Unfinished Business

Chapter Six

All day long the ships dropped out of the sky and filled the remaining spaces along the mesa top, each one spilling another crew – and sometimes passengers – into the Reunion. It had taken on a kind of carnival air, and already there were impromptu contests of various sorts breaking out all over the place. Everything from wrestling to “reactor squeezins” home-brewed spirits were being judged by ad hoc panels, with plenty of encouragement and disparagement being dispensed in equal amounts by the giddy onlookers.

Plenty of locals had come out to enjoy the mix – the Reunion was held in a remote part of the “tribal lands” where subsistence farming, nomadic herding, and hunting and gathering were the main economy. The tribesmen were an eclectic mixture of tribal cultures from Earth That Was, peoples who had held on tenuously to their cultural traditions through the Great Exodus, and had transplanted their own unique cultures to the sparse, dry wilderness of the Muir Outback.

There were plenty of Aborigines, whose ancestors had lived in the original Outback of Old Australia, long ago. There were also remnants of Siberian tribes, Native Americans, Polynesians, Sufi clans, Romany, Central Asians of all types, Maori, Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, Yoruba, and any number of smaller tribes. Either they had survived both the journey from the sacred soil of Earth-That-Was and the intense cultural pressures brought about by the dominant Indo-Chinese and EuroAmerican cultures that had arranged the passage, or they were endeavoring to re-discover – and, when necessary, re-invent – the cultures of their ancestors. They shared a common spiritual ideal, holding the biosphere as inherently sacred, and a common custom for inter-tribal relations, but precious little else. English and Chinese were both spoken freely among them, but only as second and third languages.

The various tribes had set up booths in the interior space of the Reunion, selling all manner of handmade crafts, trink