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Stories from the Verse
Con Verse Lea
Chapter 42: Takano 70
Table of Contents
Previous chapter: Beam 137
Tommy thought about what to draw on the bathroom and shower doors, and faced two problems. One was that it had to be something recognizable by the barely literate people of the tribe (for now that they were camping she thought of them as a tribe); the other was that it had to be something she could paint easily with her spray cans. Writing “Men” and “Women” or anything else faced the difficulty that she wasn’t that good with the can, and the letters would wind up very big. “M” and “W” occurred to her, but over time they would wear and possibly become confusing. Of course the traditional picture had men with straight legs and ladies with dresses, but apart from being difficult images to draw the women in this world didn’t generally wear dresses and so wouldn’t know what that was. She thought about triangles and rectangles, but realized she was extrapolating from dresses and no dresses, and so gave up that idea, too.
She remembered, though, that back home she had seen the symbols for Mars and Venus, and that these were often used to suggest the male and the female. Of course, these people wouldn’t know the symbols--but then, they wouldn’t know almost any symbols she chose, and these would be easy to teach them, not to mention easy to draw. She would make the men’s symbol--now this became silly, because she was thinking boys should be blue, but then Mars should be red, and Venus should be blue, or maybe green. That would work. She did a quick sketch of each on her sketch pad, and was happy with the result. But by now it was getting dark, so she decided to paint the doors in the morning.
Concerned about the weather, she wished she had a tent, but remembered how bulky the tents were in the store where she got her camping gear. She wondered what Lauren planned to do about shelter. That was silly, she thought. She’s right here.
“Lauren?”
“Mmm?”
“I was just wondering what you plan to do about shelter. After all, it’s going to rain eventually, and maybe snow, too.”
Lauren looked up from her Bible. “You are absolutely right. I think, though, I’ve got it covered. When I was in the parakeet world, they taught me to build a nest--very like a wigwam, I think. I only ever built the one, but I’m going to build another, and when I do I’m going to teach you and the leaders how to do it, so that they can build their own and teach everyone else how to do it. We’ll probably share one--particularly in the cold, it’s important to have warm bodies inside--but we’ll build two anyway, so we can store our gear in the other.”
Tommy nodded. She should have known that Lauren had thought of this, and while that wasn’t quite building a modern suburban development, it was better than sleeping in the open.
It seemed that everything was coming together. They had water, they had fire, it appeared they had food, and hopefully in a few days they would have shelter. They had succeeded. It wasn’t exactly the promised land, but it was more than they had been promised.
In the morning Tommy painted her emblems on the doors, red Mars emblems for the men, green Venus emblems for the women.
There is a behind-the-writings look at the thoughts, influences, and ideas of this chapter, along with twenty other sequential chapters of this novel, in mark Joseph "young" web log entry #465: Characters Wander. Given a moment, this link should take you directly to the section relevant to this chapter. It may contain spoilers of upcoming chapters.
As to the old stories that have long been here:
