FGC #16 - First World Problems

All o'er their phones, all heads are bowed.
They walk and they ignore the crowd.
They stop to concentrate, ignore
The others, who, behind, before,
Protest "It should not be allowed!"

Sometimes they crash, minds in the cloud
Unknowing what is all around
In quest, as ever, but what for?
All o'er their phones.

With such as this they're now endowed,
Distracted, and of this quite proud,
As though someone were keeping score
Of how much data from the core
They have consumed, with all heads bowed
All o'er their phones.

FGC #15 - Ad Astra

Faster-than-light was a dream we were still nowhere near realizing, and if we were patient people, the great dome of Tranq City would eventually have been buried under regolith dust, unpeopled, wouldn't it?

So, as the least patient of us contemplated the great hollowed-out corpses of asteroids being created by the miners who occasionally graced our spaceport (and sometimes contributed to our gene pool), some of us got an idea. Then another got another idea. Soon the ideas overwhelmed us all and hijacked any other purpose we might have had.

It wasn't enough to have colonized Luna. It wasn't enough to have outposts on Mars, Eros, Ceres. Our species would still die when our star did, whether it was after the long wait for it to burn out or in an instant of improbable cosmic disaster catching us with our systemic pants down.

As had been done with the settlement of Luna itself, our mission was best presented as a fait accompli. It was easy to keep the secrets from the Earthbound; all they cared about was power for their gadgets and their medical devices and their amusements, fuel cells to store that power for when they wanted it.

As far as they were concerned, we were the Molochs and they the Eloi, and that was fine with them.

It was fine with us, too.

And so one day the great polar region of Mare Frigoris opened up and discharged its secret contents, great unfathomable rings of metal, dragged clear of Luna's gravity by tug rockets, then linked together and dragged far out past the orbit of Mars. A few Earthbound astronomers noticed this and tried to raise an outcry, but their voices were lost in the din of decadence that Terran culture had become long before Tycho Powe and Spudis Spiegel had escaped it in that home-built tin can of theirs.

I am proud to be a descendant of Tycho Powe's, and while some insisted to me that my heritage should have led to a more exalted role than that I fulfill now, I'm just excited to be aboard, me and my little green friends (some of them lineal descendants of Tomatosaurus rex, actually) and my wife. Our child is due to be the first born in space, in just a few months. I wonder what he – she? -- will be like.

Reedy Powe never tired of reading her ancestor's journal, nor had her predecessors from the look of the thing. Despite the care everyone had taken with it, it was falling apart, smudged, barely legible, treasured nowadays more as a link to the otherwise unimaginable past than as reading material from which something could be learned.

She resisted the urge to give the decrepit notebook a friendly pat and carefully stowed it again in her family's vault, expertly maneuvering there from the reading station despite her pregnancy. Zero gee was so forgiving, not that she'd known anything else, really.

They'd stopped bothering with spinning for artificial gravity some generations ago. Reedy did not know when exactly the decision was taken. No one could, and it was only scholars like her who knew that once the practice had been common, ancestors fearing atrophied muscles and worse.

The bicycles and treadmills they'd also employed against this had long ago been disassembled and cannibalized to build other things, stranger things, things that Marcus Aurelius Powe, the author of the book Reedy had been enjoying, would never have recognized, but which Reedy and her generation accepted as their patrimony along with the enclosed rocky world which was their only home as they hurtled toward their destination.

Reedy worried about all of this, sometimes, in the night cycle. Captain Cross had announced at the last convocation that they were less than a year away from their destination, a small, rocky world orbiting a red dwarf star first seen by the Kepler probe the Earthbound had built and set to looking for exoplanets. With this destination in mind, the lights within the collared asteroids that were the Ship had been tuned to match that of their eventual sun, only for a few hours a day for the generation who had left Luna for the stars and for the plants in the enormous grow houses that had been scraped right off that world's "dark" side and attached firmly to the rock, but gradually for longer and longer as plants and people learned to live in such strange light.

Reedy had known only the red and never the white light, had grown up feeding on plants and animals carefully nurtured to adapt to the new conditions as they had been to one-sixth Earth gravity on Luna and no gravity out in the asteroid belt, had grown up, too, knowing that she and hers would be the first Ship-born humans in hundreds of years to stand (assisted by an exoskeleton, but still, to stand) on a planet's surface, to know up and down, to have to climb and walk and reach instead of merely floating.

And the child kicking in her belly would grow up knowing nothing else. This child would walk upright, would take wind and sky as Reedy had taken rocky walls -- for granted.

This child would be human like those they'd left behind were still human, trapped at the bottom of a gravity well but living just the same.

Reedy stroked her belly fondly, looking out across the vast main cavern of the Ship where against the far wall opposite, a young man fiddled with his prototype exoskeleton. Lowell was one of Reedy's baby's possible fathers -- not that anyone cared about this much, but he was by far Reedy's favorite of her lovers – kind and courteous as all the Ship-born had to be, but also, Reedy thought, a genuinely pleasant person, eager to share the discoveries he made through his tinkering with anyone who cared to ask about them.

