Outies

by Pournelle, J. R.

  Through the industrial district of Zarkel, choked with smog; lined with vehicle graveyards that escalated from diminutive taxis to rusting tractor rigs, the latter incongruously piled on rooftops. The highway was lined with transporters, teamsters, cart traffic: a free zone with tarp-covered trailer loads of every make and model; then water tankers in line after line.

  Their main destination for the day would be the Ezekiel wetlands: prior to Foundation the once-vast marshes were fed by aquifers seeping from beneath the Oquirrh mountains. Now, aquifer pumping had so lowered the water table that exposed peat sloughing off and blew away. Vast tracts of desiccated land outside the marsh were demarcated into lines and squares by piles of basalt stone. Within these censurations sprawled herder encampments, brown wool burlap tents fluttering in the wind, the livestock grazing thin pasturage somewhere out of view. If left ungrazed, the surrounding countryside would have reverted from bare desert to steppic scrub and prairie.

  The TCM Water Authority still diverted a small percentage of the water back into a small fraction of its former self, to maintain a desolate tourist park. The fringe of palms and tamarisk surrounding it were signposted as being reminiscent of “the primeval wetlands of Borrego Springs or Ocotillo Wells, eastward of The Barrens.” Reed brakes choked the seeps. Water grazers kept pond-sized patches open. The springs were divided by a Founder wall designed to keep salt from fresh. One end had stone arches carved in animal reliefs. An abandoned rehabilitation project had aimed to add a second pool system: all that remained was cracked mud and dust.

  Staff poured the visitors honey-sweetened tea in little glasses, then left them to wander through the brakes to an adobe observation hut overlooking a bucolic wallow.

  Refreshed, Asach and the boys next headed north through Ezekiel itself for a two-dinar wheel repair. Shops catering to the highway trade were bedecked with plush and plasticene and plaster Tweety Kitties (did people here even know of Tweety Kitty?). Asach wondered: in this teamster world, is it plush for girls, plasticene for boys, and plaster for the garden? Cascades of nuts and seeds and spices and tins; cheeses in oil; unidentifiable fruits in syrup lined shop shelves. The road into town crossed onto basalt fields as sharply as crossing a watered pitch, past a series of once grand, now abandoned guest houses, and then the black blocks of Ezekiel’s castle loomed: the Founder’s wartime headquarters, with its two-ton solid basalt door.

  They rolled onward toward Bonneville along the southern road, through horizon-wide pebble plains, trackless and capped with desert varnish, grazed clean of any puff of chaff. Along a long-dry wadi lay Amra Tabernacle—a little Founder-era bubble with a roadway tourist sign. Concrete cones, a meter high, ran parallel awhile: markers along the old First Empire Mandate track. They careened behind, through, alongside truck convoys ferrying limestone nodules the size of squashed dumpsters to facing-tile plants on the outskirts of Saint George. Foursquare, turreted Castle Peery rose above a second wadi, overlooking a Founder’s-Era landfill. Dust devils boiled past flocks of desolate sheep, fed with trucked grain; watered by tankers; allowed to graze to scorched earth any seed that dared germinate under the moisture-sapping wind. They passed a transporter overtopped with green reed headed toward the sheep camps.

  Bonneville, New Utah

  They were ten days on the road, and arrived in Bonneville at the last violet of dusk, rolling to a stop outside a battered hotel just as stars punctured the vault of heaven. By the time they clambered over one another and milled toward the grimy door, the black of night had sapped all color, flattened objects to silhouettes, and sharpened every footstep into a staccato echo. Asach, wrapped in a shapeless, hooded cloak, faded to the rear, allowing the farm boys to shove their way ahead into the shabby lobby. They did all the talking.

  “Rum long tripela man bai kostim hamas?” How much is a room for three?

  The desk clerk feigned indifference. “Yu no save long tok anglis, a? Man bilong wokim gaden, a? Pilgrim, a? ” You don’t speak Anglic, huh? Farmer, huh? Pilgrim, huh?

  “Well, yeah, grinned the lummox with the shotgun, still sporting his shades. As a matter of fact, I do. Speak Anglic.”

