Ring of fire II (assiti shards)

by Eric Flint

  "No, only two. Only Papa and Drina." He struggled to get up but Elizabeth stopped him with a hand on his thin chest. "We will find them and bring them here. You drink this broth and rest. We will bring them."

  "Is Grantville?" the boy asked, looking around the small room.

  "This is Grantville," Wade responded. "The city is not far. We will find your family. We will bring them here."

  "Grantville." He sighed and laid back, relaxing into a sleep.

  "If he was the strongest, God help his father and sister," Elizabeth said, quickly dipping broth from the kettle into an insulated flask. "We will follow his trail back. Put on snowshoes and grab some blankets."

  "Teach your grandma to suck eggs," Wade muttered inaudibly as he strapped on snowshoes. Damn bossy women! Only reason he…

  It was midmorning when the light shining through the single window in the small cabin hit Joshua's eyelids and woke him. Drina's small dark head was visible in the cot opposite his.

  "Awake, are you?" Elizabeth's feet were propped up and her chair tipped back in the corner of the room where she'd been dozing. She'd kept watch outside alone from midnight until dawn while Wade slept. Now Wade was on watch. She pushed a chamber pot towards Joshua with her boot. "Use this or go outside. Doesn't matter much up here but down in the city, well, you'll see the difference."

  "But where's Papa?"

  Elizabeth sighed and shook her head. "He didn't make it. We found your sister wrapped in his arms and the blanket that should have gone around both of them was doubled across her. It was a very loving thing he did for her. Just for the record, what was his name?"

  "Moses. Moses Amramsohn," Joshua answered and began sobbing.

  Two days later, the sky was a bright blue and the morning sun reflected off the snow into Wade's eyes. He stood with his arms folded next to the much shorter Elizabeth as they watched Joshua and Drina walk with the medic down the hill. "The folks at the synagogue will take them in."

  Wade took a breath and put his arm over her shoulders. "Going to America wasn't always easy," he slowly began. "Back when I was growing up you'd see reports of Haitians drowning, trying to cross a few miles of ocean to get to America. Chinese dying in cargo containers and Mexicans dying of thirst in the desert, all for the chance of a better life, mostly for their kids. The first generation of people coming in illegally generally had it really hard."

  He lightly gripped Elizabeth's shoulder and she looked up at him. After a short pause she said, "Our reliefs are coming up this afternoon for their week at the fire. I want a long shower, clean clothes, food I do not have to make and four large beers. What do you think?"

  Wade bent over, kissed her at the hairline and shook his head. "Two beers. You fall asleep after three."

  Malungu Seed

  Jonathan Cresswell-Jones

  A telephone rang in the seventeenth century.

  Nearly three years after his adopted town had changed times and changed a world, James Nichols heard an interruption, not a miracle. He laid aside a handful of Leahy Medical Center charts, reaching past his study's desk-clutter to the phone. "Yes?"

  "Good morning, Herr Doctor, it's Margritte. There is a man here, a new arrival, who wishes to see you."

  His Thuringian-born receptionist was cheerful, efficient, trilingual, and possessed of a voice that could melt men like taffy. Nichols' own German was serviceable and attractive-perhaps, to crows; he stayed with English. "Margritte, I have rounds this afternoon at the center. I am working on a public health plan for next spring…" He suppressed the edge that wanted to creep into his voice. His heart knew that he was sitting in an empty house shuffling paper, while Melissa was a king's prisoner in London. In his own time, that distance meant an hour's flight; here, a month of storms and bandits.

  "You know you must not call me-very much not call me at home-for every refugee and, and, carpetbagger that has a speech for me. That is what the bureaucracy is for. You must deal with it just as I do. You deal with it better than I do." He grabbed left-handed at a sliding chart, caught it.

  "I apologize, Herr Doctor. But he wears the robes of a Jesuit, and this man… well, he looks like you. And so rarely have I seen a man who looks like you."

  Nichols stared blankly at the chart he held. The white paper stood out sharply around the creased ebony skin of his thumb, cracked and rough from a surgeon's hygiene; as stark a contrast as his own color within this town, this province-this entire United States of Europe.

  So rarely have I seen a man who looks like you.

  "Herr Doctor?"

