A Meeting at Corvallis (16 page)

But a hell of a lot longer,
he thought.

Nearly eight miles in circuit, an immense feat of labor. Two major bandit attacks and a large raid out of the Protectorate had bounced off it like buckshot off a tank in years past, but he thought the Corvallans tended to overestimate the security it gave them.

After the anthem, a delegation walked up to him. He swung down from the saddle and waited courteously; there were about two dozen of them, and they took a fair bit of handshaking and honored-to-see-you-sir-or-ma'ams. That was the problem: the President, the Provost, the representatives of the Faculty Senate…back right around the Change, they'd gotten a lot done here because it was obvious what needed doing, and they'd have died if they didn't do it. And the mechanisms they'd set up went on working well enough, as long as the rest of the world cooperated by not changing much either. But try to get a policy change…right now, just getting them all in the same spot at the same time was like pushing rocks uphill.

They're tired of fighting and want to relax and enjoy life,
he thought.
Pity the world won't cooperate.

When the formalities were over and the troops and spectators had marched off, the Bearkiller party and Major Jones walked their horses through the entry complex. That was a little more difficult than it would have been at Larsdalen; here they'd overlapped two sections of the city wall, so that the entrance was at right angles to it. You had to turn sharp left to get through the outer portal, go a hundred yards with walls on either side, then abruptly right again to enter the city through the inner gate. That meant that nothing longer than a wagon could come straight at the leaves of either entryway, even if someone filled in the perimeter ditch.

Eric looked up at the complex of tower and wall and sighed as the iron clatter of hoofbeats on pavement echoed back from the concrete and stone of their heights.

“Getting fortification envy?” Havel asked quietly. “Theirs is bigger and harder than ours?”

“Well…yeah, bossman. It'd be harder to get a shot at the weak point where the leaves of the gate meet with this setup.”

“Nah, it wouldn't. 'Cause the gate ain't the weak spot back home. They made their gates of timber here, with sheet steel bolted onto the surface.”

Eric thumped himself on the forehead, a fairly loud process when you were wearing a metal-backed gauntlet and a helmet. “And ours are solid welded steel. Probably stronger than the wall.”

“It'd be quicker to dig the concrete and stone out from around,” Havel agreed. He made a gesture up and around. “What happened here is that someone got a bright idea out of a history book. Your esteemed father tends to do that too. Sometimes it's brilliant. Sometimes it's a waste of time.”

Behind him Ritva giggled. “Dad's right, Uncle Eric, and you're wrong.” Her sister chimed in, and they chanted:
“So he gets to sing the
I was right
song.”

“Silence, peanut,” Havel said affectionately, turning and winking at her.

There was one more formality as they came out of the gatehouse: having their swords peace-bonded, as all edged weapons over ten inches had to be within the wall. That meant a thin wrapper of copper wire, sealed with a lead disk crimped in something that looked like a heavy-duty paper punch; that stamped the beaver-head symbol of the University into the soft metal. The wire didn't make it impossible to draw the sword, or even difficult; it just meant that it was obvious if you'd done so, and so simplified police-work.

Law here said every family had to keep its militia weapons at home and always ready, but most people walking the streets didn't bother to carry a long blade, which looked a bit unnatural to him now. Back in Bearkiller territory, a farmer plowing did it with sword slung at the hip, and a spear or crossbow or whatever across the handles. These days you didn't need them all that often, but when you did you needed them very badly indeed, and the occasions came without warning. You put on your weapons when you went outdoors, like your hat.

They turned their horses right along Monroe at the redbrick Julian Hotel—now a barracks for militia doing their wall-duty—and continued west past the white-plastered Italianate pile of the old courthouse with its central clock-tower, which provoked more rubbernecking. Mary spoke up; he flattered himself he could tell her voice from Ritva's, and was right about three-quarters of the time. Except when they were trying to fool him, which happened every so often.

“Dad, how can they have all these people in one place? Thousands of them!”

“About eight thousand, punkin. Ten times what we have at Larsdalen and a little more.”

“What do they all
eat
? They couldn't walk out to their fields! It's too far!”

He smiled; one thing he liked about the Changed world was that nobody assumed food and goods magically appeared in shops shrink-wrapped in plastic, not even kids, and not even the kids of the big boss. Not even the people who really
did
believe in magic; they were farmers too. He pointed to the railway that ran across their path, along NW Sixth Street.

“That runs along out into the farmlands south of here. Corvallan farmers don't make as much of their own tools and cloth as ours do—they buy it from the city-folk instead with the food they don't eat. And there's another railroad that goes west all the way to the ocean, at Newport, so they can bring in fish from there. The rails were laid before the Change, but the Corvallans keep them up. It's easy to haul wagons on rails, easier than on the roads; and they have boats on the river, and they buy from us and the Mackenzies and some of the people farther south—the McClintocks, a couple of others. And some things come from even farther away, like cattle from all the way over the Cascades.”

And let's not go into taxes and such,
he thought, as the two girls nodded gravely.
Sufficient unto the day. I didn't know shit about economics until experience and Ken Larsson showed me I had to.

Just then the streetlamps began to go on. They were gaslights, fed by methane from the town's sewage works, sparse and not very bright to anyone who remembered electricity. The girls and a couple of the younger house-staff near the wagon still gasped in delight as the lamplighters held their long rods up, nudged open the glass shutters at the tops of the metal standards and snapped sparks that turned into yellow flame. Near the river the buildings they showed were mostly warehouses or small factories of frame and brick; fire had gone through the riverfront on the night of the Change, when an airliner out of Portland crashed, and more later in the riots and fighting. The streets were clean, but there was a yeasty smell in the air, the sort you got from bulk storage of farm produce. Signs hung creaking above doors, advertising millers and maltsters, dealers in hops and cloth and salvaged bulk metals, leather and glassware, makers of disk-plows and reapers and sewing machines, purveyors of fine sewing thread—or as fine as you could get without cotton—and custom gear-trains, hydraulic power systems, livery stables that rented the teams for railroads, blacksmiths…

“Did you see that?” Signe asked, turning her head so abruptly that her tired horse tossed its own in protest at the shift in balance.

