| Chapter 1 |
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My instincts screamed that I should accept his offer immediately, so as to deny him any opportunity to change his mind. Every Summer, the city of Cambridge is so completely riddled with tourists that life for academics becomes utterly wretched; indeed, at that very moment there were three total strangers peering inquisitively through the window into McCrea's dusty, oak-panelled office, hoping to catch a glimpse of Something Vaguely Historic. The prospect of escaping their attentions, if only for a few days, was enticing.
Something about the old man's self-satisfied smirk, however, told me that a junket at the college's expense was not on offer. Worse, whatever project he did have in mind, he clearly relished the thought of my enforced involvement in it.
An awful hypothesis presented itself: he couldn't intend that I'd have to, to, to work, could he?
"There aren't any anthropology conferences in Virginia this year," I answered, coldly.
"Oh, you're not going to any conference, dear fellow," he chuckled, knowingly. "No, no, you're going to Virginia to do fieldwork."
I could tell by his increasingly wide grin that McCrea was immensely enjoying the chance to be so deliberately obtuse. Doubtless, if ever I were to make it to professor, I'd also entertain myself by mercilessly taunting the junior members of staff. Unfortunately, this knowledge was of no use to me whatsoever in my current situation.
"Fieldwork in Virginia," I mused aloud. "So that's, what, the Amish? Some other group of Mennonites?"
"It's orcs," said the professor, leaning back in his chair and clasping his hands behind his head in smug satisfaction.
"Orcs." Right. "The bad guys out of Lord of the Rings. Of course. How stupid of me."
"No, Bartle, it really is orcs," repeated McCrea, with slight irritation. "Furthermore, it's not the Virginia that you might," at this point he turned and made a series of obscene gestures to the tourists outside, which succeeded in moving them on, "might be expecting."
"You're recording this, aren't you?" I suddenly realised. "You're going to play this back at the next Christmas party, and...". I stopped when McCrea sat up and began to remove something from his briefcase. It was a large, brown envelope, which was sealed up with impressively thick tape that had the words "TOP SECRET" stencilled into it. Furthermore, it was not the sort of battered, coffee-stained envelope which one would normally expect to find in Professor McCrea's possession: this one had never been used to beat a fly to death, nor to map out the physical geography of the Gambia to a complete stranger. This was a special envelope.
He opened it, thumbed through some papers inside, and retrieved a photograph. "Here," he said, passing it to me. "This is a picture of an orc."
Well, the smiling figure certainly didn't look like an orc to my eyes, at least not unless orcs dressed like Oliver Cromwell. Then again, it didn't look like a human being, either; typically, human beings tend not to have low, protruding foreheads, snouts like baboons, and hair that could be used to make paintbrushes.
"OK," I said, "so it's an orc. From Virginia."
"I can see I'm going to have trouble explaining this," McCrea sighed. "Nevertheless, I feel obliged to make the effort. If, for your part, you could attempt during the process to overcome your natural dimness, it shouldn't take me more than half an hour or so..."
Three hours later, I had the gist of it.
In 1623, a flotilla of eight ships carrying Puritan colonists from the East of England left Portsmouth, bound for North America. Somewhere in the Atlantic, they unknowingly sailed into a pocket of space-time which exists both on Earth and on another planet several million light years away. Being optimists, as all colonists are, they gave little weight to the dire warnings of the sailors that there was something severely amiss with the stars all of a sudden, and continued their journey regardless. When they finally made landfall in what they thought was Virginia, they believed that at worst they were only a few dozen miles off course. So well-appointed was the site they had discovered, however, that they agreed their strange luck must all be part of some deliberate set-up by God to reward them for their faith. Accordingly, they commenced building a town at that very spot. Boats were sent off to contact the other colonies, which must surely exist just a day or two further up or down the coast.
After a while, of course, it became apparent that there were no other colonies. The friendly natives that they met (slender, fair-haired people with pointy ears and cultured disposition) were not at all like the friendly natives that they had been led to understand they would encounter (superstitious, half-naked, red-skinned tribesmen). These "indians" called themselves faërie; the colonists were straight out of their legends, and were homons.
This was not Earth. This was Somewhere Else.
