“Well, you weren’t too slow,” Sergeant Chuck said. That was about as much praise as the underofficer ever doled out. He retrieved the target. When he came back, he looked like somebody trying hard not to smile. “Seems like some of those … people would have stopped lead, that’s for sure. Now let’s see you do it again, so I know it’s no fluke.”
Some of the musketeers groaned—but none of the men at whom Chuck was looking directly. He would have blistered them if they’d tried getting away with that. Dan didn’t want to fire another volley, either. But he wanted to do the shooting and not get shot if he had to fight some more, so he kept practicing without making any noise.
Several volleys later, the smoke was making tears run down his face from eyes that felt as if they had ground glass in them. “Well, that’ll probably do for today,” the underofficer said. He grinned a crooked grin. “If I told you to load for another one, chances are you’d aim it at me. And you might even hit what you were aiming at. I don’t think it’s real likely, but I don’t want to take the chance, either. So we’ll knock off for the day.”
He stood only a few feet from his weary students, not a hundred yards down the range. If they turned their matchlocks on him, he would have more holes than a colander, and he had to know it. But he didn’t want to admit, to himself or to the musketeers, that they were getting the hang of it.
They were plenty glad to knock off for the day. The sun was sliding down the western sky toward the nuclear glass and rubble of Santa Monica and toward the Pacific beyond it. Supper soon, and then sleep, except for the ones unlucky enough to draw evening sentry duty.
Dan always looked forward to sleep. He did enough on any day of soldiering to leave him tired. Garrisoning Westwood wasn’t so bad as the strike through the Sepulveda Pass, though. Then he’d always wanted to curl up and grab what rest he could. He’d always wanted to, and never been able to. He didn’t know how much sleep he’d got in that mad dash south. He did know it wasn’t enough.
Fowls were roasting on spits above cookfires. Cooks basted them with chilies and cilantro and other spices in olive oil. The delicious smell made Dan’s stomach growl. He could hardly wait till the savory birds got done.
Sergeant Chuck reacted differently. Pointing to the birds, he said, “I wonder whose goose they’re cooking.”
“Oh, wow!” Dan groaned. “After a joke like that, Sergeant, it ought to be yours.” You could be rude to a superior as long as you used proper military courtesy when you did it … and as long as you picked your spot with care.
Chuck grinned at Dan. “I’ve got no shame. How’s your girl, and what’s she really pulling out of the UCLA library?”
“She’s not my girl,” Dan said regretfully. Liz was polite, but he could tell she liked him less than he liked her. He didn’t know what he could do about that. So far, he hadn’t been able to do anything. Sighing, he went on, “You know what we talked about the last time I was over there?”
“Tell me,” Chuck said.
“You’re gonna laugh,” Dan said. The sergeant shook his head and held up his right hand, as if to swear he wouldn’t. Thus encouraged, Dan went on, “Whether the earth really does go around the sun like you learn in school.”
Chuck stared at him, then threw back his head and let loose. He didn’t just laugh—he howled. “I’m sorry,” he said at last, not sounding sorry at all. “You go visit a pretty girl, and you talk about that? The moon and the stars and how pretty they are, sure. But the sun and the earth? C’mon, man! You can do better than that.”
“See? I told you you would.” Dull embarrassment made Dan’s ears burn. It also heated his defiance. “And you know what else? It was interesting, too.” So there, he thought.
“Okay, okay. Don’t get all uptight about it. I said I was sorry,” Chuck replied. Dan realized you didn’t get an apology out of a sergeant every day, not if you were a common soldier. “So what does she think about that? Me, I don’t know if the teachers are as smart as they think they are.”
“I’m with you,” Dan said. “If the people in the Old Time were all that smart, would they have let the Fire fall? So they didn’t know everything there was to know—you can bet your sweet bippy on that.”
“There you go,” Chuck said. “That sure makes sense to me. How’d Liz like it?”
“Not even a little bit,” Dan answered. “You hear her talk, the earth spins around to make days, and it goes around the sun to make years.”