“What?” he said abstractedly; one of the great things about horses was that they had autopilots when it came to ambling straight ahead, so you could think about something else.

“The graffiti,” she replied.

“No,” he answered, surprised. Corvallis was a very tightly run ship these days; he supposed it came with all the civic spirit. “What did it say?”

“Help, I've fallen into the RenFaire and I can't get out!”

She giggled and her brother and sister-in-law smiled; Mike Havel gave a full-throated laugh. Mary and Ritva turned puzzled eyes on their elders.

“I bet that was written by someone over forty,” Havel chortled.

They turned right again and into a district where most houses were a century old or more; this part of Corvallis was laid out along a grid, and the streets were broad and tree-lined. Traffic was thick as the sunlight died, another strangeness in a world that mostly went home with the sun. Bicycles and pedicabs were numerous, and oxcarts and horse-drawn wagons, people on foot still more so as men and women walked home from work. The sound of human voices and feet was louder than wheels or hooves; most ground floors were workshops or small stores, with the proprietors living over them. Street vendors pushed barrows and cried out their toasted nuts and hot dogs in buns or toffee apples or hot cider; children ran home from school with their slates slung over their shoulders, and housekeepers came back from daily markets in chattering clumps with their full baskets; once a splendid red fire engine pulled by six glossy Belgians trotted past. That looked like a museum piece and probably had been until ten years ago, and it was pursued by still more children.

Feels more crowded than American cities this size ever did before the Change,
Havel thought.
Even in rush hour. They've built up most of the old open space and there are a lot more people per house. Well, you have to jam 'em in, when you've got a wall around them. Every extra foot of defensive perimeter means spreading your forces that bit thinner. But they aren't poor, crowded or no. Even the smelly types sweeping up the ox dung and horseshit into those little pushcarts look reasonably well fed.

Lamplight from most windows shone on the sidewalks, adding to the streetlights to make the night nearly bright enough to read by. The Havel children goggled at cobblers, tailors, bakers and saddlers, shops selling books and bicycle repairs, lanterns and eggbeaters, swords and knives and crossbows, candles and vegetables, eggs and jams and hams and bacon, taverns lively with raucous singing or even more raucous student arguments that spilled noise out into the chilly air along with the odors of frying onions, French fries, hamburgers and wine and beer, at churches of half a dozen varieties besides the two styles of Catholic, a miniature Buddhist temple and a couple of covensteads. There were doctors' offices, architects'…and once even a law firm's shingle.

Civilization,
Havel thought, grinning to himself and shaking his head.
Christ Jesus, we've got
lawyers
again. Ten years ago we were fighting off cannibals.

“Penny for 'em, honey,” his wife said.

“I was just thinking that I'm starting to gawk like a hayseed,” he said. “And this place is smaller now than the town where I went to high school!”

“You
are
a hayseed, darling.”

“I am?” he said, making his eyes go round in mock surprise.

Signe laughed. “You were born on a farm and lived on it until you enlisted in the Marine Corps. You thought Parris Island was the big time.”

“My dad worked the mines, mostly. We were close to town. The farm was just our homeplace.”

“Where your family raised spuds and pigs and cooked on a woodstove. And your idea of a good time was hunting deer.”

“Chasing girls and running my motorcycle were right up there. Besides, you like hunting deer too.”

“I do
now
. Back then I was a vegetarian. And when you got out of the Corps, you went and became a bush pilot in
Idaho
. You, my darling, are a hayseed of hayseeds and a hick of hicks. It's why you've done so well!”

The smile died a little as she looked around at the busy brightness and rubbed an index finger on the little white scar that nicked the bridge of her straight nose. “You know, it's scary, but
I'm
sort of impressed myself, and I grew up in the big city.”

“Portland's still bigger than this,” he said grimly.

“Portland isn't a city anymore,” she said shortly. “It's a labor camp and a mine. The city's dead. This is alive, at least.”

He nodded, then cast off gloom as they turned into a residential street overshadowed by huge oriental sycamores and lined by old homes, on Harrison near Twenty-third; it was less crowded, and some of the traffic was closed carriages with glazed windows, the CY9 equivalent of a stretch limo. Most of the homes belonged to the well-to-do, merchants and high officials of the Faculty Senate, with a sprinkling of the sororities and fraternities where the scions of Corvallis' elite did their bonding. A pair of the big brick houses were owned by the Bearkillers, for times like this when a delegation was in town; the arrangement was more or less like an embassy, though less formal. It would be undignified for the Outfit's leaders to stay at an ordinary inn. Staying with friends in town would be an imposition, and besides that gave political ammunition to the friends' rivals.

Corvallis had what was officially described as “vigorous participatory democracy”; Havel tended to think of it as more along the lines of “backstabbing chaos.”

Staff from Larsdalen had gone on several days ahead to prepare the Bearkiller consulate for them, and the windows were bright and welcoming, with woodsmoke drifting pungent from the brick chimneys. Hugo Zeppelt crowded out onto the veranda and bellowed greetings as he windmilled his arms: “It's the tall poppies! G'day, sport—good to see yer! And the little sheilas; Uncle Hugo's got a lollie for the both of you.”