Wine of the Gods 26: Embassy (5 page)

Quicksilver looked around the sloping plain and shook her head despairingly.

Oh, as a place to put a collection of embassies it would be hard to beat. But how were they going to build with bedrock almost thirty feet down? And rather soft limestone. Humph. She looked north, and then west. Clouds or mountains? Only one way to find out.

Stripy was happy to move out. The old mare had double smart horse genes, so she was aging well. Her daughter Galena stopped to snatch some grass, then followed. Her odd saddle was the frame for a bunch of dimensional containers. She was carrying a ridiculous amount of water and grain, people type food, and a small shelter that they could all fit into at need.

Two days travel got them into rolling foothills and exposed granite. This variety had lots of plagioclase in it, giving it a pinkish color. She took samples, large ones, and stashed them in bubbles, and kept going, taking the occasional bearing and drawing a sketch map as she went. A bit of wandering located some upthrust limestone, and then in the contact layer between it and the granite she found all sorts of interesting stones for building. Marble, with odd coloring closer to the invasive chemicals of the granite, shading to pure and white further away. She collected as she moved south, her goal a sharp cone poking into the sky.

The volcano was long dead, but there was black basalt to add to her collection. The beauty of dimensional bubbles was that one could lug absurd amounts of things around in them. She wouldn't want to corridor with this much mass, and was quite sure that traveling would be impossible. But riding along enjoying the good weather? No problem at all.

It was a pity people couldn't be as easily dealt with. Especially one's own self.

She'd known damn good and well Garit was acting under the influence of a pack of spells. She knew he was cautiously courting a shy young lady. The poor man had been paranoid, aggressive, ambitious. Sigh. Horny. Sigh. With enough power to ignore the collective subconscious' designation of herself as the archetype of the smart girl with zero sex appeal. No. Be honest. In the grip of that paranoia spell, he'd seduced her in a cold blooded ploy to get her on his side. And she'd enjoyed every minute of it. She'd indulged herself, repeatedly, gotten her emotions all tangled up, and now slapped down as the spells' effects faded and his hormones and adrenals and whatever all drifted back to normal.

He was horrified he'd seduced her. Oh, she could logic it around to horrified he'd done something dishonorable with his best friend's sister, when he was openly courting a different young lady. But it really didn't help a bit.

She was just so dumped. Hence this solitary trip. Hard work to keep her busy, and solitude for tears. She could bawl into Stripy's mane over heartbreak, shame, fury, self-loathing and whatever else she needed to do.

She probably collected a lot more gloomy black basalt than they'd ever need.

And then get to work. They needed a big central plaza with a fancy fountain. Lots of rock arches for the gates. An embassy building for Comet Fall. A meeting hall, courts, offices and even a jail for the Dimensional Police. Living quarters, stables and garages. She grinned slightly, and wondered what kind of vehicle, from which World she'd buy as a surprise gift for her brother.

"Wait a minute. What am I thinking? Sheesh. If I buy a sports car, I'm damn well keeping it." She nodded decisively and turned to study the ground. A fountain right there. Yes.

And as for Garit . . . If she did a little bit of showing off and overawing him, well, he deserved it for drinking that garbage pail concoction of spells in the first place.

It was a very productive month.

Best of all, she came away from it with a huge list of things to do, buy and make. Much of which would take research, so even better.

Solar panels for electricity. They could buy them on Earth, but she'd rather make them herself, if it was possible. She'd need to go to Earth to get an example, a starter set. No problem.

"She's not here." Xen frowned. "Or if she is she's awfully far away."

Garit dismounted and walked over the rock mosaic to the fountain. He scuffed his boots as if needing tactile confirmation of the rock's unitary nature. "She's obviously been here. This is a model of the solar system, isn't it? I'm almost afraid to ask if there is any significance to the patterns she put in empty space."

Xen dismounted and stripped Pyrite's saddle off before walking around and studying the model. Inasmuch as it took up about thirty acres it wasn't quick.

Garit, with considerable forethought, rode over and took a look at the random pile of huge stone blocks northeast of the fountain. A slab sitting on two others formed a cavernous shelter that already contained two saddles. He stripped Clowney's tack and brushed her down. "I suspect there's two other horses out there somewhere, if you want more company."

She nodded, calm and unbothered, and wandered off a bit to graze. Pyrite came halfway, then stopped and stared. Neighed. Two mares, a line back dun and a dark, almost black dun galloped over a hill and much huffing and squealing established that everyone already knew everyone, the mares were all pregnant and Pyrite had better behave or they'd kick his teeth in. They all galloped off for the sheer joy of speed, and Xen walked up to the stone pile with his saddle and saddle bags over his shoulder.

"So, she can't have gone far, without the horses." Garit glanced at the gate. "Unless she's gone very far indeed."

