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Well, you've got reason to be sleepless, Vicki thought as she sat and looked at the other's impassive face. She didn't know all the details, but everyone had heard something-mainly that somehow the Mita
I thought we had culture clash in our family, Vicki Cofflin thought. Her father had come from the piney woods of east Texas. I didn't know the meaning of the word, back then.
"Cocoa?" Hollard asked, holding up a thermos. Those were within Nantucket's capabilities, if you didn't mind paying three weeks' wages for it.
"Thanks, ma'am." The cocoa was dark and strong, sweetened with actual cane sugar from Mauritius Base.
"You're welcome… let's not be formal. I was just looking at the stars, and thinking about the Event," Hollard went on meditatively.
"Oh? Nothing better to do?"
Vicki gri
The stars were enormous through the dry clear air, a frosted band across the sky. Sky glow's one thing I don't miss about the twentieth, she thought.
"It occurred to me," Hollard went on, looking up and sipping, "that we may be wrong about what happened up in the twentieth when we… left. That they got the 1250 B.C. Nantucket swapped with us, that is. That's what most people assume, but there's no reason to believe it."
"Oh?" Well, a fresh hypothesis, anyway. "What else could have happened?"
Everything uptime of us could have all vanished the moment we arrived here, like a stray dream. She didn't mention that; it was another unwritten courtesy rule. The thought that they'd unwittingly wiped out billions of people and their own country and kin was just too ghastly to contemplate. Those inclined to brood on it had made up a goodly portion of the rash of post-Event suicides.
"Well, I don't think the Event was an accident," Hollard said. "The transition was too neat-a perfect ellipse around the Island, for God's sake!-and we arrived too smoothly. No earthquakes, no tremors even, no tidal wave… I mean, there must have been differences in sea level, the temperature of the land underneath the wedge that got brought along with us, air pressure… and despite a subsoil of saturated sand and gravel ready to turn to liquid jelly at the slightest quiver, every-damn-thing was so stable that nobody noticed until they checked the star patterns. That and the rest of the world being 1250 B.C.'s. Accidents just don't happen like that."
"Well, chunks of land just don't get displaced three mille
"Yes, but a technology that advanced-not just raw power, but subtlety-could as easily have not moved Nantucket at all." At Vicki's expression she gri
Vicki gave a low whistle. "You know, that's a really clever idea. And completely, utterly useless!"
"It beats thinking about my family problems," Hollard said, with a wry twist of her mouth.
"Mmmmm, if you don't mind me asking…"
Hollard shrugged. "Everyone else is going to know, soon enough. You know Ken-Brigadier Hollard-rescued Rau-pasha while he was mopping up the Assyrians north along the Euphrates, just south of the Jebel Sinjar?"
Vicki nodded. "Way I heard it, she'd killed the Assyrian King."
"Tukulti-Ninurta, yes. His father killed her father-that was when the Assyrians took over what was left of the Kingdom of Mita
"Yeah. Then we came along and retumbled the bingo-balls."
"Mmmm-hmmm. This time around, Tukulti-Ninurta showed up there with some odds-and-sods of his guard and court, after we and the Babylonians smashed their army. Made her dance for him, then he was going to drag her off and rape her. She got him first, knife in her sleeve and slit his throat neat as you please when he grabbed her. Then Ken arrived, just before they lit the fire under her feet."
Vicki nodded. Even by the ungentle standards of the ancient Orient, the Assyrians were first-order swine; the locals all hated them. That didn't make the memory of bombing runs over Asshur much more comfortable, though. She went on, pushing aside the thought of burning rubble collapsing on kids like her Uncle Jared's:
"Yeah, I've seen the princess a couple of times. Smart girl, charismatic as all hell. Asked a lot of questions the time we had her up in Emancipator, and I got the feeling she really understood about atmospheric pressure and buoyancy."
"Mmmm-hmmm," Hollard said. It was a verbal trick Vicki had noticed Commodore Alston use. "Learned English fast, and all the rest of it-well, she had a pretty good education by local standards, already spoke and wrote four languages."
"Was it the Babylonians' idea to make her queen of Mita
Officially, it had been Kashtiliash's father's notion all the way, but that was diplomacy for you. Limp as an official explanation wasn't a proverb for nothing.
"Oh, ours, but Kash and his father liked it. As a vassal kingdom, they'd get tribute and troops from Mita
Vicki nodded. She'd ferried wounded from that fight back to Ur Base. "Offered your brother the crown, or something, wasn't it?" she said.
"Damn, I knew we couldn't keep it under wraps for long. No, not quite that bad," Kathryn said, and gave the details of Raupasha's offer. "She is only seventeen, still…"
"Ouch," Vicki Cofflin said. Local politics weren't her department, thank God, but-"Ouch, ouch, ouch."
"Mega-ouchies," Hollard agreed. "Yeah, Kashtiliash hit the God-damned roof. Akkadian is a great language for swearing in, and he nearly blew out the circuits on the radio set we were using… I don't blame him for that, or for suspecting that Ken or the Arnsteins put her up to it."
"Yeah. My sympathies." She hesitated. "How does your brother feel about it?" Ke
This time Kathryn Hollard's laugh was long and loud. "Oh, he thinks he's horrified, and he thinks she's a sort of unofficial kid sister," she said. "You know how men are."
"Ayup. Emotional idiots."
A nod. "Well, with some exceptions, some of the time. Kash, for instance."
Vicki hesitated again. Damn, but I've got a bump of curiosity bigger than the Elephant's Child, she thought. You couldn't pick up a copy of People magazine these days to find out details, either. The monthly Ur Base Gazette was a feeble substitute.