Wine of the Gods 4: Explorers (5 page)

"She's very smart. She'll probably be a very strong witch." Brock ran the dry goods store here in Ash, generally with all the young women swooning over him.

Dydit bristled. "Anyway, we should figure out at least whether we'll be wintering over or getting back to the Rip in the Fall. Perhaps we should check out the north, move east, or west then late in the summer turn and head back to the Rip and
travel home."

"So we'll have the pleasure of your company for another winter." Brock was smiling at Never and Dydit was look
ed away. Scowling.

Lefty paused. He hadn't thought about Dydit having a rival. Never ignored them both and turned back to the map.

Maybe Never wasn't chasing men at all? Lefty quickly turned back to planning. His friends would have to figure out their relationships on their own. "We'll no doubt rearrange all of our plans, once we get out of the ice. So we should load up the food and feed and go."

They wrangled over organizing their travels, how many horses to take and which ones. "Storm and Zip are a good team." Question snickered. "I think Dad bred both your favorite mares."

Dydit nodded. "But that little dun mare is a pleasure to ride. And Muddy's five now, well up to a long season's work."

Never sniffed at the horse obsessed. "I dredged up some good diamonds last fall. I'll bring them, and some gold. If there are any people over there one or the other should do for trading."

Lefty looked up at an odd twitch at his inner awareness. Harry and Nil hastily grabbed a table and chairs and hauled them away, leaving an open space that was quickly filled.

The black horse was huge, splashed with blood. The rider's black leather and silver chain mail were equally splashed, the uplifted sword coated. The combined
odor of sweating horse and fresh blood rolled over the room. Somehow the stench made it undeniably real. And the way the floorboards creaked under the huge animal.

The warrior lowered his sword arm and swept his helmet off with the other. The Auld Wulf, sweaty and blood splashed. "Damn. That hasn't happened in centuries. And I'm not sure he really believed in the God of War anyway."

Harry snorted. "No doubt he does now. Why don't you get your horse out of my tavern, then come back and tell us all about it?"

The Auld Wulf laughed and disappeared.
Horse and all. Only the smell remained.

Nil sighed. "I really do wish he'd leave the horse behind, occasionally."

Harry shook his head. "He hates the idea of his horse getting old and dying." He propped the door open, and started opening the windows. Lefty could feel the delicate little spell that triggered the breeze that thinned the horse fug from the air.
I never noticed, before. They were just
here
, like the earth and the sky.

He tried to get his mind back to the expedition, but gave it up gratefully when the horde of school children flooded in to find parents or sustenance.
Quitting time. School's out.

Rustle and Havi, with their closest friends came through long enough to get permission to explore the west ridge, and departed, passing the Auld Wulf as he entered. Rustle hung back and looked him over, then Havi grabbed her and pulled her out.

Nil looked at the god. "So? Have any fun?"

"Pax leading, so to speak, Auralian troops in the New Lands. Be careful out there. If you four see a good looking blond man, twentyish, golden eyes, run away or yell for help. The God of Peace is badly misnamed." He looked clean and tidy for the short time he'd been gone. But then perhaps he'd skipped the walk down from the winery. Hair and beard short, mostly gray. Dark eyes with a rim of warm reddish brown. Crisply ironed shirt and pants, without the usual wolfskin vest. He didn't look at all like a god.

Now.

Harry walked out of the kitchen. "Pax? Haven't seen that nasty little commie for . . . I don't know how long."

"He hasn't changed a bit. Still all mouth, and no guts. I'll go talk to Rufi, warn him."

Lefty hesitated.
Maybe they were just kidding me.
"You know, I really hope that all those stories about wars between the gods are just fables. Especially since I don't believe in gods, umm."

Both putative gods grinned.

"I'm afraid we have clashed regularly. But we try to leave other people out of it." Harry looked over at the Auld Wulf. "The three of us have always stood together, and Romeau's back now. I wonder if everyone is waking up?"

Never bit her lip. "Waking up from what? And how many gods are there? I mean, we grew up around you three, but I never thought about there being
more
. And is there a reason for them to wake up, now?"

Harry shook his head. "Romeau's awakening seems to have been accidental. There were
thirteen gods. Barry Virtue—Ba'al, if you prefer—has got himself trapped in time dilation and good riddance. Chance was in Scoone for a while, before we all left. And I've caught news of Pax, off and on."

"I've seen him twice since the comet fell."
A gorgeous woman walked in on Sir Romeau's arm.

"Oh, missed opportunities.

Of these I have plenty.

But not with
him."

