The Far West (12 page)

A few days after Wash’s visit, Professor Torgeson and I headed back to Mill City to get ready for fall classes. Professor Jeffries was staying at the study center until the very last minute, on account of the medusa lizards. He and Professor Torgeson planned to alternate weekends at the center through the fall, to check on the animals and see how Mr. Siwinski was getting on with all the observations.

Lan and Papa came to meet the ferry and bring me home. When I walked in the door, Allie hugged me, read me a lecture on how awful and unladylike it was for me to be running around in the settlements, and burst into tears. Robbie rolled his eyes and told her she wasn’t Mama, and anyway I was old enough to decide things like that for myself, which got Allie started on scolding him instead of me.

In between all the talk, I got caught up on the family news. Robbie had finished his degree and found a job at Mr. Imhada’s pharmacy while he thought about what he wanted to do next. Nan was in a family way again, and Robbie teased her about it constantly, which got both Nan and Rennie mad at him. Brant and Rennie were still staying in the big house with Papa and Mama and the rest of us, though it was nearly a year
since they’d come back from Oak River. Brant was saving up from his job at the shipping company. He said it was for a house, but I noticed that neither he nor Rennie said much about where the house would be. I figured they wanted to go back out to the settlements and were avoiding arguments.

Mama had made a special welcome-home dinner, with roast chicken, chestnut-and-black-rice dressing, greens with hexberry sauce, candied beets, and bread pudding. She’d made sure the whole family would be there for it, too, at least everyone who was still in Mill City. In addition to Nan and her husband George, Mama had invited Professor Graham and Roger Boden to come for dinner, so it was almost as many folks around the table as we used to have when all of my brothers and sisters were home.

I was surprised to see Roger at first, but Mama said that he’d taken a job at the Settlement Office, and he and Lan had gotten friendly. I wasn’t surprised. Lan might have decided he was done with schooling for good, but he’d always liked talking magic theory and finding out about strange and exotic new spells, and you couldn’t get much stranger than the things Roger had specialized in.

Being the center of attention made me a little uncomfortable, but it wasn’t long before one of the childings distracted Rennie. Then Papa, Lan, Roger, and Professor Graham got to talking about the latest experiments in the magic laboratory, and pretty soon there were a lot of little conversations all around the table and I could relax and not be noticed.

Or at least not until there was a lull in the conversation and Lan took a notion to quiz me about the Hijero-Cathayans.
I couldn’t help rolling my eyes, but I described the adept’s spell casting in as much detail as I could remember. He frowned when I told him about the way the adept’s aides moved the whole time.

“Dancing?” he asked.

“Well, not exactly dancing,” I said. “But not like the hand passes for third-declension spells, either. Slower and smoother, and moving their whole selves, not just their hands.”

“I’ve never heard of anything like that.” He sounded like he didn’t quite believe what I was telling him.

“It’s what they did!”

Roger leaned forward. “It’s not that unreasonable. There are a couple of Scandian spells that work with whole-body movement.”

“Those aren’t coordinated magic,” Professor Graham said. “You can’t get the precision necessary for a group working by depending on physical movement alone.”

“Besides, nobody could cast a spell the way you describe,” Lan said in an infuriatingly superior tone. “It’s too slow. The magic would leak away before you could do anything with it.”

“The aides weren’t casting the spell,” I pointed out, holding on to my temper with both hands. “Master Adept Farawase was doing that.”

Professor Graham frowned. “They had to be doing some spell to pool their magic. That’s how Hijero-Cathayan spells work.”

“I didn’t see anything. They just … danced, all together. Except for the master adept herself.”

“I’ll have to be sure to ask Professor Jeffries for his write-up,” Papa said thoughtfully. “It’s a pity the adept was not willing to allow other observers. There are so few opportunities to see genuine Hijero-Cathayan spellwork in this country.”

Professor Graham snorted. “Few? None, I’d say. To see genuine Hijero-Cathayan spellwork, you need a genuine Hijero-Cathayan team, and Farawase’s was the first to come to Columbia that I’ve ever heard of.”