  The clerk snorted.

  “Umm, yeah,” grinned the driver. “About 12,000 hectares.” Still grinning. “Farmer, I mean.” Still grinning. “You know, Saint George? Little TCM—garden plot—just outside Saint George?”

  The clerk blanched. These weren’t Himmist hicks.

  Shotgun leaned elbows in the desk, which rather emphasized the sling crossing his several acres of chest. Still grinning. “Imagine!” he chirped brightly, “You’re right three for three! That one,” (he jerked his head rearwards) is the—pilgrim? Is that what you said? Did you actually say, pilgrim?”

  Now thoroughly confused, the clerk gaped until rescued by the driver who, still grinning, gave a little shrug. “Thing is, best not to Stick your nose in, if you follow my meaning?”

  The clerk nodded.

  “So then, brother, “ he smiled, “how much is a room for three?”

  They trudged upstairs, past sallow walls, into a poured concrete wing that at best had only ever been elegant in a developer’s imagination. The flimsy door banged open, revealing a tawdry suite with smoke-stained walls. A wheezing air conditioner struggled unsuccessfully with the heat. Asach pulled back heavy curtains, sodden with the odors of ages, to reveal grimy French windows that opened onto a miniscule balcony. The balcony could accommodate two chairs, or two people standing, but not both at once. To sit, you had to pull the chairs into the room, then plunk-and-scoot your way back out to the rusty railing.

  Not that the view was worth the trouble. The balcony faced an inner courtyard; far-below, stained concrete circled an algae-rimed pool. Bad music blared from a makeshift bandstand in one corner. Bored guests attending a bad suit convention stared into their drinks.

  “And to think, “ said Asach into the murky air, “this is the luxury wing.”

  “At full rack rates,” nodded the brothers.

  “Come on,” sighed Asach, not bothering to close the doors, “I know a better place.”

  Saint George, New Utah

  In the end, Asach’s “defection,” as HG called the no-show status, proved to be The Librarian’s own ticket off the transport returning to Maxroy’s Purchase.

  “Got to have somebody to keep tabs on things,” said HG, though how, concretely, any report of this was to be accomplished, given the absence of any direct communications means, was unclear to The Librarian.

  The Librarian did have a name: Colchis Barthes. A long-limbed man with silver hair, Barthes would appear quizzically unruffled and immaculately pressed in the midst of a hailstorm. Or, more appropriately, as the case might be here on New Utah, in the midst of a dust storm.

  Barthes had distinguished himself as head of American Collections at the Imperial Library on Sparta. It was an odd sort of division within the library: The “Americas” were a grab-bag of worlds that shared only one common denominator: their names were derived from millennium-old names of states and territories on Earth.

  Actually, this implied a second (and really, a defining) denominator: these worlds tended toward self-styled traditionalisms, linguistic revivals, and archaic information preservation societies. Hence The Librarian’s slow, patient rise through the ranks. He could read Old and Middle Anglic fluently, and was an adept at locating and recovering the flotsam of a previous information age. It was amazing what people had, figuratively speaking, tucked into their shoes across thirty generations; what church records they had defended with their lives; or what just plain turned up in long-forgotten archives. One entire city library had been miraculously preserved on a thousand-year-old flash drive, disguised (or designed?) as a piece of jewelry. Of course, no machine now existed that could decode the thing, but that’s where Colchis came into it.

  As the home world of the Imperial line, New Washington had naturally been of special collector interest, and that is where Barthes had earned his rep
utation. After the Imperial Restoration, interest also surged in archival recovery on New Chicago—his first assignment in the Trans-Coal Sack sector. Naturally, that work done, he’d been handy, so it seemed useful that he be assigned to the second New Utah accession mission.

  But New Utah was a far cry from his previous patrician career postings. He had, of course, been assigned to a Cultural Attaché here or there several times during his younger years, but always during less interesting times. He had enjoyed rambling through street markets and media stalls, rifling through junk and stumbling upon entire collections turned out of some grandmother’s locker.

