The Macedonian Hazard

by Eric Flint

  Stella wasn’t trained to be an old man’s helper. She’d been a legal secretary who had spent her entire working life in a lawyer’s office. She knew how to punctuate a tort, not how to take care of a sick old man.

  Once she got Don situated, she went back to her house, got her laptop, then headed to the computer center. The computer center was five blocks away on 7th Street, near the center of town, a larger building with a steam-powered generator to charge batteries and power computers.

  Stella used her ship ID card as her credit card to clock in. Use of the computers wasn’t free. Neither was use of the charging station and the network link that let her hook her laptop up to the larger computers and drives that held copies of Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica, but it was cheaper than using one of the computers for rent. Still, even using the charging station to charge her computer’s batteries was another reason for making do with locally made furniture. She was researching glassmaking, because Lisa Hammonds from Deck 8, Cabin 8235, said that it was simple. Stella didn’t believe it, but she was going to find out.

  While her computer was downloading the Wikipedia and Britannica articles on glassmaking, Stella thought back a few days to the discussion.

  Queen of the Sea, Lido Deck

  January 14, 320 BCE

  “Isn’t glassmaking complicated?” Stella had asked.

  “Nope. Glass is sand, potash, and if you want clear glass, you flavor it with a little lead oxide. It’s also the first industry started in the New Plymouth colony in like 1620.”

  “And where are you going to get lead oxide and potash?” Stella didn’t mention sand, because she pretty much knew that Lisa would point at the beach if she did. But she was almost sure that just any sand wouldn’t do. You needed some special sort of sand.

  “They call it pot ash because it’s ashes that you mix with water in a pot to leach out the stuff you want. It comes from the ashes of plants, especially water plants. Seaweed.” She pointed at the beach where there was a line of seaweed at the high-tide line. “As for the lead oxide, that might be harder, at least here. But it’s just lead ground into powder because lead rusts really fast. That’s why lead isn’t shiny.”

  “So why aren’t you planning on glassmaking?” Stella asked.

  “Because I’ve got a degree in electrical engineering. That’s not as good as a mechanical engineer in this time, but somebody needs to design the electrical systems for Fort Plymouth and figure out how to make radios for when the ones we have wear out. And, if I live long enough, build computers.” Lisa Hammonds was thirty-three, on vacation with her husband Richard, who taught English Lit at the University of Tennessee. They shared an outboard cabin with a balcony before The Event. Between that and what Lisa was making helping to design Fort Plymouth’s electrical grid and the larger payout for the bigger room, they would have over fifteen hundred square feet and be nearer the computer building and capitol building. Once those got built.

  Computer center, Fort Plymouth, Trinidad

  January 18, 320 BCE

  The download finished. Stella started reading the articles while her computer’s battery charged. Glassmaking was more complicated than Lisa implied. For one thing, you didn’t make glass in a Crock-Pot or a smoker. You needed heat. The sort of heat you needed to make pottery, 2,450 degrees Fahrenheit. Not much less than the melting point of steel. That, in turn, meant you needed a kiln. Then you needed a different kiln to anneal the glass after you made it, or it would shatter. At least, that was the impression that the mishmash of articles was giving her.

  As soon as her computer was fully charged, Stella put it carefully in its carrying case, and with the strap over her shoulder, headed home. It started to rain while she was in the computer center, so at the corner of every block she walked down steps onto a street that had turned to mud, slogged through the mud to the next block of townhouses, went back up four steps to the wooden walkway, then the same again for seven blocks. Fortunately, because of the way the townhouses were made, the walkway was covered by the second-story balcony.

  “Little boxes, little boxes,” she half muttered. Then she couldn’t remember some of the song, and continued, “And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky, and they all look just the same.” She knew why that was. It was because standardization made for faster, cheaper construction. And building housing for three thousand people wasn’t cheap, no matter how you did it.

  * * *

  Once Stella got home, she dried off using a dirty towel because laundry was expensive now too. Then, using the same towel, she dried her computer case and pulled out her computer. Then she knocked on Donald Carnegie’s door and tried to interest him in glassmaking as a business.

  214 12th Street, Fort Plymouth, Trinidad

  March 12, 320 BCE

  The kiln design was mostly out of Wikipedia, but Donald had helped. It turned out that plumbing helps with preheating air to make the fire hotter. Something called reverse flow. The air came in right next to where the burned air went out, so the flue preheated the air. Stella was the one who wrote up the variance request that let them put the kiln behind the house in the fifty-foot field that went between the houses and the town wall. Stella had never in her worst nightmare imagined that she would be living in a walled fort. The wall was going to be eighteen feet tall when it was finished.

  April 14, 320 BCE

  Stella helped Donald up the stairs to the second floor, then out onto the balcony, so they could watch the Queen of the Sea sail out. The second floor was fourteen feet above the ground after adding the four-foot crawl space below the first floor. That put Donald and her eyes a touch above the wall, so out in the bay she could see the Queen clearly.

