About twenty minutes along, the distant trumpets sounded again, only this time both seemed much closer. The crews were clearly coming in, and if anything, the frantic pace the girls were setting increased.
Eve frowned and shook her head in puzzlement. “I’m not sure what’s what here, but maybe we’re missing something.”
“Huh? What do you mean?”
“Could you make flour, cultivate and protect yeast, and make bread for a hundred? Seriously. I couldn’t, not without the computer in my ear telling me just what to do step by step, and even then, I’d need all the ingredients set out before me. These people, to put it bluntly, know too much about how to do it themselves.”
He sighed. “I don’t know. I’ve seen this sort of thing in the records before, when automation slowly failed and they had time to learn or be taught how to do it before the power ran out. Still, there’s no evidence that they ever had much automation here, and it’s for certain none of them are looking at cookbooks. Well, if we can get one of them, or the ones who are coming in to eat, to talk to us then maybe we can get a few answers.”
“I thought when we got down here and met our first people we were supposed to get answers,” she noted sourly.
It wasn’t long before the rest of the village came in, with dogs leaping about and barking and lots of talking amongst themselves at such a babbling rate that even the filters didn’t help.
Sounds of much larger animals also abounded, but if they brought in the elephantine crindin they didn’t bring them anywhere near the communal kitchen and dining area.
One thing that immediately stood out was that there were few old people, or at least few who looked old. Not that there wasn’t some gray, but it seemed premature, the results of a hard life rather than a long one. The men seemed to a one to be in excellent condition; there were muscles over tight bodies and nothing in the way of fat. There were plenty of scars on their reddish-brown skins, scars which stood out for that contrast, and even some missing digits or limbs here and there, but none of the injuries appeared to be the result of any sort of combat. These were subsistence farmers and herdsmen and they showed the inevitable price of long days of primitive manual labor.
Male dress tended to be a pair of cotton pants in one of a half-dozen faded colors, well worn and ragged. Some wore faded cotton shirts of the same condition, others were bare from the waist up. Most also wore something on their heads as protection from the sun, but it varied wildly, from turban-like cloth wrappings to burnooses to hats with broad starched brims. Many had big, droopy mustaches, some had beards, all had pretty long hair, but in just about every case the hair was neatly trimmed, a point of pride, obviously.
One huge man with arms thicker than John Robey’s thighs and a huge drooping mustache seemed to be something of a leader, although there wasn’t much sign of orders being given or any sort of direction. He just seemed to be the center of attention, and they tended to listen to what he said and laughed when he smiled and so on. Their training told them that this reaction was less fear than respect; this man was leader because they wanted him to be. What interested the onlookers the most was that he quieted down the group, they bowed their heads, and then they chanted what had to be a meal blessing of some kind even though it was next to impossible to make out. Then they began grabbing for the food and drink and the roar started up again.
At first the crowd, numbering perhaps twenty-five or thirty people, mostly but not entirely men, hadn’t even noticed the strangers sitting off to one side, but they were quickly made aware of this by the women doing the cooking and serving as soon as the grace had been said. The others immediately quieted down once again but not to the prayerful silence of the blessing and took furtive if rather comical note of the newcomers while pretending not to. Still, they continued eating, apparently waiting for the big man to make a move.
The big man was munching on a leg of something or other—Eve said a silent prayer that it wasn’t dog—but both his big black eyes were intent on them. Finally, with much of the meat inside him and a stiff flagon of whatever they were drinking downed like a champion, he got up and slowly walked over to them as everybody else held their breath while pretending hard not to notice.
“Heyu! Name what village comin’ you from? Nevah seen dressin’ like you wear. Got you mo’ tradin’ cloth?”
They got up and faced him, trying to look nonthreatening as the training guides always cautioned. Considering that the guy they faced was about the same bulk as the two of them combined, that advice seemed like a sick joke at this point.
Praying that the filter would work, John responded, “Sir, we are from The Mountain. We have much to bring to you if you want it.”
The big, bushy eyebrows went up. “Mountain? Mountains here flat!” He laughed. “Mountain never heard of in dis place.”
Robey gave him a returned grin. “Not there,” he pointed towards the man, “or there,” pointing forty-five degrees off, “or there, either,” pointing in back, “or even there,” pointing to the last cardinal direction. “Our mountain is there.” He pointed straight up.
There was a sudden gasp from the villagers, and for the first time the pair of strangers felt fear and hostility. There were whispers of “Found! Us dey found!”
It was clear that these people had some sense of their origins and weren’t, at least in some degree, as ignorant of the reality of the cosmos as they might have appeared.
“We are not raiders,” John assured them. “We are not here to take anything nor harm anyone in any way. If we were, would we come like this? We have seen what the raiders have done other places. They don’t come to talk and make friends. They come in and simply take.”
The big man looked none too trusting for that, but he approached them boldly and reached out and fingered the sleeve of Robey’s garment. His hand was still greasy from the leg he’d just eaten, but he noted that the grease simply wouldn’t stick to the off-white robe. With a blackened fingernail he flicked it off as if it were simply a bug on the robe and not a grease smear. “Make you dese?”
“Our people make them, yes.”
“Make on your world?”
“On our spaceship. We have no home world. We are always traveling from world to world.”
“You look for home, can’t go?”
“No, we live on the ship. We were born there. Our task is not to have a home like your people. The ship is home. We are servants of the living God. We bring His word to whoever God may lead us, and we try and live by example the kind of life His servants should, although it is a hard way.”
The village chief stifled a laugh. “Huh! Yes. Must hard be to live with dat ’stead of groundlings like us. No smellin’ de shit dere, huh?”
“That’s not the kind of hard I meant. When everything fell apart, long ago, a man of God was out here and he had a few followers and many who had been brought to God on some of the worlds out here. With their help, God did the impossible and led us to the building of a great ship that would do His will.”
“How you know God and not luck? Or maybe Devil Angels?”
“Because of the work we have done, the miracles that continue for us, not the least of which is that our leader is the third man of God now to take this message out and so twice God has lifted up another man to be His Arm.”