I had kept my mouth shut so far. Not that I didn't have things I wanted to say; my tongue was nearly bloody from being bitten. I was baffled by Trub's returning the kids to the very people whose knothead beliefs had put them in danger. I wasn't going to say anything about that in front of these lames, and thought maybe I wouldn't need to if I helped Trub drive her point home.
“I just got here today,” I said. The cult members seemed to find it easier to look at me than Trub. She stared at me blankly, as if mildly surprised I could talk.
“Just a few hours ago I had a whole gang trying to kill me. They almost did too.” I shook my head. “Poppa Poppy makes them look like a bunch of Muppets. He's a monster. He's—” I tried to summon an image that would resonate with them, that would bang their brain like gongs. “He's the Beast. You get me? The Beast."
I paused to let that sink in. They were staring at me wide-eyed, and the two women's hands now clutched the heavy crosses they wore around their necks, as if my naming the Beast could summon him, and the crosses could save them.
“Listen to me,” I said, making sure I had their full attention before continuing. “That man will take whatever pleasures he wants from these or some other kids’ bodies, and he will eat their souls, slurping them down like raw oysters. And your souls will be eaten at the same time if you do nothing to prevent it.”
My spur of the moment sermon delivered, I risked a quick peek at Trub to see how she was taking my butting in. Her face was harder to read than psychedelic Arabic.
After a moment she spoke up. “I can take you away right now. Take you and these kids someplace safe, someplace nice. Your choice.”
The adults would not look at me or Trub. They wouldn't even look at the kids, who were still clinging to me, silent and forlorn. The girl was old enough to understand that her fate was being decided. The little boy looked ready to cry. I had a hard time looking at them; it was too much of a heartbreak.
“I . . .” the man began.
We waited for him to say more.
Finally he shook his head. Having said nothing, he was done talking. His face and posture exuded curdled shame.
“We will try to protect them,” the aunt said, with so little force no one was reassured.
“Will you move away?” Trub demanded.
“We—we will try.” This came out even less convincing that her promise to try to protect them. “Can we have them back now?”
I looked to Trub for instructions. She nodded curtly.
Although it was the last thing I wanted to do, I handed the little guy over to his uncle. The girl let go of me but didn't go to her mother or aunt. She stood there by herself, lost inside my coat, shivering with the effort it took to hold back tears.
Trub stared hard at the three adults with that one good eye, then spun on her heel. “Let's get the fuck out of here,” she growled, then began walking fast, taking the path away from the village on the hill.
I hurried to catch up, taking a last glance back over my shoulder just before the path curved. The three adults and two children were together, but if there was even one single spark of joy in it, I couldn't see it.
Trub kept walking, fast and determined. I didn't need to be a mindreader to tell that she was trying to cool off, to put some distance between herself and the mess we had just left behind.
After a few minutes I couldn't take the silence any longer. “Was that the right thing to do?” I asked, carefully keeping any hint of blame out of my voice.
“Probably not,” she said tonelessly.
“Then why did you do it that way?” Again sounding confused rather than accusing. Because I was confused. According to what she'd told Poppa Poppy, the Bugs gave her the juice to do damn near anything she wanted. Yet she had done very close to nothing.
She glanced my way, and I could see that she was working hard to keep her irritation in check. “So what should I have done, kid?”
“I don't know,” I admitted. “I don't know the full range of what you can do, or even what you are in all this. Are you like a cop or something?”
“Or something,” she said with a mordant laugh. “That's me.”
“It sounds like the, uh, aliens give you a lot of leeway.”
“They do. Maybe too much.”
“What you told Poppa Poppy. You really did survive a bomb and kill the bomber, didn't you?”
“Yeah. The exertion cost so much blood I almost didn't make it.” Another grim laugh. “But it seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“And the threats you made. You could crush Poppa Poppy like a bug, couldn't you?”
A slow nod. “Without even working up a sweat.”
“You could have taken those kids away, placed them somewhere else. Exiled that peckerhead minister with a snap of your fingers.”
“I came closer to it than they'll ever know.”
Suspicion confirmed. Which left me with a question that had to be asked. I did my best to pose it in a way that wouldn't get me hurt.
“Now don't take this wrong,” I began. “I'm not pointing any fingers or making any sort of judgments. I'm new here, and I'm just trying to figure out how things work. But if you could do those things, and wanted to do those things, then why didn't you do them?”
She shook her head. “Figure it out, kid.” She raised her voice. “Transport.”
A door appeared in front of us.
“Come on,” she said.
I followed her through it, wondering what I was missing.
* * * *
Stepping through a door in one place and coming out somewhere miles away was giving my sense of reality a wedgie. In spite of that existential crack-bind I couldn't help thinking that one of the doors would sure have come in handy when I'd had the cops and Chrome Lords hunting me down.
The sense of dislocation I felt every time was partially due to having not even a crumpled gum wrapper of an idea what it was like in the Hoop. I was flying blind.
This time we emerged on the top of a high, wide plateau. Once again there was a settlement, a mix of white round buildings and others made from natural materials, what had to be at least three hundred of them widely scattered and separated by trees and gardens.
