Time spike

by Eric Flint

  "Isthat why you've got those poor kids building Stonehenge for you?"

  "Poor kids, my ass. They love it." They probably did, at that. Except for Brian Carmichael's church, nothing captivated the immigrants who kept trickling into Schulerville more than Jeff's various science projects. Of course, Andy was all but certain that most of Edelman's students had their own religious interpretation of what he was doing.

  He knew for a fact from Kevin Griffin-who'd become almost fluent in the main immigrant dialect-that the term usually applied to Edelman was the same term applied to Carmichael and Elaine Cook. "Shaman" was the closest translation. Hulbert cleared his throat. "Uh, folks. If the esteemed parties present would tear themselves away from idle speculation, can we please return to the subject which Mr. President plopped before the cabinet." He looked at his watch. "I'd like to settle this before the wedding, if we could." "Fair enough," said James Cook. "I propose we accept my advice as a formal proposal. Or if you want to get fussy about it, I recommend somebody else makes it a formal proposal." Technically, Cook didn't have any formal cabinet post, just as Geoffrey Watkins didn't. They sat on the cabinet ex officio, as the respective heads of the two other political entities who made up the confederation: in his case, Boom Town, and in Geoffrey's, the Cherokee town of Saluka. But, especially in Cook's case, that was a technicality. With Watkins, there was more substance to the distinction. As friendly as they were, and as closely connected as they'd become, the Cherokees still maintained a certain distance.

  Residual wariness, if nothing else. Andy couldn't blame them, given the history involved. Even though he knew, and so did Watkins, that there was no chance at all of that history being repeated in this world. In the North America they'd come from, the Cherokees-the other Indian tribes, perhaps even more so-had simply been overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of Europeans who kept arriving, and their offspring.

  Eventually, although it had never really vanished, their culture had gotten pressed flat under the weight. That couldn't possibly happen here. If anything, Andy thought the cultural adaptation was tending at least as much in the other direction. Besides, as far as sheer demographics went, the residents of Schulerville and Boom Toom and Saluka wereall minorities. Small minorities, at that. As time passed, they'd discovered more and more villages of pre-Mounds Indians-and, just four months ago, had finally stumbled across the Mounds culture.

  Thirty-five miles away, it turned out, the Quiver had deposited Cahokia itself. The Mounds people didn't call it that, of course. They called it something Andy still couldn't pronounce, no matter how hard he tried, and neither could anyone else in the cabinet except Watkins.

  So they kept using the term Cahokia as a practical convenience. By their current estimate, between thirty and forty thousand people had wound up in the Cretaceous, of whom more than ninety percent were Indians from somewhere in the centuries before the arrival of Columbus. True, disease was hitting them pretty badly already. But Jenny didn't think they'd be hit nearly as badly as had happened in the world they came from. If nothing else, there was no smallpox. And most of the villages within fifteen or twenty miles of Schulerville had accepted Jenny, Susan Fisher, and the other nurses-James Cook too, in a pinch-as shamans. They'd readily follow their advice, at least on medical matters. That helped a lot too. "I'll make it a formal proposal," said Jenny. "And I agree with it." Hulbert scratched his jaw. "I dunno. I'd trust Bostic as far as I could throw him." James rolled his eyes. "Rod, who said anything about 'trust'? Bostic sure as hell didn't. I spent five full days in his town, dickering with him and getting the lay of the land, and I can assure you the word never crossed his lips once. His point, though, is that we have no objective reason to quarrel with him; and he doesn't, with us. So why not make it a formal treaty?" Hulbert kept scratching his jaw. Cook tightened his. "And if that doesn't move you, maybe this will. I wasthere, Rod, you weren't. If we pick a fight with him-don't have any doubt about this-we'll be starting a war with all of his people. You keep thinking of Danny Bostic as a criminal and a gangster, but for those people he's their hero. He's fucking Beowulf, I kid you not. The valiant warrior from distant parts who showed up with a handful of stalwart companions and took care of the monster who'd been ravaging their villages." Cook's irritated look was replaced by a mischievous one.

