Chapter 16
Capitalism
Fort Peterbilt
September 20, 1006 CE
News of the events in Hocha after Fazel left took a while to get back to them. The crosses had come down after the destruction, after the murder of everyone in the Kadlo Mound. Using that and the threat of the trebuchet had forced the retreat of the rest. The Pharisees of the old gods now owned Hocha, but some of the other clans had retreated, abandoning the city and their clan mounds. In effect, the old gods owned the city of Hocha and some of the clans, but Jesus Christ was accepted in more than half the clans, at least outside the city.
The Kacla were trying to be neutral, allowing the worship of both the old gods and Jesus and maintaining a presence in Hocha. The Purdak, after seeing the destruction of the Kadlo Mound, had retreated from Hocha and gone to their own villages. The clan chiefs of the Purdak, and especially their women’s council, had been terrified and enraged by the murder of all of the Kadlo in the city. The Gruda were sticking with the old gods, but while they were happy with the murder of the Kadlo in the city, they were unwilling to undertake military operations against Fort Peterbilt, or other Kadlo villages.
The Lomak clan had broken over the matter. Several of their villages broke with their clan chiefs and applied for membership in the Kadlo.
It was a Lomak village chieftain who’d brought the word of the final—so far—resolution.
“My village needs your help if we are to defend against the Pharisees,” Kalmak said. His village of Lisyuk, like most of the Lomak villages, was on the south side of the Talak River above Hocha, that part of the Talak that the Peterbilt people knew as the Missouri River.
After discussing things inside, they went out and used the projection screen that Jerry Jefferson had brought with him to project what he knew of the course of the Talak. The village Lisyuk was around two hundred miles along the Talak from Fort Peterbilt. Sofaf was closer, at their best guess, about one hundred fifty miles upriver, about where the town of Washington, Missouri, was in the future they came from. That would mean traveling past Hocha, but that really wasn’t much of a problem. The Talak River was more than a mile across there. Both villages wanted the Peterbilt to help with the plowing, or if they couldn’t get the Peterbilt, a steam tractor.
“If you can get it to our side of the river you should be able to go over land between the villages,” Kalmak continued.
“The Pharisees might send out boats to intercept you,” Kalmak warned.
Even using the trebuchets, Hocha couldn’t reach them. But they could send out canoes and Hocha had big canoes. It was how they controlled the trade up and down the river. As Hocha’s power was based on their knowledge of “the mysteries,” much of their economic power was based on control of the river trade.
“We need a better money,” Jerry muttered.
“What was that last?” asked Jogida. She was one of the better speakers of English, but there were a lot of words.
“Disshot,” Miriam said. The children had picked up the words more readily than the adults, but often without the subtlety of meaning. Disshot did indeed mean money or trade goods, but it always included the notion that the trade goods were goods, as well as stuff to be exchanged for other stuff.
Jerry looked at his wife. “Is disshot money, as distinct from trade goods?”
“Daddy!” Miriam, at seven, didn’t appreciate her daddy—who had gone away and gotten old, then came back—questioning her.
“Miriam,” Alyssa said, and gave her a look. Miriam subsided grumpily and Alyssa continued. “I’m not sure that there is a word that means money as distinct from trade goods.”
At that point, everything devolved into a language lesson. That still happened a lot, even more now than six months in. Because now they were getting into places where there was no concept in the local language for a concept that English expressed. Or there was no word in English for a local concept. In this case, while the locals were no longer a strictly barter- and gift-based economy, they weren’t yet a monied economy. They were in a middle ground that didn’t know how to get the rest of the way to capitalism.
Capitalism, in its broadest sense. An economy where people use money to buy and sell stuff, not the much tighter definitions of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, where it had taken on so much political weight that the economics could no longer support the definition. Back in the twenty-first century, Jerry Jefferson had been on the conservative side of “middle of the road.” In the here and now, he was just looking for a way to make the economy work better so that people wouldn’t spend as much time killing each other over an old coat or a few sacks of corn.
Over the next few days Jerry learned that money is a hard thing to explain to people who haven’t grown up with it.
