Liberty's Heirs

Chapter 15

"There was no way I would have known what to do with that guy even if I could have lugged him all the way to the Inn,"  Blion told himself guiltily as he walked swiftly along the tattered but still workable concrete and asphalt.  Sparrows were chirping away in the heath beside the roadway.

At least it wasn't hot and bright.  The breakfast had been as terrible as anything else in this dreadful island but his belly was now full and he even had a piece of bread in his coat that the inn keeper had given him in exchange for a copper coin.  It was fairly clear that the discs were valued based on the metal from which they were composed.  Gold was the most valuable, then silver, then copper.  It wasn't clear if the decorations meant anything but the numbers on the coins did seem to have some bearing on how much the inn keeper valued them.

Lots and lots of agriculture.  And all of it seemed so poorly done.  Instead of agrobots specially designed for the task, there were humans in the fields.  Cows pulled wood and metal contraptions meant to move the earth for the planting of seeds.  The orchards reminded him a bit of home except these were apple trees, a rare thing back in Tataviam.  Once in a while there would be a patch of forest to pass through, it would be neither very extensive nor very dense.  It could be discerned by the stumps that people cut down the trees for their primitive uses, perhaps for something as extravagant as combustion.

He chanced upon a pink-skinned, blond haired man coming in the other direction pushing a two-wheeled wooden cart full of hay who paused briefly to tip his green felt cap at Blion and wish him a "Good day."  Blion responded to him assuming correctly that "good day" and a slight bow of the head would make a polite reply.

Shortly thereafter Blion passed up a man walking alongside a four wheeled wagon pulled by a donkey.  A plump woman followed close behind.  She had ratty hair, brown streaked with gray, a tattered purple dress, and a limp caused by something wrong with her right leg.  The wagon was piled high with goods: pots, pans, shovels, liquids in glass containers, fabric, and many other things Blion didn't understand at all.  The wheels were a novelty, as peculiar as anything loaded on the car.  Something right out of the distant past.  Nothing in Blion's society had them.  Animals walked on legs, robots walked on legs.  The closest thing that there was to a wheel was the rotors that propelled and, to some small extent, lifted a vacikarce.  Those rotors were also an anachronism.  Mac Spencer had implied, though not directly stated, that vacikarces didn't really need them.  There was some other propulsion technology at work, but he hadn't provided the details.

As interesting as all the other items on the wagon were, it was more interesting that there was a clear dividing line between the objects that were produced in the time of the Ancients, before the war, and the ones produced by these sad, primitive people.  The wagon had wooden wheels but its chassis was made of metal to tolerances that to the naked eye were indistinguishable from the that of modern machines.  The wagon was a clever hybrid of modern British carpentry and Ancient precision engineering.  The whole of society seemed to be of the same hybridization: old and new cobbled together somehow.  The houses and barns were made of Ancient walls with thatch roofs.    Blion felt a twinge pity for them.  The vestiges of the Ancients could not be relied upon to last forever.  These items would eventually wear out and then they would be back to wood and pig iron.  Then again, these people's ancestors chose such a fate for their descendants by refusing to submit to the Aye.  If those ancestors had just given in, their descendants would have been Blion's people and never known hardship.

Gradually, the farms thinned out and up ahead was another forest area.  Pines, birches, eucalyptus, and other trees made a tall dense thicket, their trunks and branches clad in green moss.  The sunlight faded considerably when Blion entered it.  It reminded him of the forest where the young man had been accosted.  He kept his eyes wide open and his hand fixed firmly on his staff.  The trees had overgrown and demolished the fringes of the road and left it just narrow enough to push a wagon through.