Faster to be accepted were sanitary napkins. Existing custom used cloth fragments, when available. Yozef’s first models were made from either wood pulp or cotton. A red-faced Yozef endured an awkward meeting with Sister Diera, where he explained their use. The abbess was initially perplexed but offered advice on size and took samples to be tried by several younger women. Yozef and Myrfild were astonished when requests for the product started within days—first as a trickle and then a flood, from within Abersford, then the district, the rest of Keelan, and other provinces. The demand was relentless, in spite of husbands and fathers not seeing the same value as did women in spending coin on such an item. Yozef never explained why he called them “kotex.”
Kerosene
The second major new project originated from Yozef’s forgetfulness. One evening, he worked on updating his English-Caedelli dictionary. He planned to write for an hour. One advantage of the short affair with Buna Keller was that he now knew the Caedelli words for most male and female body parts that he hadn’t found the opportunity, or nerve, to ask anyone else. He suspected the querying and Buna’s rejection were connected—a twofer. It was time to add those new words to the dictionary. He wasn’t sure when he would have other opportunities to either hear or use the words.
He was working on the breast area when his whale-oil lamp went out. The sudden darkness startled him, until he remembered he should have checked the oil level. He knew there was more oil somewhere on the property, but he had no idea where and didn’t want to wake Brak or Elian.
Wait a minute! Whale oil? People on Earth only used whale oil until they killed most of the whales and then went to kerosene and vegetable oil lanterns.
Yozef didn’t know what local plants might produce oils, but kerosene he did know about.
Petroleum. Kerosene was a major fractional distillation product of crude oil. It could be produced from coal, which was abundant on Caedellium, though petroleum was more efficient— if there was a source. He remembered that crude kerosene had been produced from petroleum in limited amounts for thousands of years on Earth, but its common production and use for lighting didn’t exist until the 1850s.
The next day he wrote down all he remembered about petroleum and its fractional distillation. They were already distilling ether and ethanol, so how hard could it be to modify the procedure for petroleum?
Much harder, it turned out, yet not impossible.
First, they needed to find a source of petroleum on Caedellium. When Cadwulf proved no help, the two of them asked around the abbey and the village and found a tradesman who knew of the black, sticky substance used for caulking ships and waterproofing. He pointed them to a Gwillamese trader named Linwyr, who knew of several places on Caedellium where oil seeped into pools above ground. None of these petroleum seeps were nearby in Keelan Province, though just across the border in Gwillamer Province was a region avoided by farmers because of the prevalence of the noxious pools.
Yozef paid Linwyr one hundred krun to show him, Cadwulf, and Filtin the pools. On horseback, they followed the road into Gwillamer from Abersford, about twenty-four miles to where they left the main road and wound their horses into a marshy area a few miles from the sea. It was the longest horseback ride Yozef had made, and for the last few miles, he couldn’t get out of his mind the joke line “‘Fifty Days in the Saddle’ by Major Assburns.” He now appreciated the reference more, though the humor was lost in his present condition.
They smelled the pools before they saw them.
“Thank you, God or whomever!” Yozef exclaimed in English, as he gingerly dismounted next to an odious-looking pool with a skim of water covering the seep. Sulfurous odors came and went with the breeze off the water. The pool was both encouraging and discouraging. Encouraging, in that it existed at all, showing that surface petroleum did exist on Caedellium; discouraging, in that the pool was only three feet in diameter. Linwyr assured him that larger pools were nearby.
“I’m walking for a while to rest Seabiscuit,” Yozef asserted. Cadwulf objected, Carnigan smirked, and Linwyr grunted. They walked, Yozef slightly bowlegged at first.
They found several small pools in the next hour, and Yozef was about to give up when they hit pay dirt. Before them, in a shallow valley, lay a crude oil seep a hundred yards across.
“This is more like it,” said Yozef, kneeling down to inspect the crude. While any grade of petroleum could be used, the heavier grades would be useless in the foreseeable future, given the available level of technology and infrastructure. Yozef stirred the crude with a dead tree branch and got below the surface layer.
“Good, good,” he said. “This will work fine.” It looked like what was called “light-sweet” grade on Earth. If he was right, there’d be less of the heavier, more difficult to work with fractions and a high percentage of the lighter molecules. Benzene would come off early, and they could let it blow away—no worry about the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rules here. Then, 30 to 50 percent of the total would distill off as kerosene.
They probed the seep and found an average depth of three feet at six feet from the edge. Assuming the depth increased toward the center of the pool and the depression, there was enough petroleum to supply production until they found out whether kerosene would succeed as a product. If it did, they might have to drill, though it wasn’t something to worry about, yet.
“Linwyr,” questioned Yozef, “would it be a problem in either buying this land here in Gwillamer or in taking the crude?”
“We’d have to check with the local district center,” said the trader, “but I don’t think there will be any problem. Customs and laws in Gwillamer are similar to Keelan. Give me a couple of days, and I should be able to find out. Of course, my time is valuable, and who knows what unexpected problems might occur.”