“We may not have seen actual spell casting, but we know the theory behind Hijero-Cathayan spellwork,” Lan said. “I spent most of that last year at Simon Magus studying it. And I never heard about anything like this dance of yours, Eff.”

“One actual observation is better than a hundred theories,” Roger said, like he was quoting someone. “Maybe the Hijero-Cathayans haven’t told us as much about their magic as we think they have.”

“Or maybe your professors didn’t know as much as they might,” I said before I thought. I froze for just a second. Then, before all the implications of what I’d said could really sink in, I went on quickly, “Why are you so interested, anyway?”

“Because of the expedition,” Roger said instantly.

“Expedition?” I said, puzzled.

“Master Adept Farawase’s expedition,” Lan said. “Didn’t you hear? Nobody at the Settlement Office has talked about anything else for the past week.”

I frowned at him. “I’ve been out at the study center ever since the Cathayans left, and we didn’t exactly get a lot of mail. Is she taking her aides out to the Far West?”

“Sending them, more likely,” Roger said. “At least one.”

“She’s talked President Trent into sending out an exploratory expedition,” said Lan. “The Cathayans are going to cosponsor it. She’s been pushing the idea ever since she got back to Washington from Mill City and caught out the Secretary of State and the head of the Frontier Management Department in an argument about whether it would be worse for the country to have another failed expedition, or another surprise like the medusa lizards. At least, that’s what Mr. Parsons said.”

“It doesn’t sound like an opinion he’d get from official correspondence,” Professor Graham put in dryly. “Nor has there been any announcement of such an expedition. It’s all just rumor and speculation, if you ask me.”

“Interesting speculation, though,” Papa said. “And it’s high time the government got over losing those other groups and sent someone to do a proper job of mapping the territory, at least. The McNeil Expedition came back without a man lost, and it’s been nearly ten years since then with no progress. I’d have thought we’d see two or three others go out in that amount of time.”

“If it’s a government expedition, they can’t have a Hijero-Cathayan in it,” Allie said, as if that settled everything.

“They can if the Cathayan Confederacy is sponsoring it,” Lan retorted. “Weren’t you listening?”

“Rumors,” Professor Graham said with a snort.

Mama gave Papa a sidelong look. “It’s been a while since you wrote your brother Gregory, hasn’t it?”

Professor Graham and Roger and Brant all looked a little startled by what seemed a total change in topic, but everyone
in my family smiled a little. Uncle Gregory lived in Washington and worked at the Bureau of Magic and Technology, and Papa always said that he was a worse gossip than my Aunt Janna. He liked to write long letters full of tidbits about all the important people he’d met and what they were doing. If anyone could find out what was going on and tell us, it would be Uncle Gregory.

Papa did write, and Uncle Gregory was happy to write back everything he knew. From what he said, Lan’s rumors weren’t far off. When Master Adept Farawase got back to Washington, she’d said nice things about our study center, but she hadn’t been too pleased with the lack of information about the Far West in general. She’d made it clear that she expected someone to fix that, and fix it now. Within days, the plans for a Western expedition had gone from something that might happen in another five or ten years if everything went well and enough folks agreed, to being a settled thing that would leave next spring. It helped that the Cathayans had offered to provide money as well as the master adept’s personal backing.

Talk of the expedition followed me to work, too. Professor Jeffries had three notes from the Settlement Office waiting on his desk, asking for his advice, and so did Professor Torgeson. It kept up like that all through the fall, while the folks in Washington argued and fussed and fumed and planned.

All the expedition work made it hard for Professor Jeffries and Professor Torgeson to get off to the study center every other week the way they’d planned, but they mostly managed. I stayed in Mill City, getting more and more uncomfortable with the situation at home. Mama and Rennie and Allie all
expected things of me: not just chores and minding the childings, but what they thought I ought to do with the rest of my life. Except for Lan, Papa and the boys mostly ignored me unless something specific came up, and even Lan was more caught up in the expedition planning than interested in anything I had to say on my own.

