"And we're all one singular people, all brothers and sisters," the blacksmith went on, dropping his arm and setting both fists on his hips. "Brothers and sisters somehow spread among the heavens and the stars, in times lost to memory. We're familiar with your story."
The smith paused, and Professor Scott said nothing. The blacksmith's people didn't interrupt each other. The linguists claimed that Local B had no word for interrupt that didn't connote at least a small degree of assault.
Beside him, Professor Lawson shifted her weight from one leg to the other. The first Terran woman who'd spoken up unbidden to a Local had gotten whipped across the mouth until she'd bled, and then shipped back to Earth by order of some prince or other. The sociolinguists—Professor Lawson among them—were still trying to work out the rules.
"And we hear," the smith continued, "that you often bring items to trade."
In her earpiece—the field support techs didn't rate audio implants in their skulls or cameras in the pockmarks of their faces— Bogdana listened as the interpreters quarreled in the background over whether the smith's chosen word meant trade or sell. Some days it was free entertainment, listening to the analytic support channel, eavesdropping as the brains back on Treasure Island whispered the best advice they could scrape together from the databases.
The blacksmith looked from one professor to the other, his fists still on his hips. Behind him, in the dark of the smithy, a figure worked a bellows—double acting, judging by the rhythm of the fire—while another moved a workpiece in the bed of orange coals. A smaller forge fire waited, orange fading to red.
"Yes," said Professor Scott, but he'd already started shuffling his feet. "Yes. Prince Hafzak has given his permission for us to trade with his people. But we've come as much to share as to trade, truly."
And if you'd carry your own shit to share and to trade, Bogdana thought, the rest of us could spend our time fixing the last bus that still actually runs.
What do I have to do to get fired, Professor? Just tell me.
"None of us have any doubt," said the blacksmith, and he looked past the contact officers to Bogdana, standing behind them alone with the loaded power wagon. "Just as none of us doubt that Prince Hafzak's priest speaks to the very stones of the mountain when the moons are their brightest."
In the smithy, one figure pulled the red-hot bar from the fire with short tongs and held it to the anvil, while the other started pounding it with a medium sledge.
"Unclear," said one interpreter in her left earbud. "If this is a figure of speech, it's novel. Nonverbals are unclear. Paraverbals tentatively contradictory."
Bogdana usually found it more interesting just to listen to the native speech, but she'd been feeling the need to be reminded of Treasure Island. To listen to people other than professors of whatever, who demanded that you keep moving inland, even as your convoy lost one vehicle after another. And now they'd blown another of the bus's huge tires.
Houston, we've had a problem. Some jokes never got old. Bogdana never tried to remember how hard she'd worked, to get a field tech position.
But they'd accomplished one thing, at least: building themselves a short chain of Terran settlements, stretching in from the coast across the dry uplands to this first inland valley. Four tiny Terran settlements, each populated by two or three Field Techs trying to fix a twenty-ton off-road bus, everyone forbidden to call for suborbital pickup because of what it'd look like on the logistics budget.
"We'd hoped to learn some things from you, as well," Professor Scott went on. "Our scientists are very curious about the seasons of your wool-beasts."
They hadn't found a Local word yet for scientist, so the consensus had been to say it in English. The smith just nodded, so Professor Scott continued.
"But it's true that we've brought a number of things you might find of value."
He glanced over his shoulder at the pedlar's wagon. People did say that Scott was the best Terran speaker of any Local language so far encountered, and Bogdana would have given him that. She twisted the handlebar grip and the pedlar lurched forward on its eight wheels, two freight pallets long and half a meter tall.
They'd landed at the coast with two of them, and now parts from the first had kept the second one working. They'd known the dust was bad for every bearing in every machine, but it was turning out worse than anyone had thought.
Scott and Lawson stepped back, as if to let the trade goods speak for themselves.
"Hey Dana," said Krawchuk, on the short-range net.