His face brightened as Reedy, unconsciously flicking her wrist to get a last bit of propulsion from the guide-ropes joining her area and his, glided across toward him .

“How’s my girl,” he asked, eyeing her belly. “It’s going to be soon, isn’t it?”

“A week or two,” Reedy agreed.

“You sure timed that interestingly, didn’t you?”

“Well, I didn’t time it at all,” Reedy said, laughing a little. “But if I’d known how close we were to – what did Cross call it? Landfall? – I might have shown a little more restraint, yeah.”

“Ha ha, I bet! But hey, this one will maybe do the best out of all of the kids when we hit ground. He – she? – will never know anything else.”

“Kind of what I was thinking!”

“May I?” Lowell was reaching for her belly, exposed and round, poking out of her coverall.

“Of course! You might have earlier. Anytime.”

“Just, I remember someone complaining once, about how no one respected her space while she was pregnant. She was everybody’s property.”

“Yeah, there’s that, but go ahead. No, come on, if you’re going to, do it!” Reedy grabbed Lowell’s tentative hand and pressed it firmly. “S/he’s kicking right now. Feel it?”

Lowell broke away, startled, the motion propelling both of them apart. “Oops!” Lowell spun around to catch his foot on a loop in the wall for an anchor, and stretched out to catch Reedy’s foot before she could drift too far away and crash. It was a movement so natural to both of them that ordinarily they didn’t think about it.

Reedy read the look on Lowell’s face. “Yeah,” she said.

“Wow.”

“But so, show me this?”

“Sure! You want to try it on?”

Lowell helped her into his creation, a little anxiously, seeing already more places where the contraption was going to chafe. He grabbed wads of fabric stuffed with who-knew-what and placed them strategically. The frame already sported many such pads.

“Okay, try moving around.”

Reedy did her best to pantomime walking as she understood it, scissoring her legs back and forth as she held on to a loop in the wall with one hand.

“No, it’s more…”

“More what?” Reedy asked, still flailing and trying not to giggle.

“It’s not just your legs.”

“How do you know that?”

“Study.” Lowell frowned, watching her. “We really need to practice with these. Practice properly.”

“Well, didn’t they used to spin these?” Reedy gestured at the rock and metal all around them “To give an illusion of weight? Maybe it’s time to do that again.”

“YES! I gotta…”

“Go. Captain Cross is over in the reading area where I was.”

Lowell bunched up his legs to launch himself across, then paused awkwardly, looking over at Reedy.

“Go! I can get myself out of this. Not completely helpless, you know.”

Lowell smiled and lunged in for a kiss. “Bye.”

“Bye,” Reedy laughed, already fiddling with some straps.

Within a week, Captain Cross had not only got the ancient spinning mechanisms working (with a lot of help from the Scotts, the Melzers and the Lermontovs) but had drawn up a mandatory training schedule, with orders to Lowell and his crew to get more exoskeletons made as quickly as possible.

Weird as it was to have Lowell’s invention caging Reedy's limbs and forcing her spine into a position that felt profoundly unnatural, it was nothing to trying to move with a heretofore unknown force tugging at those limbs and spine -- and suddenly unwieldy belly -- pulling them in a singular direction. The discomfort was extraordinary. Was this what it was going to be like all the time?

“Stop your giggling,” she snapped. Delilah was watching, a bowl of fresh pea pods tethered to her even as it rested in her lap. Old habits died hard, and Delilah was the oldest person on the Ship.

“Oh, let an old woman have her fun.”

“I don’t see you taking a turn in this monstrosity. They building you one special?”

“I take it you haven’t heard,” Delilah said around a mouthful of vegetables.

“Heard what?”

“Us oldtimers ain’t going down.”

“Ain’t going…?” Reedy stopped struggling with the metal surrounding her.

“Nope.”

“I’m confused.”

“Ain’t going down onto the planet.”

“WHAT?”

“Oh, think about it, girl. We don’t stand a chance down there. I have to have help moving around as it is. So does the captain.”

Tears began to pool in Reedy’s eyes. She twitched at the bizarre sensation of their falling down her cheeks. “But that means…”

“Oh, it will be all right. We’ll just stay on Ship, here. Live out our lives, last one’ll take ‘er down into an ocean when he’s sick of being alone.”

“But…”

“Pretty sure that was always the plan, honey.” Delilah reached over and gave the exoskeleton a pat. She couldn’t reach Reedy herself. “Lived my whole life on this ship, just like my ma and grandma and great-grandma on back. At least I’ll die in sight of the new sun.”

Reedy smiled wanly at this.

“Now you get back to your exercising.”

“Yes ma’am!”

