Chapter 5A: Anthropology 101

Tanda Havra glanced at the sixteen-year-old village girl kneeling a few feet away from where she too knelt. The two of them were grinding herbs in stone metates, as village women had done for thousands of years. No expression showed on Tanda's face, but inwardly she could only shake her head in sad amusement.

Tazi would not believe how far away Tanda was from, nor would she have anything but confusion if Tanda had been able to even attempt to explain it.

For all of that distance, Tanda could see the taut lines of Tazi's neck, the rigid set of the young woman's shoulders and back, all making it quite clear Tazi was exceedingly angry. And completely unable to do anything about it. Understanding though, wasn't going to be enough, not now. Not on this day.

This was me too, girl, Tanda thought. I've been just as angry; there were different reasons, but the anger at my parents and the village elders wasn't very much different than what the younger woman was feeling right now.

You have no idea of what that my life was like, girl. None. I've told no one here of my life before I came to this village. I've been here five years. During the first year maybe three people spoke to me. I was so ignorant, so stupid; I never thought to see if my name had a local meaning. I was from far away, how could it possibly matter? Who would have thought two such different languages would have a word, but not the meaning, in common?

Tanda meant death or killing, to these people. Very few cultures warm to you if you introduce yourself as Death. You would think a thorough university education would have at least mentioned that you had to check everything and assume nothing, even to the smallest, simplest detail.

Tanda's second winter had seen a particularly harsh season. There had been many long rainstorms. The snow on the hills had come early and stayed late. She'd joined the hunting and had brought back a deer each and every time she went out. Afoot, armed only with a knife. That's when they had given her a second name, Havra. Tanda Havra. Kills from Behind.

You can become popular quickly when you have plenty of meat in a famine. She had very good instincts and plenty of childhood experience hunting game. That part of her personal history though had been overlain by what had happened to her after her childhood and some of her youth.

Tanda had been born half way around the planet, in the southern part of a continent these people didn't even know existed, even if they'd been from there originally.

Tanda hadn't had an easy childhood; from the very first she was different. She was darker skinned that the others of her village, taller and stronger. She'd been six summers when a boy, a peer, pushed her and tried to take the piece of meat she'd been eating. She'd simply hit him once, hard, in the stomach. He'd gone away in pain, angry.

By the time she was twelve, she towered head and shoulders over her peers, and for that matter, most of the others in the village. She was tall, willowy thin, and wiry strong. As well as having far darker skin than any of the others of the village, she had thinner, more delicate features in her face.

One day two boys had tried to drag her into the bushes; she'd broken one boy's arm, smashed the other boy's teeth.

Instead of standing up for her at the council fire, Tanda's father had turned his back on her. It might have gone badly, but Tanda had had help from an unexpected source: the two village Grandmothers had laughed at her father. They sat at the council fire and laughed, cackling and clapping their hands in mirth, holding their sides and laughing and laughing.

Being back-sided was the worst single insult one blood relative could give another. Being laughed at by the Grandmothers was the worst insult imaginable for a man. Tanda had spoken for herself at the council fire, explained what had happened.

That hadn't convinced the council elders. But the oldest Grandmother had pointed to another girl. "Speak!"

And so the girl had, telling of how the same two boys had pulled her into the bushes, then threatened her with a knife after they'd had their way with her. Twice more the Grandmothers had pointed to young women of the village, all of whom had spoken similar tales of the two boys.

The young men had been banished and Tanda's father had been humiliated yet again.

Tanda had been called the next day to speak to the oldest Grandmother. "Many years ago, dark-skinned men, very tall, came to the village. They killed all who resisted, raped the women, and took what they wanted. Your mother was a woman they took, but she escaped and returned, with blood on the knife she brought back with her. Her husband, your father, could not turn out such a woman. If he had tried, we'd have turned him out. Women, Tanda, we are not as big and strong as our men, but we have our own ways. Being forced, Tanda, is something that happens. We can't do much, but we do what we can. Babies, Tanda, they happen. You happened."

A moon later a small party of traders passed through the village. They were, they said, looking for young men and women who would be interested in working for them. Any who went with them would be paid well; they would be allowed to return in a year to their families. They offered many blandishments, items worth a great deal.

Tanda had gone with them; life in the village, Grandmothers aside, wasn't for her.

The party of traders hadn't gone many miles before the strangers gathered them in front of their fire. "We are not magicians, we are not gods. We can do things that you can't, that's all. You could learn to do these things, if that is your desire. Here is one of those things we can do that you can't." Out of nothing a dark shape had materialized in the night.

