Six Bits (23 page)

Teba started off with a purpose. Billy, who’d been dominating their partnership most of the time, receded into the background. He wanted to think. With all the knowledge he’d brought from the future, they should be King/Queen here. He only needed to figure out how to introduce some new weapon or technology for everyone in this primitive world to recognize him/her as their leader. The question was,
which
technology to introduce.

Right now, the one he wanted to introduce the most was toilet paper! Even though Teba hadn’t had a real meal for a couple of days, she still defecated. Then she’d wiped herself with her own hand, wiping the hand clean on a handy rock. He’d been horrified by her first wipe, immediately stopping her hand from returning to her butt. He’d looked around for something to wipe with, finding nothing that looked suitable. Finally he settled for a handful of leaves from a nearby bush. To his dismay, their waxy surfaces did little to clean him. Staying in a squatting position he/she’d duck-walked around until they found some other leaves. Those cleaned better, but were painfully abrasive.

He’d been left feeling unclean and itchy until he’d found some moss a little further on and used it to clean him/herself. Teba, he realized, had none of the modern person’s revulsion toward fecal matter so didn’t mind getting it on her fingers. She only wanted to be clean because otherwise she itched. When he searched her mind for better solutions he realized that, when she could, she defecated near a stream and washed herself in it. This despite the freezing temperature of the water at this time of year.

Now Billy idly considered what he knew about paper making. It involved pulping wood somehow, he suspected with powerful machines. He knew that strong chemicals were involved, but had no idea which ones.

He snorted to himself, making paper was far beyond his knowledge base and wouldn’t make him king anyway. What he needed to make was a
weapon
.

In times of yore, swords had made men into kings. Back when he’d been a modern man in modern times, Billy had thought a sword to be a simple weapon.

Now, Billy realized that a sword was as far beyond him as a starship. He searched Teba’s mind and found no recollection of anything that seemed like a metal of any type.

He knew that copper was one of the first metals to be used. Copper and gold could both be found in relatively pure form out in nature, but only in small quantities. For that matter, meteorites made of relatively pure nickel-iron could be found and were known to have been sources of iron in prehistory.

But Billy wasn’t likely to find a metallic meteorite. Gold was pretty, but didn’t hold much of an edge. Even copper, if Billy could find it, wouldn’t make a great sword. He was pretty sure that copper ores were frequently greenish or bluish. He supposed that if he found rocks those colors, he could try heating them in the hopes of extracting copper, but he feared that the heat required was more than could be achieved with burning wood.

Bronze was an alloy of copper, but Billy wasn’t sure what the other metal was. He thought it might be tin, but it really didn’t matter, he had
no
idea how to find tin.

Billy’d be better off looking for iron ore. He felt pretty sure that at least some iron ores were reddish in color. However, he thought the heat required to smelt iron was much higher than the heat for smelting copper. Having watched a video once on the making of katanas, he knew that air needed to be forced through the fire and the iron ore to provide extra oxygen. He thought they burned charcoal to produce the heat although he’d always found it puzzling that the charcoal remaining after a wood fire could still be burned and would produce more heat than the wood fire itself.

Still, though Billy knew something about extracting metals from the earth, and even though he suspected it was a lot more than most people, even in his home time knew, he was coming to the realization that he knew far too little. The knowledge of metallurgy that he did have, with years to experiment, would probably put him far ahead of anyone alive in this time, but it wouldn’t help him
now
.

God damn Kim anyway!
Billy didn’t want to be here. He didn’t want to be hungry. He didn’t want to have this aching tooth. He didn’t want to be scared and he didn’t want to worry about what was going to happen when he ran into Bant again!

Billy didn’t want to be a woman! Not in this day and age anyway He thought he wouldn’t mind living as a woman in modern times, but in prehistoric times, when might made right, he didn’t want to be a woman.

He wanted some toilet paper… And a warm shower… And a beer…

Billy took a moment to peer out at the landscape through Teba’s eyes. Teba had control of their body and he was riding along as if she were his autopilot. It was like when he got in his car thinking deeply about something else, then found himself driving into his own driveway a little while later without remembering the intervening trip. Billy wasn’t quite sure where they were going, but decided it didn’t really matter. As long as Teba was running their body, Billy could keep contemplating possible technological advances.

A bow and arrow seemed an obvious choice. He would need some kind of springy wood. He knew that yew wood had been considered the best for bows back before the availability of glues that allowed the layering of different woods. He thought it was something to do with yew already having layers of wood in it that had different properties. However, Billy had no idea what a yew tree looked like. What he needed was some ordinary kind of springy wood.

Bamboo would be great and Billy knew bows could be made out of it, but he thought he was in Europe somewhere. The people in the cave had all had pale skin and if he were truly somewhere in prehistory, he thought that Europe was the only place pale skinned people could be found back then. Billy felt pretty sure that bamboo didn’t grow in Europe until modern man transplanted it there.

Billy opened his connection to Teba’s mind to see if she knew of a springy wood. To his frustration, the springiness of wood seemed to be something Teba had little or no interest in.

Giving up for the moment on wood for the bow, he pictured a string, thinking that surely Teba used string of some kind to bind things together. In fact… he looked at the furs she had draped about her body and saw that they had been roughly sewn together with some kind of heavy thread.

When he searched Teba’s mind to learn about that thread, he found that it consisted of strips of fiber pulled off of animal tendons. She would use flakes of sharp rock to cut the fine strands that bound the tendon together. It would be easy to strip out thicker pieces of tendon, but getting one more than twelve inches long would be problematic. When Teba wanted something longer than twelve inches, she tied pieces of tendon together. Billy’s exasperation surged. He didn’t think that short pieces of tendon, tied together, would make a decent bowstring.

