We Install (19 page)

As if on cue, an announcer said, “A paleo-ornitholologist has identified this creature as a
Titanis
, a flightless predatory bird previously believed extinct for almost two million years. Witchcraft is suspected in its strange resurrection.”

“Right on, Sherlock!” Lucy laughed, but shakily. She hadn't dreamt Fred O'Neill could do
that
. He was just lucky it hadn't taken a bite out of one of the Fernwood birders. Yet.

Her son's thoughts ran in a different direction. “How can you top him this time, Mom? A
Pteranodon
?”

“NFF,” John said. Lucy stared at him. All these years together, and she hadn't imagined he knew
that
bit of birders' slang. He was right, too. A
Pteranodon
didn't have any feathers. If she was going to top Fred, she had to come up with something that did.

She laughed again. This time, hysteria—or maybe just plain lunacy—lay under the mirth. If you were gonna go for it, you should
go
for it. “One thing,” she said. “If I bring this off, Fred's whupped.” If she didn't, chances were the spell would toast her. She tried not to think about that. The crowleyage? The magictrixity bill? Count the cost later. That kind of thinking was probably why people did so many really stupid things during wartime—one more point Lucy did her best not to think about.

Back to her
materia magica
. Which feathers to choose? She had no idea. But Fred wouldn't have known what color the
Titanis
was, either. He'd managed. If he had, so could she. She hoped.

The form the spell would take would resemble the ones she'd used before, especially the charm that brought the passenger pigeons up to be counted. But reaching back over a hundred years was one thing. Reaching back a million times that far …

“It's the same principle,” she said, and hoped she was right. Discovering she was wrong in the middle of the incantation wouldn't be much fun.

Do I really want to try this?
she wondered. She'd already started by then, though. It was either this or admit Fred O'Neill had won. She was damned if she'd do that. … A moment later, she wished she'd phrased that differently. One more thing it was too late to worry about.

Lights didn't just flicker—they went out. So did the CSPANC crystal. John's yelp from the family room said he couldn't watch
Titanis
any more, either. Lucy noticed all that as if from a hundred million miles—or a hundred million years—away. She was deep in the spell by then. Backing out would be worse than going forward.

“Come forth! Come forth! Come forth!” she commanded. Then she slumped to the floor. She'd never fainted before. Outside of women with the vapors in Victorian novels, who did? When she woke up—it couldn't have been more than a few seconds later—she felt silly. Her head spun as she stood up, but she made it.

Jesse hadn't even noticed. He was scanning the yard with binoculars. “See anything?” Lucy asked. Her voice seemed shaky—to her, anyway.

Again, Jesse didn't notice. “Nooo,” he said slowly. Lucy's heart sank. Had she half-fried her brains for nothing? Would Fred O'Neill and Fernwood spend the next year gloating? But then her son stiffened like a bird dog pointing. “Holy crap! There! In the magnolia.” Darned if he didn't point, though not with his nose.

Lucy went over to the window and stared. For a second, she didn't see it. She was looking for purple and white or something else gaudy, the way artists always showed it. The real critter, though, was brown and green. Which made sense, when you thought about it. Even way back then, protective coloration mattered.

It was about the size of a crow. It didn't look like one, though, and wouldn't have if it were all black. It looked like a lizard that had decided to play bird. Trouble was, the poor lizard might've heard of birds, but it had never seen one, so it got stuff wrong. It didn't have a beak—it had a a mouthful of teeth. It had a long, lizardy tail. But feathers sprouted from the tail, and from the wings, too, even if those also had claws to remind everybody they weren't done being arms yet.

“I did it. I really did it.” Lucy sounded amazed, even to herself. “
Archaeopteryx
.”

“
Archaeopteryx
,” Jesse agreed, awe in his voice. “There's one for the life list! Can it really fly?”

“Don't know,” Lucy replied. She got her answer a moment later. An Anna's hummingbird dive-bombed the funny-looking stranger. The
Archaeopteryx
snapped at it, but missed. It had a long, lizardy tongue. Another dive-bomb persuaded it not to hang around. Off it flew. Not gracefully, maybe, but it flew.

Jesse was talking on his pocket crystal. Lucy's spell hadn't blasted that, anyhow. “No way!” she heard Kathleen exclaim when Jesse told her what they'd just observed.

