Wine of the Gods 26: Embassy Read online

  The beauty of being in a declared state of war was that she need have no compunctions about harm caused to the government by, oh, say counterfeiting. Or bank fraud. Electronic theft? What did you call it when the money was just numbers in a computer? She had spent enough time here to be quite conversant with the culture, and more important, their electronic identification and monetary system.

  She already had working identification on hand, and needed only a few minutes with a grid connected machine a block away from the Paris branch of the income tax organization and some direct, magical, electron manipulations to convince their computers that an authorized person agreed that she deserved a large refund from them. Then she was set to shop. Later, from her luxurious hotel suite, in the latest summer fashions, haircut and makeup, she set out to find out about solar power cells.

  ". . . And these are our top of the line full spectrum panels. They convert seventy percent of the light hitting them into DC."

  Q placed her hands on the panel, ignoring the salesman's wince. "Hmm, layered. How interesting. Each layer is opaque only to the part of the spectrum it uses? Well, roughly. I suspect there's a good deal of overlap. How does it connect . . . " By the time she'd purchased a complete system she'd managed to attach a pair of engineers, or rather a cynical older engineer and his part time student assistant, to help the poor salesman answer questions. She handed the man her card and asked when everything would be ready to be picked up.

  "Surely you'll want us to deliver and install it." Poor man. She couldn't explain, of course. No doubt he'd get a bit of a shock later, but she didn't want to upset him before taking delivery. "Well, we'll have it on the loading dock in the back in, umm, two hours."

  "Excellent. I'll have lunch then be right back." She touched her card to their machine, added her thumbprint and took her pickup order.

  She took her time over lunch, found a bookstore and bought two more cookbooks.

  At the loading dock a disapproving clerk pointed to a small mountain of crates and stood back smugly. "We can arrange transportation to wherever you want to put up this system."

  Her engineer and his assistant popped out of the back door and walked down the loading dock to her mountain.

  "Where on Earth are you going to put this that it's easier to take yourself?" The old engineer, Onray Heugel, handed her an irresistible straight line.

  She caught a bubble and looped it over the stack. "Comet Fall's new Embassy Planet. This will be the start of the power supply for the Dimensional Security's headquarters building." She twisted another bubble into a corridor and flipped the other end to something that looked like a park and stepped through. She waved the corridor away as she stepped out, and still wasn't fast enough.

  The engineer and the student flew out and flattened her face down in the exquisite green lawn.

  "Boof! That'll teach me to be snarky." Q was yanked to her feet and her arm expertly twisted up behind her back. "Do you really think that's a good idea?" To her surprise it was the young one that had hold of her, rather than the older.

  "Yes! You are an enemy of the Earth."

  With her head cranked around, she could see, barely, a flush over that melodramatic declaration. She reached for the young man mentally and . . . failed.

  I can't read him at all. Like that mole, Damien Malder. I wonder what percentage of Earthers are like this? Interesting.

  "And you probably stole that merchandise you just disappeared." The old engineer walked around in front of her and scowled. He still looked tougher than the weedy youngster, however competent the grip on her seemed.

  She clicked her tongue reprovingly. "Don't be silly, I wouldn't steal from an individual. Just your world as a whole. But what do you expect when you go rampaging through the dimensions enslaving people?"

  "We don't enslave anyone. What do you mean? Is the money stolen?" The young one asked.

  "Oh, sorry, you just shoot them, destroy their trade systems, steal their natural resources and give them the opportunity to choose between starvation and working for you under unsafe conditions at minimal wages. What is your name, anyway? I feel we should at least be introduced if you're going to be so friendly."

  "David Jerald Reed, sergeant, UEM reserves."

  Heugel snorted. "Bad enough you're American. If I'd realized you were military I'd never have hired you." He switched back to Q. "And we're doing those folk a favor, bringing them the benefits of modern medicine."

  "Don't you think you should do that in a manner that doesn't destroy their governments, collapse their financial system, and bring trade to a screeching halt? It's tough to appreciate a measles vaccine when Earth won't allow ships full of grain to dock, you know?" Q frowned and looked around. "Speaking of docking, just where the hell did I throw that corridor?" She sidestepped, turned and hooked Sergeant Reed's feet out from under him, and twisted out of his grip. "Stop being so aggressive while I figure out what I just did. This all crooked."

  The young soldier started to pounce and tripped over her as she sat down. "What are you doing?" He scrambled to his feet and loomed.

  "Looking around. Huh. I've never seen dimensions cross before, and there's a whole tight cluster crossing that one . . . which is where we started. Now this is interesting. C'mon." She jumped up and walked toward the street she could hear through the shrubbery.

  "Are you saying you took us through a gate?"

  "It was a corridor, which usually wouldn't go deep enough into the in between to cross to another brane. But here there's a whole, umm, can I call it a book? It's sort of like pages in a book. A very close set of branes, very nearly parallel, with damn little space between them. And your Earth is crossing the whole book at an angle. Huh. I never even noticed it before."

  The old one grabbed her this time. "And you are going to take us right back."

