The Bothnian Coast, July: Long stretches of the heavily forested Finnish coast are almost uninhabited. Few have the resources to live in a remote home through the long, dark winter, so most of the vacation and year-round homes of the pre-Kurian era are empty of everything but bears, red foxes, and other wildlife.
Still, there are a few fine homes left on the coast, mostly near towns of year-round activity such as Kokkola, as well as smaller, more humble dwellings around villages devoted to fishing and sealing on the coast. The Gulf of Bothnia has its charms for some, including the fact that the low-salinity water freezes over for several months out of the year, making it one of the largest expanses of ice outside of the Arctic and Antarctic regions—an ice fisherman’s paradise, if you have the ability to cross the sometimes treacherous sheets and drill your way through to water. In the summer, the small, isolated beaches see a rush of campers and fishermen taking advantage of the mild weather and long sunlit dawns and dusks. Through the other seasons one might consider it an ideal climate for a philosopher or writer, with opportunities to spend weeks on end quietly and warmly indoors, if you have the resources, though the market for writing and philosophy is much lessened in the dark days of the Kurian Order.
She dropped a message for Von Krebs at the conference center first thing the next morning, before she lost her resolve to do so.
Wandering briefly through the conference center, overhearing conversations she couldn’t understand, she wished in vain to be on her way home. Even Pistols seemed to be enjoying the conference. He called the atmosphere “stimulating,” a word she doubted he had used often before their trip.
Not that the trip wasn’t good for her. She’d put on weight. The Finns used a lot of sour cream in their soups and dressings, and after an initial bout of indigestion, she was thriving on regular meals with plenty of fresh veggies. There wasn’t much of what she considered fruit at these latitudes, but the berries made up for it.
She wasn’t mentally stimulated, either. To be honest, she was bored.
It wasn’t for the lack of characters attending. There were a few big, burly, savage-looking Scandinavian guerillas who were either Bears or such beasts personally that they could have given the Bears a tougher time than they’d seen outside of a Reaper conclave.
One in particular caught her eye. He was a blond giant, like some hero out of an epic who was just waiting for a Valkyrie to carry him off from the field of the slain. He’d been partially—well, there was no other word for it but “scalped” in some encounter or other, and it left him with a huge pink patch where his hair should have been on the left side. As if to compensate, he’d let the right side grow into a long fall, giving his head an asymmetrical but strangely appealing look. He wore a thick fur jacket and what looked like wolfskin boots; he’d left the wolf faces atop the shoes, as a matter of fact. She quietly inquired about him at the security desk.
“Rolf, that one is. A Norwegian. The last survivor of an entire company of Bears. You know Bears?”
“I know Bears.”
“All died but him at Trondheim. A terrible fight, but Trondheim now, no more Kurians. Oslo and Bergen and the south coast of Norway is all they have.”
“And they’re welcome to it,” the security woman at the desk said. “Damn stupid Norwegians.”
The activity woke her appetite. She went back the hotel, wondering what she’d do with herself until the afternoon. She expected Von Krebs to get the message by noon. It was in her nature and her training to observe people’s rou
tines. She’d seen Von Krebs most days around lunchtime in the hotel, having drinks with friends. He usually hit the convention center first.
She decided to use the hotel buffet.
Meals came in two varieties—free buffets for the attendees, and personally funded meals that could be delivered to your home or eaten at an elegant table near a romantic fire.
The only head-scratcher for her was the monitors. The hotel lobby set up six big, brilliant electronic screens that produced pictures and video so sharp that they were hard to distinguish from real life. One of the hotel workers said they were Finnish-made; there was a substantial electronics remanufacturing industry closer to Helsinki and Turku.
So, with all that amazing technology, what did they do? Ran conference updates about schedule and speaker changes in between reruns of Noonside Passions, the ubiquitous Kurian Zone daytime drama. Duvalier couldn’t stand it, but Valentine would sit quite happily, drink coffee or tea, and soak up plot points about infertile women and black market scoundrels, leavened with plenty of New Universal Church sermonizing.
It was popular around the world, so they could get broadcasts of the day’s show in several languages. Moreover, since it was propaganda masquerading as entertainment, it was broadcast everywhere. Valentine liked to pick the story lines apart sometimes, trying to pick up hints about what the Kurian Order was worried about this particular month. They would do a series about energy rationing and conservation, or add a subplot about why it’s important to keep your teeth clean, or to report privately owned transmitters.
Still, every day there were little groups of men and women watching one of the several broadcasts and rebroadcasts. Some worked on notes held in their laps, others grabbed a hasty meal and watched, and still more talked and chuckled as the show proceeded.
As Duvalier idled and wondered whether she should go to the pharmacy in town for more stomach powder (her cranky gut was improving with the ample dairy and fiber), she sipped some watery fruit punch and watched the watchers. One German woman grew so excited at a Passions plot point that she hopped up and ran to one of the lobby phones to call over to the conference center. All Duvalier could get of the conversation was a character’s Germanicized name mentioned a couple of times.
People get worked up about strange things. She’d known Bears who would read Jane Austen novels to one another, crying openly at the little heartbreaks of the books’ heroines.
She’d rather spend her time sleeping. Dreams were better than anything a television writer could create. Now that she’d been eating well for a few weeks, her dreams had quit being about banquets and switched over to sunny fields, music, and sex.
Then she’d get up in the middle of the night to use the toilet, pass through the front room of their suite on the way to the toilet, holding her breath against the funk swirling around Valentine and Pistols (did they secretly hold farting competitions?), and return to her bed to drop into a deep and dreamless sleep.
Von Krebs broke his usual routine. She didn’t see him around the hotel for lunch, and when she checked back in with the message center, she found that he hadn’t come in for his notes yet.
With nothing better to do, she saw Valentine off at the train station. There was a Finnish holiday of some sort on Friday and a few of the conference attendees were taking advantage of the light schedule to see Helsinki. The Helsinki train, on turnaround, was having a twenty-minute break and crew change. The sailor rather pointedly looked at a map and timetable in a display window.
Down the straight-shooting line, the tracks vanished into the pine forest. Duvalier thought Finland could supply much of the world’s population with wood if it had to; everywhere she looked in this country there were beautifully tall pines, as straight as if they were designed with an architect’s T square.
“I’m getting out for a long weekend, too,” she said. “I’m taking Von Krebs up on his offer to see the coast from his friend’s house.”
Valentine had just a small canvas bag, the one he used for his pistol, ammunition, holster, knives, and the cleaning kit for his weapon. He made a show of adjusting the strap. “Glad to hear it. Get a little sea air and sun.”
“What’s with the gun? You’re not really taking a train across the country for art,” Duvalier said.