After some dickering, it was agreed Linwyr would receive a percentage of profits from the Gwillamer petroleum. Yozef figured that giving Linwyr a small share in any profits, in exchange for his dealing with the Gwillamese, better ensured Linwyr’s dedication to the project than salary. Approval to take the oil came the next sixday, details about which Yozef never inquired, as long as the petroleum was available.
With paperwork in hand that Linwyr said authorized them to collect unlimited petroleum, the next two steps were how to get the oil to where it could be processed and distilled. Logistically, setting up the distillation at the source would have been more efficient, but at the beginning it would have to be in Abersford, where there were already shops and workmen. Yozef put Linwyr in charge of getting the petroleum to Abersford, and Filtin with working out the distillation.
Linwyr’s solution to getting the oil from the Gwillamer pools to Abersford was simple. A wooden tanker wagon was built that would hold twelve hundred gallons. The bed of the wagon was a wooden box with no lid, the crude also serving as caulking for the wood. Once full, the top of the bed was covered with canvas to keep out dust and critters. How Linwyr got the oil from the pools to the box Yozef never asked. A six-horse team pulled the wagon, and once it arrived in Abersford, the wagon was rolled over a basin dug into the ground and lined with brick, a “cork” built into the bottom of the wagon bed was knocked out, and the crude drained into the basin. The cork was then replaced, and wagon returned to Gwillamer for another load. Yozef cringed, as he watched the first load empty into the basin, and wondered how much seeped into the ground and the water table. Again, no EPA. However, if this took off, they’d have to make other arrangements.
Filtin’s task was by far the hardest. The fundamental principle was the same as with ether and ethanol, yet the details weren’t minor. Yozef knew that on Earth, a typical refinery had combinations of huge metal fractional distillation and cracking towers to break down the larger petroleum polymers into smaller chains being distilled continuously, with fractions removed and additional feedstock added as needed, a process for which Yozef didn’t understand the underlying engineering, except for its being too complex a technolo
gy for Caedellium. Obviously, they were going to work on smaller amounts than Earth refineries did, and they’d have to use batch distillation. He remembered references to Arabic devices similar to pot stills used for making whiskey, essentially bulbous vessels that could be many feet in diameter. This approach to distillation was cruder than they were using for ether and ethanol but was more amenable to larger amounts. Then there was the residual crude once the kerosene fraction was removed, which he directed Filtin to store in deep pits, in case they eventually got around to using it for asphalt in road paving. He left the details of handling the crude and the residues to Filtin.
And figure it out Filtin did, although it took two months, three moderate accidents, turnover in workers coinciding with rebuilding a demolished first petroleum workshop, and some considerable coin. The first Anyar petroleum fractional distillation succeeded in a run producing ten gallons of kerosene. The twenty-foot-tall bronze column Filtin designed looked like something out of a metal junkyard, but it worked.
Yozef waited until they knew the kerosene could be produced before moving to the next step—what to burn it in? The test to see whether existing whale oil lamps would also use kerosene was conducted outdoors and with all witnesses at a distance, so no permanent damage resulted from the first test. Consultation with a local lamp maker and a promise of rights to produce the new lamp type gave them a functioning kerosene lamp within another sixday after tweaking existing whale oil lamp designs.
Acceptance of the new lamps benefited from Yozef’s access to standard Earth marketing strategies: free samples, demonstrations, and product placement. Evening demonstrations at the abbey and Abersford let the populace compare light from the traditional whale oil lamps to the new kerosene. Then the first batch of lamps, along with a supply of kerosene, was loaned to anyone who wanted to try them out on a three-day trial before passing the lamps on to other interested denizens. Overnight, orders began coming in, and by the next month Filtin was working on larger fractionation columns, Linwyr was building more and bigger wagons, and the lamp maker switched most of his production to kerosene lanterns.
The village of Abersford was in the middle of minor industrial and population booms. The ether, ethanol, soap, paper, and now kerosene and lanterns had long ago absorbed all available and competent workers, and additional ones were coming from surrounding villages up to twenty miles away. To avoid overloading the local community and to aid distribution, Yozef started “franchising out” production, first to the district seat at Clengoth, then to the clan center at Caernford, and later to other provinces. He left the details to Cadwulf, who hired two more assistants to handle the formalities.
Yozef’s reputation as a tycoon rose even higher. Silver and gold coins gravitated to him exponentially.
A Plan
His enterprises flourished, but never far from Yozef’s consciousness were thoughts of, What “exactly” am I doing here on Anyar? Earth was still out there … somewhere. The Watchers studied humans, and he found himself glancing at the sky and wondering whether they were looking at him at that moment. Not that he would ever know, assuming Harlie told the truth about non-intervention.
The patient who had died during an amputation had jolted him into teaching the Caedelli how to make ether, and that had led to ethanol and distillation as a basic procedure, kerosene production, soaps, and different papers. He didn’t doubt there would be more. Ideas were constantly bubbling up, some to be discarded as too impractical, some for further consideration, and others many decades or lifetimes away from implementation.
Still, when he surveyed his time on Anyar, he had made a difference: useful products, simple technologies, rudimentary medical-related knowledge, and introducing novel branches of mathematics to Cadwulf. All to the good, so why a longing for more? In his old life, living with Julie, contemplating leaving graduate school for a safe job and a comfortable lifestyle had been the extent of his ambitions. He had been satisfied then, but now … ?