  To his credit, he was appalled at the state in which he’d found New Utah’s (well, Saint George’s) Zion University library. He stood, hand pressed to his face in horror, before the melted wreckage of one Scriptorium—Scriptorium!—Actual, hand-lettered manuscripts, pre-dating First Empire!—now reduced to a gutted, ash-filled shell, inhabited by mangy dogs.

  Three small boys appeared with rocks. They pelted the dogs. His guide pointed to what had been: There was the melted slag of a stained glass wall that had once soared above the foyer, casting flower fields of light on the reading benches on every floor. There was where the genealogical archives had stood: the papers, diaries, notes and bibles that hung flesh on the bare bones of the begats. There had been an alcove, where the notes and diaries and unfinished research plans of retired and deceased professors had been stored. Colchis stood aghast, contemplating a massive charred beam, a double-hand span wide to a side, adze-marks preserved in charcoal. It was all that remained of the timbered ceiling. He reached out and shoved it with his foot. Unsteady on its bed of rubble, it rolled lazily over.

  Colchis scuffed absent-mindedly through the incongruously unburned stripe of shattered brick and mortar that had been insulated by the timber. Clearly, the fireball had exploded though from the floor above, collapsing the ceiling before consuming all below it. He traced the grey stripe, amazed at the intensity of heat that had reduced everything else around it to white ash. Then he stopped. A charred edge poked through the wrack. Expecting a flake; a fragment, he was surprised when a light tug failed to dislodge it. He brushed away the fist-deep overburden. The charred edge belonged to a clipped sheaf of hand-written paper, miraculously preserved.

  It was a conference paper, a little over eighty years old. Something to do with the biology of something called a Swenson’s Ape. Sad, that of all the things that might have been saved, all that remained of the vast collection was a random draft of a minor bit of academic arcana. There was no name on it, just the date.

  “Any idea who wrote this?” He showed the title to his guide.

  The student shrugged. “Some dead professor or other. Hard to know now. The catalogue went up with the library. You might check with the Temple archivist. Some of our collections were backed up there. Not all of them.”

  Barthes handed her the paper. She shrugged again, then swiveled, hands out, to take in the ruin. “If you’re going to the Temple, you might as well hang onto it. I have nowhere to put it. Maybe they can find a related file.”

  A week passed before Barthes thought of the paper again. The reconstruction effort itself had been all-consuming. It wasn’t just that New Utah had a different language and business culture for all things informatic (which it did). It was not just that it had its own mature bureaucratic system, accounting methods, and paperwork (there were bitstreams of that, too). The biggest impediment was that it was clearly a post-war reconstruction zone.

  He couldn’t just pop in a ‘tooth and call anyone, because the dish system still didn’t work, and anyway most people didn’t have them. He couldn’t just set an appointment, because that would tell the assassins (yes, he discovered, there were assassins) exactly the time and place to murder whomever he was meeting. So he had to just show up, and hope that the office he was visiting was open, and that whomever he needed was there.

  When he did that, traffic was utterly unpredictable. Whenever the TCM, private security teams, or a True Church VIP was moving (unannounced of course), they closed half the roads through the city, turning freeways into parking lots. About half the time—and an unpredictable half of the time—offices were just closed. Whenever there was a big security alert, which happened in unpredictable clusters, everything just shut down. At Zion University, there were no summer classes, so to save salary and electricity the campus was closed. If contractors showed up, they were turned away three times out of four, for lack of guides.

  And the big True Church construction contractors and projects—Titan-Van Zandt, Tumbridge, Orcutt Land and Mining—were sucking the city dry of qualified managers. There was just a lot more money to be made working for them than for one stray Librarian. So there might have been plenty of workmen, but there were few to direct them, and even fewer to manage routine back office matters like invoicing.