“Way,” he assured her, and then said to Lucy, “She's telling her dad.”

“An
Archaeopteryx
?” That was Fred O'Neill's bull-in-a-china-shop bellow. “Well … fudge. I'm not gonna top that this year.”

You'll never top it
, Lucy thought.
You can't, not till they find an older bird. If they ever do
. Even so, he'd come up with
something
next year, sure as sure. He always did. This time around, though, the Yule Bird count belonged to Sunset Grove. and, as far as Lucy was concerned, that was just how things were supposed to be.

DOWN IN THE BOTTOMLANDS

This story was lucky enough to win the Hugo for novella at the 1994 Worldcon in Winnipeg. Charles Sheffield's novelette, “Georgia on My Mind,” which appeared in the same issue of
Analog
—not just the same magazine, mind you, but the same issue—won the Hugo for novelette at the same convention. Stan Schmidt, the longtime boss man of
Analog
, didn't win the Hugo for editor that year. Go figure. I owe him major props for his suggestions about the story, though, and I'm delighted to say as much here. I also owe my youngest daughter, Rebecca. She was just a toddler at the time, but she gave me the idea for the koprit bird. Thanks, hon.

A
double handful of tourists climbed down from the omnibus, chattering with excitement. From under the long brim of his cap, Radnal vez Krobir looked them over, comparing them with previous groups he'd led through Trench Park. About average, he decided: an old man spending money before he died; younger folks searching for adventure in an overcivilized world; a few who didn't fit into an obvious category and might be artists, writers, researchers, or anything else under the sun.

He also looked over the women in the tour group with a different sort of curiosity. He was in the process of buying a bride from her father, but he hadn't done it; legally and morally, he remained a free agent. Some of the women were worth looking over, too: a couple of tall, slim, dark Highheads from the eastern lands who stuck by each other, and another of Radnal's own Strongbrow race, shorter, stockier, fairer, with deepset light eyes under heavy brow ridges.

One of the Highhead girls gave him a dazzling smile. He smiled back as he walked toward the group, his wool robes flapping around him. “Hello, friends,” he called. “Do you all understand Tarteshan? Ah, good.”

Cameras clicked as he spoke. He was used to that; people from every tour group wasted pictures on him, though he wasn't what they'd come to see. He went into his usual welcoming speech:

“On behalf of the Hereditary Tyranny of Tartesh and the staff of Trench Park, I'm pleased to welcome you here today. If you haven't read my button, or if you just speak Tarteshan but don't know our syllabary, my name is Radnal vez Krobir. I'm a field biologist with the park, doing a two-year stretch of guide duty.”

“Stretch?” said the woman who'd smiled at him. “You make it sound like a sentence in the mines.”

“I don't mean it like that—quite.” He grinned his most disarming grin. Most of the tourists grinned back. A few stayed sober-faced, likely the ones who suspected the gibe was real and the grin put on. There was some truth in that. He knew it, but the tourists weren't supposed to.

He went on, “In a bit, I'll take you over to the donkeys for the trip down into the Trench itself. As you know, we try to keep our mechanical civilization out of the park so we can show you what all the Bottomlands were like not so long ago. You needn't worry. The donkeys are very sure-footed. We haven't lost one—or even a tourist—in years.”

This time, some of the chuckles that came back were nervous. Probably only a couple of this lot had ever done anything so archaic as getting on the back of an animal. Too bad for the ones just thinking about that now. The rules were clearly stated. The pretty Highhead girls looked particularly upset. The placid donkeys worried them more than the wild beasts of the Trench.

“Let's put off the evil moment as long as we can,” Radnal said. “Come under the colonnade for half a daytenth or so and we'll talk about what makes Trench Park unique.”

The tour group followed him into the shade. Several people sighed in relief. Radnal had to work to keep his face straight. The Tarteshan sun was warm, but if they had trouble here, they'd cook down in the Trench. That was their lookout. If they got heatstroke, he'd set them right again. He'd done it before.

He pointed to the first illuminated map. “Twenty million years ago, as you'll see, the Bottomlands didn't exist. A long stretch of sea separated what's now the southwest section of the Great Continent from the rest. Notice that what were then two lands masses first joined in the east, and a land bridge rose
here
.” He pointed again, this time more precisely. “This sea, now a long arm of the Western Ocean, remained.”

