Chapter 3

Tom came calling one night after that. He was our inveterate bachelor. He said that he was still looking for a woman patient enough for him. We figured that he was still shell-shocked from a wicked-bad experience.

We shared a little smoke after dinner, watching the ring dissapear into the distance. We got out the six-inch reflector telescope and looked for fires. It was more fun than using the map.

"You miss snow? Christmas?"

"Naah. Well, maybe snow. Christmas? Traffic? Sales? Parking the car at a mall? That's like missing mosquitoes and encephalitis."

"Amen, brother. Amen. The women must feel deprived. No shopping."

"Oh my God. That's like no football!"

We both sniggered. We both hated football, but we knew guys that were going through withdrawl.

We were getting mean.

"How about blind soccer? Tie up a cat, listen for the yowl, kick it?"

"Need a lot of cats. That's nothing bad, mind you, just messy." stoned giggles are fun.

Then we got serious.

"We gonna have kids?" he asked.

"What, you and me? Naah, I'm married."

"No, asshole. Our tribe. I haven't seen a trace of a pregnant woman and it's been a couple of years.

We should have rug munchers by now."

"Yeah, you're right. Something's blocking our fertility. The docs have microscopes. We'll let 'em check for motility to see if it's us or the women. I'll ask the women if they're having periods.

The Bug-Eyed Monsters talked to us about grandchildren as if they expected 'em. The question is when. Maybe we'd better start asking rude questions."

"Yah, man. You have been a rude boy." he snickered.

"Asshole."

He started singing "Red Red Wine" and I cracked up. He had a good reggae jive.

We reminisced for a while and called it a night.

I woke with Janet laying on top of me, looking into my face.

"Red, Red Wine?"

"Hey, it seemed like a good idea at the time."

"We're going to have to find Tom somebody. He's lonely."

"He's burned to a crispy shell. Some bitch got to him bad. Whoever puts the touch on him will have to be patient. Tom's been hurt past hurting."

"It shows. He doesn't flirt. He keeps his distance. He sleeps away from anyone."

I thought for a while. I really liked the guy and he needed help. He was slowly dying inside.

"White knight. Rescue. The perfect setup if the woman can carry it off. Hero worship."

"Brillaint. Now who's going to be our chicken?"

I grinned. Tom's morals were firmly entrenched in Vietnam.

"How about a young, sweet delicate morsel, just begging to be eaten up."

"You dirty, dirty man. We've got eight girls just starting a bush. I'll talk up Tom as a hero and see where it goes."

The plot thickened.

Tom liked to take patrol duty near the horses. We penned them together for company and shared them out pretty much haphazardly. We had no saddles at the time and just bridles, no bits. Some of them tended to be a bit 'fractious' Tom liked to walk among them, stroking a nose here and there, talking to them. They accepted him as he made much of them. He could start and stop a stampede with a whistle.

Two girls were starry-eyed over him within days. Janet had done her job all too well.

The girls were primed and ready for a hero, and they swallowed it hook, line and sinker.

They decided that they would show off for him, sort of 'getting up his nose'. They decided to take a couple of horses out for a ride while Tom was on patrol. It worked too well. The horses took off. The first thing Tom knew about it was the screams. Cindy was a short red-headed terror who was normally fearless. She was terrified now. She was holding on for dear life to the mane of a one ton animal hell bent on running. Her screeching like a knifed bobcat did nothing to slow the horse either.

Beth was a slender black girl that thought the ground Tom walked on was blessed. She realized that she had hitched herself to the wrong star when Cindy's little ride went out the window. She had both arms and both legs wrapped around the horse's neck, repeating over and over "Please stop. please stop. please stop..."

The horse she'd picked to ride wasn't vindictive and had a good idea of what Beth wanted.

Soon, he ambled to a stop within a grove of trees. She slid from the stallion's back and started kissing him like the fireman that had saved her cat. He nickered and nuzzled her neck. She didn't even mind the snot blown all over her shirt. She was on solid ground again.

Cindy, however, was a different story. The stallion she'd picked to ride matched her very well. All too well. Her ride had a vindictive streak and tried to scrape her off against anything that was fastened down, and at a high rate of speed. Her screeching gained in volume if anything, and her limpet-imitation got better. The horse was beginning to get pissed when she fasted both fists onto the horse's ears and screeched into them for all she was worth. That was the final blow. The stallion went from a full gallop to a sitting stop in a heartbeat. Cindy didn't. the screeching, red-haired fury catapulted over the horse's neck to crash upside-down into a walnut tree and silently slid to the ground.