"Yeah," Bogdana answered as the pedlar's clamshell covers pulled themselves open, sheet metal scraping on its track. She turned her head away, so there'd be no suggestion that she was speaking out of turn.
"Perhaps your sci-en-tists would be better to travel downriver to the city then," the smith suggested—pronouncing the English word slowly, but without apparent difficulty. "I'm just a humble man."
The Local word that meant humble denoted status, not personality. Supposedly.
"Just a toolmaker for farmers and farriers," the smith went on. "Follow the brook to where it joins the River. The path is plenty wide for your wagon."
He pointed at the pedlar, just as Krawchuk came back on the short-range.
"Did we leave the Eddie the big adjustable crescent?"
Bogdana felt herself swallow.
"Yeah, why?"
Tell me what to do to get fired, she thought again.
"Compressor's fucked. If I'm getting this wheel off, it'll be by hand."
"Then we'll just run flat," she replied—lowering her voice even further. "If the big brains say we have to keep moving inland. It's not looking good. They're talking to this Local buddy about some place down toward the river."
"You gotta wonder how many horses Napoleon shot, on the way to Moscow. Did they shoot horses back then, or just slit their throats, or what?"
"Call back to Anal Sup," she told him. "One of them'll know off the top of their head. I gotta go show the beads and trinkets."
But the smith didn't move.
"Would you like to see what we offer?" Professor Scott asked, after too long a moment.
"You show me," the smith said, standing still.
Lawson stepped back and reached toward the pedlar.
"Drill bits, Dana," she whispered in English.
Tungsten carbide drill bits, and glass windows in aluminum frames, were the first things they usually pulled out for display. When it rained in that part of the tropical plateau, it poured for days, and the wood was like soft stone. Windows and drill bits would maybe buy some good will.
Bogdana passed a clear plastic package to Professor Lawson, who held it open for the smith.
The Local man slid the largest bit out from the package, and turned it over in his hand. The carbide would bore through wrought iron or even mild steel without much difficulty, and hold its edge forever drilling in hardwood.
"Ah," he said presently. "Half-toe."
The stamp was new that year, since the linguists had sorted out most of the written language they called Local B West Savannah. A half-toe was fifteen thirty-seconds of an inch—or just under twelve millimetres, where Bogdana Kuznetsova had grown up to learn about such things as drills and bits.
"If these were of any value to you, you wouldn't share them with me for nothing. I traveled with the caravans when I was young. I doubt you're any different."
Houston, Bogdana thought again, we've had a problem.
More villagers were showing up—looking first at the smith, as if to see whether it was safe to approach the strangers.
"I assure you, these are of the highest quality!" Scott replied. "These will cut hard iron!"
The smith shrugged—a gesture with his arms, not his shoulders, but easily recognizable.
"So will the tools I make, if you use them correctly. But there are boatwrights down at the River towns, who might be interested. They work in very hard wood, and certainly would be impressed with these. My older son cou
ld guide you, if you can wait a few days."
"Fuck my life, are they serious?" Krawchuk asked in Bogdana's earpiece.
Krawchuk must have gotten back onto the bus. At the seat behind the driver and the navigator, you could sit and watch the raw feeds from the contact officer's camera implants and listen to every audio channel. Bogdana turned away again and keyed the mike for the short-range.
"Call Eddie on the HF," she suggested. "See if we can figure something out."
Maybe another bus had been repaired sufficiently to limp ahead and lend some tools. Now Scott was going to have them walk, and drive the pedlar until it quit on some cart track.
"Would you use these yourself?" the blacksmith asked Professor Scott, as he handed the carbide drill bit back to Lawson. The villagers were getting interested, whispering among themselves—and not fearfully.
"Of course I would," Scott declared, loud and sure, almost indignant.
They'd be laughing at that, back at analytic support, with all their mikes on mute.
"That's interesting," the blacksmith replied immediately. "You see, I bought a half-toe bar of hard iron, this past week."