  He thought of the half-hour walk to the center, its noisy offices, the urgent to-do lists: Translate appendectomy procedure notes. Find paper clips. Stop bubonic plague.

  "Margritte," he said slowly, "you must almost never call me at home. Or bring anyone here to meet with me. I think this is one of the times you should do both." He set the chart down.

  "To your house? Like a fine guest? He is only a traveler, Herr Doctor-a lay Jesuit, not a Father. He arrived with no ceremony at all! That coachman with the beard brought him in; Heinrich, that is, the fellow who married my second cousin in the summer, after…"

  Nichols let his gaze drift across the study-formerly a living room, but the house wasn't large and his workload and cobbled-together library had swamped it. Borrowed books in a borrowed house; all that he'd once owned had been left in twentieth-century Chicago when the world changed. An ember popped in the fireplace, the only sound in silence. His daughter's hand-copied paramedic certificate hung over the mantel; Sharon was in Venice, stagnant lethal Venice, as far away as Melissa in London. Two travelers in foreign lands, with no safe home as he had.

  "There's room," he said softly. "Plenty of room."

  At the second knock, Nichols cracked the door onto freezing air and two backlit figures.

  Margritte nodded. "Herr Doctor." Beside her genial bulk, a taller, thinner man hunched in a tightly-wrapped coarse robe, probably once black but faded now to a scuffed brown lighter than Nichols' own complexion. October sun was not kind to him; that complexion showed chalky highlights where strong features shaped, sharp-cut shadows. The dark, bloodshot eyes seemed calm enough, intently focused, but something in them…

  Nichols' greatest pride-when he had time for pride-was that Grantville hadn't seen a refugee with that look for a year; they'd done that much good, at least. He'd seen thousands of eyes in 1631 and '32 with what he'd learned to call in his own time, in Vietnam, a thousand-yard stare. Not every wound hurt the body.

  The traveler waited with stoic patience, robe ruffled in the wind. Nichols realized something belatedly. "I speak an inferior Latin," he said. "Physician's knowledge."

  Hesitating a moment while he clearly parsed the words, the traveler inclined his head towards Nichols; a crucifix glinted in his robe at the motion. "Guten tag, Herr Doctor," he said in a soft-accented rumble. "Matthias Mbandi, via Asuncion. Sprechen sie Deutsch?"

  "Ah. Yes. Yes, I do." Nichols blinked. "Is that his?"

  Margritte hefted the satchel. "Yes, Herr Doctor. I have checked it, there are only clothes and a bag of spices. Is there anything I may help you with here?"

  Nichols knew from experience that Margritte's gifts included a love of gossiping over anyone not actually a patient. He couldn't help taking a harder look at the stranger, at Mbandi, checking shoulders and stance and hands; his own hands were chipped with marks much older than incessant scrubbing, older than his time in the Marines. Ten, fifteen years younger than himself, probably. Longer reach-but worn thinner than his robe. Mbandi returned the gaze without fear or challenge; Nichols eased to a smile, nodded, and glanced over. "No, thank you. I will see you at the center, and I will telephone if I need arrangements."

  "Ah." Her eyes cut sideways to the thin stranger. "Well, if you are certain-"

  Nichols' smile widened. The seventeenth century was a dangerous place at times, but assassins generally tried to blend in. "Here," he said, and took the satchel. "Now, please, at le
ast one of us should be working. Thank you."

  He gestured Mbandi inside and closed the door, plunging the hallway into dimness. "Through to that room," he said, hooking a hand toward the study. "Please, go to the fire, for the warmth. Ah, tea?"

  "No, thank you," said Mbandi; but in the study, he stood against the mantel close enough to singe his robe. Another man's face might have dissolved into bliss. His did not.

  Nichols dropped the satchel on his desk, then sat behind the cluttered surface, half-amused at doing so. The doctor is IN. He remembered early days as a physician, the occasional doubt or hostility, the whisper to the receptionist-maybe someone else, ma'am, with you know, more experience? He hardly needed to impress himself on a man who'd come-

  "How far did you say? Asuncion. Is that in Spain?"

  Mbandi looked up from clasped hands-for warmth, Nichols saw, not piety. "No, it is across the great Atlantic. Six days up the river Parana from Buenos Aires."

  "Jesus H.-" Mindful of the robe, Nichols bit off the rest. "That is very, very far."

