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Stories from the Verse
A Dozen Verses
Chapter 135: Cooper 116
Table of Contents
Previous chapter: Kondor 302
Calling it Year Two for lack of a better term, or day 366, Cooper began marking out the stars. He began by using rocks on the dry part of the beach, and during the day, he transcribed this to a large flat stone. The stone was a hundred feet long, and twenty feet wide, and a casual jog back into the woods. The problem he had was that rain would smear his data collection regularly.
How did ancient people keep data collected? Cave paintings was one idea. He had the cave, but not the paint, and the constant steam in the cave and its perpetually wet walls was probably going to make that nonviable. It occurred to him, though, that if there was one cave, there probably was another. He would keep his eye out for a suitable one close by as he did his daily walks.
If he had a chisel and hammer, he could make marks in stone. Despite the massive durability of the sword, which had yet to need sharpening, he hesitated to use it as a stone chisel. That was just asking for a breakage.
Papyrus? No, the Sumerians used baked mud tablets. On one of the nearby streams there was a bank of clay that he could mine. Really, calling it ‘mining’ was an overstatement. He could dig it up with a sharp rock, and carry armfuls. The next step would be to make a form to fit the clay into. Even if it was not baked it would be better than the charcoal from the campfire.
He set to work, and over the next week he created three tablets–one for constellations, another for his story, and another for prayers. Several weeks passed, and as he lit the campfire again with the sword, he wondered. Pulling the sword from the now burning branches, he held it upright in the darkening twilight.
Fire, he thought. It ignited. As before, flame covered the elegant blade of the oversized gladius. Fire. Things continued on as before, and he heard a fish splash in the distance down near the beach. Hotter fire. That did not create any change. Quirking an eyebrow, he drew on his comic book awareness because even if he was not a comic geek, he still knew some things.
“Flame on,” he said. Right after he spoke it, he wondered if he had made a dreadful error. What if he suddenly burst into flame all over his body? Nothing happened, to his gratitude. He tried to focus all his will, and all he accomplished was getting sweat on his forehead. Shrugging, he gave up.
Later that night he suddenly sat up. He had a method of extreme heat right here: the volcano.
The next day, he shook his head. This was crazy. Still, he crawled up to the edge of the volcano crater. Yes, there was a ledge twenty feet down, and it was a safe distance above the lava–it appeared that spouts of lava did not reach it. This should work.
On the way back he looked for the fallen branches of a tree he had labeled the grayrock for its color and durability. Rivaling ebony for toughness, he had found he could toss a branch into the fire and it would not burn immediately. It would scorch with the sword’s flame, and eventually burn, but it was far more heat resistant than any other wood he had ever used in a fire. He would use these to build his tools.
Finding several long branches, he trimmed them to the right size at the campsite, shaping them as he worked. He envisioned something on the order of pizza piles on the ends of salad tongs, so he could reach down into the crater to set his tablets down and retrieve them again later. This took an hour with the flame of the sword. The wood seemed more resistant to the sword than the iron in the hull of the pirate spaceship had been. After that, he slathered clay on the branches, covering them. This he let dry, heating it with sunlight and campfire, and the next day he added more. By day four, he was ready to go.
He took the best two branches and hiked back up the volcano. At the top he put his implements over the edge, and using a vine rope, even as it smoldered, he lay them flat on the ledge. They hung out on both sides. Two days later, he returned with another vine rope, and some clay tablets. Looping the vine rope on a hook he had built into the tongs, he lifted first one and the other implement out. At the base of each branch, he had a pile splayed out by shredding and stomping a bit of branch, like a hoe, covered with clay.
Awkwardly, he put the branches together, hoe blades facing each other, and put the three tablets on them. This he lowered over the edge with his heart in his mouth until he got the long branches down to rest on the ledge. At the top, he had the branches rising over the mouth. Carefully, he pulled the extra-long tongs out of his volcanic oven and watched with dismay as the three tablets tipped and fell into the magma.
Next time, I’m going to brace the branches together with crossbars, he thought. As it was, his plan was a disaster waiting to happen, on a good day. Today, it was just a disaster. A few days later, with the tongs braced together he was able to get his first set of clay tablets baked.
He could not store much information on an as yet unbaked clay tablet, and had to use a small shard of a seashell to make indentations. He tried a couple of times to make his marks smaller, and more tightly packed, but the ‘bandwidth’ was very low. A week after he started, he realized as he was marking the stars, and checking previous ones, that he had failed to decide the cardinal directions. His compass proved useless–apparently this planet had no magnetic field, or possibly there was enough iron ore in the mountain to confuse the device. This made his first week of starwatching useless.