  Then there was the 130-degree heat. That was not an exaggeration. The city electricity cycled in two-hour on, (hopefully only) four-hour off increments, on an unpredictable schedule. Usually it cycled off-phase, which meant that it wouldn't actually run many appliances, like air conditioners, and it fried computational electronics. So, everyone sweated through the night and arrived to work exhausted. There were backup generators, but in Saint George most of those were True-Church contracted, meaning that they ran on fuel cells, not solar, and the hydrogen extractors down on the coast were only operating at about twenty percent capacity. You couldn’t legally fill fuel cylinders (to prevent black marketing), so to refuel the cells you had to wait in line, fill a FLIVR, drive it home, and in a bloody dangerous operation siphon the fuel out of the FLIVR’s tank and into the generator’s.

  Colchis was buffered from this somewhat at his hotel—they managed to keep the air conditioning going some of the time, so his room temperature at night stayed down to around 90 degrees, which was livable with a fan—but the people working for him did not have that luxury. Compared to those unpredictabilities, sorting through a budget variance felt pretty minor, and tracking down the long-dead author of a paper presented at a Xenobiology plenary session was nowhere on his charts.

  Lying on his bed one night, spread-eagled to enjoy the full cooling effects of his fan, Barthes glanced again at the title page. It was dated 2867, for a conference somewhere in New Caledonia. He amended his assessment. For a paper never even presented at a conference. That was the year of the True Church uprising on Maxroy’s Purchase. That’s when its newly-hatched military wing had burned and looted cities across that planet, destroyed their churches, withdrawn its Temple to Glacier Valley, proclaimed itself primate, transported thousands into exile, and established its Security Zone on New Utah.

  And then, were that not enough, came the collapse of New Utah’s Alderson tramline, effectively ending interstellar travel for all but the extremely wealthy. Barthes wasn’t sure that the New Caledonia conference had ever been held, but it was dead cert that the poor biologist, beavering away in the backwaters of Zion University, had not attended. Making the paper’s lone survivorship all the more poignant. He held it up in the guttering light from the indifferently-powered bulb, and fell asleep before he’d finished the first paragraph.

  New Scotland

  HG arrived back in New Caledonia in a flurry and a huff, so puffed with self-importance and wounded pride that Horvath himself felt obliged to talk him down from his high horse.

  “Now look here,” said Horvath, “are you saying that Quinn violated the technology ban? That’s a serious charge. Don’t levy it unless you’ve got proof that will stand up in a formal inquiry.”

  “Well, no. It’s just that Quinn’s so impossible to—to—control.”

  Renner snorted. “I’m impressed. I don’t know anyone with any sense who’d even try.”

  Horvath noted, but ignored, the implied insult. “Young man,”—only in comparison to Horvath could HG reasonably called young—”it’s not my position—and therefore not yours—to control Quinn.”


  “But I was Chief of Party!”

  “No. I am Chief of Party. You are the science delegate on the advance team. Your sole function is to ensure that there are no inadvertent science and technology breeches during preparations to receive the Accession Delegation.”

  “And to do that—”

  “To do that, you look over Colchis Barthes’ shoulder during Library installation—though I daresay the man knows his job—and, as far as I care, give Quinn enough rope to hang.”

  Renner rolled his eyes and waved the Quinn comment away, grunting. “Umph. Stay on point. Quinn’s mission is—to do what?”

  “To set up extension offices in Bonneville.”

  “Pending your full Science and Technology assessment?”

  “Yes.”

  “And so far as you know, that’s where Quinn’s gone?”

  HG blustered. “Well, yes, but—”

  “So, there’s no problem, then, right? You’ll just compare the pre- and post-assessments, and look for evidence of technology leaks.”

  HG flushed, but did not answer. Horvath’s eyes flashed. Renner pounced. “You did do a pre-assessment in Bonneville?”

  “Well, no, actually.” HG’s lips disappeared. He addressed his answer to Horvath, but glared sideways at Renner. “It’s not precisely easy to get there.”

  “But your own report shows air, rail, and road lines-of-communication. Aside from the Lynx.”

  “Road takes ten days. “Air” is the solar glider, and that takes four, weather allowing. The SunRail runs overnight, but—but…” He trailed off.

  “But what?”

  HG squirmed. “There are no sleeper cars. No berths. Just—seats. And I was told there could be bandits.”