Chapter 5

Dizza Yankeur, aka “Yank”, the cultural anthropologist from the civilian science department, was fifty-seven metric years old and had two PhDs to her credit. Still in her first career when most humans her age were well established in second careers, she had arrived at CVS the previous day hoping to arrange some escorted trips to the northern border region where California, Oregon and the high desert of Nevada came together. She was interested in this particular region of the North American landmass because a population of homebodies who called themselves the “Opies” called it home. The name Opie came from the notion that their ancestors were the original people of this particular region. These were a people who had been called “Indians” at one point in history because the original European discoverer of the North American landmass had thought he was in a subdivisional region called India. That name had stuck for half a millennium before they started being called “Native Americans” because of something known as “political correctness”. Finally, they had self-adopted the name “Original People” a few generations before the collapse of homebody civilization and that had evolved into “Opies.” What made these people worthy of study was their adherence to what they believed to be their ancestors’ customs and lifestyle and their self-sufficiency in feeding and clothing themselves by hunting and fishing. They were also, of all the various cultures that made up the homebody population, one of the few that knew the true cause of the collapse and that the strange armored people who flew through the sky and carried potent weapons were simply off-world humans trying to care for those left behind.

Gath knew all this information because Yank had told him. He had seen her sitting alone in the cafeteria at the lunch serving and had gone over to introduce himself because he wanted to talk about the art and the music of the homebodies with someone knowledgeable in the subject. After the introduction, he made a small talk enquiry about why she was currently at CVS. What followed was a twenty minute discourse about the Opies and some guy named Columbus and some animal called a buffalo and various atrocities committed against the Opies more than fifteen hundred years ago and how the Opies were later exploited through corporate financed gambling establishments prior to the collapse. She spoke so fast and with so few closed end statements that he had been unable to get a single word in edgewise. Fletch was right. The woman could talk.

“That’s uh ... very interesting,” Gath told her now, wondering if his eyes were showing the shell-shocked look his mind felt. “But what I was...”

“And of course,” she interrupted, seemingly not noticing that he was trying to talk, “there are many similarities between the Opies here in the high desert and several other groups of formerly oppressed and defeated peoples.”

“There are?” he said instinctively, and then immediately regretted it.

“Absolutely,” she said. “Take the Ceepies, for example. The Ceepies are the circumpolar people who live up around the Arctic Circle. They were once called “Eskimos” and then, later, “Inuits”, the terms of which derived from the two primary languages these gentle people spoke among themselves before first contact with the European descendants in...”

She lectured him on the Ceepies for five minutes, telling him about their diet of aquatic mammal meat, fish, and seabird eggs which they still maintained today. Just as she was getting into the evolutionary and biological developments that allowed them to survive and even thrive with minimal carbohydrate intake, he forced himself to edge into the land of mild rudeness and interrupt her. He had a slew of computerwork he needed to finish and Whoever only knew how long she was going to talk about the subject he was really interested in—if he could ever steer her onto it.

“Uh ... Yank,” he spoke up. “Sorry to cut you off. That’s all very interesting, but ... uh...”

“Oh, that’s okay,” she said dismissively. “Sometimes I’m hard to shut up when I get to talking. People have to interrupt me all the time. I don’t take offense to it. I had a friend once who told me ‘Yank, it seems like you think if you don’t keep your mouth running constantly it’ll seize up on you.’”

“Uh ... yeah,” Gath said. “So...”

“His name was Goth,” she said. “Kind of like your name, isn’t it?”

“A little,” Gath agreed. “So...”

“He and I met back when I was working on Martian culture norms in the eighties. He was an engineer that helped keep all the pressurized structures on the Martian surface operational. You know that everyone on Mars has to live indoors, in a pressurized environment, right?”

“Yes, but...”

“Goth used to get frustrated to tears sometimes,” she said. “All of those structures on Mars are so old. Most were originally built back before the Great Human Expansion. It seemed like every day he had to rush from one building to another to check on a depressurization alarm, or unseal a blast door that had...”

“So, what I wanted to ask you about,” he cut in, hoping that she was being truthful when she said she would not take offense to it, “is the homebody music and their art.”