By local standards, he was becoming wealthy and would only get richer. Did he have any other purpose, except to live out his life as best he could? Not that such a future was all bad, considering his circumstances, but he was angry. Angry at the Watchers, angry at the fates, angry at—God? Even if he couldn’t assign blame, there was a need to “show” that he mattered, that his existence left a mark. Such thoughts were confusing, since they’d have been alien to Earth’s Joseph Colsco.
One inescapable fact of his existence on Anyar was Bronwyn’s coming child. What kind of future would it have? What if he married and had more children? What would be their and their descendants’ future? What of all of the peoples of Anyar? There must be hundreds of millions to low billions. If the people of Anyar had the knowledge lying available in his brain, the planet’s technology would leap ahead centuries. What if the Watchers were not neutral observers? He had only the word of Harlie that they’d had no hand in transplanting humans.
He worried. What if the Watchers or whoever had done this someday returned? If they showed up in two hundred years, would they expect to find Anyar with the technology of Earth 1900–1950? If the Anyarians could be pushed ahead, maybe they’d have the ability to stand on their own against whatever came. For that to happen, Yozef would have to both transfer his science and technology knowledge and have it accepted. He had made changes, yet most of those would have come on their own within a century or more, assuming they didn’t already exist elsewhere on Anyar. In his focus on himself and the here and now, he could easily forget there was the rest of the planet beyond Caedellium, and who knew what level of technology might exist elsewhere? He knew of the Narthani, having gotten an earful from both Carnigan and the abbot, but were the Caedelli views parochial? Maybe the Narthani were a better vehicle for what he knew. And what of other realms that might be more advanced?
These thoughts monopolized Yozef for an entire day. He walked from his house to Abersford, then to the abbey, back to his house, along the shore to his cove, to Birdshit Bay, and back to his house. By twilight, he had walked more than twenty miles without eating or drinking since morning meal. His throat was parched, his stomach ate at his backbone, and his feet protested blisters, but none of the complainants were noticed.
After he got back at his cottage, he had decided on a goal to underlie everything else for the rest of his life. When he’d first arrived on Caedellium, he’d feared introducing new ideas. Now, his position and reputation were solid enough that the risk of introducing new knowledge was acceptable, as long as he took care.
He envisioned three objectives. First, continue pushing his various projects and staying alert for new opportunities. Most important were not the novel products themselves, but the techniques and the technology adopted by workers and getting those workers to think in new directions. In addition, products generated coinage—life’s blood for change.
Second, push more basic scientific knowledge beyond the medical and biological ideas he had shared with Diera and the scholastics. He had so far been circumspect on what he shared, not knowing what they could absorb without triggering countervailing reactions. Their current level could not absorb cell structure, DNA, RNA, antibiotics, and the associated chemistry, genetic engineering, molecular biology, genetics as applied to plant and animal breeding—along with another topic that could be tricky: the evolution of organisms. It was only a matter of time before the people of Anyar recognized two lines of organisms on Anyar, and humans belonged to the line that couldn’t have evolved on this planet.
He had already changed the course of Anyarian mathematics, yet he hadn’t touched the physical sciences—physics, astronomy, geology, and whatever else he could remember. He would have to introduce knowledge step by step, trying to remember the stages in Earth’s scientific history, so the new concepts could be accepted and integrated.
The third objective was long term, mostly to be used beyond his lifetime. He would write down as much as he could remember about everything. One set of books for
the sciences and a second series on how he came to Anyar, the Watchers, and as much of the history of Earth as he could recall. He would develop a plan to keep the second set of books concealed until some indefinite future, likely well beyond his own lifetime. Anyone reading them too soon would judge him insane. But one day, there needed to be a record to let the people of Anyar know about Earth and the Watchers. And not incidentally, he admitted to himself, to know about Joseph Colsco, a.k.a. Yozef Kolsko.
He stood on his veranda, smelling the evening meal being prepared by Elian, watching birds and murvors sail over the surf. Having a life-long plan, albeit one for which he didn’t know the outcome, gave him a feeling of focus. He would dedicate himself to knowledge transfer in the confidence it would spread to all of Anyar. It would be his purpose in life and his legacy, a path for the rest of his life, a life of purpose here in Abersford.
A cruel God would smile. A beneficent God would shake his head in sympathy.
Yozef Is Happy?
The next evening, Yozef celebrated his newfound commitment to his future by walking to Abersford after eating with the Faughns. He peeked into the Snarling Graeko, and, sure enough, Carnigan sat at his table against the wall, alone.
A jovial Yozef plopped himself on a bench opposite Carnigan.
“What are you so cheery about?” Carnigan grated to an oblivious Yozef, who had decided many months ago that most of the time the grating was just the natural tenor of Carnigan’s voice. He wasn’t ready to crush your skull. Most of the time. When he was in a bad mood, his voice got softer—that was the time to make a hasty exit.
Cast Under an Alien Sun (Destiny's Crucible) Page 31