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Chapter 17

Government


Kallabi, village of the Kadlo


March 15, 1007 CE


Atacha, head of the women’s council of Kallabi, spilled the coins back and forth in her hands. They were a gift from the women’s council of Jabir and she wasn’t quite convinced that they were anything but pretty baubles.

“Will you stop playing with those things?” demanded Lacoa, her sister, and another member of the women’s council. They had sent canoes down the Talak to gather salt and amber to give to the people of Jabir for Christmas, and in return, gotten the coins. They had been hoping for the steel knives that they made in Jabir, but instead they got trinkets.

“We need the Peterbilt!” Atacha insisted. “We need it to clear that field.” She pointed at a hill a mile east of the village.

“That’s not a field,” Lacoa said. “It’s prairie.”

The hill grew nothing but a tough, tall grass that grazers ate. It was formed of black soil tied together by the roots. You couldn’t grow corn, squash, or beans in it because you couldn’t plant them, and even if you did, the weeds would strangle them. Burning the field didn’t work; the grass would just grow back from the robust root system.

“They plant in fields like it in Jabir,” Atacha insisted, still spilling the coins back and forth in her hands.

“Because they have the Peterbilt to cut the land,” Lacoa said, then stopped. “What would we trade them for the use of the Peterbilt?”

Atacha held out the coins.

“They would never do it,” Lacoa insisted. She pointed at the coins. “Those were the women of Jabir showing off their new status.” Jabir had been the second village of the Kadlo, second in size and perhaps third in status. Then the angel Peterbilt had landed between Jabir’s hunting lands and Kallabi’s hunting lands, then made the fateful decision to travel east rather than south. If they came south, they would have encountered the village of Kallabi rather than Jabir.

The place where the general store had arrived wasn’t in the territory of either village; the Kadlo, all the people associated with Hocha, farmed the alluvial plain of the Talak River and its tributaries. The high plains that didn’t flood on a semi-regular basis were not farmable with the stone tools and lack of draft animals that the natives had. Those were hunting lands and not controlled by the river clans.

Atacha shrugged. She was wearing a vest knitted in Jabir of thread spun in Jabir. It was a very nice vest and Atacha liked everything about it except what she’d had to trade for it. “If they refuse, it will devalue their gifts to us and embarrass them.” At this point Atacha was ready for the women’s council of Jabir to be embarrassed. “We have women and whole families fleeing down the Talak to get away from the Pharisees at Hocha and showing up in our village. How are we going to feed those people next winter?”

“All right, we’ll try it,” Lacoa agreed. They went to see the senior chief of the village.

Hamatak was a man in his mid-forties, still fit, but his age showed in his face. “Even if they do send us the Peterbilt, where will we get the corn and beans to plant in this new field?”

“From Jabir. They have those extra fields that the Peterbilt and the pickup cleared for them.” Which was true. The extra seed corn from the twenty-first century, planted in fields that had been fallow for hundreds of years, had done incredibly well compared to the standard eleventh-century corn kernels.

Hamatak reluctantly agreed, though he was much more worried about pissing off the Peterbilt people than the women’s council was. Hamatak was an experienced war chief and he’d spoken to survivors of both attacks on Fort Peterbilt. He wasn’t sure what the angel Peterbilt could do away from its home, but he was pretty sure it could do a lot.

They boarded canoes and rowed up the Talak to the Alga, and on up the Alga to the Bashk, and to Fort Peterbilt.


Fort Peterbilt


March 16, 1007 CE


“Push!” Etaka ordered. Etaka was a midwife even before the Peterbilt people had arrived, and she’d been watching the videos of how to deliver babies that came with the capsule, so she was about as qualified to deliver a baby as anyone on Earth.

“Okay, breathe,” she ordered in English. Her English had a very strong accent, but no hesitation at all. “Just a few more pushes. At least for the first one.” Over the past few weeks, Etaka had been listening to Melanie’s belly and had identified two heartbeats. It would be years before they could make a sonogram machine, but a stethoscope was well within their abilities.

* * *

Two minutes later, Jerry Achanu Anderle was born. Followed fifteen minutes later by Jogida Alyssa Anderle.

The village of Jabir had two Michaels, a Shane, and an Alyssa, though called by different names. The concept of godparent was anything but foreign to the locals. They lived in a rough world and having someone to look after your kids if you died was a necessity. Naming the kids after Achanu and Jogida honored the young people, not kids anymore, but respected members of the community, and offered the locals an assurance that Michael and Melanie were members of the community.

