Wine of the Gods 26: Embassy (24 page)

Hanger balanced uncertainly on horse back, and let 'Galena' go wherever she wished. He split his attention between not falling off and Easterly and Xen arguing.

"They'll no doubt open up another gate whenever they wish." Xen sounded peeved.

Easterly shook his head. "I could see the girl doing the work, she looked pretty sickly. I'll bet they'll leave us alone for awhile." He looked back at the Earthers. "Hopefully leave your World alone as well. We can work on getting you home, and hopefully some co-operation between Worlds, police-wise and nab these people."

Albrecht had said that she'd had riding lessons as a child. She at least was holding the reins and making a pretense of steering. Lancing and Phillips were like him—clueless. Fortunately the horses seemed very placid and well mannered. They walked through the disguised corridor without hesitation, and then they walked across the City of Karista to the far side army fort where the gate to the Embassy World was located.

"Eventually we may be able to bring it closer to the City, but for now, we're keeping an eye on it. Good morning Hanix." Xen exchanged greeting with the guard who was already opening the gate to an enclosed yard, with a white whirlpool at the far side. The horses were just as mellow about that as the corridors, and hopped through to a flat grassy plain with a few big buildings plopped down incongruously around a huge fountain.

"We really need to find the time to pave the rest of the streets." Inso was bringing up the rear with Hackathorn. "It'd look less like the sole bastion of civilization on the Whole World."

"But that's what it is." Lon argued.

They'd come out facing the fountain, and made a hard left to face a threatening black building. Not all that tall, but broad, and cubic.

"So," Deena looked over at them. "The Earthers and Oners all think calling it the Department of Interdimensional Security and Cooperation, Disco for short, is terribly amusing. I see you get the joke too. Can you explain?"

"Don't do it." Inso called. "Calling them Disco is the funniest thing yet."

Lon nodded. "They might go and change the name."

Xen looked back in exasperation. "I've checked all the computers. All they come up with is a music and dance style. How is that funny? Or is there something I'm missing?"

Lancing had been snickering. "A disco ball in the front entry?"

Inso whooped and started cackling. "I must find one. Must."

Two youngsters popped out to take the horses.

Even Xen looked surprised. "What are you two doing here?"

"Minding the stable and garden and helping Nighthawk and Lapwing."

"Aren't you a bit young and does anyone know where you've run off to?"

"Yep. Dad figured training with you and Q would be good for us." The boy looked about ten. Light brown hair, darkish tan skin.

"Actually we were sort of in trouble, and Mother figured you deserved us." The girl was a bit taller, but about the same age, no figure to speak of. Golden blonde hair in a messy ponytail.

"Dare I ask?" Xen looked apprehensive.

They swapped looks and started snickering. "No." The girl answered.

"Right. Later then." Xen's horse wasn't even wearing a bridle, and neither child seemed the least bit concerned with controlling him. The girl took Galena's reins from him, and Easterly's, and Inso's horses' reins as well. The boy got the rest.

"Rufi and Centauri, right?" Easterly was eyeing them.

They nodded and led the horses off.

"That's scary, what are they, ten and eleven now?" Deena smirked at Xen. "Do I really want to know the kind of trouble your children get into?"

"Probably not. And Centauri is not mine, I have better sense than to fool around with Fuchsia." Xen eyed something out in the plaza behind them. "Excuse me just a moment." He walked away, heading for a black goat looking nervously around. It was a damned big goat, but obviously frightened of Xen. He slowed down and approached it carefully, then made a sudden tossing motion with his left hand. The goat reared back, flopped over and writhed on the ground. The black hair turned flesh colored, and for a second Hanger thought it was skinning itself. Then a man staggered to his feet, buck naked and wobbly, still backing away from Xen, who was pointing to the left. The man backed that direction, hands trying to preserve some modesty as he dived through another gate.

"Inso?" Easterly looked like he was having trouble keeping a straight face. "Did Xen turn the soldiers into goats?"

"Nope. Q did it before she passed out from loss of blood. Xen said he was tempted to leave them over there, but apparently there's a food shortage. We finally swapped the locals cattle and sheep for the goats. As far as we knows none of them got eaten. The locals promised to catch and toss through their gate any more goats they find over there."

Xen walked back. "Once they're here, they keep running off to the hills, and that's going to make for some interesting diplomacy over the next few months." He shrugged and led the way up the steps to the black monolith.

After a long moment, Hanger shook himself. "Maybe it was an illusion, with hypnosis, and Xen removed it."

The others nodded slowly. "That's got to be it. I mean, people can't really change into goats and back. Not really."

Inso snickered. "C'mon in. You might as well make yourselves at home until Q can do some work. She really is the best."

"So . . . how did she end up in the middle of a gun battle?"

"She makes gates, she made the ones the Earth attacked through—not your Earth, relax."

He snickered at them, or probably their expressions. "So she was checking a new batch for stability when the Earth rolled the armored troop carriers through a different gate. And of course instead of yelling for help she just dived in to stop the invasion."

"Actually, I saw Q this morning." Xen held the door for them. "She said to pin down which branch of Earth you were from and that'd make her job easier. She claims she'll be in good enough shape to hunt it down in two weeks."

Inso snorted. "Not likely. I saw the hole in her back. Nasty exit wound, and even your wine couldn't stop the bleeding. Just because she's back on her feet—except for sleeping about fourteen hours a day—doesn't mean she's up to heavy magical work. When she staggered in here yesterday, I sent her back home with orders to stay there until that scary old lady said she could return."

Xen pinched the bridge of his nose. "She came here? Of course she did. I'll bet Mom had a fit. I hope they sit on her for a month."

