The Gaming Outpost

The sun beat down on my neck, and chopped down another joxanne weed with my mattock. The I took the Yankee off my bearskin belt, and stabbed the two spear-like tongs fixed into the hot wooden hilt into the soil next to the white, weed root.

It felt as if I had made solid contact, so I flexed the two tongs, and they snapped together, then apart, cutting off the weed root a foot beneath the surface.  I pulled it out, and tossed it into the wheelbarrow near me, and slung the Yankee back on a belt hook made of a bear tooth.

I kept on, going up the third row, protecting my potatoes, and carrots, and turnips, from the wildly growing weeds that could overshadow a good plant in a couple of days, and deprive it of much needed sunlight.  Occasionally, I moved the wheelbarrow that I had ‘invented’ in this new universe.

Farmers in the Morataki Valley called them Coopercarts as my last name was Cooper.  First is Lane.  Pleased to meetcha’.  I got to get back to the weeds in the garden below my log cabin.

Hot, dry soil trickled between my bare toes, as I continued the unending war of Man versus the Green.  Those who have never lived in a temperate rain forrest like the Morotaki do not understand.  There is no five hundred year wait while trees come back, not even twenty.  If I left this cleared ten acres of land  I owned by right of clearing in the woods of the North Morotaki, why’d I’d come back to see a tree poking through the roof of my cabin, and it’d be surrounded by its forty foot tall kin.

Coming toward lunch time, I heard a whistling from the Lenton Trail which ran past my property between Lenton and Digsvilled Docks.  Being a cautious sort, I went and got my laser rifle that I had disguised with a wood overcoat as a bolt action rifle.

But up came Kit  with a wide grin on his face.

“Just in time for lunch.” He sang out, pleased as I was to see him too.  Kit, or Catamount Willis (for his father had killed one trying to sneak into the birthing chamber the very hour Kit was born), did not look like Death’s Angel to bear so fearsome a name, although he was a handy fellow in a fight.  We were best friends for the last four years.

“Why yes.” I said gravely, my mouth twitching. “I do seem to have set too much to cooking so I might as well spare it with an indigent beggar coming by.”

He walked up to me, and swatted me with his floppy hat.

“For that, I’ll require you to wait untl after the meal for my news, and I’ll want a dessert, too, my good man.”

I made for the well, and he pumped my lone wooden bucket full since only his legs were sore from long-walking.  I was all over sore from weeding.  It went over my head, and instantly I felt much refreshed, and praised God for cool water in a loud voice.  Twere silly, but I meant it too.

He filled the next bucket for himself, and half went over his head, and the other half we shared out with the metal cups we had tied to our belts.

“So, any new, worldwalker?” He asked me as we walked up the last bit of rise to my cabin.  I sensed about with my scriff sense, and felt nothing.  I had told him about three years ago who I truly was, for its a thing, a man alone, and I was very far from my hometime and place, and also out here in the woods far from my fellows, well, you get to treasure and trust your companions more than you did when you were surrounded by a wealth of them.

So, I had only a few friends here, but each one of them knew who I really was, and I would trust my life and my gold and my cabin to them without quibble.

Kit began to spill the news of the town as I filled the plates with a good bear stew, with beans, and the last of the withered carrots.  We would get no more until our carrot harvests were ready later in the summer.  We were entering the Lean Time, after our stored food was gone, and before the summer first fruits came in.  And here in the very fertile Morotaki we were lucky (and I knew it for I had searched a bit before settling here.) for some places the Lean Time started in April and ran to September.  Here we only had a month of it.

Course it helped that Kit and I were unmarried.  A man gets married, and now he has to produce food for his wife (who although helpful just isn’t as strong or enduring) and a whole passel of kids (who also work, but whose nature is inclined to want to head toward the creek to swim rather than weed or toss stones.)  Add in the occasional passing relative, and its a lot harder to be a married man than a single man, as long as you don’t break your leg.

Kit brought me news from town, and I fed him. We also checked on each other on opposing weekends to see if the other was laid up.

And as to the urges a young man in good health gets, I found four things. One, now that I was doing a job I was proud of, that did not seem to rule my mind the way it had. Two, the Germans were right.  Near work a Jew to death on barely adequate or not food, and he does not have the energy to get angry (or romantic). Three, well, I have standards, and after a moment of loving conversation a few years back, I confided in Molly Stazin now Molly Mitck, that I could not have children, why all the decent girls would not even talk to me.  The only ones who would were the, ahem, sluts (and in a farming community where everyone has to pull their weight or die, that conveys a much greater disapproval than in the soft modern world I had been born in.)

There morality meant you consigned your kids to years of therapy after you divorced their mother.  Here it meant people died.  There, money had shielded people from some of the damage they did to each other and themselves, although not by all means, all.  Here, I earned three gold coins, and two silver in a year if I worked like crazy, and was lucky.

And the last thing, well, jonxxhan weed is also known as the bachelor’s friend.  We each took a bite.  Kit could have no children and thus had no prospects because he had caught the Purple Fever as a child.  I was an immortal verser, and some thought the life potential in that was caught back up inside the lifeforce of the verser.

“I saw a blacksmith in Waterton.”

“Yeah.” I leaned back in my workday wooden chair at the table, while Kit had the nice one with the corn husk padding in the pillow case for the seat.

“He was selling Waterton Wagons.”

I felt a stitch of indignation hit me, and then commanded it to be quiet.

“Just like the Coopercart. I never knew why…”

“You know why.” I said with a shake of my head.

“You could have raised the money for the business license from the Northern Court, and now you’d be rich, selling Carts. Instead….” He shrugged and took another bite of beans.

“Now is not then, Kit. No one knew me.  You and I were just beginning to be friends. The farmers round here saw me as a stranger.  How was I going to get them to give me a quarter of their yearly income?”

Its one of the things that makes a subsistence culture downright reactionary.  Make a mistake, and people die.  Trying a new crazy idea can kill people.  Its not a culture friendly to innovation.

“But…” He began, and I just shook his head.  If he was to travel to other worlds with me, as I hoped, he needed to be able to see beyond the Moro Valley, and beneath its surface.

“Rightly so, too.  So I made carts, and gave them away. Only asking for food while I worked, and a bit of wood.”

“Lot of them took you up on it too.”

“And enough saw how useful it was that they came to me, showed me this land, and pitched in when they could to show me how to farm, and cut timber, and build a right nice cabin.”

Kit blinked.

“I came here with very little clue how to do any of that, Kit.  I was, for goodness’ sakes, a golf caddy, which is the most relevant experience I had for this world before then.  Training to be a jet fighter mechanic in the USAF doesn’t really help that much, except for the survival training, with being a cabin farmer.”

He shrugged.

“Besides,” I said going in for the killer stroke. “Probably a Northern courtsman would have stole it from me.”

And then Kit looked at me with sudden knowledge flooding his face.

“You planned all this, years ago, saw it before it happened.”

I shrugged, a bit pleased at the awe in my friend’s face.

“I guessed. I hoped. But yeah. And the way I see it, others like that blacksmith are sure to rise.  And then I can feed him my next idea, but this one I’ll make him pay good gold for, after he makes himself rich by trusting my coopercart.”

He just shook his head.

“You see dreams like others see reality.”