Linwyr’s solution to getting the oil from the Gwillamer pools to Abersford was simple. A wooden tanker wagon was built that would hold twelve hundred gallons. The bed of the wagon was a wooden box with no lid, the crude also serving as caulking for the wood. Once full, the top of the bed was covered with canvas to keep out dust and critters. How Linwyr got the oil from the pools to the box Yozef never asked. A six-horse team pulled the wagon, and once it arrived in Abersford, the wagon was rolled over a basin dug into the ground and lined with brick, a “cork” built into the bottom of the wagon bed was knocked out, and the crude drained into the basin. The cork was then replaced, and wagon returned to Gwillamer for another load. Yozef cringed, as he watched the first load empty into the basin, and wondered how much seeped into the ground and the water table. Again, no EPA. However, if this took off, they’d have to make other arrangements.
Filtin’s task was by far the hardest. The fundamental principle was the same as with ether and ethanol, yet the details weren’t minor. Yozef knew that on Earth, a typical refinery had combinations of huge metal fractional distillation and cracking towers to break down the larger petroleum polymers into smaller chains being distilled continuously, with fractions removed and additional feedstock added as needed, a process for which Yozef didn’t understand the underlying engineering, except for its being too complex a technology for Caedellium. Obviously, they were going to work on smaller amounts than Earth refineries did, and they’d have to use batch distillation. He remembered references to Arabic devices similar to pot stills used for making whiskey, essentially bulbous vessels that could be many feet in diameter. This approach to distillation was cruder than they were using for ether and ethanol but was more amenable to larger amounts. Then there was the residual crude once the kerosene fraction was removed, which he directed Filtin to store in deep pits, in case they eventually got around to using it for asphalt in road paving. He left the details of handling the crude and the residues to Filtin.
And figure it out Filtin did, although it took two months, three moderate accidents, turnover in workers coinciding with rebuilding a demolished first petroleum workshop, and some considerable coin. The first Anyar petroleum fractional distillation succeeded in a run producing ten gallons of kerosene. The twenty-foot-tall bronze column Filtin designed looked like something out of a metal junkyard, but it worked.
Yozef waited until they knew the kerosene could be produced before moving to the next step—what to burn it in? The test to see whether existing whale oil lamps would also use kerosene was conducted outdoors and with all witnesses at a distance, so no permanent damage resulted from the first test. Consultation with a local lamp maker and a promise of rights to produce the new lamp type gave them a functioning kerosene lamp within another sixday after tweaking existing whale oil lamp designs.
Acceptance of the new lamps benefited from Yozef’s access to standard Earth marketing strategies: free samples, demonstrations, and product placement. Evening demonstrations at the abbey and Abersford let the populace compare light from the traditional whale oil lamps to the new kerosene. Then the first batch of lamps, along with a supply of kerosene, was loaned to anyone who wanted to try them out on a three-day trial before passing the lamps on to other interested denizens. Overnight, orders began coming in, and by the next month Filtin was working on larger fractionation columns, Linwyr was building more and bigger wagons, and the lamp maker switched most of his production to kerosene lanterns.
The village of Abersford was in the middle of minor industrial and population booms. The ether, ethanol, soap, paper, and now kerosene and lanterns had long ago absorbed all available and competent workers, and additional ones were coming from surrounding villages up to twenty miles away. To avoid overloading the local community and to aid distribution, Yozef started “franchising out” production, first to the district seat at Clengoth, then to the clan center at Caernford, and later to other provinces. He left the details to Cadwulf, who hired two more assistants to handle the formalities.
Yozef’s reputation as a tycoon rose even higher. Silver and gold coins gravitated to him exponentially.
His enterprises flourished, but never far from Yozef’s consciousness were thoughts of, What “exactly” am I doing here on Anyar? Earth was still out there … somewhere. The Watchers studied humans, and he found himself glancing at the sky and wondering whether they were looking at him at that moment. Not that he would ever know, assuming Harlie told the truth about non-intervention.
The patient who had died during an amputation had jolted him into teaching the Caedelli how to make ether, and that had led to ethanol and distillation as a basic procedure, kerosene production, soaps, and different papers. He didn’t doubt there would be more. Ideas were constantly bubbling up, some to be discarded as too impractical, some for further consideration, and others many decades or lifetimes away from implementation.
Still, when he surveyed his time on Anyar, he had made a difference: useful products, simple technologies, rudimentary medical-related knowledge, and introducing novel branches of mathematics to Cadwulf. All to the good, so why a longing for more? In his old life, living with Julie, contemplating leaving graduate school for a safe job and a comfortable lifestyle had been the extent of his ambitions. He had been satisfied then, but now … ?
By local standards, he was becoming wealthy and would only get richer. Did he have any other purpose, except to live out his life as best he could? Not that such a future was all bad, considering his circumstances, but he was angry. Angry at the Watchers, angry at the fates, angry at—God? Even if he couldn’t assign blame, there was a need to “show” that he mattered, that his existence left a mark. Such thoughts were confusing, since they’d have been alien to Earth’s Joseph Colsco.
One inescapable fact of his existence on Anyar was Bronwyn’s coming child. What kind of future would it have? What if he married and had more children? What would be their and their descendants’ future? What of all of the peoples of Anyar? There must be hundreds of millions to low billions. If the people of Anyar had the knowledge lying available in his brain, the planet’s technology would leap ahead centuries. What if the Watchers were not neutral observers? He had only the word of Harlie that they’d had no hand in transplanting humans.
He worried. What if the Watchers or whoever had done this someday returned? If they showed up in two hundred years, would they expect to find Anyar with the technology of Earth 1900–1950? If the Anyarians could be pushed ahead, maybe they’d have the ability to stand on their own against whatever came. For that to happen, Yozef would have to both transfer his science and technology knowledge and have it accepted. He had made changes, yet most of those would have come on their own within a century or more, assuming they didn’t already exist elsewhere on Anyar. In his focus on himself and the here and now, he could easily forget there was the rest of the planet beyond Caedellium, and who knew what level of technology might exist elsewhere? He knew of the Narthani, having gotten an earful from both Carnigan and the abbot, but were the Caedelli views parochial? Maybe the Narthani were a better vehicle for what he knew. And what of other realms that might be more advanced?
These thoughts monopolized Yozef for an entire day. He walked from his house to Abersford, then to the abbey, back to his house, along the shore to his cove, to Birdshit Bay, and back to his house. By twilight, he had walked more than twenty miles without eating or drinking since morning meal. His throat was parched, his stomach ate at his backbone, and his feet protested blisters, but none of the complainants were noticed.