I wrote a lot of letters to William that fall. Letters were better than talking, I decided, because I couldn’t see if someone wasn’t interested or notice when they stopped listening. Not that William didn’t listen; his return letters always showed that he’d thought about what I’d said, even when he had a lot to say himself. I told him all the expedition news, and he told me that some of the professors at Triskelion had already been approached to see if they were interested in going. We both agreed that if it were us, we’d jump at the chance.

Somewhat to my surprise, I also spent a fair bit of time with Roger. If I’d thought about it at all, I’d expected that between the time he’d spent in Albion and his friendship with Lan, he’d have lost interest in me entirely, but I was wrong. The attention made me nervous. Part of me didn’t want to be leading him on if Allie was right and he had an interest in being more than friends, but another part was glad for the excuse to get away from the chores and childings at home. It was very confusing. At least Allie had stopped pestering me on the subject.

In October, the mammoth nearly broke free of its pen out at the study center. It was always extra restless in spring and fall, when the wild mammoths were migrating, but this year it
was especially bad. Professor Jeffries had to make an emergency trip to help control it.

When he came back, he and Professor Torgeson had a huge argument over the cause of the problem. Professor Jeffries thought it was the trip and being in new surroundings with new people, and that the mammoth would settle down once it got used to its new quarters. Professor Torgeson thought it was because the mammoth was nearly full grown and west of the Great Barrier, and that the problem would only get worse. They finally agreed to wait until spring and see how it behaved then. Professor Torgeson walked off muttering, “At least those medusa lizards haven’t started acting up. Yet.”

At the end of October, the Frontier Management Department finally announced that a new expedition would be going out to explore the Far West. By then, everyone had known for months that the announcement was coming, and it was only the details that folks were interested in. The expedition would leave from Mill City in April, following the path of the McNeil Expedition as far as they knew it and then heading on up the Grand Bow River toward the Rocky Mountains.

The minute the official announcement was made, everyone started talking about who, exactly, would be part of it. It was no easy thing to choose people to send on an expedition that would be gone for at least two years, maybe more, and that had a good chance of not coming back at all. Also, a lot of folks seemed to think that if there
was
going to be an expedition, they wanted in on it in some way, even if they didn’t want to go their own selves.

The army and the Frontier Management Department were arguing worse than ever, each insisting that their people should be in charge. Master Adept Farawase wanted to send magical naturalists and scientists, and was even leaving one of her aides behind to go along. The National Farmer’s Society wanted to send a geographer at the very least, and a geomancer if they could get one. The railroad company wanted to include a surveyor. The Agriculture Department wanted to send a plant specialist to look for edible plants that could make for new crops. The Bureau of National Development wanted a geologist along to look for mineral deposits. Even the new National Baseball League wanted to send someone, or at least a baseball that they could show off as the first baseball to reach the Rocky Mountains.

The Frontier Management Department didn’t pay heed to most of the arguments, so far as I could tell. In late November, about three weeks after the announcement, another letter arrived from Washington for Professor Jeffries, sealed with red wax. It was an invitation to join the new expedition, and it set off quite a flurry of meetings at the college. I didn’t find out what they were about until Papa came by the laboratory late one afternoon while we were cleaning up.

“I hear you’ve been asked to head West with this new expedition,” Papa said to Professor Jeffries. “Congratulations.”

Professor Jeffries looked at him suspiciously. “I expect you’ve also heard that I’m going to decline the honor.”

“Dean Farley did say something of the kind,” Papa said. “I believe he’s hoping I can talk you into changing your mind.”

“I don’t think that’s possible,” Professor Torgeson said. “I’ve already tried.”

I looked at Professor Jeffries in surprise. “Don’t you want to go?” I asked.

Professor Jeffries looked sternly over the top of his spectacles at all three of us. “Yes, yes, it’s a great honor, but it’s simply not practical. I don’t know why on earth they came up with such a ridiculous idea in the first place.”

“Maybe because you’re the foremost expert on Western wildlife in the country?” Professor Torgeson said.