  "Certainly, I'll be much too busy examining this phenomenon to keep track of you two." She reached the sidewalk and looked both ways. Marched to the nearest corner and looked at the street sign. "Still in France, I see."

  "Still in Paris." Reed pointed between two buildings. The iron monstrosity poked up over nearer buildings. "This isn't a different World."

  She ignored him. "I think I need a newspaper, and then a history book or three. A library would be excellent."

  A man walking past them gave her a good looking over and a wink. "Ze library is one block up and two blocks to ze left." He leered and blew her a kiss.

  Reed shook his head. "Paris!"

  "What?" Heugel glanced back at the man. "I didn't see him do anything."

  "Nothing not perfectly normal for Paris."

  They followed her up a block and left two blocks. Heugel gawped at the headlines of the newspapers on the rack. He snapped his mouth shut and hissed. "You'd better get us back home. I don't belong in a World that would elect him president!" He stabbed a finger at the picture on the front page.

  "Hmm. Let's try a book on the Presidents of the World and see if we can pick a diverging point."

  Several history books later, Q switched to astronomy. She committed theft of public property, stealing a book about the presidents, a generalized world history and the astronomy book.

  "Let's check the next World over."

  "What?" Reed's head snapped around.

  "I want to see how these close worlds differ from each other." She formed a corridor, and this time made sure that it crossed to the next World.

  They were so nearly parallel that they were still outside the library. She pulled out her first three books out of the dimensional bubble and labeled them 'close parallel one' before storing them again and walking into the library.

  The newspapers were different, but the same man was president. The history was amazing. It veered from the main earth track with the destruction of Moscow in 1917, hit by what was probably a smallish asteroid, probably a carbonaceous chondrite.

  The histories first diverged then edged back toward each other. Enough that the same man was now
president. Reed walked away, came back pale. "Same librarians. Is everyone going back to the same place? What happens to the ones with no double?"

  "When membranes split, they usually just do little blisters, then close up. A big split, maybe it's just a big blister, and we're seeing a bunch of them healing. Maybe they come back together, but with a bunch of little bubbles, with each little blister healing as things inside come back together."

  "What I've read," Heugel scowled at her. "Good solid Earth science, mind, you, none of this airy fairy looking around wide-eyed and saying 'Oh, look! Isn't that interesting!' Real science. We actually see a couple hundred branes, and our brain just averages out what it sees and we think it's all a single solid universe."

  Reed snickered. "Do you suppose Miss Witch has had brain damage? Maybe her brain can't average?"

  Q blinked at him. "That's, umm. Hmm. What an interesting idea."

  She stole books from eight more universes before she took the men home.

  And had trouble getting rid of them.

  "Look David, I really appreciate the company and the help, but I need to get the solar power system back to the Embassy Planet. Hopefully you'll know all about it soon, we've contacted your government about it."

  "DJ. Call me DJ."

  "What do you mean by an Embassy Planet?" Heugel frowned at her.

  "It's an Empty World—no people and damn few land animals—where every inhabited World can build an embassy, and just maybe we can talk instead of fight. The Dimension Cops are going to be based there, which is what I'm working on. Hmm, do you suppose they'll arrest me for committing a cross-dimensional theft?" She grinned at their identical blinks. This time she was careful about where the corridor went, and didn't have any hitch hikers. She meditated in the park and partially despun tops to build a temporary gate back to Embassy.

  The first thing she noticed was the freshly graded road grid, the second, Xen and Garit working on extending it. Xen was making Garit do most of the work. He'd spotted her already, and waved. Garit stopped bulldozing and looked around. He waved a bit uncertainly.

  :: He thinks you're likely to cook him up for lunch. Are you?::

  :: Nah, he's a friend, and I ought to have known better than to misbehave. ::

  :: What's this? A witch considering sex to be misbehavior? ::

  :: Very funny.:: She pulled out her bubbles and unloaded the solar power system, then sat down with her sets of books from the ten close universes.

  "I need to go home and toss a big fat bone to the School of Magic and Dimensional Phenomena." She spoke out loud as the men walked in.

  "Then stand back and watch them fight over it?" Xen asked.

  Garit looked at three books she had open to a list of presidents. "Three worlds with minor differences?"

  "More than that. It's . . . a bit eerie."

  Xen started opening books as well.

  "Find a list of Presidents of the World. These are from ten very close membranes, I think they are coming back together after a split big enough to include the entire World."

  "They're starting out the same, suddenly go off in different directions, and then the same names start showing up again." Xen chewed on a knuckle. "Is it everyone, or just the important people?"

  "Everyone. Even the buildings. The libraries I stole these from were all the same building, just little details like paint colors, and the layout of all the book shelves were different. The staffs overlapped. It was down right spooky."

  "What about right now, these end about five years ago."

  "Six of the ten Worlds have the same President, in two others he's the Vice President, in one he's dead and the other he's in jail for murdering his wife. In all the other Worlds, he married a different woman—the same one in each. And his kids are all the same."

  Garit boggled. "Do all universes do that? I mean, are there Worlds where I was both smarter and stupider than, err."

  Xen shook his head. "Careful! First rule of holes."