"Don't look so relieved. She'll be back." Xen set his saddle at the end of the line of tack and grabbed Q's saddle bags. "Ouch!" He waved his left hand hastily at them.

Garit could see little half invisible things, like swirls of air whipping out, but had no basis to analyze them.

Xen blew on his fingers. "Spells to keep varmints and the horses from raiding it. Now, let's see if she left any clues." The first thing he pulled out was a leather folder.

Garit looked over his shoulder. "Oh, you mean like instructions with your name on it, orders, architectural sketches, that sort of thing? Old Gods! How large of a building is she planning?"

"Large. Guess she doesn't want it to be outgrown too soon. Hmm, are we going to need an actual council hall sort of thing yet?"

"Well, she's made it the center of the building, not an add on, so I think you're likely to get one, like it or not. What's . . . jail cells? Well, I guess so. Lots of offices, small courtrooms. Bigger conference rooms—unless she thinks you've got a swelled head and need a big office." Garit grinned. "Not that anyone who knows you expects you to spend much time indoors.

"Note the offices upstairs. The big ones are in the corners. That's a major office dominance indicator on most worlds."

"Including ours. And she recommends light colored stone inside for the lighting, but what do you want on the outside?" Garit looked at the small mountain of samples piled around, and snorted. "I think Q is subtly making a point about how powerful she is by casually plunking down hundred-ton blocks as samples. I really hope she's not permanently pissed at me. I like your sister. She's got a whole different sort of class."

Xen grinned. "I didn't ask how your visit to Tashi went."

Garit sighed. "I didn't dig myself in any deeper, but she's wary of me. With cause."

Xen eyed his friend and distant cousin. "The mother has such a history with violence and wizards. Even just an ordinary soldier is going to bother her, and it seemed like Tashi and her mother were very close."

Garit nodded. "Put me in a suit, at a sophisticated party, peaceful civil surroundings, and I pass. Put me in a uniform and they get wary. In a uniform, being aggressive, ambitious, and pushy sexually . . . I understand her mother being scared. I hadn't realized how I'd affected Tashi. I mean, after three years of courtship, surely one hungry kiss and grope isn't completely out of line?"

Xen smiled a bit at Garit's plaintive tone, but sobered. "Garit, when I've been out in the field, hunting bandits, Veronians, Auralians and Black Mages . . . especially after fighting for my life several times . . . when I return home, I'm still on alert. It takes time to stop reacting to every rustle as if it's someone sneaking up to kill me. To relax and mellow out. To stop being primed to fight at a second's notice."

Garit frowned and then nodded.

"Write her and tell her that. Tell her that you'll avoid her until you've had time in civilized surroundings for a few weeks, whenever you come in from the field. Tell her . . . well, I don't know. You are a damned good commander. A tactician. Eventually you'll either be running whole armies, or you'll be in politics, and that can be pretty damn dangerous territory, too."

Garit got up and walked out to kick some pink granite. "I need to ask her if I may continue to court her, or whether she is so uncomfortable with the very idea that she prefers me to go away. I dread the answer, though."

"Yeah."

"So, what about you and Deena?"

"Deena has always been very clear that she was never going to have anything but a professional relationship with me. I haven't even managed to kiss her, yet."

"Never?" Garit shook his head. "And us with no booze to console ourselves. Guess we'd better build something. Is there anything I can do yet?"

"Ah. You're getting good at push and shield aren't you?" Xen grinned evilly. "Let's see if you can do both at once, a combination my father refers to as 'bulldozer' from a machine used on Earth to build roads. I think a quarter mile grid will be about right for the town, otherwise it'll take forever to walk anywhere."

Quicksilver let her temporary gate collapse behind her, marching confidently down the street. While technically speaking all the Worlds were Earth, she tended to restrict the term to the branch Worlds that were close to the one her ancestors had been exiled from. This one.

She'd first opened a gate to this World three years ago, and destroyed their powered gate. And two years ago she'd helped Xen and Jeff get a foothold here. Xen, of course, had left early, not too many bodies and explosions behind him, not too badly injured for a change. Jeff Lovett was still here, and Janic's other people had made steady progress, infiltrating the society. They were about acclimated enough to try for government positions. She'd decided to not have anything to do with the official mission, not wanting to increase their risk. She was in the unique position of being able to come and go at will, and so she did. And enjoyed herself while she did it. Paris was a beautiful city. She strolled, using illusions to alter her appearance incrementally until she blended in, and studying the styles the locals were wearing, with shopping in mind.

The beauty of being in a declared state of war was that she need have no compunctions about harm caused to the government by, oh, say counterfeiting. Or bank fraud. Electronic theft? What did you call it when the money was just numbers in a computer? She had spent enough time here to be quite conversant with the culture, and more important, their electronic identification and monetary system.