Fort Peterbilt
October 1, 1006 CE
Alyssa Jefferson was sitting in her house wearing her new phone in a headset made partly in the mid twenty-first century and partly right here. Moore’s law had not failed while Jerry had been lobbying congress to send him to this time. The computers and memory that he’d brought back in the capsule were massively more powerful than the same weight of computers would have been when she, her children and the Anderles were dropped here.
Her new phone/computer, which was only a bit heavier than a pair of glasses, fit on her face and displayed a virtual screen about three feet distant. It also used a virtual keyboard. But Alyssa was using the keyboard on her old laptop because she couldn’t get used to the virtual keyboard. That was going to change because Farsak, a wood carver from Jabir, was carving her a keyboard. It wouldn’t actually do anything but the sensors in the new phone would track her finger movements as she typed on it so it would act as a keyboard.
Meanwhile, Alyssa was taking a course in practical chemistry for the eleventh century taught by one of her undergrads. She was now a middle-aged woman who had been an irritating teenager a year and a half earlier in Alyssa’s personal timeline. She needed the course, both because knowledge of chemistry had improved over the more than a quarter of a century while they were figuring out how to send Jerry back to her, but also because she needed to know what chemical compounds she would be likely to find in which plants. And she desperately needed that, to save children suffering from asthma, and allergies from rickets, and any number of infections and infectious diseases.
The Pharisees, among their other charming qualities, didn’t approve of “wise women.” But Jabir had several; they were on the women’s council and they worked with the local shamans who were now calling themselves pastors. Alyssa was now one of those women. Etaka was another. A big part of the reason that Etaka had become so incensed with the Pharisees of Hocha was that Priyak had refused to let her consult with him on medical cases after an instruction from the Pharisees.
Two children had died because he wouldn’t listen to her.
At least after the second attack, Priyak had left to go to Hocha. From what Alyssa had heard, he’d gotten to the city just in time to be on the Kadlo Mound when the Pharisees had used trebuchets to kill everyone.
She called up another file and listened to a lesson on how to extract and purify digitalis from foxglove, one of the seed packs that Jerry brought. They wouldn’t have any until next spring, but the same techniques could be used to extract other things from other plants.
* * *
Michael Anderle was bent over the engine of the Peterbilt. He was also wearing a pair of the glasses phones, and he was also watching a display. It was keyed to the engine of his Peterbilt and it was designed to help him use locally found replacements for seals and filters and other things, so that he could keep the engine and electrical systems on the big truck operational just as long as possible.
Jerry Jefferson had brought them a lot of toys.
* * *
Melanie Anderle was with the villagers of Jabir. She was wearing the glasses too, but they were pushed up on her forehead as they all worked on harvesting beans. She wasn’t harvesting. She was driving the pickup, which at the moment was filled with baskets to collect the beans. The pickup’s tires had all needed patching at least once in the year and a half since they’d been dropped here, and repairing tires in the eleventh century wasn’t like making a call to AAA. So Melanie was being cautious.
* * *
Shane wasn’t in the village. She was on a deer hunt with the young men of the village of Jabir. She’d been invited along after she showed them the crossbow that her dad had given her for her birthday. The metallurgy of this century still wasn’t up to guns, but the woodworking was plenty up to an eighty-pound-pull crossbow. And even if she had to use both hands to cock it, she could shoot it accurately at up to one hundred fifty yards.
They reached a stand of trees and Shane got down on her belly and used a branch to support the front of the crossbow, then took careful aim and squeezed the trigger.
The bolt took the deer in the chest. It leapt into the air and started running, but it didn’t go far. The rest of the small herd of bucks scattered.
They reached the dying buck, and Achanu slit its throat with a flint knife and spread its blood on each of Shane’s cheeks.
It was uncommon, but acceptable, for girls to hunt among the Kadlo.
* * *
Miriam Jefferson was in school and found that she liked it. She was wearing the computer glasses that her daddy had brought with him and following along as the programmed learning text taught her math.
