Chapter 21
Hilltop Station
Lisyuk, south bank of Talak River
March 24, 1008 CE
Three days later, they loaded up the Peterbilt barge with about two tons of dried buffalo meat and other products of the large animals, including quite a bit of tallow, and, perhaps most importantly, they loaded up Kazal and his mate Larka and headed back.
Larka was fascinated by the steam engine. The Peterbilt’s engine was magic, hidden as it was under the hood, and most of the workings invisible even with the hood opened. But the steam engine . . . that she could follow. That, she could make sense of. She knew from her own experience that a little water made a lot of steam, and she knew just as well that when you blew air into a tied-off piece of buffalo gut, it expanded. She put that together and the steam engine was clear and obvious to her. She loved it. A device that would do work, that would push the barge through the water. It was glorious.
Kazal watched his wife and shook his head. “You have ruined my life, Michael. She will never want to leave your repeater station.” He put on an expression of mock horror. “I may have to learn to farm.”
“It’s not that bad,” Michael said. “I doubt that there’s any place to farm on that hill anyway.”
Fort Peterbilt
March 26, 1008 CE
The Peterbilt drove through the gate, and up to their tanker. Michael climbed down to start the laborious process of refilling the Peterbilt’s tanks from the tanker trailer. The diesel was pumped out, then stirred, then carried over to the Peterbilt, one jerrican at a time. While in Lisyuk they used the Peterbilt to plow up several fields above the floodplain so that they would be able to plant there. It had used a fair amount of gas.
While Michael was doing that, Melanie introduced Larka and Kazal to the women’s council, and discussed the prospect of the weather station and “Fort Hilltop.”
“We should bring Dikak into this,” Etaka said.
Melanie grimaced. Dikak was a priest from Hocha, one of the priests of Xuhpi, the sun god who was considered a cousin of Talak.
Etaka saw the grimace and said, “Before you came, Hocha was the only place for someone like Dikak.”
It was true and Melanie knew it. The closest thing that the river people had had to any sort of school was the Hocha priesthoods. And that put them ahead of anyone else in North America. Dikak had worked with copper, including copper wires. He knew about irrigation and other things. He also knew a great deal that wasn’t true. At the same time, he was one of a group of “intellectuals” that had defected from Hocha to Jabir and Fort Peterbilt over the last couple of years.
He was a short stocky man with ritual scars on his face from ritual bloodletting to appease the sun god, and he gave Melanie the creeps. At the same time, he was probably their best local expert on electrical generation and lead acid batteries. And much of the radio repeater and weather-measuring equipment was made by him or under his supervision.
* * *
Dikak was winding a coil of wire around a cylinder when he was called to the meeting. It was a slow and laborious process with the copper wire separated so they didn’t touch. You could go from one end of the cylinder to the other, then you had to stop and paint the cylinder with two coats of resin, letting each coat dry. Then you could wind the next layer and paint that. The reason they had to do it this way was because while they had insulators, the resin was one. They didn’t have flexible insulators, at least not flexible insulators that would let the wires fit as closely together as they needed to for a powerful electromagnet.
Dikak wanted rubber. They had rubber in South and Central America. It said so in the magic capsule from the future. He wanted an expedition to South America to trade for latex.
“They want you in the women’s council,” his assistant told him. She’d been born in Jabir and moved to Fort Peterbilt when it was still Camp Peterbilt, so she spoke English better than he did and understood almost as much about electricity as he did.
* * *
Dikak was ambivalent about the project. He agreed that such a station was needed and was even convinced that they would need his batteries and generators to power it, but he didn’t want to go. He’d just gotten his hut the way he liked it after he’d moved from Hocha.
The truth was Dikak wasn’t good with change. He was very smart and learned many things very quickly, but he didn’t deal well with new situations.
Takiso
March 30, 1008 CE
The Peterbilt moved slowly up the slight rise next to the walled village of Takiso, following Kazal. He, by now, knew what the Peterbilt needed in the way of surface to drive over. Bushes, even small trees, the Peterbilt could push through and crush, but dips in the land were another matter. So Kazal spent yesterday scouting the route, and was now walking in front of the Peterbilt, guiding it as it drove into and through the woods, pulling a small locally made trailer full of goods. Packing those goods on people’s backs could be done, and probably was going to have to be done later, but as far as the Peterbilt could take them, that was how far men didn’t have to carry heavy lead acid batteries on their backs. And the station was going to take a lot of lead acid batteries to operate.