She did not seem to be offended. In fact, she looked at him pointedly, as if seeing him for the first time. “Their music and their art?” she said, a smile forming on her lips and in her eyes. “What did you want to know about it?”

“Well, I was out on an overwatch mission the other day in Sacramento. While we were waiting for the engineers to fix a gantry crane, a group of homebodies was gathered on the levee wall, watching us.”

“They’re a very curious people, the homebodies,” Yank said with obvious affection in her voice.

“Yes, it looked like they are,” Gath said. “So ... anyway, after watching us for a while they took out these musical instruments and started playing. One was a stringed instrument somewhat like a guitar, one was a woodwind instrument, the other was a percussion piece.”

“Ah yes,” Yank said. “A ‘gitter’, a ‘blow box’, and ‘the tubes’, respectively. At least that’s what it sounds like you’re describing. Did you find the music they produced unpleasant to the ear?”

“Not at all,” he said. “I was actually impressed by it. Primarily at their ability to create it in the first place and to play in harmony with each other on the level they did, but also because their instruments were in correct tuning.”

She raised her eyebrows up. “It’s very rare to find someone who appreciates music that is made by something other than synth players,” she said.

He shrugged. “Among the spaceborn, maybe, but I’m from Brittany.”

“Brittany,” she said, surprised. “You’re a groundborn?”

Now it was Gath who raised his eyebrows, his eyes searching her face to determine if she was joking or not. It certainly did not appear she was. “Yes,” he said. “Most people kind of pick up on that from my accent.”

“Oh, I didn’t notice you had an accent,” she said with a laugh. “Now that you mention it, though, you do kind of round your vowels and twist your consonants a bit. Brittany, you say? Is non-synthesized music an important part of Britannic culture?”

His eyebrows went up a little higher. Whoever wept, he thought. She holds two PhDs in cultural anthropology yet she is unaware of what a Britannic accent sounds like and that Brittany is the center of the traditional music movement of the last century? Is this really the woman I should be talking to about this? “Uh ... yes,” he finally replied. “You could say that music is kind of important to us. I myself am an accomplished acoustic guitarist, although being surrounded by spacies has made it difficult for me to practice.”

“Interesting,” she said. “I used to be ‘good friends’ with a girl from a place called Benzo. That’s on Brittany, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Gath said. “It’s a seaport town about a week’s aquatic travel from the ground port.”

Her eyes took on a nostalgic tone. “That was back in the late eighties,” she said. “I was going through one of my nome stages at the time. Peridia Valkstein was her name. Everyone called her Perry, but she used to let me call her Valky. She was such a good friend, if you know what I mean.”

“Uh ... yes, I think know what you mean.”

“Valky was married to a prominent member of the Benzo local government—a city council member ... or maybe it was the zoning board. Anyway, she and I used to sit naked on the balcony of their house for hours at a time while she played her guitar for me. It was so romantic. It was right on the edge of the rain forest and the forest birds would hear her playing and would start squawking in time with her and the lemuras and the gaddies would creep out onto the lawn and just listen to the music. And then, when her fingers would get sore she would ask me if I could kiss them for her, and I’d...”

“Uh ... wow, Yank,” Gath interrupted, holding up his hand to silence her. “You really don’t need to tell me all of those personal details. I know you spacies kind of like to keep those kinds of things to yourself.”

Yank chuckled a little, her face flushing. “Yes, sometimes I do let my brain keep control of my mouth a little too long. I hope I didn’t embarrass you too much.”

“Not at all,” he said. “I’m groundborn, remember?”

“Groundborn?” she said, wrinkling her brow. “What does that have to do with anything?”

Gath chewed his lip a little. Again, this was a cultural anthropologist with more than ten years of post-graduate education to her credit, who had had at least one love affair with a groundborn woman, but had somehow never noticed that mainstream groundborn cultures had significantly different sexual and relationship morals than spaceborn culture. “Uh ... nothing,” he said. “Never mind. We were talking about the homebody musical abilities?”

Her eyes brightened. “Right!” she said, laughing. “We were, weren’t we? What did you want to know?”

“Well ... mostly how prevalent it is.”

