The Far Side (30 page)

And that bolt weapon the little one had made!  Collum said he understood it, so maybe it was true, that they could build their own.  Maybe.  Would the short one, Andie, be so forthcoming if she was a prisoner?  He doubted it.  He doubted she’d be forthcoming, either, if she was being well-treated and the others weren’t.  And he hadn’t worked out the precedence between the two women.  Kris gave orders to Ezra, but she treated Andie like a peer -- or perhaps a good friend.  If Ezra was in the employ of Kris’ father, that would explain things about Andie’s relationship to Ezra, but what of the two women’s relationship between each other?

Ezra clapped him on the shoulder and grinned.  Melek was very sure that he understood some of the thoughts going through Melek’s head, which was disconcerting, at best.

Kris had Ezra explain her thoughts about how much to carry, which took most of the afternoon.  They’d gone back to the main chamber and sat around a small fire Collum had built.

Melek tried very hard not to let Lieutenant Menim worry him as the officer sat near the fire, staring into the flames and shaking like a leaf.

Today, they would rest and he could think; tomorrow he was going to have to decide.  For the first time in his life, he understood the desire of many officers to defer decisions until the last possible moment.  There were so many complications!

Chapter 11 :: The Woman Who Figured

Ezra sank down next to Kris and Andie as the sun started its final plunge beneath the horizon.  They were in the main chamber, but close to the entrance to the nursery.  Melek had detailed some of his soldiers to see if they could find any wood earlier, but they had returned without significant success.  Melek and his group were now huddled by the door to the outside, facing another dark night.

“These people have no game like poker,” Ezra told the two girls.  “We probably don’t want to teach it to them,” he added with a bitter laugh.

“Why not?” Andie asked.  “They’re bound to have something like money, and we could take it all away from them.”

“Yeah, but they might figure out how to keep poker faces.  Right now, they don’t have a clue.”

“And what does that mean?”

“It means Melek is wrestling with his conscience about what to do about us.  They have units of time like days, weeks, months and years just as we do, although all different lengths.  The days are about twenty hours, and there are eight days in a week, six weeks in a month, and nine months in a year.  Our years are 365 and a quarter days long, and theirs are, so far as I can tell, 432 and a tenth long.  At least they have a leap day every ten years instead of every four.

“They came here, according to Melek, about twelve hundred of their years ago, which is something like fifteen hundred of our years.  They are still paranoid about the barbarians that drove them out of their former homelands.  Think Muslims upset about the Crusades kicking them out of the Holy Lands, except half again as far back.

“Even now, they are afraid they’ll be pursued.

“And to make life interesting, I don’t think he’s assured we will receive a warm welcome back at his home.”

“That bites,” Kris said, frowning.  “The fact we’d be saving their asses doesn’t count for anything?”

“Well, with Melek it counts.  Hey, it wasn’t that much different in the army!  And you don’t even want to know how many times some captain, major, or colonel promised the American Indians peace, only to have the request laughed at up the chain of command and the promise broken almost at once.  There was one son of a bitch in Arizona that broke every agreement he ever made with the Indians -- right up to slaughtering women and children who came in for peace talks.  He started a couple of wars all by himself.”

“Well, what if we play ‘kick the can down the road?’” Kris asked. “We go with the ‘We’ll share our food with you idea,’ but if we do, they leave us here with what’s left.  We’d have a fair amount of water and if we stash a few cases of MREs, enough for maybe six weeks.

“Obviously, that’s not as good as months of food, but we were going to be hurting for water before the food runs out anyway.”

Ezra chewed that over.  “It would almost certainly jam up Melek with his bosses,” Ezra explained.

“Those bosses he doesn’t trust,” Andie commented.  “Maybe we can get him to come with us.”

“Maybe if the door was open, but seriously, Andie, what do you think I’d have told an Aussie in Afghanistan if he asked me if I’d like to defect to Australia before a firefight?”

“What would likely happen if he gets in trouble?” Kris asked.

Ezra shrugged.  “There’s no way to tell.  I can say this, though -- you’d be right about kicking the can down the road.  Unless his relief column was a large group or they brought along a shit pot of supplies with them, they would most likely turn around and go back, then mount another expedition here.  That means they might not be back for two months -- we’d be eating our shoes by then.  That might not be a good thing if we haven’t been rescued before that.”

