by John Ringo
“When was that?” Myron asked.
“Pol Pot, Cambodia,” Edmund said. “Just a tad over two thousand years ago. He’d just won a civil war and decided that all the people of the cities were to move into the country and work the land. A quarter of them, three million people, died. Many of them from being beaten or killed by thugs, but most of them from starvation. There was a similar situation in the same area a few decades before, and that one killed even more people. And those groups at least had the concept of work.”
“And it’s possible that a quarter of this population will die,” Sheida replied sadly. “But if food isn’t produced, all of them will die. And there aren’t any farmers.”
“Think they can learn it, Myron?” Edmund asked with a jerk of his chin.
“It’s best if you’re raised to it; that way you don’t consider working day in and day out every day of the year to be hard,” Myron replied with a grim chuckle. “Otherwise…”
“I guess you’ll just have to do a lot of classes,” Talbot said, taking another sip of beer. That, too, was going to be in short supply soon; they’d have to concentrate on wheat over barley for the time being. “Me too,” he added with a grimace.
“You need to be running things, not beating out sword blades,” Sheida corrected.
“Well, I don’t know how much time I can take training people and also run the farm,” Myron noted. “And if I don’t run the farm nobody will be eating next winter. Not to mention the fact that I can’t be everywhere at once.”
“What about Charlie and Tom?” Sheida asked.
“Well, what about them?” Myron replied. “They’re both ready to take over, but they’re also wanting their own farms…”
“Set one of them to be the instructor?” Edmund asked. “Maybe something like an agricultural agent.”
“Mayhaps. But he could be growing food himself.”
“I’ve come up with a way to have a sort of… roving instructor,” Sheida said. “A widely roaming one. It would have some problems associated with it, among others not being home much. Ask them if one of them would be interested. Lots of travel.”
“Okay,” Myron said dubiously. “Honestly, Tom probably would. He likes the theory of farming, but he doesn’t really like the work if you know what I mean.”
“In the meantime we’ll get the familiarization program going,” Edmund said. “Most of them will end up having to farm. But you need more than farmers. Especially if this lasts as long as it looks like it might.”
“Something else to put on the list,” Sheida said, making a note. “If it works here, we’ll pass the information around and see what comes of it.”
“One other thing, Sheida, this is a war. That means that when we start supporting you, Paul will probably find groups to attack us.”
“Yes, he will,” the council woman replied. “And I’ll help you to the extent that I can. But…”
“Well, the good news is I may not know shit about fighting a Web war, but if they have a ground force commander that’s my equal, I will be very surprised.”
* * *
“Clothing,” Roberta said. Tom’s partner was the village seamstress and it was one of the first points raised when the three went back to the meeting. Sheida’s avatar had stayed since the other avatars stated that the groups they were monitoring were still mostly spinning their wheels. Raven’s Mill’s plan of setting up an apprenticeship familiarization had been passed through the avatars and was meeting with mixed reactions.
“We can grow cosilk,” Myron noted. The hybrid cotton that integrated many of the properties of silk was hardy and made excellent cloth, but it was generally considered a hot-weather plant.
“We can also raise sheep,” Bethan said.
“You can get more material per square acre out of cosilk,” the farmer pointed out. “Admittedly, wool is a lot better for cold weather; cosilk doesn’t insulate worth a damn. But I’ve only got five sheep; we’ll have cosilk in abundance long before we have much wool.”
“There’s ferals,” Robert pointed out. “You know what the ridges look like in the summer.” Most of the ferals were from modern sheep stocks that automatically dropped their wool when the weather turned warm. This had originally been a genetic design to eliminate the chore of shearing but with the ferals it meant that for a few weeks in early summer the ridgelines above the valley were dotted with patches of white. Many of the birds’ nests in the area were made of pure wool, finer than the best cashmere.
“You have some?” Edmund asked. “Cosilk that is.”
“Aye, I’ve never grown it but I know how.”
“Cosilk has more uses than clothes,” Robert said. “We’re going to need it for bowstrings, rope…”
“Better hemp for the rope. We can get at least one crop of silk in this year. Carding and spinning though… very manpower intensive. I don’t suppose there’s much chance of some powered carding and spinning plants by the time the crop’s in?”
“When?” Edmund asked.
“By September, say?”
“Maybe, there’s so many draws on the few artisans we have. Put it on the list. What’s the growing season?”
“Off the top of my head I don’t recall. After the ground is good and warm and longer here than down south; it grows better in hot climes, but, then, many things do.”
“Tea,” Edmund grumped. “I’m nearly out.”
“No caffeinating materials at all,” Myron agreed. “I’ve a few hothouse tea plants but not enough to make more than a cup or two a year. No coffee, tea…”
“I can’t believe you guys poison yourselves that way,” Sheida said disparagingly. “Caffeine is horrible for your body.”
“… No chocolate,” Myron continued.
“No chocolate?”
“It’s got caffeine in it,” Edmund said with a grin.
“Well, trace elements,” Sheida replied with a sniff. “But no chocolate?”
