A Meeting At Corvallis

by S. M. Stirling

  Eric Larsson commanded the Bearkiller escort; he had a crest of scarlet-dyed horsehair nodding from front to rear of his round bowl helm, gold on the rivets that held the nasal bar at the front of it and the mail aventail at the rear and the hinged cheek-pieces, and more on his belt buckle and the hilt of his backsword. The metalwork of his war-saddle was polished bright, and the animal he rode was eighteen hands at the shoulder and groomed to glossy black perfection, an agile giant of Hanoverian warmblood descent. The man made a hand signal to the rider beside him; Luanne took up the trumpet slung on a bandolier across her chest and blew a complex measure. The column of lancers reined their mounts about as one to face westward, turning their formation into a double line; then they brought their lances down in salute until the points almost touched the patched asphalt of the roadway, and back up again in a flutter of long, narrow pennants.

  A small party came down from the fort, four mounted figures, the metal of their armor colored an inconspicuous greenish-brown that barely showed against the thick woods of the hills behind; the McDonald Forest had been University property even before the Change, and well cared for. Havel recognized the one who led them, a medium-tall man with brown hair and brown eyes behind the three-bar visor of his helmet and a pair of sports glasses.

  "Major Jones," he said.

  "Lord Bear," the other man replied; he was in his early thirties, of medium height but deep-chested and broad-armed; he'd been a Society fighter and teaching assistant in the Faculty of Agriculture before the Change.

  He saluted; Havel returned the gesture, turning in the saddle to make it towards the banner one of the Corvallans carried, its pole resting in a ring on his right stirrup. The flag was orange, with the brown-and-black head of a beaver on it, attempting a ferocious rodentine scowl; privately Havel thought it was dorky beyond words, but it had been the University's symbol for a long time and they were devoted to it.

  "Welcome, Lord Bear, in the name of the people and the Faculty Senate of Corvallis," Jones said formally.

  Then he stripped off his metal-backed gauntlet and shook hands, a dry, firm grip: "Good to see you again, Mike. And you, Signe, Eric, Luanne."

  Eric had been looking at the weapons his escort carried. "Finally got that quick-loading crossbow working, Pete?" he said.

  "Yeah," the officer said. "Gear, ratchet and bicycle chain in the butt and fore-stock, crank inset underneath. Turn it six times, and the weapon's cocked and ready to go as soon as you pull the trigger. Double the rate of fire of the old type and you can do it lying down, or in the saddle."

  Havel's crooked smile quirked. "Easy to build and repair?" he said.

  "Well … we're still working on some problems with production and maintenance," Jones said reluctantly. "How's that car-jack thing your father-in-law is working on?"

  "Classified," Havel said.

  Jones smirked, which meant he thought classified translated as haven't got it working yet. Usually that was true, but in this case it was precisely the opposite. He wanted to spring it on the city-state as a done deal in a month or two when they reequipped everyone, to take their pretensions of technological superiority down a peg. Nobody denied they'd come through the Change unusually well, but the way they acted as if they were the last island of civilization in a world of bare-assed savages got a bit old after a while.

  The Corvallan looked at their party. "Astrid and Eilir aren't along?"

  "They're coming separately," Signe said. "They've got … a bit of a present to show around, you might say."

  "And the Rangers are independents themselves, these days," Havel said.

  "Since we all agreed to give them that stretch of woods. Sort of prickly about it, too."

  Damned if I'm going to call them the Dunedain Rangers, he added to himself. Bad enough I have to do the Mad Max on Horseback thing myself.

  One thing he did like about Corvallis was that it was a bit less given to weird names than the rest of the present-day Valley.

  "Ken's not coming?" the Corvallan officer went on, looking surprised as Havel shook his head. "Your father-in-law usually doesn't pass up an opportunity to haunt our bookstores and the Library."

  "Tell me," Havel said, thinking of the bills the Outfit had paid in grain and wool, tuns of wine and barrels of salt pork; they'd had words on the matter.

  I'd have gotten even madder ij the stuff he dug up weren't so helpful sometimes.