Forest surrounded the plateau, fading into flatlands and the bare white stuff that the Hoop was made from. For the first time I was able to see one end of a segment. The white glowing ceiling and soft white walls came together in a flat blank surface maybe a mile away.
The view would have been scenic, and the feeling of the place idyllic, except that there was a wood and white-stuff wall running all the way around the rim of the plateau, and there were people in wood and bamboo armor guarding that wall.
“This isn't another war game, is it?” I said. The tension in the air was palpable; the faces I saw were lined with worry.
Trub shook her head. “Nope. Come on. We're going to talk to the Mayor of High Vista.”
“That's what they call this place?”
“Yeah,” she said, starting toward where the biggest cluster of men and women were at the wall, near a big gate.
The view was amazing. “It fits.”
The mayor was a tall black man in jeans, short-sleeved white shirt, and rubber clogs. He was near the gate, arms resting on the wall, gazing down at what lay below.
“How are you doing, Homer?” Trub called as we approached.
He turned toward us, and his craggy face lit with a smile. It was the smile of a man who was very tired and more than a little relieved. “We're hanging in there, Miss Trouble,” he said in a thick southern drawl. “For now, anyway.”
The light dawned on a small thing: Trouble. Of course. That's where Trub came from.
“Cyrus and his boys getting ready for another attack?”
“They sure are. Take a look at what they've whomped up this time.”
Trub went to the wall and peered over. I did the same.
Near the base of the plateau, maybe two hundred feet down, were a cou
ple dozen people in their own homemade armor, armed with spears, clubs, and longbows. In the midst of this odd attack force stood a medieval siege engine. A wooden catapult over thirty feet tall.
Trub let out a low whistle. “That's new.”
“And worrisome,” Homer agreed. “We're thinking Cyrus found himself some sort of expert in old-time weapons to help build that thing. They dragged it out this morning and have been fussin’ with it ever since. I'm thinking they're close to using it on us and causing some real damage.”
I had to agree with his prediction. The catapult had a sinister air, like the Spanish Inquisition's version of a howitzer. I wasn't an expert on such weapons but did know they'd been popular for hundreds of years. That suggested they were probably pretty useful to their owners.
“Why are they attacking this place?” I said, directing my question at Trub.
“Because—” She paused, cocking her head. A deep frown appeared. “On it,” she said.
“On what?” I asked.
“Emergency.” She laid her real hand on Homer's arm. “Would you please fill Glyph here in on your problems? I've got a hot situation to deal with. I'll be back before Cyrus and his tribe get their shit together.”
“I surely hope so,” he said. “I called for help ‘cause I believe we're surely gonna need it.”
“Trust me.” She raised her voice. “Transport.” A door appeared. She stepped through it and was gone, the door disappearing after her.
Homer gave me a curious look. “I never knew Miss Trouble to be much for partners.”
“I'm not sure what I am,” I said, “But I know I'm not a partner. I ran into her when I first got here. She took me in tow, and it's been a bit of a whirlwind ever since.”
Homer laughed and nodded. “That's our Miss Trouble for sure, a whirlwind on the hoof. So you're just out?”
“I got here only a few hours ago.” Though it felt like days. Time flies when you're totally confused.
“So how much do you know about how this place works?”
“Next to nothing.”
“Know what a wishing well is?”
I shrugged. “A waste of change?”
Homer shook his head, grin widening. “Not here on the Hoop it ain't. Come on, I'll show you.”
I followed him to an open area in the middle of the plateau. In the center of this plaza stood a waist-high white cylinder roughly ten feet across. It was made of the same white stuff used to build seemingly every part of the Hoop. When we reached the artifact a noticeably attractive Latina woman was at the far side, staring at the blank white top of the column, her lips moving silently.
“Is she praying?” I asked quietly.
“In a way,” Homer said with a chuckle. “Watch.”
A ripple appeared in the flat hard surface of the squat column, the solid stuff acting like it was turning liquid. Something began pushing its way up through, finally emerging to sit atop the once again solid surface.
“That's a copy of The Cat In The Hat," I said, stating the obvious.
“One of my personal favorites,” Homer said with an approving nod. “Read it to my kids a hunnerd times. She's got two little ones she wants to distract, and the Cat can do it.” The woman picked up the book, flashed us a shy but brilliant smile, then headed toward one of the houses.
Homer parked a hip on the edge of the column—of the wishing well. It was solid enough to hold him up. “There's plenty of folks all around the Hoop who grow and make things,” he said. “People being people, you'd be hard pressed to stop ‘em. Our hosts provide plenty of stuff to make that possible. Trees that fall into boards when you ask ‘em to. That white stuff you see everywhere can be handled endless ways. It will shape like clay, and harden like iron. You can stick a seed in it, have a plant in a couple days, food from that plant in a week, or a whole tree bearing fruit in a month or so. But a lot of things we need to get by come from these here wishing wells.”
“So how do they work?”