In the case of Jogida, it was also effectively making her the children’s nanny. In the eleventh century, it definitely took a village to raise a child. And though the Anderles and the Jeffersons were of really high status, they were still going to need help. Jogida had been first in line to help, since she’d brought her little brothers to live in Camp Peterbilt.


Fort Peterbilt


March 18, 1007 CE


“Certainly,” Michael agreed. There had been quite a bit of discussion about the introduction of money, and they had all agreed that if the money was to be accepted by the tribes, the Peterbilt people and the rest of Fort Peterbilt would have to accept it. Besides, after a year of not traveling very far at all, almost any excuse to actually go somewhere in the Peterbilt would have been enough payment.

After Michael’s agreement, it was turned over to Melanie to negotiate the price for the use of the Peterbilt and the sale of the seed corn. Then they were sent to the village of Jabir to buy the squash seeds and the beans. Also, sunflowers and other seeds, while Michael drove inland away from the trees, then along the prairie to Kallabi, where Michael, with Melanie and Shane in the pickup, plowed about two hundred acres of prairie into farmland.

The news spread, and very soon the Peterbilt and the pickup were spending all their time either plowing someone’s prairie into cropland or traveling to a village. And at the same time, the value of the coins that the village of Jabir made was demonstrated and the coins started being traded between the villages for other things besides the use of the Peterbilt and the pickup.

A lot of extra land was planted that spring. A fair amount of their food corn was planted, along with beans that might well have been better used in people’s bellies. No one starved that summer, but some folks got kind of hungry.

In a surprisingly short time, Jabir coins were making their way up the Talak to Hocha, where the Pharisees outlawed them. This had the effect of making them even more valuable.


Kallabi, village of the Kadlo


May 15, 1007 CE


Atacha looked out at the fields full of growing corn and was not happy. The coins of Jabir were all gone now. Gone to pay for the Peterbilt and the pickup to plow the fields. Gone to buy corn and beans, squash seed and sunflower seeds.

Then gone to buy fish nets to use on the river, and all the while the status of Jabir increased and the status of Kallabi decreased.

“What’s wrong now?” Lacoa asked.

“We should be making our own money,” Atacha said. “In fact, since we are the senior village of the Kadlo, we should be the ones making the money, not Jabir.”

“That’s an excellent idea,” Lacoa said, sarcasm dripping from every word. “You make us a Peterbilt and a pickup truck, and I will see about making the coins.”

Atacha looked over at her sister. She didn’t throw anything. She hadn’t thrown things at her sister since they’d become women, but she wanted to. Atacha knew that the Peterbilt and the pickup weren’t all that was happening with the money. “Also, the Kacla wanted to trade us buffalo hides for coins and the Kacla villages are all on the west side of the Talak. They weren’t going to spend those coins on having the Peterbilt plow their fields. It can’t cross the river. There is something more going on.”

“I know that. I talked to the demon person, Jerry Jefferson, too. But I still don’t really understand how it works.”

Jerry Jefferson was trying, but he hadn’t had the time that the other Peterbilt people had had to learn a civilized language.

“And you know that the Kacla wanted to buy bang powder to retaliate against the Gruda for that raid that stole some of their young women and sent them to Hocha for sacrifice.”

“My point is,” Atacha said, “it’s not just the Peterbilt that the money is good for. We need to know how to do it.”

“So we’re going back to Fort Peterbilt,” Lacoa sighed, but her heart wasn’t in it. Ultimately she agreed with her sister. They did need to know how this money stuff worked. But not just them. The women’s councils of all the Kadlo villages needed to know. And the Kacla and Purdak, as well. Because, if things kept going like this, then Jabir was going to just replace Hocha, and end up ruling all the villages of all the clans. That, after all, was how Hocha had happened. A little at a time, bringing knowledge, and that knowledge giving them power, which they used to gain more power. And the Peterbilt people brought a lot more knowledge than the Pharisees of Hocha had ever dreamed of having.


Fort Peterbilt


May 25, 1007 CE


Atacha and Lacoa weren’t the only members of the women’s councils of other villages in Fort Peterbilt. Lots of women’s councils had sent one or two of their number to Fort Peterbilt to learn about money. They also sent them to learn how to avoid becoming subject to Fort Peterbilt, the way they’d been subject to the Pharisees of Hocha before the Angel named Peterbilt had arrived. Shamans from as many villages were here to learn about medicines and tools, stars and clouds. Warriors and chiefs were there to learn tactics and strategy.

