The hall erupted, everyone talking about Hudnee’s proposal. Some were for it even though they couldn’t yet see how it would be done, and some were against it because they were naturally cautious and they hadn’t seen it done before.
In the end, Hudnee’s idea was passed by a two-thirds majority.
CHAPTER 12
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The villagers had voted to go ahead with the idea of permanent houses, but Hudnee knew he would need to start making progress soon, or they would turn against the refugees just as quickly.
Daneesa laid her hand on his arm. “I don’t think I’ve ever really appreciated you,” she said softly. “I feel like an old woman these days, to think I was once such a young girl.”
He put his arm around her, hugging her gently so he wouldn’t hurt her battered ribs. He remembered his doubts when he had married such a young bride, but she had surprised him again and again on the journey to the sea forest. She was turning out all right.
It was only three weeks before the first house stood ready to be occupied. It was smaller than most of the wooden Shellport houses, but it would do for a family of four or five, at a pinch.
Hudnee had wanted to try out his ideas on a smaller house first, and he’d wanted to build in a hurry, to show the Sea People what could be done. His team of refugees from the interior of Hud had proved their worth, quickly learning the skills that went with the new way of building.
On top of that the building team now had a raft to use, a motley collection of lighter logs lashed together with cord cut from leviathan hide. Towed by a team of dooplehuel, and using the coastal breezes to their advantage, the raft could make one trip to Spitsbergen each day – before the rains came – and return with a load of reasonably consistent gravel.
It meant that Hudnee had to stretch his workers pretty thin, but he left two of them at the site permanently, under a simple hide shelter, to sieve and carry the gravel they needed to the beach. From there it was loaded daily onto the raft. A wharf of some sort would have been a great help, but that would have to wait.
Fires now burned day and night on the side of the Kapuas river not far from the village. The banks of shells around Shellport were collected in batches, mixed with a little white clay from the edges of the hills around the swamps – it seemed to help the process – and cooked in ovens dug into the side of a low hill. The refugees took great care to keep the acidic wood ash away from what would become a very alkaline shell slurry.
Most of Hudnee’s crew could be found by the ovens, working at various tasks. They continued their work under hide lean-tos when it rained, collected wood for the fires and stacked it to dry along the top of the ovens when it wasn’t raining, and packed and unpacked the batches of shells from the oven. Flat paving stones had been laid in a chamber at one end of the primitive kiln to take the shells, while the fires burned at the other.
After some experimentation, Hudnee now had the building mix about right. He called it ‘urdra’ mix, after a figure in Sea People mythology. Habna had told him the full story. Urdra, trying to steal the secret of metalworking from the gods, had waded through a sticky mess of gruel that had been upset in the gods’ kitchen by a giant kitchen maid.
Unfortunately, the gruel hardened to the consistency of rock with amazing rapidity, and Urdra had been trapped there. The story did, apparently, have a happy ending.
A shortage of water was an unforeseen problem. It was surprising how much water went into the mixture of burnt shells and gravel. Hudnee was unsure where the water went, or what it did, but the process did not work without it.
Trying to get large quantities of clean water to the building site in hide bags had proved to be a problem. Water from the Kapuas looked as if it would be clean enough, but it didn’t work as well as clean water from a good spring. Hudnee soon discovered that after a few trial batches. He wondered what was in the river water that weakened the building mix, but didn’t have the time to do any tests on it.
Work was underway to build a wooden trough to the village from the nearest spring, and in the meantime larger hide bags had been made for the job. They could be carried within a wooden frame by two people.
And so, today was a truly momentous day. The first of Hudnee’s houses stood on top of one of the shell banks on the far side of Shellport from the docks. He and his team had poured a continuous beam of the urdra mix into wooden channels laid around the outside of the site as a foundation.
When this had hardened, another crew filled up the interior space with shells, covering the top with ground up shells that would be covered in turn by hardy matting.
That meant the floor of the house was a good step up from the water, and Hudnee had built the walls upward from there. He had finished off the walls a little lower than usual, and built a fairly complex pole and hide roof that allowed the villagers a bit more headroom than they were used to. This reduced the amount of urdra mix in each house, but meant a little more time was needed on the roof.
The villagers looked very pleased with the finished product. They crowded around the two-roomed dwelling in the spare time they had between work and the onset of the rains, poking at the walls in amazement and commenting on the matting on the floor.
There was a fair amount of good-natured ribbing, and Hudnee could feel the bonds of friendship that were building up between the villagers and the refugees. It felt like there was a growing acceptance of his less conventional approach to building houses as well.
Daneesa stood by his side, firing plenty of ribbing back at anyone who dared give anything except high praise to her most worthy husband. She in turn became the butt of jokes about the age difference in their relationship, but she absorbed it all proudly. Hudnee threatened to carry her off along the shoreline, and start another generation of workers for the house-building cause, and the gathering degenerated into ribald comments and laughter.
It was then that Hudnee felt a tap on his shoulder. He turned to see Habna motioning him to follow her.
