how much trouble . . . " the native's tirade had ended with an inarticulate scream.

They'd both stayed away over night. When Nelson sought them out the next morning, they'd been down at a creek cooking a pair of ducks.
The kids were both playing in the water, stark naked.

Dudit stood up as he approached. "I wish to apologize for attacking you yesterday. Are your peoples Hoo Key?"

"Umm, nothing serious. You have an interesting fighting style."

Levty choked a bit at that.

"Umm, would you like some duke?" Dudit shot a warning glance at his friend.

"No thank you, I've already eaten. Do come up to the camp when you're done. Doctor Galina and Doctor Odessa would like to talk to you."

Nelson stayed away, watching and listening on the camms they had installed all over. He didn't trust himself to not babble, and if they were going to find themselves negotiating for mining rights with some Native Peoples Commission, he had to just shut up.

The two lady doctors ha
d wisely chosen to have a scout handy. And armed.

"We were wondering if you could tell us about those old gods you swear by. Maybe some old stories about how the
world came to be?" Rae was being awfully careful about keeping space between her and them. Dee was less so, but still, she was closer to Javier than to the natives.

The natives swapped glanced. Levty shrugged. "Tere's lots of stories, pretmich everone gre
es that people lived here in t'uld world, and ten moved to t'new world."

"Some of t’
stories are about bean persecuted for bean different, and whole families picking up and moving together t'colonize t'new world," Dudit said. "Utha stories talk about children kidnapped, husbands and wives separated. Prisoners sent away to t'new world, whetha tey want to go or not. Some stories are about t'wizards who tried to go back. But most of tose stories talk about heaven and earth, not t'uld world."

"Ten the comet fell. T'u
ld world died. Tree cities and some scattered fulk survived on t'other side of t'world."

Levty and Du
dit stared at each other for a long moment.

Dudit shifted, nodded. "T'cities had magic lights, to grow crops tru t'dark. Ten it got light again when t'volcanoes stopped erupting. But t'volcanoes always start again. T'historians argue abit whether there have been
tree dark ages or jus two. Some people tink tere was only one, t'last one, two hundred urs ago."

"Damn," Dr. Odessa sat back, looking awed. "An oral history of a cometary collision."

Nelson was having a bit of a sinking feeling himself. The natives' Merican was good. An occasional accent, or awkwardly constructed sentence.
They understand everything we are saying around them. Everything.

"Do you know how they made their magic lights? An
y stories about sparks or lightning?"

Dudit looked amused. "Magic." He held out his left hand and squeezed it shut. Opened it to show a glowing spark of light. Then he reached and picked up a scrap of paper and a pen.
He drew a design, a circle surrounded by arrows. The inside of the circle suddenly glowed, a pure white light. "Like that."

R
ae and Dee stared at the glowing paper. Javier leaned in and eyed it, then shifted back and tried to look tough.

Dee shook herself. "Cute trick. Do you pull rabbits out of hats?"

Parlor tricks. Some phosphorescent powder.
Nelson shivered, and wondered if it had looked less convincing in person.

Rae
pulled her eyes away from the glow and turned the conversation back to the Diaspora. "Those old stories about people being arrested, prisoners being sent to the new world. Do any on them use terms like 'genetic engineering' or 'mutations'?"

Levty and Dudit paused.

Then Levty nodded. "T'ancient wizards of Scoone were supposed to be mutants, really ugly and disgusting."

Dudit nodded, wide-eyed. "I went to Scoone, six urs ago. Tey say tey burn all wizards and witches."

"Scoone is a City? Is it one of the Cities that survived the comet fall?" Rae's eyes brightened at their nods. "We must get permission to go there. We need a map of this world!"

Dudit reached out for a
nother slip of paper, and the pen. He drew something that with a great deal of imagination might have been a very fat North Merica joined to South Merica through an upraised Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico.

Very typical of parallel worlds
, Nelson had seem a hundred of them. It didn't glow, or do anything a map oughten do.

Levty
marked a line about from New York to Portland, Oregon. "Ice up here. Scoone, here."

About Ch
arlotte, if the camm angles weren't fooling him. Rae was right, they really really needed to get teams of trained sociologists in there. He craned his neck as Dudit marked two spots in South Merica as the other surviving cities. Nelson double checked that the recorders were going, and walked out to talk to Private Naomi Haskell about the range of her drones.

Three hours later, a seriously overloaded drone, stripped of everything but cameras, transmitters and with extra fuel tanks, lifted sluggishly into the air and slowly climbed to seek the strong east flowing jet stream.
Only Havi came to watch the drone take off.

Naomi
was complaining about his taking the drone, when they were all finally working. "No problems with the gravity meters at all. Kia calibrated them all and they're working perfectly."

"This is your spare, and it's important that we study the
whole civilization, not just a few people."

When he got back to his office he reviewed
the two scientists' interview with the natives. One of the most interesting things came after the men left the room. He was amused to see Rustle sitting cross legged in the corner. The two women ignored her. They looked at each other and nodded.