Tom was in full pursuit. He'd latched onto one of the larger mares and headed after the problem children. Within a half-hour he came upon beth who was quickly making a pet of the young stallion she'd absconded with. He rode up to the grove where she'd been dumped.

"If you ever do that to me again I'm having short ribs for dinner, you big, beautiful bastard. Don't you ever scare me like that again. Damn you, horse." nicker.

"you hear me you idiot? I'm gonna worm my arm up your nose and pinch off what little brain you have if you do that again." nicker.

"Hmp. Just like a man." nicker.

Things were going fine there. Now for the other one. He still heard screeches from up-river.

He galloped on, looking for the source. He heard the screaming. Then it stopped. He urged his mount to run faster.

He came upon a grove where the stallion was pacing back and forth. The horse sounded and leapt to its hind feet, scoring the tree over and again. Tom felt the horse nerving itself into a blood lust.

He was about to come down on the girl with his hooves. Tom didn't slow. He leaped from the mare's back onto the stallion and wrapped his hand in the stallion's mane. The horse screamed out his anger at having another rider. Tom's blade cut deeply, severing the great vessels on either side of the horse's neck It dropped, its great heart pumping its blood out of its savaged vessels. The stallion died within moments.

Cindy lay motionless. Tom slid from the back of the dying stallion and evaluated the site before he touched anything. the silent shivering of her feet and calves told a damning tale. This was beyond his capabilities.

There were multiple breaks to her spine. She lay in an impossible position. He was afraid to move her.

Calming his mare, he rode her back to camp. The girl needed help, and fast or she would die at worst, be crippled for life at best. It was time to try the reserved juice from the silverbush.

Tom strode through camp, seeking his friend. He found Jim in his wagon trying to pry more data from the encyclopedia.

"Jim, it's do or die. we've got a bad spinal injury in the woods. We need the liquor from the silver plant or it's all over."

"Food has always presaged use of the plant. I suspect that without it the body will starve itself to death trying to heal. You'd best set up an IV drip before starting. A blood donor wouldn't hurt. I'll send you out with a doc and supplies to get thing started, then we'll follow on to build a shelter around your victim and resupply the food. this could take a while."

We supplemented a glucose drip with two quarts of blood. A feeding tube gave her measured doses of watered honey along with a full un-diluted dose of the plant sap. Tom sat vigil near the cot Cindy was placed on. Beth rode her horse to the site, threatening her horse all the while. She slid off the horse's back when they arrived.

"Thanks, dangerous." nicker.

"Go eat. don't go far." nicker.

The horse never left her sight.

Beth wrapped her arms around Tom's leg, leaned in and cried. Tom's big hand felt at home on her back.

They stayed there together for the two and a half months it took for the plant liquor to do its job and wear off.

Cindy woke up, stretched and wondered where the hell she was. Tom and Beth were sleeping on a cot next to hers, wrapped up in each other.

"What the hell happened?"

Four eyes popped open and stared at her.

"You bitch, if you ever try to talk me into riding a horse again I'm going to take a goddamned axe handle to your ignorant head and beat some sense into you, you fucking stupid cow. You damned near died and took me with you, you ignorant slut. I'd beat you to death if it wouldn't stop me from ragging on your dumb ass for the next thirty years about how shit-stupid you were."

SLAP.

"Close your dumb fucking mouth. You owe me for your damned stupid trick with the horses and I'm going to beat every ounce of payback out of you or die trying."

Oh, shit.

Cindy knew that deep shit didn't even begin to describe where she was. Quiet little Beth had just ripped her a new one and promised that this was just round one.

Tom, her idol, her love, just sat there looking at her like a piece of meat. Maybe she'd gone a bit too far this time. Yeah, right. Like maybe she'd just fucked up royally.

Tom looked her over as a field medic, now that she'd awakened. There was no sign of damage anywhere, be it skeletal, muscular or nervous system. He turned away from her and walked away, holding Beth's hand all the while. Beth suited his life just fine. She quietly supported him through thick and thin. She was comfortable and loving. Cindy was--a mad dog. He'd had his fill of those. No. Fucking. Way. Cindy was dumped by bell book and candle--she just didnt' know it yet.

Beth found that Tom felt right around her. Then she felt protective. After they slept together for the first time she was a tiger. She learned how to throw a knife and use an atl-atl. She became vicious in the defense of her man. They melted when they looked at each other. Jim recognized that silly-assed grin. He arranged a wedding party for his friend.

"It couldn't happen to a nicer guy."

"aww, fuck you."

Cindy saw the wedding take place, knowing that she was on the outside looking in once again.

It was hard, damned hard, to be the unlucky one. Again.

