by Pam Uphoff
"Looks like we're through the worst of it, Nelson." She climbed out and took a stroll out to where she could look to the south. "There's the road to the bridge." She looked around for the scouts. "See if we can get down to the road."
With some fancy driving, they could. They both hopped out and felt the paving.
"I don't believe this." Roxy muttered. "It's textured in a diamond pattern, for traction. I'd have expected it to be more . . . worn, eroded."
Nelson walked to the edge, where a series of half meter tall, meter long slabs formed a barrier of sorts against the drop down the nearly vertical hillside, and felt the sharp square corners, studied the rock. "It's all granitite—metamorphosed granite. And damned if I can find a join." He walked up toward the bridge. Roxy followed him part way, then went back for the gyp. The road bed met the bridge at a sliding wedge.
"They must have some way of recrystallizing the rock once they have it in place. Is this all they do about thermal expansion?"
He stomped back to the gyp and dug out his harness and line. "I'm going down for a look.
The whole entire damn bridge was one chunk of rock.
Roxy winched him back up and they drove across the bridge with no further comment. Where the road hit the valley floor, they picked up the scouts, turned due east and made for the crater wall.
There were only two problem stream crossings; they were driving up the slope of the crater rim in two hours. They stopped where the slope steepened to camp for the night. No point in killing themselves rushing, when the goal was in sight.
The natives walked into camp just before the sun sank below the far ridge.
Or more precisely, they walked up and stopped about twenty feet away. Both men's hands were open, empty and on display as such. The scouts pulled guns as they leaped to their feet. Nelson froze, he hadn't the slightest idea where he'd put his stunner. Roxy dived for the gyp and pulled out a riot gun.
"Hoytoe. Mauwe enta t'camp?"
In the evening light Nelson could see that the man who had spoken had darkish blonde hair, pulled back in a braid, and either a really good tan or was from this world's equivalents of one of the southern races. The other man had dark hair and moderately tanned skin. Both good looking. Large, well fed, healthy. Clean. Not like a lot of natives.
"Hello, welcome. Come in." Nelson gestured an invitation. "Put the guns down, they are trying to look friendly."
Javier muttered something behind him, about how he thought the blond had been female. "Damn homos."
"Now, don't jump to conclusions or make value judgments." Nelson said, and sent a frown at the scouts, as they finally lowered their weapons, and holstered them with every sign of reluctance. "We'll just sit down and have dinner with them."
The natives had been listening intently, and swapped shrugs. The dark haired one rattled off something.
Nelson shook his head, "Sorry, but we don't speak your language. Come. Sit." Damn, what was he supposed to do with natives?
Dark Hair walked in and swept his glance around, stopping on Nelson. He tapped his chest. "Dud It." Gestured at Blonde and Tan, "Lev Tee."
Nelson smiled. That was simple enough. He tapped his own chest. Keep it simple. "Nel Son. Roxy. Ben. Hav I Air."
Nelson looked at Roxy. "Get my case. I have a vid camm, we need to get all of this."
The two men waited and watched while he set up the camm and started both recording and sending. Oh Hell! What were their names? He gulped. "This is a record of the first meeting. We have exchanged names."
He turned back to the natives. "Dud?"
"Dudit. Levty." He repeated obligingly. "Nel Son. Rocks Ee. Ben. Havi Air."
Well, oral traditions and so forth. A good aural memory was no doubt trained into them.
"Please, sit." Nelson gestured as he sat awkwardly on the ground.
"Tanoo fer t'huspitly." Dark Hair—Dudit folded up easily to sit cross legged.
"Crap. Did you hear what he said?" Ben was frowning at the natives. "He said 'Thank you for the hospitality.' He speaks some variety of old English."
"Oh, I didn't catch that, makes this a very recent split, doesn't it?" Nelson perked up. Less paperwork, labor more profitable. "Well, we might as well feed them."