  She looked over at Donald and saw a tear leaking onto his cheek, and Stella wanted to cry too. Because she knew as well as Donald did that he would probably not live to see the Queen of the Sea return to Fort Plymouth.

  She helped him back inside and they sat for a while as she waited for him to get enough energy to make it down the stairs. The stairs were sort of actual stairs, though they were like the stairs on a warship. They had flat rungs, but the angle was closer to a ladder than what Stella thought of as stairs. They did have extra steps, so Donald didn’t need to lift his feet that far to reach the next step.

  Once Stella got Donald situated, she went out to the “hardware” store near the center of town to buy tar. The “hardware” store did indeed have hardware. It had hammers, though it had more wooden hammers than steel hammers, and the wooden mallets were quite a bit cheaper. It had brushes and buckets, mostly handmade. The tar she was here to buy came in chunks. It was a waste product of the “oil refinery,” a still located near the oil well a few miles out of town. The tar was the crud that collected on the bottom of the still, and was mucked out by hand.

  It was also the best sealant for cracks in the roof, floor, and walls in the “townhouses” of Fort Plymouth. And Stella and Donald’s townhouses had a lot of cracks to be filled.

  One good thing was that Stella was losing weight. She was doing quite a bit of hard manual labor every day, between emptying the chamber pots, sweeping the floors, building the kiln, and, today, using a pot stove on the balcony to melt the tar. It stank, and would stink even after it cooled for days. It was a tar-paper shack, without the paper. Once she had the tar melted, it went up onto the roof by buckets as local tribesmen painted the roof with it, to give her and Donald, for the first time since they moved in, roofs that didn’t leak.

  The back of Stella’s townhouse was up against the fifty-foot field, a fifty-foot stretch of open ground between the town and the town’s wall. The field was designed to let defenders move from one point on the wall to another easily, but Stella got a ten-foot variance to build her kiln out back. The kiln was brick two layers thick, and it had a preheating chamber and was oil powered. Why not? She lived only a few miles from an oil well. It was also, after months of her work and the occasional labor of the locals, not quite completed yet.


  Community center, Fort Plymouth, Trinidad

  April 19, 320 BCE

  The community center was a combination restaurant, general grocery, half open-air gaming area, and live theater. There was even a big-screen TV from the Queen in one room that played movies from back in the world. At the moment, Stella was sitting at a table, eating cornbread and chili beans with enough super turkey meat to make it almost real chili. The peppers were as local as the super turkey. They grew all over this part of South America and the Tupky were selling them to the colony by the canoe load. Everything from fresh to smoked and dried. Chili was almost like home. Well, except for the people who insisted that chili wasn’t supposed to have beans in it.

  Next to Stella on the bench was Carol Knight Harvell. Carol was forty-five and worked as a domestic before The Event. The trip on the Queen was her second honeymoon, and her husband John Harvell had been a truck driver in Chicago. They had three adult kids who had not made the trip, and were committed Christians before The Event. They were both working at other businesses now. John was working on one of the steam generators. His job was to watch the dials, control the crude oil that the steam engine burned for fuel, and make sure the steam engine ran at a consistent speed. The sole function of his steam engine generator was to charge a bank of lead acid batteries that were then used to power electrical devices. That system was in use because here in New America they lacked the control systems to avoid power spikes.

  Carol, on the other hand, worked in the condom factory. “You have nothing to complain about,” Carol told Stella. “I spend my whole day with a wooden dildo in my hand, dipping it into a pot of hot latex, then sticking it under a blow-dryer, then dipping it again until the condom is thick enough not to rip. Then I turn it over to Tess Panay while I grab another dildo and do it all again. I’ve handled more woodies since we got here than in my whole family for generations back.”

  Stella didn’t want to talk about the utter and complete lack of woodies of any sort in her life since The Event, so she changed the subject and they talked about some of the new industries that were starting up in Fort Plymouth. They were all kitchen industries, wood shops and leather workers, manufacturers of latex water bottles and some guy trying to make a sewing machine. Another guy was trying to get a Jacquard loom built, and someone actually had a pedal-powered carding machine up and running.

  After lunch, Stella went back to the counter and got a salad to go for Donald, which she carried back.

  * * *

  Donald Carnegie was sitting on the wooden sidewalk in front of his “townhouse.” His head was lolling to the side and his mouth was open. There was some drool leaking and Stella tried to wake him. He wouldn’t wake up. She checked his heartbeat. It was still beating, but he was barely breathing at all. She shouted to William McIan, their next door neighbor on the other side. “Donald is unconscious! Run get the medics.”

  The medics arrived about fifteen minutes later, and took him away in a two-wheeled cart pulled by two men.

  Fort Plymouth Hospital, Trinidad

  April 21, 320 BCE

  President Allen Wiley stepped into the ward and looked around. This was the experimental ward. There were twelve cots, six on each side of the room, and about half the beds were filled. These patients were the ones with terminal illnesses that would have been merely chronic back in the world. The beds emptied and were refilled on a regular basis as the healers tried to do what they could, and in the process did human experiments.

