The Far Side (70 page)

“He’s black -- and their preferred slaves are white.  The people we were with were white.  Some of them were crooked, some evil and some splendid.  If you don’t use your judgment, if you let those judgments, based on your preconceptions, guide you, you can end up dead, other people in the party can end up dead -- or worse, you end up slaves.”

“That seems -- unreal.”

Kris gestured at Ezra.  “We found a chamber in a cave where once upon a time the occupants kept slaves.  The regular folks slept on hammocks, up and down the walls.  The slaves slept sitting up on the floor, lest they throw themselves off an upper level hammock and kill themselves.  Those slaveholders were white people too.

“Andie and I were women, in a culture that esteems women -- as wives and mothers.  They thought I was a man because I wore pants, and Andie at four feet six inches tall, confused them entirely with short hair and long pants.  Women in their culture wear dresses and long hair and most are within an inch or two of five six.”

“Judgment, Captain.  Judgment and values are what will carry you through.  Not political correctness or relativism.”

“You’ll never guess why I think Miss Boyle will be an asset to our program,” the general said dryly.

“There is one other thing, something that no one else has thought of,” Kris told them.  “People are making fusors in their basements and garages, all over the planet, I understand.  Some of those fusors are the variety that make doors.  People are going to make a lot of doors here in the next few years.

“It isn’t that difficult to make Far Side doors.  That means we’re going to have a lot of people going through a door and getting lost or getting in trouble and the same thing is true in the reverse.  It must be a huge universe out there, or we have just been lucky we haven’t been visited yet in modern times.”  She waved at Diyala.  “Imagine how exciting it would be if the Tengri had a door that opened here.  Chew on that for a while.”

Kurt whistled.  “Jesus!  I never thought about the shoe being on the other foot!”

Ezra was more prosaic.  “After what it took to do a simple rescue like ours, you have to wonder what it’s going to be like to rescue others.”

“And, considering the current degree of unhappiness with things,” Kris added, “there will always be the possibility that some of those leaving have neither intention of coming back nor any desire to be rescued.”

“There’s definitely a lot to chew on,” General Briggs said.  “What say we go back to campus and have lunch and we can talk about it some more?”

* * *

Andie Schulz sat expressionlessly across the conference table as Jon Bullman sat down opposite her.

He held up two pages of paper, clipped together.

“Is there anything else?” he asked with a little laugh.  Two pages of three columns each, 10 point type -- Andie’s wish list.

“That’s a start.”

“You need to do another list,” he told her.  He let the pages flutter.  “I understand this, and I don’t have a problem with any of it.  The panty-waists and stuffed-shirts will, though.”

“That is my bottom line,” she told him.

“Fine, just fine.  But the chicken-shit crowd will look at this and decide that you have to be stopped -- for your own good, of course.  And then you would have a very difficult time -- at least for the time being.  Better, Miss Schulz, to have another list -- one that will set their little politically-correct, liberal-progressive hearts beating with pride.

“Instead of a UAV, you should have the collected works of Mao.  Instead of thirty more P90s, you need some of the poems of Maya Angelou.  Things like that.”  He smiled genially.  “You should have a few Native American canoes, instead of three outboards, and it should be a ‘Pacific Islander’ catamaran instead of just a two-hull cat boat.”

She looked at him without expression.  “None of us have been able to figure you out, Mr. Bullman.  Not even Linda.  She said the book on you is mixed.  You helped with the ten million person march, but that you had been planning on running for the NY state Senate this fall.”

“I had to withdraw from the race,” he told her.  “Late this spring, my oldest daughter was talking to her friends at school during lunch when she collapsed, jerking and suffering serious convulsions.  She was diagnosed with ‘Uncertain Origin Epilepsy.’  They have done MRIs, CAT scans, ultra-sounds -- they took her brain apart virtually, and they can find no cause for the seizure.

“While she was undergoing testing, she had another seizure and since she was wired up to an EEG at the time, they had a good read on what was happening -- even if they still didn’t know what’s causing the seizures.

“They put her on some drugs, and in the five months since, she has had no more seizures.  There is no certainty in life, Miss Schulz -- they could return at any time.  About a half percent of her brain cells die with each seizure.  She has trouble remembering a few things now.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.  My father’s death has given me a new perspective on compassion that I never imagined.  I am truly sorry.”

“He was a very brave man, strong and determined,” Jon told her.  “I admired him, I admired his struggle and I greatly admire the way his daughter turned out.

“Just because I’m a New York Democrat, do not assume I have much in common with most of the members of my party.  Like a lot of people, my actual beliefs don’t fit into the neat little boxes people have made for us.

“I do think you acted rashly and foolishly, without thinking everything through.  That said, you are eighteen; at that age no one spends enough time thinking things through and even when you think you have, you have so many gaps in your experience that major concerns are omitted.  You were not malicious and, in hindsight, it’s now clear that the doom-sayers were wrong once more.  People like me, Miss Schulz, are getting almighty tired of narrow-minded bigots defining what can and can’t be done in this country -- whether they come from the left or the right.”

“And this answers my question in what way?”

“For reasons I don’t pretend to understand, back in February the senior senator from New York ended up seated next to me at a Democrat Party fund-raising dinner.  We struck up a conversation, and he seemed genuinely interested in my candidacy for the state senate.  Since then, he’s aided me a few times.  Clearly, I was being cultivated and courted.

“People at his level do not engage in clear quid pro quos.  There is nothing so crude, even, as a mention of ‘You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.’  When I had to withdraw from the campaign for personal reasons, he was quite supportive and told me that there would be a next time.  There is always, he told me, a next time.

