tougher by far than any made these days. Had he not known for a fact that the men of Old Time enjoyed both godlike power and godlike goodness, that might have made him wonder about their integrity.
Before he scrambled in through the window opening, he paused to sniff. His nose caught none of the rank order of cat piss, so no cougar-otherwise known as puma, catamount, or, though Eestexas had no mountains, mountain lion-had denned in there any time recently. Just to stay on the safe side, the shaman thrust in his spear and poked around as far as he could reach. Nothing screeched or hissed or writhed under the point, so he scrambled in himself.
His boots scrunched on drifted leaves. He stood still for a couple of minutes, letting his eyes adjust to the gloom. Then he looked around to see what sort of building this was.
A few feet ahead stood a closed door, the frosted glass panel inset into its upper half still miraculously intact. When Madyu saw that door, hope that he’d come upon a real find began to flower in him. If this place had been looted before, the door would have been ajar, the glass broken, or, more likely both.
Gilded letters marched across the glass. Some had peeled away, but the shaman could still read the words they made: veterinarian’s office. All at once his breath came quick and short, as if he and Neena lay joined together on his pallet. In the Old Time, veterinarians had been shamans specially charged with healing animals. An unplundered veterinarian’s office might yield-
“Anything,’’ he said aloud, in soft, wondering tones. “Anything at all.”
He went up to the door and twisted the knob. He let out a whoop when it refused to turn-would a looter have locked a door behind him when he was through? It seemed anything but probable. He smashed the glass with the butt of his spear. After the rest of his searching was done, he would gather up the sharp shards to use in cutting blades and as arrow points. Nothing from the Old Time went to waste.
He reached into the opening he’d made and opened the door from the inside. The chamber thus revealed was better lit than he’d expected. A quick look showed why: part of the roof had fallen in, baring the office to the sky- and the rain.
“Oh, a pestilence,” Madyu groaned. Everything that had lain anywhere near floor level was long years ruined. Cobwebs lay thick upon every shelf. They covered countless jars of pills. Madyu would have fought shy of those no matter what. Old Time medicines, whether meant for animals or men, were likelier to kill than cure when given by someone who did not thoroughly understand them, which, in the days since the Big Oops, meant everybody.
The shaman went over to a low cabinet with a great many drawers. He pulled one open, tearing more cobwebs. He felt like shouting-in fact, he did shout-when he discovered it was full of little sharp knives of several sizes and shapes. They were as bright and unrusted as if they’d been forged the day before. He scooped them out of their neat pigeonholes, stuffed them into the stout leather sack he’d brought for booty, then tried another drawer.
This one held hollow needles attached to glass cylinders. No one these days knew why the men of Old Time had chosen to imitate rattlesnake fangs, but they had. The shaman took a few of the bigger ones; sometimes women in the tribe used them to stick sauces deep inside a joint of meat. Other than that, so far as he knew, they had no use.
Other drawers were full of things that had no use whatsoever that he knew about. A lot of them, however, were made of metal and glass, so they were valuable even if not useful in and of themselves.
But next to the cabinet stood a real prize, a metal bookcase full of books. Or, rather, almost full of books: those on the bottom two shelves had at some time in the unknown past been chewed up and turned into rats’ nests. The bookcase, though, was sheltered from the elements, and had kept its smooth coat of paint. Rodents hadn’t been able to get at the volumes on the upper shelves.
Madyu pulled one out, dusted it off, held it close to his nose to read the title on the spine: Collected Numbers of the Journal of American Veterinary Medicine. That looked as if it might be interesting. But when he opened the volume, the collected numbers flaked to pieces under even the gentlest touch.
“Pox-ridden paper!” Madyu growled. So many books from Old Time were like girls who teased but wouldn’t deliver; instead of giving up the precious information they contained, they crumbled away to nothingness.