  Al went over to the doctor, Ronald Kemper, who had been a registered nurse back before The Event.

  Ronald looked up from the patient he was injecting. “It’s fish-derived insulin, Mr. President, and not nearly as pure as I would like. But this guy is in a diabetic coma and headed to the grave if we don’t do something.”

  “Did you have his permission?” Al asked.

  Ronald nodded. “It’s on the chart. We can try anything we want.” It was a standard question that all the citizens of New America were asked to fill out even before they moved off the ship.

  Donald’s eyes flickered. The insulin was working.

  May 15, 320 BCE

  Ronald Kemper pulled the sheet up over Donald Carnegie’s head. The allergic reaction to the insulin contributed to a chest infection, which in Donald’s weakened state proved fatal. Other patients were doing fine, at least for now, on the fish-derived insulin that was only purified by centrifuge. But there were too damned many who died from allergy to the non-insulin element that the poor purification methods left in the juice, and even for those it did work for, there were often side effects. Gradual damage to the fatty tissue around the injection points. Other things.

  He got up and scratched his head. He was a nurse, a surgical nurse, and a good one. Not a doctor, much less an expert in experimental medicine, which was what they needed.

  214 12th Street, Fort Plymouth, Trinidad

  May 16, 320 BCE

  Stella looked around Donald’s room in the double townhouse that was now hers. Donald’s will left her everything he had. She lived upstairs in her side, and there was another room just like hers in Donald’s side that he never occupied. She would move the bed and the chair up to her room and happily get rid of the sack full of reeds.

  This floor, the ground floor, was designed to be a workshop. She spent two hours cleaning and packing everything Donald had. It wasn’t much. Some clothes and a book reader. Donald spent most of his time reading after The Event. He told her that he was never much of a reader before, but he was so weak after that he couldn’t do much else, and the nearest TV was in the community center.

  Once she was done with his room, Stella went next door to look at her latest failure to make glass. She used a pry bar to break open the mold and looked at the roughly lens-shaped piece of flint.

  The glass kiln in the back was up and operational, although the firebricks weren’t of the quality she wanted. But as the dark gray object indicated, the real problem was that in spite of having all the equipment and reading up on it, she had no clue how to make glass. She needed an expert, and though there was one guy who blew glass as a hobby for a while when he was younger, he used premade glass ingots for his glassblowing. Besides, he wasn’t interested in “helping the competition.” The asshole.

  She had to find someone who could make glass.

  Community center, Fort Plymouth, Trinidad

  May 17, 320 BCE

  Stella plugged her computer into the ethernet port. There was a row of them with bench seats and little wooden half walls between them. It was where Stella did all her research, and after much consideration she called up not Wikipedia nor Encyclopedia Britannica, but instead the post-Event news feed and did a search for glassmaking. What came up first on the search was glass baubles made in Carthage and Alexandria, and there bought by the Queen and available for sale on their next landing at Fort Plymouth. Apparently, the Carthaginians were competent glassmakers. One thing that Stella knew from her reading was that glassmaking was easier if at least part of your mix was already made glass. She put in an order, but then she had a thought. She needed someone who knew how to make glass. Why not try to hire someone from Carthage or, for that matter, anywhere in Europe where they made glass? She sat at her computer and wrote out an ad to hire a glassmaker. Then she called up the translation app for Phoenician.

  Wanted: Skilled glassmaker to move to

  Fort Plymouth, Trinidad, New America.

  Then she added her name and how to get in touch with her. After translating it into Phoenician, she translated it into Greek, Egyptian, and Latin. Then she checked the price for sending a message to the Queen and cursed for two minutes straight. The price, even for text, was twenty bucks.

  Queen of the Sea, Port of Izmir

  May 17, 320 BCE

  Joshua Varner pulled the next message from the queue. It was an ad for a glassmaker. It wasn’t the first of that sort of message. Over the last month since they left Trinidad, they’d
gotten several requests for skilled craftsmen of one sort or another. This one, though, wasn’t from the government. It was a private individual. Joshua forwarded it to Eleanor Kinney.

  * * *

  Eleanor Kinney sat in her office, checking her email. They were going to be shipping craftsmen to the new world if they could find them. The “Indians”—everyone knew the term was inappropriate but it was still the one they wound up using because it was handy—mostly lacked the skills that they needed in Fort Plymouth, and the ship people certainly lacked them, skill being a completely different thing than knowledge.

  The question was how to get the people they needed. In the here and now, a lot of the skilled craftspeople were slaves. Not all of them, but the majority. Eleanor would have liked to start up an underground railroad, but that wasn’t practical. A thought rose up in her mind and she slapped the disgusting thing back down to the evils of her subconscious where it belonged. But it wouldn’t stay slapped down.