“You know what?” Sergeant Chuck said as they lined up to get their pieces of chicken or duck or whatever the cook dished out. “The real deal is, so what? I mean, who cares? It doesn’t make a penny’s worth of difference in your life or mine. It wouldn’t matter if the earth was shaped like a .50-caliber bullet. We’re just going to see this little bit of it, and that’s all.”
“Yeah,” Dan said. Back in the Old Time, you could fly all over the world. Those people might not have been all that smart—must have been human, in other words—but they knew more than their modern descendants. That seemed unfair to Dan. He wondered what Liz thought about it. She knew a lot. Did she miss not knowing even more?
Seven
Luke was a ginger-bearded trader up from Speedro. Liz didn’t know whether the Valley soldiers knew he’d come up to deal with her folks. She would have bet against it. Luke had the air of a man who dodged authority whenever he could. And Speedro and the Valley weren’t the best of friends anyhow.
“Got me some of the things you said you were looking for,” he said now, puffing on a nasty pipe and sipping from a glass of raw corn whiskey Dad had given him.
Dad had a drink of his own, though he didn’t smoke. There was such a thing as taking authenticity too far. Wrecking your lungs crossed the line. “Well, let’s have a look,” he said.
“Sure enough.” Luke had a knapsack on his back and two stout flintlock pistols and a Bowie knife on his belt. Ignoring the guns, he slid off the knapsack. “Don’t quite know why you want these, but I found ’em.”
“Oh, come on,” Liz’s father said. “You never ask that question. Maybe I’ll make a profit selling them to somebody with more money than sense. Maybe I want ’em for myself, just because of how far out they are. Long as you make money selling them to me, what’s your worry?”
The other trader gave him a crooked grin. “Well, I know how that works, all right. One fellow’s trash is another guy’s treasure.” The grin grew more crooked yet. “And we’re all living in the middle of the trash from the Old Time, and I expect we will be from now till doomsday, or maybe twenty minutes longer.”
“Wouldn’t be surprised,” Dad said, and then, “Well, well. How about that?”
Luke displayed a dozen popular-science and science-fiction magazines from 1965, 1966, and 1967. The UCLA library’s files on those were less complete than they might have been. Sometimes the library’s holdings were less complete than the card catalogue said they should be. Some time between the fall of the Fire and now, people had made things disappear.
To Liz, stealing from a library wasn’t just a crime. It was a sin. And this library’s card catalogue fascinated her. All the equivalents in the home timeline were electronic, of course. The idea of a room full of actual, physical files you could shuffle through struck her as extremely slick. And, surprisingly, once you got the hang of it, it was almost as fast as accessing a database.
That wasn’t fair. Using the card catalogue was accessing a database. You couldn’t do it with just a computer and a keyboard or a mike, but you could do it. Some of the things you could do without electricity startled her. They still had working windup phonographs here. In the home timeline, vinyl was a teeny-tiny niche market. Liz didn’t think she’d ever heard a real record there. It was nearly all downloads. Here, records were all they’d known about when things went boom. Hearing a classic like the Doors’ first album coming out of a tinny speaker that looked like a giant ear trumpet, and hearing it all full of scratches and hisses because it was so
ancient, was almost enough to make her cry.
Dad sorted through the magazines. He handled them with great care because the pulp paper was ancient, too. Comparing these issues to the almost-matching ones from the home timeline would—or at least might—give researchers a few more clues about what had gone wrong here.
“Well, I can use ’em,” he said at last. “How hard are you going to rip me off?”
“Two dollars apiece.” Even Luke sounded amazed at how much he was asking. Two dollars, here, could buy as much as a couple of hundred benjamins—$20,000—back in the home timeline.
Liz’s father had the money. It meant no more to him than Microsoft Monopoly money did. But you couldn’t make a deal—especially not a big one—without haggling. And haggling was a full-contact sport here. Luke called Dad some things … Well, if he’d said anything like that to Liz, she would have done her best to murder him. But her father only grinned and gave back as good—or as bad—as he got.
