On the Oceans of Eternity

by S. M. Stirling

  The doing, though, the doing, that was the thing…

  The things we've seen and learned. My journal, Jaditwara's sketches, Sue's botanical stuff, the plants and animal specimens- He'd stood in one place on a knoll and rough-counted ten million buffalo going by, once. A single passenger-pigeon flock of a million and a half, crossing the Ohio…

  The fourth member of the expedition was sitting cross-legged and leaning against a tree, sketching with charcoal on a flat piece of white pinewood. Their local guide, Tidtaway, stood a little way away from her, posing.

  At least we actually know he's called Tidtaway now. Since he'd been visiting them for months in their winter camp and traveling with them for weeks. The name probably translated as something like "Quick Tongue."

  Half the time they couldn't be sure if what a local said when he tapped his chest was really a name, or meant something like "That's me," or "I am your guide," or "Hi, and who are you?" or "Wow! Funny-looking foreigners sitting on weird deerlike creatures!"

  Or a phrase might be the name of his tribe or clan or whatever they had… just as the "names" of local features might mean "that's a lake" or "why are you pointing at the mountain?" It was frustrating, not being able to stay in one spot long enough to get past gestures, grunts, and a few elementary words. But there were so many languages here, sometimes changing from one little band to the next, particularly up in the mountains; they'd barely got to an elementary-conversation level with Tidtaway. The ranger thought that the guide's tongue might be ancestral to the Penutian family of languages, but he couldn't be sure; the sources on the Island had been frustratingly general, and he himself was no scholar. He wished it had been practical to bring one of the pre-Event tape recorders along, so that students back on the Island could hear the actual sounds.

  The Indian was a short dark man, muscular and strong, with an engaging smile showing a gap in his white teeth. Giernas suspected it was something of a salesman's smile; certainly Tidtaway had been trying to bargain with the strangers from the moment they arrived, and hadn't stopped since they decided to winter near his band last fall.

  Jaditwara of the Teluko lineage of the Fiernan Bohulugi finished the drawing and shook back her long yellow mane, slipping on a beaded headband she'd gotten in trade for another drawing six months before, and picking up her rifle. Giernas chuckled silently to himself; among other things, the guide had tried to buy Jaditwara with three strings of oyster-shell beads, a volcanic-glass pendant, and a bundle of wolverine pelts. Now he exclaimed in wonder at the drawing, wrapped it carefully between two pieces of bark secured with thongs, and added it to his bedroll-a large woven mat that also served as a poncho or cloak at need, rolled into a tube with a bearskin lashed around it. The lashings also held one of the grooved throwing-sticks with a hook at the end the Aztecs had called-would have called-an atlatl, and four feathered darts with wickedly sharp obsidian points that must have come from far away in trade. For the rest he wore sandals, a breechclout with panels falling fore and aft, and a belt that carried a steel trade knife and a stone-headed hatchet; his hair fell to the shoulders, confined by a headband sewn with plaques of bone.

  "Let's go," Giernas said.

  Tidtaway picked up a quiver of arrows and a short recurve bow; that had been a major part of his pay, that and showing him how to make and repair and use it. He trotted up to take point with the Islander leader, making a respectful circuit around Perks, who didn't like him. Eddie fell back to walk rearguard; Jaditwara led the horses, all traveling single file. After the first mile or so Spring Indigo judged Jared asleep enough and transferred him to a fur-lined wicker basket on one of the pack saddles. It was shaped like a recliner version of a child's car safety seat, complete with leather crossbelts; versions of it had held the boy for better than two thousand miles of travel. She shrugged into a haversack arrangement that put another openmouthed basket on her back and ranged alongside the pathway with a digging-stick, stopping now and then to collect a handful of clover or bulbs, or early flowers gone to seed, and toss them over her shoulder. When she saw something unfamiliar she'd call Sue over, and the handy little Field Guide to Western Plants would come out. Once or twice what they saw wasn't listed at all, and a specimen would be carefully transferred to the drying press. The only problem were the colts, who had a tendency to wander and dash about. When

  Jared woke up, he'd point and say dis? dis?, his current all-purpose word for "information, please."