“Must be hell with that belly of yours. When you due, now?”

“Any day, I think.”

Delilah tsked.

Reedy’s next turn in the exoskeleton was more eventful. She was getting better at moving around in it, and with a liberal application of some aloe vera gel at points of contact that chafed despite Lowell’s padding, was more comfortable doing so.

She was alone in the collar when chaos erupted. Voices called out, hooting and cheering, and there was the sound of applause.

“What’s going on?” Reedy shouted. And, when no one answered her, “Hey!”

Lowell came, laughing, through the darkness. Without explanation, he began helping her out of the exoskeleton.

“Come on,” he said when she was free.

“What’s going on?”

“I don’t want to spoil it for you.”

Tugging on the guide-ropes to follow him, Reedy approached the crowd gathered around one of Ship’s few portholes.

“Hey, let her through? She hasn’t seen yet,” Lowell said. The crowd parted obligingly and soon Reedy saw the source of the commotion.

“Our sun,” she said. “That’s our new sun, isn’t it?”

And a moment later, “Ow, ow, fucking ow!”

The newest addition to the proud Powe line had a fine sense of drama. Reedy had just gone into labor.

*

“You’re getting good at this!” Lowell explained, watching a slim-again Reedy going through her paces in the exo.

“Watch this,” Reedy said. “Here, chuck that apple piece onto the ground, would you?”

Lowell complied, and with pride Reedy bent over, exo and all, picked up the fruit, and popped it into her mouth.

“Wow!” Lowell said. “Really good. Did you see that, Astra? Did you see your mommy pick up the apple?”

Reedy’s daughter, all of six months old, was more interested in Lowell’s finger than in her mother’s accomplishments. To Reedy’s disappointment, she looked more like Mikhail than Lowell, but that meant Reedy was still perfectly free to enjoy as much of Lowell’s company as she wanted, in every way she wanted -- and Lowell was far more interested in the child anyway.

“Now we’re spinning, we can’t play ‘toss the baby’,” Reedy noted. “That’s always so fun.”

“Astra’s got more interesting things in store for her, yes she does,” Lowell said, smiling at the baby. “And we can still do this. Astra likes this, don’t you, Astra?” Lowell was now holding the girl by her underarms and swooping her around. The baby gurgled happily.

“Here, give her to me,” Reedy said, reaching out with exo’d arms for her daughter. The harness squeaked at the motion. The baby began to cry.

“She’s scared of the harness,” Lowell observed.

“Well, she needs to get used to it,” Reedy said, more sharply than she’d intended.

Lowell wrapped the baby in blankets she didn’t really need for warmth, trying to pad her against the discomfort of being held by a mother in a metal harness, and passed her over. Reedy peeled down one side of her coverall top to feed her daughter, pivoting at the waist awkwardly to rock her. The exo squeaked more.

“Here, I’ve got some oil,” Lowell said. Soon the squeaking and the crying had both stopped. Reedy began to pace back and forth in the small space laid out for exo practice.

“Wish there was somewhere to sit down in here,” she said.

“Well, this area is supposed to be for exercise.”

“It’s supposed to be for practice.”

“Same thing.”

“No, not really. Shh, Astra. It’s okay. It’s okay.”

“She knows,” Lowell said. “She’s a lot easier to calm down than my little sisters were. Than any baby I’ve seen, really.”

“You know, I think you’re right. Huh.”

“I think it’s because she’s the first one who’s been born to something normal for us.”

Reedy smiled. “Good point. The first,” she whispered to her daughter, “But not the last.”

Lowell’s eyebrows shot up.

“No, that’s not what I meant, stupid.”

“Oh.”

*

Astra was far less calm when the most momentous moment of her little life – of any of the Ship-born’s lives – took place a few weeks later. The Melzers and the Hudocks had done their best to make the shuttles they’d built to bring the Ship-born to their new home as comfortable as possible, but quarters were close and the excitement made everyone sweat, which made everyone stink, which made toddlers whine and parents speak sharply and Astra cry and cry even before the shuttle carrying her and her mother and her father and any number of other father-like figures down to the surface of Home fired up its engines.

“It’s going to be okay,” Reedy cooed anxiously.

“Shut her up,” Mikhail said from the pilot’s seat at the front of the shuttle. “I need to concentrate.”

“He does not,” Lowell muttered. The shuttle’s course had been carefully programmed by Captain Cross; Mikhail was just there in case the terrain at the landing site wasn’t as smooth as it looked from orbit.

“Shh,” Reedy said.

Delilah floated into the passenger area. With departure imminent, the spin had been shut off forever for the comfort of those who would be staying behind.

“All right, honey, give her to me,” Delilah said, taking the baby into her arms.

“She’s going to be all right, isn’t she?” Reedy couldn’t tamp down the anxiety, the near-panic.

