which I seen people do oftentimes after they drunk too much. It’s like the wine or the beer turns into fumes inside them, and the fumes start filling up their head. That’s what it feels like too in my experience.
“What kind of questions?” she says to me then.
“Mostly about tech,” I told her. “About how you come to know so much about it, and maybe…” I thought most carefully about my words. “Maybe where a man could go to find it. For you got some I never seen before, and you seem to know a lot about how it works. More than Ramparts, maybe.” I said that last part to please her, hoping it would put her in the right mind to say yes, but also I believed it to be true. The things I was seeing all around me here, that Ursala used so lightly, was a store of treasure like I never dreamed of.
Ursala set the wineskin down but kept her hand on it, tapping her thumb against the neck of it while she thought. “Well,” she says, “here’s the problem. Some questions are easy to ask, but hard to answer. Often, you can start out on an explanation only to find that it doesn’t make sense unless you explain a second thing, and then a third, and so on. You’ve pulled on a loose thread, and instead of snapping off clean it just keeps unravelling. I’ll tell you what I can, Koli, but that’s not the same as telling you all I know. Very far from it. Is that acceptable?”
It made me feel good how she asked me that. Like we was two people of weight and solemn mind, striking a bargain. “Yes,” I said. And I used her word because I liked the sound of it. “That’s acceptable, Dam Ursala.”
“Then go ahead and ask.”
I meant to ask straight out where I might find myself some tech like hers, but what come out of my mouth was a different question. I think it was something I hadn’t ever stopped thinking about since I seen it, and now it was sitting right behind my tongue, like they say. “How did you bring down that drone with just a rock and a stick?”
“Seriously?” Ursala said. “That’s what you want to know?”
“To start with. Please.”
“The drones are very old. They were built hundreds of years ago, and nobody has ever inspected or repaired them in all that time. When they were new, they had a dozen different targeting systems – line of sight, sound, vibration, body heat, god knows what – so they could switch between them at need. Over time, those systems have degraded. Some of them are permanently offline. The thermal imaging, though, is very robust.” She looked at my face and she seen the blankness there. “The heat,” she said. “It’s easiest for them to hunt you by the heat of your body. So when I picked up the burning branch and moved it around in front of me, I confused it. I was blurring my heat signature so I didn’t look quite so much like a human target any more. And when I told you to go stand in the fire, it was for the same reason. You didn’t do it, but my trick with the burning stick worked, fortunately. The drone came in closer to try to resolve the anomaly, and… Well, that was when I deployed my secret weapon.”
“The rock?”
Ursala nodded, her face all serious but with a smile underneath somehow. “The rock, yes.”
That give me a lot to chew on. Like most people, when I thought of tech I mostly thought about it as a kind of magic. I knowed it was men and women like us that made it, but that was in the old times. We was fallen a long way from what we was in them days, and we had lost the lore of such makings. But Ursala seemed to know a lot of things nobody else did. I seen I was right to take my reward in questions.
“Where does your tech come from?” I says to her.
Ursala shaked her head. “I could give you a name, but the name wouldn’t mean anything to you. It came from the place where I was born and grew up.”
“Elsewhere?”
“Elsewhere just means far away, Koli. And what’s far to one man is no distance at all to another. It was a town called Duglas. There was a great deal more tech there than