  Garit snorted. "When in one, stop digging. Right." He eyed Q.

  "Don't worry, I took my mad out on the rocks." She looked over-head and around. "I was a bit pissed, but as much at myself as you. I knew you'd had practically every gland in your body interfered with."

  "Yeah. Old gods I was mean for a while. And I didn't trust Xen, kept sending him off to Verona or Auralia so he wouldn't betray me, outshine me, get all the girls, and especially not get behind me and slip the knife in."

  "Was it that bad?" Xen looked alarmed.

  "I knew it was spells, not real. I was trying to not show it, not feel it. Actually it did wonders for my reputation with the Army. I'm officially a stone cold killer and a clever tactician. Lead from almost the front because I'm not completely stupid. Truly amazing."

  "Um, Garit, you were all that before you got dosed. Were you the only one that didn't know that?" Xen was grinning. "Really, everyone's been saying 'just like his Uncle Rufi' about you for years."

  "Really? Like Uncle Rufi?" Garit grinned back. "I'll have to start telling tall tales to all my younger relatives to cement the position."

  "The Great Grand tells tall tales?" Q gathered up her history books and stored them again. "What kinds?"

  Garit started laughing. "Oh. Oh, no. You don't know about them? They're all about the adventures of his witch granddaughters and their friends. Old gods! I hadn't realized you guys didn't know about them. They're full of magic dragons that terrify bandits by kissing them instead of eating them. And the witches eat very strange food, that generally cooks itself. Bad guys getting turned into goats, trees and purple bunnies, and of course, there's the boy with the talking horse. A very mean sheep who, after about five stories, turned into a wolf. They got rich making doorknobs from red rocks, and had fruit trees that grew chocolate oranges. Now, beside the boy with the talking horse, which I figured out years ago, how much was real?"

  Q swapped grins with Xen. "Mother had some purple rabbits, but they started out as normal bunnies, not bad guys. Much too small to have started out as a person. Xen did have an interesting encounter with some bandits. Unfortunately he changed them right back. Goats . . . goats I could see. Trees? Umm, I don't think so, or at any rate the person wouldn't survive as such. Trees don't have brains, so all the information would be lost. The spell, if reversed, would produce a person with less starting knowledge than a newborn baby. I don't think even Nil would do that to someone. No chocolate orange trees either. It's too cold for oranges at all. Hmm . . . chocolate berry bushes, on the other hand . . ."

  "The witches sometimes magically refine the iron out of some low quality red shale. But they usually use brass for making doorknobs." Xen snickered. "The very mean sheep, on the other hand is locally infamous. And that's turned back into a sheep. I don't think mother ever told Nil she turned a wolf into a sheep."

  "Oh no. Please. I refuse to believe it." Garit was snickering.

  "She turned him back into a wolf, after he helped with those bandits, but the other wolves rejected him. He started hanging around—they are pack animals, after all—and mother made him a mental switch to trigger the change back and forth from sheep to wolf. He, umm, pretty much stays with mother's odd colored sheep, now." Xen looked innocently at Garit.

  "No. I am not even going to consider the possibility that you are telling the truth. The funny colored sheep are hard enough to believe in and I've seen them." Garit wiped his eyes. "I wonder if your invisible sheep have made it into his stories yet?"

  "Chocolate trees and bushes . . . I must talk to mother about this."

  Xen and Garit swapped grins. "Women and chocolate."

  "Ha! If I hadn't gotten so interested in these merging Worlds I would have remembered that I was planning on buying myself a sports car before I left. Oh, and the girl dragons, erm, kissed the bad guys before they ate them. Not instead of."

  Garit eyed her uncertainly, then edged over to read the labels on the boxes. "Power. Yes! Computers. Computer games."

  "You were
supposed to be learning how to use Oner computers, not how to waste time on silly games."

  Garit just grinned. "Asti knows how to get people enthusiastically accepting uncanny things like those computers."

  Q sniffed and got back to business. "I think most Half Moon witches can duplicate the solar cells. This isn't big enough for the whole building, we'll need a lot more. The capacitor and conversion systems are large enough to triple the area of panels, which will do until you lot start hiring people."

  Garit nodded. "Q? Want a job? Head Researcher of the Multiverse or some such?"

  "Umm. Hmm. I suppose I ought to finally settle down to a job, instead of volunteering all over the place."

  Xen grinned. "But it means you'll have to stop stealing things. I'd hate to have an internal scandal before we've even got an internal to have it in. These are library books, young woman!"

  "And I bought the solar stuff with, umm, the Internal Revenue's money. I was sort of acting under the auspices of the King. At any rate Rufi asked me to do anything that needed doing, so?" she shrugged.

  "Are we really going to be cops?" Garit opened two history books, then reached for a third. "Or are we just going to stop wars?"

  "We keep saying cops but it's peacekeepers we really mean, isn't it. Do we need a criminal division? There's no such thing as an interdimensional criminal."

  Chapter Nine

  Summer 1398

  Black Island, Comet Fall

  Falchion couldn't stand another minute in the company of the witches and their griping.