Wine of the Gods 1: Outcasts and Gods

by Pam Uphoff

  ***

  That night they tried the future world again. Chou's team drove through; the leader hefted a hard sided case, grinning. Wolfgang frowned as he took a mental glance at the truck. He'd thought six men had crossed. It seemed that seven were returning.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  NewGene Experimental Facilities

  Wisconsin, North American Union

  21 August 2116

  "BOCC's vehicles are certainly interesting." Jason strolled down the line of cylindrical trucks, admiring the various custom paint schemes.

  "The President of the colony company owns an RV manufacturer or at least, enough of if to special order these babies. They fit through the frame and rings ideally." Charlie snorted. "Unlike some ore carriers."

  "Yeah. Poor idiot driver never knew what happened."

  "Hard to believe jamming halfway in could shred a big tough truck like that. And the rings looked untouched. And are working fine. Now the trucks are going to be completely enclosed, so they don't ever heap them up so high." Jason turned and paced back. "These things are so nice. They can detach parts, drop the home chassis where they want and then use the truck frame for other stuff. I heard it had an extra-low gear range and can do most of the work of a tractor. Lucky dogs. Even if we escaped and got through the rings, we wouldn't have any thing like that to explore in, live in."

  Charlie grinned. "Loosing faith in the almighty Wolfgang? That boy scares me sometimes. He thinks too much, and only tells as little as he can get away with."

  "I want to know how to stretch one of those 'corridors' to Texas. I probably have half a dozen nieces and nephews by now. Not that I'm complaining about being able to visit Eau Clair, but . . . " Jason shrugged in frustration.

  "Yeah. It's all well and good to get paid, but the things I most want aren't things I can buy. Now that I think about it, I could do with a night out on the town. Maybe we ought to take Wolfgang with us, we can try to get him drunk enough to babble all his secrets."

  They watched as the gate opened and the RVs started moving, one after another. Charlie timed it. Twenty-six minutes. A new record. Five hundred and forty one RVs.

  "They've got seventy-five thousand families emigrating? We're going to have to run back to back to back gates for weeks."

  They dodged the new group of telies heading in to reopen the gate, and grabbed Wolfgang as he wobbled out.

  "Those new computers aren't bad." He blinked around and rubbed his eyes. "You can sort of relax, just keep an eye on them. If Mercy hadn't fainted, we'd have kept going."

  "Yeah right, and how bad a shape would you be in, then?"

  "Umm, hard to say. I'll probably find out tomorrow."

  "Tomorrow? No time off?"

  "Kennedy's back from San Francisco. He said we'd do one gate an hour for fifteen days, longer if necessary. He's looking pretty good, for an old man."

  "He's fifty-five."

  "He's dyed his hair and gotten some sort of skin tightening done. Or something."

  Jason eyed him. "You're thinking about what they brought back from that futuristic near world, aren't you?"

  "Yep. He's hopping around all energetic and healthy. Why don't you drop that gem in Dr. Health's ear and see what she thinks?"

  "You know, everyone thinks I'm your stooge."

  "You aren't?"

  ***

  Harry staggered to a halt at the two kilometer marker.

  "So they're shutting down the animal experiments entirely?" Wolfgang wasn't even out of breath.

  Jason walked in small circles, breathing deeply. "Not the horses!" He looked out over the field to their right, and whistled. Then panted a bit. "What are they going to do with the horses? It's bad enough they gelded all the yearlings, surely they won't kill them?" A small herd of horses burst out of a grove of trees and galloped across the field.

  Six leggy yearlings, three mares and three colts.

  Wolfgang admired them. "I've never ridden a horse. Perhaps I should take lessons."

  Jason laughed. "You mean there's something I do better than you?"

  "Charm women," Wolfgang said. "They start laughing at your ghastly poetry and just fall into your arms."

  "Look at this fellow," Jason climbed through the fence. "It was a crime against equanity to geld him." He fussed over a bright chestnut yearling, all elegance and promise. "They wouldn't kill him. They couldn't.

