“Thank you,” the headman said, wiping at his eyes one palm; the calluses scraped against the blond-gray stubble on his cheeks. “We will try it.”
The headman’s daughter came in, with a tray: slices of roast wild boar and gagrumpher, steamed plantain, sauces, the rough homemade wine. Tyra’s mouth filled at the smell; her own camp-cooking had grown tiresome.
“It is good of one of the Freunchen clan to take time for our troubles,” the headman went on.
“Duty,” Tyra mumbled. Embarrassing. Perhaps only in a place as out-of-the-way as this, as completely isolated from the past century, could you find that sort of faith in the Nineteen Families and their tradition of stewardship.
“We must do what we can for you, who helped those who were strangers,” he said.
“Murphmmhg?” she replied, then swallowed. “You’ve already helped me,” she said. Quite sincerely; a month in the wilderness with nobody but her horse and Garm to talk to had been a chastening experience.
“There are…bad people in the mountains,” he said. “Some of them have been here for a long time—they fought the ratcats a little, stole from us more. The real fighters, to them we gave without asking, but they went back to the towns when the liberation came. The others have become worse, and more have joined them since. They do not come this far back into the mountains often—we have little to steal, and we will fight to keep what we have, When the police chase them, then they run deep into the Jotuns. Some of the ones who were here during the war, they know their way around, a little.”
“Do you help the police?”
“Yes.” Flat and decisive. “The outlaws, they are advokats.” That was a small, scruffy, unpleasant-smelling carrion eater common to this part of the continent; it travelled in packs, attacked sick or wounded animals, and would eat anything including dung. Eat until it puked up, then eat the vomit. The beast was almost all mouth and legs, with very little in the way of a brain, an evolutionary holdover. “If we had more guns, we would shoot them ourselves.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I’ll be cautious.”
“And…” he looked down at his feet in their crude leather sandals. “You said, you were looking also for unusual things?”
Tyra felt a sudden prickle of interest. Unusual could mean anything, back in here; jadeite, a meerschaum deposit, abandoned kzinti equipment from a clandestine base…or news of the party she had been told to look out for. Business for herself, or for Herrenmann Montferrat-Palme. It was about time something turned up, it was cheap to live in the outback but not free, and she would be damned if she was going to be a burden on Mutti. Doubly damned if she would go asking Ib for help.
“Yes, if you please,” she answered.
“Here.”
He pulled out something small but heavy, wrapped in cloth, and placed it on the table between them. The work-gnarled fingers unfolded the homespun cotton with slow care and the young aristocrat leaned over, holding her breath. A dull-shining piece of…not metal, she thought. About the size of her palm, with a curved surface and a ragged edge, as if it had been torn lose from a larger sheet. Not any material she recognized, but there was a cure for that.
“Excuse me,” she said, and rummaged in the pack-saddle braced against one bamboo wall. The sample scanner Montferrat had gotten for her was late-model, a featureless rectangle with a pistol grip and readout screen. She pressed it against the whatever-it-was and pulled the trigger.
No data, it told her.
“What do you mean, no data?” she muttered. Perhaps the contact wasn’t close enough: she turned the piece over and made sure there was no airspace.
No data.
“Swine of a gadget!” she said, and tried it on the surroundings. No problem with the table, a rock on the floor; the bamboo wall, or her own hand. Tyra pressed it firmly against the artifact.
No data.
“Hmmpfh.” The girl tapped at the back, running the diagnostic. Everything fine.
Her hand stopped in mid-motion. The scanner worked by firing a tiny but very intense burst of laser energy into the sample, then analyzing the result. The material involved was minuscule, too little to even feel if you used it on yourself, unless you pressed it to your eye, of course. But the laser was very energetic.
She tapped out temperature. At ambient, which was no surprise. Then she squeezed the trigger for the sample function—no data—and asked for hotspots. Nothing: still at ambient temperature. Whatever this was, it was absorbing the energy and not ablating; not even warming up.