By now, Fort Peterbilt was turning into a city, with as many houses outside the walls as within. And the sheer number of people was threatening an ecological disaster simply from all the feces dropped in places it didn’t belong.

Lacoa was blunt. “How do we keep you from becoming Hocha?”

Shane, who was translating, immediately insisted, “We would never do that. We would never sacrifice young women.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about!” Lacoa interrupted. The truth was while she’d not liked it, she’d accepted that it was necessary for the next harvest. And she was less angry about the young women who had died than she was about the Pharisees lying to her about the need. Lacoa, like any woman on any women’s council, was used to making hard choices for the good of the village. “Hocha started out helping us, sharing their knowledge of when the flooding would come and when to plant so that we would have good crops, and the longer it went on, the more they commanded and the less they listened. Tell him that.” She pointed at Jerry Jefferson.

Shane tried to explain, and after a few back-and-forths, Jerry got it. “You want to know how to form a government.”

“What is a government?” Atacha asked.

That took some explaining, and as they went through it, Jerry learned that they already had a government. It was made of traditions more than laws, but it was a government and it worked well enough for a single village. A bit less well for a clan made up of several villages, and not well at all for a nation made up of many clans.

That was ultimately how Hocha had gained power. They knew more about making a government work than the clans did. Their system was hierarchical, based on the notion of divine right, with the high priests of the gods telling everyone what to do based on their relationship with the gods.

But direct democracy, absent a hi-tech communication network, simply couldn’t work for groups much larger than a village. And, in Jerry’s opinion, even with hi-tech communications, direct democracy still didn’t work, because most people were too busy doing their jobs and living their lives to bone up on every issue that a government must handle. He tried to explain the concepts of representative democracy, also known as republics, where the people chose and had the power to recall and replace their representatives, and the women got it immediately.

That was precisely what the women’s councils were; they weren’t all the women in the village. They were the older women who had the support of the other women. The notion of election rather than selection through consensus was new, but as they talked it out, they all realized that the consensus was at least somewhat coerced by the majority. What they had was majority rule of a sort.

It was a sort that involved a lot of extra arguing and bullying.


Fort Peterbilt


July 4, 1007 CE


This year’s celebration of July fourth was almost an excuse for the meetings of the chiefs and the women’s councils. Starting in April, men and women of the villages and clans that had been vassals of Hocha and the Pharisees had been arriving in Fort Peterbilt, and Jerry had been dutifully sending reports to the twenty-first century.

The reports were about the natives’ interest in the form of government known as representative democracy. One thing that the more liberal factions in the twenty-first-century political landscape had insisted on was that he avoid any sort of political or social imperialism. That political faction included some Native Americans, but a majority of Native Americans were on the other side. They wanted the United States in the tenth century, but with their people in charge of it. They wanted it so they would be ready when Columbus got lost on his way to China.

So Jerry’s instructions were not to impose either the notion of democracy or a republic on the people of this time. But not to refuse them either, if they wanted it. It turned out that what was actually happening was not exactly what anyone had expected. The locals were very interested in the information he brought and not at all worried about the seven of them, four adults and three kids, “taking over.” Instead, they were examining the stuff on government that he brought back and combining it with their own customs to make something new.

The fact that the Peterbilt people celebrated the birth of their great nation that stretched from one side of the continent to the other and more, struck the locals as a good idea, and the Fourth of July struck them as a propitious date to start things off.

Jerry set his camera computer glasses to record and transmit to the module and watched as on July fourth of the year 1007 of the Common Era, the first official meeting of the Continental Congress of the United Clans of America was called to order, and Kasni was named the first Speaker of the Great Women’s Council.

* * *

Slowly, over the course of months, they argued and discussed, consulted and compromised, and came up with their own notion of representative democracy.

It was based partly on the American constitution and partly on some of the tribal governments of Native Americans from the twenty-first century, but mostly it was based on the women’s councils.

The new government had a congress. The congress was called “the great women’s council.” And after considerable debate, it was agreed that men could be members. The women’s council selected the president, called “the first chief,” which was distinct from the first speaker, who was the head of the great women’s council.

The first chief was not allowed to sit in the women’s council and was, in effect, the head of the executive branch of government. They also selected some of the sub-chiefs, those that dealt with national matters. Meanwhile, each clan would have its clan women’s council, who would select the clan chief and clan sub-chiefs. And each village within the clan would have its own women’s council and its own chiefs, just like now, but a little bit more formalized.

And, at the insistence of the Peterbilt people, there would also be a Bill of Rights made up of things that neither the government nor the churches, including the new Christian churches, could compel people to do, or prevent them from doing. This included the notion that no church could compel anyone to take part in any ritual of that religion. Along with the standards about not being prevented from speaking or assembling, not being forced to give testimony against themselves, the right to keep and bear arms, or not having their stuff taken or examined without due process. It wasn’t exactly the United States Bill of Rights, but it was similar.

Most of the people who signed this constitution were women, though all the Peterbilt people signed it, even the kids.

Then it was decided that Fort Peterbilt would be the capital. All that took most of the summer of 1007, and in the meantime the Pharisees of Hocha were adjusting their government too. Partly this was out of desperation. Partly because it’s really hard for an authoritarian government to back down, and really easy for such a government to start believing its own propaganda. Hocha was becoming more authoritarian, but it was also reaching out to the plains tribes on either side of the Talak, seeking warriors and promising loot.

And by the fall of 1007, there was a lot of loot. Steel was in production, though not on a large scale by twenty-first-century standards, or even by seventeenth-century standards. But most of the villages in the Peterbilt alliance had a blacksmith with a brick or stone forge to make the steel from bog iron. And Jabir didn’t just have a smithy. It had a foundry.


Fort Peterbilt


August 31, 1007 CE


It was Jerry’s arrival day. And his daughter was pulling on his arm, insisting he wake up. “Wake up, Daddy. We’re having eggs for breakfast.”

One year ago today, Jerry Jefferson and a cylinder full of knowledge had arrived in this century. Along with him, he’d brought seeds and a dozen eggs in an incubator. The eggs had hatched three days later, and ten hens and two roosters had been born. Careful husbanding had produced two flocks of chickens, one that was bred for meat, and the other that was bred for eggs. For the first few months, no one ate chicken or eggs. All the eggs were fertilized and used to make more chickens, but by now there were several flocks.

Alyssa rolled over and groaned. But a little later, they were all awake and dressed and Jerry was fixing eggs and trying to figure a way to get to England for cattle, sheep, goats, anything that would provide milk so that he could have a cheese omelet or, better yet, a cheeseburger. Instead, it was scrambled eggs with ground venison patties and cornbread.

The winter wheat was all carefully stored away to be planted this winter. There was still too little of it to eat.

“We have to go to England or Spain,” Jerry muttered.

“Yes. Where else are we going to get smallpox?” Alyssa agreed, sarcastically.

“Where else are we going to get milk?” Jerry countered. “Also horses and cattle, pigs, sheep for wool.” Jerry knew that they wouldn’t be going to Europe, at least at first. Instead, they would be going to the colony in Greenland. But that wasn’t a guarantee that they wouldn’t run into smallpox or some other European disease that devastated the native populace. Besides, they were going to have to go to Europe eventually. They would need other varieties of plants and animals, and eventually trade and development around the world, as well as mica from the Russian steppes and silk from China.

“We have watermelon and cantaloupe from the seeds you brought and we don’t need to go to Europe and risk the diseases that the Europeans brought to this continent.”

Jerry disagreed. Not that he thought Alyssa was wrong about the risk. He didn’t. But, one, it wasn’t going to go away and they would have a much better chance of surviving it if they controlled the initial encounter. If it was their boats that made the trip, not Spanish or Portuguese boats.

Conversation turned to other things. Absent draft animals, the need for steam engines was much greater. And not just any steam engines. They desperately needed steam tractors and steam bulldozers and, yes, steamboats to ply the Talak River. The sort of heavy dugouts that the natives had had, even the birchbark canoes they had now, weren’t big enough to support serious trade. They were also a lot of work to move up or down the river.

Meanwhile, with all the uses that the diesel and gasoline in the Peterbilt was being put to, they were going to run out. Probably in no more than another year or two. They were going to need more oil. They were going to need more everything, and that meant that they needed better transport.

* * *

“We need steam engines,” Jerry told Michael.

“Ah, yes. Now, I understand,” Michael said. “I didn’t the first five hundred times you told me, but now I get it. We need steam engines. Why didn’t I think of that? It’s not like we’ve been trying to make steam engines since six months after we got here. Oh, yes, it is like that. Exactly like that. It’s not that easy, Jerry, even with the technical manuals and how-to videos you brought. It’s taking time.”

“I know, Michael, and I’m sorry.”

“No. I’m sorry. Pelok got raided by one of the plains tribes. Four killed and two young women captured, and those young women are probably going to end up strangled in Hocha to ensure a good harvest next year.”

Pelok was a village of the Kacla, located on the east side of the Talak River. The plains tribes were hunter-gatherers who lived in the plains east of the Talak and hunted buffalo. Hunting buffalo with bows and arrows wasn’t a sport for the faint of heart. They were some tough SOBs and not overburdened with what a person from the twenty-first century would consider morals. Stealing from people not of your tribe was not just acceptable, but the next best thing to your duty. Certainly, successfully raiding a Hocha village brought respect as well as trade goods.

In the last year or two, the river people had new stuff well worth the stealing. The plains tribes called the Hocha “the river people” because they settled next to the rivers where the flooding restored the soil. So raids as well as trading had already started increasing before the blowup in Hocha, and now with the river people divided and fighting among themselves, the plains people were attacking even more. They lacked horses, but other than that were very much the spiritual ancestors of the Comanche, in that they were a migratory warrior people who weren’t overly fond of the more settled farmers, and especially didn’t approve of those farmers spreading out and occupying their hunting grounds.

The cold truth is that hunter-gatherers need more land to support them than farmers, and so tend to be outnumbered. So for the past hundred years or so they’d been being slowly pushed back from the river valleys. Now, with the river people at war with each other, seemed a good opportunity to get some of their own back.

All of which Michael and Jerry knew well by now.

“Another request for aid?” Jerry asked.

“Yes. They know we can’t get the Peterbilt across the Talak, but they’re desperate.”

“Why can’t we?” Jerry stopped, then said, “I’m an idiot.”

“All right,” Michael agreed. “Why are you an idiot?”

“The barge plans.”

“What barge plans?”

“Look, when you guys were brought here, it was by accident. You had what was in your truck and what was in that part of the country store that was transferred. With me, it was different. As the designs for the capsule were worked out and the launcher was built, everybody and their brother put in their two cents. Everyone had a design for some trick or device that you would need.”

“Right, I got that.”

“Stacks and stacks of them, all piled on each other. I got briefed on as close as we could come to all of them. But most of them were low-probability situations. And one of them was to use the Peterbilt as a power supply for a barge. Actually, there were about forty of them, everything from pulling the engine from the Peterbilt and putting it in a riverboat to run paddle wheels to a set of rollers built into a barge that would let your spinning wheels power a prop.

“In among those designs were designs for barges that would carry the Peterbilt. Barges that could be built using wood and stone tools. Then I got here just as the big fight with Hocha was ending, and, well, for the last year I have been spending half my time teaching modern medicine to local shamans. Half of it helping to design everything from a new monetary system to a new government. Half of it on new farming implements, half on new crops like the winter wheat, modern watermelons, cantaloupes, saffron, and cinnamon. That’s a lot of halves. Let’s just say, even though I was just advising and wasn’t actually doing any of it, I’ve been a little busy.”

“If you could find your way back to the point?” Michael asked. He understood that Jerry had been busy. They had all been busy. For that matter, the children of Jabir who spoke English had found themselves being teachers to their parents because the new knowledge was in English. Yet, surprisingly, he wasn’t unhappy. Michael had known long before the event, back when he was driving a truck, that happiness was having a job to do and getting it done. And, since the event, he’d added the notion that being too busy to worry about whether you were happy helped as well.

“The point is I forgot all about the barges and the power supply options. There are ways to build the sort of large barge that can be used to move the Peterbilt up, down, and across the river. Most of them powered by steam engines, but some of them powered by the Peterbilt or the pickup.”

They adjourned to the capsule room and put on their glasses. They sat down and Jerry used his data-retrieval skills to pull up the many options for building a barge big enough to carry the Peterbilt. There was even a barge big enough to carry the Peterbilt and its trailer.

The problem with all these plans was scale. By now, the village of Jabir had over two thousand people living there, mostly moved in from other villages of the Kadlo, but more than a few from the Gruda, who were the clan most loyal to the Pharisees of Hocha. And Fort Peterbilt had twice that many who had come from every clan. But, put them all together and that wasn’t enough for a building project like this. Not if they were going to plant the crops needed to survive next year and do all the other things that a city had to do to survive.

They didn’t have enough people, and they didn’t have enough money. This was going to have to be a government project.


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