  "Rombeau, do you have a bubble?" Wolfgang scratched his nose and kept his voice low.

  "A what?"

  "Bubble. You've been doing the same dimensional exercises I have. Have you ever captured a bubble?"

  Jason shook his head. "What are you talking about and what good would that do me?"

  Wolfgang climbed over the fence. The horses all crowded around him, and he patted them tentatively. The black colt snorted as if laughing at him, and keeping an eye on Rombeau's scratching techniques, Wolfgang rubbed under the colt's eye and scratched his withers.

  Harry leaned in and stared as Wolfgang swept his hand around. "See the bubble?"

  Jason nodded. "I see it."

  "And now you don't."

  The black colt was gone.

  Jason wheezed in disbelief. "Air! He needs to breathe."

  "Not a problem." Wolfgang grinned. "There's almost no time in there when it's closed to the world, and it is moderately permeable to air and water. I've tested it. Hell, I've hidden inside them. How do you think I survived so many of those battles I got those pretty medals for, eh?"

  "Ah." Harry was enlightened. "That's how they found you."

  "Yeah, saved their miserable lives and what do I get for it? Turned in. Slavery. Customized brain piercing, free from Lobotomies R Us."

  "They don't actually do brain piercing. That's just a rumor." Harry said.

  "Oh? I haven't seen Richie, Chauncey or the Evil Twins for a week now."

  Harry frowned. "Some others are missing, as well. I heard that Barrows was working up a new team."

  "Got one." Jason held out absolutely nothing. The chestnut nudged him . . . and disappeared.

  Harry sighed. "Do you know how much trouble you two are in?"

  "What for?" Jason asked. "Sun Gold is missing? Surely you do not think I have him in my pockets? Doesn't he have a transponder? Can they track him?"

  Wolfgang laughed. "If that doesn't work, let me take the blame. I'll say I let him out far, far away." He reached into nothing and pulled a small bloody pellet out of thin air. "Speaking of which." He wiped it carefully onto the wooly coat of another colt, and then walked over and did the same to thin air by Rombeau. "Stick the bubble on your wrist like this, and it'll follow you around. Not that it's really moving, not being a 3-D phenomenon. The only problem with these are that Pax figured them out himself, and he can snitch to the Company Goons if it's to his advantage."

  "Is this how you made that corridor to town?" Jason demanded.

  "Yes. You pin the hole down somewhere handy, and stretch the rest of it to wherever you want to go. Open another hole and pin it down. A dimensional corridor, like a permanent miniature gate. Harry, I'll show you where it is later."

  "Do I really want to know? And can we go away before they come and shoot us?" Harry eyed Wolfgang. He seemed to have a number of almost nothings stuck all over himself.

  "Got your breath back? I swear you must not have exercised the whole time I was gone." Wolfgang vaulted the fence and trotted away.

  Harry growled and followed at his own pace, walking the last half kay. Bubbles. Bubbles had potential. Serious potential.

  He caught one himself that evening. It was ridiculously easy, once you knew what to look for. Gisele caught on right away. "Forget optdiscs, get books, actual paper books and toss them in a bubble. As much as you can get away with."

  He passed on knowledge of the bubbles to every Telie he met. He suspected the rest were as well, especially after the fourth time someone else tried to tell him about it.

  "They can be layered for security. The big
ones you could fit a mansion inside." Jason grinned. "If you had one."

  Harry eyed him warily. "One trusts you haven't actually got one."

  "No, but I snuck into town last night and there was this absurd . . . well, I've resisted temptation. So far."

  "How do you sneak into town? How do you even get out of your room?"

  "We control the locks. We have for years. The guards know, and they know better than to challenge that. Wolf's got dimensional corridors to several places. And I've opened one myself. To get through a wall, put a bubble into it. Make a hole, take a deep breath and step in. Open another hole opposite your first and step through. A corridor is simply a stretched bubble."

  Harry nodded comprehension. "I really don't think wholesale theft is a good idea, though."