Odd, she thought: very odd. Back home in Gerning, the manor-house had had a functioning computer system with good educational programs. Tyra Nordbo had received a sound university-entrance level scientific education, and offhand she could not think of anything with those characteristics. A moment’s conference with her belt-comp’s reference functions confirmed her ignorance. It could be a kzin product, or something military that was not in the general databases…
“Do you mind if I test this?” she said to the headman.
He grinned. “We tried shooting at it. Then we dropped large rocks on it. Nothing we could do would so much as scratch it. The smith’s forge didn’t even heat it up.”
She nodded. That did not mean much, since the only thing these outbackers had in the way of weapons was old-fashioned chemical energy rifles. There were plenty of modern materials that would be untouchable to anything they could do, and which would reflect away a lot more thermal energy than charcoal could produce.
A crowd of children gathered as she came out into the sun, blinking for a moment in the brightness; all dressed alike in shorts, bare feet and varying degrees of grime. They clustered bright-eyed as she drew the magrifle from its sheath beside her saddle, on the porch of the hut, and held up the piece.
“Would one of you like to help me?” she said. A sea of hands waved at her amid eager clamor. She picked a girl of nine or so, with strawberry-blond braids and a gap in her teeth. “What’s your name?”
The girl blushed and dug at the packed dirt with a toe. “Helge,” she whispered.
“Well, Helge, why don’t you take this all the way down there—down by that big boulder—and put it in at ground level? Jam it in tight, facing me. The rest of you,” she went on, “get back—back behind me. Yes, that means you, too. One of you take the little one.”
A few adults had come to look as well; some of them with envy at her equipment, more in curiosity. Gracious lord Gott but it must be boring here, she thought. The cassette of regular ammunition came out with a clack sound, and she slid in the red-flagged one from the bottom of her war-bag. The normal rounds were single-crystal iron, prefragmented for antipersonnel or hunting use. These were narrow penetrators of osmium, in a ferroplastic sabot that would peel off at the muzzle. Antiarmor darts, and at a hundred meters they would punch through two hundred millimeters of machinable steel plate. Much less of real armor, and it drained the batteries like the teufel, but she had a solar-charging tarpaulin spread out over a sunny patch of ground. She tapped the velocity control to maximum and set the weapon for semi-auto.
Helge ran like the wind, heels flashing, and used one to pound the piece of material into the angle between ground and rock. Tyra gave her a smile of thanks and waved her back into the crowd as she sat, pushed her hat back and brought the rifle up with her elbows on her knees. A final check to be sure that everyone was behind her—Dada-mann had taught her about firearms as soon as she could walk; even under the occupation Herrenmann families had been allowed hunting weapons—and she took up the slack on the trigger. The sighting holo sprang up before her eye on x5, and she laid the target blip on the center of the gray material. Squeeze gently—
Whack. The recoil was punishing, several times worse than normal; there was not all that much mass in the darts, but they were travelling fast. She let the tremor die out of her arms and shoulders and the sight settle back on the target as the muzzle came down with its own weight. Whack. Whack. Whack. Whack. Fiv
e rounds, as much as her shoulder could stand and more than should be necessary.
“Don’t touch it!” she called sharply, as some of the children ran ahead of her.
The older ones pulled their younger siblings back, making a circle around her as she knelt. The impacts had driven the fragment back against the stone; into the stone, in fact, cutting a trough. The surface was shiny, plated with a film of osmium, and splashes had colored the earth and rock. She reached out with a stick, and it sizzled as the end came in contact with the shiny film. The osmium layer peeled away at the touch, falling to the battered earth below.
“Scheisse,” she whispered. Nothing. Gottdamned nothing. The dull gray surface of the material was utterly unmarked, to the naked eye at least. She shifted the rifle to her left hand and pulled out the scanner. Another no data, and the temperature was still at ambient…no, about .002 of a degree higher. That after being struck with penetrator darts that splashed across its surface in a molten film!
Well, Herr Montferrat-Palme wanted the unusual she thought. And this is certainly unusual enough.