She kept herself from crying as she walked home.

A keyboard and screen were generated at the back of each encylopedia. The ecologists realized that a dialog would contribute to the survivability of the colonists.

A complaint about the polluted sediement struck a nerve with the ecologists. The dredges would be halted and modified units would be put in place within five years, as the technology for filtering and recovery could be implemented. The earth colonists replied "nothing worth while is ever easy."

Time-phased maps of the asteroid strikes were requested and provided, noting that the later strikes would have a more serious ecological impact as they hadn't had time to be leached out yet. The locations of races were plotted and leaching beds were situated to avoid them. Metal recovery phases were planned out.

This is when we figured out that the ecologists were computers. The race that had built them had died long ago. They would adopt our requests with only a token gesture towards testing our requests against the ecology. It was as if we had been tested and weighed as worthy. I didn't like it. We needed more oversight from a more mature viewpoint and objected. They complied and put a more robust testing suite in place.

The hidden ones exposed their existence to us. We received small laptop-sized computers and received a better history of the ringworld. It was over eight million years old. there had been several generations of re-birth on the ring--we were just the latest.

From Behind Other Eyes

I woke up high in my favorite tree. Stretching, I rolled over and pulled myself to the main trunk. the new trees that came to us several generations ago had interesting smells, and some grew savory nuts. Our life was good on many fronts. I took my time getting to the forest floor. Three females were after my loins and avoiding them was a game that got harder and harder. I was about to give in to two of them, letting them fight it out, when the wagons came.

When I sighted the newcomers I sped back up my tree and screeched out a warning. We were being invaded by enormous ones again. We had to brew poisons and dissapear among the dark green leaves.

We were reading all we could about the biology of the ring--all biota, be it plant, intelligent or non-intelligent.

There were a few cross-over races, one of which we had found in the plains-dewllers.

There were no sessile races, such as molluscs, fungi or communal tree colonies.

The cross-over races were traditionally of limited intelligence and ecological niche dwellers, such as arboreal or bearing young on land and living mostly in the water.

The giant otters that we'd spotted probably were of that niche.

Nothing like the 'swamp thing' had ever been recorded.

We came under the canopy of a non-earth-based forest. The trunks were huge and the heavy canopy made the ground underneath appear as if in twilight or even new dark.

The understory was almost barren, except for a few dark-tolerant species and lots of mushrooms.

A bare trail ran through it, more than wide enough for our wagons.

We camped when we were tired. We fed the stock, cooked, ate and slept.

Tiny hostile eyes kept watch.

It was disorienting to wake to such a gloomy environment. This is why I never even considered living in Seattle.

Once everyone was awake and had fertilized a tree or a bush we fed the stock and broke camp. We didn't stop to cook, rather wanting to put miles behind us. The map showed several hundred miles of this stuff with only occasional breaks. I wondered at the utility of such a single-resource environment and attempted to identify the species when I had time with the encyclopedia.

We were riding through one of the ring's air processing plants. The trees grew on minimally-acceptable soil with roots spreading out in huge flat webs. The roots inter-connected and could pass resouces from mineral-rich to mineral-poor areas, thus explaining the even coloration of the canopy. The trunks were hollow, capturing rain when it fell. The trees grew quickly to a uniform height and upon dying the trunks broke down in just a couple years to fertilize its neighbors. Odd fungi and plankton-like forms inhabited the water reservoirs in the plants that were not found elsewhere on the ring. Interesting.

We stopped for over a week at the first clearing in the woods. There was no soil to grow upon. The surface was similar to granite. We needed to wash clothes and take a break in general. The kids had been cooped up for weeks and were climbing the walls. The encyclopedia needed recharging, too. We hung out getting suntans and watching the goats. They were acting goofy.

At night we sat around a fire-tree campfire and listened to the guitar chorus. With a supply of new strings and hardwood from the forests we had new instruments and new players. We had everything from latin to jazz to classical to traditional folk to flamenco percussion guitar showing up. Tiny eyes watched and listened in wonder.

Soon we deveoped itchy feet and started down the trail again. There was nothing to do but to cross this thing.

The soil comprising the trail was remarkably uniform, like a compressed clay. We wondered how the trees had been trained to not grow in the strip which comprised the trail.

Some practiced guitar as we rode, some cooked over tiny fires in pots half full of sand. Others used the encyclopedia, while the more indigent played games such as backgammon and chinese checkers. As time passed we adopted a gypsy lifestyle. Gossip drove our daily life. We even found that we could talk to the three other wagon trains with the computers. The ring was doomed, helpless before the twin forces of gossip and sloth. The Chinese were distilling potato vodka, driving their wagon-master quietly nuts. I guess I had it pretty good. The western-asians, notably those from India, were busy spreading a variant of Buddhism. I knew that this could get us into trouble but there was not a damned thing I could do about it.

