Phoebe's Tale: Into the Light, page 68
Technically, all fungi are edible. Some fungi are edible only once.
Underground, raising farm animals of any sort was out of the question. Everybody was about to become a vegetarian. The fungus farms were one thing; the vegetables and cereals were another matter entirely. Fungus grows fine in the dark. The others do not. This meant I had to figure out how to provide “sunlight” for plants.
I think I bruised my forehead, banging it on the table as I kept finding more and more problems. I was already familiar with the basics of a farm—if the farm is on the surface of the Earth! I was also familiar with farming in space—inside a solar system, with sunlight all over the place!
I wanted to think outside the box, or, rather, inside the magical box, but Uncle Dusty flatly refused to let me build Cabinets of Creation, or Sacks of Snacking, or even a Fountain of Fortified Fruit Juice. It was fine to have a whole barn in Tauta shift in a warehouse full of meat. It was an acknowledged miracle by the gods. Here, it would draw too much ire and fire. When I pitched a fit about it, he admitted he might be able to bend the rules a little and, once in a while, sneak in a shipment of stuff for them through his reactor world shift-closet. It would have to be by surprise, as the exception, not the rule. It would be an emergency supply drop, not a daily delivery. I had to accept it as the best we could do in the face of formless Chaos-creature opposition.
I took a two-pronged approach to the problem. First, I went to the Human Resources department and searched the computer’s database. Was the human genome the only thing it could fool with? Yes. It was only programmed for human cloning.
Rather than hunt down the correct timeline and load up a lot of information—which I would then have to figure out how to use—I simply ordered up specialty crops, kind of like what we did in finding genetically modified crops for La Mancha. In this case, the stuff I wanted had to grow in the caves’ temperatures and it had to cope with limited light. How efficiently could we feed people? Pretty efficiently, as it turns out. Efficiently enough? Well… maybe. We could minimize the amount of light the farms required by using better crops, but we still had to see how much light we could get.
Which brings me to the other prong of this attack: teaching the locals how to use magic. In our trip through Brevimons—the village we toured—we saw no signs of magic-working. I didn’t see anything at all with my second sight. The ability to work magic is, I venture to say, innate to the human condition, so they should be able to do so. Talents vary, of course. Even when dealing with people from a low-magic Earth, at least one out of a thousand should be able to consciously and deliberately cast a spell simply by following instructions.
This does not mean they’re smart enough to understand what they’re doing or how, only that they have enough innate capacity to do so.
Since I didn’t have anyone local to help, Rusty and I cast several stone-shaping spells. At each village, we started with existing caves and worked to rearrange them. We repeated the process at other villages wherever they had mountains and caves nearby. Pop would lay a final arrangement over the whole interior of a mountain and tell it to get busy. Rusty and I cast spell after spell—going room by room, as it were—to create long tunnels, drains, pools, air vents, private chambers, public chambers, storage chambers, and so on. Given a few weeks, they should have plenty of living and farming space, plus a lot of extra space to allow for any population growth.
Uncle Dusty mentioned “two or three human lifetimes.” The thought stuck with me.
I’ve made sure the roof of each non-fungus farming tunnel is glossy, for reflection, to maximize the lighting and I’ve arranged for crops that minimize the need. Now we need people who can provide light—hopefully enough!
To this end I’ve started teaching people how to cast spells. This has gone reasonably well, all things considered. While the initial surprise and “She’s a witch!” was pretty par for the course, I didn’t start with a demonstration. Rusty helped by pretending to be a spectator. His job was to be interested and curious and to shout down naysayers. By having a member of the crowd lead off with questions, people were more likely to listen.
It helped that I was only showing two spells. One is designed to be a magical source of heat and regular light, with a touch of ultraviolet for vitamin D production. The other is a “farm fire,” with less heat and more of the invisible wavelengths plants like.
