The Warlock Wandering (33 page)

"Makes sense," Chomoi snorted. "No douETt the Proletarian Eclectic State of Terra was too cheap to put more than one audio and one video pickup on each car." Rod's mouth tightened, though he had a fleeting thought that Chomoi might have been trying to be tactful. Irritated, 260 Christopher Stasheff THE WARLOCK WANDERING 261

he directed a glare at the small grille in the ceiling in the center of the car, thinking searing thoughts. When smoke curled out of it, he relaxed. "Okay. Audio's out now, too." Yorick nodded, satisfied. "No way they can tell where we get out now."

Rod frowned at a sudden thought. "But they don't have to, do they? They just have to detail a bunch of guards at every station." He turned to Chomoi. "How many do we have coming up?"

She had paled. "Only one—the Canary Islands. After that, the next stop is Puerto Rico.."

"So." Rod leaned back, pursing his lips. "We've got one chance."

"Why bother?" Yorick settled back, grinning. "I always liked the Western Hemisphere."

Rod suffered a shy grin. "Well, actually, any place will do fine." The realization suddenly hit him like a bottleful of champagne. "Hey! We're home! This is Terra—the real, bona fide ancestral home of humanity! The planet where we evolved!"

Yorick cocked an eyebrow. "Never been here before?" Rod shook his head. "Heard about it, though. Lots." Gwen was looking from one to the other, totally lost.

"This is the planet people started out from, Miz Gallowglass," Chomoi explained. "Your ancestors spread out from here in starships, in all directions. They colonized the planets you live on now."

Awe filled Gwen's face.

"There's still the problem of getting off," Yorick reminded, "without getting arrested." Chomoi's gaze roamed the car. "Most of these people have luggage, don't they?"

"They do?" Yorick sat up, looking here and there all about the car. "Son of a gun! I suppose those shoulder bags could be suitcases."

"Sure. You don't need much room to pack a weekend's clothes."

"I'll never get used to this compact clothing you folks use," Yorick sighed. "Personally, I always thought we should leave spider silk to the arachnids."

Chomoi smiled. "Okay, primitive. What backward planet did you come from?"

"You'd be surprised." The caveman looked wary. "But I gotta admit, it is handy having a suit that can fold as flat as a board."

Chomoi frowned. "What's a 'board'?"

Rod said quickly, "So they've all got luggage. You're not thinking what I think you're thinking, are you?"

"I think so." Chomoi nodded at a nearby passenger. "He's about your size, and he's got some clothes to spare."

"Of course, we would have to knock him out," Rod reminded her.

Chomoi nodded, scowling. "That's the part I don't like. But it won't do him any permanent damage—and when he wakes up, he'll never know it was you who robbed him."

"We'll leave cash." Yorick eased a flat wallet out of his pocket.

Rod stared. "You've got PEST credits?"

"Sure." Yorick shrugged. "What kind of a traveler would I be, if I left home without some of the cash of the country I was going to?"

A time-traveler, Rod thought, but he had to admit the sense of what Yorick said. A person who was going to travel chronologically, should naturally take the same precautions as a person who was going to travel geographically. It was just that he couldn't count on being able to exchange currency once he got to his destination...."

"So why were we going through that whole elaborate routine at the casino?" Chomoi demanded. Then she frowned.

"Oh, yeah, I forgot. Nobody on any of the frontier planets will accept PEST credits for anything anymore."

"Why—because they're free of PEST'S tyranny?"

"No—because the PEST BTU isn't worth very much. 262 Christopher Stasheff

Legislation never was a very sound basis for a currency, Major."

"The price of thrift," Rod sighed. "I hate to point this out, but while we're stealing that guy's pajamas, won't the other passengers notice?"

Gwen sat very straight for a moment, gazing off into space. One by one, the other passengers began to snore. Finally, she relaxed with a bright smile and said, "Nay." Chomoi stared about her, closed her eyes, shook her head, and looked again.

Yorick expelled a hissing breath and said, "Yes." Then he said, "Well." and, "Someday maybe I'll get used to what you can do. Lady Gallowglass."

Privately, Rod hoped he would, too.

Yorick pushed himself out of his seat. "Let's get on with it, shall we?"

A few minutes and quick trips to the powder room later, the four of them sat down again, leaving four suitcases a little lighter and a lot richer.