Scowling at yet another such betrayal, the shaman pulled out another volume, this one also labeled Collected Numbers. He opened it even more cautiously than he had the first. All at once, he grinned in startled pleasure. The numbers collected here were not what the title claimed. Bound inside the spine were half a dozen copies of an Old Time magazine with which he was already familiar, one whose pictures displayed not only incomprehensible ancient artifacts like cameras, CD players, and Toyotas, but also a good many perfectly comprehensible ancient pretty girls in various interesting states of undress.
He closed this volume with the same care he’d used to open it, then stowed it in his leather sack. He had more than a little hope that he would be able to get it safely back to the encampment. Unlike the real Journal of American Veterinary Medicine, the magazines that had hidden behind the lying binding were made from a shiny, coated paper that was better at withstanding the ravages of time than was the more common kind.
The shaman plucked out more books, searching for others printed on the coated paper. He found a couple and put them into the sack. Several others, made from the ordinary variety, disintegrated as soon as he opened them. He murmured a prayer of regret at having destroyed so much irreplaceable wisdom, but did not know what else he could have done.
He picked up the heavy sack, closed the office door behind him, and left the ruin by the window through which he’d entered. He was surprised to note how far the sun had crawled across the sky; he hadn’t paid attention to the shadows as he ransacked the Old Time office.
He hallooed for Jorj, and felt a good deal of relief when the chief hunter hallooed back a moment later. Jorj had the knack for moving quietly through the undergrowth; in a couple of minutes, he simply seemed to appear in front of Madyu out of thin air. He pointed to the bulging leather sack. “Ha! No demons, eh?”
“None that I saw, anyhow,” Madyu answered. He’d only meant to be strictly accurate, but saw he’d also succeeded in frightening Jorj. Well, that wasn’t such a bad thing. Hiding a smile, he went on, “No snakes, either.”
“Good, good. What do you have in there, anyway?”
“Some little knives of good steel, some hollowed needles, glass and metal junk, and some books.”
“Books,” Jorj’s voice informed the word with scorn. “Why bother bringing out books, shaman? What good are they?’’ Like almost everyone else in the tribe, the chief hunter was illiterate.
“You’ll like some of them. Pictures from Old Time.” Madyu’s hands shaped curves in the air. As they did so, he thought again of Neena.
Jorj’s eyes lit up. “You’ll trade some?”
“Why not?’’ Madyu said. “I see you’ve also done pretty well for yourself.’’
More than a dozen dead songbirds, their little yellow legs bound together with twine, hung head down from Jorj’s belt, along with a possum and a couple of chipmunks. “Could be worse,” the chief hunter allowed. “I just wish there was more meat to each one. But as long as I do even this well, we won’t be down to eating grubs and grasshoppers the way we had to a couple of years ago.”
“The gods be praised for that,’’ Madyu said, and meant every word of it. Grasshopper stew was vile; no matter how long the insects cooked, they crunched horridly between the teeth. And Chief Raff had been about to run him out of the tribe for weak magic before the famine finally broke. Madyu never had figured out why the gods got so angry at him, or why they finally decided to relent.
Shaman and chief hunter walked back to the encampment in companionable silence, each well enough pleased with his day’s work. Thanks to his tasty burden, Jorj got the big half of the wishbone’s worth of greetings, but Madyu created some enthusiasm among the men when he told them about the pictures of Old Time girls he’d found.
Neena happened to be standing close by just then, and let out a sniff loud enough to make him regret for a moment having come across the volume with pictures. Soon enough, though, thoughts of profit ousted regret. It wasn’t, worse luck, as if Neena were his woman.
After supper but before sunset made reading impractical, Madyu settled down with the other two books he’d brought back from the ruin. One of them, its title page proclaimed, was about the diseases of cats. He read three or four pages, then put the book down with a grunt of disgust. It was as incomprehensible as the one with which the other shaman had cheated him.
He wondered if he was the problem, but shook his head. He read pretty fluently, and the Old Time language