  The pace was easy enough, easier on the humans than pack animals still a little out of condition from winter idleness; all the rangers were in hard good shape, and he'd found that Spring Indigo could walk any of them tired. If it weren't for the needs of a nursing infant they could have made the West Coast before snowfall last.

  But we did have Jared along, and weren't in a hurry, he thought.

  They'd taken the crossing of the Plains in slow stages and made frequent long stops at campsites with good water and game, particularly when they got up into the high basin desert country of Nevada. It had been late September by the time they reached Tahoe, far too late to risk the Donner Pass route. Yet still plenty of time to build good tight log cabins, cut meadow hay for the horses, and lay up supplies. They'd discovered that there were few things that ate as well as a fat autumn grizzly weighing in around half a ton-if you were carefully unsporting about shooting from a place they couldn't get at- and the brain-tanned pelts made superb coats and blankets.

  He smiled reminiscently; they'd also made skis, which had been fun and had impressed the hell out of the surrounding tribes, visited far and wide to trade or for feasts and ceremonies and study, hunted, chopped holes in the ice of streams and lakes to fish, spent hours cutting wood and hauling it on improvised sleds, sometimes had daylong games of snowball ambush. Periods when they were snowbound with weeklong blizzards outside were spent resting, catching up on their notes and journals and specimen collections, playing with Jared and whittling toys for him, mending gear, entertaining visiting tribesfolk, singing, storytelling, playing chess, making love… not a bad winter, all in all. They'd all been glad for spring and snowmelt, though.

  Today the path lay westward and downward, through pine forest and meadow, with an increasing share of black oak as they dropped, and then an occasional blue oak as well. The mountains still stood snow-fanged at their backs, but now and then the way ahead gave a clear view, and he could see down and west toward the green-gold foothills and the long blue line of forest along the rivers of the Sacramento Valley. The stream whose course they were more or less following gurgled and leaped to his right, and sometimes the foot trail was close enough that drifts of spray came through the thick growth of ferns and drifted across their faces. Near a stand of sequoia they stopped for lunch-grilled elk liver and kidneys, wild onions, and more of the acorn-meal bannocks.

  "God, but this is pretty country," Giernas said, looking up into the swaying tops two hundred and fifty feet above and breathing in the cool scented air of their shadow. The thick straight ruddy-brown trunks of the grove were thirty feet around and more; he knew, because Sue had gotten out her measuring rope and sampled half a dozen. Above a pair of condors wheeled, winged majesty, their unmoving pinions spreading the width of a Coast Guard ultralight as they rode the foothill thermals.

  "Rich, too," Eddie mused, biting the last of a kidney off a stick and then prying at a fragment between two teeth with a fingernail. "And I don't mean the gold; gold is good, but you can't eat it or ride it. This would be a stockman's paradise, and it's getting better as we get lower. Even better than the plains east of the mountains, more sheltered, not so cold in winter- wonderful, wonderful, wonderful grass, Hepkonwsa hear my word. The horses are putting on flesh, even as hard as we're working them."

  Giernas snorted. "You know, back when I was a kid, before the Event, I read about a party coming west-this was long before my time, a hundred and fifty years-who starved near where we wintered."

  "In the Donner Pass?"

 
"Yeah, the place was named for them. The Donner Party." Donner, party of sixty-seven, your table's ready, he quoted to himself; it would take too much effort to explain it to the ex-Alban.

  Eddie looked baffled. "Starved? Even in deep-snow winter… that would be like starving in a stock pen."

  "Natural-born damned fools can do that anywhere-

  They shot to their feet at the dogs' baying and Tidtaway's shout, wheeling and crouching. The horses began to snort and back, working their feet against the picket ropes and hobbles. Giernas snatched up his rifle and thumbed back the hammer; the others did likewise, except for Spring Indigo, who grabbed a Seahaven crossbow they had along, with a bow made from a cut-down car spring. He'd adjusted the stock for her smaller arms. The pawl-and-ratchet cocking lever built into the fore-stock was easy to handle, and since bolts were reusable she'd practiced enough to be a clout shot. She pumped it six times and slotted a short, thick bolt into the groove, moving with businesslike dispatch.