They finally settled on a dollar and a quarter per magazine. Luke was one of the people who preferred silver quarters to the copper-and-nickel sandwich ones that had replaced them. “Yeah, I know we can’t make anything like those nowadays,” he said when Dad asked him which he wanted. “But silver’s silver, confound it. I’d like it even better if you gave me cartwheels.”
A cartwheel was a silver dollar, and it weighed more than four quarters or two half-dollars. To Liz, it was a just a symbol. It was worth what it said it was worth, and that was that. To Luke, and to a lot of people here, it was worth what it said it was worth because it had so much precious metal in it. They came from different worlds not only literally but also in their minds.
“You know what?” Dad said. “I can do that, and I will, because you’ve gone to some trouble for me.” The difference in weight wasn’t enormous. It was as if he were giving Luke an extra-nice tip at a restaurant.
But the trader’s eyes lit up when he got his hands on those fat, sweet-ringing silver coins. “Much obliged to you, sir,” he said, and tipped his broad-brimmed hat. “You didn’t have to do that, and I know it. You’re jake with me, and that’s the truth. I take back all the stuff I called you—till I need it again next time we dicker, anyways.”
Dad laughed. Even Liz thought that was pretty funny. Dad said, “Don’t get yourself in an uproar, man. If you don’t help your friends, you don’t have friends for long, right?”
“Right on!” Luke said. “And I’m mighty glad you put it that way, on account of those funky magazines weren’t the only reason I came all the way up here.”
Speedro was a couple of days away from Westwood in this alternate: no small journey. In the home timeline, you could hop in your car and get there in a little more than an hour … if the freeways weren’t jammed. If they were—and they often were—it took two or three times that long, and felt like a couple of days.
“Well, what’s on your mind?” Did Dad sound cautious? Liz thought so. She would have, too—she was sure of that.
Luke, by contrast, was cagey, almost coy: “You’ve got a friend with a big old dog, isn’t that right?”
“Not any more,” Liz blurted. Not even the enormous and ferocious Pots could stand up to machine-gun bullets. The Westsiders—and Pots himself—had learned that the hard way. Losing the terrible dog went a long way toward breaking the Westside’s morale. It must have gone just as far toward pumping up the Valley’s soldiers.
The trader nodded to her. “You’re right, Miss. That’s the straight skinny, all right. But you sure know somebody who did have a big old dog, don’t you?”
“What’s Cal got in mind?” Here, unlike in a haggle over money, Dad didn’t have to waste time beating around the bush.
“Well, he aims to throw these Valley squares back where they belong, and then another mile further,” Luke replied.
“People can aim at all kinds of things. ‘A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, / Or what’s a heaven for’?” Dad quoted old poetry—Liz remembered the lines from Brit Lit. He went on, “But just ’cause he aims to do it doesn’t mean he can. And where do I fit into all this?”
“Well, he was hoping you could let him know where the Valley soldiers are at and how many they’re keeping down here,” Luke said.
“Through you?” Dad asked.
“No, man. Through the Easter Bunny.” Luke snorted like a horse. “Of course, through me. You gonna write him a letter, like, and stick a stamp on it?” People remembered stamps, the way they remembered cars and TVs. Unlike cars and TVs, stamps still did get made by some of the larger, more stable kingdoms in this shattered alternate. None of the ones in Southern California qualified, though.
And the idea of putting stuff that dangerous in writing wasn’t anything to jump up and down about, either. Nor was the idea of taking sides in the petty struggles here. That was the last thing people from Crosstime Traffic were supposed to do.
On the other hand, people from Crosstime Traffic were supposed to act as much like locals as they could. And a local trader might well want to help Cal against the Valley soldiers. If your instructions started quarreling with themselves … Liz waited to see what her father would do.
“I don’t usually go looking around for soldiers, you know,” Dad said.
“Cal says he’d make it worth your while if you did,” Luke answered.
Cal didn’t have anything that could make it worthwhile for someone from the home timeline … and Dad was holding a lot of his assets. Without a doubt, Cal could make a trader here—or a couple of traders here—rich. From what Liz had seen of him, though, there was a big difference between could and would. Maybe he’d just say Dad could keep what he was already holding.