“Better than if you just held her in your arms, certainly,” Delilah said, settling Astra into a seat specially fashioned for her and strapping her in tightly. Astra liked Delilah, so had been happy to go to her, but had protested at being put into the safety seat until Delilah turned it around so she could see her mother and Lowell.

“There she is, there’s momma,” Delilah said. Astra struggled in her tiny restraints, finally giving up with a frustrated little grunt.

“It’s going to be fine,” the old woman said, turning to Reedy. “You know that.”

“I know, grandma. Just…”

“I’d come if I could, but I’m just too damned old. I waited too long to have yer ma and then…” Delilah trailed off, wouldn’t speak of it, and neither would Reedy. “Good bye, honey. We can still radio after all, so it’s not really good bye, is it?”

“I guess not.”

“You take care of them, Lowell, you hear? And make sure this girl has more babies. Lots more babies. Us Powes are good breeders, with a little help.”

“I’ll do what I can, ma’am,” he said. “And, uh, so will everybody else, of course.”

“See that at least one of her babies is yours,” Delilah said sternly. “I want a red-haired great grandchild.”

“Everybody’s hair is red now,” Reedy said, sticking her tongue out.

“Some’s redder than others,” Delilah said. “Now I gotta git. You take care.”

The other oldtimers crowded into the shuttle said their last good-byes and floated out one by one, until it was only the colonists, who would soon be struggling to start a new life on a new world, were left.

Without any further ceremony, the rocket fired, and for the first time, Reedy and Lowell and the other soon-to-be colonists saw their home from the outside, the first humans to do so in hundreds of years. Five huge rocks, joined together by enormous metal collars, drifted silently away from them in the shuttle’s windows, until the craft turned away to enter Home’s atmosphere. Soon nothing was visible through those windows but fire and light.

Astra cried at the rumbling, the vibrations, the shaking as they made their descent. She wasn’t the only one. Reedy and Lowell clasped hands, squeezing tightly. Generations ago, they might have prayed, but now they simply clung to each other and watched Astra, anxious and afraid and sick to their stomachs, profoundly glad they’d obeyed Captain Cross’s orders to fast the night before this launch.

A lurch. Another. Earthbound humans who flew from place to place on their limited little world were accustomed to atmospheric turbulence, but that commonplace was a frightening new reality for the colonists who had never known rollercoasters or cars or anything but floating gently, insulated and safe in a cocoon of rock and metal and long-recycled air. Many screamed; many wept; all retched.

And then, with a mighty thump, they touched down. And bounced. And touched down again. And skidded across the ground of Home for hundreds of kilometers. Later they would discover, to their extreme distress, that one of the shuttles had gone over a cliff and plummeted hundreds of meters, killing almost everyone aboard, but now, right now, there was just the sense of gradually decreasing velocity and the tug of gravity that both was and was not like what they’d managed to simulate in space.

At last the craft came to a stop.

“Are we all all right?” Mikhail bellowed from the cockpit.

Variations on “Yes” sounded all around. Even Astra was silent, round-eyed and still, paralyzed with fear and panic but somehow sensing that, as her mother always liked to tell her, things were going to be okay.

Reedy and Lowell struggled out of their safety harnesses, exos already donned in preparation for the moment, coming very soon, when they would be needed on the surface of Home. Opinions differed as to how soon – if ever – these could be discarded, but for unloading cargos and building shelter (such a foreign, old-fashioned word) and starting their new lives, the Ship-born’s frail, unhabituated bodies would need the support these ungainly things provided, replacing never-developed muscles and supporting spindly, fragile bones.

Lowell hoped that in time his and Reedy’s bodies would get used to their new burdens. And as for Astra…

Reedy’s tears streaked down, down, down her face to see it as the hatch opened and they took their first squeaky steps onto the surface of Home, Astra struggling in her arms.

“Put her down,” Lowell said. Reedy shot him a funny look, remembered what “down” was, and shrugged.

And then her tears renewed to see her daughter crawl.

FGC #14 - Spudis' Woes

My name is Paul Spiegel, but call me Spudis. Everyone here does.

Well, saying “everyone” is kind of a stretch, since there’s only one other person here, but run with me on this. Actually, no, don’t run, leap with me, because hey, we’re on the freaking moon!

Tycho – that’s my buddy Tyler Powe for you historians who will no doubt be poring over my immortal words for generations to come – thinks it’s dumb of me to sit here and record this, but sometimes it just seemed like his imagination got knocked clean out of him when we crash-landed here. Either that or he thinks I’m shirking.

Maybe he thinks I’m shirking.

This city isn’t working according to its original design, you have to understand. The architects and engineers who dreamed this up had it in their heads to create a whiz-bang sci-fi city with all the robot butlers and automagic everything we lazy apes could ever want at hand, then programmed a rocketful of drones to come up here and have it all built and ready before the first wave of highly trained and motivated settlers arrived. I’m sure it would have been cool.