From the moment they had left Portsmouth, the colonists had held that they would spend the rest of their living days in Virginia. Thus, when the truth of their situation was finally so apparent that even they had to accept it, they elected to apply the name "Virginia" to the entire world onto which they'd stumbled. This planet Virginia was the Virginia I would shortly be spending six months on.
Scientifically speaking (which is not something that anthropologists often have cause to do), close together in geostationary orbit above the Atlantic Ocean are four equidistant, microscopic black holes. In a similar position above Virginia are four more of these primordial black holes. Due to the way that such gravitationally intense objects warp space-time, it turns out that in this particular case they are the same four black holes. As a result, a number of stable congruences exist - volumes of three-dimensional space shared by both planets. What this means is that if you enter such a shared space in our solar system, you'll leave it in Virginia's, and vice versa, instantaneously, without necessarily even noticing. Yes, they're like wormholes, although strictly speaking (which, again, is not something that anthropologists often have cause to do) it's the black holes which are the wormholes, not the congruences.
Of course, most of these pockets of mutual volume (or "bubbles", as they are referred to by the physicists) are deep underground, but some do intersect the surfaces of both planets, albeit perhaps only occasionally. The generally temporary nature of their appearances is because, although they apparently rotate around a line between each set of black holes and their corresponding planet's centre of mass, they always take a slightly offset, elliptical path; this is probably due to the influence of the Moon on Earth's side - Virginia has no moons.
Little is known about subterranean bubbles, but the surface ones appear to range in size: some are small (rabbit disappears into warren on Earth, digs a tunnel out in Virginia); some are medium (woman falls from boat in raging Virginian river, resurfaces in placid Somerset lake); some are quite big (group of dwarfs enters caves in Virginia, reappears in caves in Norway); the odd one or two get to be surprisingly large (the one found by the 1623 colonists, and by the USS Rhode Island last year...).
The number of accessible bubbles linking Earth and Virginia has, over the course of the millennia, remained small but fairly constant. The continual crossings-over between one planet and the other has kept their evolutionary paths interlocked: if one planet evolved grass, it was only a matter of time before some of it was carried to the other.
Nevertheless, there are significant differences between more recently-evolved species. In particular, on Earth the primitive hominids homo erectus gave rise solely to homo sapiens sapiens and homo sapiens neanderthalensis, the former being the only ones to make it to the present day. On Virginia, however, the land bridges which homo erectus had used to migrate between continents were destroyed at a crucial juncture when the Virginian ice caps melted (as ice caps are wont to do from time to time) causing the sea to rise several metres. Because of this, each isolated population of homo erectus on Virginia evolved independently, natural selection favouring those individuals best suited to local conditions; as a result, the planet became home to some 15 different refined versions of the basic homo erectus model, all of which remain extant. Of these, the most notable ones are: homo sapiens albus ("elves", ie. "faërie"); homo sapiens minor1 ("dwarfs"); homo sapiens magnus ("giants"); homo sapiens dimidius ("halflings"); and homo sapiens ineptus ("orcs"...).
Infrequent visits over the millennia by hapless homo sapiens sapiens did not make much impact on Virginia except as fodder for local folklore, much in the same way that casual visitors to Earth from Virginia provided enough material for Wagner to write 26 hours worth of Der Ring des Nibelungen about, but they didn't bring down the Roman Empire or anything. The colonists of 1623 were not, however, mere occasional guests: they had sufficient numbers, supplies and enthusiasm to form a viable settlement, and muskets enough to ensure they'd keep it. Taking a long term view of this, of course, it's just one more example of a species from (in this case) Earth spilling over into the evolutionary melting pot of (in this case) Virginia. On a more immediate timescale, though, it was bad news for homo sapiens X, where X stands for anything not sapiens...
Our intrepid colonists, faced with a world full of strange, alien cultures, outnumbered, and with no links to the rest of humanity, did what any group of ordinary English people would have done under the circumstances: they set about conquering the place. Unfortunately, Professor McCrea was unable to explain how exactly the colonists accomplished this task, as he had inadvisedly eaten an entire 22-ounce steak the evening before he was due to be told. All I could get out of him was that it had something to do with "atomic fireballs".