See the fire? I’m good with fire! Anyone who wants to learn how to summon fire—gee, it’s kinda cold out, isn’t it?—Anyway, anyone who wants to learn how to summon fire, I’ll teach you. Yes, if you have the talent for it, you can create fires out of thin air! And if you’re really talented—or practice an awful lot—you might even be able to throw fire. Maybe at giant bugs. Or ice giants.
“Hey, that sounds really useful!” shouts the Voice of Reason. People all around nod thoughtfully. Witchcraft? Sure. But, like the man said, really useful witchcraft…
I wish Pop was here. I don’t mind teaching, but I’m more of a tutor, doing it one-on-one. Trying to teach a whole class? That’s a skill. That’s an art. I do not like it. I don’t think I’m cut out for it. Give me one student and I’m your gal. Fifty? Not my thing. It’s not Rusty’s thing, either. He does okay as a “talented” individual who can help his “fellow students,” though. When he’s not doing that, I’ve got him writing down instructions on how to cast each spell. He’s a good choice for this. I take too much for granted. He’s uncertain enough about his own skill to be concerned about making the instructions as clear and detailed as possible.
So we wandered around, casting spells on caves and importing seeds and teaching the masses all through the night.
Yay.
Caves. On it. Crops. On it. Illumination for the farming caves? Probably. Emergency support? Likely. Survivability?
Hmm.
I’m not sure how well this is going to go. Uncle Dusty is trying to un-paradoxify—yeah, I know it’s not a word—an apparent divergence in the history he knows. I can’t help but think the upcoming ice age killing off a large percentage of people who aren’t living near a cave complex is going to result in deaths they weren’t supposed to have. This will change the numbers descendants down through generations… won’t it?
Maybe I don’t understand it well enough to have an opinion. I hope Uncle Dusty does. I would hope and pray Uncle Dusty knows what he’s doing, but I talk with him pretty much every day, anyway.
One nagging thought that keeps coming back to me is a different, more fundamental question. What caused the change, the paradox, in the first place? When Pop came back in time, did he do something to alter history without meaning to? Or did the thing he was chasing already do the damage before Pop stopped it? Or did Pop stop it? Could he and Uncle Dusty only think it’s all sorted out?
I would ask, but Uncle Dusty already made it clear telling me more would further jeopardize the potential future.
I hate it for multiple reasons. First, I hate it because I hate not knowing. Second, I hate it because if I know it could, paradoxically, make things worse. Third, I know that I know this and still want to know!
Grr.
In between teaching people how to make fire—magically, I mean—and casting expansion spells on cavern complexes, Rusty and I brought out Bronze’s war wagon.
The vehicle impresses me. It started as a semi tractor-trailer rig. That description doesn’t do it justice. It indicates a point of departure. She did things to it. This was more bullet-shaped and aerodynamic, although the reinforced front bumper resembled two rows of steel shark teeth more than anything else. Mounted on it, integral to it, was a horse-shaped… hood ornament? Calling it a hood ornament is misleading. Maybe a horse-head-shaped battering ram is more accurate.
It also runs on tracks rather than wheels. It still has front wheels, half-hidden under the aeroshell of the cab, for steering. The former drive wheels are replaced by track-laying modules—one on each side and one down the middle, presumably so she can run over things more thoroughly. In the back, where the rear wheels of the trailer would be, there is a similar arrangement of tracks. Those have electric motors for power rather than a drive shaft.
It’s not an eighteen-wheeler. It’s a six-track, all-wheel-drive off-roader. A very intimidating one, too. The windshield looks like a pair of backswept, slanting eyes, for example. And the air horns on the roof… I’m not sure if they’re meant to be sonic weapons or were merely intended for intimidation purposes.
For someone who hangs around with Pop—an almost obsessive road-builder—Bronze sure put a lot of effort into not needing a road.
We drove from village to village, preaching the apocalyptic word. The winter is coming. The sun won’t rise again. The world is ending. All that stuff. And people listened. It’s an impressive thing, not having a sunrise. Everyone talks about how tomorrow is another day. What do you do when it isn’t? What do you do when the sun refuses to kick things off? How much time has to go by before panic sets in? The moons still rose and set, so tracking the “days” wasn’t hard. After a month of night, the future starts to look more than a little dark.