Another thought struck her as she lifted the material and turned it. The edges were torn, twisted as if something had struck a sheet of whatever-it-was and belled this piece out beyond the breaking strain of the material. Considering what the tensile strength must be, that would have to be a fairly drastic event.
“Careful about that,” she said to a curious child who was poking at the film of osmium; the edges would be razor sharp even though it was thinner than tinfoil. She crumpled it with the heel of her boot and stamped it into a harmless lump. Turning to the headman:
“Where did you find this stuff?”
“The Muttiberg, Fra Nordbo. We pan a little gold in the rivers below it, to trade for things we must have. In the wash beneath—”
• CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“Let her rip!” Hans called into his beltphone. “Don’t get your underwear in a knot,” he went on to Jonah. “And that’s enough dirt”
“My back agrees with you but my greed dissents,” Jonah said, straightening up.
The water-furrow that fed their wash was nearly half a kilometer long, dug along the hillside or carried in troughs of log slab. Nothing in it had come with them, except the monofilament line that held it together. The wash itself was a series of stepped wooden boxes, ingeniously rigged with baffles so that the flow of water would shake them.
Their bottoms were different; memory-film, made in Tiamat, the central manufacturing asteroid of the Serpent Swarm asteroid. Leads hooked them to a wooden stand where their computer and main distortion-battery lay. A single keystroke would activate the memory-film; each box’s floor was set to form an intricate pattern of moving ripples. Rushing water would dissolve the mixture of water-deposited volcanic soil and gold granules Jonah shoveled in to the first box; a thin layer of water would then run over the rippling film. Gravity would leave the heavier metal particles in the troughs of the ripples, and they would move slowly down each box to deposit the gold in a deep fold, ready to be scooped out. The surface had a differential stickiness, too, nearly frictionless to the useless garague, catching at any molecule the computer directed.
From higher up the water-furrow a rumbling sounded. Spots had lifted the sluicegate, and the flood was rumbling along. Raw timber vibrated and thuttered, and the beams reinforcing corners groaned as the first weight threw itself against them. A meter across and deep, the wave bore dirt and twigs before it, and a hapless kermitoid that peeped and thrashed. It curled and rose as it struck the pile of gold-rich dirt, then washed it away and into the settling tanks like a child’s sand-castle. The tanks themselves began vibrating back and forth, their squealing groans almost deafening.
“Shovel, boy, shovel!” Hans called. “That’s a pocketful of krona with every shovelful of dirt”
Jonah cursed and wiped at his face, covered in an oil of sweat and dirt; more moisture ran from the sodden rag around his forehead, trickling down to cut runnels over his face and drip onto his bare chest. He had always been muscular for a Belter, but the weeks of labor had thickened his arms and shoulders, besides burning his face and body nearly the color of teak. The loads of dirt still felt heavy as he swung the long handle. Hans was spindly and wrinkled beside him, but his movements were as regular as a metronome.
“You’re putting too much heave into it,” the old man said after a moment. “Remember what I told you. Don’t jerk at it. Just enough to get the shovel moving, then turn your wrists and let the dirt slide off into the water. No need to waste sweat sticking it in.”
Jonah grunted resentfully, but he followed Hans’ advice. He was right; it was easier that way. Zazen helped too. His training was coming back to him, more and more these days. Use the movements to end thought; become the eye that does not seek to see itself the sword that does not seek to cut itself, the unself-contemplating mind. Feel sensation without stopping its flow with introspection, pull of muscle, deep smooth breath, aware without being aware of being aware. The two humans fell into lockstep, working at the high pile of precious dirt. Presently the pile grew smaller, and Spots came up with more. He was dragging it on a sled made from more of the film, set to be nearly frictionless on the packed earth of the trail. There was a rope yoke around his neck and shoulders, and he pulled leaning far forward, hands helping him along. When he was level with the men he collapsed to earth, panting.