Whatever, by 1850 the colonists were the rulers of the entire planet. The system of government which they developed was, unsurprisingly, quite similar in nature to that of the British Empire on Earth, although a tad more democratic in that subjugated peoples were actually allowed representation. The world parliament met - indeed, since this is how they still manage their affairs, meets - in the original human colony (now a large city), New Dulwich. The prime minister has absolute authority, and King James I is head of state (his having been dead for 350 years being regarded as no impediment; indeed, since he never commits any indiscretions and doesn't cost the taxpayers a penny, he's actually rather popular).
Now, although the Virginians have known for certain of Earth's existence since 1623, we Earth-dwellers remained unenlightened concerning Virginia until quite recently. Practically the entire population of our planet is still unaware, in fact, which is how the Virginians like it; the last thing they want is an invasion of settlers, missionaries, or (no no no!) tourists.
It was on July 13th last year that the people of Earth finally came into direct contact with those of Virginia. The Princeton-class destroyer USS Rhode Island, rendezvousing with its sister vessel USS Connecticut for exercises in the North Atlantic, suddenly disappeared from radar screens. 30 minutes later it reappeared, having about-turned and (despite loss of satellite navigation aids) successfully backtracked along its course until it re-encountered the space-time bubble it had originally passed through.
Two science vessels were despatched by the US government immediately, along with the aircraft carrier USS Hawaii and a number of auxiliary supply ships. The entire convoy, purely for peaceful, scientific reasons, sailed through the bubble (which at this time measured nearly 500m in radius and was expanding at the rate of 1cm a day), and the USS Hawaii launched some aerial reconnaissance sorties. The Virginians, though, were somewhat aghast at seeing super-sleek contraptions zooming through the air towards their capital at much greater speeds than their own flying machines were capable of, so lobbed a volley of house-sized fireballs in the way. This rather interfered with the reconnaissance jets' ability to stay in one piece, and displeased the Americans greatly.
The upshot of the resulting military altercation was that the American forces found they stood no chance in combat on Virginia, and the Virginians found they stood no chance in combat on Earth. It's of little advantage being way ahead technologically if your opponents are able to blast you any time with their own personal thermonuclear missiles, and it's of little advantage having weapons that your enemy can't defend against if you don't have the necessary ammunition to hand, which apparently it isn't on Earth.
Unlike their military counterparts, the US and Virginian scientists thankfully got along very well together, and, after cordial discussions, formulated a united plan of action which they presented to their respective governments. Although its position drifts, the smallest that the Atlantic bubble gets at sea level was calculated to be about 30 metres in diameter, which is still enough of a size to allow continued, uninterrupted passage. The scientists reasoned, therefore, that since transfers between Earth and Virginia could thenceforth proceed at leisure, there was no need to rush into anything - they had all the time in the world to settle on a solution which would satisfy both sides. Come to that, they had all the time in two worlds. So, before deciding how any permanent interaction between the different societies should be arranged, the sensible thing to do would be to discover whether or not it was even desirable. To this end, each planet should send representatives to study the peoples and cultures of the other, concluding with a joint conference in ten years' time to determine what steps, if any, to take next.
In other words, "send in the anthropologists!"
Astoundingly, both governments acceded to the scientists' plan, their diplomats having fared little better than their navies in terms of bonding with their new-found neighbours... So it was that the Pentagon was host to a convention of top American and English anthropologists, which Professor McCrea had attended. Oh, I ought to mention at this point that the reason the English were included was to pacify those Virginians who felt that if they could remain loyal to the crown for hundreds of years while living on a completely different planet then why couldn't the Americans, who, after all, were only a mere ocean away?
Because all this was to be highly secret, at least on Earth (which has by far the greater population, and therefore by far the greater number of nutcases), anthropologists would have to be slipped through the bubble without arousing suspicions. Professor McCrea knew that I was due to begin sabbatical leave the following academic year, so could easily claim to be headed for Madagascar (or somewhere equally out of the way) for a spot of fieldwork; being unmarried, it wasn't going to throw my home life into turmoil, either, since I obviously didn't have any (sigh). He therefore promptly booked me a place, without fear that I could evade my duty when he finally got around to telling me what he'd done.