“When they were looking around for someone to come here, he offered my name as a suggestion.  Good Democrat, former shop steward, and then popular line foreman and a bunch of other ticket punches like the Lion’s Club -- where I volunteer because they have an outreach program for handicapped kids, and I love helping kids.

“They completely ignored, as near as I can tell, everything else in my history that doesn’t fit their idea of what a liberal-progressive should be.  Now my would-be mentor is in the dock with a lot of his peers, and he’s too busy trying to save his ass than worrying about me.  In fact, except for the couple of dozen panty-waists and moron scientists that have shown up here, no one is paying any attention to me at all.

“So, Miss Schulz -- do up another list.  An innocuous list.  Do what you please, however.  I would be willing, if nothing else, to offer advice if you would let me.”

“Advice, as opposed to mandates?”

“Miss Schulz, your sins were those of youthful exuberance.  I have trouble seeing that as a bad thing.  You lack experience, to be sure, but at the same time, I don’t think you are someone who makes the same sort of mistake twice.”

“I try not to,” she told him.

“That’s what we do, Miss Schulz.”  He tapped the list.  “Some of this you are clearly passing to the Arvalans and some you are not.  I seriously doubt if they will be able to operate even a simple UAV for a long time to come.  On the other hand, hand saws, hammers, files, chisels and assorted other tools are a different matter.

“The outboards -- I’m not sure about those, but the catamaran is probably for them.”

“Yes.  It’s a special design I got from one of my dad’s drinking buddies who designs racing hulls.  There is no way to get anything longer than fourteen feet through the door, because of the narrow tunnel on the other side.

“I am loath to start changing the shape of the other side significantly.”

“It didn’t seem affected by two pallets of supplies you put in there.”

“No, but it wouldn’t do to find out that something we did broke the connection.  I like the Arvalans; they have an interesting planet, but I don’t want to live there the rest of my life.”

“The ATVs,” he said, looking at her.  “You have to realize that transporting gasoline through the door is a risk.  You might want to be sure how safe the containers will be when exposed to the magnetic field and voltages that exist around the Far Side Door.”

“Linda took a five gallon gas can through once, during the rescue.  She was thinking they could use ATVs to chase after us, but Jake Lawson found us before she could arrange for them.  We used the gas to burn some farm fields.”

He lofted the sheets again.  “I know you are now somewhat wealthy, Miss Schulz, but this is going to cost a lot.  While I can deflect the government busy-bodies for the most part, I think it is safe to say that for the foreseeable future there is no chance of the government funding any of this.”

“That’s fine with me.  Look me in the eye and tell me that you’re an honest man.”

“I’m as honest as most people,” he told her.

“More honest than Richards and Foster?”

“Please, Miss Schulz, the worst mistake you will ever make in your life is to compare the rest of us with those two.”

“My friends Kris and Ezra are intelligent, but we had a lot on our plates over there.  Once, exactly once, the subject of money came up among us, and it was in reference to Ezra not wanting to teach them poker, so they wouldn’t develop ‘poker-faces.’”

“I have to say, I never thought about it, either,” Bullman told her.

“Well, they’re pretty much like us, although on their planet copper is significantly more rare than it is here.  Thus, there was a strong push early on to work iron, instead of copper, bronze, and brass.

“Like us, they use metal coins, worth, literally, their weight in the metal.  But, copper, silver, gold and platinum occur in different abundances there than they do here.  Platinum, for instance, is more common there than silver, while silver and gold have about equal abundances.  Since gold is softer than silver, they use it for ornamentation -- jewelry -- rather than coins.

“Thus, a hundred iron washers about an inch across, are worth a platinum disk about the size of a quarter.  Two platinum disks are worth a coin the size of a silver dollar -- only it’s made of copper and not silver.

“Their equivalent of a twenty dollar gold piece is a piece of copper shaped a little like a bell.  At one point we needed something metal that would be easy to work so we could tip the crossbow quarrels.  I saw the little bell-things and asked for all of them to be gathered up.  I wondered why they seemed upset at the time, and I was impressed how well they policed the battlefield after the battle to recover quarrels.

“I had no way of knowing that each of those copper pieces were worth about a month’s pay.  We got it sorted out in the end, but it’s just one of a million things that can trip you up.

“I shipped a hundred pounds of copper across, and they feel bad because I’ve been trading them straight across for their most common jewelry metal -- an amalgam of platinum and gold.  They think they are taking advantage of me.”

Jon Bullman sat still, until he finally shook his head.  “Morality, once you go through that door, takes on entirely new and different shapes than anyone ever imagined.  Black people holding white slaves.  The local white folk think women should be barefoot and pregnant...”

“Not barefoot,” Andie corrected.  “But, yes.  There was a serious population problem at first, with only forty or so women of child-bearing age who survived.  The average number of children each of those women had, once they were there, was five -- and the men were hyper-solicitous of their health and safety, and had to be for another hundred years or so until they got through the population bottleneck.  Even now women are respected in ways our society has never experienced -- but on the other hand, beyond being kept safe, they are expected to keep pregnant and raise their children.”

“Miss Schulz, what are your ultimate intentions?”

“To keep the Arvalans safe from the Tengri.  To educate both sides about what the word ‘equality’ means.  The Arvalans no longer have the critical situation they once had -- women can afford to no longer be cosseted -- not to mention, it would help their society if they freed half the population to be all that they could be.  The Tengri outnumber them many times over -- but they can double their effective population at a stroke if women are free to work.”

“I know you think highly of the Japanese for the ability to adapt to Western ideas.  You do realize that women in their society lagged by fifty or sixty years, with Western ways?” Bullman asked.