The scouts started stirring about to get dinner ready, just hot packs of course, and the natives conferred and the blond, Levty, got up and walked to the edge of the camp's lights to pick up two sacks and return. Nelson braced himself. Apparently the sharing of food ritual was going to go both ways. Some sort of pancake-like primitive yeast bread, and meat. It didn't smell off. In fact it smelled wonderful and smoky. They all sat around in a circle and sampled each others food, and told each other what the names of the foods were and included a lot of words Nelson thought he ought to understand. The natives were picking up their language a lot faster than the reverse. As the food disappeared, Dudit produced what looked exactly like a wine bottle and looked thoughtfully at them. "Glassos?"
"Glasses. Certainly."
Javier fetched glasses, ordinary drinking ones, but what did it matter. This stuff they'd slung around in their backpack, made with primitive methods, was probably going to be awful, but he'd take a token drink . . .
"Holy Mother!" Roxy exclaimed. "This is good stuff."
It certainly had a good nose. He sipped. "Merlow, I think. Very nice." He sipped again. "I'd like to taste this when it hasn't been shaken up in a backpack."
Dudit nodded. "Goodur. Ulder s'better."
"Yes. A good year. And I suspect older would be better." God! A few hours and they were damn near speaking Merican. If Dallas could get a license to import labor from here, they'd have half the budget for education most of the labor companies had. And if they opened mines here, the overseers wouldn't have too many problems either. It was all a matter of finding something worth mining.
When the wine was gone, Dudit and Levty stood up. "Good noche. Via Marnan." They scooped up their empty bags and walked out.
Ben frowned, "Should we keep them here?"
"No," Nelson yawned. "They'll be back." He got up and shut off the camm and turned on the radio. "Did you get that, Lon?"
"Oh yes, I've half the staff on duty. Turn the camm back on. If they come back and massacre you all, we'll have that on record too."
Nelson snorted. Lon's sense of humor showed up at odd times, sometimes. "Tell Doctor Galina her times for the splits are all wrong. These guys can't have split more than three thousand years ago. Less, actually. English was one of the last of the pre-modern languages to form. Their culture must have stagnated."
"Either that or the world split earlier and we're looking at an Early Diaspora situation."
"That's just a theory. No one's ever proven it."
"Well, think of the opportunity."
"Ha! I'm afraid that this crater provides all the answers to the narrow genetic diversity that we need. And it's a cold hard fact, not a silly theory."
***
The invisible woman retreated silently. Never had put her bow and arrows away hours ago, but the creepy voice from the box made her wish she had them in hand. The voice had sounded like it had seen them, heard them. Well, Dydit and Lefty. Question and Never had both remained invisible, listening and watching.
Hmm, well maybe she shouldn't condemn the strangers for having invisible watchers.
She slipped around a couple of brushy areas, and upslope to their rendezvous. Question was already there.
She dropped the light warp. "They were speaking some variety of old Scoo, weren't they?"
"Close enough to guess most of what they were saying."
Lefty nodded. "I doubt I was getting as much as Dydit, but Old Gods! What a bunch of snobs. Talked over our heads regularly, like we were idiots."
"They must be nobles," Dydit said.
"Slave masters," Lefty growled. "They talk over the merchandise like that too."
"That box on the three legs?" Never said. "It was some sort of listening and looking de
vice. Nelson talked to someone named Lon on another box about you, and it talked back."
"Magic?"
They both shook their heads.
"It had some concentration of electricity about it," Question said. "But there was no mental, magical, twisting going on in any of them."
"And they never twigged to us being there."
"Let's keep it that way." Lefty said. "Let's get to know them better before we complicate the situation with attractive women."
Question sniffed. "Roxy was cute enough, and they didn't act dominant around her. She had a weapon, too."
Lefty eyed her. "Which doesn't mean that outsider women will get the same treatment."
