Time Salvager, page 24
“Knock. Knock,” he said.
There was another startled stammer, and then Elise laughed, her voice ringing inside his head. She must have been laughing aloud because he could hear her voice downriver, the echo bouncing off the tall black structures rising up from the ground
James picked up his pace. If she were any louder, she’d wake the whole tribe in a few seconds. He found her kneeling at the water’s edge, arms elbow deep in the slow-flowing sludge that folded over itself as it ran downstream. He didn’t try to mask his steps and she craned her head as he approached.
“Who’s there?” She smirked.
“It’s James.”
Elise rolled her eyes as she stood. “You’re hopeless. Do you know that?”
He actually had no idea what she was talking about but he had more pressing matters to deal with right now. He looked at the ominous buildings that shot up into the skies around her, their windows like blackened eyes, all seemingly staring right at them.
“You can’t just wander off like this,” he said, pointing at the high-rise on the other side of the river. “It’s not safe out here. There are more feral inhabitants in the buildings across the city than there are people. In fact, according to the hunters, a nasty nest of wolf variants took up residence right there across the street. If one of them decided you were dinner, I wouldn’t be able to save you in time.”
They were in an area far too enclosed and with far too many places to hide for his liking. The wilderness filled the night air not only all around them, but above them, in the abandoned buildings a hundred stories tall. Howls, barks, and the constant chirping of unknown creatures continuously emanated from the derelict skeletons of these once mighty structures as nature took back the land block by block.
“This isn’t the first time I’ve worked in a dangerous environment,” she said.
“There are also some very dangerous people hunting us as well.”
She shrugged him off as she set a plate of the sludge on a boulder. “I’m not going to hide in a cave for the rest of my life, James.” She turned her back to him and stuck her arms into the river, this time reaching deep down until the water reached up to her shoulders.
“This is not up for debate.” He knelt down next to her and peered over her shoulder. “There’s … what are you doing? Be careful or you’ll fall into the river.”
Elise rolled her eyes. “Cut it out, Dad. I have your atmos thing on anyway.” She pulled her right arm out of the mud and wiggled her fingers toward him. He just gave her a blank stare. She exhaled in exasperation. “You’re no fun.”
“Mud’s not much of a deterrent, though I think I have enough caked on me as it is.”
“Well, if you must know…” She pointed at the boulder nearby. For the first time, James noticed the fourteen plates lined up neatly in three rows. He walked over and picked one up.
“Don’t touch it,” she said, more sharply than he’d ever heard her speak to him.
James put his hands up and backed away.
Elise joined him and shooed at him. “They’re all in order.” She pointed at the top row. “Two hundred meters upriver before the sharp bend at three elevations.” Then she pointed at the middle row. “Immediately after the bend.” Then she pointed at the last row. “Four hundred meters down.’
“I don’t understand,” James said.
“The water is infected.”
“How can water be infected?” he asked.
“Like a festering wound. Back in my time, we called it Earth Plague. It was a newly discovered virus that sprung from a combination of environmental variables: carbon levels, pollution, radiation, ultraviolet rays … a perfect storm of bad crap upon bad crap happening. We first discovered small blooms of it in the Indian Ocean. And then reports of similar patches sprung up all over the world.”
“How do you know so much about it?”
“That’s what the Nutris Platform was for. The global governments realized that this Earth Plague was a real threat to our planet, and they all pooled their resources and gathered the most well regarded scientists to destroy the plague.” She bowed her head. “Some of the best minds on the planet. I had a lot of friends there.”
“I don’t remember seeing this Earth Plague when I was in your time,” James said, puzzled.
“We intentionally built the Nutris Platform in the Arctic Circle. We needed a clean environment where the virus couldn’t prosper. Cold weather hinders its rapid mutation rate.”
“I wonder why it was labeled a military installation by ChronoCom.” Or by Valta. He wasn’t sure who was in charge of that operation anymore.
She shook her head. “I don’t know where you got that idea from. It was a cleanser. By the time the platform went online, we were only a few months away from starting trials. All we had to do was refine the particle filtering and sequencing.”
James shook his head as a lump sunk into his stomach. “You mean if the base hadn’t blown up when it did, Earth wouldn’t be this mess?”
“We could have cured her,” Elise said. “Maybe I still can.”
“By yourself?”
“I can try. It’s not like I have anything better to do right now,” she groused. “If I had the right equipment, who knows? Maybe I can pick up where we left off. It’s definitely something worth exploring, but this place is a mess.”
James stayed with Elise for the rest of the night until dawn, acting as her lab assistant and pack mule as she gathered more samples and carried them back to camp. By the time Sammuia found them to gather for the day’s work, they had collected over forty plates, each carefully labeled. Elise had to recruit the two children to help move the small trays into cover.
“How is this going to cure the planet?” James asked as they returned to join the tribe for the morning assignments.
“Not sure if I can,” she admitted. “Not without any equipment. This is just more out of curiosity right now than anything. It’s nice to have something to think about other than this awful mess I’m in.”
He leaned in to her. “We still need to talk about what to do next. We can’t stay here forever.”