He walked over to the next map, drawing the tourists with him. “Things stayed like that until about six and a half million years ago. Then, as that southwest section of the Great Continent kept drifting northward, a new range gradually pushed up
here
, at the western outlet of that inland sea. When it was cut off from the Western Ocean, it began to dry up: it lost more water by evaporation than flowed into it from its rivers. Now if you'll come along …”

The third map had several overlays, in different shades of blue. “The sea took about a thousand years to turn into the Bottomlands. It refilled from the Western Ocean several times, too, as tectonic forces lowered the Barrier Mountains. But for about the last five and a half million years, the Bottomlands have had about the form we know today.”

The last map showed the picture familiar to any child studying geography: the trench of the Bottomlands furrowing across the Great Continent like a surgical scar, requiring colors needed nowhere else on the globe to show relief.

Radnal led the tourists out to the donkey corral. The shaggy animals were already bridled and saddled. Radnal explained how to mount, demonstrated, and waited for the tourists to mess it up. Sure enough, both Highhead girls put the wrong foot in the stirrup.

“No, like this,” he said, demonstrating again. “Use your left foot, then swing over.”

The girl who had smiled at him succeeded on the second try. The other balked. “Help me,” she said. Breathing out through his beaky nose in lieu of sighing, Radnal put his hands on her waist and all but lifted her into the saddle as she mounted. She giggled. “You're so strong. He's so strong, Evillia.” The other Highhead girl—presumably Evillia—giggled too.

Radnal breathed out again, harder. Tarteshans and other folk of Strongbrow race who lived north of the Bottomlands and down in them
were
stronger than most Highheads, but generally weren't as agile. So what, either way?

He went back to work: “Now that we've learned to mount our donkeys, we're going to learn to dismount.” The tourists groaned, but Radnal was inexorable. “You still have to carry your supplies from the omnibus and stow them in the saddlebags. I'm your guide, not your servant.” The Tarteshan words carried overtones of
I'm your equal, not your slave
.

Most of the tourists dismounted, but Evillia stayed up on her donkey. Radnal strode over to her; even his patience was fraying. “This way.” He guided her through the necessary motions.

“Thank you, freeman vez Krobir,” she said in surprisingly fluent Tarteshan. She turned to her friend. “You're right, Lofosa; he
is
strong.”

Radnal felt his ears grow hot under their coat of down. A brown-skinned Highhead from south of the Bottomlands rocked his hips back and forth and said, “I'm jealous of you.” Several tourists laughed.

“Let's get on with it,” Radnal said. “The sooner we get the donkeys loaded, the sooner we can begin and the more we'll see.” That line never failed; you didn't become a tourist unless you wanted to see as much as you could. As if on cue, the driver brought the omnibus around to the corral. The baggage doors opened with a hiss of compressed air. The driver started chucking luggage out of the bins.

“You shouldn't have any problems,” Radnal said. Everyone's gear had been weighed and measured beforehand, to make sure the donkeys wouldn't have to bear anything too bulky or heavy. Most people easily shifted their belongings to the saddlebags. The two Highhead girls, though, had a night demon of a time making everything fit. He thought about helping them, but decided not to. If they had to pay a penalty for making the supply donkeys carry some of their stuff, it was their own fault.

They did get everything in, though their saddlebags bulged like a snake that had just swallowed a half-grown humpless camel. A couple of other people stood around helplessly, with full bags and gear left over. Smiling a smile he hoped was not too predatory, Radnal took them to the scales and collected a tenth of a unit of silver for every unit of excess weight.

“This is an outrage,” the dark brown Highhead man said. “Do you know who I am? I am Moblay Sopsirk's son, aide to the Prince of Lissonland.” He drew himself up to his full height, almost a Tarteshan cubit more than Radnal's.

“Then you can afford the four and three tenths,” Radnal answered. “
I
don't keep the silver. It all goes to upkeep for the park.”

Grumbling still, Moblay paid. Then he stomped off and swung aboard his animal with more grace than Radnal had noticed him possessing. Down in Lissonland, the guide remembered, important people sometimes rode stripehorses for show. He didn't understand that. He had no interest in getting onto a donkey when he wasn't going down into Trench Park. As long as there were better ways of doing things, why not use them?