She already had working identification on hand, and needed only a few minutes with a grid connected machine a block away from the Paris branch of the income tax organization and some direct, magical, electron manipulations to convince their computers that an authorized person agreed that she deserved a large refund from them. Then she was set to shop. Later, from her luxurious hotel suite, in the latest summer fashions, haircut and makeup, she set out to find out about solar power cells.

". . . And these are our top of the line full spectrum panels. They convert seventy percent of the light hitting them into DC."

Q placed her hands on the panel, ignoring the salesman's wince. "Hmm, layered. How interesting. Each layer is opaque only to the part of the spectrum it uses? Well, roughly. I suspect there's a good deal of overlap. How does it connect . . . " By the time she'd purchased a complete system she'd managed to attach a pair of engineers, or rather a cynical older engineer and his part time student assistant, to help the poor salesman answer questions. She handed the man her card and asked when everything would be ready to be picked up.

"Surely you'll want us to deliver and install it." Poor man. She couldn't explain, of course. No doubt he'd get a bit of a shock later, but she didn't want to upset him before taking delivery. "Well, we'll have it on the loading dock in the back in, umm, two hours."

"Excellent. I'll have lunch then be right back." She touched her card to their machine, added her thumbprint and took her pickup order.

She took her time over lunch, found a bookstore and bought two more cookbooks.

At the loading dock a disapproving clerk pointed to a small mountain of crates and stood back smugly. "We can arrange transportation to wherever you want to put up this system."

Her engineer and his assistant popped out of the back door and walked down the loading dock to her mountain.

"Where on Earth are you going to put this that it's easier to take yourself?" The old engineer, Onray Heugel, handed her an irresistible straight line.

She caught a bubble and looped it over the stack. "Comet Fall's new Embassy Planet. This will be the start of the power supply for the Dimensional Security's headquarters building." She twisted another bubble into a corridor and flipped the other end to something that looked like a park and stepped through. She waved the corridor away as she stepped out, and still wasn't fast enough.

The engineer and the student flew out and flattened her face down in the exquisite green lawn.

"Boof! That'll teach me to be snarky." Q was yanked to her feet and her arm expertly twisted up behind her back. "Do you really think that's a good idea?" To her surprise it was the young one that had hold of her, rather than the older.

"Yes! You are an enemy of the Earth."

With her head cranked around, she could see, barely, a flush over that melodramatic declaration. She reached for the young man mentally and . . . failed.

I can't read him at all. Like that mole, Damien Malder. I wonder what percentage of Earthers are like this? Interesting.

"And you probably stole that merchandise you just disappeared." The old engineer walked around in front of her and scowled. He still looked tougher than the weedy youngster, however competent the grip on her seemed.

She clicked her tongue reprovingly. "Don't be silly, I wouldn't steal from an individual. Just your world as a whole. But what do you expect when you go rampaging through the dimensions enslaving people?"

"We don't enslave anyone. What do you mean? Is the money stolen?" The young one asked.

"Oh, sorry, you just shoot them, destroy their trade systems, steal their natural resources and give them the opportunity to choose between starvation and working for you under unsafe conditions at minimal wages. What is your name, anyway? I feel we should at least be introduced if you're going to be so friendly."

"David Jerald Reed, sergeant, UEM reserves."

Heugel snorted. "Bad enough you're American. If I'd realized you were military I'd never have hired you." He switched back to Q. "And we're doing those folk a favor, bringing them the benefits of modern medicine."

"Don't you think you should do that in a manner that doesn't destroy their governments, collapse their financial system, and bring trade to a screeching halt? It's tough to appreciate a measles vaccine when Earth won't allow ships full of grain to dock, you know?" Q frowned and looked around. "Speaking of docking, just where the hell did I throw that corridor?" She sidestepped, turned and hooked Sergeant Reed's feet out from under him, and twisted out of his grip. "Stop being so aggressive while I figure out what I just did. This all crooked."

The young soldier started to pounce and tripped over her as she sat down. "What are you doing?" He scrambled to his feet and loomed.

"Looking around. Huh. I've never seen dimensions cross before, and there's a whole tight cluster crossing that one . . . which is where we started. Now this is interesting. C'mon." She jumped up and walked toward the street she could hear through the shrubbery.

"Are you saying you took us through a gate?"

"It was a corridor, which usually wouldn't go deep enough into the in between to cross to another brane. But here there's a whole, umm, can I call it a book? It's sort of like pages in a book. A very close set of branes, very nearly parallel, with damn little space between them. And your Earth is crossing the whole book at an angle. Huh. I never even noticed it before."

The old one grabbed her this time. "And you are going to take us right back."

"Certainly, I'll be much too busy examining this phenomenon to keep track of you two." She reached the sidewalk and looked both ways. Marched to the nearest corner and looked at the street sign. "Still in France, I see."

