by M. R. Carey
“I don’t, Koli. You do. Mythen Rood does. But it’s beyond my skill to fix it, so it’s best not to talk about it. If you refuse to drink alcohol, how about some tea?”
“Tea would be good,” I said.
Ursala cast around in among them boxes until she found the one she was looking for, though it didn’t look no different to the rest as far as I could see. She opened it up and took some dried leaves out of it, then dropped them in another tin cup and poured water out of the bubbling pot in on top of them.
I was still thinking about what Ursala just said, and about what Haijon said to me not so long before. It was the same thing twice, really: that Catrin Vennastin was angry, and that they both was a little afraid of what she might do. And I thought about one other thing that hadn’t struck me strange until now.
“Most days you leave your drudge up on the gather-ground,” I said.
Ursala was swirling the cup in her hands to speed the flavour. Her movements was a little clumsy, like when she poured the wine. I wondered how full the wineskin had been when she sit down, and how full it was now. But there was nothing in her voice to say she was sotted. “Yes,” she said, “most days I do. Sometimes, though, I keep him close by me. When I need a visual aid. He reminds people that while I travel alone and may seem weak, I have resources that are not immediately obvious.”
“You never struck me as weak,” I said, once more grabbing onto a word or two while the rest run right by me.
Ursala lifted up one eyebrow. “I’m inside your gates. Depending on your hospitality and subject to your laws. Weakness is a matter of context, Koli Woodsmith. Until it becomes a matter of logistics.” She set the cup down in front of me. “Would you like some honey in that?” she asked me. I liked honey any way I could come by it, was the honest answer. I nodded and she pushed over a jar that was on top of the table. The honey was thick, brown and mostly solid, so I had got to push the spoon in hard. I got a big scoop of it, then waited to be told it was too much, but Ursala didn’t seem to mind. I dropped it in my tea and stirred it around.
“I was hoping to see you before I left,” she said as I was doing this. “There being some unfinished business between the two of us.”
“What business is that?” I asked.
“You saving my life.”
“I didn’t do nothing,” I mumbled, sipping at the tea (though it was still too hot) to keep from having to look at her. I was not even halfway comfortable to be in this quiet, private place with her. With someone I had thought I knowed but really understood no more than I understood the world that was lost. Ursala-from-Elsewhere. Where was Elsewhere, now I thought on it? And how did its people come to be so wise and so strange?
“You stopped Mardew Vennastin from cutting me in two,” Ursala said. “That’s very far from nothing. Can I tell you a secret?”
I nodded. “Surely.”
“I don’t like people very much. I’m all in favour of them as a concept, but I don’t get on with them at all when I have to mix with them. Having to talk to you now, at such close quarters… well, it’s not pleasant, frankly. And being in debt to you is considerably worse.”
She rummaged around in among the boxes, opened one up and held it out to me. There was little pieces of cake in it, cut off square with a knife and sitting in a bed of their own crumbs. I could see they was made with raisins. I took one and et it in two bites. Ursala watched me do it, her face all thoughtful and serious.
“So tell me, Koli Woodsmith,” she said, as I licked my fingers clean, “is there something I can do for you? Something I can give you, whether it’s goods or money, that will make your life easier? Because that would resolve the whole issue, and we could both go our separate ways again.”
I squirmed on the cushion somewhat, trying to make sense of this. Ursala was looking at me hard, and I could not sit easy under that stare. “I don’t think you owe me anything, Dam Ursala,” I said he hasn’t said this before. “If I helped you, you done the same for me right after. You done it twice over, for you broke the drone in pieces and you made Mardew stand down when he was gonna get me brung up before the Count and Seal.”
Ursala’s look never shifted. “Generally,” she said with a coldness in her voice, “it’s the one at the sharp end of the debt who has the clearest sense of it. You’ll have to indulge me, Koli. Let me reward you so I can go back to not thinking about you at all.”
