Time Salvager (31 page)
He leaned in to her. “We still need to talk about what to do next. We can’t stay here forever.”
She shrugged. “It’s not a bad life, James. These seem to be good people and the work is honest. What else are we going to do?”
“I didn’t bring you back here for…” He paused. Why did he bring her back? It wasn’t for her own good; that, he had to admit. He did it for himself, and now that she seemed to be adjusting to life here, he wanted to take her away again.
“Selfish bastard,” James muttered under his breath.
He felt the familiar pull of anxiety as they were separated and she was led by both hands by that gaggle of old women back into one of those tall rusted relics of the past. His instincts were to run after her and snatch her from that group of old hens coaxing her away from him, shoot to the underground garage across the river where the collie was parked, and flee to some remote place far away from the searching eyes of ChronoCom and these savages.
Oldest Qawol waved him over and pointed toward the same group he had worked with yesterday. James kept his face neutral and held in his sigh. The other large party of men was venturing northwest to hunt for game in one of the skyscrapers. He would be much more useful running with them. But that would require a large degree of trust on both sides, something neither had at this moment, which relegated him back to digging ditches and damming rivers, crap work that was far beneath a chronman.
Ex-chronman. Even worse: fugitive.
“Your thoughts are loud, stranger,” Qawol said, putting a hand on his shoulder. “I can hear your worry all the way from afar.”
“It’s nothing,” he said.
“Running minds never run nowhere,” Qawol said. “Josni says you worked hard with the others yesterday. He was surprised.”
“Why would he be?”
“People who have no intention of staying have no need to work hard for the tribe’s benefit. I do not anticipate you or the girl staying much longer.”
James stopped. The Oldest was right. Why did he break his back for them yesterday? He didn’t know. James looked back at the six towers that disappeared over the ridge as his group made its way down to the river, then he looked back at the makeshift dam they had erected yesterday. The whole wall looked ready to buckle. Being in that pit right now was dangerous.
It had leaked in a few areas and the supports—bunches of gray plant stems bound together—were bending and being pressed deeper into the mud. He watched as the first group of men jumped down into the ditch to inspect the braces, probably not realizing the danger they had just put themselves in.
He watched, alarmed, as one of the men knocked on the dam wall and then tried to readjust the slanted stem pushing against it. The wall sagged a little more. Three kinetic coils burst out as the glow of the exo crackled around him. Alarmed, several of the Elfreth nearby jumped back and pointed. Another standing on the far ridge aimed a rifle at him.
James gritted his teeth and jumped down into the ditch just as the stem supporting the sagging wall snapped and a torrent of water came rushing into the ditch.
Elise nursed the small fire tucked safely inside the ring of rocks and fanned it gently with a fan made from knitted insect wings that Rima had given her. Sammuia’s older sister had developed a fascination with Elise and was now resorting to nothing less than a string of gifts of silly trinkets and useful knickknacks to curry her favor.
As much as Elise had tried to tell the girl that bribery wasn’t needed to earn her friendship, Rima was persistent. The rest of the Elfreth seemed fine with the girl hanging around her, even relieved that she was so preoccupied. It seemed Rima had a reputation as a troublemaker among them.
Some of the gifts were very useful; for example, what looked like a hollowed-out half of an old carburetor that now served as a heating plate for Elise’s tests. Others, like this insect wing fan, were just pretty to look at.
Wait, no, she took that back. Elise switched the fan to her left hand, silently thanking it for helping keep the fire alive. It had taken her the better part of the morning on her rest day to get the fire started for the heating plate so watching it finally grow felt she had just climbed Mt. Everest.
Qawol had cut her off from using the tribe’s supply of oil, so in order to run her experiments, Elise had to gather her own tinder and figure out how to start her own fires. The first few days, James would just zap something and it would be—presto!—fire. He wasn’t always around, though, so she decided it was high time she learned how to make one on her own.
