A Long Time Until Now (55 page)

CHAPTER 32

Gina Alexander sat atop Number Nine, next to the turret, spinning yarn. The ten feet of height helped a lot with speed. Ortiz was on watch. She hadn’t been in weeks, and Elliott had confided with her it was due to her slipping attention. It was frustrating, but she knew it was true. The old lady was broken, and starting to look her age. The scar tissue in her foot didn’t help, either. It was painful to walk long distances.

She was taking a break from admin work, which seemed to take longer than it had, and she had trouble finding some of the less common functions. Brain fuzz, and fatigue. Breaks stopped her from falling asleep during the day.

She didn’t like heights, but she did like the view. It was a lovely day, clear and bright, puffy clouds here and there, and a wafting breeze.

And she could watch Martin pound away on the iron.

He wore an apron of goat hide over bare skin, and his taut, lean biceps rolled with every swing of the hammer. His left hand was wrapped in leather to protect it from the heat, holding vice grips. His right hand held a ball-peen hammer from the tool kit. He pumped the bellows, grabbed the tools, pulled out the iron, placed it on the boulder, and started beating. After about twenty seconds, he’d stick it back into the fire and work the bellows again.

“Tiring?” she called down.

“Yes,” he said. “It’s the only way to get more iron, though.”

“What are you making?”

“Well, first, I have to make this into a long bar, upset the ends—widen them—punch holes in those, cut a piece off as a rivet, and make them into a pair of tongs, so I can hold the rest of the metal more easily. I’ll need to learn how to use those. I mostly used long handled vise-grips.”

“What after that?”

“Shovels, hoes, plow bits, axes. Flat metal is easy. I know how to make an axe, but never have.”

Would she consider being married to the village blacksmith? Maybe. That was a skilled trade.

Why was she thinking in that context?

Oh, yes. She was spinning yarn from goat wool, and remembering a Viking era event. Or was it Civil War? No, the drop spindle was Viking era, though the smiths were mostly the same.

He broke for lunch, as the Urushu hunting party returned with a young antelope and took it to the kitchen area.

“Tasty,” she called down.

“Nom,” they replied.

She giggled. That was still hilarious. And thank gods no one had taught them obscenities as fake useful phrases. That always pissed her off when she encountered it.

Caswell and Barker came back from upstream. No matter what Caswell claimed, Gina thought she was hitting it off with Barker and would pair with him. The young men would just have to take native wives.

“Good news and possibly more good news,” Caswell announced.

“Yes?”

“We found nuts. More butternut type things, almonds and walnuts.”

“I have trouble with almonds,” she said.

“You don’t want to eat these anyway. They’ll be toxic in more than tiny servings. But they do have oil.”

“For cooking?”

Spencer said, “No, for the engines!”

Barker said, “Yes, if we can grind enough, we can add some fuel. You said nut oil would work.”

“Fantastic,” he said. “It’ll mean a lot of grinding, but yes.”

“We can cook in the walnut and butternut oil,” she said. “They’ll also go in salads, and we can do more bacon. There are a lot of trees up there.” She pointed farther uphill to a wooded meadow that was just visible over the terrain, below a slope in the hill.

Barker said, “The bee colony is coming along. It'll be nice to not have to ]crack hives for honey..”

“I wish I’d studied more of these things,” she said. “All I know is textiles.”

“Gina, I am delighted at my repaired socks, and the new pair,” he said.

“Sure, but I need a loom eventually. That’s a lot of work.” She’d knitted them with needles homemade from twigs.

“We’ll do it.”

Caswell said, “Oh, I must remember to ask the Urushu to find us flax. Linen would be nice to go under the wool.”

Indeed. Linen was also good for bandages, bedsheets, filtering wine and oils, and for bandages and sanitary necessities. Those improvised pads Caswell had to use wouldn’t last forever.

She twitched awake from a micronap and rubbed her eyes. She really did need to rest. She was even medically authorized one, by Doc and the LT. But if everyone else ran all day, then she would, too. Then she’d sleep badly at night.

Growling in frustration, she pulled up the spindle. It had dropped all the way down and the yarn had snarled. She knelt carefully, and started stretching it around the turret, as Ortiz watched, so she could fix that section.

“Dozed off?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“Caffeine help?” he offered some of the native leaf drink.

“Not if it tastes like that. It’s bad enough to gag a maggot.”

“Didn’t you eat maggots in SERE school?”

“No, but I did eat other bugs, and they’re much tastier than that crap. I’ll be fine,” she insisted.

Once the fiber was untangled, she decided she’d be safer on the ground, even if it meant shorter spins. She wrapped it carefully, climbed down the back and resumed her seat in her office.

Sean Elliott noted the date in the log. September 17, local time, August 9 home time. The anniversary of their loss and arrival.

Everyone knew the date was coming, but no one really wanted to make any preparations for it.

They were all silent at breakfast, and Sean didn’t offer anything. The existing task list would do fine, and he’d offer counsel or duty to anyone who needed support, depending on what would motivate them better. Spencer had orders for the same thing. They ate warmed up dry goat and some mixed berries with goat milk.

It was a beautiful partly-cloudy morning. Doc was all excited because the full moon had been followed by Jupiter, Mars and Spica rising in close proximity to the east before dawn.

“There’s software that could tell us what date it was, if I had time to place star positions,” he said.

“Is it on your phone?”