  Books were expensive these days, unless you were talking salvaged paperback copies of Tom Clancy or the like, and even those were getting rare and fragile in this damp climate. Real books on something useful were pricey, either because they were irreplaceable—books made good kindling and a lot of libraries had burned after the Change—or because they'd been new-printed with hand-operated presses on dwindling stores of pre-Change paper. Or on the even more expensive rag-pulp type Corvallis had started making recently. The city-state had a biweekly newsletter, all of four pages, and copies cost more than a day's wages for a laboring man.

  Luanne chuckled. "We unloaded the grandkids on Ken—Mike's youngest, and both of ours. And since he and honorable step-mom-in-law Pam had the bad taste to produce two more at their decrepit ages, he's up to his distinguished wizardly white beard in rugrats. Labor-intensive work."

  Jones nodded. "Tell me," he said, and touched the rein to the neck of his horse to fall in beside them. "Between the kids and the farm and the weaving, I don't know how the hell Nancy stays sane when I'm out on patrol, even with Mom and the hired help."

  "We do have our doc along," Signe said. "He needs some supplies."

  Jones nodded proudly; Corvallis was the best place in Oregon to buy such. Havel shot a glance at his brother-in-law, and Eric's hand chopped forward. The column rumbled into motion southward.

  "OSU our hats are off to you,

  Beavers, Beavers, fighters through and through

  We'll cheer thru-out the land,

  We'll root for every stand,

  That's made for old OSU!

  Watch our pikes go tearing down the field;

  Those of iron, their strength will never yield

  Hail! Hail! Hail! Hail! Hail to old OSU!"

  Christ Jesus, what an abortion of a national anthem! Mike Havel thought, behind a gravely respectful face. Just as well we don't have one. Though we use "March of Cambreadth" a lot, at least the lyrics aren't outright stupid and it's got a great tune.

  Then again, at least the city-state wasn't pretending to be something it wasn't. There were half a dozen governments in this general part of the continent that claimed to be the United States, from single small towns to one that covered most of southwestern Idaho. All of them were rather nasty dictatorships. They used "The Star-Spangled Banner," which was not only presumptuous of them but to Mike Havel's way of thinking in extremely bad taste.

  The Corvallans weren't just singing. Pompom-wielding cheerleaders led the crowd through the fight song, their short-skirted orange-and-black costumes swinging as they kicked and leapt. That was fairly ludicrous too, but then, he'd thought cheerleading was dumb even back in the eighties when he'd been on the bench and the local maidens were egging on the audience for the Hancock High Wolverines. As a teenager he'd considered football the chosen sport of idiots; track and field had been what he liked, and cross-country skiing, and by choice he'd hunt or ride his Harley or tinker with its engine or even work chores at home instead of doing head-butts with behemoths. The little Upper Peninsula high school hadn't had talent to waste, though, and he'd been effectively conscripted as the fastest running back they'd had for years.

  And wasn't that a complete waste of time, he thought.

  Which didn't prevent him observing with interest when a pretty girl shook it hard, then or now, and there was some righteous booty here; he caught Signe raising an eyebrow at him, and smiled back at her.

  "Monogamous, alskling, not blind," he murmured.

  The cheerleaders looked even odder doing their leaps and pyramids in front of rank
s of armored troops standing to attention. The sixteen-foot pikes made a steel-tipped forest above them, points catching the red light of sundown in a manifold glitter as the sun set over the low hills to the west; the rest stood with crossbows held at present arms. He supposed the folk of the city had gotten used to it, cheerleaders and all.

  Corvallis proper had about eight or nine thousand people inside its walls, and besides the militia battalion a quarter of them were out to see the visitors, singing along heartily and then cheering, plus people from the countryside round about. They made a huge dun mass in the open space between Highway 99, the railway, and the old Hewlett-Packard plant to the east and the Willamette River beyond, trampling up to the edge of the mulched, harvested truck gardens. The low-slung campus-style buildings of the high-tech factory had been taken over for noxious trades not allowed in the city proper; he could smell the whiff of leather curing in the tanning pits, and see acrid charcoal smoke from the squat brick chimney of a foundry.

