Chapter 19
The Raid
Sofaf village of the Lomak
October 10, 1007 CE
Gorai, head woman of the village of Sofaf, looked on as the men and women unloaded the canoes, bringing the tractor to their village. She was happy it was finally here and happy that it would be available to use for spring plowing, as well as helping in construction around the village in the meantime. It had cost enough.
Sofaf, which had switched allegiance to the United Clans after the Lomak chiefs in Hocha had stuck with the Pharisees, was a nice place located on the south side of the upper Talak, what the Peterbilt people called the Missouri. They were still farming in essentially the old way, not having the Peterbilt. They had adopted the Peterbilt people notion of fertilizer, so they didn’t have as many fallow fields as they used to. They were also carrying steel knives made by their own blacksmith and steel arrowheads, not to mention the steel hoes they used to plant. In general, all that they could have from the Peterbilt people, they did have.
Not all of the Lomak villages had switched and there was considerable rancor, but they were also related to the people in the surrounding villages, which was some protection. Their cousins weren’t in any hurry to raid their village.
Now their tractor was here. Their own Peterbilt, built in this time, mostly by the hands of people from this time. It wasn’t put together yet, but it was here.
She went back to work. She was learning to write, and she was learning her numbers as well. She had a phenomenal memory. She had to have it, with no other way of recording information than her memory. Now that memory was put to use in allowing her to remember which sound each letter represented and how each word was spelled. She read slowly, at about second grade level, sounding out each word and often looking them up in the book.
Books, too, were a new innovation. A printing device based on a mimeograph had been put into use within days of Jerry Jefferson’s arrival. Up until then, they’d been working on a movable type printing press, but didn’t have it working yet. Those lead letters were hard to make, but a good piece of hemp cloth coated in something waterproof that can be pressed out worked just fine. You couldn’t print as many copies, but you could print enough.
Sofaf village of the Lomak
October 13, 1007 CE
The raiders came out of the night. They landed their canoes a mile downriver and walked up to the vicinity of the village. Once there, they pulled out their rockets and rocket troughs and went to work. When everything was in place, they started shooting.
A rocket trough is much easier to carry than a catapult. They’d brought a lot of rockets.
The first Gorai knew of it was when rockets started landing in Sofaf. Like the catapult bombs from Hocha, they didn’t have explosive warheads. They had incendiary warheads. The roofs in Sofaf were thatched. They made excellent kindling. In minutes, the whole village, close to a hundred and fifty houses, was in flames. With everyone so focused on putting the fires out, no one noticed as the warriors from Hocha slipped in and started killing.
By the time the fires were out, over half the village was dead. As many from smoke inhalation and being burned alive, as from Hocha steel axes and arrows. All the food from their excellent harvest had burned in the village store houses, but the parts of the tractor were, for the most part, made of steel. The fire didn’t affect them at all. The rest of the villagers of Sofaf were tied up and taken back to Hocha, where they were executed except for a few young women, who were drugged and sacrificed to the river goddess, the goddess who had taught the priests about corn.
Fort Peterbilt
October 20, 1007 CE
Kasni banged her gavel again and again. The noise wouldn’t die down, and the line from Jesus Christ Superstar ran through her mind. If every tongue were stilled, the noise would still continue, the rocks and stones themselves would start to sing. But this was no joyous hosanna.
This was rage.
It was a rage she shared. The news of the massacre of Sofaf had just reached them yesterday. Kasni was terrified, and because she was terrified, she was furious.
Before the gods of Hocha there had been frequent raiding between their ancestors. There were still stories told of those raids. Stories that Jerry Jefferson described as similar to the stories of the ancient Greeks or, for that matter, the ancient Israelites or any other group.
Then the Pharisees had come with their stories of the gods, and especially the river goddess Talak who made the ground ready for the corn, squash, beans, and all the other bounty that fed the people. They had condemned the raids, but only punished them if the village or clan that did the raiding was out of favor with the Pharisees.
People had gotten used to it, and the raids had diminished, but not stopped.
Then the Peterbilt people came and introduced Jesus and “Put away your sword.” But, at the same time, when Fort Peterbilt was raided, the raiders got nothing and many of them died. They encouraged peace, but not because they were weak.