"Still in Paris." Reed pointed between two buildings. The iron monstrosity poked up over nearer buildings. "This isn't a different World."

She ignored him. "I think I need a newspaper, and then a history book or three. A library would be excellent."

A man walking past them gave her a good looking over and a wink. "Ze library is one block up and two blocks to ze left." He leered and blew her a kiss.

Reed shook his head. "Paris!"

"What?" Heugel glanced back at the man. "I didn't see him do anything."

"Nothing not perfectly normal for Paris."

They followed her up a block and left two blocks. Heugel gawped at the headlines of the newspapers on the rack. He snapped his mouth shut and hissed. "You'd better get us back home. I don't belong in a World that would elect him president!" He stabbed a finger at the picture on the front page.

"Hmm. Let's try a book on the Presidents of the World and see if we can pick a diverging point."

Several history books later, Q switched to astronomy. She committed theft of public property, stealing a book about the presidents, a generalized world history and the astronomy book.

"Let's check the next World over."

"What?" Reed's head snapped around.

"I want to see how these close worlds differ from each other." She formed a corridor, and this time made sure that it crossed to the next World.

They were so nearly parallel that they were still outside the library. She pulled out her first three books out of the dimensional bubble and labeled them 'close parallel one' before storing them again and walking into the library.

The newspapers were different, but the same man was president. The history was amazing. It veered from the main earth track with the destruction of Moscow in 1917, hit by what was probably a smallish asteroid, probably a carbonaceous chondrite.

The histories first diverged then edged back toward each other. Enough that the same man was now president. Reed walked away, came back pale. "Same librarians. Is everyone going back to the same place? What happens to the ones with no double?"

"When membranes split, they usually just do little blisters, then close up. A big split, maybe it's just a big blister, and we're seeing a bunch of them healing. Maybe they come back together, but with a bunch of little bubbles, with each little blister healing as things inside come back together."

"What I've read," Heugel scowled at her. "Good solid Earth science, mind, you, none of this airy fairy looking around wide-eyed and saying 'Oh, look! Isn't that interesting!' Real science. We actually see a couple hundred branes, and our brain just averages out what it sees and we think it's all a single solid universe."

Reed snickered. "Do you suppose Miss Witch has had brain damage? Maybe her brain can't average?"

Q blinked at him. "That's, umm. Hmm. What an interesting idea."

She stole books from eight more universes before she took the men home.

And had trouble getting rid of them.

"Look David, I really appreciate the company and the help, but I need to get the solar power system back to the Embassy Planet. Hopefully you'll know all about it soon, we've contacted your government about it."

"DJ. Call me DJ."

"What do you mean by an Embassy Planet?" Heugel frowned at her.

"It's an Empty World—no people and damn few land animals—where every inhabited World can build an embassy, and just maybe we can talk instead of fight. The Dimension Cops are going to be based there, which is what I'm working on. Hmm, do you suppose they'll arrest me for committing a cross-dimensional theft?" She grinned at their identical blinks. This time she was careful about where the corridor went, and didn't have any hitch hikers. She meditated in the park and partially despun tops to build a temporary gate back to Embassy.

The first thing she noticed was the freshly graded road grid, the second, Xen and Garit working on extending it. Xen was making Garit do most of the work. He'd spotted her already, and waved. Garit stopped bulldozing and looked around. He waved a bit uncertainly.

:: He thinks you're likely to cook him up for lunch. Are you?::

:: Nah, he's a friend, and I ought to have known better than to misbehave. ::

:: What's this? A witch considering sex to be misbehavior? ::

:: Very funny.:: She pulled out her bubbles and unloaded the solar power system, then sat down with her sets of books from the ten close universes.

"I need to go home and toss a big fat bone to the School of Magic and Dimensional Phenomena." She spoke out loud as the men walked in.

"Then stand back and watch them fight over it?" Xen asked.

Garit looked at three books she had open to a list of presidents. "Three worlds with minor differences?"

"More than that. It's . . . a bit eerie."

Xen started opening books as well.

"Find a list of Presidents of the World. These are from ten very close membranes, I think they are coming back together after a split big enough to include the entire World."

"They're starting out the same, suddenly go off in different directions, and then the same names start showing up again." Xen chewed on a knuckle. "Is it everyone, or just the important people?"

"Everyone. Even the buildings. The libraries I stole these from were all the same building, just little details like paint colors, and the layout of all the book shelves were different. The staffs overlapped. It was down right spooky."

"What about right now, these end about five years ago."

"Six of the ten Worlds have the same President, in two others he's the Vice President, in one he's dead and the other he's in jail for murdering his wife. In all the other Worlds, he married a different woman—the same one in each. And his kids are all the same."

Garit boggled. "Do all universes do that? I mean, are there Worlds where I was both smarter and stupider than, err."

Xen shook his head. "Careful! First rule of holes."