New Novel
Chapter 36: What Oren Pulled Down

Chapter 36: What Oren Pulled Down

Oren chose the line in about four seconds and it was not where Leon would have put it.

The obvious break was the failing drainage channel. It ran east to west across the slope below the granary, a metre wide and half a metre deep, already cut, already there, and Leon had been looking at it since the wind turned and had been waiting for somebody to say it.

Oren walked past it and kept going, forty metres further up, and stopped at a line of nothing.

Then he pointed at the old storage frame and said one word, and it was not a word Leon knew, and he did not need it.

That frame was the last thing standing from the structure that had come down in the retaining-wall collapse. It had survived that. It had been repaired twice and reroofed once and it was the oldest built thing on the terrace, and Oren had been maintaining it since before Kharun’s beard, and it sat directly in the middle of the ground he had just chosen.

Ket looked at him.

"The roof first," Oren said. "Then the two uphill posts. Backward, not over."

Ket went and got the ropes.

They took it down in nine minutes. Not by pushing it over, which is what Leon would have done, because pushing it over would have laid it across the slope in the fire’s path and given the fire a bed of split dry timber a metre deep to walk through. They took the roof off first and threw it downhill. Then they cut two posts on the uphill side and hauled the whole frame backward and away, so that when it came down it came down behind the line, on ground that had already been cleared, where it would be somebody’s problem tomorrow instead of everybody’s problem in nine minutes.

Leon stood in the smoke and watched a man dismantle forty years of his own work in the correct order, at speed, without one second of hesitation, and understood two things at once.

One was that Oren had not chosen the channel because a ditch is a firebreak only if the fuel stops at it, and the grass ran straight across the channel on both sides and would have carried the fire over it like a bridge.

Two was that Leon had been about to say so out loud, in front of everybody, in his forty words.

***

He carried timber for two hours.

That was all. That was his entire contribution to the worst day of the year.

He was a hundred and ninety-six centimetres tall with reconstructed bone density and a cardiopulmonary system built for this atmosphere, and what the settlement needed from him was to pick up the heavy end and keep picking it up after everybody else had stopped being able to, and so he did that, on Oren’s line, until his hands stopped closing properly.

Nobody thanked him for it and nobody was going to. Bren had been at the racks. Sila had gone into a burning frame for the strap she was carrying and come out with her eyebrows gone. Ket had opened his forearm on a rope. The terrace was full of people doing the thing they could do, and being able to lift more than most was not a distinction here, it was a job.

Twice he was close enough to the flat stone to break off and go for the panel.

Both times there was a beam on his shoulder and a man on the other end of it.

It held at twenty to five.

The line held because there was nothing behind it, and there was nothing behind it because fourteen people had spent forty minutes making sure of that, and because the wind that had turned north-east at twenty past turned again at half past and came down the slope instead of up it.

"It will turn back," she had said, at twenty past, with three birds going over. "That is a shoulder of wind off the ridge. It does not hold."

Tala had said it would.

She had told Kharun at twenty past, off three birds and the shape of the smoke column, that the turn was a shoulder of wind coming off the ridge and that it would not hold, and Kharun had committed everything to a line that only made sense if she was right. He had not asked her twice. He had not asked anybody else.

Fire came up against four hundred metres of bare dirt, and reached, and did not find anything, and began to go out from the front backward.

It took another two hours to die properly and nobody went to sleep.

***

Doran gave the count at dusk, standing up, which he never did.

Nine drying frames. Six burned, three pulled down and salvageable. Of the twelve days of dried fish and meat on those frames, Fel Longline and two others had got four days’ worth clear in armloads before the fourth frame took.

Seven days gone.

Their store had held twenty-five days against thirty-two days to the fish run. It now held eighteen.

Doran said the number and then said it again in a slightly different construction, the way he did when he wanted to be sure a thing had landed, and Leon watched Veya’s hands move on the cord and understood that a knot was being tied for it.

"Fourteen days short," Doran said, and sat down.

Oren’s old storage frame was gone.

So was the eastern palisade section. That stretch had been closed with a temporary frame since the Styracosaurus juvenile went through it, and it had burned out completely, posts and all, along nine metres. It was no longer a gap with something across it. It was an opening you could walk four people through abreast, and Kharun stood looking at it for a long time and did not say anything at all.

Nesh had burns to both forearms, red and blistering, and would keep the hands. Nayra put him under the fourth mark and wrote what she used and how much and at what hour, because she wrote everything now.

Sila’s eyebrows would come back.

Ket’s forearm took nine stitches and he watched the whole thing and asked her twice why she was pouring the water over it first.

And on the flat stone above the water chain, Panel A had taken four embers.

Two had burned out on the frame. One had gone through the polymer sheet at the edge and one had landed flat in the middle of the fractured cell string and sat there long enough to melt a hole the size of a thumbnail through the encapsulation and into the cell beneath.

Leon carried it down to the lamp shelter and set it on the bench and tested it in the last of the light with the multimeter, which was the only instrument on this continent that could tell him the answer.

One string still made current. At noon, flat, in full sun, the whole panel now gave nineteen percent of what it had given on the day it came out of the module, and it had been sixty-one at the last measurement.

Nothing else would come back, because a solar cell is not a thing you fix with a file and a length of copper wire. Panel B was intact. Panel B was now, for any practical purpose, the entire electrical supply of human civilisation on this side of the continent, and Panel B had been made in a factory that would not exist for two hundred million years.

He wrote the reading in the book under the seen-mark and did not write anything after it.

***

Kharun’s rule came the next morning and it was not put to the council.

"The racks go outside the wall," Kharun said. "All of them. Thirty paces past the line, on the bare stone by the lower landing."

Nobody spoke.

"There is nothing there to catch, and nothing behind them."

It meant carrying every fish thirty paces further, twice, every day, for as long as there was a settlement here. It meant somebody standing out there in the dark with them. It meant that the smoke would no longer keep the flies off the drying ground because the drying ground was now somewhere else.

Doran worked out what it cost in hours before the sun was properly up. It came to a little over two full days of labour every month, forever.

Nobody argued.

Leon sat on the terrace edge with his hands wrapped in Nayra’s linen and looked at the black ground where nine frames had been, and did the arithmetic he had been avoiding since dusk.

Eighteen days of food. Thirty-two days to the fish.

Two ridges north, in ground the fire had never reached, forty square metres of turned earth had come through the afternoon without anybody once thinking about it.

Nine days planted. Nothing up yet.