“Sort of, maybe. So the Fall happens and the Council starts fighting and suddenly it’s got no power to do weather control. It’s back to forecasting. Talk about pissed.”
“Ouch.”
“Her name is Lystra, and I do mean she. Anyway, it’s not ‘hiding’ like a lot of the AI’s but it has declared itself strictly neutral. It doesn’t care who wins just that they get the power systems back on line so it can get back to controlling the weather! She’s really, really pissed.”
“Funny.”
“Yeah, one humorous spot in an otherwise crappy situation. Lystra says about a month and a half.”
“We might be able to get one crop in the ground in time. It’ll have to dry some before we can plant. And a few more plows wouldn’t hurt.”
“I’m on it,” Edmund replied. “I’m glad Angus brought in that load of sheet stock. We need to send someone up to him to get some more material. And he’ll need food as well. We’ll have to see what we can spare.”
Myron took another sip of beer and his face worked. “So, have you heard anything about Rachel?”
“No,” Edmund said quietly as another blast shook the building.
“They’re not at home. One of me went there already but they’d gone,” Sheida said quietly. “Mother’s privacy protocols are intact, damnit, and I can’t simply order a location search without a supermajority of the Council. I’d have to do a full sweep to find them and… I just can’t spare the power. I’ve set out, well, guides, to find travelers. Hopefully one of them will find them and direct them to Raven’s Mill.”
“What kind of guides?” Edmund asked.
“There are… semiautonomous beings, like homunculi and hobs, that manage some of the ecological programs. I found a low-power update conduit that let me reprogram them. They now have the path to ‘safe’ areas mapped for each of their areas and if they find lost travelers they’ll direct them. It’s all I can do right now. Maybe later something more can be done.
“For most of the refugees, there’s not going to be a ‘later,’ ” Edmund said.
CHAPTER TEN
They had been traveling for nearly two weeks through the worst weather Rachel had seen in all her life.
The house had turned out to have an immense quantity of material suitable to take on the trip; Rachel had been surprised and even a little dismayed at how many of the objects in the house had to do with her father’s hobby. At times picking through the piles it had seemed as if Edmund Talbot had more of an influence on the home he had never entered than either of the people living there.
But the problem was not so much that they had items, but what items to pack. They both had good backpacks, late twenty-first-century designs that were light as a feather and fit their bodies like a glove. But filling them had taken careful thought. Finally, it was decided that the most important things were food and appropriate clothing and shelter. They had ended up leaving almost everything else. Rachel ended up packing a few items of jewelry and Daneh packed her single “period” medical book, something called Gray’s Anatomy. And with that they set out into the driving rain and sleet.
The weather had never relented. In the last thirteen days it had seemed to rain, sleet or snow an average of ten hours each day. All of the rivers and streams were swollen, and in a few cases the bridges that the hiking groups maintained were washed out. In those cases it was a matter of trying to carefully cross the freezing and swollen stream despite the lack of a bridge, or go upstream looking for a crossing place. Crossing was preferred even though the frigid water flooded under their clothes and seeped into their boots. Better to be soaked than take days out of the way. That finally happened to them at the Anar and it took them nearly two days out of their way before they found an intact log bridge.
This had taken them off the main trail that passed the small hamlet of Fredar and onto less well-tended trails through the wilderness. These weren’t any better or worse than the “main” trail, and the rain had turned them into soup as well. The boots they had dredged up were also late twenty-first century and the mud slid off them like water from a duck’s back. But the effort was still constant, to lift one wooden foot after another, slip, slide, grab at a tree or go down on your face in the sucking bog. It just went on and on in an unceasing view of trees, swollen streams and the very occasional natural meadow.
Every day had been the same. After sleeping overnight in their small tent they would get up and make a fire. They had set out snares or fish-lines the night before but with the rain they had gotten little every day. So they would eat a bit of their road-food, flip the tent into its packing form and head off through the woods. Rachel well understood how relatively well-off they were. They had warm, dry clothing designed by specialists at the very tag end of the industrial revolution for exactly these conditions. They had good footwear, excellent foods and water carriers. In this time of madness they were rich.
They had passed others on the trail who were not so well off. Now, as they crossed over another of the simple log bridges there was one slumped and twisted by the side of the trail looking like nothing so much as a pile of torn clothes.
Rachel turned her head away, hardly looking at the body tumbled up against the tree, but her mother stepped over and examined the woman thoroughly, as she almost always did, finally shaking her head and moving back to the trail.
“She had something in her bag that the dogs had been at. She was wearing waterproof clothing. And her face looks as if she wasn’t even starving.”
“She just gave up,” Rachel whispered, slipping again in the mud and grabbing at a tree as she looked at the sky. It was already starting to get dark and it was probably the middle of the afternoon. She looked over at the corpse, then at the swollen river. What was the use of putting out trotlines when nothing ever bit. “I can understand how she felt.”
“Don’t say that,” Daneh said, sharing her glance at the sky. “Don’t even think it. Think about roaring fires, well-tended thatch and beef red at the bone.”
“Food,” Rachel said. They had been traveling on half rations at first, sharing one of the automatically heating packets between them. But as the food had dwindled and dwindled, despite their efforts at foraging, they had switched to quarter rations. They had been subsisting for the last three days on less than a thousand calories a day and with the walking through the mud and the cold, body-heat-leaching rain, snow and sleet it just wasn’t enough.
“Not that much farther,” Daneh said, taking a breath. “I hate to camp by a corpse but there’s a stream right here; maybe we’ll be luckier if we put the snares down by the water. What do you think?”
“What do I think?” Rachel laughed hysterically.
“Stop it,” Daneh said, grabbing her by the collar. “Food. Fires. Warmth. That’s no more than a day or two away.”
“Sure, sure,” Rachel said with another half-hysterical giggle. “Mom, that’s what you said yesterday!”
“I’ve taken this path before,” she said, determinedly, then shook her head. “But… I’ll admit it was a long time ago.”
“Mother, tell me we’re not lost,” Rachel said shakily.
“We’re not lost,” Daneh replied, glancing at her compass. She also had a positional locator but that was only useful if the path was traced in on it. And she hadn’t had it the last time she had been through when she had been very young and stupid enough to think that a trip up to the Faire on horseback would make an idyllic time. In retrospect, it had. The weather had been fair, as scheduled, and Edmund had taken care of ninety percent of the camp chores. It wasn’t this endless slog through a swamp.