Forest southeast of Takiso
April 4, 1008 CE
Kazal climbed up on the Peterbilt’s running board. “That’s as far as the Peterbilt can go. The creek is dry, but the crack in the earth where it flows is too much.”
“Well, we did fairly well,” Michael said.
They’d traveled a roundabout route, and gotten about twenty-three miles toward the hilltop that would hold Fort Hilltop.
That only left about seven more miles and the people carting the stuff up the hill weren’t going to have to go quite so far out of their way. So it was going to be about a ten-mile slog through the woods and up the hill. They’d be lucky if they made five miles a day, but with any luck they would have all the gear on the top of the hill by the seventh. Of course, then they’d need to chop down the trees to build the walls, but they had steel axes and saws. Michael helped them unload, then turned the Peterbilt around and drove back to the river.
Fort Hilltop
April 7, 1008 CE
Kazal looked around. It wasn’t a fort, not yet. It was a hilltop covered in old-growth forest. But it was over a thousand feet higher than Fort Peterbilt and with the derrick they were planning, they would add another hundred above that.
Right now it was just a chunk of forest with sacks stacked everywhere, and about a hundred men guarding them. A hundred men and twenty women, including his wife. They had supplies, dried corn, dried beans, dried squash, dried strawberries, black berries, and even a fair amount of dried buffalo meat and dried fish.
What they needed was water. The St. Francois Aquifer should be here, according to the data sent back with Jerry Jefferson. The issue was going to be reaching it.
Meanwhile, Kazal needed to get away from all these people or he was going to kill someone. He gathered up his gear and a few friends, and after talking to his wife, went hunting.
* * *
Larka knew her husband. He was a good man, but he was first and foremost a hunter. Organizing camps wasn’t something that she felt men were suited for. She got to work organizing the labor forming crews to use the case-hardened axes to chop down trees, and collect rocks for a fire pit. “Dikak, set up your batteries?”
Dikak looked up blearily. He wasn’t used to walking so far in a day. He especially wasn’t used to walking so far uphill with a thirty-pound pack of equipment on his back. After a moment, he nodded, but made no other move to comply.
Larka looked at him, shook her head, and went off to other tasks. She knew the man a little by now. Eventually, in five minutes or an hour, he would get up and get to work. Pushing him wouldn’t get it done one moment sooner. It would just piss him off and frustrate her.
* * *
Fifteen minutes later, Dikak got up and started setting up the batteries and the generator. The generator was powered by a small steam engine, two small cylinders, and a flywheel, which got its steam from a tube boiler. It took him an hour to get the batteries set up and connected to the chip set that was the radio. The chipsets had connection and their radios broadcast on several frequencies. So the single pair of glasses computer that they’d sent along didn’t need to be plugged in. Not this close to the main radio station.
Dikak went over to Larka. “I need the computer.”
“Yes, certainly,” Larka said.
She reached into her pack and pulled a wooden box wrapped in leather from it. She unwrapped the box, then opened it and removed the glasses. She handed them to him.
He opened them, and put them on. He then touched his fingertips to the upper edge of the glasses so that they would know which user was accessing them, then he called up the pairing function and paired them with the local radio station that was hooked up to the bank of lead acid batteries. CONNECTED showed up in front of his face, looking like the word was hanging in the air about two feet away. At the same time, the bone conduction ear pieces that were part of the glasses said the word “Connected.”
“I’m connected.”
“Well, try giving Fort Peterbilt a call,” Larka told him.
“I don’t have the antenna hooked up yet. Just a bit of copper wire.”
“Well, they have their antenna hooked up. Give it a try.”
He did, calling Jerry Jefferson. His display showed only one bar, but Jerry answered. “Hello, Dikak. What’s up?”
“Just a communications check,” Dikak said.
“Tell him we’re encamped at the location for Fort Hilltop,” Larka demanded.
“I heard,” Jerry said. “Good job, people. When do you expect to do the seismic tests?”
“Not for a few days.” Along with the thermometers, humidity gauges, and so on that Dikak had built under the instructions of the recordings brought by Jerry Jefferson were a set of seismometers. A seismometer is just a couple of magnets, at least one of which should be an electromagnet. When the earth vibrates, one of the magnets vibrates, and you get an electrical reading. The trick is in interpreting the vibrations, and that would be done by the big computer built into the capsule in Fort Peterbilt. “I want to get the weather station set up and operating first. After all, predicting the weather is the cornerstone of the power of the priests of Hocha.”