So, I was all set up to go with the first batch of my fellow pioneers the week following the conference. Except that by the time McCrea got back from Washington, it was this week. In fact, it was the day after tomorrow.
Well gee, thanks, Professor...
I made only one despairing attempt to escape from my doom, claiming that because I was an anthropologist, that meant my remit was only to study human beings. McCrea's response was something to the effect that it wasn't his fault the Ancient Greeks hadn't bothered to come up with a word for "orc", and that he was damned if Cambridge was going to look so unprofessional that it couldn't even rustle up a single any-kind-of-logist to make the first trip to Virginia that came with a return ticket.
So it was that two days later I stood on the concourse at Heathrow Terminal 3, awaiting my flight to Ascension Island by way of Madeira, and trying to put from my mind a whole catalogue of objects I wished I had remembered to pack into my suitcase before I'd boarded the train to London. I'd done some fieldwork before, of course, for my PhD, but somehow the experience I gained in my studies of Dublin's pub culture didn't seem to have much bearing on my present plight.
Judging by the state of my fellow passengers, I was not alone in being decidedly unprepared for the journey. Oxford had sent two representatives, both female, and both hoping that they could survive six whole months on another planet while equipped only with biting sarcasm. The chap from Bristol had at least held off panicking for long enough to enquire whether it would be Summer or Winter where he was going (it was Winter), and so had only appropriate attire stashed away in the rucksack which he proudly carried on a pair of skis.
The exception was Durham's delegate, Chad Hacket, a wiry Geordie of about 50, whose name I recognised immediately from a paper I'd once read about the ritual disembowelling of incestuous adulterers in Sarawak2. A true anthropologist's anthropologist, he had clearly embarked on fieldwork dozens of times before, and knew exactly what to take along: whatever clothes you happened to be wearing at the time of your flight out, and as many packets of chocolate digestive biscuits as you can stuff in your bags while still remaining able to close them.
We were all social anthropologists (or cultural anthropologists in American), which made sense; the other types possible (linguistic anthropologist, physical/biological anthropologist, and archeologist) wouldn't have been able to reach immediately useful conclusions at this stage (eg. whether or not Virginia might be likely to release chemical weapons into Earth's atmosphere). Social anthropology tells us primarily about a people's ways, not about their ancient history or genetic make-up. Well, that's what we tell the funding bodies, anyway.
The Air Portugal service to Madeira was suitably pleasant, but once there we had to board a charter flight which the US Department of Defense had rather obviously arranged in great haste. It's not that I object to propeller-driven planes per se, but I do harbour the not unreasonable desire that all of the propellers should rotate, at least during take-off. Nevertheless, once airborne, and with the privacy of thirty seats to share among the five of us, we finally got to talking about our forthcoming ordeals. I think the large number of free mini-bottles of spirits we had acquired on the first leg of our journey may have helped break the ice, too.
I had been allocated a tribe of orcs living in a fairly hilly, perhaps even mountainous part of the northern (slightly colder) hemisphere, something equivalent to, say, Edinburgh in terms of its climate. One of the Oxford women was due to visit another tribe of orcs some way further East, and the other had an intriguing appointment with some trolls (homo sapiens convalescens) in a reservation on the continent lying West of New Dulwich. The man from Bristol was scheduled to spend his six months in a dwarfen city beneath some otherwise inhospitable mountains; the sadness in his eyes when it was pointed out to him that his chances of skiing underground were pretty slim was quite poignant.
Of all of us, Chad Hacket had the best deal, since he had been present at the Pentagon briefing and was able to get his foot in the door before the Americans took all the most desirable assignments for themselves. He was to study some of the human population of Virginia, specifically the inhabitants of an area bordering halfling lands at a temperate latitude in the southern hemisphere. Apparently, a large ocean to the West brought quite big waves to the region's seaboard, and the locals there had developed surfing as a major pastime.
Upon hearing this, the man from Bristol began to cry.
"So, Chad," I said, during a lull in the conversation. "Did you happen to eat an entire 22-ounce steak at any point during your stay in Washington?"
