01. When the Changewinds Blow (18 page)

For example, there were the three Casablanca-style ceiling fans turning slowly above them, keeping the hot air circulating. And the lights, both behind the bar and, subdued, along the side walls, looked, well-not at all primitive. The bottles behind the bar seemed to be of clear glass with fancy labels on them, not the crude stuff of the cave, and when someone yelled to the barman he nodded and drew a tankard of what might have been beer or ale from a
tap
and brought it over. The customers-the only ones other than themselves-were also obviously from somewhere else. One fellow had a loud and ugly voice and a face and body that looked more like a Neanderthal than a modern human, accentuated by the fact that he was wearing a worn fur breech clout and a somewhat matching fur vest over his incredibly hairy chest. His companion was dressed in a fancy bloused top and tights, with fancy pointed boots, and had features far different from those seen in the village-lighter, sharper, with long hair, a black goatee, and a moustache that must have been half wax.

"Don't look now," Charley whispered to Sam, "but I'd swear Conan the Barbarian over there is wearing a wrist-watch."

"I noticed," Sam whispered back. "And I think that fugitive from a playing card is smoking a filter-tipped cigarette. This is nuts."

Zenchur gave them a sour look and they shut up. Sam was curious to know what the strange pair was discussing, but the cave man had such lousy command of the language it was hard to make him out most of the time. In a language where a shift of a mere quarter tone could make "I am going to kill you" sound like "I want to make love to a fig tree" she was definitely at a disadvantage only slightly less than Charley's.

"But, my friend, I need five," said the fop, clearly but in a very strange accent. You knew what he was saying but only barely and with some concentration. The people in the changewind vision had also seemed to have odd accents to her, but not this extreme.

"You ask my ass be cake-baked," the Neanderthal seemed to reply. The conversation, thanks to his horrible lack of subtleties, seemed almost comic to Sam, although Moustache seemed to make the right sense out of it.

"But, be reasonable, my friend. Fewer will simply not work."

"I want to lick my pig-sucker," replied the barbarian.

"But there's the watch, the grappler, the-"

"Our names be pudding Daisy loops!"

Sam had to stop listening. The thing made no sense, but if she kept on with it then Zenchur would surely know that she could understand-more or less-if only because she would no longer be able to keep from cracking up.

The barman came over to them. "Yes, sir. How may we serve you?"

"You have food, I take it? You did the last times I was through."

"We do, sir, but there is no kitchen between lunch and dinner and this is off-hours. I could bring a bread, meat, and cheese tray and some fruits or vegetables, though."

"That will do fine. Make it large enough for my companions and bring three cold drafts."

"At once, sir." The barman turned and went back to the bar, drew three very large beers, and brought them over, then went back through a doorway to the right of the bar to get the food. Charley noted that both Zenchur and Sam had the beer set in front of them while the third was simply placed to one side, as if a refill rather than for her.

"Oh, all the respectable types of both sexes will absolutely ignore your existence," he whispered to her. "To them you are to be treated as if you do not exist. But, do not worry-if that old man wanted a fling he'd pull me aside discretely and try and make a deal for an assignation." He paused a moment. "But-please, no more talk for now. I do not like the look of those two."

Charley had never heard of an assignation, but she got the meaning. The usual high moral hypocrites. She did have to wonder what kind of dictionary they'd used to teach him English, though.

The platter that the barman brought out looked like it'd been arranged by a caterer; it had mounds of sliced meats, as well as what appeared to be lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers-you name it-along with a
very
long loaf of French-type bread and a bread knife. Small canisters with spreaders contained something that looked a lot like mayonnaise, a type of mustard, soft white butter, and two others, one of which seemed a lot like very thin peanut butter. Cutting off a piece of the bread and slicing it, then filling it, was no trouble at all; watching Zenchur eat what looked for all the world like a peanut butter, radish, and roast beef sandwich was harder to take.