She shrugged. “It’s not a bad life, James. These seem to be good people and the work is honest. What else are we going to do?”
“I didn’t bring you back here for…” He paused. Why did he bring her back? It wasn’t for her own good; that, he had to admit. He did it for himself, and now that she seemed to be adjusting to life here, he wanted to take her away again.
“Selfish bastard,” James muttered under his breath.
He felt the familiar pull of anxiety as they were separated and she was led by both hands by that gaggle of old women back into one of those tall rusted relics of the past. His instincts were to run after her and snatch her from that group of old hens coaxing her away from him, shoot to the underground garage across the river where the collie was parked, and flee to some remote place far away from the searching eyes of ChronoCom and these savages.
Oldest Qawol waved him over and pointed toward the same group he had worked with yesterday. James kept his face neutral and held in his sigh. The other large party of men was venturing northwest to hunt for game in one of the skyscrapers. He would be much more useful running with them. But that would require a large degree of trust on both sides, something neither had at this moment, which relegated him back to digging ditches and damming rivers, crap work that was far beneath a chronman.
Ex-chronman. Even worse: fugitive.
“Your thoughts are loud, stranger,” Qawol said, putting a hand on his shoulder. “I can hear your worry all the way from afar.”
“It’s nothing,” he said.
“Running minds never run nowhere,” Qawol said. “Josni says you worked hard with the others yesterday. He was surprised.”
“Why would he be?”
“People who have no intention of staying have no need to work hard for the tribe’s benefit. I do not anticipate you or the girl staying much longer.”
James stopped. The Oldest was right. Why did he break his back for them yesterday? He didn’t know. James looked back at the six towers that disappeared over the ridge as his group made its way down to the river, then he looked back at the makeshift dam they had erected yesterday. The whole wall looked ready to buckle. Being in that pit right now was dangerous.
It had leaked in a few areas and the supports—bunches of gray plant stems bound together—were bending and being pressed deeper into the mud. He watched as the first group of men jumped down into the ditch to inspect the braces, probably not realizing the danger they had just put themselves in.
He watched, alarmed, as one of the men knocked on the dam wall and then tried to readjust the slanted stem pushing against it. The wall sagged a little more. Three kinetic coils burst out as the glow of the exo crackled around him. Alarmed, several of the Elfreth nearby jumped back and pointed. Another standing on the far ridge aimed a rifle at him.
James gritted his teeth and jumped down into the ditch just as the stem supporting the sagging wall snapped and a torrent of water came rushing into the ditch.
TWENTY-NINE
CURE
Elise nursed the small fire tucked safely inside the ring of rocks and fanned it gently with a fan made from knitted insect wings that Rima had given her. Sammuia’s older sister had developed a fascination with Elise and was now resorting to nothing less than a string of gifts of silly trinkets and useful knickknacks to curry her favor.
As much as Elise had tried to tell the girl that bribery wasn’t needed to earn her friendship, Rima was persistent. The rest of the Elfreth seemed fine with the girl hanging around her, even relieved that she was so preoccupied. It seemed Rima had a reputation as a troublemaker among them.
Some of the gifts were very useful; for example, what looked like a hollowed-out half of an old carburetor that now served as a heating plate for Elise’s tests. Others, like this insect wing fan, were just pretty to look at.
Wait, no, she took that back. Elise switched the fan to her left hand, silently thanking it for helping keep the fire alive. It had taken her the better part of the morning on her rest day to get the fire started for the heating plate so watching it finally grow felt she had just climbed Mt. Everest.
Qawol had cut her off from using the tribe’s supply of oil, so in order to run her experiments, Elise had to gather her own tinder and figure out how to start her own fires. The first few days, James would just zap something and it would be—presto!—fire. He wasn’t always around, though, so she decided it was high time she learned how to make one on her own.
Sitting over the fire on top of a metal grate was one glass and three tin cups, borrowed from the cooks. She wished they were all glass so she could examine how the contents of the sludge from the river broke down, but she had a feeling glass-making was pretty much a lost art around these parts, like just about everything else.
“Should have paid attention to those blacksmithing and glassblowing classes at summer camp, Elise,” she tsked. “You’d be all set by now.”
She was delusional if she thought this stone age experimentation was actually going to lead to a cure for the Earth Plague, but she wanted to learn more about this exotic new world. She was a scientist after all, and this is what scientists did when they were curious, so she studied the sludge with what she had on hand even if that meant resorting to third-grade science projects. If anything, it helped pass the time.
Ever since the second week James and she had joined the tribe, her routine had become: get up before the sun rises, gather samples until dawn, work the assorted tribal chores, then spend the rest of the evening after dinner playing at caveman biologist. These exercises gave a little of her previous life back to her. They also reminded her of everything she had lost.
“You busy?” James said, knocking on the wall of her lab.
“Lab” was a really loose term. She had commandeered a burned-out residential guardhouse of an old complex downriver from the settlement. It had only two and a half walls, but the roof didn’t seem to be in any danger of collapsing. It kept her dry from the rains and offered just enough ventilation so she didn’t smoke herself out when some of her less-than-aromatic experiments went awry.