“Extremely prevalent,” she said. “Virtually every cultural subdivision on the planet exhibits a strong propensity toward the composition of music and is known to fabricate musical instruments ranging from the crude to the sophisticated.”

“Every one?” Gath said.

“Every one that I have observed directly or read studies on,” she said. “The most primitive of the homebodies on the planet are a group in Eastern Europe called the Ukes. They do not speak or understand the universal human language at all, instead using an ancient Slavic tongue that was abandoned well before the Great Human Expansion was even conceived of. They adhere to a religion centered on a named God and worship an offspring of this God who is said to have sacrificed himself to absolve his followers of their sins. They believe that we are demons that attempted to conquer them but the son of their God returned from the dead to enslave us and force us to serve them.”

“That’s kind of what the homebodies around here believe, isn’t it?”

“In a manner of speaking,” Yank said. “Most of the homebody religious beliefs are centered around father and son deities with the son being sent to initially repel and contain what they believe to be the invasion of their planet by us, but which we know to be the Great Collapse. Most of these beliefs, however, are just distortions of the Ukes religion, known as Christianity, which dates back to the earlier days of human civilization itself.”

“They used to kill each other over that religion, didn’t they?” Gath asked, remembering a few tidbits from his elementary school and undergraduate days.

“That is perhaps an oversimplification, but yes,” Yank said. “The Christians were persecuted in their early days but later on, it was they who were the persecutors. Somewhere around twenty million lives were taken in the course of human history by people calling themselves Christians who were killing non-Christians for refusing to become Christians. And then there were the inter-Christian killings.”

“Inter-Christian killings?” Gath asked. He had never heard of this.

“Oh yes,” Yank said. “Some of the bloodiest and longest duration wars in pre-industrial history were fought over this issue. Catholic versus Protestant. Both are branches of Christianity, which means they believed that Jesus Christ was the son of God and the savior of mankind, but minor differences in the interpretation of the ancient texts that this belief was based upon led to a fundamental branching of the rituals and rules involved in how one was supposed to worship and how one was supposed to live one’s life. Once the split occurred, adherence to one side or another became entangled with the wielding of political power and from this came the bloodshed. The Thirty Years War, the Eighty Years War, the German Peasants’ War, and, to a lesser degree but still significantly, the English Civil War were the earlier and bloodiest of the examples, although the bloodshed and strife continued in a more limited way all the way up to the start of the Great Human Expansion itself.”

“That’s very interesting,” Gath said, with complete honesty this time.

“But we were talking about homebody music, weren’t we?” Yank said with a chuckle. “It would seem I digressed a bit, huh? I do have a habit of doing that.”

“Uh ... yes, I guess you did,” Gath said. He actually had not noticed her digress this time, so seamlessly had she plugged it into the flow of conversation. If she had not brought the subject back herself he would have gone on discussing the Jesus Christ mythology with her for Whoever knew how long.

“Anyway,” she said. “My point about the Ukes was that they are perhaps the most primitive of the organized homebodies on Earth, and even they are able to fashion stringed instruments that are played with tree bows and sound so beautiful you weep when you hear them. They sing in harmonious voices that make you yearn to understand the words they felt fit to put to music.”

“Does it mean anything?” Gath wanted to know.

“That so many of the homebodies are musically inclined?”

“Yes,” Gath said. “There must be a reason behind it.”

“It is a rather interesting phenomenon, isn’t it?” she asked. “I’ve been studying these homebodies for a number of years now and I have a few ideas about why.”

“What are they?” Gath asked.

“Nothing that has been examined in any kind of official study,” she said. “Just loose hypotheses really.”

“Like what?” he insisted.

She smiled again. “Well, I think it’s something as simple as the fact that musical ability and appreciation for music on the level that allows for composition of it has a natural, inverse relationship with the human sense of curiosity and wanderlust.”

He took a moment to translate her words into a concept and then nodded. “You’re saying that those with the most musical ability back during the Great Human Expansion, when droves of people were leaving the planet for other systems, tended to be the ones who had no desire to leave?”