  "It's hard for a slave to be a law-abiding citizen, Harry."

  "But if the courts ever back our claims to emancipation, to citizenship . . . "

  "I'll become suddenly contrite. But I'm not optimistic."

  Nothing was said about horses, but there was a search for missing puppies.

  The other horses disappeared.

  The animal labs were shut, no news, lots of speculation.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  NewGene Experimental Facilities

  Wisconsin, North American Union

  10 September 2116

  :: Stop it, Wolfgang. You are not going to mess this up. :: The voice in his head was mostly AK's, but there were tones that might be others as well. Their minds were too open to each other.

  :: Look around. :: He told her. :: There are more dark areas, we should check them all. ::

  :: No. We are not exploring today. :: That was someone else, Nero, he thought. From the Purple team.

  Rebeccah was holding the mag bottle steady, Marty Beta was reaching out and making stabs at the fizzing blueness.

  :: Down there is where they want us to go. :: AK reached down and touched the dense cluster, spotted the spark and reached specifically for it. The blue spun into foam, into a giant whirlpool, the throat of a tornado as it touched down.

  The power supply jumped and jiggled as the gate opened. Wolfgang leaned to support Rebeccah. Just hold the bottle gently, focus on the streaming electrons. Ignore the maelstrom we're creating. The flow steadied, and Wolfgang withdrew. He pulled a part of his attention away from the blue and opened his eyes, listened. Vehicular traffic, shouting, then more vehicles.

  Someone closer, griping about the size of the rings. "If you could make them big enough for a decent sized ore hauler, we wouldn't need so much time. Yeah, I know, energy efficiency. But there other efficiencies to consider as well."

  "Unfortunately our ability to cover distances falls off rapidly as we enlarge the cross section. Half again this size and we wouldn't be able to reach your mining world."

  "Yeah? Well, the physicists claim these aren't distances."

  "Well, not in three dee. But in however many dimensions the gates operate in, some places take more energy and more time to connect to. We are calling that the distance, as it seems to be consistent. And we're mapping out directions according to the spherical distortion of the field. Those are also constant for each world."

  Wolfgang suppressed a smile. He'd be out of sorts too if he spent weeks at a time on a world where the highest form of life was algae. The mining companies loved them, because even the most rabid environmentalists had trouble getting support for the poor algae, hundreds of miles away from the mines.

  One of the more interesting things about the worlds across the dimensions was their congruence with Earth. At the point they'd split, they'd each been identical to their Earth at that point in time. Then they'd begun diverging, but slowly. Many of the rock formations were the same, and the locations of high quality ores. And some were completely different. An entire clump of otherwise pretty worlds had had major extensional faulting on the west coast of North America. The California gold fields had never formed. Unlike this world, where, despite the earlier split, gold was plentiful.

  So the miners got the gold, and other groups were colonizing almost as fast as they could get themselves organized.

  "So it just isn't possible to enlarge the rings." That was McNiff, wasn't it? The PR flack. He made it sound so simple. The vehicle noise died, Wolfgang could hear them calling to start the shut down.

  Rebeccah was shrugging off Jack Kelso's hands. Idiot either didn't realize how he interfered with the shut down, or didn't care. Some of the newer guards were to starting act like him; it was time to crop that behavior back. It was time to finish up his manipulations.

  He sank back into the team to help. He knew how a lot of mental manipulation worked, now. Soon he could start aggressively pursuing his own purposes.

  ***

  "If you will let me expand the new set up, I'm sure we can keep the gates open for several hours at a time. That should take care of the complaints about cutoffs. The setup would also save on personnel resources. I think we can run gates for, say three out of four hours, around the clock. One day for maintenance each week."

  What new set up? Is that why some of the telies are still missing?

  Harry hadn't been invited to the meeting, but it was being remote viewed by several people who couldn't attend. Someone had slipped up and left his office computer able to tap the Company Net. Or perhaps they thought that keeping him locked up after hours was sufficient security. He'd found that he could unlock locks easily, and scramble video monitors. So he leaned back in his office chair and watched impassively on the computer monitor. Perhaps he ought to stretch a corridor between home and office. But how was he to hide this end, with everyone coming and going?