The medicine woman disturbed him a little more each time he saw her. The way she had interpreted his dream showed him that a much bigger picture of the universe was possible, and that unnerved him. He had always felt secure within his role as an experienced builder, working with the approval of his community. It was a comfortable position, well within the safe and the known, but Habna seemed to be challenging him to become something else.
“Come with me,” she said curtly, and he followed her without saying a word. When they reached her house, Habna sat him down on the flat area out front where she sometimes treated people, sometimes dried medicinal herbs, and stored a number of her curiosities.
“The rains are late,” she muttered, moving a square board to the edge of her porch. Then she produced a set of carved pieces that looked like they could be set into the board. She put the pieces in place and aligned the board with a number of marks on the sea forest trees about her house.
Hudnee wondered what she was talking about. The rains came early in the afternoon every day, didn’t they? He thought for a moment, and had to admit the morning had seemed longer than usual the day before. Did that mean the wall of grey had appeared over the continent of Hud later than usual, and the rains were now closing in later each afternoon?
He realised he had lost his ability to tell time by the sun – it had seemed irrelevant when each day was overcast and they rose, worked and slept by the pattern of the rains.
“The rains have been getting later each day for a while now,” said Habna, sitting back from her completed task.
Hudnee could make nothing of the contraption in front of her. He could see that the tall, thin central stick still cast a shadow – just – despite the clouds, and there were several markings along the side facing him. The markings started very close together, but then the gaps between them began to get larger. Habna marked another point on the edge of the board, and moved the whole thing in under the roof.
Moments later the shadow o
f the tall, thin stick faded away entirely as a wall of weather rolled in from the east. In a moment the scene was transformed from a muggy, hot day to a cooler and more drizzly one. They moved back under the overhanging roof, and Habna pointed to the chalk marks.
“You can see the pattern,” she said. “The rains are arriving a little later each day, and the amount is increasing.”
Hudnee could see the progression of chalk marks, but he didn’t understand the system well enough to interpret it.
“Here,” said the medicine woman, pointing. “This line of dots is about a quintuk apart, the time allowed to make a submission to the village council. Initially the difference was about a quintuk extra every few days, but now it’s getting longer by a quintuk a day.”
She looked at him meaningfully. He didn’t understand.
“It’s speeding up,” said Habna. She waited, then added with extra emphasis, “at this rate the occurrence of rains in the afternoon will cease in maybe half a quadroon.”
Hudnee tried to take all this in. Half a quadroon, two of the old ten-day prayer and service cycles of the Descendants, then.
“Why,” he asked tentatively. “Why are the rains going to stop?’
“Why did they start in the first place?” she replied, answering his question with a question.
“Someone . . . made them start?” he hazarded.
“Well, someone did something that changed the weather on our world, yes,” agreed Habna.
“And now they’ve changed it back?” said Hudnee.
“Maybe,” said Habna. “Or maybe, and I think this is more likely, another ‘someone’ has come to help us.”
“The people in my dream,” breathed Hudnee, the hair standing up on the back of his neck.
“Maybe,” said Habna. “But remember, they’re just people, like you and me.”
“They look like us?” queried Hudnee.
“I don’t think so,” said Habna with a smile. “But they’ll be people like us just the same.”
Hudnee couldn’t follow what she was saying. Either they would look like him or they wouldn’t. Then he got it. Whatever they looked like, they would think and feel something like the people of Hud did. They were people, of some sort, and that was a reassuring thought.
CHAPTER 13
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The ArchOrdinate looked out over the gathered Descendants of the Prophet with more than a few misgivings. Times were hard, and loyalty was a very subjective matter. How long would some of these Descendants stay true to the cause?
The regular supplies from the Descendant offices in the towns across Hud had begun to dry up some time ago. The villagers the Descendants usually relied upon to keep Roum functioning had melted away when rations were cut. The population had halved.
The ArchOrdinate had been through some terse conversations with the Magisters in each district, but it had only confirmed that the districts were barely holding their own. Then some of the district offices had stopped responding at all. The ArchOrdinate suspected they had been overrun by villagers looking for whatever stores they still had left. They were unfortunate casualties of the state of anarchy that now reigned across Hud.
Since then the Descendants had found it necessary to do a lot more of their own work. The number of Descendants in the hall today was down by a third, attrition caused by desertion, disease, and the rioting in the poorer quarters. Some sort of permanent order had only been restored when the Descendants became the majority of those left in Roum.
The ArchOrdinate said something in a low voice to his clerk, who called Descendant Peters to the front of the imposing hall. The imposing space had once been the centre of Descendant life, and it had been kept apart for ordinations and special days in the calendar. Now it was used for nothing but meetings and storage space.
This reminded the ArchOrdinate of the day Descendant Peters had taken the same walk to the front, to announce that the second planet’s moon had somehow been thrown out of orbit and swallowed by the sun. That had happened before the rains started, and this whole sorry mess began.
