Where to go?
The first two seemed to head towards what might be a center. She recalled that Fairfield was said to have been spared from the worst of the Rain by being farther out. That suggested that Big Springs and White Rocks ought to be safer than Meade and Cimarron. Of the former, the map told her she could get to more worlds from White Rocks than from Big Springs. She wondered if that meant that people on White Rocks might have more knowledge of things.
Well, one way to find out. White Rocks, here I come.
CHAPTER 4
Passing through the hyperspace portal left Lisa disappointed. For such a momentous event, traveling from one world to another, the experience was nothing more than walking through an open door. No odd sensations, no feelings of nausea or ecstasy, nothing to signify the event. Even her horse was startled for only a moment, when the area between the metal opening briefly turned a rainbow of colors. The moment was gone, and the colors replaced with a view of the outdoors, the only sight of note because the Fairfield portal was enclosed.
Lisa led her horse through, and that was that. One step was on Fairfield, the next on White Rocks. After her horse’s tail was past, she stepped off the platform. She checked this portal’s controls to be certain they would work. Satisfied that they would, she watched the view of Fairfield disappear. She had arrived.
She took some time to look at this new world. Now she really did have a view of mountains. On three side of her vantage point were tall, snow-capped peaks. The fourth had high, tree-covered hills. The air felt slightly warmer than it had on Fairfield; perhaps it was later in the spring?
There appeared to be a sharpness to the mountains that she didn’t expect. There also appeared a compelling contrast in the colors: stark white snow; dark green trees; and the clear blue sky. In the distance she could hear water running. It was a sound she’d only heard before when one of Fairfield’s creeks or rivers was high. The air smelled odd, too; she recognized the odors of human activity, but not the natural scents.
She saw that she had arrived among ruins, like the ones she had left, but these ruins were flatter, the destruction more complete. She wondered if the buildings had been leveled instead of left standing. She also wondered, since it did appear so thorough, if the destruction wasn’t more intentional.
To her left and front, however, there were few fallen structures. Sounds of activity could be heard from beyond. Unlike Centropolis, this city hadn’t been completely abandoned. It had been moved from the old center. Maybe that was for safety reasons, or possibly to forget about the terrible past. Knowing that she wasn’t going to learn anything by standing around, she grabbed the reigns of her horse, and walked towards the noise.
She was almost at the edge of the new town when several armed men appeared in front of her, pointing weapons at her. One, the best dressed of the lot, took a step towards her. “Stay where you are,” he ordered.
“Okay,” Lisa replied. She wasn’t certain what more she should say.
“You came through the portal?”
“Uh, yes. How did you know that?”
“What do you want?”
“Well, my name is Lisa Herbert. I’m from Fairfield. Y’know, the next planet across the portal?”
“Why are you here?”
She hesitated, wondering what to say. She didn’t want to be evasive, because that might get misconstrued. She certainly didn’t want to make demands. After all, she was a stranger. She had to be nice so they would believe she meant them no harm.
She wondered if this man was in some sort of authority. If he was, she knew that it would be better to be honest. Telling the truth might keep him from assuming the worst about her.
She cleared her throat. “Well, sir, I thought…well, maybe I could do some good. I mean, things are going pretty well on Fairfield, and...”
“Come with us.”
“Why?”
“Come with us, or leave.”
“Okay. I’m not here to cause any trouble. Could you at least tell me the name of this town? Please?”
“Great Junction. Now, move!”
***
Lisa tried to relax as she waited for the next person to enter the room. She put her mind to the task at hand. While thinking did keep her alert, it really didn’t relax her much. Still, she reasoned, things could be a lot worse for me.
The room contained three chairs and a table. There was one door in and out, and no windows. Lisa observed that the building clearly was one of the few in this new town that had survived the Rain and was in use. It was a two-story structure. She sat in a second-floor room. She’d passed by offices as they hustled her into the room. The men (and a few women) wearing uniforms suggested that this was some sort of official place, probably the jail and police station.
Lisa took this evidence to mean that Great Junction had some sort of formal government. That could suggest that the Rain hadn’t affected White Rocks too badly. It could also suggest that some crisis had arisen since then, and the locals formed a government to deal with the situation.
Whatever the reason for the government, Lisa didn’t think it had taken too strong a hold. Few of the uniforms she’d seen were clean and neat. Except for those men who brought her here, no one else wore uniforms. The floors were dirty, the interior lighting varied, and no one inside the building appeared to be in much of a hurry.
What’s more, they allowed her to keep her traveling bag. They had looked through it and examined the contents thoroughly. At first they weren’t going to let her keep it with her. When she asked politely to hang onto it, and added “please,” they gave in. She decided that there wasn’t strict authority on White Rocks, and that they might not view a young woman in a dress much of a threat.
Unnerving, maybe, but not a serious threat.
The door opened. A middle-aged man in a uniform, and an older man not in uniform, entered and sat down. The man not in uniform said, “My name is Edward Coe. I’m the town manager of Great Junction.”
“Manager? Like mayor?”