At least two of the boys, one of them the boy Tanda had punched in the gut many years before, peed themselves. Tanda had blinked, but her curiosity overwhelmed her fear. The half dozen villagers who had volunteered were ushered inside the dark maw and that was the start of the rest of her life.

The strangers didn't explain things very much, not at first. She'd been taken to a town, a place with bright sun, warm breezes and soft waves on a beach not far from the town. She'd been asked questions, given what she now knew were tests. Medical and general intelligence tests. Tanda knew she was healthy; she had no idea she was smart, too.

A kindly man, a little plump, far darker-skinned than even she was, had explained things to Tanda, at least a little. "My people have many things, we are rich beyond your comprehension, at least what you comprehend now. One thing we lack is a desire to do work that requires physical effort, or work that we consider demeaning. Work such as tending to the needs of others, acting as servants. Doing work that requires contact with dirt and mess.

"We go places, very far away from our homes. We ask people, poor people like yourself, if they would do some of the jobs that we do not want to do. Jobs that are not so bad, not really. Cleaning, cooking and sewing, tending children and animals. All sorts of things, simple things, everyday things you knew in your village.

"Some though, some of the people we meet are pretty smart. Someone like you, Tanda. Such people usually do not have happy lives at home; they don't fit in. To them, we offer a special treasure, if they want it.

"We will send you to school, Tanda. A school is a place where people will teach you all sorts of things. How far you go in school will be determined by how hard you are willing to work, how much you want to learn. School isn't for all, or even most people like you, Tanda. It's work, but of a different sort than you are used to."

It hadn't taken even that much to convince her to agree to be schooled by the strangers. For five years she'd studied hard, there at that beautiful place by the sea. Classmates came, classmates left. Teachers came and went; Tanda remained. She was a tall, dark-skinned sponge who absorbed all they taught and was always hungry for more.

At the end of five years the same plump man had shaken her hand. "You've done very well, Tanda. Now, you have another choice to make. You've been told about the job opportunities that you are qualified for. We have also explained to you the areas of further study you may undertake if that is your wish. You have to pick, Tanda. Or you can go home."

She'd long since learned how to make rude gestures, she made one then. The two of them had laughed and she had opted to continue her studies.

"Then, I will tell you one more thing, Tanda." He'd gone from laughing and joking to deadly serious in a heartbeat. "We travel places, you know that." She'd nodded. She had, after all, traveled to where she was.

"Let me show you something." What he showed her was a picture, taken from high up. It didn't mean anything to Tanda. Then the shot zoomed in, until Tanda recognized it as the river valley where her village was. Only there was no village. There was no sign that it had ever existed, in fact.

"This is where you lived, but it's different," he'd told her. "Here, in this place and time where we are now, there are no people. In fact," he waved his arm in a circle, "except for those of us here on this island, the entire planet has not another single human being on it. The only way to leave this place is in one of our machines."

That was no surprise; they'd made it clear from the first.

The man had gone on. "You will attend a preparatory school. One that feeds graduates to the University of Dhergabar; that university is one of the premier learning institutions of my people. A year to prepare further and if you do well there, then you'd be eligible for the University. Four years at the University..." He'd grinned at her. "You would be in the top 1% of the educated people in the universe."

"I'd like that," Tanda had told him.

"Except, what I just told you is the greatest secret of all time; a secret my race kills to protect."

Tanda had shrugged. "I don't tell secrets."

He'd smiled. "If you agree to go, you would be trained in such a way that you simply could not tell anyone."

"Since I would not anyway, I don't have a problem with that."

And so, five years later, she'd graduated from the University of Dhergabar, a budding young anthropologist, who was curious about human cultures, how they grew and developed, particularly how they dealt with meeting other cultures, more advanced cultures.

Oh, and the secret that was so important? Why, that was the Paratime Secret! Men in one universe had discovered a way to travel into alternate realities as easily as others traveled through space. Tanda learned a lot of surprising things, including that people weren't really originally from Earth, but their ancestors had come from Mars, long ago.

Ghaldron and Hesthor had discovered Paratime transposition; within a very short time Ghaldron-Hesthor conveyors had explored vast tracts of space-time.

The First Level was what they called the "Home Time Line." That was just one time line, because it was the only one that had discovered the Paratime Secret.

Then there was the Second Level. They were highly technologically advanced cultures, every bit as advanced as the First Level, except they did not have Ghaldron-Hesthor transposition conveyors. Quite a few of the Second Level cultures had learned to travel to the stars. That fascinated Tanda, but not as much as she was fascinated by what shape human societies took. And what had shaped those societies.

Third Level was nearly as advanced at Second Level, far ahead of anything Tanda's villagers had known, or would know for thousands of years.