"That explains the weird genes." Galena said.

"Yes, and what happened to all the genetically engineered people who were supposed to have been killed at the end of WWV. They exiled them to a world no one in their right mind would want to live on." Dee Odessa nodded.

"And that's why the Archeologists could never find evidence of the genocide."

"And why our tall friends have no cavities and such good eyesight." Odessa licked her lips. "They colonized from
our
world."

"The Company should be able to
sell some licensed rights, run the camp the Historians and Archeologists are going to want. Call it a lost colony."

"The Company can kiss my ass. Do you know what these papers are going to do for us, professionally? They're going to kick all those thousands of little theories clean off the stage, and leave you and me standing in the limelight."

Hmm. Yes. As the head Geologist, his report on the Astrobleme . . . not to mention that
he
was the man who contacted the natives, the mutants . . . yes, play this right and he could be quite famous, retire and write books . . .  Might even be worth more to him, personally than the fat bonus he'd land for the mineral discovery.

He pulled up the geologic mapping program. He'd been tentatively identifying major features from the aerial photographs and spectrographs. Now he zoomed out and studied the whole. Zoomed back in and looked around carefully.

"Why aren't there any towns?"

"Sir?" Steven Nickels, the pimply faced boy that ran the instruments looked around the corner.

"Towns. There's Dudit and Levty with horses and a wagon. Where did they come from? Where are they going to? The only road we've seen is the bridge and the approaches to it. There's just this dead end valley to the north, and then nothing at all to the south. They moved south, from our first sighting. Where were they going?"

"Maybe they're pastoralists? They just move around and graze their herds."

"Four horses isn't a herd. And anyway, Dudit said he was just taking the kids camping while their mother did some ceremony. How far did they come? They said the whole 'old world' was depopulated. Do they mean all of Asia? Eurasia? What about Africa? How did they get where we found them? How far from home can they possibly be?" He levered himself up and walked out.

Dudit
, Levty and Havi were watching Roxy. She had the hood of her gyp open and was explaining how the alcohol engine worked.

"A bit different from horses, eh?" He hated talking to
natives, and knew he sounded like an ass. "I wondered if you needed to check on yours? Maybe you could bring them over to this side of the ridge?"

"Eah, probably we ought t'check 'em. They betta off over tere, away frim ya gyps."

"Roxy, why don't we drive them over there? I'll go get a few days supply of meals." Nelson walked off quickly, before any of them could turn him down. George Hicks, another one of Lon's usual crew, obliged with five days of hot packs for six. Nelson set Steven to counting layers in the soil, looking especially for any sign of impact roughly a thousand years ago. Rae and Dee glared at him for taking their walking genetic samples away and they were off, kids and all.

Roxy was an excellent off road driver. Cautious enough to rarely get into trouble, bold enough to get into some interesting places. Having driven this way once, she made good time to the foot of the ridge where they camped for the night.

"What were you guys doing over there? Where were you going?" Nelson asked, over his steaming hot meal.

"Exploring, jus like you."
Dudit poked his meal dubiously. Probably thought it was more magic.

"We fund a way acroz t'ice." Even
Levty had lost most of his accent. "Going to see what is there. Fund you instead. Now we explore you."

"Across the
ice
? With horses?"

Dudit
nodded. "Iz very strange. Canyon goes all t'way. We study it over der. Den we follow it to here. It goes away by t'Astrobleme." He pronounced that carefully.

"We think perhaps t'comet made the canyon. Cracked it when it hit."
Levty said.

Nelson frowned. "How far away is this canyon. I'd like to see it."

"Horses took five days. Tirty oh forty miles a day."

"Well, miles. Umm, I'll guess three hundred kilometers total. Maybe not this trip."

"The gyp would be much faster." Roxy grinned at the two natives. "If we run out of food, you guys can hunt, right?"

"Right. Or we cud get food from t'wagon."
Dudit eyed the woman uncertainly. "If we go ter first, no problem."

Poor man didn't know the sisterhood of women dimensional drivers took pride in how many different types of natives they'd seduced. Not that Roxy was one of the short term haulers that had the worst reputation, but she still had a roving eye.

But she didn't make any moves on either of them, just sought her sleeping bag early. Dudit and Levty stretched out on the grass, the kids curled up between them. Hmm. He hadn't thought, but they really had just yanked them away from all their stuff, without a word about how long they'd be away.

In the morning they broke camp quickly and drove up the ridge. They stopped to have a breakfast pack up there, with the spectacular view of rolling green cut off by the stark blue-white cliffs of the ice cap. They made it to the
wagon shortly after. The horses galloped up at a shrill whistle from Dudit, and munched grain while the men rummaged for food, clothing and bedding.

Nelson grabbed a handful of the grain, a peace offering for Rae, and pet the horses. One male, the orange and white one. Three females, in three different sizes. The black and white one was the biggest, then the brown one, and finally the gray one with the black mane and tail, that was practically a pony.