But Qesem’s condition changed not a whit. Her appetite didn’t change, her belly didn’t grow, and she didn’t lose her conviction that she’d been pregnant just about nine months even as the months since she encountered the time warp turned into two and Pwalu brought in the harvest with help from his father, brother and neighbors, and helped them with their harvests in turn. Then they all set out to the market town with the cash crops, and Qesem eagerly told everyone they met that she was going to have a baby in a few days, and that their name would be Suialem if she were a girl, and Tikisha if he were a boy.
After they sold the harvest, and were preparing to return home, Pwalu stayed up late talking with his father and mother.
“Kumen said I should consult a scientist,” he said. “I asked around today and the nearest one anyone knows about lives in the ruins of the ancient city two hundred kilometers to the east. That’s much too long a journey for Qesem in her condition. Could she stay with you while I’m gone?”
“Of course, Pwalu,” his mother said. “But why don’t we loan you one of the carts, now that we don’t need it for the harvest, and have Qesem go with you? I’m sure the scientist can tell you more if he can actually examine her.”
“I thought so too, but the person I talked to said there aren’t any passable roads once you get within about ten kilometers of the city. So I’d have to leave the cart and proceed on foot, and again that’s too far for Qesem to walk, especially on rough ground. Besides, I don’t want to risk having the cart stolen while I’m finding my way into the ruins and finding the scientist’s house.”
“How about this,” his father said. “Take Qesem in the cart, and some money from the harvest. When you get to the last town or village before the roads end, find some reputable family and pay them something to keep the cart and ox for you and take care of Qesem while you go on to the ruins. Then ask the scientist to come back to the village with you – it won’t be a big imposition on him, like it would to ask him to come all the way to your farm.”
“That’s a good idea.”
So after asking his father to check on the farm and Shwaki to feed the turchicks, that was what they did. Qesem was a little vague about why they were traveling. As the days passed and they got farther from home, she was still eager to tell every passing stranger how they were going to have a baby any day now, and how they were going to stay with her cousin “in town” to be closer to the midwife. She continued saying some variation of this this even as they passed towns and villages Pwalu had never heard of, asking directions in each to the ruins of the ancient city and whether anyone knew more about exactly where in those vast ruins the scientist made his home.
Finally, after several days of cloudy, cooling weather and intermittent rain, they reached a village which was apparently not far from the ruins. “But nobody with any sense goes there,” the miller warned him. “So much dangerous technology lying around, ready to activate if anybody says boo, and nothing worth going there for – everything safe was already scavenged by my great-grandfather’s time, and everything left is dangerous. Including the scientist. He comes through the village on his way to town two or three times a year, and he’s as crazy as they come.”
“When do you think he’ll come next?” Pwalu was eager to avoid a trek through the wilderness and the ruins if he could avoid it.
The miller shrugged. “No telling. He doesn’t exactly come at predictable times, and his last visit was less than a month ago, so it probably won’t be for months.”
“I can’t wait that long. Does anyone know where in the ruins he lives? Can anyone guide me there?”
“Tiequ, the blacksmith, he goes to see him sometimes. I don’t know why. Maybe he can tell you, or even guide you.”
“Thank you. And another thing – do you know of anyone who might take care of my wife while I’m traveling?”
At the miller’s recommendation, Pwalu took Qesem to the local shrine of the Shining Ones, where the priestess, who was also the village midwife, said she’d take care of her while Pwalu was away.
Tiequ, the blacksmith, had some urgent jobs to forge and couldn’t spare the time to guide Pwalu through the wilderness and ruins to the scientist’s house. But he gave Pwalu detailed directions on how to get there and pick his way safely through the ruins, which he memorized and repeated back to be sure he had them correctly. Tiequ also had plenty of stories about the scientist’s wondrous machines and exotic plants, and the strange sights he’d seen in the ruins, which Pwalu wasn’t sure if he could believe. But he’d see for himself soon enough.
“One more thing,” he asked. “What is his name? Everyone I’ve spoken to just calls him ‘the scientist’.”
“Probably because it’s kind of hard to pronounce,” the blacksmith said. “It’s Gareth. A very old-fashioned name when he was young, he told me, and he lived through the War, so that tells you how old he is.”
“Go on!” Pwalu scoffed. “He can’t have lived through that, he must have just popped through a time warp and skipped over it.”
“Well, that’s what he told me, anyway. You’ll meet him soon and can decide for yourself whether to believe him.”
It was still overcast as Pwalu set out from the village. He passed the last farm a few kilometers from the village, and entered the forest as the road petered out into a barely-recognizable trail. He kept an eye out for the trail marks on the trees Tiequ had told him about, as well as for snakes, although it was probably getting cool enough now that they’d be in hibernation. If something bigger came after him, he’d put up as much of a fight as he could, but he was afraid he wouldn’t last long against a bear or pack of wolves or a bioweapon. And hopefully the bears and some of the bioweapons would be hibernating, too. He hoped they could get back to the farm before the first snow.
He came to a break in the trees, where there was an expanse of flat grey rock-like stuff with frequent cracks through which various plants grew, including some trees, but not as closely spaced as in the forest he’d just passed through. Not far ahead, there was about half of an old building, two grey exterior walls about twice his height and some traces of a couple of interior walls, and a grey floor that again was cracked in a couple of places, letting trees grow up through it. He went around it and continued deeper into the ruins, following Tiequ’s directions to avoid the buildings that still had active technology of some kind in them. As he got further into the dead city, the buildings got taller and closer together, though many were broken off partway up. Tiequ’s directions had him mostly skirting around the old city center, so the tallest buildings were always off to his left somewhere. Finally, he reached what he recognized from Tiequ’s directions must be the scientist’s house: a two-story building painted bright purple, the only one he’d seen that looked to be in good repair and the only one from which the paint hadn’t long since faded or flaked off. Its roof, like those he’d seen on some buildings whose roofs hadn’t totally collapsed, was of a shiny black substance. There was a garden plot in front, the plants having recently been harvested; Pwalu recognized glowbulb and corn and a couple of others, but not all.
He walked up the path between the rows of plants and rang the bell hanging beside the front door. It wasn’t long before the door swung open.
“Who are you?” Gareth asked rudely. He was a lighter-skinned man than anyone Pwalu had ever seen, with unkempt hair and beard the green of an unripe glowbulb, and taller than most of the people Pwalu knew by a good fifteen centimeters. He spoke with a slight accent, like a traveling merchant from a distant land. Or someone who’d fallen through a time warp, like Mohammed.
“I’m Pwalu son of Tyamu. Tiequ sent me. My wife –”
“Come in, sit down, tell me out of the cold.”
So he came in. The house was warm inside, but Pwalu didn’t see any sign of a fireplace or stove. The front room was almost as big as Pwalu and Qesem’s entire house (though they had planned to build on more rooms if they managed to have babies and if they survived their first year). There wasn’t as much strange technology as Pwalu had expected to see, the front room being filled mainly with furniture, books, and sculptures – people, familiar and unfamiliar animals, mostly smaller than life-size, although there was a full-scale statue of Tiequ. The room was lit by windows and glow-bulbs, the same as anyone else’s home. The only strange things he saw were a small table by one of the windows that was about half covered in books and half covered in some kind of green goo, viscous enough that the puddle just sat there, about two centimeters thick and half a meter wide.
“Have a seat,” Gareth said, pointing to one of the chairs. It had a strange look, kind of puffy-looking, and when Pwalu sat down he found it was cushioned on the seat and back like a feather pillow or mattress. It was the most comfortable he’d ever been sitting up. Gareth sat down in another chair beside the table; at first it seemed rude that he didn’t adjust the chair to face toward Pwalu, but then he turned and the seat turned on its base without making a sound. “So what about your wife?”
Pwalu explained what had happened. “So she goes on from day to day, always pregnant and never having the baby, and what’s worst of all is that she always thinks it’s been nine months. It doesn’t seem to confuse her about what time of year it is, she just tells me something different every time I ask her when she first noticed she was pregnant. At first she could also remember having not been pregnant when she left for the market that morning, kind of two opposite things at once, but after a day or so that ended and she just remembered having been pregnant for nine months and expecting the baby any day.”
“Hmm. I’ll have to do some reading. I don’t know if those books,” Gareth gestured at the bookshelf, “will have what I need, so I might need to consult the digital library, and for that we’ll need to wait for a sunny day.” Here he gestured to the puddle of goo on the table.
