“So how do they work?”
“Miss Trouble says everything here runs on some kind of super-duper nanotech. As for the wells, you just go to one and describe and visualize what it is you need. Like Minna there just did, getting that book for her kids. She described it well enough to get herself a copy.”
I was starting to get the picture. “So this well is what those people with the catapult want. Right?”
“They sure do. See, there are wishing wells all over the place. So many you’re never more than half a mile away from one. But nearly all of ‘em are about the size of a fifty-five gallon drum sawed in half, only a couple feet across. Big ones like this one are scarcer’n hens’ teeth.”
“And that makes them valuable.”
“Bound to, I guess. A big well like ours can serve more people at once, and produce larger stuff than a regular one could squeeze out. Like, back home I was a chef. Well, a cook, anyway. Still am, I guess. You know what a Garland range is?”
I had done several stints in restaurant kitchens over the years, a career as a posto paying even less than being a poet. “Sure. It’s a big honking stove like you’d find in a commercial kitchen.”
Homer beamed with pride. “Well, I wished me up one a while back. Flat-top, double oven, eight burners, salamander, the whole nine yards. I got no idea where the gas that runs it comes from, but man oh man, can I cook with that baby.”
I thought about the difference between what could be gotten from a small well to one this large. Big difference. “So you guys are being attacked because the people down below want access to—or possession of—this well.”
“They had access to it. They lived here. Thing is, they had two big problems. Wishing is a bit like cookin’; some folks is just naturally better at it than others. The man who started all the trouble wasn’t very good at it, and neither were his friends. To make matters worse, they kept trying to wish up weapons and other bad shit. They banded together into a sort of gang, though they called themselves the po-lice, trying to take over this well and keep everyone else away from it.”
“But you managed to throw them out.”
“We did. We’re not proud of it, but we didn’t have much choice.”
“How’d you do it?”
He grinned. “I wished us up cases and cases of wine and whiskey. The good stuff, gallons of it, and we threw one hell of a party. Once Cyrus and his people were well and truly bombed we rounded them up, hogtied them, and hauled them down to the bottom of the hill. They’d already started a wall—that kind always does. We finished it. They’ve been trying to get back in ever since.”
“So how long has this been going on?”
“Over nine months now,” he said with a sigh. “They got a camp out there, them and their wives, so we don’t dare go down. They have their own regular sized well so they needn’t be hurting for anything, and if they were, they could head on out through a mystery door and try to find another big well.”
I shook my head. Of course they didn’t do anything that rational. It appeared that Venus had been set up to give people a fresh start. It also appeared that some people couldn’t be busted loose from the stupid groove with anything short of explosives.
“So that’s how we live now,” Homer continued. “They go away for a few days or a couple weeks, hatch some new plan of attack, come back and take another run at us. They were gone a month this time. You saw what they came back with.” His shoulders slumped wearily, and his gaze was distant and haunted.
“A lot of us folks here on High Vista are refugees. All most of us want is a quiet, peaceable life. A place to be with our families, set down some roots, let some scars heal. Instead we have to guard this place around the clock and fend off attacks like this new one.”
“That’s a damn shame.” I really meant it. There in the center of their community, by the well, it was quiet and peaceful. Maybe not the sort of place that needed a posto like me, but that might not be so bad either.
“We surely think so.” He stood up. “I’d best get on back to the gate. I do hope Miss Trouble turns up soon.” He scowled. “But hell, where are my manners? We like to think we’re a hospitable folk, and here I go being a poor host. I’d fix you something, but we’re short on time.”
He turned back to the well. Stared into it, lips moving silently.
Ripples appeared almost immediately. Four objects pushed up through the surface and stopped moving once they rested atop the well. Two bottles of Dr. Pepper, and two paper bowls of pork rinds. Homer nodded in satisfaction. “That’ll do, I guess.”
Homer handed over a bottle and a bowl. My eyes went wide in amazement. The bottle was cold, ice cold. The pork rinds were still hot and smelled heavenly, just like the ones you can get fresh-made from certain ethnic stores.
“Anyone can do this at a wishing well?” I said. I had just seen God’s Walmart, the take-out window of the Universe.
“Well, that depends,” Homer said, collecting his own soft drink and bowl of rinds. “The better you can describe and visualize something, the better the result. It took me a lot of tries to get that there Dr. Pepper to taste right. As for the pork rinds, they ain’t real pork—our hosts aren’t real crazy about us eating animals—but the taste and texture will pass, I think.”
“So you’re real good at this wishing stuff?”
“I guess I am.”
I shook my head in wonder. “It’s like making something out of nothing.”
Homer laughed. “I was chef at a soul food joint before Hurricane Tonya. That’s what soul food is, my man. Making something good out of next to nothin’.”
We returned to the wall near the gate. On the way Homer filled me in on how some other things worked on the Hoop, and I asked questions between bits of crispy pork goodness and slugs of soda. I couldn’t believe how good that soft drink tasted. The flavor was sharper and more vivid than anything I’d ever had back home. It was like Homer’s memory of it—and consequently his recreation—radically outdid the original.
As for the wells themselves, the very idea was seriously gooning me out. I couldn’t help thinking about the difference wishing wells could make back on Earth. Food, clothing, water purifiers, medical supplies; an endless shopping list of things that would be available for those who needed them the worst. Why hadn’t the Bugs given them to people?
Then I got it: They had given wells to humans. But to have them we needed to come out to Venus. What a raw deal, forced to come to a place with clean air. A place that wasn’t overcrowded and subject to increasingly violent weather. A place where the rain didn’t burn your skin, where the coastal areas weren’t being swallowed up by rising oceans, where the threat of tornados, hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, forest fires, killing droughts, and flash floods hadn’t gotten so bad that the news more often than not led with the weather. On most of Earth, food was either very expensive and very good, or very cheap and almost guaranteed to put you in an early grave. If you ate at the bottom of the food chain your tissues ended up so saturated with chemicals that when you croaked from what you ate, embalming would be redundant.