Unlike most people, Dikak didn’t call the priests of Hocha “Pharisees.” He wasn’t sure what he believed, except he believed in electricity.
Fort Peterbilt
April 10, 1008 CE
Jerry picked up the chicken and put it in the basket. He paid the woman with two coins, a one and a five. Meat was still much more expensive than corn or other vegetables. The man behind him made a fairly rude grunt, and Jerry looked around and lifted an eyebrow. The man said something in Kadlok, but Jerry could barely understand it.
“You mind your own business,” said the woman keeping the stall. She was one of the women of Fort Peterbilt and had her own flock of chickens. This time Jerry could understand. “This is Jerry Jefferson.”
“I don’t trust moi,” the man said belligerently.
“Moi?”
“He means money,” the woman said. “He’s from Abaka, a Kacla village. That’s why he has the accent.”
Jerry nodded understanding. Each clan had its own dialect, or perhaps language, often as different from each other as Spanish and Portuguese, and sometimes as different as Spanish and French. The stranger wasn’t speaking Kadlok, but Kaclak, which was either a different language or, at the very least, a different dialect of the river people tongue.
“Why don’t you trust money?” Jerry asked.
“Because he’s an ignorant fool,” said the woman, whose name Jerry couldn’t remember.
“Because it has no value. You can’t eat it or wear it or use it to hoe your garden. Not that I’m needed to hoe my garden anymore, what with the Peterbilt and the pickup plowing up the land.”
“Well, you still need to plant the seeds,” Jerry offered, starting to sort of understand the man’s speech. Jerry was still learning Kadlok, and Kaclak was quite close.
“My wife and daughters use the seed planter. And they’ve planted half again the fields this year.” He was an older man, so his children were probably teenagers. He was also a bit stooped from doing backbreaking labor for much of his life. He shook his head. “She told me to go find a new trade and not come back until I had one.”
“That’s harsh,” Jerry muttered. This was a matrilineal culture and in most, but by no means all, of the villages, that meant that the women owned most of the real property, land, huts, that sort of thing. So a woman who wasn’t happy with her man could throw him out, which would leave him without a great deal. It didn’t happen often, but it was happening more often as the men’s labor was less needed. “What would you like to learn to do?”
“I’m a farmer!” the man said belligerently. Then he sighed and admitted, “I don’t know how to do much of anything else.”
The woman who owned the stall cleared her throat, and the man tried to buy a chicken with a stone hoe blade—one of the things that had been used as quasi money before the Peterbilt arrived—wanting change.
“And don’t try to foist off that moi on me. I want corn or beans.”
“Well, you’ll not get it here,” the woman said. “And that blade isn’t worth much anyway. We have steel blades now.”
So not only did the older man not trust the new money, his old money was losing its value. And while that was true of the stone blades, it was perhaps even more true of the corn and beans because the extra fields meant more seeds planted and more food grown, so the value of food decreased. At least the foods that were the cornerstones of the local economy. Yes, it meant that fewer children would starve this winter, but it also meant that it took more beans to buy a leather pouch or a mortar and pestle, or any of the other products that were for sale in the Fort Peterbilt marketplace. And there were a lot of new products. Aside from the seeders and the steel hoe heads, there were spinning wheels, wood lathes, tables, chairs, fabrics, printed books, many of them picture books on everything from reading and writing to how to sterilize a wound or set a broken arm.
Jerry considered. Winter wheat was growing in nearby fields and there would be enough when it was harvested to plant several fields. The natives knew how to process corn so that it provided the proper vitamins and minerals, something that had taken a while to cross the Atlantic in that other history. What was there for this man to do? “Come with me,” Jerry offered. “We’ll go to the capsule and see if we can find you a new job.”
Putting his stone hoe back in the leather pouch, the man followed Jerry.
“What’s your name?”
“Broko.”
* * *
At the capsule, Jerry put on his computer and started a search for jobs for displaced farmers. There were a lot of options, but at least half the problem was that Broko didn’t want to change jobs. He wasn’t the brightest man Jerry had met. He knew how to farm, which he had learned at his parents’ knees, and that was pretty much all he knew. He took pride and satisfaction out of the slow and simple process of hand-planting seeds and seeing them grown into the food that would feed his family. And because of that, he had resisted every change to farming, and really all the changes brought by the Peterbilt people.