  On the screen, Jack rubbed his forehead before going on. "So, after tests here, we can begin operations at the second site under the new plan right from the start. That will be, umm. March of twenty-one nineteen. Then as we train up the youngest of the Cadre, and gain experience in the longevity of the new system, we'll have a better grasp for how many gates we can operate." He squinted at his notepad.

  "So our revised plan calls for a third gate complex in . . . " He broke off with a sudden grimace.

  "Are you all right, Kelso?" Kennedy frowned down the table.

  "I've been having these horrible headaches. I guess I shoo shee a doc . . ." His voice slurred as one side of his face sagged. He hit the floor with an audible thump.

  Harry watched grimly, as a secretary made several calls. Gisele rushed in, in nightgown and robe. She checked his eyes, breathing, reflexes. "Looks like a stroke. I don't have anything on hand that might help. Let me talk to the EMTs. You have called for an ambulance, haven't you?"

  "It's on the way." The middle-aged secretary was wringing her hands.

  Gisele stood up and took the woman's phone and spoke briefly into it. Her eye kept drifting back to Jack, and she handed off the phone abruptly and bent over him. "Never mind. He's gone."

  Harry shivered, and wondered which telie had done it. Which one had the medical knowledge to make it look like a stroke? He watched Gisele on the small screen. With her hair loose, without glasses, without makeup, she was gorgeous. In person her glow nearly overcame everything she used to disguise her attractiveness. Had Jack gone beyond the frequent invasions of her space, to actively harass her? Only her value as a part of the transdimensional gates kept anyone who wanted her from taking her. And perhaps the memory of two dead rapists. But the lessons learned from that incident worked both ways. This death wasn't going to be so grossly, obviously, caused by a telie.

  I need to talk to Gisele, and maybe to Jason. His guts roiled. Or perhaps I'll skip them and go straight to Wolfgang.

  After the morning gate he followed Wolfgang back to the dorms. "We need to talk."

  "Do we?" Wolfgang eyed him. "We don't usually allow guards and managers into our buildings, but I think you need a bit of a demonstration. Come with me."

  The remote controlled doors to the wings were all missing, open arched do
orways, nicely trimmed, replaced them. When did that happen? The lock on Wolfgang's door buzzed faintly as they approached and Harry walked into a nicely appointed living room. Hardwood floors? Leather furniture? An open door where there shouldn't have been one at all, gave Harry a glimpse of a combined bedroom and office with a desk top computer and full sized bed.

  Wolfgang's grin flashed. "You see? The Company doesn't control us any longer. The guards know better than to even try to come in our four dorms. We work for the company, so far. If they try abuse, they'll get a rebellion. Now, what can I do for you, Harry?"

  "There have been several guards who died."

  "There have been several rapes, beatings, threats. Or just pervasive harassment. No one will protect us but ourselves. So we are. We won't just roll over and take it. The company can make it better, or worse. And worse will, in the end destroy them."

  "Everyone is afraid of the telies. This is why."

  "Everyone is safe. We attack only those who directly threaten us, and our rebellion will involve leaving, not fighting."

  "Leaving?"

  "Oh, come and have lunch, Harry." Wolfgang steered him back downstairs, the lobby of the building looked the same as always, the same as all the others. Mostly. Harry frowned at two ordinary doors, side by side. There was a closet for cleaning supplies . . . but he didn't remember the second door. Hadn't all the dorms been identical? Wolfgang led him through the second closet door. Into an alley, and out onto a side street. As they walked, memory clicked in. He knew this street.

  "This is Eau Clair."

  "Yep. Remember where that alley is, there's an illusion over the corridor, but you can feel it. Once you're in it, you'll feel like you're suffocating until you get the door open at the far end. There's no lock on it."

  Harry nodded his acceptance of what amounted to permission to use the corridor.