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Stories from the Verse
Con Version
Chapter 72: Takano 107
Table of Contents
Previous chapter: Cooper 23
A few days later Davey began clearing a space adjacent to the campground of Varlax’ group. He had gathered a group of men who apparently had modern tools they had acquired to build some bridge on the way out of the caves. Davey marveled at these, having read about them but never having seen them; but they didn’t have anything with which to fell a tree, so his axe did most of that.
Tommy came by periodically to see what was happening, and so she got the explanation: they were learning how to build a log cabin, similar to the ones in which his family lived up north. He said he wanted to take his wife and adopted kids home to meet his parents and the rest of his family, but not until spring when he could rely on somewhat better weather.
The concept of changing seasons was still somewhat new to the people, so his assurances that indeed winter was temporary and that he had lived through it every year of his life kept spirits up. On one of his occasional visits to Tommy he commented that he could see just how big her challenge had been, given how little these people actually knew about the world in which they were living. She said yes, it must have been something like traveling to another planet, which caused his eyes to expand. He had, of course, read about traveling to other planets, but had not known it had ever been done. She explained a bit more of her life as a verser, and of what she had learned from Johnny Angel and from Lauren Hastings, but admitted that she was not certain whether she had every been to another planet, or to any world which traveled to other planets, other than that in her own time and place there had been a few fights to the Moon and some talk about going to Mars. She didn’t know whether his ancestors had gone farther than that, but she suspected that they hadn’t gotten too far in creating human settlements elsewhere or they wouldn’t have created the caves.
She was impressed by how quickly the cabin rose, particularly since it wasn’t a one-room open space but was divided to create a kitchen, bedrooms for each of the kids plus one for themselves and a spare, and a sizable common room with room enough for a dining table and some additional furniture. That would come, he said, given time. The most challenging part was that he had to scavenge quite a distance along the rivers that fed into and out of the lake to find enough stones to build a fireplace, and he took the time to dry them alongside a fire for several days to ensure that they could survive the heat. He also created a simple cement from available ingredients to construct a low chimney.
When this was finished, he suggested that those he had trained begin building additional cabins for the other leaders, and offered to help. He told them that in the days before the caves people were able to build houses and other buildings because they all worked together and so had the skills and musclepower to erect and secure walls and roofs, and to build doors and windows. He told them of a people called the Amiss, who lived in a place they called the Yoo-essay, or sometimes the United States of Amiska. Tommy decided not to correct his history, partly because she didn’t see that it mattered, and partly because she didn’t want to undermine either his credibility or his confidence. He was also learning--with the crosscut saws brought by the men they were able to turn logs into planks much more effectively than he had been doing by splitting them with his axe.
The snow was thick on the forest floor when Davey and Varlax invited Tommy to dinner. He had built a crude dining table along with a couple benches and several stools, and she had roasted a turkey on a spit over their fire and cooked some vegetables in a pot they had made. Tommy thought it might have been the best meal she had had since they left the caves, and thanked them for their hospitality.
Yes, she thought, a godsend.
There is a behind-the-writings look at the thoughts, influences, and ideas of this chapter, along with eleven other sequential chapters of this novel, in mark Joseph "young" web log entry #506: Characters Involved. 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:
