Up Jim River

XI. INTO THE WILD

Méarana had second thoughts about leaving Donovan behind, but her two companions assured her it was all for the best. “A man that sick can’t help us,” Teodorq told her as they rode the bumboat up to Blankets and Beads.

“We just go Wild look-look,” Billy added. “You see. Back no-long time. Sahb get good care meanwhile.”

But it was not whether Donovan received good care or bad that bothered Méarana, it was whether he received that care from strangers. And a friend was not measured by the good he could do you. “Maybe we could have waited a little longer.”

“Ah, no, memsahb! Port Captain say long time no more trade-ship.”

“What the little weasel means, babe,” the barbarian told her, “is this was his best chance to run out on his master.”

“You no say such, lack-wit! Mistress Harp need me now, not sick-man Donovan.”

“Quiet, the both of you.” She fell into a morose silence as the boat hurtled upward on Port Gatmander’s laser lift. Teodorq tried to pretend he was an old hand at this sort of thing, but every time the vessel shuddered, the Wildman grabbed for the edges of his seat. Billy saw this and snickered, though by his own admission he had himself ridden a laser lift only twice.

Méarana sighed once more. “I hope our luggage makes it.”

“No worry, memsahb. Dukovers handle luggage alla time. Cargo boat lift, yawn-yawn-time.”

Méarana once more tried to relax, but almost immediately the boat began docking maneuvers and the gyros spun the great, gray world of Gatmander into her viewport. Ah, Donovan. Sure, and it’s all for the best.

Blankets and Beads resembled more a small town in orbit than anything once called “ship.” Domes, spheres, apses, barrels, and tubes joined in a complexity of angles, connections, and fusions, like a mass of soap bubbles. The resemblance to a town was heightened by the whimsical outer structures by which the pressure vessels were decorated to resemble buildings of different eras in the long history of human habitation. The skin-style had been popular among shipbuilders a generation before, but had grown passé among the inner worlds. It survived now only among the thrice-used ships at the edge of civilized space.

She carried survey-class alfvens, for in the Wild she could expect no assistance from ground-based propulsion, and must pull herself along by the very strings of space. She also contained ffffg-imagers to analyze the berms of uncharted roads and probe for unmarked exits. It was a dangerous business, as the slightest miscalculation could take the ship into the subluminal mud to dissipate in a Cerenkov blink. Consequently, while her owners were tight enough with the ducat to outfit her with secondhand gear, they were wise enough to scrounge only the very best of secondhand gear.

The other reason for the trade ship’s size was that such vessels often embarked on voyages years in duration, and when they did so took along families and friends. She resembled a small town because on many occasions she was one. This left plenty of room for passengers on those shorter jaunts on better-established routes when only the crew was aboard.

Méarana, Theodorq, and Billy Chins were welcomed aboard by the cargo-master, if welcome it be called—a subtle if unwitting indicator of their status in the ship’s economy. The master’s name was Mart Pepper, who projected by his attitude a preference for less animate cargo. He checked each of them against a list, and gave them a chit directing them to their quarters. The chit would brighten or dim depending on whether they were on the proper path or not. It would also open and lock their cabins, debit their meals from their deposits, and so on.

As he handed each of them their chit, Pepper muttered in a wonderful economy of syllables, “Cap’n’ll bead-lighted tavya-come t’dinner-atse’n-point-five horae, metric,” although he did not communicate a very heartfelt delight nor even that the sentence was composed of more than a single, very long word.

Méarana said, “We’ll try to keep out of your way.” But even that, Pepper indicated by his grimace would not be far enough.

Their cabins were in Dome Three, encircling what appeared to be a village green. It featured bushes, a fountain, children’s playsets, and several dwarf maples. It was cleverly landscaped to appear larger than it was, and Méarana inferred the long-ago hand of a High Taran greensman.

There were a few other passengers already about on the green. One was a veiled woman with the grand title of Princess of the Farther Spaces from a small world on the farther side of the Burnt-Over District. She had negotiated a trade treaty with the League, had been suitably awed by what she had seen, and was returning with her eunuch and maidservant with a page full of promises.

“You pipple of the Farther Space,” she later complained to Méarana in a heavily-accented Gaelactic, “you tink because we pipple got no ray guns, we stupider than you pipple. But we know it when we getting poked up the butt.”

The fourth passenger was a thin, well-shaped man a little older than Méarana, dark-haired, long-nosed, with a dusky complexion, and garbed in a practical traveler’s coverall. He sat by himself on a bench by the fountains and, so intent was he on a reading screen, that he had created a bubble of privacy that Méarana was loathe to break.

Lastly, there was a Wildman from Teodorq’s own home world; though their bodyguard was not pleased to find a compatriot on board. “Paulie’s O’ the Hawk clan out in Overmount,” he said. “Yuh can tell by his tats. They futter sheep out there, ‘cause they can’t get no women.”

“Stay away from him, then,” the harper told him.

When the dinner chimes called the passengers to follow their glowing chits toward the barrel vault leading into Dome Two, Méarana noticed the dusky man still engrossed in his screen; so she went to him and touched him on the shoulder. “Dinner bell sounded,” she said. “They won’t wait.”

The man did not look up. “You are casting a shadow on my screen.”

Surprised to be so admonished, Méarana stepped aside and glanced curiously at the man’s screen—and recognized the gene map he was studying.

“Professor Doctor Doctor Sofwari! I have been wanting to meet you for a very long time.”

At that, he did look up, his eyes showing surprise, puzzle, and pleasure in rapid succession. He rose and took Méarana’s hand in his and kissed the back of it in a greeting gesture that the harper had not encountered before, but found unusually pleasant. “And I have been waiting even longer for a beautiful stranger to say that to me.”

Méarana laughed and offered her arm and they walked together to the dining hall. “You and I,” she said, “have much to discuss.”

Teodorq Nagarajan knew he was destined for greatness. He was not certain what form this greatness would take, only that his village did not contain it. And so, not long after killing his first man, he had taken up the trade of the wandering champion. Partly, this was a necessity. Dead men have kinsmen. But partly, too, it was sheer wanderlust. On some worlds, he would have been called a mercenary though he often worked pro bono.

He followed rumors to the coast, where he found “the Big Encampment” to be wood-and-brick buildings, stacked cheek-by-jowl, some soaring to three storeys, and built by the strange green-faced men from over the Boundless Main. They had come, the coastalmen told him, in large canoes with blankets tied to sticks. But Teodorq set himself the task of “learning the ropes,” in the sailormen’s talk, signing on as a “landsman” and making several voyages with them.

He mastered the new by never allowing his sense of wonder to become a sense of awe. He learned to study a thing with narrow-eyed concentration rather than to stare at it in gape-jawed astonishment. Too many coastal-men had fallen into drunkenness and squalor from awe of the green-faced men.

In the Oversealand he saw wonders beyond wonders and learned that the “Big Encampment” was a poor imitation of the sprawling, brawling cities of Old Cuffy and Yavelprawns and the other Great States. There had been employment there, too, and he had learned the art of the musket and the cannon. Although he regarded the latter as unmanly and the former as too slow to reload, he did not allow his sense of honor to outweigh his sense of practicality. He learned, too, a grave respect for captains who used men well, and contempt for those who used them badly.

Still, it was the “stunt” which lured him, and he sensed that in the massed armies of the Great States there was little scope for a man not “born with a cockade in his cap.” He heard tales that far to the southeast, in the land of the swartsmen, were fabulous cities where men had caged fire in steel. And so he set out to find them.

His journey, had any of the skalds of his homeland known of it, would have earned him immortality seven times seven. He crossed inland seas and deserts, he passed the broken monuments of forgotten empires, he gazed on the ruins of a city that would have put to shame even the grand capital of Yavelprawns had it not been the hovel now of howling savages. He endured a winter beyond imagination in the high ice-mountains of Bellophor, where lived a degraded and cannibalistic folk who dressed in the furs of the White Grizz. And in the end he had come to the finest city on World, where an appalling stench of soot and fire blackened the very air, but in whose stamping mills wondrous weapons and other goods were forged. The smiths of the plains had fashioned swords upon anvils with mighty strokes of thick-hewed arms. Those of Old Cuffy and the other Great States had done so with trip-hammers and water-driven wheels. But in the cities of Varucciyam in the far southeast they had tamed the Fire itself! Ai, Tengri! Awe very nearly overcame wonder in his heart.

But he had schooled himself well, and he saw in the whirling “gears” and “driveshafts” but finer versions of the cams and blocks and tackle of the northwest, and in the power delivered by steam a more refined version of the power delivered by water unboiled. He hired himself out as usual, starting with the most menial deeds; found dishonor and treachery to be fine arts among the Varucciyamen; and taught them a bit of what honor meant on plains so distant that word of them had not yet reached their ears.

And then, one day a ship that sailed no ocean drifted down from the skies. That something so massive could float like a leaf was a wonder in itself, and Teodorq found himself asking, “How do they do that?” It shamed him that the proud men of Varucciyam abased themselves before these overskymen. Had not he, Teodorq sunna Nagarajan the Iron-Arm, stood before the squalid wonders of the “encampment” of New Cuffy, knowing that he stood before that which his own people could not build? And yet he had stood before it. He had not knelt or bowed or banged his forehead on the ground. That a man commands steel or fire made a man more dangerous, but it did not make him more of a man. Greed and pride and, yes, love and honor were to be found among all: among the plainsmen and the Varucciyamen, among the Great States and even among the feral tribes of the Ice Mountains.

And so it was with an eye practiced on a score of cultures that he had identified among the strange-garbed men of the sky-ship the “chief of the boat.” This man understood the speech of the Varucciyamen, for this was not the first such visit, and Teodorq approached him and became once again a “landsman” on a new sort of “sailing ship.”