Hard iron was what the Local smiths called steel, steel with just enough carbon to respond to the most basic heat treatment regime. Back on Treasure Island, different ideas made the rounds, about how the Locals produced it.
"I was going to make a few hand shears," the smith went on, "for my herdsmen customers up on the grassland."
He paused.
"But now, you tell me that you know how to use a half-toe drill."
Not every culture they'd encountered had invented drills, but the West Savannah Locals were, so far, the most technologically advanced. They had something like a brace-andbit, but Bogdana had never seen the fittings up close.
"Yes," Scott replied.
"Can you show me, then, how to put a round half-toe hole in a round half-toe bar, so the bar is still as strong?"
Analytic support was suddenly silent, and Professor Scott—for the first time Bogdana had ever seen—fumbled with his words.
"I'm not sure I understand," the contact officer managed after a second.
Then analytic support came on the air, perfectly precise: "He challenges you to perforate a bar of circular cross section, twelve millimeters in diameter, creating a circular hole twelve millimeters in diameter, without significant loss of mechanical performance of the original workpiece."
"I—" Scott began, and stopped. "I don't see how that would be—even possible. You'd cut the bar in two."
The smith waited, silent, while a few of the villagers laughed. But then Bogdana felt a smile pulling at one side of her mouth.
Her gut tightened, and she took a breath.
"It's a joke, sir," she said, in the clearest Local B West Savannah she could manage.
"What the fuck?" Krawchuk asked in her earbud, as Scott and Lawson turned, jaws open in silent unison.
"Silence, Kuznetsova! You know you're not to speak!" said Lawson in English. "One more word and you're—you're back on the Island fixing septic tanks!"
"It's an old joke," Bogdana repeated, still in Local. "Between blacksmiths and machinists."
She said machinists in English, unsure if Local had a word that meant anything analogous.
"Between blacksmiths, and—and whom? Or what?" demanded the smith—as if genuinely curious for the first time since the arrival of the grey-uniformed space aliens at the front of his shop.
The half-circle of villagers had fallen silent, watching and listening as if they already knew they'd tell this story a thousand times, about the blacksmith and those people who'd supposedly come from the stars.
Bogdana spoke up again. Scott just stared at her.
"A machinist is what we call someone who works cold metal by cutting small chips of it away. Like a carpenter works wood with a rasp, or chisel, or adze."
She was confident of the word for carpenter, and for the names of a carpenter's tools.
The smith stepped forward.
"A mach-in-ist," he said. Then he frowned at Bogdana, and looked her up and down. "Your father must be in all the hells."
Hells were plural in Local B, although heaven was apparently singular.
Bogdana said nothing, but kept her eyes on the smith's face.
"What is this joke you mention, then?" he asked. "Between my trade, and these machin-ists?"
Looking at his forearms, Bogdana decided that if he hit her with anything more than the softest open hand, he'd knock her unconscious. But he'd asked her a question, hadn't he? Presumably the thing to do was just answer. Not that it mattered anyway. A beating would be a cheap ticket out of the traveling nut house.
"That a machinist cannot put a half-toe hole in a half-toe bar, although any blacksmith can," she answered.
The smith looked at Scott, then at Lawson, and then back at Bogdana.
"Your master just said that he doesn't think it's possible," the smith remarked. "Are you going against your master's word? Is that a thing your father taught you to do?"
"For fuck's sake, Kuznetsova, don't answer that," said a different voice on the analytic support channel, and there was no audible chatter in the background at all. "This is mutiny, Kuznetsova. Mutiny. You just have no idea, the damage you're potentially doing. Don't make us send a team out there."
Some poor duty officer, cursing his luck at having been at the desk when shit had happened and an incident report needed writing. Bogdana wouldn't be alone for the trip back to Earth.
"He is my master," she replied. "So I won't go against him. But he's not a blacksmith. Not a machinist."
"And are you?" asked the smith.