  "It is. I crossed that ocean once before." He smiled as sharply as Nichols had earlier. "I liked it better this time. I could see."

  In his mind, Nichols shoved aside the charts and papers. "You are a courier, then?"

  "No, I carry no letters. Only, something far more important. Ah-" The traveler set himself in a formal stance. "Father Ruiz Montoya of Asuncion sends greetings to the famous Moorish physician of the United States of Europe, the 'medical-doctor' James Nichols. It is his understanding that in your time, it is known what will succeed in ours, and what will fail. The work he has given his life to-" Mbandi hesitated in his clearly memorized speech "-the reducciones, the Jesuit missions, of Guaraya-the security and happiness of so many-this is now known to fail. The communal ways of living he practiced among the Guarani Indians, and that others are said to twist into such misery in later centuries, cannot survive. Their enemies will inevitably destroy them. And so the Company of Jesus has decided, with wise logic, to cease those ways. The Guarani missions will close and the fathers be recalled to where their efforts will bear fruit."

  Something twisted in Mbandi's expression. "Father Montoya cannot convince the father general that this is wrong. Or that-that his enemies, the paulistas, raiders of the missions, can be stopped. Can, sometimes, be saved. Or that there is hope and will beyond logic.

  "Therefore, he will depart from the Company, and remain with the Guarani to aid them as he might. He has only a few years before his body will fail, but his spirit will not… Others are staying with him, choosing between their oaths and their dreams. His last hope, which failed him, he now wishes to pass freely to you."

  Nichols concentrated on following the archaic German, and quashed the flicker of cynicism: No one gives anything for free, in this century or any other.

  "Years ago, when word from your books first went through the Company, Father Montoya sent Father Gustav-" Mbandi smiled at that name "-to try to gain something which your time has shown to succeed. In the Apolo region of the Viceroyalty of Peru, near the mines of Potosi, grows a certain tree whose bark has the highest property of curing fevers-"

  "Quinine?" said Nichols, jerking upright in his chair. "You, you speaking are-" he floundered a moment "-are speaking of quinine?"

  "Yes, what is, will be, called cinchona roja. The bark from which a true febrifuge can be made."

  Nichols stared at the fat satchel. "Cinchona bark?" Jesus H. Christ, there must be ten pounds of it.

  He looked back to Mbandi in astonishment, and new respect. There'd been solicitors enough before; Grantville, an alien pocket of future lore, drew them like a lodestone. Princes and courtiers, spies and merchants, and never a one of them could offer Nichols what he wanted. Clean your cities, inoculate your people. Stop the plagues and the dying. Even in the midst of what up-time records called the Thirty Years' War, humans couldn't kill each other as fast as pathogens could. And quinine worked, even if it didn't cure. The dose wasn't large, this would be enough to…

  On the heels of surprise, dull realization settled in, a medical official's mindset trumping a doctor's. Not enough. Not for the coming summer. Malaria was widespread, even through much of Europe; it killed popes in Rome, kings in Spain, merchants in Venice-Sharon!-even Oliver Cromwell, supposedly, although perhaps now they'd never know. The Jesuit's Bark that could treat it traveled in small quantities like this-exotic, expensive, like the contents of the glass jar Balthazar Abrabanel kept under lock in his apothecary.

  "No, not the bark," said Mbandi hastily. "Although there is a little. Father Montoya offers, offers…" He shrugged aside his recitation and took two hasty steps to the desk and his satchel, opened the buckles and dumped out an oilskin bag. Tugged at the lacings-

  "Father Montoya offers seeds."

  Nestled in the oilskin was a shifting mass as dark and fine as pepper.

  "He has said that there are fifty thousand in this bag, and also in this other. Each seed may grow one tree, to provide bark for years. I am to be giving one bag to you, Herr Doctor, so that you may find your own places to plant them-not here, but in warm countries." He gave a belated shiver.

  "Fifty thousand," marveled Nichols. He felt a shiver of his own. "And the other bag?"

  "I will take that to Africa," said Mbandi with infinite calm. "I will go wherever I can, and wherever the soil is right, and the slope, the air and the rainfall-I will plant them, five in a cross, as the cascarillos, bark-hunters, learned from the fathers. And I will go on again. This is what Father Montoya has asked of me, and I will do it."

