Wine of the Gods 4: Explorers (8 page)

"Hello, welcome. Come in." Nelson gestured an invitation. "Put the guns down, they are trying to look friendly."

Javier muttered something behind him, about how he thought the blond had been female. "Damn homos."

"Now, don't jump to conclusions or make value judgments." Nelson said, and sent a frown at the scouts, as they finally lowered their weapons, and holstered them with every sign of reluctance. "We'll just sit down and have dinner with them."

The natives had been listening intently, and swapped shrugs. The dark haired one rattled off something.

Nelson shook his head, "Sorry, but we don't speak your language. Come. Sit." Damn, what was he supposed to do with
natives?

Dark Hair walked in and swept his glance around, stopping on Nelson. He tapped his chest. "Dud It." Gestured at Blonde and Tan, "Lev Tee."

Nelson smiled. That was simple enough. He tapped his own chest. Keep it simple. "Nel Son. Roxy. Ben. Hav I Air."

Nelson looked at Roxy. "Get my case. I have a vid camm, we need to get all of this."

The two men waited and watched while he set up the camm and started both recording and sending.
Oh Hell! What were their names?
He gulped. "This is a record of the first meeting. We have exchanged names."

He turned back to the
natives. "Dud?"

"Dudit. Levty." He repeated obligingly. "Nel Son. Rocks Ee. Ben. Havi Air."

Well, oral traditions and so forth. A good aural memory was no doubt trained into them.

"Please, sit." Nelson gestured as he sat awkwardly on the ground.

"Tanoo fer t'huspitly." Dark Hair—Dudit folded up easily to sit cross legged.

"Crap. Did you hear what he said?" Ben was frowning at the
natives. "He said 'Thank you for the hospitality.' He speaks some variety of old English."

"Oh, I didn't catch that, makes this a very recent split, doesn't it?" Nelson perked up.
Less paperwork, labor more profitable
. "Well, we might as well feed them."

The scouts started stirring about to get dinner ready, just hot packs of course, and the
natives conferred and the blond, Levty, got up and walked to the edge of the camp's lights to pick up two sacks and return. Nelson braced himself. Apparently the sharing of food ritual was going to go both ways. Some sort of pancake-like primitive yeast bread, and meat. It didn't smell off. In fact it smelled wonderful and smoky. They all sat around in a circle and sampled each others food, and told each other what the names of the foods were and included a lot of words Nelson thought he ought to understand. The natives were picking up their language a lot faster than the reverse. As the food disappeared, Dudit produced what looked exactly like a wine bottle and looked thoughtfully at them. "Glassos?"

"Glasses. Certainly."

Javier fetched glasses, ordinary drinking ones, but what did it matter. This stuff they'd slung around in their backpack, made with primitive methods, was probably going to be awful, but he'd take a token drink . . .

"Holy Mother!" Roxy exclaimed. "This is
good
stuff."

It certainly had
a good nose. He sipped. "Merlow, I think. Very nice." He sipped again. "I'd like to taste this when it hasn't been shaken up in a backpack."

Dudit nodded. "Goodur. Ulder s'better."

"Yes. A good year. And I suspect older would be better." God! A few hours and they were damn near speaking Merican. If Dallas could get a license to import labor from here, they'd have half the budget for education most of the labor companies had. And if they opened mines here, the overseers wouldn't have too many problems either. It was all a matter of finding something worth mining.

When the wine was gone, Dudit and Levty stood up. "Good noche. Via Marnan." They scooped up their empty bags and walked out.

Ben frowned, "Should we keep them here?"

"No," Nelson yawned. "They'll be back." He got up and shut off the camm and turned on the radio. "Did you get that, Lon?"

"Oh yes, I've half the staff on duty. Turn the camm back on. If they come back and massacre you all, we'll have that on record too."

Nelson snorted. Lon's sense of humor showed up at odd times, sometimes. "Tell Doctor Galina her times for the splits are all wrong. These guys
can't have split more than three thousand years ago. Less, actually. English was one of the last of the pre-modern languages to form. Their culture must have stagnated."

"Either that or the
world split earlier and we're looking at an Early Diaspora situation."

"That's just a theory. No one's ever proven it."

"Well, think of the opportunity."

"Ha! I'm afraid that this crater pro
vides all the answers to the narrow genetic diversity that we need. And it's a cold hard fact, not a silly theory."

***

The invisible woman retreated silently. Never had put her bow and arrows away hours ago, but the creepy voice from the box made her wish she had them in hand. The voice had sounded like it had seen them, heard them. Well, Dydit and Lefty. Question and Never had both remained invisible, listening and watching.

Hmm, well maybe she shouldn't condemn the strangers for having invisible watchers.

She slipped around a couple of brushy areas, and upslope to their rendezvous. Question was already there.

She dropped the light warp. "They were speaking some variety of old Scoo, weren't they?"

"Close enough to guess most of what they were saying."

Lef
ty nodded. "I doubt I was getting as much as Dydit, but Old Gods! What a bunch of snobs. Talked over our heads regularly, like we were idiots."

"They must be nobles," Dydit said.

"Slave masters," Lefty growled. "They talk over the merchandise like that too."

"That box on the three legs?" Never said. "It was some sort of listening and looking device. Nelson talked to someone named Lon on another box about you, and it talked back."

"Magic?"

They both shook their heads.

"It had some concentration of electricity about it," Question said. "But there was no mental, magical, twisting going on in any of them."

"And they never twigged to us being there."

"Let's keep it that way." Lefty said. "Let's get to know them better before we complicate the situation with attractive women."