  "Old Ep, sure enough," Giernas said grimly. "Perks, Saule, Ausra-back and watch! Stand!"

  The humpbacked bear walked into the open shade of the great trees with a shambling arrogance, his silver-tipped cinnamon hide moving on the great bones like a loosely fastened rug. The big-dished muzzle lifted, sampling the air with its strange, tantalizing smell of cooking meat and undertone of raw bloody flesh, and then he reared to his full twelve feet of height with a grumbling bellow.

  Four.40 bullets and a crossbow bolt designed to punch through armor might be enough to take him down; or they could just make him very, very angry. Since there was very little apart from another grizzly that could meet a charge, Old Ep didn't have much of a run-away-when-hurt reflex. Giernas swallowed past a dry mouth, watching the bear, watching his reaction to the unfamiliar scents and sounds, to the three dogs making little snarling rushes and bouncing about just out of range of the piledriver paws. Sometimes grizzlies ran a wolf pack off its kill…

  Dane Sweet ought to see this, he thought. Hell, we're the endangered species, hereabouts.

  "I don't think he's angry, just curious," he said finally. "We'll try and see him off. Jaditwara, you and I'll fire over his head. Everyone else, yell. Sue, Eddie, Indigo, keep him covered."

  Crack. Crack.

  The shots blasted out, jets of off-white sulfur-smelling smoke rising from the rifles. The butt thumped his shoulder with a familiar blow. Giernas's hand went to the knob on the top of the rifle's stock, pulled it up and the lever with it, and the brass plunger attached to the underside that filled the breech. That was blocked by the greased wad from the base of the nitrated paper cartridge; he dropped a fresh round into the slot and pushed it forward with his thumb, driving the spent wad ahead of it. A quick slap of the hand brought the lever back down; he pulled the hammer back to half-cock, brought the priming flask up and thumbed the catch to drop a measured pinch of fine-grained powder into the pan, used the flask-head to knock the frizzen back to cover it, then dropped it to dangle on its shoulder cord while he brought the weapon to full cock.

  That all took ten seconds, the fruit of endless practice. Meanwhile he could see and hear the others yell, jump, howl, shriek. The bear started violently at the hammer noise of the firearms, and more at the unfamiliar scent of burned powder, falling to all fours and roaring with wide-stretched mouth, showing long wet yellow teeth in a pink cavern of mouth.

  Tidtaway surprised him, turning to snatch the ends of burning sticks from the campfire in both hands. Whipping them into flame he ran forward, waving them aloft and screeching. The bear began to back up, waving its dish-faced head from side to side on the long snaky neck.

  "Sue, Eddie, more shots in the air," Giernas shouted, keeping the bear's right foreleg in his sights-he was pretty certain of breaking the bone, there.

  Crack. Crack. A frenzy of reloading.

  The grizzly flinched, and Tidtaway ran toward it, throwing a burning stick pinwheeling through the air. It landed in dry pine duff not far from the animal. Sparks flew out, caught, and turned into crackling fire and smoke. The bear visibly decided that food wasn't worth all this trouble no matter how good it smelled and turned, hurrying away with a shambling gait that covered ground faster than a man could run, then breaking into a slow gallop, complaining gutturally. Giernas worked his mouth, whistled on the second attempt. The dogs halted, despite the almost irresistible attraction of the retreating grizzly's rump; the last thing they needed now was the bear enraged by a mouthful of fangs in the ass.

  "I must be getting old," Giernas muttered. "I'm learning to leave well enough alone."

  And the adventures had been a lot more carefree before Jared was born. Not just the danger of the child being injured, first and foremost and bad though that was. He found himself worrying about getting injured or killed himself and not being there to protect his son. If it hadn't been for good friends who he knew would pitch in, it would have taken all the fun out of things.

  Eddie came up, laughing as he eased the hammer of his rifle back to half-cock, the safety position. "Pete, that was one beautiful rug we lost there. Did you see the size of him! That hide would be perfect for in front of the fire in the place I'm going to build back home on Long Island."