And there he found his understanding blunted at last. The gulf that separated the overskymen from even the Varucciyamen was wider than the gulf of the Grand Crevasse that split the Wondering Mountains of Eastern Bellophor. Yet there were certain tasks that wanted less the How than the simple What. What this button did could be learned. How it did so was better left to the shamans.

Afterward he thought, in a moment of self-awareness, that he had moved so easily with the overskymen because he had not come to them with the same conceit as the Varucciyamen. He had seen, time and again in his wanderings, that none could count themselves the greatest of all. Conceit he had; but it was conceit in himself as a man, and not in his mastery of this tool or that weapon. The proud cities of the southeast, looking far and wide, had found no rival to their greatness. To learn their true place in “the Spiral Arm” had been a crushing blow and made of a once-proud people a race of lackeys.

And so Theodorq listened to the science-wallah aboard the Blankets and Beads with a practiced and a practical ear, if not with an ear tuned to full understanding. He heard the Whats and dismissed the Hows. He suspected there was more of the latter in the explanation than was strictly needed. Sofwari was one of those who enjoyed the mystification of others. It was common among the physically weak to seek their victories on other fields. For any man must feel that he excels at some one thing, and the more he fails in other endeavors, the more he elevates the one in which he does not.

Yet Teodorq detected no malice in the man, and wondered if he chattered on not to show off his kennings but simply because he took such joy in them that he could not conceive that others did not.

Teodorq understood maps, and the holographic projections that Sofwari showed them were only another sort. That the color gradients indicated the spread of certain clans from their points of origin he accepted on faith. In his own land, the migrations of the clans were recorded in the Great Lays and sometimes one came across a mountain or a river or a rock formation remembered from a Lay and would feel one’s heart swell at the thought of ancestors who had once roamed there.

“But what was it that my mother found so interesting in these maps?” Lady Harp asked the wallah.

Sofwari turned the holostage toward her. Everyone could see, except Lady Harp, that the wallah was much taken with her. “It was the anomaly,” he said. “The clan-mother I call ‘Zhaamileey.’ You see, the little thread shapes change over time for reasons that are not entirely clear. The rate differs from world to world, but for my purposes it only mattered that that between-world variation was small and randomly distributed. Then it could be treated as a constant for all practical purposes.”

Teodorq made “get on with it” motions and was none too subtle about it.

“As you see,” he told them in case they could not see, “this is a very old clade. Its most recent common mother—or DCM in Gaelactic—lived seventy-eight hundreds of years before present.”

Lady Harp raised her eyebrows. “Which places her before the Cleansing…”

“Yes, but that is not the anomaly. Zhaamileey is in the wrong part of the sky. Her descendants are mostly on Harpaloon, not in the Old Planets or the Jen-jen. The marker was first seen among scattered creole descendants on Cuddalore and New Shangdong, those with ancestors among the aboriginal’ Loons. That was one reason to visit Harpaloon. The other was that the flow of colonists from all over the Arm makes her a wonderful sampling point.”

“How do you explain the anomaly?” asked the harper.

Sofwari flipped a hand. “Two possibilities. Harpaloon is where Zhaamileey’s descendants first appeared; or it is where they last appear. As for the first, Those of Name scattered our ancestors far and wide. Harpaloon may have been scattered a little bit farther. But the second is the more likely explanation. The clan of Zhaamileey was once more widespread, but died out across most of the Periphery, so that the’ Loons are a remnant, not an origin.”

“Interesting…But there is a third possibility.”

“So your mother said.” Sofwari smiled in a kindly-meant manner and placed his hand over hers. Teodorq noted how the harper allowed it for a moment before slipping out. “One means no offense, of course, but your mother was not a science-wallah. Like many women, she was prone to romantic notions. She thought the anomalous pattern had to do with an old Commonwealth fable.”

“The Treasure Fleet,” said Lady Harp.

Sofwari bobbed his head side to side. “Yes. I had never heard of it; but she told me it was a well-known children’s tale when she had been ‘in barracks.’ But archeology must be based on facts, not romances. One may as well believe in Babylonia or California or the Snowdrift Ride of Christopher Chu.”

“California…,” Méarana suggested.

“A fabled land of eternal youth, of gods and goddesses, where the streets were paved with stars.” Sofwari chuckled and leaned toward the harper, as if to impart a confidence. “But the truth of it is that it is only a nebula off on the edge of Old Commonwealth space.”

“Is there a bright, hot, blue star nearby?” the harper asked. “Like the one at Sapphire Point?”

Sofwari wagged his hands ulta-pulta. “I don’t know. Other science-wallahs specialize in cataloging stars. Besides, it’s over in the Confederation.”

The harper sang softly a capella,

Sofwari sighed. “A science-wallah does not leap ahead of the facts, let alone for the sake of a song.”

Teodorq chuckled and the other three turned to him. “Well enough, Sofwari,” he said. “If our Bridget ban leaped ahead of the facts, yet here we are, tiptoeing after.”