  Mary and Ritva were quiet behind him; they were well-mannered kids. He'd been brought up that way himself, in a straightlaced rural-Lutheran tradition enforced with love, discipline and an occasional swat on the butt when necessary. He could sense their excitement at the huge crowd, though; they'd never seen any place larger than Larsdalen. And their awe at the city wall, a little to the south. It wasn't higher or thicker than the one around their home; in fact, it was pretty similar, down to the girder-reinforced boulder-and-concrete construction.

  But a hell of a lot longer, he thought.

  Nearly eight miles in circuit, an immense feat of labor. Two major bandit attacks and a large raid out of the Protectorate had bounced off it like buckshot off a tank in years past, but he thought the Corvallans tended to overestimate the security it gave them.

  After the anthem, a delegation walked up to him. He swung down from the saddle and waited courteously; there were about two dozen of them, and they took a fair bit of hand-shaking and honored-to-see-you-sir-or-ma'ams. That was the problem: the President, the Provost, the representatives of the Faculty Senate … back right around the Change, they'd gotten a lot done here because it was obvious what needed doing, and they'd have died if they didn't do it. And the mechanisms they'd set up went on working well enough, as long as the rest of the world cooperated by not changing much either. But try to get a policy change … right now, just getting them all in the same spot at the same time was like pushing rocks uphill.

  They're tired of fighting and want to relax and enjoy life, he thought. Pity the world won't cooperate.

  When the formalities were over and the troops and spectators had marched off, the Bearkiller party and Major Jones walked their horses through the entry complex. That was a little more difficult than it would have been at Larsdalen; here they'd overlapped two sections of the city wall, so that the entrance was at right angles to it. You had to turn sharp left to get through the outer portal, go a hundred yards with walls on either side, then abruptly right again to enter the city through the inner gate. That meant that nothing longer than a wagon could come straight at the leaves of either entryway, even if someone filled in the perimeter ditch.

  Eric looked up at the complex of tower and wall and sighed as the iron clatter of hoofbeats on pavement echoed back from the concrete and stone of their heights.

  "Getting fortification envy?" Havel asked quietly. "Theirs is bigger and harder than ours?"

  "Well … yeah, bossman. It'd be harder to get a shot at the weak point where the leaves of the gate meet with this setup."

  "Nah, it wouldn't. 'Cause the gate ain't the weak spot back home. They made their gates of timber here, with sheet steel bolted onto the surface."

  Eric thumped himself on the forehead, a fairly loud process when you were wearing a metal-backed gauntlet and a helmet. "And ours are solid welded steel. Probably stronger than the wall."

  "It'd be quicker to dig the concrete and stone out from around," Havel agreed. He made a gesture up and around. "What happened here is that someone got a bright idea out of a history book. Your esteemed father tends to do that too. Sometimes it's brilliant. Sometimes it's a waste of time."

  Behind him Ritva giggled. "Dad's right, Uncle Eric, and you're wrong." Her sister chimed in, and they chanted: "So he gets to sing the ‘I was right song.’”

  "Silence, peanut," Havel said affectionately, turning and winking at her. There was one more formality as they came out of the gatehouse: having their swords peace-bonded, as all edged weapons over ten inches had to be within the wall. That meant a thin wrapper of copper wire, sealed with a lead disk crimped in something that looked like a heavy-duty paper punch; that stamped the beaver-head symbol of the University into the soft metal. The wire didn't make it impossible to draw the sword, or even difficult; it just meant that it was obvious if you'd done so, and so simplified police-work.

  Law here said every family had to keep its militia weapons at home and always ready, but most people walking the streets didn't bother to carry a long blade, which looked a bit unnatural to him now. Back in Bearkiller territory, a farmer plowing did it with sword slung at the hip, and a spear or crossbow or whatever across the handles. These days you didn't need them all that often, but when you did you needed them very badly indeed, and the occasions came without warning. You put on your weapons when you went outdoors, like your hat.