“Requires several products that are only grown in the tropics,” Myron said dolefully. “No chocolate. Not until some sort of trade is established.”
“Well that is going to get a priority then!”
“Citrus,” Edmund said, shaking his head. “I’m going to miss citrus. And it’s a good scurvy preventer.”
“That you can grow in Festiva,” Myron replied. “If the weather settles out.”
It had started within a day of the Fall; the weather had closed in and stayed that way. Wind, rain, sleet, rivers flooding. It seemed as if it would never stop storming as all the pent-up fury of weather long leashed was released upon the land.
“It’s going to,” Sheida replied with a shake of her head. “Did you hear what happened?”
“No?” Myron replied but everyone looked interested.
“The program that did weather control was an AI, that I knew, but what I didn’t know was that it was one of the really old ones; it actually predated weather control and was a weather forecasting AI.”
“Damn, that is old,” Myron said as the wind tore at the roof of the pub. “And that means it can predict this stuff?”
“Sort of, maybe. So the Fall happens and the Council starts fighting and suddenly it’s got no power to do weather control. It’s back to forecasting. Talk about pissed.”
“Ouch.”
“Her name is Lystra, and I do mean she. Anyway, it’s not ‘hiding’ like a lot of the AI’s but it has declared itself strictly neutral. It doesn’t care who wins just that they get the power systems back on line so it can get back to controlling the weather! She’s really, really pissed.”
“Funny.”
“Yeah, one humorous spot in an otherwise crappy situation. Lystra says about a month and a half.”
“We might be able to get one crop in the ground in time. It’ll have to dry some before we can plant. And a few more plows wouldn’t hurt.”
“I’m on it,” Edmund replied. “I’m glad Angus brought in that load of sheet stock. We need to send someone
up to him to get some more material. And he’ll need food as well. We’ll have to see what we can spare.”
Myron took another sip of beer and his face worked. “So, have you heard anything about Rachel?”
“No,” Edmund said quietly as another blast shook the building.
“They’re not at home. One of me went there already but they’d gone,” Sheida said quietly. “Mother’s privacy protocols are intact, damnit, and I can’t simply order a location search without a supermajority of the Council. I’d have to do a full sweep to find them and… I just can’t spare the power. I’ve set out, well, guides, to find travelers. Hopefully one of them will find them and direct them to Raven’s Mill.”
“What kind of guides?” Edmund asked.
“There are… semiautonomous beings, like homunculi and hobs, that manage some of the ecological programs. I found a low-power update conduit that let me reprogram them. They now have the path to ‘safe’ areas mapped for each of their areas and if they find lost travelers they’ll direct them. It’s all I can do right now. Maybe later something more can be done.
“For most of the refugees, there’s not going to be a ‘later,’ ” Edmund said.
CHAPTER TEN
They had been traveling for nearly two weeks through the worst weather Rachel had seen in all her life.
The house had turned out to have an immense quantity of material suitable to take on the trip; Rachel had been surprised and even a little dismayed at how many of the objects in the house had to do with her father’s hobby. At times picking through the piles it had seemed as if Edmund Talbot had more of an influence on the home he had never entered than either of the people living there.
But the problem was not so much that they had items, but what items to pack. They both had good backpacks, late twenty-first-century designs that were light as a feather and fit their bodies like a glove. But filling them had taken careful thought. Finally, it was decided that the most important things were food and appropriate clothing and shelter. They had ended up leaving almost everything else. Rachel ended up packing a few items of jewelry and Daneh packed her single “period” medical book, something called Gray’s Anatomy. And with that they set out into the driving rain and sleet.
The weather had never relented. In the last thirteen days it had seemed to rain, sleet or snow an average of ten hours each day. All of the rivers and streams were swollen, and in a few cases the bridges that the hiking groups maintained were washed out. In those cases it was a matter of trying to carefully cross the freezing and swollen stream despite the lack of a bridge, or go upstream looking for a crossing place. Crossing was preferred even though the frigid water flooded under their clothes and seeped into their boots. Better to be soaked than take days out of the way. That finally happened to them at the Anar and it took them nearly two days out of their way before they found an intact log bridge.
This had taken them off the main trail that passed the small hamlet of Fredar and onto less well-tended trails through the wilderness. These weren’t any better or worse than the “main” trail, and the rain had turned them into soup as well. The boots they had dredged up were also late twenty-first century and the mud slid off them like water from a duck’s back. But the effort was still constant, to lift one wooden foot after another, slip, slide, grab at a tree or go down on your face in the sucking bog. It just went on and on in an unceasing view of trees, swollen streams and the very occasional natural meadow.
Every day had been the same. After sleeping overnight in their small tent they would get up and make a fire. They had set out snares or fish-lines the night before but with the rain they had gotten little every day. So they would eat a bit of their road-food, flip the tent into its packing form and head off through the woods. Rachel well understood how relatively well-off they were. They had warm, dry clothing designed by specialists at the very tag end of the industrial revolution for exactly these conditions. They had good footwear, excellent foods and water carriers. In this time of madness they were rich.