“No, on my laptop back on base, which is probably sent home now, or will be, fuck if I know. It’s a great view, and I know I could back-calc, given time.”

Sean wasn’t sure. That wouldn’t make it any easier. Whether it was thirteen thousand BC or thirteen million, they weren’t going home.

A year. In some ways, it didn’t feel like it. In others, it felt like an eternity

It was a significant day, a milestone. None of them knew how much longer they might have, but it would all be here.

Oglesby was the first to speak.

“It just occurred to me. I wonder how much of English and Latin is feeding into the Urushu language to become Proto-Indo-European?”

Spencer said, “That depends on whether or not it has any effect. But if it does . . . yeah, we might be causing something here.”

Sean asked, “Might? Why wouldn’t we be?”

Spencer said, “Well, bronze working is still ten thousand years in the future, iron another thousand or more after that. Textiles are about the same time frame, aren’t they?”

“No,” Alexander said. “There’s textiles as far back as a hundred thousand years, flax and cotton. They’re not as sophisticated, but the Urushu have nets, so they can weave or knot fabrics.”

“Ah. I stand corrected. But the metal would be very useful. Knowing you can burn ochre to get metal is easy to remember.”

Oglesby said, “Given the length of time, I doubt there’s much continuity of any language, especially without writing. ‘Ma,’ ‘dadad,’ ‘a!ka,’ and ‘mmm,’ seem to be about it so far, with some very vague syllables in Gadorth. But stuff could feed in, decay, evolve and become something else, if either group lasts that long and passes any terms onto others. Which is unlikely.”

Sean pointed out what they all knew and said, “And where do those vehicles go? I doubt we can find a way to cut them up. It would take a huge fire to melt them. They’d almost certainly have shown up in some excavation or other.”

“Unless there’s some secret government office hiding their existence.”

“Do you believe that?”

“No, but given time travel exists, I can’t say it’s impossible.”

There wasn’t much to say past that. They really had no way to tell.

“So we’ll do the best we can,” Elliott said.

Dalton said, “I have a small service I’ve put together, if anyone’s interested. A closure of the past.”

“That’s the future,” Doc said. “I’d like to see it again.”

Dalton said, “I’m fairly well adapted to here. It’s tough in some ways, but invigorating.”

Spencer said, “Let’s keep it low key, guys. Everyone’s got their own thoughts. Thanks for the offer, Dalton. I’d encourage anyone to talk about it if they want to. But find privacy for any talks, don’t let them spill into a general activity.”

“I’m available to talk if anyone needs to,” Sean said. “On with tasks.”

It didn’t seem like a day to celebrate.

Before everyone got to tasks, he pulled Oglesby aside.

“Can you tell the guests we’re having a meditation day and not talking much?”

“Yes, sir.”

The next day, Martin Spencer took a break from sorting iron and watched Barker turn another bowl. Typically, one cracked each week. As they got better seasoned wood, and now that they had nut oil for treating them, they’d last longer. Once he could forge a couple of turning chisels, it would go much faster, though Bob did a decent job using the tip of his machete to cut the inside, and the straight edge to turn the outside.

He watched two shavings float down and land atop each other.

“Ah, hell, we were stupid again,” he said.

“Eh?”

“That hot tub you want. We’ve been trying to figure out how to sluice cut or coop lumber into tight fits.”

Barker looked up for a moment, then talked while he turned. “I figured we were going to do a lot of splitting and filing, until we can build a planer table of some kind.”

“Or, we can split, shave and strake them together like planks on a Viking ship, and caulk them with pine pitch.”

Barker stepped back from his work and lowered his machete.

“Goddam, are we stupid or what?”

“Well, it’ll still be a lot of work,” he admitted.

“Sure. But it’s work we can do with what we have.”

He said, “That just leaves a drain trough and petcock, which I’m pretty sure I can turn and carve.”

“Good. A hot bath in winter will do a lot for morale, and smell.”

Martin said, “I wonder how the Romans did theirs, and of course, we’re not going to go look.”

“Still don’t trust them, eh?”

“Why should we?”

“I wasn’t disagreeing.”

“Well, that gets us much closer. Let me check with Alexander on caulking.”

The place was starting to look like an Iron Age village. It did remind him of re-enactments, and that was somewhat comforting. He liked those on weekends. The Regia Anglorum site in the UK was neat. This was even better, except for the fact he could never leave it. Be careful what you wish for. Except he’d never wished for anything like this. He knew better.

His guts were steady with mild irritation, but he knew ultimately it would kill him. There were several ways it could catch up to him. It was just a case of which one was first.

If it got painful enough, or his esophagus distressed itself closed, did he have the nerve to just end it with a bullet?

It was a decision he might have to make sometime in the next decade.

Life would be nasty, brutish and short.

He walked over to Number Nine and leaned around the steps.

“Yes?” she said, looking up from spinning and tapping keys in between spins. She looked baggy-eyed and tired.

He asked, “Can you spin or twist thicker thread, almost rope, to use for caulking?”

“We can twist several strands together. There’s a basic machine which I’ve seen. Otherwise, we can ask the Urushu for hair. Didn’t the Vikings do that?”

“We could. I’d rather not impose if we don’t have to.” Besides, her hair wasn’t that long.

“Are you building a boat?”

“Caulking the hot tub.”

“Oh,” she said. “That does make sense. But I better be high on the list.”