Sir Romeau grinned and tossed his outrageous hat at a peg on the wall. Lefty felt the little touch of levitation and push he used to correct his throw. Gods! It was enough to make him glad to concentrate on the real work in the real
world. But he hadn't gotten to where he was by not being curious.

"Since the comet fell?
That's a myth, told as one of the reasons for the death of the old world." Lefty eyed the woman . . . surely this wasn't . . . Lady Gisele. Goddess of Health and Fertility. The myths said she was the Maiden, the Mother and the Crone. He'd met Lady Gisele, the old woman with the herb garden across the alley . . .

"Oh, one of the Farm Group. It killed nearly everyone, and caused the first of the dark ages."
The Auld Wulf kicked back in his usual chair and grinned.

That brought a pause to all conversations around them.

Some rather alarming information about comets, remembered from books read decades ago, surfaced in his mind. This was going to need some thinking about.

"Where did it hit?" Lefty's mind drifted toward the expanse of the wastes.

The gods all shook their heads.

"On the other side of the
world." The Auld Wulf said. "We broke it up, tried to divert the pieces. At least two large pieces hit, and lots of smaller ones. No one survived, on that side of the world. On this side, a few small, self sufficient colonies held on with magical assistance."

Lefty shivered.
They may be gods, but they aren't all powerful.

Harry sighed. "Thirteen of us acting together, with thousands of witches and mages, and we couldn't do it."

"Not the Auralian traditional thirteen?" Never looked fascinated. "So, there's a God of Peace and God of Chance out there? Who else? Who's missing? You all know each other, don't you?"

Gisele sighed. "The Goddesses of Mercy and Logic. Gods of Art, Youth, Just Deserts, Virtue and Vice. Edmund Vice is Barry Virtue's twin brother. Well named, instead of sarcastically named."

"Just Deserts?" Lefty started snickering. "That's . . . as odd as Romeau's poetry."

"He's a royal pain to be around. Think of a practical joker with a god's power. Who's really soured on life." The Auld Wulf shook his head. "And Mercy is . . . merciful
only by her own standards. Art's a snob. Even Logic was a bit odd. All things considered, I could do without any of them waking for another century or two."

Never shook her head. "I really can't think of any of you as snobs or dangerous to ordinary people. You're more like the foundations of the
world."

The four gods all laughed at that. Harry shook his head reprovingly. "The
world was here before us, and will survive our demise, probably without noticing."

2
March 3477

Dallas
, Earth

McCamey walked into Lon's office and closed the door.

"That's not a good sign."
Lon leaned away from his computer and gave his boss his full attention.

"Has Jackson Jefferson been talking to you?"

"Not as such. We swapped equipment lists. He commended my parsimony, and I suggested that he should take a good look at the site before moving that much equipment."

"Really? What did he say?"

"That I clearly wasn't bothering with a preliminary survey. I pointed out that I had treeless rolling hills and he was on a very steep slope in the middle of a dense forest. Haven't spoken to him since. Has he gone?"

"Gone? How can he do that when he neglected to schedule
gate time? He said New Carolina had flunkies to do that, and that we should have taken care of it."

Lon could hear the man
's teeth gritting, and sighed. He could see the writing on that wall clear enough. "You want my earliest time, don't you?"

"Yes. He says he can't be ready to return trucks
in a week, so we want your third slot too."

Lon swiveled his chair back to the computer and brought up the
gate scheduling page. "Let me see if there are cancellations, or if I can swap some spots with other companies. What we need are two outbound times and two returns. If JJ goes on March 16, and he wants two weeks . . . "

"He said three would be perfect."

"Sloppy. Well, I'll update my estimate for the second gate to sixty seconds, for my first movement. Then he can use the third gate for his return. Let me ask for any cancellations in between for my return . . . And it looks like we can get gates two and three weeks later for regular supply runs. All right. That's the best I can do, right now. He goes on the sixteenth, and I'll go on the twenty-third. Good, a hole popped up on March twenty-sixth. Three days to completely off load is a bit tight but we should make it with no problem. So that's my return. Now the scheduled gate on April 7 is his return, and he'd best schedule a supply delivery for that gate. The scheduled gate on April 28 I'll keep for my first regular supply run. May 16th can be his. Tell him March 16, April 7 and May 16 are reserved for him, and he needs to set up what he needs after that."

"Your
first supply run was scheduled just two weeks after the prior gate? Why?"