She pounded her gavel again, and it was still having no noticeable effect.
The attack on Sofaf wasn’t a raid. It was a massacre. Everyone in the new congress was terrified, and everyone in the new congress was so angry they could, as Melanie would say, “chew nails and spit tacks.” The problem was that most of that fury was based on fear, and though they wouldn’t admit it, the chiefs were just as frightened as the women. They knew how to fight with bow and club, stone knives and fists. Even the new steel knives and crossbows, they understood.
But rockets that could be fired from out of bow range and destroyed warehouses full of grain? That was new. Even the trebuchets that had been used in the defense of Fort Peterbilt, then in Hocha to force out the Christian clans, weren’t as frightening as the rockets.
But what was even more frightening than the rockets was the fact that somehow the Pharisees got them before the Christians. It shook the faith that the Christians had in the Peterbilt people and indirectly the faith they had in the cross god.
How had the Pharisees gotten rockets first?
* * *
Congress wasn’t the only place that question was being asked.
“How could they have come up with rockets on their own?” Alyssa Jefferson asked Jerry.
They were in Jefferson house. Alyssa, Jerry, Zanni, Hamadi, as well as Shane, Zara, Michael, and Melanie. Miriam was on the floor in the living area playing a board game with her little brother.
“You got me,” Jerry said. He was moving his hands around in the way he did when he was using his glasses as an interface to the computer in the capsule. “There was only one question about rockets. Miriam, you asked me about rockets?”
He looked at his daughter. The computer kept a record of every time Jerry or anyone accessed its files. And Jerry, who’d spent the last years of his training for this mission learning to be a librarian, had learned that you always record who asked a question or accessed a file.
Miriam looked up from the game she was playing. “Huh?”
“You asked me about rockets. It was March.”
“Dad, that was, like, six months ago! How am I supposed to know about something that long ago?” Miriam was eight now, and doing well in school. She had lots of friends, mostly the children from Jabir and Fort Peterbilt. Both of which had lots and lots of children. With the medical knowledge brought back, first with the Peterbilt people and later with Jerry, a lot fewer children had died in the last couple of years. In fact, no child had died in either village for over a year.
Jerry was back in his virtual library, looking at what other questions Miriam had asked him around the same time. “Ah, here it is. The day before, you asked about ‘The Star Spangled Banner.’”
“That’s it. It was in my lessons and I sang it,” Miriam said. “I even translated it for the girls.” Miriam had a pack of six- to ten-year-old girls that she ran with. They played with dolls and studied together. “Red was easy, but rockets, well, they didn’t have a word for rockets. But I remembered ‘bottle rockets’ from back in the other place.” Miriam had stopped referring to the twenty-first century as home before Jerry had arrived in this time. It was the other place or the old place. This was home. Fort Peterbilt was home.
“Okay,” Alyssa said, “you sang them ‘The Star Spangled Banner.’ ‘And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air’ told them about bottle rockets?”
“That’s right,” Miriam agreed, “and hot dogs, potato salad and ice cream, and fireworks at night.”
“Now I remember,” Alyssa said. “You asked me about rockets too, and about how to make hot dogs. That led to the whole sausage-making thing, which led to the smokehouse, and smoked sausage.” Smoked sausage was now made in Jabir and sold up and down the Talak River. It was similar to, but different from, foods the locals had.
“In other words, it was just another day with another set of questions that led to new products,” Jerry agreed.
“But I told you rockets were too complicated to make in the here and now,” Alyssa said.
“Then I asked Dad, and he sent me an educational cartoon about Newton and the second law of motion. So I showed it to Jika and Tenaki.” Jika and Tenaki were two of the girls that Miriam played with, and they were both talkative and well liked. So from there, the cartoon on basic rocketry could have gone anywhere. “But I told ’em that it was too complicated for the here and now, just like you said,” Miriam told her mother.
“I guess someone didn’t believe that part,” Jerry said.
“I don’t care if they believed it,” Alyssa Jefferson said angrily. “It’s true. There’s a reason that people say ‘it’s not rocket science’ about stuff that anyone can do. Rocket science is hard, complex science that takes getting everything right.”