"Don't discount her stubbornness." Easterly said. "If she said two weeks, she probably means fourteen days."

Inso and Lon headed upstairs. Two women stuck their heads out of offices and then joined them.

"This is our in-house library." Xen led them into a large room with more shelves than books. "All our survey reports, plus we're trying to collect history books from every inhabited World we find. Now, you call your World Earth, so we can eliminate notes on Dinosaur Worlds and probably Mammoth Worlds?"

"Absolutely."

"And you said you were from 'America', do you mean North or South America, or the United States of America?"

"United States."

"Okay. Do you recall a meteor impact in Siberia in 1908 or there abouts?"

"The Tunguska Event? Couple of hundred square miles of timber flattened? Yep, and the rain of fire in 2159. Burned most of the west coast of North America—a couple thousand white hot meteors rained down during a drought."

"Yikes! Okay, let's see if this rain of fire is in any of the Tunguska sector histories."

They attacked the shelves.

"Who's the President of the World?" Julianne asked.

"World!" Phillips looked at her in shock. "Oh, don't tell me you have the One World Government thing!"

"Don't tell me you're mired back in the MAD era, with nations ready to kill each other at the touch of a button?"

"It's a bit harder to do than that, and we haven't had a war for nearly forty years." Albrecht looked through the index of a book and shook her head.

"Wait, how about wars?" Xen pulled another book of the shelves. "Twentieth Century. World War One, 1914 to 1918? First use of airplanes in combat. The Red Baron? Okay. World War Two. Surprise attack on Pearl Harbor? The United States of America dropped two atomic bombs on Japan?"

"World War Three was named retroactively, and encompassed a lot of diplomacy, puppet wars, and MAD." Hanger said. "World War Four, 2001 to 2024. Started when airplanes full of people were flown into buildings full of people. Ended with a nuclear exchange in the Middle East.

Hanger nodded and took over. "World War Five, started with threats of nuclear exchange in South East Asia, then the South American Quetzals got their hands on some nukes and blew up Bogota, Mexico City, and were barely stopped in Southern California."

"No, they didn't hit Bogota. Er, that is, that sounds like where our worlds start splitting, apparently." Lon sighed. "Did you have much genetic engineering?"

"It was outlawed right about then. Actually, a couple of decades before Bogota." Albrecht was frowning. "What does genetic engineering have to do with anything?"

Deena tapped a chapter in the book Albrecht was reading. "On Lon's Earth they exiled the genetically engineered through gates."

They all shook their heads. "I've never heard of such a thing, taking such a risk."

"What risk?" Deena was looking highly amused.

"Umm, the engineering was said to unbalance the mind. There were some very dangerous people who were rumored to have been engineered." Lancing was frowning. "In the US, they sterilized all the engineered. A World full of the descendants would be some species of Hell."

Xen scratched his chin. "Well, we call it Comet Fall, not Hell, but Inso has been known to insult us. Now my poor unbalanced brain says we need to look at the Worlds that are close to our gated Earth. I'll take a look, but unless there's something obvious there, it'll be mostly guesswork."

Hanger eyed them puzzled. "So this Q isn't the only person who can open gates?"

"Oh, bunches of us can
open
gates. It's opening them to the
right place
that's the whole trick, and her specialty. She's got some understudies, but no one who can replace her yet." Xen looked around at the sound of footsteps. "Ah. Mr. Montgomery. Back again?"

Inso leaned and whispered. "Ambassador from Warmonger Earth."

"Infuriated. Where the hell are all the rest of the soldiers and what else have you done to them?"

"As you saw yourself, most of them freaked out and bolted. In their present forms they can eat grass, and there are no predators here, so eventually we'll find them all. Umm, are there additional problems? What sort?"

The man turned bright red. "Of a, umm, reproductive nature."

"Re . . . oh. Dear me. Did Q toss a sex change spell on some of the soldiers too? That's a bad one. It has to work completely through, which takes three months, before it can be reversed, which takes another three months. Have your troops troop through here in three months and we'll fix them up—so long as they aren't pregnant." Xen looked innocently at the red-faced ambassador.

"The last few men you've . . . morphed said there were problems among the goats out there."

"Oh dear. Goats can be a bit . . . Well, as I said, you can send unarmed search parties out looking for them, before the problems get any worse. And don't worry, the changes are just physical, not genetic. If any of the goats have babies they'll be just as human as their parents. Hmm. I'm not actually sure what they'll look like. They'll be genetically human."

The ambassador gritted his teeth. "The Geneva Conventions, in the sections dealing with POWs specifically mentions preventing rape among the prisoners."

"Are you really citing the conventions, again?"

The ambassador reddened further and stomped away. A young woman named Nighthawk swooped in to deliver keys and tell them how to find the little cabins, the privies, the baths and the dining hall.

Albrecht eyed her dark skinned beauty and relaxed a bit.

"It's these insane Fallen." Inso said. "They think there's something wrong with having everything in the same building. Comes from having never invented the flush toilet, I expect."

"We have flush toilets, thankyouverymuch. It's horribly unhygienic to have it right there where you're brushing your teeth and how can you enjoy a long hot soak in the same room? Eww!" Nighthawk made a face.

They argued amiably for a while, with Xen stepping out to change another goat into a naked and embarrassed young man.

Hanger shivered. It looked so convincing.

And it kept happening, off and on for the two weeks. He got used to people coming and going from various gates, accepted that some people had purple hair and skin tones not otherwise found outside of morgues. And that the Arbolians had a 'Major God' who looked to be half warthog with illusions all over his skin like pictures of the surface of the Sun, complete with drifting sunspots and plasma loops.