by David Weber
"A black-and-white chipmunk! Gods and thunders, a black-and-white chipmunk! And look?there are dozens of them, so it's not an isolated deviant individual!" Over the course of their three-day march, that had become Futhai's favorite cry. "They're everywhere! It's not an isolated population! Black-and-white chipmunks! A true new subspecies!"
Braiheri Futhai was a man whose fastidious nature showed itself not so much in the way he carried himself, or engaged his surroundings?he was every bit as good a woodsman as any other member of the team?but in the way he thought, down deep at the core of his Ternathian soul. Futhai was not Braiheri chan Futhai, for he'd never served in Ternathia's military. Not because he was unpatriotic, but because soldiering was not a gentleman's occupation.
Futhai was a very good naturalist, with a veritable treasure trove of scientific information stored in memory. His knowledge ranged from geology to meteorology, from zoology and botany to physics, and the mathematical precision with which all worlds?including their beloved Sharona?whirled through the ether in their journeys around duplicates of Sharona's sun. He had a keen eye and a keen mind, and a gift for detailed observation that made him a valuable member of the survey team.
Unfortunately, those excellent qualities shared brain space with all too many notions about proper attitudes and behaviors for a certifiable (by birthright and exalted pedigree) gentleman of Sharona's most ancient, prestigious empire. Worse, he expected others to treat him with the deference he, himself, believed he merited, as the grandson of a Ternathian duke. And he treated everyone else in accordance with those same social rules, as carefully learned as his science. He wasn't demanding or petty, or even rude about it, which only made matters worse, as far as Shaylar was concerned. He was insufferably polite, in fact, particularly with her, treating her to an unending barrage of courtesies, looking after her every need … whether she wanted him to or not.
But the thing that drove Shaylar craziest was his unshakable conviction that his notions and customs were as unalterably and exclusively correct as the physical laws of the University so delighted in studying. It had simply never occurred to Braiheri Futhai that not everyone on Sharona thought the Ternathian way of doing things was the best way. He possessed just enough Talent for Shaylar to realize he truly believed, in his innermost heart, that someday every enlightened Sharonian would metamorphose himself or herself into a clone of a Ternathian gentleman or lady. He simply didn't grasp the basic truth that Shaylar preferred her Harkalian viewpoint and beliefs, just as Jathmar preferred his Faltharian ones, and Elevu Gitel preferred his Ricathian ones.
Not that there weren't profound similarities between most of Sharona's great societies. With psionic Talents running through at least a fifth of the world's population, there were bound to be some similarities. And given the enormous territory the Ternathian emperors had once ruled, and the colonies that had spread across vast oceans from Ternathian shores, at least half of Sharona's population could claim at least some Ternathian heritage, whether it was by blood relation or the holdovers of colonial civic administration. Personally, Shaylar preferred Ghartoun chan Hagrahyl's straightforward military mindset to Futhai's more civilized notions. It was probably rude of her, but she simply couldn't help it when Futhai went to such pains to make himself so utterly, unctuously disagreeable.
So she grinned back at Kasell, rolled her own eyes toward the self-absorbed naturalist, then sat down facing the stream and tuned out the distractions around her with the practiced ease of an experienced professional. She unrolled the chart they'd compiled to date, weighted it down so that it couldn't roll up again, and marked off the section due east of their campsite. Then she laid out her tools: compass with pencil fixed in place, steel ruler, protractor, a second pencil, and a template with precut map symbols to speed and simplify her work. She wouldn't ink the chart until she and Jathmar had gone over it tonight, doublechecking her accuracy after supper.
She also laid out her field notebook, and one of the piston-fill pens she and countless other survey crew members?not to mention ordinary clerks and officials?blessed on a daily basis. She filled the pen from a metal flask of ink she'd carried with her through three virgin universes, made sure the flask's cap was screwed into place, and carried it back to her tent.