“There don’t seem to be any good options,” Kris said forlornly.

“Yeah, and I was thinking that I could make some more crossbows,” Andie told them.  “Except there’s enough material for one and a half more stocks, unless they burn the wood for firewood tonight.  Because, while that steel wire they have works okay, there aren’t any more broken swords in the midden heaps.  I’ll defer to you about asking them to part with their swords, Ezra, but I suspect not.”

“No, they wouldn’t do that, I’m sure.  They’re a man’s last line of defense if a dralka gets close.  Once they’re on the ground and hopping towards you, the only arrow targets you have are the eyes, each about the size of a silver dollar.  A sword, on the other hand, gives you a fifty-fifty chance of surviving.”

“I guess our Buck knives aren’t worth much then?” Kris asked.

“Not a bit.  Not even my Bowie.”

“And that is a big-ass knife,” Andie agreed.

“Sure, but the dralka have a mouth as long as your arm.  It takes one bite to cut through an arm or a leg.”

Kris sat up.  “Did they see them today?”

“No, and they were looking.  Maybe they were killed in the storm.”

“You never really think of wild animals dying in a storm,” Andie said, a curious look on her face.

Kris laughed at her friend.  “And you think all those fossil animals died of old age, peacefully passing in their sleep?”

Andie gave her a finger and Kris laughed harder at her.

There was no point after that in staying up much later, except for wasting flashlight batteries.  Melek and his people had let their fire go out and the room was very dark.

In the morning they were awoken at first light by a commotion.  Ezra went over to Melek and waited while the man sent some of his men outside, then went himself.  “What?” Ezra asked.

“Menim leave.”

Melek and his men spent most of the day looking for him, but he’d vanished.  Kris wasn’t sure how that could work, because nights here were very dark, with just faint starlight.  That reminded her that she wanted to check the sky.  The first night had been traumatic, when they hadn’t recognized the stars.

It was in the late afternoon that Ezra looked up from where they were, near the cave entrance; he was frowning.  Kris watched him curiously.  “What is it?” she asked after a minute.

“It’s getting dark too early.”

The shorter day had long since hashed their internal clocks, to say nothing of their watches.  They had taken to writing down each day what time they thought noon, sunset, and the next day’s sunrise would be, and then going back with twenty-twenty hindsight and noting the actual times.  This was their sixth day wherever they were, and sunset was due at six PM, according to their watches.  But it was the equivalent of about five now and it was too early for the sun to be setting -- but it was getting noticeably darker outside.

The three of them got up and went towards the entrance.  Ezra stopped suddenly in his tracks, staring to the west as soon as he was outside.  Andie’s jaw dropped and Kris followed with her eyes where everyone was looking.

She had no idea what she was seeing.  Along the western horizon, it was like someone had taken a black bite out of the sky.  There was a dark crescent that lifted a few degrees above the horizon.  It wasn’t as wide as the horizon, but still, two thirds was a whopping big chunk.  And the sun was clearly setting behind the bite.

“What’s that?” Kris asked.

“That has to be a moon,” Andie said, her mouth moving silently after she spoke.

“That’s one big moon.  And rising in the west -- what’s that called?  A prograde orbit?” Kris asked.

Andie giggled.  “No, you’re looking for the wrong answer.  You’re thinking of a retrograde orbit, where a moon would rise in the west and set in the east.”

“Yeah, that’s what I meant.”

“Well, in this case it’s actually a prograde orbit.  That is, it rotates in the same direction as the planet rotates.  If it was a retrograde orbit, it would rise at least once a day, most likely in the west, for sure, but it would zip across the sky relatively quickly.  Earth’s moon slowly twirls around the Earth once a month and is a semi-fixed spot in the sky, rising roughly an hour later each day.  It’s moving in its orbit in the same direction the earth rotates.

“This moon must orbit around the planet in a little more than once a day.  For this, think of it as something like a geosynchronous orbit, only closer.”

“This moon has an atmosphere,” Kris pointed out.  “You can see it there against the sun.”

Andie whistled.  “Wow!  Oh, wow!  A double planet!”

“Pardon?” Ezra asked.

“That planet may well be roughly a twin of this one.”  She chuckled.  “I bet these people never had any trouble figuring out that this was a sphere rotating in space!”