“Miss Trouble says everything here runs on some kind of super-duper nanotech. As for the wells, you just go to one and describe and visualize what it is you need. Like Minna there just did, getting that book for her kids. She described it well enough to get herself a copy.”
I was starting to get the picture. “So this well is what those people with the catapult want. Right?”
“They sure do. See, there are wishing wells all over the place. So many you're never more than half a mile away from one. But nearly all of ‘em are about the size of a fifty-five gallon drum sawed in half, only a couple feet across. Big ones like this one are scarcer'n hens’ teeth.”
“And that makes them valuable.”
“Bound to, I guess. A big well like ours can serve more people at once, and produce larger stuff than a regular one could squeeze out. Like, back home I was a chef. Well, a cook, anyway. Still am, I guess. You know what a Garland range is?”
I had done several stints in restaurant kitchens over the years, a career as a posto paying even less than being a poet. “Sure. It's a big honking stove like you'd find in a commercial kitchen.”
Homer beamed with pride. “Well, I wished me up one a while back. Flat-top, double oven, eight burners, salamander, the whole nine yards. I got no idea where the gas that runs it comes from, but man oh man, can I cook with that baby.”
I thought about the difference between what could be gotten from a small well to one this large. Big difference. “So you guys are being attacked because the people down below want access to—or possession of—this well.”
“They had access to it. They lived here. Thing is, they had two big problems. Wishing is a bit like cookin'; some folks is just naturally better at it than others. The man who started all the trouble wasn't very good at it, and neither were his friends. To make matters worse, they kept trying to wish up weapons and other bad shit. They banded together into a sort of gang, though they called themselves the po-lice, trying to take over this well and keep everyone else away from it.”
“But you managed to throw them out.”
“We did. We're not proud of it, but we didn't have much choice.”
“How'd you do it?”
He grinned. “I wished us up cases and cases of wine and whiskey. The good stuff, gallons of it, and we threw one hell of a party. Once Cyrus and his people were well and truly bombed we rounded them up, hogtied them, and hauled them down to the bottom of the hill. They'd already started a wall—that kind always does. We finished it. They've been trying to get back in ever since.”
“So how long has this been going on?”
“Over nine months now,” he said with a sigh. “They got a camp out there, them and their wives, so we don't dare go down. They have their own regular sized well so they needn't be hurting for anything, and if they were, they could head on out through a mystery door and try to find another big well.”
I shook my head. Of course they didn't do anything that rational. It appeared that Venus had been set up to give people a fresh start. It also appeared that some people couldn't be busted loose from the stupid groove with anything short of explosives.
“So that's how we live now,” Homer continued. “They go away for a few days or a couple weeks, hatch some new plan of attack, come back and take another run at us. They were gone a month this time. You saw what they came back with.” His shoulders slumped wearily, and his gaze was distant and haunted.
“A lot of us folks here on High Vista are refugees. All most of us want is a quiet, peaceable life. A place to be with our families, set down some roots, let some scars heal. Instead we have to guard this place around the clock and fend off attacks like this new one.”
“That's a damn shame.” I really meant it. There in the center of their community, by the well, it was quiet and peaceful. Maybe not the sort of place that needed a posto like me, but that might not be so bad either.
“We surely think so.” He stood up. “I'd best get on back to the gate. I do hope Miss Trouble t
urns up soon.” He scowled. “But hell, where are my manners? We like to think we're a hospitable folk, and here I go being a poor host. I'd fix you something, but we're short on time.”
He turned back to the well. Stared into it, lips moving silently.
Ripples appeared almost immediately. Four objects pushed up through the surface and stopped moving once they rested atop the well. Two bottles of Dr. Pepper, and two paper bowls of pork rinds. Homer nodded in satisfaction. “That'll do, I guess.”
Homer handed over a bottle and a bowl. My eyes went wide in amazement. The bottle was cold, ice cold. The pork rinds were still hot and smelled heavenly, just like the ones you can get fresh-made from certain ethnic stores.
“Anyone can do this at a wishing well?” I said. I had just seen God's Walmart, the take-out window of the Universe.
“Well, that depends,” Homer said, collecting his own soft drink and bowl of rinds. “The better you can describe and visualize something, the better the result. It took me a lot of tries to get that there Dr. Pepper to taste right. As for the pork rinds, they ain't real pork—our hosts aren't real crazy about us eating animals—but the taste and texture will pass, I think.”
“So you're real good at this wishing stuff?”
“I guess I am.”
I shook my head in wonder. “It's like making something out of nothing.”
Homer laughed. “I was chef at a soul food joint before Hurricane Tonya. That's what soul food is, my man. Making something good out of next to nothin'.”
* * * *
We returned to the wall near the gate. On the way Homer filled me in on how some other things worked on the Hoop, and I asked questions between bits of crispy pork goodness and slugs of soda. I couldn't believe how good that soft drink tasted. The flavor was sharper and more vivid than anything I'd ever had back home. It was like Homer's memory of it—and consequently his recreation—radically outdid the original.
Analog SFF, July-August 2010 Page 21