  That was Eddie's particular dream, land of his own and fat herds and tall horses and strong sons; in that, he was still Zarthani. When the gold was in the saddlebags he could do it, and quickly, although Giernas suspected he'd be bored. The other ranger went on:

  "And after I'd told her how I killed the beast single-handed as it charged, roaring like thunder, what girl could resist getting laid on it?"

  Sue came up beside him. "Plenty, when they saw the scars where your face used to be before the bear ate it," she said dryly. "You're going to raise horses, so use a horsehide rug."

  He glared at her for an instant, genuine horror in his look. "Kill a horse to make a rug! Are you crazy or…" He caught the half wink she gave Giernas. "Oh, the Lady of the Horses give you both arse-boils and bleeding piles, you scoffers!"

  She shook her head as he stamped off; however assimilated in other ways he remained an obstinate pagan, convinced that Christian scorn for his tribe's ancestral gods was both blasphemy and likely to bring bad luck to boot, at least for him personally. Sue enjoyed ribbing him about it occasionally, and it usually stayed good-humored enough.

  "Let's get moving, people," Giernas called, in what he thought of privately as his head-of-the-expedition voice. He chopped his right hand westward and downslope. "Yo!"

  Tidtaway resumed his position after they'd extinguished the fire with earth and water, and the party passed through a rocky field of boulders, over a ridgeback, down further on the westward path.

  "Good, with the fire sticks," Giernas said, in what he hoped was the guide's language. He spoke Lekkansu fluently, the tongue of the tribes who lived along the New England coast near Nantucket. That had about as much relation to the languages hereabouts as English did to Babylonian. "Strong heart." He thumped the fist of his free right hand on his hunting shirt. "Guts" didn't usually translate well.

  Tidtaway shrugged. "Bears… with long time," he said, in atrociously accented English, and held his own hand out at waist level.

  f think he means he grew up around 'em, Giernas decided. Since he was knee high to a hopper.

  The ranger nodded; the smaller black bears were worth treating with respect, but these Western silvertips were a lot bigger and meaner. Most of the time they'd leave you alone unless you provoked them. Then again, they might suddenly decide you were edible, or just slap out at you like a man at a fly.

  He snorted softly. The Lost Geezers, the way they talked about animals… Hell, I like animals. Wouldn't want to be in a place where they were scarce. But Jesus, they're not all little fluffy bunnies that'll die if you think mean thoughts! Time to get to business, though.

  He pointed westward. "Your friends?" he said.

  Tidtaway looked around at the landscape, then up at the sun that was sinking before them
. When he spoke, Giernas sighed and gestured to him to slow down. After half an hour, he judged he'd gotten a confirmation of previous conversations, if they weren't just misunderstanding each other in the same way every time. The band ahead weren't of Tidtaway's people, and didn't speak his language although it was related to his. But he'd visited years ago to trade obsidian and quartz for shells and salt, and he spoke their tongue a little, and they were hospitable to traders and travelers.

  Hmmmm. Tidtaway's getting to the edge of his useful range. Should we give him his stuff and pick up another guide for the rest of the way to the coast, or just pay him off and wing it?

  The trail was widening, and they were in the real foothills now, growing less rocky and steep as the land flattened. The Indian looked around, increasingly puzzled.

  "Where people? See hunter here, see woman here-crazy, where people?" he bust out at last, then a long sentence in his own language, and back to English: "Bullshit, man. Fuckin' bullshit."

  They crested a rise and looked down into a valley bright-green with spring grass, streaked with orange-yellow drifts of California poppies. It was broad, opening out to the west into the Sacramento plain, with a river fringed by big live oaks rushing over rocks to their right, falling to a pool and then meandering down the middle of it. Here and there it spread out in shallows that reflected blue from the cloudless sky overhead, great flights of wildfowl taking off and landing as he watched. The hills to either side were low and smooth, open savanna studded with round-topped trees, huge valley oak lower down and black oak on the summits. He unlimbered his precious pre-Event binoculars and scanned; at the far western edge of the valley he could see a herd of pronghorn antelope cantering, a hundred or so of them.

  Wait a minute, he thought. They shouldn't be that close to a lair of humans. H. sapiens was the top predator in any area, even one infested with grizzlies. Game should be a little wary, at least.