For Kris, her first thought was that if Andie said it, it had to be true.  Then she remembered some of the truly inventive models of the universe some of the primitive cultures had back on Earth and she wondered.  Then little wheels stopped rotating in her mind.

“Ezra, can you ask Melek what sort of weapons his ancestors came here with?”

“From what he said, they had bows then as well.”

“Fifteen hundred years and they haven’t improved very much,” Andie opined.

Ezra shook his head.  “We had bows on the Earth back a couple of thousand years BC.  Things like armor and crossbows came after thousands of years of development.  I think the dralka drove the development of the long bow, but they still have a ways to go.  I’d say they are like the Greeks or Romans.”

“They have no armor to speak of,” Kris mused.

“No, but these are, more or less, scouts,” Ezra told her.  “They wouldn’t carry much in the way of armor or heavy weapons.

“Why don’t you ask?”

Kris jerked her head south.  “It never rains but it pours.”

Andie and Ezra craned to look.  Five or six miles away to the south was a rising pillar of smoke.  “Correct me if I’m wrong,” Kris went on, “but aren’t most fires man-made?  And didn’t Melek’s people go north?”

Ezra cursed under his breath.  “They’re going to think we’re jinxes.”  Still, he cupped his hands and called Melek, who came.  Melek had a faint smile on his face that made Kris wonder if he’d figured out that they weren’t from this planet.

Still, he wasn’t happy with the smoke.  He called a name and the largest of the soldiers came to him.  Kris could see the soldier’s eyes narrow, and while she couldn’t understand any of the words, the meaning was clear enough: go see who’s there, don’t be seen and get right back.

The man pointed higher on the mountain and traced a line along a higher ridge that would lead south.  Melek nodded and then the man was loping along the ground, staying low.

Ezra pointed to the slice out of the sky and asked a question.  Again, Melek looked like he understood their confusion, and he and Ezra spent a half hour hashing over the concepts.

Finally he turned to Kris and Andie.  “Yes, it’s another planet, although he’s not sure if it’s larger or smaller.  In fact, the idea it’s round I guess is only a couple of hundred years old.  It is, he says, blue and white, dark green, and brown.  From what he says, the planet is tidally locked, unlike this one -- the same face always looks down from the sky.”

Andie nodded.  “I wondered why the day was so short here.  Typically, rotation periods slow, not speed up.  Jesus!  These fuckers are sure going to have it good when it comes time to motivate them to go into space.”

Ezra agreed.  “Probably.  The ‘Big Moon,’ as he calls it, rises in the west and sets in the east -- it takes about five and a half days before it’ll be out of sight again in the daytime.”

Andie sighed.  “I sure wish Kris’ laser range finder worked that far.  With an estimate of the timing of the orbit and a good number for the distance between the two bodies, I can work out their combined masses.  A guesstimate of the relative sizes and I’d know their real diameters and the force of gravity at the surface of each.

“I have a feeling this is a big planet,” Andie went on.  “You said their ancestors were supposed to have been at sea for three months.  If they were moving at the usual clip of a ship running before the wind, it might be anywhere from eight to twelve thousand miles they sailed.  That’s one big honking ocean.  And if the oceans store up heat like they do at home, and you have a hurricane that runs for days across warm waters -- you’d get a lot of Category 5 hurricanes -- like the one the other day.”

“I wonder if the storm came up behind a ship from wherever their homeland was and swept them far, far off course?” Kris suggested.

Ezra shook his head.  “Right now, it’s bad to speculate.  Until we get some solid information we shouldn’t do it.”

Kris suddenly felt like she’d been poked.  “This used to be a pirate hideout, right?”

“Well, outlaws at least,” Ezra agreed.

“We should move that boulder so that it almost blocks the entrance and be ready to move it to completely block it in case those people are hostile,” Kris suggested.  “We should do it before they send a scout here and see us going in and out.”

Ezra nodded.  “Good idea!”

“And, you have to think these bandits had to have some way for a lookout to secretly look outside, right?  They would have wanted to know if the coast was clear, wouldn’t they?”

Ezra laughed.  “I’m sure they would.  Are you sure you don’t want my job?  I should have thought of that already.  They had a lot of spy holes in Afghanistan, although sometimes they were pretty hard to find, even from the inside.”