By the time she returned to her work table, Jathmar had hiked far enough to start picking up new terrain features. When Shaylar reached out to contact him?the nature of his Talent meant she had to contact him, since he could See but wasn't able to transmit to her or anyone else?the pictures in his mind started flowing into hers. The process was second nature to her, now, although she paused now and again to reflect on how dull life must be without any Talent at all to turn the multiple universes into a maze of fascinating playgrounds.
The glorious, crisp morning and the sunshine that glowed across her shoulders combined to keep her contented with life. She hummed under her breath, not even really aware that she did so, and concentrated on what Jathmar was seeing?and on what he was Seeing, since there was a distinct difference. When she'd first begun her training, Shaylar had found it difficult to sort out the images Jathmar saw with his two physical eyes from those the Saw with his "third eye." The screen in Jathmar's brain Saw a far wider slice of terrain than mere eyes could take in, and that screen was what Shaylar tapped when establishing her link with him.
Her husband was actually looking at a bend in the creek that already existed on their chart, since it was well within his five-mile radius from camp. Although that image was the stronger of the two, she ignored it with practiced ease and focused on the other, ghostlier image he was Seeing.
For Jathmar, the mechanics involved seemed to be a sort of looking "up" and then "out" along an invisible gridwork that registered as faint threads of light. He Saw terrain superimposed across that gridwork, like shadows glimpsed through mist. For Shaylar, the mechanics of her Talent took the form of a sudden gestalt, a totality of impressions that simply appeared, complete, in her own mind's eye. She Saw what he did as a whole, complete image?like a stage play containing nothing but scenery. Had Shaylar been in contact with another Voice, the images would have been far sharper, more like seeing it with her own eyes, rather than catching shadows that had the look of a watercolor painting left too long in strong sunlight.
She had to reach out consciously to pluck the images from Jathmar's mind, which took concentration. But he was close enough to camp that it wasn't particularly taxing. The further apart she and Jathmar?or another telepath?were, the more concentration it took to make contact and maintain it. Shaylar's maximum range was just over eight hundred miles. That put her in the top ten percent of all Voices, although at that distance it took every ounce of concentration she could summon to hold contact.
Other Voices had even more limited ranges, which gave her team a distinct advantage. When she and Darcel had first been assigned to the same team, Darcel had been startled at the range she achieved. Startled and a little worried, since his own maximum range was barely two-thirds as great as hers. It was entirely possible for Shaylar to go far enough out of his range that he could pick up her transmissions, yet be too far away for him to transmit a reply back to her. They'd worked carefully together in a well-established colony world before heading for the wilderness, using the railroads in a very serious game of leapfrog to gauge effective distances at which they could both make contact. In the end, they'd found that he could Hear her at up to eight hundred miles, whereas she could Hear him at almost six hundred and fifty. Unfortunately, at anything over five hundred and eighty miles, he could Hear her only if he knew she would be trying to contact him and went into Voice trance to Listen for her, which limited their effective maximum range to that figure.
Once deployed, that maximum effective range dictated how far they could travel from any new portal before a relay team had to follow them out, to serve as a connection that would enable them to push deeper into the wilderness. It was an awkward arrangement, in some respects, but far better than
the alternative would have been. If the survey crews hadn't been able to report without physically sending a member all the way back to the portal, it would have taken decades longer to reach as many portals and virgin universes as Sharonian teams had already mapped. As it was, the exploration of the intricately connected universes was moving forward at a steady pace. The one thing everyone wished for was a Talent that would lead them directly to new portals.
The best they could manage at the moment was to push outward with as many teams as they could reasonably field, with at least one member of each team sensitive to the still unexplained physics behind portal formation. Some?and only a few?Talented people, like Darcel, could actually sense the presence of other portals well enough to at least provide a compass direction to them, which was enormously better than nothing. Still, the task of actually locating no more than one or two portals anywhere within any given universe, when an entire planet identical to their own had to be searched, was far worse than hunting a needle in a haystack.