While just turned six, Norman played with blocks with letters carved into them. Mom had gotten them made for him by a wood carver in Jabir. He was wearing the glasses too, and the augmented reality was showing him force vectors as he set the blocks as off-center as possible without them falling.
Fort Peterbilt
October 15, 1006 CE
The crops were mostly in and the locals were shifting to their winter routine, but, both in Fort Peterbilt and Jabir, it was going to be a good winter. A winter with plenty of food and a winter with chimneys. By now just about every hut in both places had brick chimneys rising from brick fireplaces and most of them had iron tops on the fireplaces so that even as the smoke went out much of the heat stayed in. And they could even cook over, or in, the fireplace.
Jabir had bricklayers. It was a new profession and one that took great pride in itself.
* * *
Oaka was seated at a potter’s wheel making clay pots. She had several tools and sacks of clay as she made each pot to a precise size. The openings in the top needed to fit the lids right so that there wouldn’t be much leakage, because these would also act as Dutch ovens. You want them to be covered in hot coals but not have the coal dust get into the food, so she used a premeasured piece of wood to trim the top of each pot to the same size. Standardization meant that if a piece or a lid broke, another lid would fit.
She finished the dish, moved it to a shelf to dry and started on another, then stopped. The evening was getting chill, so she put some wood in the fireplace and started a small fire. Then she filled a pot with water and set it on the metal top of the fireplace to heat. She would have warm water to wash her hands after she was done and would sleep in a warm house tonight. And most every night all winter long.
Across the room, Jogida was working at a spinning wheel. They’d been trying for a year and a half to make it work and it wasn’t until Mr. Jefferson arrived that they learned what they were missing. After that, it became easy. Jogida made excellent-quality hemp thread. Using it and the crochet hooks, she was making fine crocheted clothing for herself and her little brothers, and to sell.
Jogida had lived for the better part of a year on the charity of the village, and she never wanted to be in that position again.
Her little brother, Faris, had become great friends with Norman Jefferson, and the two often played together. Faris spoke English very well at five and a half, though his understanding was that of a five-year-old. Three-year-old Ubadan followed them around when he could. He spoke both languages interchangeably, not even seeming to know that they were two languages.
“I want popcorn,” Faris demanded in English.
“May I have popcorn,” Jogida corrected.
Faris started to cloud up, then seeing the look on his big sister’s face, said, “May I have popcorn, please?”
“All right,” Jogida agreed, and got out the lidded iron skillet. It was made from bog iron and was worth as much as a half dozen ceramic pots. Achanu had killed a deer and traded it to Michael Anderle for the frying pan, then given it to Oaka, but they all shared.
Fort Peterbilt
November 15, 1006 CE
Jerry Jefferson listened to the discussion after the latest showing of Jesus Christ Superstar as Alyssa translated. The latest showing was projected by the Capsule Theater. The new brick building that housed the capsule had a smooth whitewashed wall on one end. The wall was fourteen feet tall and twenty wide and the roof and walls of the Capsule Theater kept the light out so that the projector didn’t need to work quite so hard to fill the whitewashed wall with images. In other words, it was a decent, if small, movie theater with the capsule providing both image and sound.
While Jesus Christ Superstar was still very popular and watched several times a week by people who came from many villages to see it, the locals were less enthralled by the Old Testament and found much of the doctrine that brought by Jerry Jefferson in the capsule to be not at all in keeping with their faith. There was just the hint of a sect based on Judas forming that focused on lines like “No talk of God then, we called you a man” and came to the conclusion that Jesus wasn’t God but just a man who’d started out with the right idea, but had gone crazy with the power. They’d latched onto the Jefferson Bible as proof that the wise of the Peterbilt people rejected the divinity of Jesus. And Judas’ complaints about spending and Jesus’ comments about “There will be poor always, pathetically struggling, look at the good things you’ve got” as proof that Jesus was abandoning his dedication to the poor and being corrupted by his power.
“It’s fascinating,” Jerry muttered quietly, “watching them create their own faith out of that rock opera.”