“Why do you need a sunny day to read, if you’ve got glowbulbs?” Pwalu couldn’t read himself, but the people he knew who could seemed to be able to read by the light of a glowbulb – or a window on an overcast day, for that matter. He wasn’t sure what “digital” meant, but he knew what a library was; one of the bigger towns they’d passed through had one, and its citizens were very proud of it. It was a room in the town hall full of books that people could come in and read, if they knew how.
“Not just to read,” Gareth said. “I need sunlight to power the gel computer. I’ve got a biofuel generator to power my other gadgets, but the gel computer isn’t made to take anything but sunlight – it was designed for sunnier climates than this, but all the electronic computers in the ruins stopped working centuries ago. And this series of cloudy and rainy days we’ve been having, plus all the number-crunching I’ve been doing, has really depleted it, so I won’t be able to use it again until the clouds break.”
Pwalu hadn’t understood all of that, but he thought he’d gotten the gist. “Can I stay here while I wait? Or should I go back to the village and return when we have a sunny day?”
“Eh…” Gareth looked conflicted. “You can stay,” he said finally. “I’ve got a spare bedroom that Tiequ sleeps in when he visits. And you might not have to wait; let’s see if I can figure anything out about your wife’s problem from the paper books.”
Gareth hadn’t said anything about payment. “What will I owe you?” Pwalu asked. “I turned my credit from the harvest into coins and brought it with me, and I’ve only spent a little on the journey; I’ve still got three hundred and sixty-two fhelun.”
Gareth waved a hand dismissively, already getting up and pulling a book down from the shelf. “Keep your money for now. You’ve brought me an interesting problem, and that’s worth more than all the money your farm will earn in ten years. Although depending on what I find out, we might need money to buy certain things in the nearest town, if they can be had.”
“What kind of things?”
“I’ll know when and if I figure out what’s wrong with your wife,” Gareth said irritably, putting the book back on the shelf after looking at a few pages in the back. He took another down and said, “Be quiet while I’m reading.”
“All right,” Pwalu said, and subsided. Gareth seemed more satisfied with this book, and sat down in his chair to read.
Pwalu wasn’t used to being bored. There was always work to do on the farm, but here he didn’t have anything to do but look around, and after half an hour he’d memorized the contents of the room and his mind had nothing to do but worry about Qesem and wonder whether Gareth would be able to figure out what was wrong. He didn’t want to interrupt Gareth to ask permission to look at the other rooms, and he doubted Gareth would allow it anyway.
When the dim cloud-filtered light from the window got even dimmer and vanished, Gareth finally seemed to notice the passage of time, and invited Pwalu to share his supper. Gareth cracked a glowbulb and led Pwalu into an adjoining room, this one containing a lot more of the technology Pwalu had expected, most of it sitting on sideboards. There was also a large metal cabinet and a biofuel-burning stove. On one of the sideboards was a prettily decorated pot connected to the wall with some kind of white cord, with some knobs on the front. Gareth fiddled with one of the knobs and took off the lid, releasing a delicious odor. He served out two bowls of some kind of stew; Pwalu recognized potato, onion, meatfruit, and beet, but there were other flavors he didn’t recognize.
They sat down at a table in the corner of the room, and Gareth kept reading during the meal, so after Pwalu finished his stew and had memorized the contents of this room, he was left to twiddle his thumbs.
Finally Gareth seemed to give up on that book, and went to get another one from the shelf. Pwalu took advantage of the interruption to ask, “Do you want to go to the village where Qesem is staying and examine her?”
“What good would that do?” Gareth asked irritably. “I’m not a doctor or midwife. I don’t know enough of what a normal pregnancy looks like to tell what’s wrong by looking, and it sounded like the midwife couldn’t tell what was wrong either. It’s not like I’ve got a working ultrasound or anything. But if I can find something in the paper books or ebooks about a case similar to your wife’s, I may be able to solve the problem.”
“All right,” Pwalu said, cowed. “Then may I ask where I’m to sleep?”
“Oh, right. This way.” With the book he’d just taken from the shelf tucked under his arm, Gareth led the way to a smaller room with a bed and a few glowbulbs in a basket beside it. “You ready to crash?”
“Yeah, it’s been a long day, and I rarely stay up this late. Good night, and thank you so much for your help.”
“Don’t thank me until I figure it out,” Gareth said, and left him worrying even more that the scientist wouldn’t be able to figure out what was wrong.
I love all your stories but I'm super extra excited for both this and CC&C!!