Sitting over the fire on top of a metal grate was one glass and three tin cups, borrowed from the cooks. She wished they were all glass so she could examine how the contents of the sludge from the river broke down, but she had a feeling glass-making was pretty much a lost art around these parts, like just about everything else.
“Should have paid attention to those blacksmithing and glassblowing classes at summer camp, Elise,” she tsked. “You’d be all set by now.”
She was delusional if she thought this stone age experimentation was actually going to lead to a cure for the Earth Plague, but she wanted to learn more about this exotic new world. She was a scientist after all, and this is what scientists did when they were curious, so she studied the sludge with what she had on hand even if that meant resorting to third-grade science projects. If anything, it helped pass the time.
Ever since the second week James and she had joined the tribe, her routine had become: get up before the sun rises, gather samples until dawn, work the assorted tribal chores, then spend the rest of the evening after dinner playing at caveman biologist. These exercises gave a little of her previous life back to her. They also reminded her of everything she had lost.
“You busy?” James said, knocking on the wall of her lab.
“Lab” was a really loose term. She had commandeered a burned-out residential guardhouse of an old complex downriver from the settlement. It had only two and a half walls, but the roof didn’t seem to be in any danger of collapsing. It kept her dry from the rains and offered just enough ventilation so she didn’t smoke herself out when some of her less-than-aromatic experiments went awry.
“Hey you.” She beamed as he walked in and studied the fire. They didn’t see much of each other during the day because of all the chores the Elfreth set them to, so it was always a little thrill when he stopped by every evening. It was strange; he totally wasn’t her type, but nothing made a smile splash across her face the way his being around did.
She was also very proud of James. After the incident at the dam when he saved a group of tribesmen from drowning, the Elfreth seemed to have finally thawed toward him. In return, she saw him make a real effort not to be such a statue to them. Now, he stomped and scowled less in camp, and not all of them pointed their guns at him when he passed. She considered that a vast improvement. Most were still uncomfortable around him, but at least both sides were making a little effort.
“The old windbags ordered me to bring you dinner,” he said.
Elise made a face. Eating had somehow gone from her favorite pastime to her most dreaded. She had mostly gotten use to the meager sustenance of this land, though some of it still took choking down for her to digest. At least her body had adjusted. During the first few days, her stomach had launched a protest that kept her perpetually cramped.
He passed a hand over the boiling sludge. “Any luck on the cure?” He asked this every time he stopped by. For a guy from the far future with very advanced technology at his disposal, he was surprisingly a knuckle-dragger when it came to certain things.
“This isn’t like fixing a mechanoid or curing the cold, James.” She shook her insect-wing fan at him. “Look at what the hell I have to work with! Do you know what in Gaia this is made of?”
He paused, his gaze moving from the slurp she was cooking in her little pots to the fan in her hand to the makeshift shelf of scrounged lab tools she’d accumulated over the past few days.
“What do you need, then?” he asked.
“Well, for one, it’d be nice if I didn’t have to spend two hours to build a damn fire every time I want to heat something up. Maybe a real filtration device instead of a spaghetti strainer, and how about some real equipment? Holy hell, how about a room with four actual walls?” She laughed as she ticked off half a dozen old comforts of home that she missed. James looked serious as he took in every single one of her suggestions.
“I’ll see what I can do,” was all he said. “This might take a few days to track.” He turned and left her lab.
“What? Wait.” She ran out after him. “Do you mean it? Can you really get the stuff for me?”
He must have seen the ear-to-ear grin on her face because a rare smile grew on his. “For a cure for Earth? Sure. For you? If it makes you happy.” He looked at the opening in her lab where a wall should have been. “What do you think about moving the lab into one of the Farming Towers? I don’t feel comfortable with you working so far away from the safety of the tribe.”
She shook her head. “It’s pitch-black up there at night. You won’t catch me climbing those stairs after sundown.”
James thought about it and nodded. “I’ll see what I can do about adding power to your lab.”