“What interests me is the fact that even now that they have access to the rest of the Bible and the Apocrypha of Christianity, not to mention Buddhism and Islam and the rest, they are sticking with Superstar as their guiding document. Even more than the gospels.”
Jerry nodded and looked at the clock. It was time for the next educational show. “Folks, we have a show on money, what it is and how it works, coming up. If you’re not involved in that, can you let the people who are in?”
The audience for this showing of Superstar were mostly shamans from other villages. Some left and some stayed.
They and the new viewers took their seats and watched an educational cartoon about money and how it worked. There was only a little speech in the cartoon because the people creating it knew perfectly well that the people watching it wouldn’t share a language in common with them. Mostly it tracked money as it moved through the economy, making trade easier and more efficient.
In the lead-up to the transfer after the scientists realized that they would actually be able to do it, a major political wrangle about what to send back with Jerry developed. Some groups wanted to excise whole chunks of history, like communism “because it had been discredited,” or “slavery” because it showed Americans in a bad light, or “the treatment of Native Americans,” for the same reason. At that point, black people, including Jerry, and Native Americans got their backs up and insisted that if they were going to show history, they had to show it warts and all. And others pointed out that even “failed” economic theories like communism had contributed to the understanding of the field. Then the communists insisted that communism hadn’t failed, but instead had been hijacked by fascists like Stalin.
For a while, what to put in the capsule with Jerry had become a political football.
However, with the advances in data storage and computing power, the final conclusion was to send everything. At that point, universities and Native American tribes, politicians and movie studios had started producing their own videos to present what they thought the natives of the eleventh century would need.
This cartoon was one of those productions, designed to provide an introduction to what money was and how it worked. It was produced by the economics department of the University of Chicago in cooperation with a movie studio.
It was one of a dozen on money that were created just for the capsule and it happened to be the one that Jerry liked the best.
After the cartoon, which lasted about half an hour, finished, Jerry set up the next video, one on water filtration using charcoal. Then he, Alyssa and the members of the women’s council left the theater. They went to Alyssa’s house to discuss how and whether to create money. After a set of discussions, they’d determined that the creation of money should be left in the hands of the women’s councils.
Kasni, head of the women’s council of Jabir and an increasingly important voice in the women’s council of the Kadlo, wanted to know, “Why do we need money? We have the hoes and the beans and the corn.”
That was true. Corn, beans, and stone hoe heads were all used as mediums of exchange in Hocha society.
“Because,” Alyssa said, “all of those are things you use and every time you eat a bean, you decrease the money supply.”
It took a while, but they were convinced. Then they got down to the how. Alyssa said, “I can make a glaze for ceramic coins that will be a bright green. It’s a color that will be hard to reproduce if you don’t know how it’s made, and we can keep that a secret.
“And with a stamp, we can make coins with images stamped into them. We can even stamp them on both sides if we leave the bottom flat.”
That took some explaining, but it turned out the coins wouldn’t be circular. Instead, they would be a half circle with a flat bottom to stand on while they were fired.
All that was fine. Then they had to decide how many of the coins they were going to make.
Fort Peterbilt
December 15, 1006 CE
The first of the coins were ready. They each had a raised image of the Peterbilt on one side and a denomination on the other. The women’s council of Jabir had decided that they would be introduced first as gifts from Jabir to other Kadlo villages. The tradition of Santa Claus was taking hold in the towns and villages that were abandoning Hocha. And not just Santa giving gifts to children or friends giving gifts to each other, but also villages exchanging larger gifts.
By now, both the Peterbilt and the pickup were known, and it turned out that one of the major restrictions on the expansion of agriculture was the thick soil away from the rivers. It was tied together with thick fibrous roots and impractical to plow by human labor alone. And there were no oxen to pull plows. If you wanted to plow that land, you needed to use the pickup or the Peterbilt.
Kasni had realized the importance of money and wanted it in the hands of the women’s council of Jabir. She was giving coins that had images of the Peterbilt on them to other villages to try to tie them to Jabir’s money. It was a gamble, and very dependent on the Peterbilt people accepting the coins of Jabir in exchange for using their truck to plow fields.