Question sniffed. "Roxy was cute enough, and they didn't act dominant around her. She had a weapon, too."

Lefty eyed her. "Which doesn't mean that outsider women will get the same treatment."

"
We need to follow those people back. That 'gyp' of theirs travelled faster than the horses. Can we ride back with them, leave the critters here? The horses are good for a week. Any longer and they'll wander off and we'll have trouble finding them, let alone catching them. We can turn the chickens loose. Most likely a wolf will snack down on them inside of a week. But what are we going to do about the kids?" Never glanced over at a barely perceptible shielded circle, and the two bundles sleeping inside it.

Dydit shifted uneasily. "We'll never be able to keep them hidden. I'll have to bring them along."

"We'll help! We can spy on them, because we're small." Rustle, of course.

Lefty sighed. "They're damn smart. And Rustle is a natural born eavesdropper. They may be an asset, depending on what this lot has in mind for us.
People say things in front of kids they'd never say in front of an adult."

Never bit a finger nail, then nodded reluctantly.

"If they try anything, I'll take them apart." Dydit growled.

Never dug into her backpack and pulled out dinner. "I didn't want to miss t
heir conversational asides."

Question snorted. "I ate and listened, and you were certainly getting close enough for them to hear you chewing."

Dydit gave Never a fishy look.

"It was interesting. Nelson mutters."

"Oh, what did he say?"

"That the language similarities would make it easy for the mining supervisors."

"Told you. Slavers." Lefty shifted. "I want to hear what they think of this ridge and the lake. But then perhaps we should report home. These people are strange, and potentially dangerous."

***

Lon found Naomi Haskell in the mapping trailer. "So, have any of the balloons made it across the ocean?"

Naomi
reached to switch channels. "Not as of half an hour ago, but number eight looks like it may actually make it.  . . . ah. Perfect timing, it's almost local dawn. That dark line on the oblique camm is land, we should be crossing it in . . . The balloon's dropped a bit, must have lost some helium . . . about half an hour. And yes it is recording everything." Naomi busied herself with the other balloons, but switched the main screen back to number eight as it approached shore. The sun was just clearing the horizon, lighting the land and sea below the balloon.

The balloon passed
a thousand meters over the sailing ships, over the fortifications on the point, over the good sized city located on the large bay. The balloon was low enough, with good enough magnification to get a top down glimpse of horse drawn wagons in the grid of streets draped over the hills. The two tallest hills sported palaces facing each other across a strip of parkland. A defensive wall around the inner city showed that the city had long outgrown its defenses, and now felt secure enough to not build new walls. City gave way to suburbs, to farmland, to scattered farms among rough terrain, dry scrubby forests and brushy desert, foothills and pine trees and rising ground until the balloon crashed somewhere in the snow capped mountains, this world's equivalent of the Rockies.

Lon had been glued to the screen
for hours, and sat back now, suddenly conscious that he was sweating in the air conditioned trailer, his stomach upset, hands shaking. "Well. I'd better go add this to my report home." He walked out quickly, and sought the privacy of his own quarters.

He fought off a desire to go fetal under the covers in bed and tried to calm down. The Native's were obviously more numerous in the other hemisphere. Maybe they didn't even need to contact them? Maybe he could order his people to pack up immediately. T
hey could be out of here in ten days, when the gate opened. Damn Jackson, taking half his early gates. He shivered, cold now. This world was cheap, a gamble. Not worth the hassle of dealing with the authorities, the Department of Native Affairs. Maybe the company could be persuaded to put this world on the back burner, and they could go on to Twelve-forty.

Lon shook his head. "We'll just study the
world for three more months, then pack up and leave. No further contact needed. No negotiations needed. I'll talk to the scouts about how they are to avoid the natives. And not shoot at them no matter what."

He took a couple of deep breaths and started writing a report for management. It would go back
through the gate in ten days. Or three weeks. God only knew what gates JJ would steal from him. But whenever this report got there, the board of directors was not going to be happy. He stared at the screen. Damn. He was going to have to report this in person. Talk to the Department of Native Affairs. And Nelson had half a month to find something that would make this world worth the hassle of all the paperwork.

Damn. Damn. Damn.

At least there wouldn't be a problem communicating with the natives.

The question of languages nagged at him.

Lon pulled up Rae Galina's preliminary report on the dimensional split. It was easy to calculate splits from DNA changes. Usually. Of course the more recent the split, the more inaccurate this particular method. Heh. Yes, as he remembered, some species suggested a split thirteen thousand years ago, others a very recent bottleneck at under two thousand. He got up and walked over to the Biology and Medical box. The labs were joint, and the two women experienced at working together. At the moment, Rae was the only one there.

"Have you heard about the
natives?" he asked.

"Of course.
What's on your mind."

"How about a dimensional spilt
thirteen thousand years ago, and an Early Diaspora between one and two thousand years ago. Would that explain your results?"

"Oh
. Hmm. Equally well, I should think. I've been trying to explain away the two thousand year split with a population bottleneck caused by Nelson's crater out there. Which explains nicely why the majority of the plants and animals show such low diversity, and such ecological simplicity. A whole bunch of extinctions, probably world-wide, but worse right here. Then migration in from outlying areas, of the ancestors of the limited genetic pool of survivors. Except that some of them have limited genetic diversity, and some have incredibly limited diversity and are seriously inbred. Now, a few of the animals have shown some interesting oddities, and the Early Diaspora Theory would explain that quite nicely. The wolves and the rabbits have . . . do you know what introgressions are?"