  They turned their horses right along Monroe at the red-brick Julian Hotel— now a barracks for militia doing their wall-duty—and continued west past the white-plastered Italianate pile of the old courthouse with its central clock-tower, which provoked more rubbernecking. Mary spoke up; he flattered himself he could tell her voice from Ritva's, and was right about three-quarters of the time. Except when they were trying to fool him, which happened every so often.

  "Dad, how can they have all these people in one place? Thousands of them!"

  "About eight thousand, punkin. Ten times what we have at Larsdalen and a little more."

  "What do they all eat? They couldn't walk out to their fields! It's too far!"

  He smiled; one thing he liked about the Changed world was that nobody assumed food and goods magically appeared in shops shrink-wrapped in plastic, not even kids, and not even the kids of the big boss. Not even the people who really did believe in magic; they were farmers too. He pointed to the railway that ran across their path, along NW Sixth Street.

  "That runs along out into the farmlands south of here. Corvallan farmers don't make as much of their own tools and cloth as ours do—they buy it from the city-folk instead with the food they don't eat. And there's another railroad that goes west all the way to the ocean, at Newport, so they can bring in fish from there. The rails were laid before the Change, but the Corvallans keep them up. It's easy to haul wagons on rails, easier than on the roads; and they have boats on the river, and they buy from us and the Mackenzies and some of the people further south—the McClintocks, a couple of others. And some things come from even further away, like cattle from all the way over the Cascades."

  And let's not go into taxes and such, he thought, as the two girls nodded gravely. Sufficient unto the day. I didn't know shit about economics until experience and Ken Larsson showed me I had to.

  Just then the streetlamps began to go on. They were gaslights, fed by methane from the town's sewage works, sparse and not very bright to anyone who remembered electricity. The girls and a couple of the younger house-staff near the wagon still gasped in delight as the lamplighters held their long rods up, nudged open the glass shutters at the tops of the metal standards and snapped sparks that turned into yellow flame. Near the river the buildings they showed were mostly warehouses or small factories of frame and brick; fire had gone through the riverfront on the night of the Change, when an airliner out of Portland crashed, and more later in the riots and fighting. The streets were clean, but there was a yeasty smell in the air, the sort you got from bulk storage of farm produce. Signs hung creaking above doors, advertising millers and maltste
rs, dealers in hops and cloth and salvaged bulk metals, leather and glassware, makers of disk-plows and reapers and sewing machines, purveyors of fine sewing thread—or as fine as you could get without cotton—and custom gear-trains, hydraulic power systems, livery stables that rented the teams for railroads, blacksmiths …

  "Did you see that?" Signe asked, turning her head so abruptly that her tired horse tossed its own in protest at the shift in balance.

  "What?" he said abstractedly; one of the great things about horses was that they had autopilots when it came to ambling straight ahead, so you could think about something else.

  "The graffiti," she replied.

  "No," he answered, surprised. Corvallis was a very tightly run ship these days; he supposed it came with all the civic spirit. "What did it say?"

  "Help, I've fallen into the RenFaire and I can't get out!"

  She giggled and her brother and sister-in-law smiled; Mike Havel gave a full-throated laugh. Mary and Ritva turned puzzled eyes on their elders.

  "I bet that was written by someone over forty," Havel chortled.

  They turned right again and into a district where most houses were a century old or more; this part of Corvallis was laid out along a grid, and the streets were broad and tree-lined. Traffic was thick as the sunlight died, another strangeness in a world that mostly went home with the sun. Bicycles and pedi-cabs were numerous, and oxcarts and horse-drawn wagons, people on foot still more so as men and women walked home from work. The sound of human voices and feet was louder than wheels or hooves; most ground floors were workshops or small stores, with the proprietors living over them. Street vendors pushed barrows and cried out their toasted nuts and hot dogs in buns or toffee apples or hot cider; children ran home from school with their slates slung over their shoulders, and housekeepers came back from daily markets in chattering clumps with their full baskets; once a splendid red fire engine pulled by six glossy Belgians trotted past. That looked like a museum piece and probably had been until ten years ago, and it was pursued by still more children.