Gwen plucked at the flimsy gray fabric. '"Tis so light that I feel quite unclothed."

"I know what you mean," Chomoi agreed. "After my tights and jerkin, it feels really odd."

"You weren't kidding with that crack about pajamas, were you?" Rod asked.

"Not a bit," Yorick said sadly. "But on Terra, going outdoors is a job for specialists now, so why should anyone else bother wearing all that heavy, uncomfortable wool and buckram?"

"I'm just not used to common sense, I suppose." Rod looked down at his bland, gray pajamas. "How come they all wear the same thing?"

Yorick shrugged. "Standard government issue. This is the Proletarian Eclectic State of Terra, Major.... Hey! Don't take it so hard, Chomoi! How could you know what they were going to do?"

"By really thinking about what they were saying," she whispered, "instead of just latching onto the parts I liked." They filed off the car with the other passengers, just four more gray-clad bodies. Rod was glad the pajamas had come with hoods; it gave them a fighting chance that no one would recognize their faces. They filed onto the escalator and glided up. Rod stared at the blank tan plasticrete wall, letting his thoughts go numb. Then he frowned. "This isn't plasticrete anymore."

"Right." Chomoi looked at him strangely. "Plasticrete is tan. This is red."

"It's stone!" Rod wanted to reach out and touch it, but the wall was four feet away from the escalator. "It's real, bona fide rock! But why so far away?" He looked down at the shallow stairs cut into the slope beside the escalator.

"And why are there steps there?"

"Because that's the way the Spanish built them," Yorick answered.

"The Spanish?" Rod looked up, frowning. "I thought PEST was an international government."

"Yeah, but they're thrifty, remember? Why pay good money to build a new station, when you can just adapt an old one?"

Rod stared around him. "You mean..."

"Right." Chomoi nodded. "You're in Puerto Rico, Major, where the Spanish once had a colony. They fortified the island heavily. We're inside the castle El Morro, built in the seventeenth century."

"Fourteen hundred years ago!!?!"

Chomoi nodded. "And it's still standing. They built well, back then."

Daylight struck them like a spray of needles, and the moving stairs delivered them gently onto a moving belt. Gwen breathed deeply of the warm, fragrant air. "Why, 'tis Paradise!" Then she frowned out toward a low rock wall 264 Christopher Stasheff

Rod looked, then stared. "That, dear, is an ocean. Water. All of it."

Gwen gazed for a while, then said, "Rarely have I seen waters so blue. What sayest thou, husband?" Rod was staring up at the other side.

"What seest thou?" Gwen turned to look, and gasped. The red wall towered up, blotched here and there, but stem and sheer, tilting back away from them, curving away around the headland, and up, up, up.

" 'Tis the abode of giants'," Gwen whispered. Rod glanced nervously around the terrace. It somehow seemed very narrow now. The wall was so huge that it made him feel like a fly clinging by his toes.

"Men built this?" Chomoi said softly.

Yorick nodded. "Lots of them. And they didn't have much choice about it."

The slidewalk delivered them to the base of another escalator. It carried them into a tunnel, rising up along a rampway. Rod stared around at the size of it. "Seventeenth century, you say?"

Chomoi nodded.

"What was this tunnel for? I mean, they didn't have escalators then."

"For cannon. Major. Huge cannon, ten feet long, made out of cast iron. They threw iron balls as big as your head, and they weighed like sin. Tons. You saw those six-foot notches in the seaward wall, down there on the battlemenis?" Rod nodded.

"Well, that's what they were for—cannon. Only to get them there, they had to lower them down this ramp. And to get them back up, they had to use horses." Chomoi gazed around her, looking grim. As they neared the top of the rampway, she nodded toward a niche in the wall with a grille of iron bars covering it. "Torture dungeon. When some poor bastard of a soldier broke the rules, they locked him up there for a while. Not enough room to stand up straight, and not much in the way of sanitary facilities, either."

"Plus knowing all his mates were watching him suffer every time they came down here." Rod nodded. "Nice guys."

"Yeah." Chomoi looked at the red stone around her, and shuddered. "A soldier must have thought he was in Hell here, back then. This piece of rock was all there was for him—and the officers were his masters."