It was surprisingly easy to persuade people to go elsewhere. I mean, look at it this way. A monster grunts and rumbles its way across the landscape, blazing light ahead of it. It slows as it approaches the fortified village. It stops, sighs, and goes quiet. Then two people shout “Hello!” The monster is… their steed? It’s a mount, not a monster! Well, okay, it’s a monster, but one people can tame and ride! Whew!
Then comes the offer. Abandon the village. Leave the sunless lands and go elsewhere. Initially, there’s resistance. How far is it to lands where the sun shines? There’s a lot to consider when planning such a journey!
I open a gate inside the trailer. One can walk up the ramp, in through the back doors, down the length of the trailer’s interior, and, instead of reaching the forward wall of the trailer, they can step from steel decking onto sunlit grass. They can look at it. The people outside can see sunlight pouring out of the trailer doors. They can smell the ground and feel the warmth. Brave souls can go there, look around, look back through the gate, wave at their friends, even come back and take them by the hand. Gates aren’t one-way. You can walk back and forth. Go through, pick a ripe strawberry, bring it back.
Yeah, holding a big gate open is expensive. I’ve got big crystals. I also I know a guy who has a nuclear reactor I can use. It’s worth it, because although it’s ruinously expensive, it’s also tempting. Not everyone was willing to go, but most did. There were always a few who wouldn’t leave even if you burned the place down.
Rusty did suggest we burn the place, the first time. I didn’t let him. “For their own good” is an excuse I don’t like.
As for the ones who did go, Uncle Dusty came up with a solution for where to put them. He didn’t want them in a reactor world; he had enough people for his tastes. Instead, he picked another world I knew.
Tauta.
No, not La Mancha, nor anywhere in the Tassarian Empire. The southeastern continent has a human presence, based on abandoned colonies. They weren’t scratching to survive. They weren’t exactly a great civilization, either. All the former colonies were along the northern coastline and, for the most part, hadn’t expanded inland much.
Putting a bunch of excommunicated Romans on the east coast of the southeastern continent, as far from the Tassarian Empire as possible, would give them time to grow into a formidable civilization. It also meant they could spread out along the coast, working their way north while the—what do I call them? The former colonies on the north coast? The Yankees? I don’t think they have a name for themselves. They aren’t unified enough. They’re a bunch of villages and small towns. They know each other and trade freely with each other, but they don’t think of themselves as a group. I guess they’re more like city-states than a nation.
Until I come up with better names, the north coast has the Colonizers and the east coast has the Immigrants.
Anyway, with the Immigrants on the east coast, the two groups will bump into each other on a narrow front when they expand along the coastline. This should let them meet each other without being directly in conflict, especially since it will leave them with plenty of room to expand in other directions without challenging one another.
I hope.
The Immigrants took pretty much everything with them, from food to tools to furniture. I didn’t mind. Once any given village was convinced, they wasted no time. They organized everything, packed up, and hustled.
We plunked individual village groups down along the coast in what Uncle Dusty said were good spots. They were near enough to each other to be supportive, far enough away to have elbow room. Everyone had their share and more of fertile, well-watered land.
I didn’t do the surveying. I took him at his word. I did throw in a lot of food, though, to make sure they had ample supplies for overcoming startup disasters. Rusty had several suggestions, too, from his listening to them worry and gripe at each other. They were concerned about tools, mostly, from a potter’s wheel to chisels to a forge.
I consulted with my uncle.
“Yeah, I know,” he assured me. “The spots I picked each have something going for it besides farmland. If they bother to look for it, they can find good limestone and granite quarries, as well as places where they can mine iron or cut timber for charcoal. Please, trust Me on this. I’m going to look after them.”
“Oh? You didn’t want them in a reactor world.”
“Ah, but living in Tauta and having no gods to speak of, they’re perfect candidates for conversion. I can use their help there.”
