The Romulan War_ Beneath the Raptor's Wing (Book 1) - Michael A. Martin [70]
In a voice filled with reverence, Qaletaqu explained that this place was the consecrated site of the local habak, or religious shrine, a sacred place where the Canyontowners came to seek guidance in the form of visions from their animal spirit guides and the shades of their dead ancestors.
When they aren’t brawling in the tavern, she thought, but refrained from saying aloud.
An hour or so later, after she had booked herself a room over Ahota’s Public House, Canyontown’s sole tavern, Brooks quietly took a seat in the back of the establishment’s smoky but surprisingly spacious game room. From the careworn condition of some of the furniture and fixtures, she concluded that the place must have been experiencing something of a slump recently, perhaps because the specter of war was never particularly friendly to the tourist trade of any nation or world.
Brooks watched as about two dozen of the locals, whose ages ranged from teen to elderly, slowly filled the room’s obviously temporary complement of plastiform folding chairs, which someone had arranged in three rough concentric circles around a forlorn-looking pool table. Quietly studying the primarily Native American but nevertheless highly variegated faces arrayed about her, she wondered whether the anarchic behavior she had seen so far today had been merely a fluke. She already strongly suspected it wasn’t, however, as she watched the grizzled old man who had taken the seat beside her busily typing on a square padd that had a larger than usual display, probably to accommodate his failing eyesight. The old man told her, without being asked, that he was working on a political manifesto. The elderly but strong-looking woman seated at his other side interrupted him long enough to explain that he’d been working diligently on this very same manifesto every day of the past twenty-two years. The old man then interrupted the interruption to describe his work as a reimagining of the Fundamental Declarations of the Martian Colonies, using a political vocabulary that made it sound like a weird and probably explosive mix of classical Marxism, post–World War III Meltdown Nihilism, Grange Populism, and grab-up-the-guns Ayn Rand Objectivist-Libertarianism. He finished his rhapsodic description by saying that his document, while still a work in progress, promised to deliver the long-sought-after goal of proving the ultimate perfectibility of human nature.
Good luck with that, she thought from behind her politest smile. She refrained from pointing out that a perfected human nature wasn’t likely to be of much more help against the Romulans than would the Canyontowners’ streak of eccentric, colorful independence.
As the old man returned to his work, Brooks continued to study the rest of the faces in the crowd. They displayed a panoply of diverse emotions ranging all the way from eager anticipation to stuporous boredom, but all of them living, breathing manifestations of that independent streak. Brooks considered using that singular characteristic as the primary angle for the profile she was going to write about these people. Based both on what she’d observed so far and the backgrounders she had read, she assumed that the Canyontowners’ ornery self-reliance shared an origin with the formal name the place had received from its Hopi-Pueblo expat founders—Popé Pueblo—when they had established it in 2109. A quick search of the local infonets right after she’d checked into her room revealed that Popé was the name of the Native American tribal leader who’d led the 1680 revolt against the Spanish conquerors who had dragged his people into forced labor in Mexican mines.
Brooks wondered if she was already becoming used to the weirdness of this place, so far from the mainstream of ordinary Earthbound human experience, yet so much closer to humanity’s cradle than Alpha Centauri, Tau Ceti, Altair, or any of the human species’ other long-term habitations. If human weirdness turns