Well, I was not one to kick at a reward, but it was not easy to answer her. I never really seen myself as needing anything, excepting to be a Rampart, which was only a foolishness, and to be with Spinner, which now she was pair-pledged was worse foolishness still. Except that I had whipped it up so much inside my head that all I could see was the froth.
I thought about the place where those two things – being a Rampart and being with Spinner – seemed to come together. Ursala’s tech was as good as Rampart tech or maybe better, and would make a villager be a Rampart the second he could call it his. For a second, or maybe a bit longer than a second, I wondered whether I could ask her if she had some other thing like the water-boiler or the computer or the drudge’s dagnostic. Something like those things, only smaller, that she could bear to be parted from. But it was like asking to be made a king such as they had in the world that was lost, with a palace and servants and wives and an army of soldiers. The words wouldn’t come out of my mouth, for I didn’t want to seem so greedy nor so stupid.
And once I seen that, I seen too that there wasn’t nothing else I wanted, except maybe another piece of cake and some more tea with honey in it.
But just as I was opening my mouth to say that, another idea struck me. I considered, and Ursala seen me do it. “What is it?” she says.
“You know lots of things, Dam Ursala,” I says to her. “More than anyone I ever met.”
She shaked her head, it seemed with sadness. “I know a little more than you do,” she said. “Not much. Not nearly enough.”
She was being honest, or thought she was, but all the same what she was saying wasn’t anywise true. I learned since then, and paid a price to learn it, that them as lay claim to great wisdom most often got nothing in their store but bare scrapings. And by the same token, them as think they’re ignorant think it because they can see the edges of what they know, which you can only see when what you know is tall enough to stand on and take a look around. I had no idea of this back then, but I still knowed that Ursala was a lot cleverer than me and I believed that the things I wanted to know about must surely lie in her telling.
“Will you answer some questions I got?” I asked her. “I’d see that as a great kindness and a full reward, though I’ll say again you don’t got nothing to pay me back for.”
She looked surprised at that. She didn’t answer right away, but took a long swig of her wine and then filled it up again from the skin. She huffed out a breath, which I seen people do oftentimes after they drunk too much. It’s like the wine or the beer turns into fumes inside them, and the fumes start filling up their head. That’s what it feels like too in my experience.
“What kind of questions?” she says to me then.
“Mostly about tech,” I told her. “About how you come to know so much about it, and maybe…” I thought most carefully about my words. “Maybe where a man could go to find it. For you got some I never seen before, and you seem to know a lot about how it works. More than Ramparts, maybe.” I said that last part to please her, hoping it would put her in the right mind to say yes, but also I believed it to be true. The things I was seeing all around me here, that Ursala used so lightly, was a store of treasure like I never dreamed of.
Ursala set the wineskin down but kept her hand on it, tapping her thumb against the neck of it while she thought. “Well,” she says, “here’s the problem. Some questions are easy to ask, but hard to answer. Often, you can start out on an explanation only to find that it doesn’t make sense unless you explain a second thing, and then a third, and so on. You’ve pulled on a loose thread, and instead
of snapping off clean it just keeps unravelling. I’ll tell you what I can, Koli, but that’s not the same as telling you all I know. Very far from it. Is that acceptable?”
It made me feel good how she asked me that. Like we was two people of weight and solemn mind, striking a bargain. “Yes,” I said. And I used her word because I liked the sound of it. “That’s acceptable, Dam Ursala.”
“Then go ahead and ask.”
I meant to ask straight out where I might find myself some tech like hers, but what come out of my mouth was a different question. I think it was something I hadn’t ever stopped thinking about since I seen it, and now it was sitting right behind my tongue, like they say. “How did you bring down that drone with just a rock and a stick?”
“Seriously?” Ursala said. “That’s what you want to know?”
“To start with. Please.”