He couldn’t believe it could be this hard!

Billy’s whole life, being kind of a technical guy, he’d assumed that the knowledge he had of how modern things worked would put him head and shoulders above anyone even a few decades back. Now the old saying about “standing on the shoulders of giants” rattled through his mind. He’d never considered just how complex even the simplest things he took for granted actually were. He knew how a wheel worked, but even if he had a use for one right now, he realized that it could take him weeks to make one with no better tools than Teba’s small hand axe.
You need tools, to make tools, to make tools…

“Standing on the shoulders of giants” usually referred to the scientific knowledge passed on by those proverbial giants. He’d never given thought to the fact that the modern manufacturing of even a simple object like a knife required first a miner who knew where iron ore was to be found and how to get it out of the ground. Then it required someone with the knowledge and equipment to smelt that ore and remove the iron from it. Next you needed people and furnaces and alloying materials to convert that iron into steel. Once you had the steel, ideally it needed to be worked to strengthen it, then shaped. Even if you had a piece of steel of the correct size and shape and all you wanted to do was put an edge on it, you would need the proper abrasives to do so and if you didn’t want it to be
extremely
labor-intensive you would want those abrasives mounted on a powered wheel!

He realized that, starting from scratch, he didn’t even know how to make good strong
string
for the bow he’d thought he’d invent. He thought,
I don’t even have a
midget
to stand on!

Billy’d been trying to think of an even simpler technology that he could invent in order to impress Teba’s tribesmen when he realized they were arriving back at her cave.

He hadn’t been paying much attention, but now observed that it was late afternoon. Although Teba had stopped to drink water at a couple of streams, she was gnawingly hungry. She was fervently looking forward to eating some of the wolf slung around her shoulders.

When Billy wondered why she hadn’t eaten some of the wolf already, the knowledge flooded into his consciousness from hers. The women of the tribe were expected to share
any
food they obtained with the tribe. The men generally shared whatever they got on the hunt, but not always. No one would be surprised if the hunters brought down some small game like a ptarmigan and consumed it in the field without bringing any of it to the rest of the tribe.

They thought of this as their right as hunters.

On the other hand, a woman who ate some of the food she gathered before she shared it with the tribe could expect a beating at the very least. Teba might have gotten away with eating a couple of mealworms from under that tree, out there far from anyone else, but she would have been
expected
to bring them all back and share them.

Billy, who’d never thought of himself as particularly socially aware, felt appalled. Not only that the men would treat the women in such a fashion, but that the women would stand for it.

Teba reacted to his rebellious thoughts as if they were ridiculously naïve. She considered it simply asinine to think that she or any other woman could revolt against the men of her tribe and survive. As if Billy’s recollection of his/her casually brutal rape at the hands of Bant that morning weren’t enough, her memories began to flash up other events from her relatively short life. Beatings, bullying, rape, casual killing.

The strong
ruled
the weak in this ferocious world and those who were the strongest ruled everyone else.

The men were almost all stronger than any of the women and they ruthlessly took advantage of it!

When Billy briefly considered the possibility that he/she should strike out on their own, leaving the tribe, Teba’s mind considered it impossible. First, they would have to leave her son Gano, something she could never do. Second, though they’d been lucky enough to kill a wolf today, and Teba knew she could gather some food, she felt sure they’d soon be starving without the rest of the tribe. And then there was the fear. Not just fear of the large predators that populated the landscape, but fear of the men in her own tribe who would track her down.

And if those men didn’t find her, the men of another tribe would.

Certainly no authority figure existed. No one who might punish the ruthless, cruel, vicious, and inhumane individuals of this pitiless society. Murder and rape were everyday facts of life, not occasional horrific occurrences that made the news. Billy considered himself to be a person who would stand up for the weak and downtrodden, but finding
himself
to be someone relatively frail shocked him. Even as he
considered
fighting back, memories of what had happened to him when he fought back against Bant surged back into the forefront of his consciousness.

In dismay, he retreated from the forefront of their mind to let Teba handle their return to the tribe.

Teba slipped Billy’s staff and club under the bushes about thirty feet short of the cave. Turning the corner into their area, she saw that the entire tribe was there. Eleven adults, of which six were women, plus three children. They’d started the winter with three babes as well, but, because hunting had been poor, none had survived.

She strove for an intermediate demeanor. She didn’t want to appear cocky or the men would become angry, but she didn’t want to appear cringing or they would take advantage of her. A quick glance around showed no evidence the men had had a successful hunt.

Her heart leapt with the knowledge that the wolf she’d brought would be
greatly
appreciated. Selah, Bant and Gano were the only ones who looked up as she approached. All of them had wide eyes.

If one of the men had brought in a kill by himself, the tribe would have had to listen to him bragging. Teba stepped to the center of the group, slipped the wolf from around her shoulder and laid it quietly on the ground in front of Selah. “A wolf pack attacked me. I killed this one,” she said simply.

By then,
everyone
was staring. Teba could sense their joy as they anticipated full bellies. A glance under lowered brows showed consternation among the men that a woman had hunted successfully. And killed a
carnivore
! But for now, everyone waited in anticipation as Selah began deftly skinning and disjointing the wolf. Of course, she handed out the choicest bits to the men. They always got the choicest bits, claiming it as the hunters’ right for bringing it in.

Billy considered the irony of Teba settling for a tough, bony shank when
she’d
been the one to bring in the food. However, Teba was just happy that the men weren’t being assholes. He felt revulsion as Teba began tearing into the raw meat, but the joy expressed by her body over the food it represented quickly overcame his distaste. With a shudder, he wondered,
Am I going to get so hungry I like eating bugs?