Obviously, everything rose in the east and set in the west–but did so imperfectly. That is, on earth, at least, during the course of the year the sun shifted between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn, on a regular period of a year observed by ancients as far back as perhaps Babel. The moon also danced north and south more erratically, or at least in some pattern he had never learned. Thus watching the sun cross the sky he knew it moved from east to west, but not whether it was moving from northeast to northwest or from southeast to southwest. He assumed he was in the tropics because the flora seemed tropical, but it could be that this world was just warmer; he had failed to notice whether the sun actually did shift its course, partly because he hadn’t paid attention to the stars to this point.
That night as the sun set he searched the sky for anything that could be recognizable, and he found, just clearing the peak of the mountain, a pair of stars separated by about the width of a moon (the night was at this moment moonless, although the moon would rise later). They were both bright, one was bluer and the other slightly reddish, and over the course of the next nine hours he watched them cross the sky to the western edge, where they set almost simultaneously.
If they both crossed the oceanic western horizon at the same moment, they must be on the same longitude, and thus they were directly north and south of each other. He had a pointer for his directions–not a north star, but a north-south pointer. The red one was to the right, which made it the north end.
He slept much of the next day, and was watching as the sun set. His pointer stars were visible in the fading dusk, which concerned him–he didn’t know much astronomy, but he did know that planets were the brightest objects in the night sky and frequently first to appear, and that their positions changed relative to everything else in the sky. However, his pointer stars were a bit higher over the volcano than they had been the night before, and seemed to be in the same position relative to each other. He named them, rather unimaginatively, Rednorth and Bluesouth, and began to plot stars working out from these as his reference point.
He recognized two flaws in his methodology. With the crater in the center of the island he could not see the eastern horizon from here. That meant his pointer was already about thirty degrees above the horizon the first night he saw it, and traveled only one hundred fifty degrees to setting, which a bit of quick math told him should take ten hours, if a full rotation of the planet was twenty-four. It was appearing higher every night, shortening the trip to the horizon, and in five months it should be setting with the sun, out of sight. He would by then have some sketches of the stars behind it, but absent the bright pair it might be more difficult to orient his star charts.
He already knew he was not on Earth. There was a Moon, but it was light green, and it had different splotches than Luna. There was no Polaris or North Star, Little Dipper, Orion’s Belt, or Southern Cross. In the end, he decided not to make constellations, and instead just focus on the brighter stars, and the phases of the local Moon. Once he got skilled enough, he would add the planets, but that was for later.
A few weeks before he expected to lose his pointer, a new grouping of bright stars appeared, this to the south of the mountain and so he could see it coming up over the southeastern ocean. It was very close in shape to an equilateral triangle, again spaced about a moon’s-width apart. He estimated it to be about eleven and a half hours behind, or correspondingly twelve and a half hours ahead, of his pointer, which meant one or the other would usually be in the sky–although the position of the pointer meant he would not see it rise for the first month, as the sun would follow it before it crested the peak.
Over the next ‘year’, he continued his observations about the stars, his story, prayers and theological insights, notes about the local plantlife, and sea life, and other things of note, all of which he stored in a dry cave he had found. In that time he only lost twenty tablets to the lava. After twelve months his pointer reappeared over the volcano, and the star charts began repeating themselves, which meant he was pretty sure that the year was three hundred sixty some days–in which case, it was time to advance his skills and start marking planets. In that same time, he improved his marking skills and his tablet making skills to the point where he could put around 120 letters on a tablet. The star charts required more space due to their nature as maps.
There were many other things he did in what he considered his Club Med vacation to satisfy his curiosity and keep himself amused. His chief new endeavor other than the tablets was swimming. He did this in the several ponds in the interior, and the larger lake, but then graduated to the ocean. It was in the midst of the third ‘year’ that he began to seriously consider swimming around the entire island.
Others had crossed the English Channel. It was about the same distance, he thought, and the Channel was cold water. This water was always warm, and the weather, except for the brief rains, remarkably mild. On the downside, he would have no pace boat, nor was he any sort of champion swimmer. He prayed about it, and thought. It would be an interesting challenge, and while it might take him several years to get really ready, he had the time.
Otherwise, well, he had hiked the whole island, swum and fished in every pond and the main lake, climbed hundreds of trees and explored several caves (not deeply, as water or hot fog or heat barred the way), cataloged most of the fruits and trees and grasses, and wrote some theology. One could only do so many windsprints backwards before it got a trifle uninteresting, even as he kept up with his exercises, it was a bit routine now.
As to the old stories that have long been here:
