He wiped his thumb across the door plate—interesting that they locked up to go out into the backyard—and held it open for them.
“Stuff” it was. Most of the house was one huge warehouse room. Motorcycles and bicycles seemed to be specialties. Above a neat row of parked motorcycles hung a row of bicycles dangling from hooks, all looking new and shiny. Three walls were full of paintings and holos and one was a floor-to-ceiling bookcase with hundreds of books, maybe a thousand. Martha stared at them; probably more books than she had ever seen outside of a library.
On the floor were obvious things like lawn mowers and vacuums, lamps, and fans, and many things whose functions were not obvious.
A door slid open as Arl approached it, and he stood in the doorway to let the others through.
This was a kitchen and pantry. Except for one wall with a window that looked out on the front lawn and street, every wall was covered with hanging pots and pans and utensils, and shelves of foodstuffs. There were hanging baskets of onions, potatoes, and fruit. A refrigerator and huge freezer, both with transparent doors.
Martha stared wildly around the room. “I’ve worked in the MIT kitchen, but I’ve never seen anything like this. You could feed a hundred people.”
“We must getalmost a hundred people when Arl sets up the grill out front. He’s famous for his chicken.”
He clapped his hands together and grinned. “You could’ve counted almost a hundred last Sadday. They were all over the front lawn with their stuff.”
“What do they bring?” Matthew asked.
“Most of them straight barter for food and drink. Like you bring seven pieces of chicken; I cook six and keep one. Two whole chickens for a bottle of good wine.” He looked at Martha with interest. “What’s an MIT kitchen?”
“Massachusetts Institute of Theosophy.”
“Oh, wow—I should’ve known from your outfits. That’s in the old Christ Dominion?”
“I suppose. We call it the World of Christ.”
“They let you out?”
“Well, we sort of escaped,” Matt said.
“I guess you did,” Arl said. “How long ago was that?”
“Couple of thousand years.”
Arl nodded slowly, brow furrowing.
“It’s still there?” Martha said. “MIT?”
“Who knows? Nobody’s tried to cross the Mississippi since forever. They’ve got killer satellites waiting day and night with lasers. You don’t want to fly within a hundred kays. Was it that way back in your time?”
“I was only there for a few days.” He looked at Martha. “Do you know?”
“I don’t know what a killer satellite is,” she said in a small voice. “History says that the Lord’s Avenging Angels can smite invaders from their place in Heaven, above the sky. I’ve seen a moving picture of it happening, in the Museum of Theosophy, and some melted metal from a flying machine.”
“Could they still work, after a couple of thousand years?”
“Sure,” Arl said. “I’ve seen it on the news. Every now and then, they try to fly a robot plane over there. Pow, every time.”
“Hard to see how an automatic system could keep going for more than two thousand years. They must be replacing or repairing the satellites, or at least their sensors and lasers.”
Arl looked puzzled. “What do you mean? Machines repair themselves all the time.”
That gave Matt pause. “Not really old ones.”
“Well, I guess they’ve replaced the old ones with self-repairing ones. More than a thousand years ago, they could do that.”
Matt suddenly realized how far into the future he’d actually come. He’d been lulled by the similarities between these people and the ones at home; much less strange than Martha’s people. It was even easier to understand their speech.
“Seems funny that we can understand each other,” He put the thought to words. “If we’d gone backward two thousand years instead of forward, we couldn’t. It must be the cube.”
“Sure,” Arl said. “We see movies all the way back to the twentieth century, and understand most of it. Though people did funny things back then.”
“We still watch Shakespeare,” Em said. “But he’s hard to follow.”
“He was for us, too.” Matt followed Em’s gaze and saw that Martha was silently crying, tears rolling down her cheeks. He put his hand on her shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” she sobbed. “I’m so lost.”
Em took her hand and patted it. “You’ll get used to it, sweetheart.”
“But I won’t! This is Gomorrah, isn’t it? This is Hollywood. ”
“Huh-uh,” Arl said, shifting nervously. “I don’t know about Gum-gumorrow, but Hollywood’s over in LA.”
“We’ve been there three times,” Em said. “Rides and all.”
“But you don’t live in God and Jesus.”
“Well, we’re not religious ourselves,” Em said, still patting, “but there are those who are.” She looked anxiously at Arl. “The Reynoldses, down the street?”
“Yeah, they’re Christers. Always off to church.” He scratched his chin. “Bunch of Muslims, downtown, and Unitarians and B’hai all over the place. Not like it was in the East, though, in your time.”
Em gave her a tissue. “Thank you. What about now, in the East? People still live and worship over there?”
“Not many left, I don’t think,” Arl said. He looked at Em, then back at Matt. “This isn’t really a movie, is it?”
“Never said it was,” Matt said. “We are what we say we are, scholars from the past. I guess we should find a university. ”
“None nearby. Have to go to Santa Fe or Phoenix. Maybe just go on to LA. That’s the biggest.”
“Too far to walk. How do you get there, fly?”
Arl paused. “That’s what you would do, in your day?”
“That or drive. Cheaper to fly.”
“You’d take the train now, for the same reason. Flying’s ten, maybe twenty times as much, even for a good barterer.”
“What, you even haggle for airfare?”
“Bargain for it, yeah. You didn’t?”
“No, the government set the prices.”
He laughed. “And that’s it? Boy, they’d love that!”
“They do set a price in B chits,” Em said, “but not even half the people pay it. People who don’t have any choice or are so rich they don’t care. Everybody else, you show up with your luggage and something to barter with. By law, they have to show which seats are available, and you bargain with the agent.”
“If there’s no competition for the seat,” Arl said, “you can fly anywhere for almost nothing. But you never know.”
“Sounds like a clumsy way of doing business,” Matt said. “Everything takes so long.”
“But so what? It’s time well spent. If you just pay and get on the plane, the flyport wins and you lose. Wait ’em out and you can fly for less than cost.” He grinned. “Worth an extra day, for the satisfaction.” Em nodded enthusiastically.
Of course, Matthew knew people like that, who would go through hoops for any bargain, but a whole culture? A culture predicated on haggling?
Matt’s stomach growled audibly. He hadn’t had a thing to eat since that pickled egg two thousand years ago.
“Oh, you poor things,” Em said. “I didn’t offer you anything to eat or drink.”
“We don’t have any B chits,” Matt said, not sure whether he was joking.
Martha looked into the bag. “We have bread and cheese.”
“And that’s not all,” Matthew said, reaching into the bag and bringing out the wine bottle with appropriate reverence. “Two-thousand-year-old wine.”
Arl stared at it, struck momentarily dumb. “MIT 67?”
“Bottled at the Massachusetts Institute of Theosophy sixty-seven years after the Second Coming.”
“That . . . could be worth something.”
“I should think so. Probably the only bottle of it in the world. Do you collect wine?”