They had passed others on the trail who were not so well off. Now, as they crossed over another of the simple log bridges there was one slumped and twisted by the side of the trail looking like nothing so much as a pile of torn clothes.
Rachel turned her head away, hardly looking at the body tumbled up against the tree, but her mother stepped over and examined the woman thoroughly, as she almost always did, finally shaking her head and moving back to the trail.
“She had something in her bag that the dogs had been at. She was wearing waterproof clothing. And her face looks as if she wasn’t even starving.”
“She just gave up,” Rachel whispered, slipping again in the mud and grabbing at a tree as she looked at the sky. It was already starting to get dark and it was probably the middle of the afternoon. She looked over at the corpse, then at the swollen river. What was the use of putting out trotlines when nothing ever bit. “I can understand how she felt.”
“Don’t say that,” Daneh said, sharing her glance at the sky. “Don’t even think it. Think about roaring fires, well-tended thatch and beef red at the bone.”
“Food,” Rachel said. They had been traveling on half rations at first, sharing one of the automatically heating packets between them. But as the food had dwindled and dwindled, despite their efforts at foraging, they had switched to quarter rations. They had been subsisting for the last three days on less than a thousand calories a day and with the walking through the mud and the cold, body-heat-leaching rain, snow and sleet it just wasn’t enough.
“Not that much farther,” Daneh said, taking a breath. “I hate to camp by a corpse but there’s a stream right here; maybe we’ll be luckier if we put the snares down by the water. What do you think?”
“What do I think?” Rachel laughed hysterically.
“Stop it,” Daneh said, grabbing her by the collar. “Food. Fires. Warmth. That’s no more than a day or two away.”
“Sure, sure,” Rachel said with another half-hysterical giggle. “Mom, that’s what you said yesterday!”
“I’ve taken this path before,” she said, determinedly, then shook her head. “But… I’ll admit it was a long time ago.”
“Mother, tell me we’re not lost,” Rachel said shakily.
“We’re not lost,” Daneh replied, glancing at her compass. She also had a positional locator but that was only useful if the path was traced in on it. And she hadn’t had it the last time she had been through when she had been very young and stupid enough to think that a trip up to the Faire on horseback would make an idyllic time. In retrospect, it had. The weather had been fair, as scheduled, and Edmund had taken care of ninety percent of the camp chores. It wasn’t this endless slog through a swamp.
“We need to camp,” Daneh continued. “And set out our snares and lines. We’re not getting much, but not much is different from nothing.” She glanced over her shoulder at Azure as the rumpled and foot-sore house lion walked slowly over the bridge. “Maybe Azure will get something.”
The house lion had actually been bringing in most of the group’s protein. He had started off the trip in fine fittle, despite the rain, tail high and off on what looked to be a very interesting long walk. That had lasted most of the first day, but house lions weren’t well designed for long-distance travel and by the end of the day his tail was dragging. Despite that, in the morning he was sitting by the remains of the fire with a dead and only somewhat mangled possum. And he had continued to bring things in from the woods for the entire first week: twice rabbits, three more possums, a female raccoon and on the third day had turned up dragging a spotted fawn.
But by the eighth day the cat was getting as fine drawn as the humans and for all practical purposes had stopped hunting. Cats were obligate carnivores, which meant that they had to eat meat every day. Daneh had shared small helpings of the readimeals, hopefully enough to keep him from having liver damage, but the cat wasn’t getting enough food, even with his own foraging, to keep him
in condition.
Daneh looked at the cat and her daughter, who had also lost too much weight, and shook her head. “We’ll rest here tonight, up the road a bit in case any more scavengers come around. We’ll lay out our snares and tomorrow we’ll do nothing but forage. Maybe we can scare some game out of the woods for Azure to catch. We’ll spend a good bit of it just resting, though. And if we don’t find anything, we don’t find anything. Day after tomorrow we’ll go on.”
“Works for me,” Rachel said, shifting her pack. “Couple of hundred meters?”
“Yes.”
Rachel looked around at the rain-sodden woods and shrugged. In another couple of days they’d be up to the Via Appalia and some relative degree of civilization. Surely the worst was over. How much worse could it get?
* * *
“Ten more refugees today.”
June Lasker had been one of the first in. She lived in a house not far to the west, up the Via Appalia at the edge of the Adaron Range. It was comparatively well set up for the environment with wood fireplaces and a few items that could be used to cook in a pinch. But she knew there wasn’t going to be anything to cook in it and as a long-time trader at the Faire she knew right how to find Raven’s Mill. She was one of the relatively well-off refugees, having come in on her own horse and carrying the tools that had made her a successful dealer. Her stock in trade was handmade calligraphy, and the reams of parchment, inks, pens and various quills were well received; no one had thought until they were well into the plan that there was no way to keep records.
So June had become the primary archivist and was training two of the refugees as scribes, including how to make inks and paper. As soon as a few of the artisans were freed up she intended to get started on a printing press.