Shaylar shuddered every time she thought about the Haysam Portal, for example. The inbound portal from New Sharona was almost eight thousand miles from the outbound portal to Reyshar, and over six thousand of those miles were across the Western Ocean. Getting to that portal must have been an indescribable nightmare, she often thought. Indeed, she considered it remarkable that Sharonian exploration teams had managed to find as many portals as they had, even after eighty years of steady exploration.
Meanwhile, she and her husband were doing their part to further that exploration. The Portal Authority had already sent a full contingent of soldiers and supplies down the transit chain to build forts at each of the new portals they'd opened up. The Authority didn't conduct exploration, but it maintained absolute jurisdiction over every portal into a new universe. Private companies hired teams like Shaylar and Jathmar's to push forward into new universes, with the greatest incentive known to humanity: profit. The Portal Authority charged only "users' fees" on traffic through a portal, but it was the internationally appointed guardian of all of the other rights and commerce which passed through the portals. And the rights to land and minerals and other valuable natural resources belonged to whatever company or individual got there first and staked a claim to them.
That was one reason Shaylar's notebooks and charts were so valuable. The Chalgyn Consortium could lay claim to everything she and Jathmar?and the rest of the team, who made their presence here possible?could map. Other companies' teams could, and eventually would, follow them through the portal, but the first-comers held all the advantages.
As soon as a team could figure out exactly where it was, which took a combination of painstaking mapping and star-fixes, combined with strong backgrounds in the natural sciences?geology and biology in particular?all the team had to do was compare their location here with master charts of Sharona to figure out which areas to reach first. If, for instance, they had emerged near a spot where valuable iron deposits existed on Sharona, they would head straight there and claim them before any other company's teams got word that a new portal had opened at all, let alone where it led.
The team which made it through a portal first could make a great deal of money for the company which employed it. And since survey crews were paid, in part, on a system of shared stocks in the assets of the company, team members could get rich, as well, with just one or two lucky breaks. This was the third virgin universe Shaylar and Jathmar had "pushed" on behalf of of Chalgyn. There wasn't much in the way of value anywhere near the swampy mess just behind them, but they'd mapped some valuable terrain in the one prior to that, which meant they would have quite a nest egg built up for their retirement years. As for what they might yet find in this universe …
They'd had to wait for the Portal Authority's garrison to arrive before stepping through into this universe, but they were the only team anywhere near this end of this particular transit chain. The other major consortiums were going to chew nails and spit tacks when word of this lovely little cluster of portals filtered back. Shaylar grinned at the very thought, having been on the other end of the stick all too often. She'd lost track of the number of times they'd jumped through portals somebody else had already opened up, crossing miles and miles of someone else's claim in the hopes of reaching a valuable area nobody else had claimed, or?best of all?finding a new portal of their own.
This time, she told herself happily, we get first choice of what's out here.
But for now, Jathmar's images were coming through steadily as he began a long, leisurely sweep from the eastern edge of his morning's hike, turning toward the south to begin the leg that led him down parallel to the end of the southern transit. By the time he finished the long day's hike, they would have filled in the blanks remaining in the southeastern transit zone. The portal lay behind them, almost due north of their present camp, clearly marked on Shaylar's chart. Once they'd filled in the entire region around their current day-fort, they would compare what they had to the master charts and see if they could come up with a correlation to Sharona. She doubted it, given the immense sweep of land that usually had to be charted before a terrain feature large enough or distinctive enough emerged to make that accurate a determination possible. But a few more days of charting ought to do the trick. Then all they had to do was decide which way to head to secure the best chunks of land for the Chalgyn Consortium.
Shaylar plotted out more terrain features as Jathmar sent new images, with new topographical features?gullies, a deep ravine, another stream that came trickling in from the east of Jathmar's current position. She jotted down a running commentary, as well, on the images flickering through her awareness. She and Jathmar would go over her notes tonight, while the information and both their impressions remained fresh. They would make whatever amendments were necessary before calling it a night, then begin again the next morning.