“Thank you, ArchOrdinate,” wheezed Descendant Peters, his voice a little stronger these days from his labours in the gardens. The Descendants were trying to grow some of the plants that were surviving in the new, harsh conditions. There were few successes. Most of them were too unpalatable, and grew too slowly, to be a useful source of food.
Now that the rioting in Roum had largely ceased, the ArchOrdinate had sent the guards out to catch whatever they could in the swamps. When they did return with some hideous beast they had caught, the meat was always tough, and tasted foul.
Half rations would have to be reduced even further, and soon, thought the ArchOrdinate to himself. He wondered how long the Descendants could continue to function like this.
“While there has been little time for anyone to study the new sciences recently,” began Descendant Peters, “the ArchOrdinate has ordered myself and my students to scan the heavens with the new combination glasses each day at daybreak, and again before the rains arrive.
“It is fortunate he did so, because there have been further unusual events in the skies over the last few days.”
The gathering held its breath. Would this be a sign of things getting even worse?
“We haven’t been able to get much in the way of detail with the glasses,” continued the Descendant, “but somewhere above the clouds, and possibly even above this air we breathe, there have been tracks in the sky.”
This sounded a bit like the reports of five new suns in the sky that had preceded the heat and rains that led to the current problems. Another report of unusual events sounded like another foreboding of doom. The atmosphere in the hall grew tense.
“The tracks are very faint,” continued Descendant Peters, “and appear as two white trails, side by side, high in the sky. They fade away after a short time. On some occasions we have seen several of them in the sky at once.”
There was a growing murmur in the hall. The ArchOrdinate gestured swiftly, and his clerk rose to call the hall to order.
“The most unusual thing about the trails,” continued the Descendant, “is the colour of the sky behind them. The blue-black of the sky before them becomes a lighter blue as the tracks pass by, and the effect can be seen spreading outward for some time after they’ve gone. Then the blue-black colour slowly returns.”
An air of gloom settled over the meeting. In the current desperate conditions, there was only one thought in the mind of every one of the Descendants, and that thought was, ‘nothing good can come of this.”
A great many parsecs away, the causes of the strange tracks in the sky over Hud were sitting around a long table in the Prometheus boardroom.
Cordez sat at the head of the hastily convened meeting. It was at the top of the huge base’s admin tower. He had asked for the overhead dome to be left unchanged as a panoramic view of the production centre’s surroundings.
Neptune hung overhead in its ‘full’ phase, a ghostly grey-blue phantom that covered half the sky above the dead surface of its moon. It was reflecting the thin, watered-down light it received from the Sun.
It was rare for the South Am Regent to visit the Prometheus site, and most of those present in the boardroom had never seen him in person. There was a muted feeling of awe at his presence.
Cordez was fast becoming a legend among those who knew of his activities in defence of Earth, and as with all legends it had its basis in the hero archetype in the deep unconscious. Being presented with the flesh and blood person it was based on was a disquieting experience.
No one had asked the Mersa whether they had an equivalent unconscious mental process, or if they had discovered archetypes deep in their own unconscious minds.
“We have some serious questions to consider today,” began the Regent, “and these questions have a rather marked ethical element to them. Since this will largely be a matter of a conscience vote, I expect you all to speak up if you have any
thing to contribute.”
The level of tension in the room increased a notch. It looked as if each and every vote would need to be considered carefully.
“The atmosphere on Aqua Regis is, as you know, being returned to its normal state by a squadron of Prometheus Javelins that have been fitted with ramjets, so they can manufacture ozone out of the Aqua Regis atmosphere.
“The Javelins are effectively in the process of building a shielding layer above the planet. The first question we have to consider is whether we reveal ourselves to the inhabitants as their benefactors or not.”
He stopped to let his words sink in.
“It is likely the people on the planet will have noticed the appearance of the Reaper ships in their system initially, even though they’re only at a medieval level of technology. They may even have noticed the appearance of our ramjets in the upper levels of the atmosphere. The Sumerian injunction of non-interference would be a problem for us if we do make contact, but the consequences of non-interference appear to be far worse.
“The level of civilisation on the planet is almost certain to fall back into barbarism for some time, even with our intervention to restore a habitable atmosphere. Humanitarian concerns would suggest we should help avert this, if it can be done with minimal impact on their existing culture.
“There is another consideration, one that will appear purely selfish initially, but may in the long-term mean the destruction of the people of Aqua Regis if they do not, in their turn, help us against the Reaper ships.”
This dramatic statement got the undivided attention of everyone in the boardroom.
“Aqua Regis is an unusual planet to be supporting life,” continued Cordez. “With a relatively cool core it did not develop much in the way of tectonic activity, or the equivalent of Van Allan radiation belts to protect it from the heavy-particle radiation of its sun.
“The people of Aqua Regis have evolved to counter this in a number of ways. By heavy pigmentation in their skin, an immune system that is particularly effective against pre-cancerous cells, and what we presume is some sort of ‘double redundancy’ system for their nervous systems.
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