  "He did it the same way you did, by the way. Dug a big pit and served himself up as tyrannosaur bait." That piqued Hulbert's interest, naturally. "No kidding?" "Allosaur bait," Edelman said wearily. But that was a battle he'd lost months ago. Whatever the huge theropods might "really" be, everyone except him had long ago decided that "tyrannosaur" just plain sounded better. "Yup, no kidding." Cook's expression got more mischievous still. "He even made the same silly mistake you did. Took the time and effort to line the bottom of the pit with sharpened stakes." Rod chuckled, a bit ruefully. He and his hunters had spent days getting those stakes ready. And had then discovered-which he admitted he should have realized from the beginning-that the stakes were pointless. A complete waste of time and effort. No land animal who ever lived, be they never so fierce and ferocious, could survive a plunge into a fifteen-foot deep pit. Not when they weighed better than six tons. Most of the stakes had just splintered, without ever piercing the monster's thick hide. It mattered not at all. Half of its bones had been broken, including its spine, its hip, one leg, both arms and its lower jaw. All they'd had to do was wait by the side of the pit until it finally died. "But that was about the only mistake he made. A dumb gangster would have tried to take over by force. Bostic just did his heroic deed, made modest hero-like noises, and bided his time. The only problem he ran into was that all three of the chief's eligible nieces started quarreling over him. That took a while to sort out. But, eventually, it did." Nieces, not daughters. Like all of the Indians they'd encountered, including the Cherokees and the Cahokians, the village societies were matrilineal. Descent ran from mother to daughter, not father to son.

  And while males always occupied the position of chiefs and-in the case of the Cahokians-the top priests, their own lineage was reckoned through the children of their sisters, not their own. Which meant that when the current chief died, Danny Bostic was in line to succeed him.

  So were several other men, of course, but the tribe would decide among them-and what tribe in its right mind was going to pick anyone else for chief, when they had Beowulf sitting right there? Andy thought it wouldn't take more an a generation-two, at the most-before matrilineality became established custom in Boom Town also. The population of that town was still overwhelming ex-convict. The final deal Andy and Cook had worked out concerning the surviving prisoners had been that the Boomers would nominate people for a pardon, and a committee of guards appointed by Andy would make the final decision-but they could only decide from the list presented by the Boomers. Balance of powers, so to speak. Then, there'd be a sort of parole that would last for somewhere between six months and six years, depending on the inmate involved, although it could be shortened if the Boomer panel and the guard panel jointly agreed. During that stretch of time, the parolees were under one and only one restriction: they were forbidden in Schulerville and Saluka. They had to go live in the new town the Boomers created-or anywhere else, for that matter, but almost all of them wound up in Boom Town. In essence, the Boomers had wound up being the confederation's parole officers. And they were parole officers whom it wasreally tough for an inmate to fool. They knew every trick in the book. After a few months, the guards had gotten confident enough about the situation that the pace of releasing prisoners speeded up a lot. There were only a hundred and forty-six inmates still locked up in the cells, and the truth was, except for a handful those men would probably stay there the rest of their lives.