I pulled together my cabinet and we discussed why we hadn't seen anyone prosetylizing their favorite flavor of religion.

We had Christians, Moslems, Jews, Sikhs, Jain and ancestor worship out of China. It was as if a Buddhism had slipped thru a filter somehow that did not emphasize cultural outlets for rulership, only responsibility to one's self and others, being your equal. All sectarianism had been somehow abolished from our day-to-day lives.

The only thing left that could cause a war was resource scarcity or territoriality. Without nations there could be no nationalism. If we could keep slavery out of the picture then even local raids would be irrational.

"Why did you attack that tribe?"

"Eh? Oh, we were bored."

I can see a perverse logic that would drive that behavior, but it's damned edgy.

Yet each race we'd come to had a history of either raiding or being raided, giving each tribe a different, yet slightly psychotic flavor. Trade was needed and as fast as we could promote it. Music was innocuous and attractive to seemingly any race with ears. We needed more instruments.

You needed lips to use a horn. Most races we'd seen didn't have 'em.

We had horsehair and pine resin. We had bows. We made fiddles.

The kids were beating on everything with drumsticks. I strung up a couple of dulcimers and let 'em have at it.

From a guitar it's not a long stretch to make a bass.

All we needed was a horn section and we'd have a Mariachi band.

Jesus wept.

I know, I really shouldn't have said that out loud. We had too many Latinos with that strange sense of humor that gets baked into your head south of the Rio Grande.

We got bugles, then trumpets. Then tubas. We had a bastard mix between a Klezmer band, a Mariachi band and a polka band. John Phillip Sousa must have been rolling in his grave.

A xylophone was easy to make, even out of wood So were Tambourines. A Bhodran drum was a short step from a Tambourine. A native american dance drum was next.

At night, the quiet ones gathered by the hundreds to listen. If we'd had looked up at the trees we'd have seen nothing but eyes looking back down at us, silent, watching--listening and wondering.

I burned several bastard flutes before I got the hole intervals right. I left one on the wagon seat while I went to pee.

It was gone when I returned. Nobody would fess up to taking it. I heard the sound of a flute coming from a tree that night. We had critters. Sticky-fingered critters that liked music. I told the others. We mass-produced a few dozen flutes and left them beside the trail. More flute noises. Hm. If they climb, they've got fingers.

What can you play with fingers? A thumb piano! little strips of metal, all different lengths, secured over a sound box.

You flip the bars with your fingers, or even wands, and you get sounds. I played around with one, getting the sound box glued up and solid, then the sound bars set in with a fret bar below to hold 'em up and a brace behind to hold the bars down. It sounds like a music box when done right. I made a few with sixteen bars, two octaves.

I kept one and laid two out. Pretty soon we were playing with a fairy band at night. We never saw them, but we did jam.

You can make a thumb piano out of wood, too. I made one and left it behind, with a couple of saws and chisels I figured that as arboreals they didn't have any heat-oriented industry. The only arboreals in the encyclopedia were sixty pound cats. Before we left the forest we left behind cat-sized Tambourines and Bhodrans. A band's gotta have a percussion section.

The oxen liked the music. The horses seemed to listen. The chickens and goats thought it was one more noise.

The pigs-- The pigs swayed to the music. It was wild. We had boppin' pigs.

We kept making instruments. I'll never be a Benny Goodman but I know which end of a Clarinet to blow into. It doesn't take much lip, either, just air and fingers. After all, you need a clarinet for a good Klezmer band. Next, a bass sax. You STAND UP to play a bass sax. You have to. It's over five feet tall.

It'll rattle your fillings out. Cool stuff. Honk.

We had people writing down the music they knew and had heard their parents, aunts, uncles, grandfolks and cousins had played. We had impromptu polka parties. We had band concerts. We had folk fests. We even attempted "The Devil Went Down to Georgia" a time or two. We were weak on vocals but had a blast on instruments. We'd never had passed the first night of a battle of the bands. We were horrible, but horrible was better than nothing. Besides we got better. Either that or my ears got numb. It was garage band at its worst.

Besides, it was fun. People RUN AWAY from a bad Klezmer band.

We were so glad to leave that forest. The sun was like an old friend that had come to visit. We never tired of its presence. At the next intersection of streams that we found crops we recognized we stopped. We did more that stop--we built a small village. We built a long, high structure for threshing, weaving and kibitzing.