“I told my parents I wanted to become an apprentice verrul trainer and groom. They didn’t mind. I had always been excess baggage. They just made me finish school and let me go. They said, ‘Be happy, baby.’ ”
She paused and stared at Amerie without expression. “I was a groom only until the team manager saw how I could control the animals. That’s the secret of playing the game, you see. The verrul has to make the goals and maneuver to keep you from getting stunned by the short-range weapons the players carry. I played in the preseason as a novelty, to give the Green-hammer box office a hype. The team had been in the cellar for three years running. When they saw that I was more than a publicity gimmick they put me onto the first string in the season opener. I whipped the other clowns on the team into such a froth trying to outdo me that we won the bloody game. And all the rest… and the pennant, too.”
“Wonderful!”
“It should have been. But I had no friends. I was too different from the rest of the players. Too freakish. And in the second year… when they really began to hate me and I knew they would force me out, I… I…”
She pounded both fists on the table and her child’s face twisted in anguish. Amerie waited for the tears, but there were none; the briefly revealed hurt was masked almost as soon as it had showed itself. Sitting across the table, Felice relaxed, smiling at the other woman.
“I’m going to be a huntress, you know. On the other side. I could take care of you much better than the old man, Amerie.”
The nun rose up, blood pounding in her temples. She turned away from Felice and walked out of the cabin.
“I think we need each other,” the girl said.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
My dear Varya,
We have completed our little games of survival and craftsmanship now, and our bodies are fully acclimated to the tropical world that was Pliocene Earth. There remain only a Last Supper and a good night’s sleep before passage through the time-portal at dawn. The apparatus is inside a quaint cottage in the gardens of the auberge, and you can’t imagine a more incongruous site for the gate into another world. One looks in vain for the sign above the doorway saying, per me siva tea la perduta oente, but the feeling is there all the same.
After five days of working together (more like a holiday camp than basic training, you must understand), the eight of us in Group Green have achieved shaky competence in our chosen fields of primitive technology and a faith in our ability to cope that is probably dangerously inflated. Few of the others seem to appreciate the potential hazard that we might face from our predecessors into Exile. My fellow Greenies are more inclined to worry about being stamped upon by mammoths or bitten by python-sized vipers than to anticipate a hostile human reception committee greedily awaiting the day’s grab bag of well-heeled wayfarers.
You and I know that the time-gate arrival would certainly have been ritualized in some manner by the people on the other side. What the ritual will be is another matter. We can hardly expect to be treated as casual commuters, but whether we shall encounter welcome or exploitation is impossible to fathom. The literature offers certain speculative scenarios that make my flesh crawl. Personnel at the auberge are careful to present a neutral face while at the same time reinforcing our childhood self-defensive training. We will pass through the portal in two groups of four persons, with larger pieces of baggage following. This, I feel, is designed to give us a certain safety in numbers, although the momentary pain and disorientation of ordinary subspace translation will probably affect time-travelers as well, putting us at a tactical disadvantage for the first minute following our arrival in the Pliocene.
Your amused speculations upon my new vocation in the primitive world were much appreciated. However, since the last dinosaurs perished at least 60 million years before the Pliocene Epoch, there will be little can for sweeping up after them! So much for your visions of me as an antediluvian fertilizer tycoon. Prosaically enough, my new job is to be little more than an extension of my erstwhile hobby of sailing. I shall fish for a living and ply the seas on my Quest, and perhaps undertake the odd bit of trade if the occasion presents. The sloop was far too sophisticated a vessel to take to the Pliocene, so I traded her in for a smaller trimaran that can be ballasted with water and sand instead of mercury. If need be, I can whip up a very simple craft from scratch materials as well. We are furnished with toolheads of a gemlike glassy material, vitredur, which stays eyersharp and is virtually indestructible for some 200 years, after which it degrades, like decamole. Besides the shipwright’s kit, I am equipped with the auberge’s survival gear (very impressive) and what they call a Smallholder Unit, tools and decamole appliances for setting up light housekeeping on a subsistence farm, together with a few packets of seeds and a large fleck library with a raft of “how-to” books on every subject from animal husbandry to zymurgy.
The latter, by the way, is the vocation of choice for our Viking. He also confided to me that if there should be a demand for swash-buckling mercenary warriors, he might combine the two trades.
The individual whom I dubbed the Pirate also plans to get involved with alcoholic beverages, wines and brandies, that is. He and the Viking are now the straightest of friends, spending their off-hours tossing down the most expensive spirits that the auberge can supply and speculating on the quality of female consolation that might be available in the By-and-By. (Group Green itself has lean pickings. Besides the Nun, our female members include a sinister Virgin Huntress who seems to have wreaked mayhem or worse on one of the auberge counselors in order to qualify as a recidivist, and an extremely cautious ex-Meta Lady who is, at the moment at least, content to remain just one of the boys.)
Last night we had a fascinating glimpse into the background of the Pirate. His brother and sister turned up unexpectedly to say adieu and turned out to be Fleet line officers of the most impressive stripe. The poor P was very discomfited and the ex-Meta Lady speculates that he must be a cashiered spacer himself. He’s a competent sort if you don’t mind grouches. I worked with him for a few hours in the Small Boat Handling exercise, which he wanted to cram, and he seemed to have a natural flair for messing about in the water.
Most of the others in Group Green seem to be alone in the world. The Nun received a long conference call from her religious sistren in North America bidding her bon voyage. And earlier today she met with a Franciscan Brother in full conventual fig, no doubt hearing her last confession or whatever. (The friar drove one of those souped-up Gambini eggs with the heat dissipation fins, not the patient gray donkey you might have anticipated from memoirs of Il Poverello.) The Nun was a medic and psychological counselor by profession and plans to retire to a hermitage. I hope the poor woman isn’t counting on ministering angels such as the Old Paleontologist overmuch. He’s a fine chap with a penchant for carpentry, but I dare say the ex-Meta is right when she pegs him as a death-wisher.
I concur with your analysis of the little Joker. There must have been some valid square-peg reason for him to be thrown off his home world, but it’s a pity that his wild talents couldn’t be harnessed for the Milieu. Poor little nonborn. He’s endeared himself to the rest of us Greenies, not only for his ghastly sense of humor, but also for his fantastic ability to make something out of nothing. He has assembled a large collection of vitredur toolheads that need only be equipped with shafts or bandies to be operational. You get the feeling that after this boy has been in the Pliocene for a week or two, the Industrial Revolution will be raging! He has a whole forge lashup in decamole for his village blacksmith and rustic mechanician acts, and has acquired a plaqueful of geological survey charts to clue him in on metal ores in the unlikely event that none of the other Exiles has gone in heavily for prospecting.