"We need to follow those people back. That 'gyp' of theirs travelled faster than the horses. Can we ride back with them, leave the critters here? The horses are good for a week. Any longer and they'll wander off and we'll have trouble finding them, let alone catching them. We can turn the chickens loose. Most likely a wolf will snack down on them inside of a week. But what are we going to do about the kids?" Never glanced over at a barely perceptible shielded circle, and the two bundles sleeping inside it.
Dydit shifted uneasily. "We'll never be able to keep them hidden. I'll have to bring them along."
"We'll help! We can spy on them, because we're small." Rustle, of course.
Lefty sighed. "They're damn smart. And Rustle is a natural born eavesdropper. They may be an asset, depending on what this lot has in mind for us. People say things in front of kids they'd never say in front of an adult."
Never bit a finger nail, then nodded reluctantly.
"If they try anything, I'll take them apart." Dydit growled.
Never dug into her backpack and pulled out dinner. "I didn't want to miss their conversational asides."
Question snorted. "I ate and listened, and you were certainly getting close enough for them to hear you chewing."
Dydit gave Never a fishy look.
"It was interesting. Nelson mutters."
"Oh, what did he say?"
"That the language similarities would make it easy for the mining supervisors."
"Told you. Slavers." Lefty shifted. "I want to hear what they think of this ridge and the lake. But then perhaps we should report home. These people are strange, and potentially dangerous."
***
Lon found Naomi Haskell in the mapping trailer. "So, have any of the balloons made it across the ocean?"
Naomi reached to switch channels. "Not as of half an hour ago, but number eight looks like it may actually make it. . . . ah. Perfect timing, it's almost local dawn. That dark line on the oblique camm is land, we should be crossing it in . . . The balloon's dropped a bit, must have lost some helium . . . about half an hour. And yes it is recording everything." Naomi busied herself with the other balloons, but switched the main screen back to number eight as it approached shore. The sun was just clearing the horizon, lighting the land and sea below the balloon.
The balloon passed a thousand meters over the sailing ships, over the fortifications on the point, over the good sized city located on the large bay. The balloon was low enough, with good enough magnification to get a top down glimpse of horse drawn wagons in the grid of streets draped over the hills. The two tallest hills sported palaces facing each other across a strip of parkland. A defensive wall around the inner city showed that the city had long outgrown its defenses, and now felt secure enough to not build new walls. City gave way to suburbs, to farmland, to scattered farms among rough terrain, dry scrubby forests and brushy desert, foothills and pine trees and rising ground until the balloon crashed somewhere in the snow capped mountains, this world's equivalent of the Rockies.
Lon had been glued to the screen for hours, and sat back now, suddenly conscious that he was sweating in the air conditioned trailer, his stomach upset, hands shaking. "Well. I'd better go add this to my report home." He walked out quickly, and sought the privacy of his own quarters.
He fought off a desire to go fetal under the covers in bed and tried to calm down. The Native's were obviously more numerous in the other hemisphere. Maybe they didn't even need to contact them? Maybe he could order his people to pack up immediately. They could be out of here in ten days, when the gate opened. Damn Jackson, taking half his early gates. He shivered, cold now. This world was cheap, a gamble. Not worth the hassle of dealing with the authorities, the Department of Native Affairs. Maybe the company could be persuaded to put this world on the back burner, and they could go on to Twelve-forty.
Lon shook his head. "We'll just study the world for three more months, then pack up and leave. No further contact needed. No negotiations needed. I'll talk to the scouts about how they are to avoid the natives. And not shoot at them no matter what."
He took a couple of deep breaths and started writing a report for management. It would go back through the gate in ten days. Or three weeks. God only knew what gates JJ would steal from him. But whenever this report got there, the board of directors was not going to be happy. He stared at the screen. Damn. He was going to have to report this in person. Talk to the Department of Native Affairs. And Nelson had half a month to find something that would make this world worth the hassle of all the paperwork.
Damn. Damn. Damn.
At least there wouldn't be a problem communicating with the natives.
The question of languages nagged at him.