Again, as with the plants and birds, the tastes and textures of the sandwich material were slightly off what they would have suspected-the tomatoes, for example, tasted very tomatoey but also had a kick like mild peppero-but nothing was all that exotic and it was pretty good.

Zenchur was a pretty big drinker; he finished off two large steins and was working on his third before he completed his first sandwich. Sam, too, had a big thirst although she was unused to beer or other alcoholic beverages and Charley worried about that. Charley also worried about her own reactions; alcohol always brought out the worst in her, and she just sipped it and tried to eat what she could of her own sandwich concoction. She found to her surprise that her eyes were far bigger than her stomach; what she would have normally packed away with no trouble back home was far too much for her now and she felt stuffed.

Sam had no such limits. Clearly in spite of Boolean's look-alike magic, they were very different beyond outward appearances, something that made Charley actually feel a bit better. Still, it was amazing to see Sam pack away almost as much as the big, muscular Zenchur.

"You are beans! I
will
seduce the governor!" proclaimed the barbarian at the far table in a loud voice, pounding his fist on the table. They all looked at him, a man clearly with too much to drink in the middle of the afternoon, and the fancy dressed man looked nervous.

"This is not the place for more talk," he said. "You are drunk. Can you ride some more?"

"I can sail a fish to the moon!" responded the barbarian confidently. Sam dearly would have liked to have seen
that,
but she was relieved that the pair got up, threw some coins on the table, and made their way out of the tavern. She was having great problems stifling the giggles and stuffed some more sandwich in her mouth to cover it. "How far are we from this city?" Charley asked Zenchur. "Not far," the navigator responded. "A few hours. We should be in by nightfall."

Charley groaned. "More hours on that hard seat! Well," she sighed, "I don't think my rear end can get any more bruises. It's tough sitting here now on this chair."

"I think I want a bathroom," Sam said. "They got one or is it out the back?"

"Oh, there's one off the kitchen. Through there. Come-I should go, too."

Charley didn't really have to go but she had this sudden fear of sitting there alone while her two links to this world were both out of sight. "If they have separate rooms I guess I should, too."

"They do. Even in the home there are two bathrooms." The men's room was surprisingly clean, with two bowl-shaped toilets in two door-less stalls. They looked a lot like pinched oval toilets without seats, and on either wall of the stall were grip handles. Apparently you didn't sit down-you just squatted and held on to the handles. Zenchur was appalled by the idea of a toilet seat. "It would be so-unclean," he said, shaking his head.

Still, he didn't have the problem. He just stood there and pissed into it, while she had to take down her pants, remove the codpiece, and hold on for dear life. You sure as hell wouldn't spend any time reading in
these
Johns. She envied him the convenience but couldn't help but stare a bit. My god, it was so-
large!
How did they
walk
with those things between their legs?

Zenchur would have been far more startled had he known that this was the first time Sam had ever seen a male organ except in a picture.

If Sam was having trouble, Charley had to practically undress to be able to go. The toilet was the same sort of hold-on affair but shaped very differently. Still, this was gonna take some getting used to.

Even so, here was another thing that seemed oddly different. Flush toilets-inside plumbing. A small, basic sink with running cold water. And while the toilet paper looked more like Kleenex and came out that way, and was
rough,
it was none the less a manufactured product. Clearly, for all its looks, this was not any Dark Ages civilization.

There was a full-length mirror that was a big aid in rewrapping the dress, but which also gave her a real look at herself. She looked
thin,
thinner than Sam ever looked, and the skin was really smooth. It was a hell of a body, better than she remembered Sam's as being. Even the boyish face looked not at all boyish now but, well,
sexy.
It was more than just the look, though; it was the way you moved and carried yourself and even the way you used your face. She would have preferred a better face than Sam's, but it was, overall, the kind of body she would have
killed
for.

Maybe it was the beer again, but, God! Was she
horny!