Jerry considered her. She was right and he knew it. “‘It’s not brain surgery’ and ‘it’s not rocket science’ were catchphrases.” Then he remembered that he’d been given lessons in brain surgery. At least in how to relieve the pressure caused by a skull fracture. That there were things you could do, even without computer-controlled laser scalpels. Then he remembered something else. An argument between an engineer and an engineering manager. “It’s the eighty/twenty rule. Or maybe the ninety/ten rule.
“What? It must have been three years before the mission’s go date. Two of the engineers on the project, not about the basic idea, but about the exact numbers. Rick Boatright called it the eighty/twenty rule and Dian Donovan insisted it was the ninety/ten rule.”
“And what is the ninety/ten rule?” Alyssa asked.
“When you’re trying to improve the efficiency of something, the first ninety percent of the improvement of efficiency costs ten percent of the budget and the last ten percent of the improvement costs ninety percent of the budget.”
“Okay. I’ve heard the same rule in reference to the efficiency of chemical processes,” Alyssa agreed. “How does it apply here?”
“Because we aren’t talking about a manned mission to Mars or even to the moon. We aren’t even talking about an ICBM or a V2. We’re talking about a bottle rocket. A little black powder in a tube stuck to a stick.”
“They didn’t have sticks,” Hamadi said.
“Are you sure? I mean, we’re working from secondhand information.”
“Yes. We have a good description.” Zanni had moved to Fort Peterbilt shortly before the major attack and Zanni, who was very tied in to the culture in Hocha, had become their expert on what was going on in Hocha.
“Not that good,” muttered Michael.
“Yes, I know that we should have known about the raid sooner,” Zanni admitted. “But the whole project was kept very close until the attack. On their way back, they had the rockets on their backs to prove they were so light that a single man could carry one. They were about four feet long, they had fins on the back, they were about a half a foot wide and the fins were angled like on an arrow, but more. Three fins, but they twisted around the body of the rocket.
“And they were painted with a feathered snake.”
“Someone’s figured out the gyroscopic effect,” Alyssa said.
Jerry moved his hands around. “No help. That’s come up forty-three times. Everything from tops to turning a bicycle.”
“And throwing pots,” Zara added.
“So what you’re saying is we could have had rockets when Hocha attacked Fort Peterbilt?” Hamadi demanded.
“We’re just people, Hamadi!” Michael said. “We’ve mentioned that before. We don’t know everything, not even Jerry. And I thought Alyssa was the know-it-all.”
“She still is,” Jerry said. “I’m just a salesman, and a half-assed librarian.”
“My point is: we are going to miss things. We’re going to make mistakes based on stuff we think we know that doesn’t turn out to be as true as we thought it was.”
“I understand, Michael,” Hamadi said. “I just hope others do.”
“‘Here lies a toppled god,’” Melanie quoted. “‘His fall was not a small one. We did but build his pedestal, a narrow and a tall one.’”
“What’s that?” Jerry asked.
“It’s from Dune, I think,” Melanie admitted. “One of the Dune books, anyway. I think it refers to Maud’Dib. But it’s appropriate here. We are endangered not by what we know, but by the fact that we’re just human beings and the people out there”—she waved at the walls—“want us to be more than that.”
“Someone is going to have to make a speech,” Hamadi said. “You need to explain to the congress that you were wrong.”
“I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” Zanni said. “Admitting error could weaken us. The Pharisees never admit to mistakes if they can avoid it.”
“None of that makes any sense,” Shane said. “How can anyone insist on the need to sacrifice their children to the gods anymore?”
“Because people hate to admit to being wrong,” Zanni said. “And the more they have committed to that mistake, the harder it is to admit it was a mistake. After you’ve sacrificed a daughter to the gods so that the rains will come and the Talak will flood next spring, preparing the soil for the new crop, you don’t want to admit that Talak didn’t want your daughter killed or, worse, that the Talak was just a river and never a god. You hold onto that belief for dear life because if Talak wasn’t a god and didn’t want your daughter’s life, you killed her for nothing. So you have to keep believing that Talak is a god, even if it means you sacrifice another daughter.”
“That’s just creepy,” Alyssa said.