“The drones are very old. They were built hundreds of years ago, and nobody has ever inspected or repaired them in all that time. When they were new, they had a dozen different targeting systems – line of sight, sound, vibration, body heat, god knows what – so they could switch between them at need. Over time, those systems have degraded. Some of them are permanently offline. The thermal imaging, though, is very robust.” She looked at my face and she seen the blankness there. “The heat,” she said. “It’s easiest for them to hunt you by the heat of your body. So when I picked up the burning branch and moved it around in front of me, I confused it. I was blurring my heat signature so I didn’t look quite so much like a human target any more. And when I told you to go stand in the fire, it was for the same reason. You didn’t do it, but my trick with the burning stick worked, fortunately. The drone came in closer to try to resolve the anomaly, and… Well, that was when I deployed my secret weapon.”
“The rock?”
Ursala nodded, her face all serious but with a smile underneath somehow. “The rock, yes.”
That give me a lot to chew on. Like most people, when I thought of tech I mostly thought about it as a kind of magic. I knowed it was men and women like us that made it, but that was in the old times. We was fallen a long way from what we was in them days, and we had lost the lore of such makings. But Ursala seemed to know a lot of things nobody else did. I seen I was right to take my reward in questions.
“Where does your tech come from?” I says to her.
Ursala shaked her head. “I could give you a name, but the name wouldn’t mean anything to you. It came from the place where I was born and grew up.”
“Elsewhere?”
“Elsewhere just means far away, Koli. And what’s far to one man is no distance at all to another. It was a town called Duglas. There was a great deal more tech there than there is here, and we had ways – limited, but reliable – of making more.”
“You could make tech?” That thought was astonishing to me, but seeing there was more tech in Ursala’s tent than in the whole of Mythen Rood I was ready to believe it.
“Make it, or change it to suit our needs.”
“Where did you get that knowing, Dam Ursala?”
“The same place you get yours. From our parents, and people of their generation, who got it from the generation before, and so on. The difference was that we were in better shape to start with. The world went through some bad times many years ago. Bad times that turned into worse times, and then worse still. When they were getting really bad, a lot of precious things – equipment, information, personnel – were evacuated from the mainland in the hope that they’d survive. Some of them ended up in Duglas, and we kept them safe there for as long as we could. For centuries, actually. Our records go back a long way.
“But Duglas fell in the end, and her people were scattered. I’m part of that diaspora. The last part, possibly. Certainly nobody ever answers when I call.”
“But could somebody go there?” I tried not to let my hopefulness show in my face or my voice, but it was hard to hide. “I mean, there might be tech there still that was left when… when whatever happened…”
I let them tail off, for Ursala was shaking her head again before I even got through them. Her face was stern, like she wanted to put that thought a long way out of my mind. “Nothing was left standing,” she said. “And nobody was left alive. If I thought there was any chance of either, I would have gone back myself. Or I would have tried at least, though it’s not a journey I’d undertake lightly. For one thing, it’s across thirty miles of ocean.”
“What’s Ocean?”
“Like a forest, but made of water. And with things in it that you don’t want to meet.”
I tried to imagine that, but couldn’t. Mostly the water I’d seen was puddles after rain. Howsoever deep they were, they weren’t so bad that you couldn’t wade across them – or walk around them, if you wasn’t sure how deep they was in the middle. There was also the lake at Havershar, where we would fish in Spring and Falling Time. You could cross Havershar in half an hour, in a little corkle boat that was light enough to carry on your back. I thought if Ursala only pointed me in the right direction I might prove her mistaken.
Right now, though, I just stopped making pretence and asked straight out. “Do you know anywhere else I could find some tech?”
“No, I don’t,” Ursala said with some considerable force behind the words. “It’s been so long, most of it is in pieces now, or rusted away, or buried, or in the hands of people like the Vennastins. And though I’m in your debt, Koli, such equipment as I have myself I need to keep. I can’t work without it.”
That was me done then. I didn’t have no other idea in mind for what to ask. But I seen from Ursala’s face she was thinking on something. I had a hope, and though I was fixing to thank her for the tea and the raisin cake and get myself out of there, I stayed where I was and waited.