He shook his head. "There are two types of people in America: super-fit buggers who run fifteen miles each day, and super-unfit buggers who don't walk 15 miles in a year. The super-fit buggers stop eating when they're full, and the super-unfit buggers stop eating when their plate is empty. Anyone who eats an entire 22-ounce steak is either a super-unfit bugger, or they're going to the electric chair in the morning and they don't give a bugger of any kind anyway. Or I suppose they could just be a damnfool idiot."
"Well when Professor McCrea was filling me in on the Virginia story - "
"He's a damnfool idiot."
" - he was a little hazy on how a handful of humans eventually became masters of the planet."
"Masters and mistresses," said one of the Oxford women (the one who was to study orcs East of mine). She was about my age, and could probably have made herself quite pretty if she'd decided to. Her attitude, however, seemed to indicate that she had decided quite deliberately not to...
"Let's hope so, lassie," said Chad, "or you're going to have problems."
"Lassie?" She looked stunned. "Lassie? You call grown women lassie?"
"Well if you're going to start criticising my dialect..."
I thought I'd better intervene before things got ugly. "Look, we're all a bit on edge here, and we have several more hours of each other's company before we land. Let's just calm down and try to keep on good terms, shall we?"
"Dragons," said Oxford Woman.
Hmm, dragons... "Is that a new form of abuse they're using at Oxford, or am I missing something?"
Oxford Woman sighed. "The catastrophe that wiped out the dinosaurs on Virginia came several million years later than the one that did for Earth's, and in the interim a sub-species of pterodactyl evolved which later proved able to survive the rigours that were to lay waste to the others. Fossil evidence from Earth suggests that it was common for many types of dinosaur from this era to swallow small, gravel-sized pieces of rock, apparently as an aid to their digestive systems. It so happens that the rocks on Virginia, having been formed under different circumstances to those of Earth, are extremely rich in ceramics; after a few thousand generations, a refinement of pterodactyl had evolved which was producing an enzyme that acted as a catalyst on certain types of these naturally fired clays when in contact with acids."
"So?"
"So? So? Do I have to spell it out for you?"
"Er, if you would, yes, please."
"So the consequence of all this was that each beast could run a continuous cold fusion reaction in its stomach!"
I was rather amazed. "Cold fusion? You're saying they had like a mini atomic power generator inside them?"
"Had and have, yes. Originally, in terms of natural selection, it was an advantage in that they were able to live quite happily in even the coldest of climates, such as the polar regions and the tops of mountains. Crucially, though, it also gave them a handy, nuclear-powered central heating system for those awkward times when the sun has been blotted out by dust from a massive volcanic eruption and it's -40 degrees outside..."
"Ah, I understand now: dragons!" I may not be quick, but I get there eventually. "So the colonists noticed that once in a while a large lizard thing would pass by and incinerate their crops with fiery breath, and they decided, what, to capture one and train it to help them?"
"No, no, of course not! They shot one with their muskets and took it to bits to find out how it worked. Within a decade, they had developed a hand weapon that could blast off several hundred fist-sized fireballs from a single handful of gravel, and by 1850 - "
"The entire planet was theirs..." Neat. "I see, well, it all seems to make sense now. You and Chad can get back to arguing if you like."
"No, I don't think we will." She smiled at him, rather engagingly. "He had a point in that I was criticising him for using a word which might have had no patronising overtones where he comes from."
Chad shrugged. "I'll call you a frump if that makes it any clearer," he replied.
Awaiting us at the large USN base that is Ascension Island was the American contingent of anthropologists. They were each kitted out with up-to-the-minute equipment, from solar-powered laptops to night-vision capable camcorders, and had enough baggage to ensure that whatever the Forces of Darkness had in store for them, they wouldn't have to go without home comforts ("Reports indicate that the target civilisation has not yet isolated peanut butter jelly."). I have no doubt that if the Virginians had permitted them to set up a 64-channel digital TV transmitter, they would have done so; as it was, they had to make do with a stack of laser discs and a kinetic-driven playback system (which is to say, a clockwork one).