Dad also took a jaundiced view of the Westside City Councilman. “I’m sure Cal’s word is worth its weight in gold,” he said dryly.
Luke needed to think about that for a couple of seconds before he got it. When he did, he gave a snaggle-toothed grin—no orthodontists here—and snorted again, this time on a higher note. “You’re a funny fella—you sure are. Worth its weight in gold! I got to remember me that one.”
“You see what I mean, then.” Dad spread his hands.
“Well, Cal’s slipperier’n smoked eels packed in olive oil, no two ways about that,” Luke allowed, and Dad smiled in return. The trader from Speedro went on, “Chances are he’d pay off for this, though. He purely hates those Valley dudes, and he wants to get rid of ’em.”
“Now that you’re up here, you could look around as well as we can,” Liz said.
“I could.” By the way Luke stretched the word, he didn’t want to. He explained why: “I’m a stranger in these parts, and they’d get hinky about me in a hurry. I bet they don’t even look at you people twice.” He paused. “Well, they’d look at you twice, honey, but not on account of they figured you were spying.”
Liz’s cheeks got hot. She’d thought Dan’s attention was the last thing she wanted. Now she found it was next to last. Having this hairy, smelly, old trader notice her, that was way worse. And she could tell him, “Some of them already do think I’m spying.”
Luke grunted. “That’s not so hot.”
“If I find anything out, I’ll let you know, Luke,” Dad said. “I’m sorry, but I just haven’t paid that much attention till now.”
“Too bad. Cal was hoping you would have.” Luke heaved himself to his feet. “Well, I’ll be on my way. Much obliged for the silver dollars, my friend. Like I say, you didn’t have to do that, and I know it.” He touched a callused forefinger to the brim of his hat.
Liz sat in the courtyard, wishing she were ugly. Life would be so much simpler if she were.
Dan was coming up Glendon when a trader left the house where Liz and her folks lived. The fellow looked tough, and wore not one but two pistols. That meant, in case of a miss, he could fire again while Dan was still reloading. Muskets were nice, but they were slow.
The trader didn’t want any trouble, which was a relief. He nodded p
olitely to Dan and said, “Hello, kid. How ya doin’?”
Don’t call me kid! Anger automatically flared in Dan. Then it faded, and not just because the man was heavily armed. Gray streaked the trader’s hair and whiskers. To him, Dan, with his own thin, scraggly, scratchy beard, was a kid, no two ways about it. So Dan nodded back and said, “Not bad. You?”
“Tolerable.” The trader considered, then nodded. “Yeah, I’m just about tolerable.”
“Cool,” Dan said. “Ask you something?”
“Well, you can always ask.” The older man’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t promise to answer, mind you. Your business is yours, and my business is mine.”
That wasn’t necessarily so. The trader represented nobody but himself. Dan served the Valley and King Zev. Somehow, he didn’t think the trader would be much impressed if he told him so. Instead, he said, “Did you do any of your business with the people there?” and pointed to Liz’s house.
“What if I did?” No, the trader wouldn’t give anything away.
“Look, I’m not trying to get money out of you. I don’t care about money,” Dan said. That wasn’t exactly true. He cared plenty about his own money, but he was willing not to worry about the trader’s. “There aren’t any new taxes for trading here”—if there were, chances were they would have sparked an uprising—“and I’m not trying to shake you down.”
“Says you,” the trader answered. “If you knew how many lines I’ve heard … But I haven’t heard one just like this, anyways. So if you aren’t trying to shake me down, what the devil are you doing?” His leathery face was watchful, wary. He kept his hands well away from the pistols, but Dan would have bet he could have one in his grip in a hurry. And the matchlock wasn’t even loaded.
“What I want to know is, what did you bring up here to trade with those people?” Dan said.
“You won’t believe me if I tell you.”
“Try me.”
“Okay. Remember, you asked for it. I unloaded some magazines from Old Time, from the days just before the Fire came down.”
The Valley-Westside War Page 12