Elise couldn’t believe it. She didn’t think he was taking her seriously. This was more than she could hope for, and she ran through the list of requests that she had haphazardly shot off in her head. She definitely should have been more considerate with what she asked for. “Hang on, let me think it over and get a real list.”
James held her hand with his. “Take your time. Eat your meal before the food gets cold. You know how much worse it tastes once that happens.”
Elise was so excited she barely noticed the dead grubs, moss soup, and wilted leaves she inhaled for dinner. She made a detailed wish list and double-checked it like a little girl picking presents for winter solstice. By the time she was ready to turn in for the evening, the number of things she wanted had grown to over a hundred.
Afraid that she was being too greedy, she refined it once more, putting the list of lab equipment she wanted into separate columns, from required to optional to nice-to-have alternatives. Too excited to sleep, she stayed up and tweaked the list until it had been reduced to a trim thirty-six items. Then she decided that the eight semi-optional items weren’t actually optional after all, which brought up the final list to forty-four.
“Forty-four to save the Earth,” she said and rubbed her hands in anticipation.
Farther upstream in the field, the guard on watch banged his nightstick against the column he was perched on. Fourteen times the ringing of the aluminum tube echoed across the camp. By the time the sun came up, the guard would have banged the nightstick up to forty times, the occurrences evenly divided by an old recovered hourglass that he continually flipped. Each banging let the rest of the tribe know how deep in the night they were, and more important, let them know that someone was still watching over them. Falling asleep while on watch was one of the worst crimes a tribesman could commit. No one knew exactly how long the hourglass was, but if Elise had to guess, she’d say it was approximately ten to twelve minutes.
That was the way with things now in the present. Everything was measured in approximations. These people lived life from sunup to sundown, and measurements were taken based only on the capacity of what they used. Metrics for these people were based on fingers, toes, and persons. Thus, those seventy-seven blood corn stems stacked on the far bank for tomorrow’s work on the dam would be three persons, three limbs, and two fingers. It made sense, she guessed. Last month, her team was triangulating core temperatures near the center of the Earth and now she was counting mutant tomatoes with her hands and fingers. Go figure.
It was the middle of the night by the time Elise popped her head into their tent. She had counted at least twenty-seven taps of the nightstick, which meant she had only a few more hours to sleep. Tomorrow was going to suck. Knowing how much of a light sleeper James was, she tiptoed around him toward her side of the tent.
James, who was asleep in his cot nearby, rolled over and suddenly thrashed out, startling the hell out of her. He let out a low guttural moan and both his arms shot up into the air as if he were pushing something away. His head pivoted left and right violently as another groan, painful and heartbreaking, escaped his lips. His hands clenched and unclenched as they drew circles in the air.
Elise realized then that he wasn’t pushing something away, he was clutching for it. Cries of “no!” rang in the tent as he thrashed even harder. Afraid that he would wake the rest of the tribe, and worried that they might not understand what was happening to him—half of the Old Ones still wanted to send him away—she tried to wrap her arms around him and hold him down, shushing into his ear. He was terrifyingly strong, and for a second, Elise feared for her safety.
“It’s all right,” she whispered, over and over again.
Eventually, the cries softened and fell into mumbled whispers. He seemed to be apologizing to people named Grace and “Nazi boy.” Then he let loose a stream of names, thirty long, saying that he was sorry over and over again. Elise held on to him, trying to keep him still. Eventually, whatever was happening in his dream passed and his heart rate steadied.
The worst seemed to have passed, but Elise didn’t move. Maybe her being so close comforted him, and to be honest, his closeness did the same for her. For the rest of the night, for the last thirteen nightstick bangs until sunup call, she stayed near him, her arms draped around his shoulders. And for the second time in so many weeks, Elise slept well.
The small armada of transports landed one by one in the bombed-out basin of Mt. Fuji on what remained of the Japanese islands. This particular region had been hit hard by the rising tides and earthquakes over the centuries. Tokyo, its last remaining city, had sunk into the sea in 2242. Now, only the land mass around Fuji was stable enough for use, and it was here that whatever remained of this island’s population lived.