It transpired later that this was all show. The poor wretches had been given little better warning than we English, but the US government's funding of such expeditions is rather more generous than Britain's (ie. they have some). I struck up a conversation with one fellow I'd met in passing at a conference a few years earlier, who was looking even gloomier than the rest of us. He told me he'd been in such a rush leaving that it was only when watching an in-flight movie that he'd recalled he had a pet dog. Requests to contact his neighbour had been vetoed on security grounds, but the CIA had promised to mail food and water to his animal in their special dog-accessible packages, developed at a cost of seven million dollars for just such an emergency.
It was then I remembered that I, too, had a pet dog.
Darn. I wonder how long pet dogs can survive on furniture?
We were given about an hour to "freshen up" before boarding the ship that would take us to the bubble. Including the Americans, we now numbered 27. In charge was a dynamic young naval lieutenant who clearly relished her rôle; she had a little stick with three pieces of ribbon tied to it ("If she starts Morris-dancing, I'm going to have to shoot her"), which she held aloft in the best tradition of tour guides everywhere. Her name was Tammy-Sue Lickit.
"Excuse me," asked Oxford Woman. "Your surname..."
"It's French," stated Tammy-Sue, proudly.
"Yes, yes, I know," replied the anthropologist. "At a guess, I'd say some immigration officer admitting your great-great-grandparents in the late 1800s anglicised it from the original French la quête, meaning `the quest', or, informally, `seeker'; this kind of name-mangling was very common at the time." She was waving her hand, dismissively. "No, what I wanted to ask you was how you felt about having `LICKIT' written in such invitingly large letters across your left breast?"
Fortunately, Tammy-Sue's military training didn't include a course on understanding English humour, otherwise we may well have had to stand all the way to the bubble and not speak unless to apologise. As it was, she merely explained what an honour it was to wear the uniform, and would we all follow her please as our vessel awaited.
This "vessel" turned out to be none other than the USS Connecticut, which had been present when the bubble was most recently discovered. Presumably, the rationale was so that no new crews would be exposed to the bubble's existence, but having seen during my time in Dublin how sailors like to chat to one another when they have a pint or two of Guinness inside them, I felt it likely that by now half the US Navy knew about the strange goings-on in the Atlantic. Still, protocol must be observed.
The bubble was five days' cruising from Ascension, which gave me time to read the material that the Virginians had prepared in advance for my attention. It comprised a set of maps, some generic tourist books about New Dulwich (relabelled "Background Notes"), and an ethnography of the orcs I would be studying. An "ethnography", for the benefit of those readers who have better things to do with their lives than study anthropology, is basically a collection of scientifically collected data pertaining to a society; if it pertains to several peoples or races or societies, and to the relationships of these to one another, it's an "ethnology", but ethnologies usually only appear once ethnographies of the various cultures involved have been published. Think of it as ethnography = description, ethnology = explanation.
Ethnographical information is mainly free of interpretation: important religious ceremonies, kinship relations and formal institutions will usually merit a mention, but their purpose, or their impact, is not necessarily covered. Only language, and details of physical anthropology (ie. racial origins and characteristics), tend to get the in-depth treatment. The job of an anthropologist tends towards ethnology: to produce a coherent analysis of exactly why things have come to be arranged in the manner that they have, and how the society in question really functions. This can't be done merely by reading what other people have written about the society (although, admittedly, this has to suffice when said society has disappeared, eg. that of the Carib natives of the Caribbean). No, only fieldwork - actually living among the people for several months, studying them - does the business. That said, an ethnography, despite by necessity being superficial (and often wildly inaccurate), is nevertheless an important foundation upon which to build a proper anthropological study.
Eagerly, I opened the document...
...and found that I didn't understand a single word.
After several minutes of thumbing through it, trying vainly to convince myself that I had it the right way up, my brain's primitive linguistic centres gradually began to kick in; I found myself able, with some effort, to extract bits of meaning from the text. It was in English, largely as spoken/written in the 17th Century, but with 350 years of divergence added on for good measure, and liberally peppered with bizarre words from Elvish, Dwarfish and Halflingish. Imagine reading a handwritten copy of the King James Bible backwards through a mirror, and you'll get some idea of what I was up against.