“Have you ever operated any of the tech from the old times?” she asked me. Like as you might say, did you ever put a ladder up against the moon and climb up there, when it was full and the light was good?
I laughed, thinking she meant it as a joke. “No, Dam Ursala, I did not.”
“Then did you watch closely when someone else was using it? There’s a point to the question, Koli. Don’t laugh.”
“No,” I said again. “I mean, I seen the Ramparts at work oftentimes. But not what you’d call close.”
“Let me show you something then.”
She picked up the computer and tilted it so I could see the moving, changing pattern that was on it.
“That’s very pretty,” I said.
“Isn’t it?” Ursala said. “Now watch.”
She touched her hand to the edge of the computer, and of a sudden the pattern was gone. The picture had turned black as night, and at the same time there was a sound like a dead twig snapping. It happened so quick it brung me bolt upright. I thought Ursala had broke the picture on purpose, and I was shocked at the awfulness of such a thing. That anyone might do that to a piece of tech.
But then she touched the same place and the pattern come right back again, between me opening my mouth to yell and me getting the words out. So the words, when they come, was all stammering and weak. “You… you…” I said, pointing at the computer like the world’s biggest fool. Then: “What did you do to it?”
“I turned it off and then on again,” Ursala said. “There’s a place at the corner there that moves under your finger. One touch depresses it, just a little, and a second touch releases it. Makes it stand out again. The picture only comes when the switch is depressed.”
She couldn’t make me understand just by telling it. She had to make me touch the place – the switch – for myself, again and again, making the shiny leaves go and come back each time. My hands was shaking when I did it. Apart from that one time, at my testing, I had never touched tech. Only Ramparts got to touch tech. Koli Rampart, I said inside my head, and almost said it out loud too, for it felt like a thing that needed to be said at such a time, when such an impossible thing was happening.
“It’s called a switch,” Ursala said, “because that’s what it does. To switch a thing is to swap it for something else. In this case, you’re swapping between the computer’s sleeping state and its waking state.”
That word made the connection in my mind. We always said waked for when the tech answered to someone or lit up or did what it was supposed to do when their hands touched it. That’s what had just happened. The tech had waked for me. But it had only waked because I touched the switch.
“But… then…” I said. Tried to say. “When we’re tested… is that…?” I struggled with the words, for I was struggling with the idea of it. My first thought was that the computer was of a different kind from Rampart tech, since it seemed it would wake for anyone. Then another thought come on the heels of that, which was that waking might not be what I believed it was.
I was pushing it away from me, because it was too big to think about. But as much as I pushed, it just kept coming back. Was testing just a trick after all, like Spinner said that time and then unsaid right after? Was there a switch on the bolt gun? On the cutter? On the firethrower? Did the Vennastins make the tech answer to them by knowing where the switch was and finding it with their fingers when they picked it up? And did Garan, that was Rampart Fire before Catrin was, tell it to her, and to her sister Fer? Did Loop tell it to Mardew, and Catrin to Haijon?
My mouth had locked itself shut, but my mind went racing on. It jumped right over that hedge and landed in the thistles and ropeknot on the other side.
“There’s more to it than that,” Ursala said. No doubt she was reading in my face the fight I was having, and guessed the reason for it. “There’s another part of the tech, buried deep inside, that’s called the battery. It stores power. Energy. The tech will only switch itself on if the energy is there. And the energy comes from sunlight – among other places. You see this?” She showed me the other side of the computer. There was a black strip there that was shinier than the rest of the thing, though it all had the polish and the smoothness to it that only old tech has ever got. “That’s called a photo-voltaic strip. When it’s placed in the light – out in the sun, for preference – it turns the light into electrical energy. The energy that makes tech do all the things it does. It needs to sit out in the sun for at least an hour, the first time it’s used, and then to be taken out at intervals after that to charge it up again. Otherwise it will deactivate.”