“Hey you.” She beamed as he walked in and studied the fire. They didn’t see much of each other during the day because of all the chores the Elfreth set them to, so it was always a little thrill when he stopped by every evening. It was strange; he totally wasn’t her type, but nothing made a smile splash across her face the way his being around did.
She was also very proud of James. After the incident at the dam when he saved a group of tribesmen from drowning, the Elfreth seemed to have finally thawed toward him. In return, she saw him make a real effort not to be such a statue to them. Now, he stomped and scowled less in camp, and not all of them pointed their guns at him when he passed. She considered that a vast improvement. Most were still uncomfortable around him, but at least both sides were making a little effort.
“The old windbags ordered me to bring you dinner,” he said.
Elise made a face. Eating had somehow gone from her favorite pastime to her most dreaded. She had mostly gotten use to the meager sustenance of this land, though some of it still took choking down for her to digest. At least her body had adjusted. During the first few days, her stomach had launched a protest that kept her perpetually cramped.
He passed a hand over the boiling sludge. “Any luck on the cure?” He asked this every time he stopped by. For a guy from the far future with very advanced technology at his disposal, he was surprisingly a knuckle-dragger when it came to certain things.
“This isn’t like fixing a mechanoid or curing the cold, James.” She shook her insect-wing fan at him. “Look at what the hell I have to work with! Do you know what in Gaia this is made of?”
He paused, his gaze moving from the slurp she was cooking in her little pots to the fan in her hand to the makeshift shelf of scrounged lab tools she’d accumulated over the past few days.
“What do you need, then?” he asked.
“Well, for one, it’d be nice if I didn’t have to spend two hours to build a damn fire every time I want to heat something up. Maybe a real filtration device instead of a spaghetti strainer, and how about some real equipment? Holy hell, how about a room with four actual walls?” She laughed as she ticked off half a dozen old comforts of home that she missed. James looked serious as he took in every single one of her suggestions.
“I’ll see what I can do,” was all he said. “This might take a few days to track.” He turned and left her lab.
“What? Wait.” She ran out after him. “Do you mean it? Can you really get the stuff for me?”
He must have seen the ear-to-ear grin on her face because a rare smile grew on his. “For a cure for Earth? Sure. For you? If it makes you happy.” He looked at the opening in her lab where a wall should have been. “What do you think about moving the lab into one of the Farming Towers? I don’t feel comfortable with you working so far away from the safety of the tribe.”
She shook her head. “It’s pitch-black up there at night. You won’t catch me climbing those stairs after sundown.”
James thought about it and nodded. “I’ll see what I can do about adding power to your lab.”
Elise couldn’t believe it. She didn’t think he was taking her seriously. This was more than she could hope for, and she ran through the list of requests that she had haphazardly shot off in her head. She definitely should have been more considerate with what she asked for. “Hang on, let me think it over and get a real list.”
James held her hand with his. “Take your time. Eat your meal before the food gets cold. You know how much worse it tastes once that happens.”
Elise was so excited she barely noticed the dead grubs, moss soup, and wilted leaves she inhaled for dinner. She made a detailed wish list and double-checked it like a little girl picking presents for winter solstice. By the time she was ready to turn in for the evening, the number of things she wanted had grown to over a hundred.
Afraid that she was being too greedy, she refined it once more, putting the list of lab equipment she wanted into separate columns, from required to optional to nice-to-have alternatives. Too excited to sleep, she stayed up and tweaked the list until it had been reduced to a trim thirty-six items. Then she decided that the eight semi-optional items weren’t actually optional after all, which brought up the final list to forty-four.
“Forty-four to save the Earth,” she said and rubbed her hands in anticipation.
Farther upstream in the field, the guard on watch banged his nightstick against the column he was perched on. Fourteen times the ringing of the aluminum tube echoed across the camp. By the time the sun came up, the guard would have banged the nightstick up to forty times, the occurrences evenly divided by an old recovered hourglass that he continually flipped. Each banging let the rest of the tribe know how deep in the night they were, and more important, let them know that someone was still watching over them. Falling asleep while on watch was one of the worst crimes a tribesman could commit. No one knew exactly how long the hourglass was, but if Elise had to guess, she’d say it was approximately ten to twelve minutes.
That was the way with things now in the present. Everything was measured in approximations. These people lived life from sunup to sundown, and measurements were taken based only on the capacity of what they used. Metrics for these people were based on fingers, toes, and persons. Thus, those seventy-seven blood corn stems stacked on the far bank for tomorrow’s work on the dam would be three persons, three limbs, and two fingers. It made sense, she guessed. Last month, her team was triangulating core temperatures near the center of the Earth and now she was counting mutant tomatoes with her hands and fingers. Go figure.
It was the middle of the night by the time Elise popped her head into their tent. She had counted at least twenty-seven taps of the nightstick, which meant she had only a few more hours to sleep. Tomorrow was going to suck. Knowing how much of a light sleeper James was, she tiptoed around him toward her side of the tent.