She got ready, then left the bathroom and rejoined the pair already back at the table. She was relieved to see them both; she had this paranoid fear that they would somehow disappear and leave her alone in this world.

As they made their way back to the stable she saw two of the white-robed girls walking hand in hand across the street, their white masks impassive, their features-frankly, even their sex or humanity-impossible to tell. She didn't think she ever could've stood that, although you never know what you'll accept if you grow up thinking that's normal. The sad thing was that little girls probably dreamed of the time when they'd wear the white robes and masks. It was being grown up.

Still, she had to wonder how easy to get those outfits were. They all looked manufactured, that was for sure, but fitted, probably. They'd make one hell of a disguise in a pinch, though-and in this kind of society who would dare pull off the mask and hood and risk being wrong? She bet that such an act would be tantamount to rape for these people.

Before leaving they went into an odd little store and Zenchur purchased a small device that looked something like a spout from the top of a gas can with a long, narrow and bendable base. It wasn't until they were back on the road, however, that he explained it.

"Learn how to use it," he told Sam. "If you learn the proper positioning and get it just right you will not have to sit to pee. It is very handy out in the wilderness where there are few or no bathrooms."

"Yeah-what about those bathrooms?" Sam asked. "Modern plumbing, and I swear those lights and fans were electric!"

"They were. The town is rather modern, as are most. There is a small generating plant at a waterfall not far from here." "But there were no wires anyplace!" "So? Your world is so primitive it runs its wires openly? And do your plumbing pipes run atop your streets? How ugly that would be!"

It was time to change the subject. "Those two men back there-who were they? They sure didn't look like nobody 'round
that
town," Sam pointed out.

"I do not know who they were but, you are correct, they are not from anywhere around here. The big hairy one might barely be considered Akhbreed at all, I think. Certainly from some primitive wedge far away from here to the north. The other-I am not sure. He was wealthy but no noble and his speech marked him as coming from elsewhere. Such men hire men like the barbarian to do dirty work they do not wish done themselves. Such men are the sort who usually hire me, in fact."

The countryside grew less wild; the farms seemed smaller and more specialized, the towns a bit larger although still in that European provincial style, and traffic built up, not just on foot or horseback but wagons and carriages of every shape and kind. They made good time, reaching the city before sundown, and it
was
a city-one hell of a city. Sam had expected something on the order of the primitive farming village and castle she'd seen in her vision, but this was something else.

Densely populated and stretching out along the shores of a lake or sea, its central core rose up in great buildings like shining cathedral spires, and out from it spread the rest of the city, smaller buildings to be sure, certainly much lower, but it was sure a big city all the same.

"Tubikosa contains about a half a million people, all Akhbreed," Zenchur told them. "It is one of the largest cities on the planet, and one of the grandest, although it is also one of the most dangerous. If a changewind ever got this far in, there would be no place to really run and hide from it."

Charley frowned. "What's the chances of something like that happening?"

The navigator shrugged. "Who knows? Perhaps tonight, perhaps in a week, perhaps in a hundred years. There has been none through here in more than a century and a half, that is known, and the people are complacent. They choose to ignore the risk, perhaps even the inevitable, just to live and work here."

Charley couldn't get a handle on all this. A civilization great enough to build maybe forty-story buildings, crazy as they looked, with electricity, indoor plumbing, and all the comforts of home, yet one that still used the horse and wagon as a primary means of getting around, with no buses, cars, trains, or anything else, and maybe no TV or even radio, and where swords, spears, and armor were still the rule, and who had a city of half a million people with mostly dirt streets where the women dressed in robes and saris and scarves on their heads and the men dressed like Shakespeare or Robin Hood. It didn't make much sense at all.

It
did
have mass transportation, though, of an old-fashioned sort. Horses pulled big double-decker stagecoaches that looked like buses and acted like them, too, and all over the place fancy-looking three-wheeled enclosed black carriages went about, picking up people and letting them off, and were clearly cabs.