When Jathmar halted for a rest at midmorning, Shaylar sat back and was almost startled by the sound of voices behind her. They'd gone virtually subliminal during the previous two hours, no more noticeable than the murmuring sound of insects. The noise was startling, now that she'd come up for air, so to speak. From the sound of things, Futhai was trying to talk chan Hagrahyl into letting him hike further along the stream than the team leader thought prudent.
"?if you would just authorize a guard, that wouldn't be a factor!"
"Not until Jathmar and Shaylar complete the basic grid around this camp," chan Hagrahyl rumbled in the tone that most of their team understood as "subject closed; don't bother to debate it." Futhai, however, was a zealous naturalist surrounded by new species?several of them, in fact. He'd also already established a most unusual co-mingling of species from different climatic regions. As far as he was concerned, that clearly confirmed Darcel's belief that they'd found an actual cluster. How else could so many species that didn't belong here have wandered into the area?
He obviously wanted to be out there collecting more specimens, and it appeared he wasn't prepared to take "no" for an answer. Not when his professional standing in the community of scientists was virtually guaranteed by the notes he was making in this camp alone. His enthusiasm for discovery was wreaking havoc with standard protocol, however, and chan Hagrahyl didn't sound amused.
If he hadn't been such an irritant, Shaylar might have felt a sneaking sympathy for Futhai. She knew only too well what it felt like to have something wonderful dangled in front of her, only to be told "no, you can't." Braiheri Futhai was only doing what she herself had done: fight to get what she wanted. Unfortunately for Futhai, chan Hagrahyl was a tougher customer than the combined weight of the Portal Authority's governing board and her own people's conservatism.
She grinned at that thought, then caught a glimpse of blackberry brambles all around Jathmar, along with a hint of deep satisfaction that the birds hadn't gotten all of the berries yet. Shaylar chuckled aloud, then relaxed back from the discipline of prolonged telepathic contact. She rose from her makeshift desk and shook th
e cramps out of her fingers and shoulders. Her work with Jathmar wasn't difficult, so much as intense. Her concentration needed a breather almost as much as Jathmar's legs?and taste buds?did.
She strolled west along the bank of the creek, casting a sharp woods-wise eye around the entire area, looking for any trace of hostile wildlife. She didn't expect any, given the amount of noise they'd made since setting up camp yesterday, but you could never be certain in a virgin universe. None of the animals in this Sharona had ever even seen a human being. They had no reason to be afraid of humans, which could be delightful, but could also be dangerous, since it meant their reactions to the presence of those humans was often difficult to predict. Personally, however charming she might find it to have wild deer willing to take food from her hand, Shaylar was in favor of having cougars or grizzly bears be wary enough of humans to leave her in peace.
She was also too experienced a field operative to take her safety for granted in the wilderness. All it would take to injure her, possibly fatally, would be a moment's carelessness, and the presence of several armed men in camp did nothing to absolve her of the responsibility for her own safety. This lovely forest doubtless had snakes in it, at the very least, and a rattle-tail's bite would be serious, indeed, even with Tymo Scleppis available. The telempathic Healer could speed the healing of deep cuts or broken bones, or help repair internal injuries, but pharmacological trouble like snake venom was another matter entirely, and their team was a long way from the nearest medical clinic. She scanned the terrain for potential trouble, aware almost peripherally of the weight of the handgun at her hip. She'd never needed it, but it was there, just in case of danger, and she knew how to use it. Very well, as a matter of fact.
Once she was sure of her environs, Shaylar descended the steep bank and crouched down to wash smudges of graphite off her hands. The water was shockingly cold, sending an ache up the bones of her hands to her wrists. Somewhere far upstream, several miles away, from the sound of it, a distant CRACK of rifle fire split the silence. Shaylar grinned, wondering what Falsan had bagged for the cookpot. He'd have plenty of time to clean the carcass, lug it back to camp, and butcher it properly before it was time to throw supper on the fire.