"Legalized slavery," Yorick said with a scowl. They came out into the sun again, and found themselves in a wide courtyard, with a score of rooms cut into its walls. Two huge cylinders stood in its center.

Chomoi nodded toward them. "Cisterns. They were ready for a siege here."

"Siege, cannon..." Gwen frowned. "Why so much might?"

"Because Puerto Rico was the gate to the Caribbean, Miz Gallowglass, and to all the wealth of the countries that lie along its shores. That's the Atlantic Ocean over there, with Europe on its far side—but just around the curve of this shoreline, is the Caribbean. Other countries tried to take this island from the Spanish, and that wealth with it. The Dutch tried it first, then the English, so they built this castle to guard against those enemies."

Gwen gave a somber nod. "It must have guarded well."

"It did," Chomoi agreed. "It was built to ward off seventeenth-century caravels, but it'd be very effective against any rebel group that tried to take over the transatlantic tube, today." Rod lifted his head slowly. "So that's why the trip ends here!"

Chomoi nodded. "It'd also be easy to lock out anybody trying to invade through the tube from Europe. All you'd have to do would be to lock those big gates over there, and shoot down from the battlements up there." She pointed up at the rooftops. They could just make out the shape of the gun-slits against the sky. It wasn't hard to see the uniformed armsmen walking their beats, though.

Rod shuddered and looked away. "Not an entirely happy 266 Christopher Stasheff

with a slice of blue between it and the sky. "What is that azure field?"

thought, under our circumstances."

"Don't worry about it." Elaborately casual, Chomoi strolled out the main gate. The others followed her, with sighs of relief. "Where're we going?" Rod asked.

"Over there." Chomoi pointed at the skyline. Another fortress topped a rise before them.

Owen shivered, then squared her shoulders. "We do what we must." She stepped onto the slidewalk.

"That was the only tube from Europe?" Rod asked. They were coming in through another gate in a reddish stone wall, and they found themselves in another courtyard. Gwen gazed about her. "Why, 'tis like to the other, only far smaller."

Chomoi nodded. "Good way to put it. I mean, it makes sense, doesn't it? If it worked with El Morro, why not do it again? This is the fortress San Cristobal, Miz Gallowglass—and yes. Major, that El Morro tube is the only one from Europe."

"For the whole Western Hemisphere?"

Chornoi nodded. "Oh, it makes for traffic jams, right enough, but it sure lets PEST control who moves where."

"So why aren't they stopping us?" Yorick muttered. Chomoi frowned. "I was wondering that, myself. They must have figured out that we're not in the Canaries."

"But they don't know we're wearing gray," Rod reminded her. Chomoi shook her head. "They've got to have guardsmen out with our pictures by now. All we had was a change of clothes, not plastic surgery."

They rode the slidewalk through the courtyard of San Cristobal slowly, each mulling at the thought. Finally, Yorick said, "You don't suppose the local guardsmen might not be too happy about PEST telling them what to do, do you?" The slidewalk shot them into another dark tunnel.

This one was low, and not very wide. Discreet, indirect lighting showed them when the slidewalk turned into an escalator.

"They didn't used to have lights in here," Yorick muttered. Chomoi's gaze snapped to him, eyes narrowed.

"They had charges of gunpowder set at regular intervals. That's what the lines there are for." Yorick pointed at straight cracks, an inch wide, that ran up the walls and across the ceiling. "If they blew up the far end of the tunnel, the near end would still stand. So if any poor bastard of a soldier had to come down here at night, he wasn't allowed to carry a torch."

Rod looked around at the dark close walls, glanced forward and backward, and saw that all the daylight had been blocked off by the curve of the tunnel. He shuddered. The slidewalk stopped, and they stepped through a low doorway into a small tunnel at right angles to the main one. Rod noticed that they passed another grille of iron bars, blocked open.

He found himself in a very long room, like a section of tunnel that had been closed off. Far away at the end, daylight glared through a small rectangle.

"We wait here," Chomoi explained. "When the next car comes, we'll go down that escalator to board it." She pointed at a plasticrete portal that obtruded in the side of the tunnel, hideous in its smooth blandness.

Rod was looking about him. He noticed a clear panel and stepped over to it. Behind it was a section of tunnel wall with five crudely-drawn ships colored in earth tones, and a scrawled word above them.