Frederick Case was a cabinetmaker, the best in three counties. Just as he had been one of the best psychotronic techs in the Brigade. Even now, when he had renounced his past as thoroughly as I had renounced mine, he was sometimes called in to fix the simpler psychotronic machines that Camelot owned.
He never charged for the job, either. “You pay me to make something out of wood,” he’d say. “You want to pay me, you commission something nice, some of those harp-back chairs or maybe a linen press. Haven’t made a linen press in a while. But to do this, no, ~every~body helps out the way they can. Let’s just let it ride.”
I’d actually heard him say it just that way on two occasions. And he never called me Jazz. Never. He ~respected my desire to live in the present as much as he respected his own.
“So, Jazz, you hear the news? That damned pirate said that he was coming back in three months for harvest,” Frederick said. His face was dark red and his hands were clenched. “You hear that? We have to do something, old buddy.”
I hadn’t heard and the thought of it made me want to kill something right there. Like that maypole guy. He would do for a start.
“So what can we do?” I asked. “Organize a patrol of us who remember how from the old days?”
Frederick nodded. “I kind of thought of that. We’re having a meeting down at the church tonight, after supper. And since you were an officer, Jazz, you’d be a natural at it.”
I shut up for a while. Sure I’d go. But I hadn’t ever commanded men. I never drilled with power rifles, not that we had any on Camelot anyway. I never was ~infantry. I only knew Bolos, and they were a far cry from Camelot.
After six weeks it was hopeless. Frederick and I had spent every evening with the Volunteer Force down in the town square. Three hundred men, young women and a few adolescent boys had managed to learn to throw kitchen knives and did close order drill with rakes. They couldn’t hold off the pirates for three seconds.
“What we need is guns,” old Edward Fletcher said at the meeting after church. “We need power rifles as good as theirs, and laser sticks. Otherwise we might as well just all slit our throats with our ploughblades.”
There was a sudden cheering in the pews. Even the monks nodded sagely to each other. “Real weapons,” the priest said, calling for order, “are going to cost money. And since the raid we don’t have any.”
“We’ll raise it,” old Edward countered. “Because we might as well roll over and die if we don’t.”
The priest called me and Frederick and William Yellowhair and Thomas Blacksmith, who had all once served in the alien wars far away, up to the front and held a little meeting of our own.
“If we had the weapons could we hold off the ~pirates?” the priest asked. He was another Camelot ~native and had never seen a real fight in his life.
Not one of the four of us said anything for a full fifteen seconds. Finally Thomas took the diplomatic approach. Thomas had always been very good at that, as General Bolling’s aide-de-camp. “Well,” he said slowly, “we surely can’t even think of trying if we don’t have any real weapons. Though no guarantee we can even find a decent supply of power rifles, let alone ~laser sticks. And if we found a supply I’m not sure we could afford them. But like we are, Old Edward is right. We might as well roll over and play dead straight off, because we don’t have a chance in Hell. Begging your pardon, sir.”
The priest didn’t even notice. “Well, then,” he said briskly. “We’ll see about some funds. I believe that the Abbey has some stashed away, an old donation they’ve been saving for an emergency. If we managed some cash, would the four of you be willing to go out and act as agents, and try to bring back whatever we can use to save ourselves?”
Frederick and I looked at each other. We exchanged glances with William and Thomas, who had once been Bill Solestes and Tyrone X. Then the four of us nodded together.
After all, we’d discussed it among ourselves, sitting at a table in William’s alehouse after a drill on a rainy day. We knew we needed something more serious than pitchforks and hog slaughtering knives.
“Happy to go, padre,” William said. “We’d all agreed, anyway. But I don’t think you quite understand just how much this is going to cost us. And then there’s the matter of using it well enough to make a difference.”
The priest shrugged. “We do what we can. We’ll pray for you here, and maybe God will help us find a solution we had not considered.”
I never thought that praying alone did all that much good. But the next day the priest arrived with what looked like a couple thousand credits worth of silver coins and candlesticks and a gold plate that had been buried under the Abbey apple press.
“Not nearly enough,” Frederick sighed, and I agreed, but we didn’t have any choice. Maybe the praying would help. I figured I’d been on Camelot way to long.
We went over to the alehouse to call Dover Port and get a merchant schedule. Most houses in Camelot don’t have individual links, but the alehouse and the commercial establishments and the government all have them. It’s not that we’re unable to use technology here. It’s that we have chosen a different way. We don’t hate technology. Like I said, we use some simple psychotronics for tasks no one wants to do, but we aren’t going to make our lives around them, either. We live close to the earth, to things that are real, to each other.
The Slocum was leaving in two days for Miranda, a major hub in the sector. A center of corruption as well as trade. There was no shortage of arms dealers on Miranda, at least not ten years ago. And that sort of thing doesn’t change real fast in these parts.
Isabelle packed my bag, washed and folded my old work suits in faded Command green. She also wrapped up a loaf of fresh brown bread and two cheeses, one sharp yellow one from our own cow and a softer sheep’s milk cheese as well. “Because there won’t be very nice food out there,” she whispered softly when she handed me the bundle at the door. “Come back soon. We’ll be waiting.”
I looked at them like I’d never see them again. Ricky, who can’t wait to reach seven and be called Richard, stood straight, trying to be brave. Margaret was too young to understand and held out pudgy hands and chattered incomprehensibly. Leaving was the hardest thing I ever had to do.
Miranda was just like I remembered it from my last trip out, the trip that brought me to Camelot for good. The city stank more than ten years ago and there were, if possible, more holosigns floating over the arcade. We ignored those and walked along the ~arcade floor, feeling like rubes from the outer worlds and not like four vets of the alien wars at all.
“Where the hell do we find a cheap arms dealer?” William Yellowhair asked rhetorically.
Thomas Blacksmith smiled. “A few calls,” was all he said. Thomas, having worked for the general who had accepted most of the credit for the tide-turning defeat of the Enemy at Torgon, had a lot of contacts.
We went into a bar that was nothing like the alehouse I’d frequented for the past decade. Here everything was chrome and holo and bright, and there were about seventeen hundred different drinks on tap. Thomas disappeared to the private phone stalls against the back wall while Frederick and I tried to order. ~Finally we just stuck to plain old Guinness, the drink of choice in the Regiment.
It came, and after William’s homemade ale, it seemed thin and uninteresting. How wonderful we had thought Guinness was when we were in the field, how we talked about it at night when the Bolos were lit like Christmas trees with forty-eight colors of blinking lights, spitting out projectiles and energy at different rates of penetration.
Thomas returned as we finished the last of the pitcher. His glass was untouched, had never been filled. “What is it, guys? None for me, and I done all that talking?”
Frederick shrugged. “It isn’t as good as Will’s, you’re not missing anything. Come up with anything?”
Thomas still looked wistfully at the foam sliding down the sides of the empty pitcher. “Yeah, sure did,” he said dully. “Damn, I wish you guys had saved me a beer. Anyway, someone I heard about only, a real long time ago, you understand, is going to see us in about six hours. We’ve got to get over to his place and see what he’s selling. I got the directions here, we’re going to have to fence this stuff and get a car over there and we don’t have a hell of a lot of time. Damn I could use a glass of that stuff.”