  Not even the Boomers wanted any part of them. Feeding those remaining inmates had been something of a strain for the colony, since they didn't contribute much in the way of useful labor, until the legend spread through the surrounding villages-Andy suspected Cook was behind that, al
though he denied it-that the remaining inmates were demons who needed to be placated until they finally went away. Thereafter, quite regularly, small parties of villagers would show up with food offerings for them. The villagers always got a guided tour of the former prison when they brought the offerings, which was an added attraction. For people whose culture was barely beyond the Stone Age, the installation that had once been Alexander Correctional Center was deeply impressive. Sort of a cross between seeing the Pyramids and visiting Disneyland-except Disneyland never had real live demons you could look at, locked behind bars. And, after a while, some of the inmates decided the situation was amusing and started putting on a show in their cells. The one big problem that remained, of course, was that Boom Town's original population was entirely male, except for the former Elaine Brown. And James Cook wasn't about to tolerate his people getting wives by violence. The three men who tried had been executed. Not summarily, either. There'd been no need to use the services of Geoffrey Kidd-although he was always there in the background, just as a reminder to everyone. No, the Boomers had held real trials. They'd even asked Andy to provide the judges. Found guilty by juries, the men had been hung on a knoll just outside the town. Which, of course, promptly got the name Boot Hill. That meant any man who tired of the absence of female company had to go out there, some way or another, and sweet talk the villagers. That turned out to be reasonably easy to do, if a man had any sense and was willing to work. At least, for inmates who hadn't spent a lifetime behind bars and had lost any useful skill-but Luff had murdered most of those anyway. Still, while they were willing enough to accept Boom Town swains-even eager, sometimes, with ex-inmates with certain skills-the villagers retained their own customs. They were usually matrilocal as well as matrilineal, although they didn't insist on the former. Still, any children born to the union belonged to the mother's family, not the father's. And while the former guards in Schulerville might have put up a struggle over that issue, the ex-inmates didn't much care. Most of them had come from dysfunctional families to begin with, and didn't see anything particularly unusual about having a mother instead of a father at the head of the family. Andy stopped ruminating. By now, he thought Rod had had enough time to digest Cook's proposal concerning Bostic. They needed to settle this. Andy had decided from the beginning that James' attitude was the right one to take. Bostic wasn't a threat-and the much larger Cahokian culture might very well turn out to be one. There was a society Andy didn't like at all. A harsh theocracy, essentially, much larger and better organized than any of the village cultures, and with some truly repellent features. They did, in fact, practice ritual human sacrifice. Nothing on the scale of the ancient Aztecs, granted. But it was woven into their customs nonetheless. What made the situation all the more explosive was that, six months earlier, the damn Spaniards had tried to seize Cahokia by brute force and impose themselves on the Cahokians as a new aristocracy. With less than two hundred men, almost no ammunition left-and de Soto killed by a tyrannosaur long before, according to the stories they'd heard. Whoever had wound up in charge of the survivors must have had delusions of grandeur that he was another Cortez. John Boyne, it turned out, knew a lot about the history of Mexico. He'd explained to Andy, once, that the two main reasons Cortez had been able to conquer the Aztecs weren't the much-ballyhooed advantages of having guns and horses-much less the Quetzalcoatl myth-but the fact that disease had already ravaged the Aztecs and most of the soldiers he had were allied Indians who had their own good reasons to hate the Aztecs. Even then, the first time the Spaniards seized their capital, the Aztecs had counterattacked and driven them out. The same thing had happened again. Only, as someone once quipped, history had repeated itself as a farce. These Spaniards had only one horse left. Ran out of ammunition before they got into the capital complex. Had no allies; in fact, they were hated by every Indian village that knew them. And a leadership whose only resemblance to Cortez was ruthlessness. In the end, according to what they'd been able to piece together, probably not more than forty or fifty Spaniards had survived. And those men had disappeared somewhere. For all intents and purposes, de Soto's expedition was simply no longer an important factor in the political equation. Eventually, one way or another, those men who'd survived would just get absorbed into the villages. But, not surprisingly, the attempted conquest had made the Cahokians belligerent and suspicious-and they had a culture for which suspicion and belligerence came easily to begin with. Some day, Andy figured, they might even wind up having to fight another war. If so, why go out of their way for no good reason to make enemies elsewhere?

  The day might come when they'd be approaching Bostic for an alliance, not simply a peace treaty. "I think James is right, Rod," Andy said.