"
Three weeks after we go in. That gives me a week to find out what we don't have, send the order with the return trucks and get it two weeks later. I prefer more frequent contact the first few months. In case of disaster. Or people who just can't handle the isolation. Once that's settled, I'll stretch out the supply runs, probably to once a month. Looks like I'll be jumping straight to once a month on this one. I'll offset JJs gates so the warehouse people aren't so rushed. I'll see what sort of schedule JJ settles for, then shift mine so they don't coincide." He drummed his fingers. "He's got a gap of more than a month . . . I'll grab this open spot late on April 13th. Keep an eye on him. If he doesn't get at least a month's supply of stuff on his April 7th gate, you can switch the gate on the 13th to him and send him a month's worth of food and fuel even if he hasn't remembered to order it. I'll be ready for that gate, and if it doesn't happen, I'll be ready for the 28th. If I make the 13th, we can decide whether JJ needs the 28th, or we can cancel it, or the next one."

"Right.
I hope we don't need that sort of flexibility. Thanks, Lon."

Lon sig
hed, but . . . an ice age world. He might be glad of the extra week into spring. He turned to the Cadre bulletin board and posted the new departure time, and last acceptable arrival time to the Asian Gate Complex that everyone referred to as Nowhereistan.

Three weeks later, n
ine large trucks and four gyps drove through the gate to a new world.

Lon grinned in delight, as they emerged from
pre-dawn Nowhereistan into a bright sunny day. Rolling green hills, deer bounding away, then stopping to stare at the new comers. His gyp kept going, bumping over thick tufts of long grass. The first rule of gate travel was never
ever
stop in the gate or stop where someone else will be halted in the gate. Collisions in transit tended to get energetic. The big trucks were all coordinating well, splitting left and right to immediately space themselves, and then turning as they reached their designated distances. "Loop around, Roxy."

Roxy Seabaugh was an old hand at dri
ving around new worlds. She turned right and swung around to give him a good view of the deployment. He spotted the red flagged final vehicle—Ray's gyp—as the glowing night view of the gate complex shrank and disappeared. They were on their own.

This world, like all the so-called parallel worlds, was an Earth with a slightly different history. The gate should have put them down somewhere with in a two thousand mile radius of the same location on their Earth. Exactly where they were would be one of the first things they'd try to find out. Then they'd find out if the same rock formations were present, check for known ore
bodies, or start from scratch if the geology was different.

Ray was already in action, taking a long steady look around the
gate area and nodding in satisfaction. Next he'd grab his soil tester, yep, there he went. Lon turned around and took a look himself. "Roxy, top of that hill there, please." The view was close to spectacular. Rolling green hills climbing to foothills and then mountains to the southwest. The tall pointed peaks of volcanoes stood up against a cloudless deep blue sky. East of them, a large river wound between hills, perhaps three miles away. Beyond it, a long steep ridge running more or less north-south poked sharp edges at the clean blue sky. North held more white, a long ridge, and to the south, rolling hills faded into the distance. The air was chilly, and would be down right cold tonight, but the grass didn't look like it had been frost burned. Everything was green and fresh, and Lon could feel himself grinning. "Now this is a lovely world. I hope we find something here to rival that mountainous mess of Twelve-seventeen."

Roxy sniffed. "I know all about mountains."
She turned up the collar of her company jacket.

Lon chuckled. "I
suspect we've got enough here to keep you busy. For now, let's let Ray know he's got a nearby river, for water."

Ray had the tractor down and one of the 'scouts' mowing the tall grass al
ready. Scout was just the short term for the guys that did the muscle work, and if there was danger, the shooting. Some of them had hunting experience, all had extensive travel histories. Ray was walking around placing stakes. Lon flipped on his radio comm and frowned at the crackling static. Odd, with no clouds in sight.

Ray measured and noted his way up
to Lon's hill. "I don't see any reason to prefer north or south of the gate, so pick your favorite. Want your box right here?"

"And steal the be
st view? I'm afraid I should be nearer the anchor. Let's put everything south of it. Unless you need the river."