Insert your own joke about making God laugh here, if you believe in God. Or Murphy’s Law. Or mice and men. Anyway, the construction phase went fine, and everything here really is pretty shiny and nifty, only those settlers never came. The Luna Project got scrapped. Not cost effective. Bigger problems to tackle. Irreligious. Everyone had a reason not to do it.

But so the settlers are both highly trained (the best training MIT’s Open CourseWare and the Edupunks had to offer) and motivated, but so far there’s just me and Tycho, and as for the robots? Well.

It’s a long story, and we’ve set it down elsewhere, but, well, our first scrambled transmission back to Nicola’s gang said it all, really: “We made it, but we had to fry the robots. Sorry!!”

So Tycho and I have been pretty busy, finding ways to get things done without those robots, or any of the computer systems that kept stuff going while Cives Tranquilitatis (we really don’t dig on that name, but it’s everywhere. We usually just call it Tranq) awaited its inhabitants. But really, it’s not turning out to be as hard as Tycho likes to say it is; there are mechanical backups for pretty much everything; the hardware just needed some TLC and re-routed power from the bigass solar array out in the mare. I mean, enough water was cracked out of the rocks to keep 5000 people in drinking water and toilet flushing, plants growing – oh my god plants growing – to provide oxygen and fresh veggies, though some of the veggies look pretty strange… as long as we have that, we have a good chance at making it, or at least holding it together until the next gang comes.

Well, a pretty good chance. Cuz, well, I know I sound pretty sanguine but we did have a bit of an adventure the other day. Could have potentially ruined the Park*, too.

It happened like this. Tycho and I were busy trying to hack through some overgrowth that had closed off a huge swath of the main spiral**. Better Boy tomatoes do very well in one-sixth gee. Very well. Anyway, we were doing our jungle thing, hacking away with machetes, when all of a sudden, Tycho started screaming bloody murder.

It took me a minute or two to get to him – I was pretty tangled up after climbing to try to get to the biggest fruit we’d found yet, bigger than my head, that thing. I’m sure you’re used to those by now, future Lunans, but at the time we just couldn’t get over those – but I finally made it to him and at first, well, at first I thought he’d just had a close encounter with a tomato, if you know what I mean. He had a bright red streak along his temple, and a lot of pulp on his ear.

Except it turned out the pulp was his ear. And it wasn’t tomato juice on his face at all.

He said something sharp and heavy had screamed down from above and ripped his head open. Something hot. Really hot.

I started dabbing at his face with a clean rag but he slapped me away and yelled at me to find what hit him. I’d been getting really good at not arguing over little stuff, so I just clammed up and did.

It wasn’t too hard to find the missile; it was smoking. A rock a little bigger than my fist was lying there red hot on the regolith.

“Holy balls, you got hit by a meteorite!” I remember screaming.

“A meteorite is a rock that falls to Earth, dummy,” he said.

“Yeah, and… Oh!” I said, or something like that. Look, I’m really, really smart, but Tycho was the language nerd of the pair of us.

“OK, a metoroon, then. Holy balls, you got hit by a meteoroon!”

“Meteoroon? Really?”

“Well, I don’t know what you’d call it.”

“Neither do I. But that sounds stupid.”

I could have glossed over this stuff, future Lunans, but you deserve to know what we were really like. And by this point, we hadn’t had anyone but each other to talk to for months.

Oh, and we weren’t a couple, okay? Let me just set that straight right there. Heh.

Anyway, so there we were, standing there with our teeth in our mouths, staring at this freaking rock from outer space that had just… come down on us… and we… were under a dome…

We both looked up at the dome high above us and said a very bad word at the same time, because sure enough, one of the big plexiglass panels that kept the air in and the cosmic rays and crap out was pretty well smashed. It wasn’t a huge hole or anything, but the danger was still pretty obvious.

Pruning Tomatosaurus rex was going to have to wait a spell.

Now, Tycho used to kind of make fun of me for my Batman obsession when we were little, but after this he never mocked me again, because one of the first things I ever designed for our DIY colonization mission was, you got it, utility belts***.  And yes, they had grappling guns, because, grappling guns.

I was already speeding toward the damaged panel when Tycho pointed out that I didn’t have anything to fix it with. Hey, we’re a team, all right? One’s a thinker and a planner and one is a doer. Otherwise, we’da never made it out here, amIrite?

I figured as long as I was up there, I’d assess the damage. There was a pretty good hole in the glass and, sure enough, air was rushing out at a good clip. There would still be plenty of air under this big ol’ dome for a long time to come, but if we didn’t do something about it, well, I wouldn’t be writing this now, and you wouldn’t be reading it, future Lunans.