“Correct,” she said. “It’s not an absolute, of course, just a general trend. The musically and artistically inclined stayed on Earth and bred more musically and artistically inclined with even less desire to leave the homeland. You could draw a corollary by pointing out that among the spaceborn there is a strong desire for exploration and a wanderlust that precludes them from settling in any one place and —again, this is a generality, not an absolute—there is an extremely weak and limited sense of artistic and musical appreciation.”

“What about the groundborn who moved on from Earth but settled on other planets?” Gath asked. “How would they fit into the equation?”

“Well, let’s take you for example,” she said. “You’re from Brittany, correct?”

“Correct.”

“And you say you are musically inclined?”

“My entire family is,” Gath said. “Brittany, in fact, is known for producing some of the best contemporary artists, writers, and musicians.”

“Hmm,” she said thoughtfully. “I didn’t know that. In any case, if this is true, I would imagine that the early settlers of Brittany had just enough wanderlust and curiosity to get them off of Earth and out to the stars, but not enough to keep them moving. Or perhaps there was just enough of a reason for them to leave that it overrode their lack of wanderlust. Once your foreparents landed on Brittany, they stayed there, did they not?”

“They did,” he confirmed. “I’m an eleventh generation Britannic. I am the first of my bloodline to choose a profession that took me away from the AZ system.”

Her eyes looked into his, probing. “That’s very interesting in and of itself,” she said. “Why did you do it?”

He shrugged. “I guess I just wanted to see some of human space while I was young.”

“That sounds like wanderlust,” she said. “If you have both wanderlust and musical inclination, you are a statistical anomaly to my theory.”

“Not necessarily,” he said. “I don’t want to live permanently somewhere else. My plans are to eventually find my way back home and settle down in Diphen.”

“Then it’s just a young man’s sense of adventure that is driving you?” she asked.

“Something like that,” he said. “It has certainly set my family on edge. They have no idea why anyone would even want to leave the River District of Diphen, let alone the entire city of Diphen, or the Planet of Brittany, or—Whoever forbid—the Alpha Zulu System.”

“Brittany is a beautiful planet,” she said. “But every planet is beautiful in its own way. I admire your sense of adventure, Medic Stoner. It’s a very spaceborn attitude.”

He chuckled. “No need to get insulting,” he said.

She looked at him pointedly. “Did I say something insulting?”

“Not at all,” he assured her. “Just a little groundborn humor.”

“Interesting,” she said. “I was under the impression that groundborn didn’t have much of a sense of humor.”

He opened his mouth to reply to her—something about how maybe she should start studying up on modern groundborn culture instead of just those who had been left behind on a Whoverforsaken rock that was ultimately doomed—but before he could say anything his commer beeped three times, indicating a priority communication.

“Excuse me for a second,” he said, pulling it from his waist and looking at the display. The commer was Zen, who was the duty medic for the day. He activated the link. “Gath here. What’s the word, Zen?”

“I want to see if you’d be willing to take a deployment, Gath,” Zen’s hologram told him.

Gath blinked in surprise. “Uh ... sure,” he said, “but I went out yesterday on the overwatch deployment to the Merced River Dam, remember?”

“Yeah,” Zen said. “I know it’s Bong’s turn to deploy, but ... well ... she asked if I could ask you to go instead. She says she’ll take your next two on her off rotations if you agree.”

Gath was immediately suspicious. “Why?” he wanted to know. “What’s so torked up about this mission that she doesn’t want to do it?”

“Nothing that should bother you,” Zen said. “We need to pick up an injured floatie off a cargo ship out in the ocean and take him to NAWM. We spacies kind of get the squeams about flying over open water in a hover, especially when the weather is a little rough; as it is right now. Bong will do it if she has to, but ... well ... she’d rather not. Slag like this is not our idea of a good time.”

Gath did not have to think the proposition over for long. Flying out over the open ocean and landing on the deck of a floating cargo vessel sounded fun. And he knew that with winter fast approaching in this hemisphere there were a slew of night deployments scheduled up in the AOR’s higher elevations to make sure automated equipment on dams, stream diversions systems, and spring injectors were operating properly. Being able to skip two such deployments was quite an enticement. “I’ll do it,” he said. “Who’s going with me?”

“Riff is first up for med tech deployment today,” Zen replied.

“How’s he going to feel about an over water flight?”