"Nah. The soil's deep and moist, there will be water in every gravel or sand layer,
so it's just a matter of going deep enough to have filtered out all the bio-contamination. All right. I'll run the entrance road straight out for five hundred meters, and the return lanes just north of them. Fuel tanks and water tower to the north, boxes south . . ." He marched off and Lon hauled all the scientific staff off and out of the way of the work going on. After mowing came the grading and the building of elevated pads for the boxes, in a neat double row south of the gate. Then they started dropping the boxes and expanding them. The size limitations of the gate had created some interesting challenges for engineers, but these 'boxes' were simply accordion folded or had sections that slid inside each other, or both.  They, and the trailer they were mounted on, had to fit through a three and a half meter circle, and be no longer than eleven meters. Ray dropped the HQ box just up the hill from the anchor. For now Lon would be living in the HQ box. If they got lucky, he'd bring in more staff (and boxes) and it would become all office space. The BioSci unit was next. Again, if they were lucky it would become the medical center for the expanded operations, and the biologists would get one or more boxes of their own. The Geology/Physics box would likewise be augmented, according to the specific things they found. The aerial mapping box, mess, two boxes of private living quarters, one barracks box for the drivers who'd be coming and going. It was a small cadre, leaving him the funds to hire short or long term specialists at need.

The scientific staff, pretty much as a whole, turned their backs on the camp construction and started poking around. Nelson wheedled Roxy and the gyp from Lon and headed east, with his assistant and the biologist, who was muttering about the lack of trees. Apart from the brushy willows along the fringes of the river and the little creeks running into it, there were no trees to be seen.

Kia Farr, the physicist Nelson had recommended, was fooling with some of her equipment. She was an unknown quantity, being one of the new hires. She was supposed to be a solid mapper, but with plenty of
theoretical background as well. The tiny fluctuations in the local gravity and magnetic fields gave clues as to deep faults or dense ore bodies. The drone aircraft would carry out a grid search of the planet, full spectrum, IR through gamma, magnetic as well as gravity. Then they'd go out and check on the ground to determine the cause and meaning of changes in any of the surveys. The gyps had a range of about two thousand kilometers, could carry extra alcohol to extend the range, and if all else failed, they could limp slowly home on the electric motors and solar panels.

The radio clipped onto his belt crackled a bit over Ray's voice. "Damn static. No sign of a thunderstorm, though. We'll have all the boxes dropped and the mess box up by sundown. Water piped in by tomorrow, so we can set up the lavatories, expand the rooms. Do the labs the day after."

Lon nodded reflexively. "Good. I expect even the newest of the cadre can manage a night out of doors."

"
I'll get the Barracks Box opened, so if the temps drop, the faint hearted can sleep inside. There just won't be any working plumbing. And I've got the runway for the drones at the top of my list. We'll impress the Board of Directors yet."

"Bah. They're dead easy to please. Just find lots of anything over atomic number twenty-six."

Ray snorted. "Not
anything
, just most of it. In fact they'll take iron is if it's easy enough to mine."

Naomi
Haskell wasn't wasting any time, she had one of the balloons out, and ready to be filled. She had dozens of high altitude helium balloons with throwaway instrument packages. A complex camm, radar altimeter and ranging unit and the broadband communicator.  The communicator sent compressed messages, and could be set to repeat them. That ought to get around the damned static problem. And as long as the balloon was in sight, they'd be able to double check the altitude, giving them better confidence in calculating the altitudes of features to either side that the ranging radar pinged. The complex cam would make analyzing color changes from IR through visual to UV easy, so they could identify surface rocks from a distance. It couldn't be steered, but it was dead easy, reliable and an altogether simple way to locate themselves. If it caught a strong jet stream it might even cross the ocean and get them some information about the Noram continent.

Half of Lon's attention was now on Farr, as she seemed unhappy with whatever equipment she was using. He clicked off on Ray and walked over. "Problem?"

"The readings aren't settling down properly. It's jiggling all over, and showing spikes."

"I thought that was what it always looked like."

"Only when moving. Just sitting here, it ought to settle. There! See that? A gravity drop of zero point zero five milligals. Absurd. It must have gotten damaged. I've got a spare, but it's in the Box. This is really irritating."

"The drones all have gravity meters too, don't they?"

"The main surveyors do. I just prefer to calibrate them both before they take off and after they return. There's another long dip. I'm going to ream the people who certified this machine."

"It'll be awhile before you can get to them."

She nodded glumly. "Oh well. I should be able to get the spare out tomorrow. After all it's not like the gravity field is actually behaving like this."

"Right."
He wandered back to watch the balloon filling with helium.

Naomi
released the first balloon immediately and as it drifted south nearly everyone gathered around the small field mapping comp as it translated data and pictures into terrain maps.

When Nelson returned in the twilight, he pounced on the maps.

"Look at those glaciers! That may be the northern ice cap. A thousand miles of rolling dry grasslands to the south and southwest." Nelson quivered in place as the balloon's field of view drifted southward and they lost sight of the ice. "I'll need to take a look on foot, the ice can't be more than a couple of hundred miles to the north."