Gotta give Tycho credit. He made sure we brought lots and lots and lots of JB Weld. Oh, that stuff is amazing. So while I messed around trying to rewind my grappler (after a really fun trip down. Whee!), he grabbed a piece out of an unassembled greenhouse kit, broke it into a manageable size with a hammer, and threw together an emergency patch kit. We’ve since made up a whole bunch of these and are never without them! Anyway, he bounded over – I gotta tell ya, that never gets old! – with it and this time I let him do the honors. And don’t let him tell you otherwise, if he ever does tell anyone about this, he whooped and hollered just as much as I did on the way up.

So anyway, that’s why the dome above Tomatosaurus rex**** looks like a sloppy kluge job. Maybe someday it’ll get fixed up proper but right now, we’ve got other things to do. Like building dynamos to charge up our stuff, because I’ll be damned if I’m going to spend another six months without being able to get my Rebo and Zooty on.

*Spudis is referring to Tranquility Park in the center of Cives Tranquilitatis, which was housed in its own separate unpressurized dome within the city’s larger dome for many decades to preserve the Eagle, Neil Armstrong’s historic footprint and other historical artifacts, up until just a few months ago, when an incident very like that which Spudis describes in this story finally occurred. – ed.

**The spiral of which Spudis speaks is, of course, Armstrong Circle. – ed.

***The design for these is virtually identical to those all citizens of Tranq wear to this very day – ed.

****The same location as the vertical farm of the same name today, where Armstrong Circle and Cernan Spoke intersect. – ed.

********************************************

This week's Form and Genre challenge is a 1500 word short story written in the first person. I've had requests for sequels to pretty much all of my entries in this challenge to date, but as my personal favorite of these (for reasons that will become spectacularly clear in time) is "Settler's Woes", so yes, this is a sequel to that wacky little tale.

FGC #13 - Disturbance

The makeshift saloon in "downtown" Blacksand had seen better days -- and it was only a few months old. Already three chairs and two tables were smashed to firewood, if not to kindling, the one remaining hand-turned leg among them now serving as a club in the hands of the man who most, but not all, would later agree had started the fight.

"I said I don't know nothing about it," the man, bellowed. The chair leg made an audible whooshing sound as he missed his target. His opponent had seen the blow coming and taken an easy step back, even taking the time to spit to one side as the wood missed his jaw.

"I would never go so far as to accuse you of knowing anything," the spitting man, a drifter who claimed to have come through the settlement seeking employment,  said.

This insouciance just made the man with the club even angrier.

"Clinton Ellison Wayne, don't you bust up this place," a woman anxiously watching the developing brawl called out, reaching with one hand to grope blindly behind her for a whiskey bottle before it toppled over the cards the two men had so hastily abandoned.

"Who let that woman in here?" someone demanded over the sound of a punch finally connecting. “Is nowhere sacred?”

"Who let you in here?" The woman sipped daintily from her rescued prize.

"Get out of here before someone gets hurt!"

"I would say the same to you," the woman said, spinning around to fix the speaker with a severe and unfriendly squint. Her voice was very soft and very calm, which, had the object of her attention thought about it at all, would have signaled to him that he was in trouble.

"Donald, if you please," she said.

Without further ado, Donald and another dirty, muscled old-timer seized the loudmouth by the arms and hustled him out of the saloon.

"Mr. Johnston is going to hear about this, be assured," the woman called out after them. “Won’t he, boys?”

"Shore thing, Miss Louise," came a voice from the other side of the swinging doors.

"Oh, and clear out of the..."

The fight spilled abruptly out of doors on the heels of the ejection.

"Way..." the woman -- Miss Louise -- murmured. She sighed, set the bottle back down on the card table, and picked her way around the wreckage of the room's other furniture.

"I told grandpa he was a fool to open this place up like this," Louise said, dusting herself off and smiling at the man tending bar. "I suppose we'd best fetch him."

The bartender touched his hat and headed out the door, through which the sounds of fighting could still be heard.

Louise sighed, cast a long-suffering glance at the shambles left in the fight’s wake, and followed everyone else out of the building.

The action was nearly impossible to see, lost in clouds of dark dust that stung the eyes and coated the skin. The settlement of Blacksand had been founded to exploit a seam of coal near the surface that a degree promised prosperity as soon as the railroad came through this part of the territory. The handful of workers harvesting this bounty had come out on promises of minerals more lucrative than coal, but made do with what they found after no gold or silver turned up, gladly accepting Louise's grandfather's offers of employment when their own, often pitiful, resources ran out.

It was usually a peaceful town, the miners too tired after long shifts to cause much trouble and, Louise had to admit, too poorly paid to have much to cause trouble with.

Which was why Louise was making no great effort to break up the fight between Clinton and the newcomer whom even she suspected of having cheated at cards.

"You big dummies," she screamed into the dust. "You’re all in big, big trouble!"

"No you're not," a bystander told her.

"Is that a threat?"

"No, just... ain't you heard?"

"Heard what?"

"The Blacksand's on fire, ma'am."