From what I could gather, it seemed my orcs were called the HA. When human explorers had reached their part of the world, they'd asked the head of a neighbouring tribe of orcs, "Are there civilised peoples beyond those hills?", and taken the answer ("Ha!") to be their name. The capitalisation is formal, Virginian linguists having developed a transcription procedure to record the way that these and a number of other tribes of orc speak. Whereas on Earth there are several languages which are tonal in nature (most notably the main dialects of Chinese and certain African tongues), the HA use volume to overload their basic set of phonemes. Thus we get sha ("flower"), sha ("sun"), SHA ("river") and SHA ("pigeon"). These four volumes are relative, so it is possible to whisper to someone that there is a pigeon outside without frightening the poor bird away, but of course it takes a lot of practice to get the levels right. Anthropologists are steeled to such problems, though, and I was confident I would soon get the hang of it, perhaps after a week or two...
The physical characteristics of the HA were described in terms of their differences from and similarities to other tribes of orc of the same race ("Northern Orc"). This made guessing what they might look like somewhat difficult, since the only orc I had seen thus far was the one in Professor McCrea's photograph, and that one was of unknown provenance. Battling my way through the nigh-impenetrable English of the ethnography, however, I eventually deduced that the HA were fairer skinned than most of their fellow Northern Orcs, and that maybe one in four had hair that wasn't the regulation mud-brown. The orc in the photograph, I figured, was an Equatorial Orc, since he was much darker than the HA must be from what I was reading of them. I was later to discover that, in practice, many orcs have pretty much the same apparent skin tone anyway when you see them up close, a consequence of their not caring to bathe very often.
Oh well, anthropologists are also well practised at revising their assumptions...
There was a knock at my door: it was Lieutenant Lickit, with a small package for me. "We had a few of these spare," she smiled, with genuine sincerity, "and I am authorised to give you one."
"What is it?" I asked, taking it from her despite my suspicions concerning her generosity.
"It's a counter-biological warfare pack. If you catch anything life-threatening from the orcs, just jab yourself in the belly with the needle to a depth an inch and a half, and it'll release a cocktail of broad-spectrum antibiotics right into your intestines." Her voice was the epitome of cheerfulness. "We don't want you bringing any exotic parasites back with you, now do we?"
The USS Connecticut is a big ship, but for some reason I fell sudden victim to what was diagnosed as seasickness.
At last, the great day arrived, and we were ferried by helicopter to the makeshift docking station that had been constructed at the bubble to Virginia. We were to make the journey on foot, a condition of the accord signed between the Virginians and Americans to prevent little accidents like the USS Hawaii incident from happening again. To this end, a pontoon bridge had been built, leading from the American docking station (which was actually a decommissioned WWII troop carrier with a helicopter landing pad bolted astern) through the bubble to the Virginian docking station some 200 metres beyond.
Lieutenant Lickit explained the basic process to us. Upon entering the bubble, we would immediately be on Virginia as well as being on Earth; upon leaving, we would only be on Virginia. If we entered from Virginia, we would immediately be on Earth as well as being on Virginia; upon leaving, we would only be on Earth. While in the bubble, therefore, we would be on both Earth and Virginia, and could interact with other people also in the bubble as normal. What we saw outside the confines of the bubble, however, would depend on which planet we'd entered it from; from Earth, we'd see Virginia, and from Virginia we'd see Earth.
"Excuse me," I said, in a voice for some reason two octaves higher than I had intended. "I've been thinking about this, and it doesn't add up. Suppose I pushed a pole for half of its length into the bubble. Half would be on Earth, half would be on both Earth and Virginia, right?"
Lieutenant Lickit's eyes were wide with the panic of a TV presenter whose autocue has just broken.
"Well," I continued, emboldened enough for my voice to have returned to normal. "If I were to pull the pole out, what would happen? The half in the bubble would remain on Virginia, according to you, so I'd only have half of a pole on Earth, the remainder being millions of light years away. And if I then pushed the pole back so that half of the Virginian half went back into the bubble, then that quarter would be on both Virginia and Earth? So, if I then pulled the whole lot out again, wouldn't I have a pole with a quarter section gap in it, because that bit would still be on Virginia?"
"That information is ... unavailable," answered Lieutenant Lickit, attempting to retain her composure but not completely succeeding.