It took them some time but they came up with a pretty simple way to make a produce box out of wood shavings. The shavings, about four inches across, were folded so that each sheet formed the bottom and two sides of the box, while a smaller strip was woven through them at the rim to keep the whole thing together. It wasn’t much, but it would let him make a product from local trees and perhaps get by.
Jerry wished he could do better for the man, but he stubbornly rejected just about everything Jerry suggested. The truth was, the old fellow wanted the world to go back to what it used to be.
Old fellow, hell. The guy wasn’t much older than Alyssa. He sent Broko on his way shortly before Alyssa got back from the lab.
“How was your day?” Jerry asked.
“Frustrating. How was yours?”
“I’ll match you frustration for frustration,” Jerry said and told her Broko’s tale of woe.
“Ha! I bet he talked about the good old days when they sacrificed young women to the river god to bring the harvest one too many times for his wife and daughters.”
Jerry didn’t know. Broko hadn’t mentioned human sacrifice, but then he wouldn’t, not in Fort Peterbilt. The people who lived and worked here were among the least forgiving of the practices of the Pharisees. Which position, Jerry completely agreed with. He was enough of a salesman to express his distaste in less strident terms than most of the new followers of the cross god.
“Well, we have working caps, but smokeless is causing us problems.” One of the things in the library was a way of making the caps for cap and ball revolvers that didn’t involve nitrated mercury but used potassium chlorate instead. Potassium chlorate was much easier and safer to make and much less likely to explode while you were making it or loading it into the copper cap.
That part was working fine, and they’d been assiduous about collecting up their brass, so if they could get a smokeless powder which wouldn’t clog the guns like black powder did, they could reload the brass and keep using the guns.
Jerry’s guns, the ones he’d brought, were specially made so that they could use either black or smokeless powder, and they used an electric spark to ignite the powder, so they didn’t even need primers. But those two guns were like ten grand apiece and utterly beyond anything they could do in the here and now.
By now they were out of unexpended rounds for the guns that had come back in the original event, and those guns were important, more for their political effect than their military or hunting uses.
There was iron made here in Jabir, and all throughout the United Clans, but everyone was still learning to use the new metal. It was going to be a while before anyone was turning out barrels in any quantity, much less the six-cylinder chambers of a revolver.
Fort Hilltop
April 15, 1008 CE
Dikak put the computer on and touched the upper rim and found himself in the augmented reality of the computer world. The computer at Fort Peterbilt was, by the standards of the mid-twentieth century, a supercomputer. For that matter, the computers built into the glasses he was wearing and the small chip that was the core of the radio and weather station were pretty darn powerful as well. The limiting factor was the data transmittal rate between the computers here and the big one back at Fort Peterbilt.
They were finally ready to do the seismic test to see what was under the hill they were sitting on and how it lined up with the information in Jerry Jefferson’s database.
According to Jerry Jefferson’s geological information, there should be iron here. Iron that could be mined and which would be much better for making steel than the bog iron they were using now.
Having set up the computers and attached them to the sensors, Dikak waved to Kazal, who was back from his most recent hunting trip. Kazal now hunted with a crossbow, and regularly returned to Fort Hilltop with deer. And this last time with a bear, which he’d killed more for the protection of hunter-gatherers than for the meat and grease. Not that the grease wasn’t going to be useful.
At Dikak’s wave, Kazal lit the fuse which led to a buried charge that was down against the stone of the ridge. Half a minute later, the small charge went off and the sensors that Dikak had put out vibrated with the blast. Dikak had made four of them, but only three of them worked. In the fourth, the rod was stuck and couldn’t move through the hand-wound electrical coil.
Fortunately, three of them were enough. They located several small deposits of magnetite, or what the computers thought were magnetite, close to the surface.
Fort Peterbilt
April 15, 1008 CE
Jerry got the results of the seismic test almost as soon as Dikak did, and while it added a bit of detail, it mostly acted as confirmation of the information in the capsule computer’s geological maps. If the iron was where it was supposed to be, it was a safe bet that the oil was too. So they knew where there were oil fields that could be dug, even using the materials that they had locally. At least when combined with the pickup truck’s engine to provide power.
It was time for the mission downstream.