***

"Oh god, it's true," Louise said, hat twisted up in her hands as she watched enormous clouds of black smoke billow forth from the air shaft where dozens of her grandfather's employees were gathered. "Does Grandpa know yet?"

"Oh, he knows," a miner said. He took a quick look at his hand, decided it was too filthy to put on Miss Louise's shoulder and ruin her pretty new blouse. She may wear britches, the miners said to each other, but she's still a lady.

Louise kept looking at the smoke. "He's down in it, isn't he?" she said. No emotion showed on her face or in her voice, but her hat was nearing irreparably crumpled, would have been torn to pieces if it were the kind of lacy bonnet most of her contemporaries favored.

"'Fraid so, miss."

"Trying to rescue his men."

"Weren't too many down there, at least."

"Thank god for that," she said, but she didn't sound especially thankful. "And what are we doing about it up here?"

"What can you do, miss? Wait for it to burn out, I reckon."

"That could take years, you fool! Do you know how much coal is down there? " Her laughter was brittle. She moved to approach the mine. This time the man standing next to her did reach out, filthy hands and all, to stop her. The shock of it brought her momentarily to her senses, but he held on to her as she surveyed the scene.

"They're not too deep down, are they? I've never... I've never been," she said.

"Naw, that seam's up purty close. Hundert feet or so, maybe two."

"We need a head count as soon as possible. We have to find out how many people are down there."

"Yer grandpaw said there was eight."

"Eight plus him makes nine," she corrected.

“Here come some!” someone shouted, and it was true. First one man, then another, and then what might be the rest stumbled out of the mine entrance, coughing, clutching their chests, tripping over sage brush. Then at last came two more.

Louise tore herself out of the miner's restraining arms and ran toward the shaft, from which the last man had just emerged. Louise flung her arms about him and all but lifted him off the ground.

“Let me go, girl!” Thomas Johnston was not a demonstrative man.

“You’re all right?”

“Of course I am.”

Louise was unwilling to let go of her grandfather completely, and escorted him from the mineshaft with a loving arm over his shoulders. Around her, the rest of the men who had nearly been trapped fell to the ground. One struggled mightily to breathe, coughing up huge gouts of sooty phlegm. Another seemed unconscious.

“How bad is it?”

“Bad. Whole damn mine is burning up.”

“Oh god, what are we going to do?”

“What can we do. Pray and plan and pack up.”

“What?” Louise stopped walking, stunned. It was not like him to give up.

“No, there has to be something. Suffocate it somehow…”

“We dug seven big ventilation shafts, girl,” her grandfather waved her off. “No. We’re done.”

They resumed walking away

“How did…?”

“It was that fool Sutton. Drunker’n a two-peckered billy goat and knocked over a lantern. Stupid ass can’t hold his firewater.”

Louise stopped short again, casting her eyes over the landscape. She tugged at her grandfather’s sleeve. “What did you say?”

“Can’t hold his firewater.”

“That’s it!” she let go and took several strides to the south on her own. Unktehi Creek was running bankful, swollen with spring runoff. Louise snapped her fingers. “That’s it! Hey, you guys, grab all the shovels you can. Pickaxes too.” She ran toward the water’s edge.

“The hell you on about?” her grandfather shouted.

“We’re going to put out the fire, grandpa. Come on, you bastards! Get over here.”

Her grandfather, still spry, ran coughing to her side.

“Just what the hell are you planning, young lady?”

“Look at all this water,” Louise said.

“Yeah, and?” there was a warning edge to her grandfather’s voice. He knew what she was thinking, just wanted her to say it.

“All we have to do is divert it.”

“And drown the mine? How will that make things better?”

“It will put the fire out, for starters. It will save all that coal.”

“By submerging it completely?”

“Well, yes, in the short run.”

“And the long. You think all that water will just go away once the fire’s out?”

“Shh. I’m thinking about that.”

“This is tomfoolery.”

“Walk with me, grandpa.”

Louise surveyed the banks, looking for a lower point, looking for a path. “We just have to dig a trench and divert some,” she said softly, distracted by her thoughts. “We don’t have to re-route the whole creek.”

“You dig a channel deep enough to let the water run, you’re getting the whole creek. Forever.”

“Not if it’s shallow enough. We just want a little of the extra runoff.”

“Louise, I love that you’re trying.”

“Don’t you patronize me.”

“I’m not. But it’s my mine and I’ll make the decisions. Where’s Powe? Powe! Get over here!” Obie Powe was the mining engineer Thomas had hired out of West Virginia the year before.”

“He’s still out cold, sir!” a man shouted from where the rest of the rescued were still gathered.

“Wake ‘im up and get ‘im over here!”

“Yes sir!”

“If he agrees with me, we’re doing this. Right?” Louise insisted.

“If he agrees with you, I’ll dig the damn trench myself. But!”

“But what? Your fortune’s going up in smoke.”

“It’s yours too, my dear, don’t forget that.”