"No, sir," she replied. "I am a millwright. My father was a machinist, and his father was a blacksmith."
The smith nodded.
"Show me, then, mill-wright."
He turned his whole body so he was facing Professor Scott. With one arm, he pointed to Bogdana.
"I'll borrow your young woman, if I may. Your very proud daughter of the son of a blacksmith. We'll all see if she can do what you say is not possible."
Some of the villagers laughed at the smith's choice of words. No one on the analytic support channel had anything to say about it, though.
"Yes," said Scott. "Yes. She's—she's spirited, this one. Still needs to learn some things about minding her tongue."
And then he laughed, as if all of everything had been his idea in the first place.
But the smith didn't join in.
"Everyone needs to learn things," he said, after maybe a second had passed. "I need to learn things. Do come in."
He turned and led them through the open front of the smithy. Professor Scott went in first—naturally—and Bogdana followed, watching the professor's head swivel in every direction. Maybe there wasn't a lot of video from inside Local blacksmith shops. Scott would scrape together some glory for himself, no matter what happened. He'd write an article about everything he'd discovered.
Burning charcoal and hot iron came stronger in her nostrils, and the air was hotter and heavier than outside. The crowd of villagers dispersed around the perimeter of the shelter. The two men at the larger forge—teenagers, Bogdana decided—looked over briefly, but continued with their work after seeing the blacksmith's face.
"No one touch anything unless it's directly offered to you," said the analytic support duty officer—as if anyone would have, Bogdana thought. Maybe he just wanted to give himself the sense of being obeyed. Half the world gave unnecessary orders, just to get credit for things that were going to happen anyway.
The smith motioned to the anvil—a rough inverted pyramid, forge-welded together from whatever had been to hand, embedded in a stump of the superhard wood that dulled axes and sawblades. On the stump, an angledpein hammer leaned against the anvil. Bogdana smiled at her first good luck that day: by the pein angle, the smith was right-handed too. His tools wouldn't quarrel with everything she asked.
No one said
anything as she stepped closer and looked down at the anvil. Sure enough, a hole was punched and drifted through one corner of the shining grey face, maybe three-quarters of an inch across.
Punches of varying size waited in a wooden rack, just within reach. Long-handled iron tongs hung to the left, seven pair. A small sledgehammer was cradled, handle up, in a stone stand on the floor to the right of the anvil. The smith might have called himself a humble man, but his shop wasn't poorly appointed in its tool selection.
The half-toe bar waited in the forge fire, not quite out of the charcoal, but not in the hot zone. She touched it with the back of her left hand, and then grasped it—it was warm, but not uncomfortably so—sliding it out toward herself and then directly into the center of the fire, disturbing the coals as little as she could manage. The bellows lever was the same hardwood as everything else, warm to the palm of her right hand.
"Hey Dana," said Krawchuk, laughing in her earpiece. "Professors are getting it all on the video, but listen: they've launched a containment team, suborbital. You're a fucking rock star now. They're all going crazy, back on the Island. The duty dick called it up the chain, and the brigadier came in and put the whole base on alert."
"Okay," she said, because Krawchuk was being kind enough to aid and abet her with the play-by-play.
Only the tip of the bar belonged in the hottest volume of space, where orange coals gave way to yellow. The charcoal, whatever wood they made it from, gave off heat like the cone of an acetylene flame.
The steel warmed from grey to red to orange as she worked the bellows. Her eyes had already adjusted to the light of the forge, and now she could barely make out the professors, dark silhouettes standing beside the smith.
They'd find a way to say that they'd known it all, all along. That's what professors did.
She let go of the bellows lever and grasped the bar with her right hand—it was warmer, but not as hot as she'd expected. As she swung the orange end through the short arc to the anvil's face, she slipped a punch from the rack with the fingers of her left hand. The bar gave a flat sound as it touched the anvil, and Bogdana half-stepped forward, reaching with the point of the punch for a spot maybe an inch back from the end of the glowing steel rod.
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