“Probably about the same as Bong does,” Zen said. “Unfortunately, however, there are no groundie med techs for him to swap with and protocol requires a med tech for a transfer flight.”

“Yeah, we don’t exactly have groundies falling out of our slagholes around here, do we?” Gath observed.

Zen blinked—or his holo did, anyway. “An interesting analogy, Gath.”

“I got a million of ‘em,” Gath assured him. “I’ll head to my quarters to armor up.”

“Stop by here, first,” Zen said. “I have some briefing materials for you on the patient’s condition and the weather along your route.”

“Right,” he said. “Signing off.”

It took Gath the better part of fifteen metric minutes to make it to the deployment briefing in the medical clinic. A good portion of that time was spent trying to extricate himself from Yank’s company. She enjoyed releasing hapless victims from her conversational web about as much as arachnoids enjoyed releasing hapless insects from their literal webs. After being forced to be borderline rude to her by cutting her off mid-gambit, he made his way through the underground tunnels to the clinic, where Zen and Taz—the duty med tech of the day—watched over a host of empty beds.

“Another busy day, huh?” Gath observed. Despite the fact that the coming winter was generating a slew of off-base maintenance details—circumstances that usually resulted in a steady stream of marines with vague and unverifiable symptoms—the past metric week had been unusually slow. Perhaps, thought Gath, the recent revelation that Sol System was doomed had led to an upswing in the marine’s work ethic. Or, more likely, it was just a statistical anomaly.

“Let’s not tempt fate by mentioning it, shall we?” Zen said.

“Sorry,” Gath said. “Where’s Riff? I would’ve thought he’d be here by now.”

“Change of plan,” Taz said with a nervous smile. “You’re stuck with me instead.”

“Oh?” he said, raising his eyebrows a tad. “What kind of deal did you make with him to let him skip out on an over water flight?”

She giggled mischievously. “He takes my next three off base deployments.”

“Three?” Gath said. “I only got two out of Bong.”

“You should’ve held out,” Zen said. “I bet you could’ve soaked her for four, maybe even five.”

“You spacies hate flying over water that much?” Gath asked.

“It’s not flying over the water we don’t like,” Zen said. “It’s what happens if something goes wrong with the aircraft and we end up in the water.”

“Nothing happens,” Gath said. “Your armor safes inflate and you float on the surface until another aircraft comes to rescue you.”

“That’s your idea of nothing?” Zen asked with a shudder. “An hour or more floating in an endless expanse of water waiting to be rescued.”

“Whoever wept,” Taz said, looking as if she were suddenly having second thoughts. “I can’t think of much of anything worse than that.”

Gath could not resist an eye roll and a shake of the head. “You spacies and your phobias,” he said. “Did I ever tell you about my uncle Dax, the amateur floatie?”

“Amateur floatie?” Taz said. “He goes out on the water without getting paid for it?”

“It’s a common hobby on Brittany,” Gath said. “We have nice wide rolling oceans outside of the bays. Uncle Dax has a ten-meter sloop and...”

“Sloop?”

“A sailing vessel,” Gath clarified. “It’s propelled by the wind influencing large sheets of carbon fiber cloth attached to masts.”

Zen and Taz looked at each other and then back at Gath. “No engines?” Zen finally asked.

“Well, there’s a small propulsion engine for times when the wind is too calm, but it’s considered cheating to use it.”

“And your uncle goes out into the open ocean on such a vessel?”

“All the time,” Gath said. “I’ve been out with him quite a few times. It’s exhilarating. There’s nothing like the smell of salt and the sea air in your face. Nothing like being so far off shore that you can’t see land. It gives you a perspective of how big the ocean really is.”

“That’s insanity!” Zen declared, almost angrily. “Out in the middle of the ocean in a tiny vessel using the wind for propulsion? Why would anyone risk their very life doing something like this?”

“Because it’s fun,” Gath said. “Relaxing. No other reason than that. And there’s no real risk to one’s life in sailing.”

“No real risk to life?” Zen said. “What about drowning? I’d say that’s a risk to life. And how about getting lost? Or being eaten by carnivorous fish? Or getting caught in a violent weather phenomenon?”