Lon pulled up Rae Galina's preliminary report on the dimensional split. It was easy to calculate splits from DNA changes. Usually. Of course the more recent the split, the more inaccurate this particular method. Heh. Yes, as he remembered, some species suggested a split thirteen thousand years ago, others a very recent bottleneck at under two thousand. He got up and walked over to the Biology and Medical box. The labs were joint, and the two women experienced at working together. At the moment, Rae was the only one there.
"Have you heard about the natives?" he asked.
"Of course. What's on your mind."
"How about a dimensional spilt thirteen thousand years ago, and an Early Diaspora between one and two thousand years ago. Would that explain your results?"
"Oh. Hmm. Equally well, I should think. I've been trying to explain away the two thousand year split with a population bottleneck caused by Nelson's crater out there. Which explains nicely why the majority of the plants and animals show such low diversity, and such ecological simplicity. A whole bunch of extinctions, probably world-wide, but worse right here. Then migration in from outlying areas, of the ancestors of the limited genetic pool of survivors. Except that some of them have limited genetic diversity, and some have incredibly limited diversity and are seriously inbred. Now, a few of the animals have shown some interesting oddities, and the Early Diaspora Theory would explain that quite nicely. The wolves and the rabbits have . . . do you know what introgressions are?"
"Genes that don't appear to have evolved in the species that has them. Genes they acquired from interbreeding with other, closely related species."
"Close enough. You were about to get my report on Siberian wolves with introgressions from domesticated dogs, and rabbits with some genes we usually only find in domestic rabbits. The introgressions could be from their own species, if there was a sudden addition of a different sub-population. I was thinking Bering land bridge, bringing them in contact with a North American subspecies, which had naturally developed these genes, identical to our domesticated ones. An identical effect could be had by your Early Colonists bringing both domestic dogs and wild wolves and rabbits with them, and deer, but not antelope. The three local species of deer are quite solidly less than two thousand year split species. North American and European species that migrated in, after that meteor, no doubt, but is their tiny genetic pools due to near extinction or a small number of imported animals? But the antelope are thirteen thousand years from a common ancestor with Earth. They're all African, related to the Dik Diks. Likewise the wild cattle they found down south."
"Hmm. Hard to
believe people would bring wild animals. Maybe game animals, to ensure they'd have something to hunt."
"Perhaps. All you have to do is explain how they developed dimensional travel fifteen hundred years before they had the computational power to do so. Not to mention the energy requirements."
"Well, they did have computers in world war five, and a wide variety of electrical generating power plants. It's not like we're talking about the Romans. In fact, it's rather egotistical of us to assume they came from our world. Maybe another world that split off in the twentieth century and didn't get knocked flat by the Great Depression, or didn't loose a significant portion of the population in world war six."
Her eyes narrowed. "I want samples from those natives. I'll bet I can pin them down."
"Nelson's collecting rocks. We'll have to see what else he brings home."
"Most likely, proof that there was a worldwide disaster two thousand years ago."
"Yes, but he's met two natives, and their language is close enough to Merican to almost be understood. The thirteen thousand year split won't work with that. Two thousand, at the longest."
Rae pursed her lips and nodded. "Now that's going to change things."
***
"See how the strata is tilted?" Nelson forgot that the natives couldn't understand him and babbled on. Maybe it was the kids that had shown up with Dudit and Levty that made him babble. Kind of made him nervous. "Classic astrobleme. Absolutely classic. Unfortunately whatever made it was probably pretty much vaporized. I doubt we'll find any pieces of the asteroid that. . . "
"It was a comet." Rustle interrupted.
Nelson blinked at the girl. "A comet? Good God! Do you mean a comet hit after civilization? After written records?"
Dudit stepped in with more information. "Un thousand tventy tree urs. Comet foul. Heah, everyone killed. Uthah sid, mos killed."
"One thousand twenty-three years ago?" Nelson eyed the rocks. "I need samples. Lots of samples."