“Yes. This is Captain Redfern. He runs the town police. I was told that your name is Lisa Herbert, and that you came through the portal.”
His tone was neutral, so Lisa kept her voice the same. “That’s right.”
“Why, may I ask, have you come here?”
“Well, Mister Coe, my father raised me to be the smartest girl around. Unfortunately, the only jobs for smart girls are being mothers or teachers. So I left Fairfield, my planet, and decided to see if I could find a place somewhere else. Somewhere where I could fit in, do some good.”
“Simple as that?” Redfern asked.
It didn’t sound to her like he believed her. She mulled over the situation before saying anything more. She wasn’t here to cause trouble. She wasn’t looking for an argument. She had to convince them, politely, that she had the best of intentions.
She glanced at her backpack, then looked at Coe. “May I show you some things?”
“All right.”
She slowly reached into her backpack. She took out her notebook and the portal manual. She placed the notebook on the table and opened it to a random page. She showed the open page to the men.
“I know that if I’m to fit in, I’ll have to prove my worth. I took notes from the books in our library. I’m hoping that this notebook will help me to solve any problems that might come up. Part of how I’d like to do some good.”
Redfern pointed to a spot on the page. “I can’t make that out. What does it say?”
“If I told you, you wouldn’t need me. I may be young, but I’m not a complete fool.”
Redfern glared, but Coe said, “I suppose you’re as distrustful as we are.”
Lisa smiled. “Yeah, I guess.”
She took back the notebook. She then put the portal manual on the table. As soon as the men saw what it was, their eyes widened. Coe touched the book gingerly. He turned the pages as if they were logs burning in a fireplace. Redfern simply stared.
Lisa made the obvious observation. “I guess none of your manuals survived.”
“No, they didn’t,” Coe replied.
“Can I show you something?”
“Yes, please.”
She turned to the passage on the security application. “I know this is a little hard to understand, but read those two paragraphs.” She waited for them to finish. “I figured that out just before I turned on the portal on Fairfield. It’s a way to keep people from using the portal, if you don’t want them to, without turning the portal machine off.”
Coe was still mesmerized, but Redfern came out of his trance. “If that’s so,” he asked, “how could you come through ours?”
“Turning on one portal allows you to go through another that’s connected to it,” Lisa said. “It works kinda like that door. You open it to get to the hallway. You can’t open it and get to the first floor, or outside. You have to go through other doors.
“What’s more, just because I came through Fairfield’s portal to here, that doesn’t mean I can go back whenever I want. I have to turn on your portal to get back to Fairfield. I used that security application thing to keep anyone else from using the Fairfield portal. No one else can come from there to here, unless I activate the portal.”
“So,” Redfern said, “we can’t stop anyone from coming here?”
“No, you can’t. But someone has to turn on their portal to come here. There are three worlds that someone would have to come from, no others. One is Fairfield, where I came from; the other two are Big Springs and Lone Star. If I’m the first person to come through your portal, then no one’s turned on the others.”
“Makes sense,” Coe said to Redfern. “My grandfather thought that the last person through the portal came when he was a small boy, and he wasn’t too sure about that.”
“If they don’t have this,” Lisa added, tapping the manual, “they can’t turn on the portal. I guess if you can read well enough, you could figure it out. But I’ve read a lot of books, and if I didn’t have that, I don’t think I would have known exactly what I was doing.”
The room was quiet for a second or two. Coe looked at Redfern. “I don’t think she’s much of a threat, Ben.”
“Maybe not.” Redfern looked back at Lisa. “What did your father do? How is it you came to read so many books?”
“My father is a trader. He finds a surplus of crops, or gets someone to make clothes or something like that. He takes the goods around the villages and finds people who need the goods.”
“How much does he make?” Coe asked.
“How much what?”
“Does he, what’s the term, barter those goods?”
“Uh-huh. He gets goods in exchange for trading, and for moving the goods around. Don’t you trade your surplus goods?”
“Bartering doesn’t always work well around here,” Coe said. He reached down to his belt, brought up a tiny sack and opened it. Wooden discs spilled out onto the table. “We use these trade tokens to help things along.” He pointed out a few. “Five small ones would get you a sack of grain. A medium buys you two sacks. A large token buys ten sacks.”
“Okay, I can see that. Works like money did before the Rain.”
“What? Oh, you mean the Savage Rain. Yeah, right.”
“Does that work for other things, too? What if I need a hammer, how many tokens does that take?”
Coe frowned. “That depends. Here in Great Junction, you could get a hammer for two smalls. Down at Red Cloud, it might be four smalls up to a medium and two smalls. Up in Pueblo, who knows? It changes from day to day. And you could have a hundred larges, and you probably couldn’t get a hammer in Highland or Two Forks.”
“The Merchants’ Councils in the towns can’t always agree on prices,” Redfern added.
“Merchants’ Council?” Lisa asked. “Is that who runs your towns?”
Coe nodded. “Anyone in a trade can select the local Council.”
“Trade? You mean, like a job? Like farmer, or blacksmith?”
“That’s right.”
“How many people are on the Council?”