“Am I going to have to perform a divine manifestation for you?” I sighed, wearily.
“Not in Tauta! You did the legwork to get them there. I’ll handle them from here. With the handshake gates to move power from the reactors into Tauta, I can fuel minor miracles easily. And with the new general-purpose closet I can find things they need and deliver them—and you don’t have to.”
“I’m glad to hear that.”
Journal Entry #116
Once we evacuated everyone we could evacuate and cavernated—yes, yes, I know that’s not a word either—the rest of them, Rusty and I turned our attention to more personal matters.
We gave up on finding the “perfect” place to live. Perfection is the enemy of progress. Instead, we lowered our standards. We shopped for a place that would be comfortable and without too much bureaucracy. Voidworlds were headed our shopping list, of course, and with the addition of a fairly reliable Dingus-removing procedure, Earthlines were also up for consideration. We already had a lot of worlds already listed in the MMM2 we could camp out in, if we cared to. Establishing identities there might be problematic, but paying cash would let us get by for quite a while.
The priority was to finally get out of Uncle Dusty’s apartment building. We would have taken a Polynesian hut in 500 BC or an abandoned tower in the Dark Ages. Heck, I would have been fine with a badly-used interstellar yacht from Honest John’s Junkyard as a fixer-upper project. At this point, we wanted a quiet place, one where we wouldn’t be required to work-work-work. A place to relax. A place we could come home to, put the feet up by the fire, and know we wouldn’t be bothered.
Okay, I wanted a place to relax. Rusty wanted to be unbothered. They’re different things, but they’re related.
We settled on a nice place in a cleaned-out (we removed the Dingus vampires) Earthline. We pretended to be rich Americans in France. We laid down a big pile of gold and bought a vineyard estate shortly after World War Two.
We got it cheap. It needed work, mostly due to age and recent neglect. Rusty and I were fine with that. The place was perfectly habitable. It only needed a little TLC. Rusty is pretty good with a hammer and saw, and the technology of the time was, to him, incredibly simple. When we arrived it was early in the year and an excellent time to start an herb garden. And to pull down a lot of wall-climbing vegetation!
This was more our speed. A little gardening, a little yard care—not working to save the world, preserve a civilization, spread my uncle’s religion, or whatever else the Powers of the Universe wanted! Nothing was actually required. Nothing had to be done now. If a few climbing ivies wanted to creep up a wall for another week… so what?
I got quite a shock, however, a week later when Rusty brought in half a dozen farmer types. They wanted to know if the new owners had any plans for the season. Letting the whole vineyard lie fallow for another year was our prerogative, of course, but it had been four years already…
That’s when I realized the estate was more than a house and grounds. It was a whole… thing. All of it. There were gardens, sure, and I was happy to handle those. On the majority of the property, there was also actual farming to be done—grapes to grow and wine to make. Before we bought the place—before the war, I should say—it was a major economic force in the region. During the war and after, the locals had suffered considerable hardship without it.
I briefly considered dumping a huge pile of money into the local economy. I resisted the notion. An economy runs on a cycle of money. Transfusions of cash have short-term benefits, but also cause inflation.
So, since planting season—is that what they call it for grapes? There were things needing doing on a schedule, anyway. Rusty and I were both ignorant of how it all worked. This meant we hired every able-bodied man and woman and kid who wanted a job. In a minor way, the estate also grew lettuce and eggplant and green beans and carrots and a whole host of other stuff. That’s farming. The grapes were the commercial crop, for winemaking.
The herb garden was more my speed. I have the general idea about farming, but I’m a gardener at heart, not a farmer.
Rusty, on the other hand, got out in the fields and leaned into the whole French farmer thing. There wasn’t a hope in hell he would eat any of it, but planting it and growing it sat quite well with him. He enjoyed practicing his French with the hired laborers—with his translation amulet turned off—while learning how to hoe a row. I was as surprised as he was. He’s a city wolf. For some reason, once he got into the swing of things, he decided he liked it. It was fun!