  "We should draw up a formal treaty and present it to Bostic. And if he agrees, sign it and be done." Andy looked at his own watch, now. "We don't have much time left, people. Any discussion?" That really meant, did Rod still want to hold onto his mulish recalcitrance. Andy knew, from private conversations, that everybody else in the cabinet had already come to the same conclusion he and James had. Hulbert shrugged. "Yeah, sure. Beside, it's your decision, Andy. A cabinet vote's not binding on you, anyway." "Officially, no. Have you ever seen me override a majority of the cabinet, though? Answer: no. That's because I'm not stupid. Any proposal or policy that can't win a majority of the cabinet is not something I figure the people out there will swallow either, if I try to shove it down their throats. This little confederacy of ours is about as far removed from Prussian autocracy as I can imagine." Rod smiled. "True. Okay, I'll vote in favor also. Holding my nose, but I will." Andy rose. "That's it, then.

  Let's get down to the church." The moment he finished that sentence, the church bell started to ring. "I love that sound," said Jenny.

  "Even if it is tinny." James had just gotten to his own feet. "Give John a break. As he'll tell anyone who asks, he's a machinist, not-toss in at least four expletives here-a metal caster. That bell's the best he could come up with. So far, anyway." Itwas a tinny-sounding church bell. But Andy agreed with Jenny. And, in his case, not simply out of sentiment. He was coming to believe, more and more as time went by, that in the long run that tinny-sounding church bell was more likely to bring down any enemies they might have than all the rifles in the armory. As they left the tower and headed for the big wooden structure just outside the walls of Schulerville, he found himself pondering the matter. Andy had mixed feelings about the church that Brian Carmichael had founded-and which Elaine Cook had then boosted enormously. The colony had two really good singers.

  Elaine and Marie Keehn. Personally, for his tastes, Andy thought Marie was a little better. But it hardly mattered either way. Better or not, neither Marie's style of singing nor her own religious beliefs would have allowed her to throw herself wholeheartedly into building Brian's new church the way Elaine had. True, Elaine and Brian got into some ferocious theological disputes, from time to time. She'd belonged to a church that, while fundamentalist in many respects, didn't share some of the extreme views of Brian's church. But since Brian was naturally easygoing and was never willing to force an issue, as long as everyone was willing to respect what he considered "the basics," Elaine usually got her way. The end result was a church that, whatever quirks it might have from Andy's viewpoint, didn't dwell too much on theological fine points. And it was vibrant, lively-and, most of all, cheerful.

  Brian's sermons focused on the love of God and Jesus, and came with the man's natural ebullience and goodwill. It was hard to imagine anything more remote from the spirit that had filled the stern churches of the old Puritan colonists. You'd never hear Brian Carmichael describing the streets of hell paved with the skulls of unbaptized children, the way Cotton Mather had. Carmichael barely talked about hell at all. The devil simply didn't interest him. The man was odd, that way. As was about to be demonstrated again today.

  The same Brian Carmichael who would insist that the Quiver was God's way of demonstrating the falseness of the doctr
ine of evolution-the logic there was enough to make a pretzel shriek in agony-and could recite, literally, chapter and verse from the Bible, simply didn't seem to care about the way people filled his teachings, exactly. As long as they did it in what he considered a Christian spirit-which, for him, ran heavily toward love of fellow man and spent little time at all scolding that same fellow man for his failings-and were willing to follow a few "basic rules," he was satisfied. Even the transparently idolatrous aspects of the way most villagers interpreted his teachings was something he was willing to ignore. It turned out the effigies and carvings the villagers paraded around with on holy days and religious festivals weren'treally icons-much less papist saints-they were actually "symbols of upright folk." So spake Brian Carmichael, anyway. And since he was the prophet, in the Cretaceous, who was going to argue the point? The sermon done, Elaine would trot out and start the singing, and within two minutes the entire congregation was joining in. On their feet, clapping and dancing-and using musical instruments upon which were often carved representations of the same "upright folk." Andy had come to the conclusion that he could live with the quirks. Like Rod, holding his nose sometimes.

  Because he was pretty sure, now, that every sermon that went by, every raucous and happy congregation, was another little trickle slowly undermining the cultures around them, where they needed to be undermined, and cementing them where they needed that instead.