"Only it's quite important, you see. I wouldn't want to enter the bubble and have some of me leave it while the rest was still in there. It would only take for some blood to be pumping away from my direction of movement, say, for it to exit the bubble, re-enter it, and be in Earth's space instead of Virginia's. Where would that leave me? Pretty sick, I should imagine."
"There's no risk involved at all, I assure you - "
"Hey, he's got a point," interrupted one of the American anthropologists. "How do we know that every time we enter this bubble, a little bit of us isn't going to stay behind?"
"It'd sure gross me out," added another.
"Come on, Tammy-Sue," shouted a third, "we want the whole picture before we step one foot through there. We got rights, you know."
The word "rights" is apparently quite a powerful one in the American vocabulary, and upon hearing it Lieutenant Lickit visibly paled. "I'll, I'll see what I can do," she flustered, and meekly left to seek assistance.
I wasn't altogether proud of having inadvertently demolished the poor woman's self esteem, however I comforted myself in the knowledge that, her being an American, she would assuredly be paying periodic visits to a psychiatrist anyway; two or three regular sessions, and she'd soon be back to her perky self. Besides, there really was something weird going on with this bubble, and I for one wanted a proper explanation of how it worked.
Well, I did at the time.
Lieutenant Lickit returned with a physicist whom she introduced as one Dr Barking. He was - barking mad. Dr Barking proceeded to give us a 40-minute lecture on quantum mechanics, punctuated by sudden, surprised shouts at people he seemed to believe were hiding in the ceiling. The essence of his explanation was that when matter entered the bubble it took on a dual existence, and its specific location was neither Earth nor Virginia but "one or the other". Only when its quantum wave collapsed was its actual destination fixed. Pushing a pole half-way into the bubble would, in effect, create two copies of the inserted half, but which was the "real" one would depend on what happened to it next. If the rest of the pole went into the bubble, and there were no force connecting it back to Earth, it would be on Virginia; if it were pulled back through the bubble, it would be on Earth.
This made sense to me, to the evident relief of Lieutenant Lickit and those of my colleagues who hadn't found some excuse to sneak off while Dr Barking was harassing the people in the roof. It took about 15 minutes to round up the escapees, whereupon we were all taken down to the departure lounge and given our bags. The bow doors of the troop ship opened...
Out we walked.
There was quite a swell on the Atlantic that day, but nothing that anyone couldn't get used to after a hearty vomit. Lieutenant Lickit led the way, eager to show us that she had made the trip several times before and yet there weren't bits of her floating around on Virginia whatever I thought.
It occurred to me that it was rather a good thing that the bubble was on the surface of the sea in both worlds, otherwise there might have been rather disastrous results. It transpires that something akin to centripetal force ensures that bubbles are normally roughly the same distance from the centre of each planet, but on occasion they can get out of line because the masses of the planets and suns involved aren't identical. Doubtless someone somewhere will get a PhD explaining how just such a surface/undersea anomaly led to the Biblical flood, but it's not going to be me.
The location of the bubble's edges wasn't immediately apparent. As we looked in its direction, the light reaching our eyes had come from Virginia, so we saw no change as we strode through into its interior. Looking behind, though, was a different story: one moment, there was the US docking station in all its seedy glory, and the next it was gone, replaced by open seas. Eerily, people following would suddenly pop into view, rather than emerge as if through an invisible curtain, which is how I had imagined their arrival would look; I took this as evidence in support of Dr Barking's theories. We would be able to tell when we had left the bubble, Lieutenant Lickit informed us, because at that point we could look back through it and once again see the US docking station.
Not that anyone was paying attention to her. We were there, inside the bubble, and at the true start of our journey. The ocean still had its swell, but it wasn't the Atlantic; the sun was still shining, but it wasn't the Sun. This was the planet Virginia, some 65,000,000 light years away from Earth, and home for the coming six months to 27 joyful anthropologists whom all the gold in Fort Knox couldn't have lured back.
Well, OK, maybe for all the gold I'd have considered it.
1 The Latin for "dwarf" is actually nanus, but Virginian scientists aren't ones to miss a good opportunity to make a weak pun.
2 He'd written the paper, not been ritually disembowelled.
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21st January 1999: ltlwo1.htm