  Nichols absorbed this for a few moments. It stunned him with its scope, but… He lifted a hand. "Who is this Montoya? You said he was the provincial, the senior Jesuit in the region? What is his interest in quinine-why was he there at all?"

  "He is a great man," Mbandi said sincerely. "He founded the mission at Lareto more than twenty years ago. At first it was only to teach Christian ways to the Guarani, the Indians near the Parana River…"

  Nichols' patient questions-and an atlas from the shelf-pieced together the account. In what would become Uruguay and Argentina in Nichols' own time, a handful of Jesuit missions had themselves become pockets of communal society ever since 1609: Willingly organized, wisely ruled, and humane beyond anything else in this time, it seemed. Thousands of Guarani dwelt there without lords or kings; prospered; learned the catechism in their own tongue. "There was even an orchestra at San Mini," murmured Mbandi with wistful pride.

  The coming of the up-timers changed all that in a year's time: both at the missions, and far away in Peru.

  "Some books told of cinchona, the bark that cured fevers." Mbandi shrugged. "Who could tell what bark it was exactly? But all who heard came down upon the viceroyalty of Peru, hungry for bark worth a fortune for each quintal's weight." Government agents, adventurers, brigands, men who would be kings; a locust-swarm, seeking their feast. Many bark-cutters would have none of it; they claimed the cinchona as their own. Others fobbed off any bark as cinchona, and laughed at the joke with a pocketful of gold. All was chaos.

  "And Father Montoya?"

  Ruiz Montoya's great leap was to do what he had always done: to help those about him, and let them make their own choice. After a deadly flurry of attacks on the most vulnerable missions, those closest to Brazil, there was no choice but to retreat to the city of Asuncion; but Montoya spared an effort, and a man, to a new quest. He sent Father Gustav-Mbandi again seemed wistful at the name-to do what he could among the bark-cutters in Apolo. "While Father Montoya organized a desperate retreat of twelve thousand people-hundreds of miles down a river's falls and rapids, with paulista raiders snapping at their heels-Father Gustav befriended a cascarillo in dire straits, promised him sanctuary, and earned the gathered treasure of a secret hillside's cinchona roja. His name was Mamani, his loyalty unswerving, and he accompanied the Jesuit back to Asuncion with his great gift, determined to follow him forever.

  "Father Gustav was m
y own guide to the faith for eleven years," explained Mbandi. "It was he who taught me German, and a little Latin like yours."

  Father Montoya, rejoicing, sent this Mamani to look about Asuncion and the missions upriver, find a place where the cinchona might grow. He knew of the up-time texts that condemned the missions, and the debate at Rome as to their fate; his hope was that by offering a valuable crop, he might stave off the inevitable decision, even give the Guarani a prosperity all their own. His hope was soon destroyed. Cinchona would not grow at the missions.

  "Too low-the land must be much higher. Too wet a soil, too thick a jungle." Mbandi shook his head slowly. "Upriver, far upriver, perhaps-but that is Brazil highlands, a few days' march from Sao Paulo, where the paulista bandits make their nest. No mission could survive there without guns and aid from Portugal and the Company, and no aid would come. In another time, it did, at Father Montoya's own appeal, and the missions lived another one hundred fifty years-but not in this time."

  A lot of things won't happen this time, Nichols wished to say against this gentle accusation. Did they tell you of the dictator with the mustache? Either one? Instead he said, "These paulistas-they seem very…" Savage? That was a disturbing word; he fumbled for another. "Angry. Fierce. Why-oh, no matter. You would not know."

  "But I do," said Mbandi. "I was one of them myself. That is how I came to know Father Gustav, and was saved."

  Nichols sat back carefully. "Okay," he muttered. "Ah… Mbandi, you will need to tell me something that I have been wanting to know of, to know, from when I saw you. How did you come to be in a Jesuit mission in-in Uruguay? Were you born in Brazil, or…"

  "I was born in Ndongo, a kingdom in the Malanje highlands. That is perhaps ten days' march inland from Luanda, the colony town of Portugal. Less by river."

  "In Africa? In… Hold on," muttered Nichols in distracted English, flipping the atlas' pages from one continent to another. "Ah… Luanda's still there… will still be there… Jesus!" He looked up. "You're Angolan?"