Fourth Level was the largest level. The others had all resulted from low probability accidents; Fourth Level was where Tanda had come from. Civilizations on the Fourth Level ranged from space faring to primitive, hundreds of thousands of cultures and civilizations.

Then there was the Fifth Level, where the school had been. Fifth level had no indigenous humans, no civilizations.

There was never a single moment at the University where Tanda realized what she wanted to study. It came in bits and pieces, one idea at a time. Cultures and societies fascinated her. The impact of societies meeting, one far more advanced than another made her curious about what determined the outcome. Some peoples survived, some didn't. Not only did some cultures survive, they prospered. And others wilted like a snowflake in an inferno. She had no idea what the characteristics were that made the difference between a culture imploding on contact with a more advanced society, or adapting and accommodating itself to the changes required.

In her second year at the University a call had gone out for temporary researchers, to study the Kalvan Time Line.

Tanda had been exposed to Paratemporal transits; she'd been in conveyors several times. It had never occurred to her that all was not well with the system. If two conveyors happened to be at the same "place" and the same "time" at the same "instant," the field weakened. It was possible, when that happened, for outside objects to penetrate what was supposed to be impenetrable, invisible and undetectable. Sometimes those objects were living things, not infrequently, they were people.

To keep the Paratime Secret, the standing doctrine was to shoot anyone out of hand that entered a conveyor in transit. When Tanda had learned that, she'd had nightmares for weeks; it had been bad enough for her to have required psych treatment.

Corporal Calvin Morrison, Pennsylvania State Police, from the Fourth Level, Hispano-Columbian Sector, had been picked up by a conveyor. Calvin Morrison was not some poor, lost soul, whose meanderings led him to a lethal blunder. He was an armed policeman, weapon in hand, seeking to arrest a dangerous felon. And when the Paratime policeman had raised his weapon against him, Calvin Morrison had shot him, instead of the other way around.

Corporal Morrison had stumbled out of the conveyor, no longer in the Hispano-Columbian Sector where he'd originated. Instead, he emerged into the Aryan-Transpacific Sector, specifically the Styphon's House Subsector. There, a group of priests ruled North America, based on their monopoly of gunpowder, known locally as "fireseed."

The Paratime Police had moved quickly, flooding suspect time lines with investigators, searching for the person who'd wounded one of theirs. It had taken man-years of work before eventually a spent pistol cartridge had been found. Verkan Vall, then the deputy Chief of the Paratime Police, had transported into the time line where the empty casing had been found, masquerading as a trader. His mission was simple: the Paratime Secret was to be protected at all costs. If Calvin Morrison was a threat to it, he was to be killed.

Except, Calvin Morrison had not stood still. He was a genius, and on top of that, a clever, careful man. He'd shown his new hosts how to make gunpowder, he'd shown them a great many things. Most importantly to the Paracops, he'd constructed a "defense-in-depth" to explain what had happened to him and where he'd come from -- none of which involved the Paratime Secret.

For public consumption, he was from the "Winter Kingdom," a mythical land of snow and ice to his hosts, Korea to Calvin Morrison; he'd been a soldier there. The next layer of his defense was that he'd been abducted by sorcery, and would never be able to return home. A sore topic, one he didn't wish to talk about.

By the time Calvin Morrison's cover story was in widespread acceptance, he'd become Lord Kalvan, then Great King Kalvan, then the High King.

Verkan Vall determined that Kalvan was no threat to the Paratime Secret. Calvin Morrison knew what had happened to him, that much was certain. And he knew that he couldn't talk about it, and if there was any rocking of the boat, he could spoil what he'd built. He was an Emperor, he'd married a pretty blonde, a woman fit for any man's dreams of a wife and he was doing good work.

Verkan Vall and the Paracops decided to take no action against the new High King. But the same was not true of paratemporal theorists. Kalvan was something unique: a single individual who, in a matter of months, had changed the fabric of space-time all by himself. Other people had done the same thing, but none had done it with such dramatic swiftness and completeness. Every academician worth his or her salt was drawn to what was going on. Study teams were formed and sent to Kalvan's time line and to adjoining time lines to study what was happening.

Tanda had been co-opted for some of the fieldwork, at first on an adjoining time line. She helped with the studies of what had happened to the time lines without Kalvan's intervention. Her height and skin color had turned out to be hindrances to that. In her second season, she worked in the Kalvan Time Line itself, with what were called the Northern Ruthani, the natives local to the American continent, pushed aside when the Aryans, the Zarthani, had moved through. She looked enough like the Ruthani that major cosmetic changes to her body hadn't been required.