Wine of the Gods 4: Explorers Read online

  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.

  Chapter Six

  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 lands, 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 guard. "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 had 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 grees 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'uld world died. Tree cities and some scattered fulk survived on t'other side of t'world."

  Levty and Dudit 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? Any 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."

  Rae 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 another 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 Charlotte, 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.

  "Her name is Little Bit." Havi informed him. "That's Muddy, Zip an Storm." Respectively the brown, the black and white and the male.

  "Is she young?"

  "No. She's jus small. Very smooth, and she can go very long distances."

  "I see." He had vague memories from movies about something called an Arabian horse, that was small, but still better than most of the rest. A subspecies, he supposed. Might be similar here. He pulled a few mane hairs, more for Rae to analyze when they returned. Then he sauntered back to the wagon.

  Dudit looked around, then climbed up on the wagon and looked.

  "Is there a problem?"

  "New. Bit we've got a goat, too, and it isn't here. Your scouts? They hunt? Could you till dem ders a big black goat out here somewhere? Stupid pet, good for nothing, but please done kill?."

  Levty snickered at something, tossed a bundle of blankets and clothes out of the wagon, and followed carrying a large lumpy sack.

  "Of course. And I'll be sure they understand about your horses, too." Unobserved for a moment, he grabbed the hair brush and pulled a handful of hairs out of it. Tucked them into a pocket, and back at the gyp, got out clean bags and transferred all his samples. He wanted credit, not sarcastic comments about sweating all over the evidence.

  Levty and Dudit plunked their stuff in the gyp and they headed across the grasslands. Levty was able to guide Roxy to the stream crossings they'd used for the wagon, so they made good time. They camped up close to the cliffs rising under the glaciers.

  The glaciers were thinning, deforming and slowly flowing downhill to the south west. Nelson took some vids, and refrained from trying to climb up for samples that would have just melted. Dust streaks in the ice showed the flow direction nicely.

  Dudit busied himself around the campfire, roasting potatoes on the hot stones, and keeping an eye on the kids as they ran off the energy they'd saved up riding in the gyp for two days. Levty wandered in from the dark with a couple of dead rabbits. Roxy made a faint gagging noise, but after the pair of them had reduced the animals to pieces of meat on sticks, she stopped looking so horrified, and ate her rabbit and baked potato with apparent relish.

  "I guess there's a real trick to building a camp fire." Nelson frowned at the hot rocks as dripping fat sizzled and popped. "I didn't see how you started it."

  Dudit looked back innocently. "T'wood is jus t'add a bit of flavor, I heated t'rocks magically."

  Roxy tucked in a smile and Nelson wished he'd been just a bit less patronizing to the natives.

  In the m
orning they ate boiled oatmeal with brown sugar.

  "No animals were murdered for this meal." Roxy murmured

  Nelson smiled stiffly. The water was boiling on the hot rocks with no sign that more sticks had been burned that morning.

  Levty directed them right up against the cliffs and they stopped to look at the start of a ramp up the side of the cliff. It had the same diamond shaped traction roughing as the bridge. And no side barrier whatsoever.

  Roxy looked up the incline and blanched a bit. "It sticks out, over nothing!"

  "It looks thick enough, though."

  "I'd be happier with a rail." But she drove carefully up it anyway, and at the top turned left into a canyon.

  Nelson looked over the side. The river rushed by below them. The canyon wall was scooped out so only half the road over hung the water. The canyon widened and they drove along over smooth rock for about ten miles. Small bridges crossed runoff streams carrying glacial melt down to the river. A high mist formed overhead and thickened. The light dimmed. The wider canyon started looking like a miniature bad lands, with small plateaus and drop offs down to the river, and suddenly he caught a warm, moist, sulfur stink. They drove across a small bridge over a trickle of water that flowed to meet a steaming pool. On the far side a brief splash marked the venting of steam.

  Nelson threw up his hand. "Stop. That's a geyser." He scrambled down to it, walking carefully, but the rock underfoot seemed solid. He took pictures of the mineral deposits, cursed himself for not having a thermometer, and looked further down the canyon.

  Roxy walked up beside him. "This is eerie, what's going on?"

  "Do you know what this is?" Nelson waved around. "It's a spreading ridge. Like the mid-Atlantic ridge, except it's on a continent. It's raised enough that the ice flows downhill away from it, hot enough to stay ice free down here. This is how Levty and Dudit got to Asia. They really did drive those horses right through the ice cap."