“We have flotation vests,” Gath replied, “and global positioning navigation systems, and weather reports, and weather warnings that keep us from being out when conditions are dangerous.”

“And the carnivorous fish?” Zen asked.

“There are sharks in Brittany’s oceans,” he said with a shrug. “Some of them will attack a human if they encounter one, but if your boat sinks and you find yourself in the water, odds are that one of these dangerous sharks won’t come across you in the ten to fifteen minutes it would take for a rescue hover to get to you and pluck you out. And even if one did, the standard flotation vest has an ultrasonic generator that will drive sharks away.”

“Oh ... I see,” Zen said slowly. “Well ... maybe it’s not quite as dangerous as I thought, but it’s still the very definition of insanity to go floating around on the open ocean in a tiny vessel. How anyone could enjoy such a thing is beyond me.”

“A valid point of view, I suppose,” Gath said, thinking about, but not mentioning, the fact that one of the most popular activities for spaceborn vacationers on star cruises was to pay money to take a ride on an atmospheric diving ship, fleets of which were used to scream into the upper atmosphere of a gas giant to harvest hydrogen.

“Is it too late for me to back out of this mission?” asked Taz, who was looking a little green after listening to the conversation about the open ocean.

“Far too late,” Gath told her with a smile. “There’s no way in purg that Riff is going to agree to switch back with you.”

“Maybe I should think things through a little more before I act, huh?” she said, looking at Gath.

Knowing that she had arranged to get herself on this mission, not because of the four duty days she had traded away but because he was the medic on it, Gath gave her a sympathetic pat on the shoulder. “If we all did that then the galaxy would be a really boring place, wouldn’t it?”

“I suppose,” she said.

“All right,” said Zen. “Let’s do this briefing, shall we? Clinny, bring up the holo map with the briefing material on it, please.”

“You got it, Zen,” Clinny’s arrogant male spaceborn voice replied. A moment later, a three dimensional relief map appeared. It encompassed the entire region of California, the desert of Nevada and about two hundred kilometers of the Pacific Ocean. CVS and NAWM were represented as red dots in their correct geographical location. Out in the ocean, just a centimeter offshore and five centimeters north of San Francisco on the scale of the map, was a red icon in the shape of a water vessel. The words HSFOV PAC-RUN 2, presumably the vessel’s name, floated above it.

“This is the Pac-Run,” said Zen. “It’s one of six cargo vessels that make the run from Homeport Ground to the cargo ports of North and South America, delivering food and supplies for the Fleet bases and the homers. It left the offload facilities at San Francisco thirty-seven local hours ago and is now on its way to the offloads at Portland. One of the floaties assigned to this vessel was injured this morning by a fall from a deck ladder while on a maintenance task.”

“How in the tork did he do that?” asked Taz. “Wasn’t he wearing a safety harness? Didn’t he have floatie armor on?”

“I asked the same thing,” Zen said. “It seems it was a simple task that was only to take a minute or two and he elected not to armor up or use the safety harness. The commander of the vessel is most upset with him.”

“Torkin’ floaties are crazy as a vent mole,” Taz said with a shake of her head. “Why else would you volunteer to be on a Whoever damned water vessel day in and day out.”

“What are his injuries?” Gath asked.

“A fracture and level two displacement of the right radial head,” Zen said. “Surgical intervention will be required. That’s why he has to go to NAWM instead of just bringing him here. The injury is stabilized and distal circulation is present. He’s been medicated with TOB to control his pain and Benzo-active to keep him relaxed.”

“Sounds easy enough,” Gath said.

“Weather is a little bit of a concern,” Zen said. “A winter storm from the Gulf of Alaska has come ashore in the last eight hours and is dumping moderate to heavy precipitation and producing some significant winds. Here in the AOR and at the Pac-Run, things aren’t so bad; just spotty rain and some wind gusts around ten to fifteen meters aloft. Further south, however, on your flight path between Pac-Run and NAWM, is where the heart of the storm is currently. You can stay below the ceiling for most of the flight but in order to get over the Sierra Nevada Mountains, you’re going to have to climb up to six thousand to get up over the clouds and the icing conditions inside of them. Once on the other side of the Sierras you can drop back down below the cloud layer.”