“We have seven here, including me. Pueblo and Red Cloud still have five-man Councils.”
“You think you ought to be telling her so much?” Redfern asked.
“Look, Ben, unless you’re really afraid of her, she’s going to stay. The more she knows, the less likely she is to get into trouble.”
“You could let me prove myself,” Lisa said.
She hadn’t planned on saying anything like that. She had hoped to leave and explore this world before trying to get involved in anything. She didn’t want to make a fool of herself on her first trip. Nor did she want to disrupt things without learning about the people or their ways.
Something inside her told her to speak up. It urged her to say something to get out of this room. It suggested that unless she made an offer, she was heading back home without even having tried to make a difference. Either volunteer to act, or volunteer to return to Fairfield.
Neither man replied immediately to Lisa’s statement, so she pressed on. “Let me try to solve some problem. Deal with something that’s stumped you. It doesn’t have to be anything huge. Nor does it have to have a life-or-death outcome. Give me a chance. If I get the job done, you let me stay for as long as I want. If I fail, I head back to Fairfield and never come back.”
“Sounds fair enough. What do you think, Ben?”
“I could live with it, Mister Coe. Send her up to Pueblo. See if she can get those farms up there to produce something more than mud.”
“What are you talking about?” Lisa asked.
“There’s a river that runs past Pueblo,” Coe explained. “Comes out of the mountains, jogs north by the town, then turns west. Before the Savage Rain, the town was a vacation spot. Right after the Rain it was abandoned. In my father’s time it sprang back up, once people figured out that the river meant good growing soil.
“Some time back they suffered a few summers of drought. They tried an irrigation system. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it floods the fields. Since no one person owns the fields, the farmers can’t agree on how to make the thing work completely right.”
“And you want me to, what?”
“Go up there,” Coe told Lisa, “figure out what the problem is, and get the folks to agree to solve it.”
Lisa didn’t need more than a moment to decide. “That doesn’t sound too difficult. Okay, Mister Coe, I’ll give it a try.”
***
Lisa wasn’t able to dash off to Pueblo to prove herself. For one thing, she wanted to learn more about where she was and where she was going. The history of White Rocks and Pueblo wasn’t interesting, and didn’t seem to yield any hints of how she could approach the problem. The one thing she did find compelling was that back when the planet was being settled, groups of “Indians” also came here to live. These people didn’t make their homes in the towns, but lived in the wilderness around the settled areas. Aside from finding out that the groups chose this world because it seemed “similar to their original lands,” Lisa learned very little about them.
Probably for the best. I can learn more once I deal with the problem at hand.
Another reason why she didn’t leave straight away was that Coe wanted to introduce her to the rest of the Merchants’ Council. She knew from the start of the meeting that this would be no mere formality; Coe clearly wanted their backing before he allowed her to travel. She answered more questions, told them what she had told Coe and Redfern, and generally dried out her throat. The effort paid off; he got the full support of the Council.
Even then Lisa couldn’t leave. She’d arrived on White Rocks early in the afternoon. By the time the meeting ended, the sun neared the horizon. Coe told her that travel at night wasn’t advised.
“Every so often, bandits rob people on the roads,” he said, “especially at night, and especially lone travelers. The attacks started up a couple years ago, once trade between
towns got going.”
“Now, people travel in groups?” she asked.
“That’s right. There might be a group coming down from Pueblo tomorrow. When they head back the next day, you can ride with them.”
“Why don’t you go after these bandits?”
Coe cleared his throat. “Let me say this,” he said, his voice low. “All bandits are robbers, but not all robbers are bandits.”
At first Lisa didn’t understand what he meant. Then, the next day, as she wandered around Great Junction to get a feel for this new world, she began to catch on. Almost every action was a negotiation. Exchanges between merchants often escalated to name-calling. She watched a few deals between traders take place, and only once did both sides come out ahead.
Little wonder that the farmers up in Pueblo are having problems, and that travel isn’t entirely safe. The climate of White Rocks discourages compromise. People look for and take every advantage. As long as you get what you want, the effects of your deals don’t matter.
Either someone takes control of this mess, she noted, or these people are going to suffer through another Savage Rain.
***
The Pueblo Merchants’ Council met Lisa when she arrived the following day. A messenger from Great Junction came the day before with an explanation. This time she wasn’t met with suspicion. She was given a tour of the town, introduced to the contesting parties, and had the dispute spelled out in detail. She let two of the farmers show her to the site in question.
She found it surprising at arrangement of the farms that the people had established. Before arriving she had pictured farms as she knew them: large plots of land with a house along a side or in the corner of the farm. In Pueblo, the farms were smaller squares of land along the river, each divided by stakes and a rope “fence.” The farmers lived in the village, and came out each day to work their section. The arrangement seemed to make sense; no valuable land was occupied by residences, and the smaller plots put more land to use.
Lisa saw what she thought was another reason for these odd farms. Most of the crops in the fields weren’t as healthy as they should for that time of year. The farmers here would need all the land they could get, if that signaled how good a crop they were growing. What’s more, there seemed little variation from field to field.