Jonah stuck his shovel in the pile and helped him out of the rope harness, then handed him a bucket made from a section of log. The kzin lapped down a gallon or so and then poured the rest over his head, scooping out another from the trough and repeating the process. Then he licked his whiskers back into shape and shook himself, showering Jonah and Hans with welcome drops from his fur. The air was full of the smell of a quarter ton of hot wet carnivore.
“Bigs needs someone to help with the shoring,” he rasped, drinking again. “He digs more quickly than we thought.”
“Guess I’d better,” Hans said, rubbing a fist into the small of his back. “See you later, youngster.” He walked off up the trail to the shaft they had sunk into the hillside, whistling.
Spots paused as he gathered up the drag harness and the film. “Ah—adventure!” he said. “Travelling to far-off lands; ripping out the gizzards of hardship and danger; winning fortune and Name. Is it not glorious? Does your liver not steam with—”
“Go scratch fleas,” Jonah muttered, spitting on his hands and reaching for the shovel.
“Better that than hauling freight like a zitragor,” the kzin replied, flapping his ears ironically as he turned to go for the next load. “Far better.”
“I cannot believe it! I do not believe the testimony of my own nose!” Bigs said, pawing through a pile of datachips.
“Believe what?” Spots replied.
Across the campfire Jonah looked up at the sound; the hiss-and-spit of the Hero’s Tongue always sounded like a quarrel, but this was probably the real thing.
“That I was stupid enough to let you pack the virtual-reality kit!” Bigs said.
That was a late-model type, with nose implants for scents as well as ear and eye coverings for visual and aural data.
“It’s in perfect working order.”
“The chips, fool, the chips—you forgot the Siege of Zeeroau, the Hero Chruung Upon the Ramparts, no Warlord Chmee at the Pillars—all our good stuff. None of the classics at all!”
Spots flapped his ears and fluttered his lips against his teeth. “You run too many of that graypelt sthondat excrement,” he said. “You will curdle your liver and stultify your brain living in the past that way; you should pay more attention to the modern world, sibling. Renovate your tastes! Entertainment should be instructive!”
“Modern—heeraaeeow—The Kzinrette’s Rump?” Bigs said sarcastically, throwing one chip aside and digging for more. His voice rose an octave as he listed titles, and his tail quivered and then began to lash.
“Blood and Ch’rowl? The Los
t Patriarch of the Hareem Planet? Energy Swords at the Black Sun?” He screamed, a raw sound of rage. “Is there nothing here but smut and cheap, trashy science fiction adventures?”
He abandoned the carton of chips. The two kzinti faced each other, crouching low and claws extended: their ears were folded away and their tails held rigid. The air smelled of ginger as they growled through their grins, and their fur bottled out. Jonah started to rise in genuine alarm; most of the siblings’ spats were half in fun, but this looked like the real thing—and when kzinti got angry enough to stop exchanging insults in the Mocking Tense, they were milliseconds away from screaming and leaping. It must be the sheer frustration of the hard labor…
Hans broke in first: “You two tabbies interested in our results, or are you too set on killing each other and leaving it all for us monkeys?” he said dryly.
The kzin relaxed, breaking the lock of their unwinking eye-to-eye stare. The huge golden orbs turned on the old man instead, and they both licked their lips with washcloth-sized pink tongues. After a moment their fur sank back and their tails relaxed, but they both drooled slightly with tongues lolling. Hans brought out the portable scale and a set of bags of tough thermoplastic, setting a heatrod at one hand.
“That’s the last of it,” Hans said.
He took the container off the scales and dropping the dust into a bag; then wrote the weight on the outside and sealed it shut with the rod. Jonah watched the digital readout blink back to zero. They were sitting in front of the humans’ tent—the shelters of the felinoids were longer but much lower—and the sunken firelight was flickering on their faces, shining in the eyes of the kzin. Tonight it was scarcely brighter than the moon, full and larger than Luna from earth, leaving a circle of blackness in the sky where the stars were outshone. The dust had not looked like gold, save for a few granules larger than pinheads. Mostly it was blackish.
“Not much to look at,” he said, hefting one of the bags. It was a little larger than his fist, but heavy enough to bring a grunt of surprise.