“Grandfather!”

“Don’t you ‘grandfather’ me, girlie.”

“Sorry. But what’s your ‘but’?”

“But… you still haven’t told me how we’re gonna rescue the mine after we flood it.”

“I’m still thinking on that. And maybe Obie will have an idea too.”

From the chaos near the mine entrance came two men, one supporting the other’s weight. They were as filthy as Grandfather, coughing and covered in soot.

“You wanted me, sir?” Powe said, leaning heavily on his friend.

“Yes. You feeling better, boy?”

“I’ll live. Thanks for getting us out, sir. You saved all our lives. Still got a fine set of lungs on ya.”

“Well, look. My granddaughter here has an idea about putting the fire out.”

Powe cast a sour look at Louise. New to the operation, he’d still not learned to respect her or her opinions.

“Hear me out, Obie,” she said. “Look at the creek here.”

“Uh huh.”

“What if we dug a shallow trench, right about there,” she began, pointing, “And –“

“And what, flood the pit? Wait…” All the scorn had left Obie. “Wait, yes. If we keep it shallow and just get the overflow, yes, that could work.”

His look was one of awe.

“That’s our girl,” his partner, young Andrew Gardner, said proudly. “Almost as smart as her pappy.”

“Almost too smart for her own good,” her grandfather said. “And as crazy as her damn father.”

“Why would you say that?” Louise said. Her father had blown himself up excavating the very mine they were now trying to save.

“I apologize. But tell me, Powe. This damn idea of hers – any good?”

“Actually, yes, Mr. Johnston. Been did before.”

“Done,” Louise whispered.

“What was that?” her grandfather asked.

“Nothing.”

“But so, what do we do after?”

“Grandpa, I think I know…” Louise said. “You still got that Montgomery Wards catalog we got last month?”

“Some of it, yeah. What we haven’t wiped with yet.”

Louise made a face at this.

“Well, I think there was an ad in it…”

“It’s all ads, my girl. That’s what it’s for.”

“…For steam-driven pumps.”

Her grandfather began to laugh, quickly, nervously joined by Powe and Gardner.

“What? I’m serious.”

“Ho ho ho, I know you are, m’girl,” Thomas said, hugging her. “You’re brilliant. Isn’t she brilliant, Obie? Brilliant!”

“Was what I were fixin’ to suggest,” Obie said, spitting up a gob sooty phlegm.

“Well, what the hell are we standing around for?” Thomas demanded. “You lot, get your asses over her and get to diggin’. We’re burning daylight. And coal.”

*

They dug until dusk, starting from the edge of the nearest ventilation shaft and working toward the edge of the creek. The men who had been rescued were excused from this labor, all except for Sutton, who had been told he could either dig or find other employment.

The Johnston mine was the only employment – the only settlement of any kind – for a good hundred miles in either direction.

Louise stayed up far into the night, poring over the remains of the last Montgomery Wards catalog anyone had received with Obie Powe, figuring out how many pumps they would need and penning a letter to place the order.

“These should do us a treat,” Powe said. “And, to be honest, we should have had some on hand anyway. Vital equipment, for a mine like this, back east.”

“Back east, the water table is a few inches underground,” Thomas snapped from his bed at them. “I don’t know how you people get anything out of there.”

“Which is why you hired me,” Powe said.

“True.”

“Miss Louise, you’d make a fine engineer, if you was…”

“If I was a man?”

“Well, yes.”

“Times change, Mr. Powe. Times change.”

At dawn the next morning, Thomas Johnston roused his entire crew except for one badly injured man whom all suspected of having irrevocably singed his lungs – Thomas said later Shane Quenzer had been the last man out, had stayed behind to make sure there were no stragglers – and, true to his word, had grabbed a shovel himself.

No one protested when Louise, tall as a man and nearly as strong as some, joined in the effort.

By midday, the crew broke through the last crust of earth separating their trench from the creek. The last strokes of the pick were difficult and muddy, as the water gushed forth on its way to the mine.

By sundown, the thick black smoke that had poured nonstop from the mine entrance and its ventilation shafts had mostly changed to steam.

They had done it.

“Now we’ve just gotta wait for the Pony Express to send off our order, I reckon,” Powe said, standing with Thomas and Louise and admiring their handiwork.

“The hell we do. Sutton! Sutton!”

The woebedraggled miner had stayed close to his employer since the trouble had started.

“Sir?”

“Rest good, boy. You’re a-riding east in the morning.”

“Sir?”

“You’re not in Deadwood and mailing Miss Louise’s letter in three days time, you in a whole heap o’trouble, boy.”

“Yes sir. I’m sorry, sir.”

“You’ve said that about a thousand times already. Time to prove it.”

Sutton said nothing more and retired to the shack he shared with a dozen others.

“Now, grandfather,” Louise said sweetly. “About that stupid saloon of yours…”