Also guilty of overweight baggage were a middle-aged Tarteshan couple. They were overweight themselves, too, but Radnal couldn't do anything about that. Eltsac vez Martois protested, “The scale at home said we were all right.”

“If you read it right,” Nocso zev Martois said to her husband. “You probably didn't.”

“Whose side are you on?” he snarled. She screeched at him. Radnal waited till they ran down, then collected the silver due the park.

When the tourists had remounted their donkeys, the guide walked over to the gate on the far side of the corral, swung it open, and replaced the key in a pouch he wore belted round his waist under his robe. As he went back to his own animal, he said, “When you ride through there, you enter the park itself, and the waivers you signed come into play. Under Tarteshan law, park guides have the authority of military officers within the park. I don't intend to exercise it any more than I have to; we should get along just fine with simple common sense. But I am required to remind you the authority is there.” He also kept a repeating handcannon in one of his donkey's saddlebags, but didn't mention that.

“Please stay behind me and try to stay on the trail,” he said. “It won't be too steep today; we'll camp tonight at what was the edge of the continental shelf. Tomorrow we'll descend to the bottom of the ancient sea, as far below mean sea level as a medium-sized mountain is above it. That will be more rugged terrain.”

The Strongbrow woman said, “It will be hot, too, much hotter than it is now. I visited the park three or four years ago, and it felt like a furnace. Be warned, everyone.”

“You're right, freelady, ah—” Radnal said.

“I'm Toglo zev Pamdal.” She added hastily, “Only a distant collateral relation, I assure you.”

“As you say, freelady.” Radnal had trouble keeping his voice steady. The Hereditary Tyrant of Tartesh was Bortav vez Pamdal. Even his distant collateral relations needed to be treated with sandskink gloves. Radnal was glad Toglo had had the courtesy to warn him who she was—or rather, who her distant collateral relation was. At least she didn't seem the sort who would snoop around and take bad reports on people back to the friends she undoubtedly had in high places.

Although the country through which the donkeys ambled was below sea level, it wasn't very far below. It didn't seem much different from the land over which the tourists' omnibus had traveled to reach the edge of Trench Park: dry and scrubby, with thorn bushes and palm trees like long-handled feather dusters.

Radnal let the terrain speak for itself, though he did remark, “Dig a couple of hundred cubits under the soil hereabouts and you'll find a layer of salt, same as you would anywhere in the Bottomlands. It's not too thick here on the shelf, because this area dried up quickly, but it's here. That's one of the first clues geologists had that the Bottomlands used to be a sea, and one of the ways they map the boundaries of the ancient water.”

Moblay Sopsirk's son wiped his sweaty face with a forearm. Where Radnal, like any Tarteshan, covered up against the heat, Moblay wore only a hat, shoes, and a pocketed belt to carry silver, perhaps a small knife or toothpick, and whatever else he thought he couldn't do without. He was dark enough that he didn't need to worry about skin cancer, but he didn't look very comfortable, either.

He said, “Were some of that water back in the Bottomlands, Radnal, Tartesh would have a better climate.”

“You're right,” Radnal said; he was resigned to foreigners using his familial name with uncouth familiarity. “We'd be several hundredths cooler in summer and warmer in winter. But if the Barrier Mountains fell again, we'd lose the great area that the Bottomlands encompass and the mineral wealth we derive from them: salt, other chemicals left by evaporation, and the petroleum reserves that wouldn't be accessible through deep water. Tarteshans have grown used to heat over the centuries. We don't mind it.”

“I wouldn't go that far,” Toglo said. “I don't think it's an accident that Tarteshan air coolers are sold all over the world.”

Radnal found himself nodding. “You have a point, freelady. What we get from the Bottomlands, though, outweighs fuss over the weather.”

As he'd hoped, they got to the campsite with the sun still in the sky and watched it sink behind the mountains to the west. The tourists gratefully descended from their donkeys and stumped about, complaining of how sore their thighs were. Radnal set them to carrying lumber from the metal racks that lined one side of the site.

He lit the cookfires with squirts from a squeeze bottle of starter fuel and a flint-and-steel lighter. “The lazy man's way” he admitted cheerfully. As with his skill on a donkey, that he could start a fire at all impressed the tourists. He went back to the donkeys, dug out ration packs which he tossed into the flames. When their tops popped and began to vent steam, he fished them out with a long-handled fork.