“I know, dear, but every salesman knows it,” Jerry said. “It’s why encyclopedia salesmen could make a living, and why internet providers are so happy to get you to switch to their service. Because once they get you, you decide it’s a good service because you don’t want to admit you got took.
“Which is why Zanni has a point about the speech that Hamadi wants. People don’t like to admit they were wrong, so if you stick to your story, a lot of them are going to believe you in spite of the evidence.”
“But admitting we were wrong is sticking to our story,” Alyssa said. “We’ve never claimed to be gods. We’ve never even claimed to be prophets or priests. We’re just people who know stuff.”
“Yes, I know,” Jerry said. Then he sighed. “The problem is that it’s less about what you said than about what other people said about you.”
“So you don’t think we should admit we were wrong,” Michael said, starting to sound a little angry.
“No. We have to admit it,” Jerry said. “But you need to be aware that we are going to take a political hit. It’s going to hurt us, and help the Pharisees.” He shook his head. “The problem is we don’t want to be seen as gods or prophets, but our enemies do. They are more willing to lie than we are. It gives them an advantage in the propaganda war. And we need some way to counteract that.”
“We need the big barge for the Peterbilt,” Zanni said. Then, when everyone looked at her, she explained. Zanni had spent her life in the culture of Hocha, learning how the chiefs and the Pharisees interacted and operated. “The Pharisees have Hocha as this symbol of their power. The symbol of the Peterbilt people’s power is the Peterbilt. It’s what everyone knows about, but it’s much smaller. Not as impressive as the mounds at Hocha. Not when you just hear about it. When you see it with its windows shining clear in the sunlight, it’s more impressive.
“But what’s really impressive about it is that it can move. We need to demonstrate that it can move across the Talak, that it can go up the river and down it, then drive around on the ground. That it’s not just a pile of mud that they got someone else to move for them.”
Fort Peterbilt
October 23, 1007 CE
Shane stepped up onto the platform next to the speaker and the room got quiet. She’d been selected to give the speech for a couple of reasons. First, she was young enough that she’d learned the language without much accent. Second, she was known, since she acted as translator between the adults quite often. But also because, having turned fifteen two months ago, she was very much in the age range of the young girls that were sacrificed to the river to bring the floods and the good harvests that they foretold.
She looked around, took a deep breath, and started to speak. “We are not gods, or prophets. We aren’t endowed with special knowledge that only we can know. You can, given time, learn everything we know. So can the Pharisees in Hocha. We do not hide our origins or claim that the gods speak through us. We don’t even claim that Jesus Christ speaks through us. Not the movie Jesus Christ Superstar or the gospels are us. We just happened to have them with us when we got here. My parents are Christians. Jerry Jefferson isn’t. Whether you choose to be is your choice. And that choice doesn’t depend on what we know, but on what you feel . . . ”
The speech lasted almost thirty minutes, then she opened up the floor to questions and she got them. By the time she was done, most of the people in that room had the basics of how to make a black powder rocket. And it was clear that the rockets that were made in Hocha were actually inferior compared to what Alyssa Jefferson thought of as rockets.
It worked, sort of. But only sort of. The Pharisees of Hocha still claimed that their rockets were special and magical and that the “demon people’’ were leading the faithful away from the true gods.
On the other hand, not that long after her speech, most villages on both sides had rockets and just about every village kept guards on their walls day and night.
Report: 127
Jerry Jefferson
Fort Peterbilt
November 15, 1007 CE
The thing everyone wanted to avoid is unavoidable. It’s shaping up to be a religious war. The Pharisees at Hocha (I know, but that’s what the followers of the cross god call them) insist that the temporally displaced persons are evil and attempting to seduce the people away from the true gods, and the followers of this rather unique version of Christianity are resentful of the human sacrifice practiced by the Pharisees of Hocha, as well as the forced labor and the gradual reduction of the power of the women’s councils.
The massacre at Sofaf has hardened positions on both sides. The Lomak clan retaliated against a Gruda village three nights ago. It was less one-sided, but the village of Talmak is smoking ruins and the body count was pretty high.
Jerry sent the file along with pictures and audio recordings of the language of this time.