Marina stood up, feeling very odd looking up at everyone on the floor. She brushed the dust off of her backside, creating a little cloud and said, “Because it gives us a time for the First Heroes! If we can find that, then we can maybe find the time of the First People. Don’t you see?”
Taylor gave an uncertain nod and handed the book back to Piotr. He accepted the book like it was a delicate baby he didn’t want to jostle awake.
Greta pointed toward the bottom of the next page and said, “You see here. This gives the information on the burial itself. Note that a Grace attended. Also, go back and page through till you find the year. It gives the year as the 13th Year of the Olive.” She paused a moment and asked Marina, “And did you say that the year before those olives were twelve years old and just planted to replace old ones?”
“It was 65 years, I think,” she answered.
All three of the others nodded almost in unison as understanding came and Marina smiled. “If we can narrow down the other orchard entries for that farm, the one that counts in olive years, then we can find out our timeline. Who knows what else we might figure out?”
Greta asked, “How many of the books for this farm have you found?”
“This is just the second. The other one is the one I just finished with,” Marina answered and pointed at the book she had so recently slammed shut with such frustration.
Greta accepted the other heavy book from Piotr, who looked reluctant to give it up, and told them, “I’m going to go through these and see about collating a timeline.” To Marina she said, “You keep on at this row. You’ve had good luck with it.”
“Do you want help?” Piotr asked, clearly wanting Greta to say yes.
Greta saw this yearning too and smiled. But she shook her head and said, “It only takes one to do this thoroughly and right now you’re more important as a searcher for more of the same.”
Without another word, she turned toward table and chairs on the very far end of the archives. Piotr looked crestfallen. Taylor gave him a pat on the shoulder and said, “We might find more.”
Piotr looked at the pile of discarded and yet to be searched materials on the floor where Marina had been sitting. He said, “Our stuff is boring old mechanical and maintenance reports. Manufacturing!”
Marina gave Taylor a little smile. He raised his eyebrows in return.
To Piotr he said, “But maybe we’ll find something else we can’t even imagine now. Marina certainly didn’t expect to find the burial of a First Hero in a farm book. Right?”
He perked up a bit then, not so much satisfied as mollified. He gave Taylor a hearty clap on the back and said, “You’re right. This is no time for dawdling.”
She dropped back into her sitting position on the floor and tugged her leg in close for better balance. She lugged the next of the farm books into her lap. It was for another section of dirt farm, this one counting years in apples. More fascinating entries on the cross breeding of carrots and the attractiveness of the brussel sprout heads competed in trying to put her to sleep but she found nothing that might date the book concretely and it carried no burial records of note.
She found nothing save a discontinuity that she jotted on a piece of the scrap paper and put inside the book to mark the page. The handwriting for this farm became erratic and almost illegible for a period of time. Words were misspelled that shouldn’t be. Carot written in place of carrot and other words that were used over and over in previous entries were wrong. It was almost like they were being spelled phonetically by someone who forgot how to spell and could write only by sounding out the words.
Marina flipped through the pages and found the errors lasted for a few months in total. They started suddenly, then increased until the writing and spelling were almost unreadable and then very slowly returned to normal. There were strange additions to the sentences too. Things like, ‘Her name is Callie,’ or ‘I live in compartment 22’ peppered the entries.
As she looked at the entries and their random additions, Marina thought it looked like whoever this was might be undergoing Remediation. Could that be possible? She had never heard of anyone going through the treatment and still going to work or living at home during the process. She knew that the process helped to order memories and restore balance but that the side effects were often holes in the rest of a person’s memories.
She flipped through the rest of the big book and paid close attention, but she found nothing. She set that book aside for Greta to look at, just in case. She had run out of farm books for the moment. As she looked at a messy stack of porter logs, she sighed. There was always more to choose from.
Chapter Fourteen
The farm books had turned out to be an unexpected bonanza of information once they knew what to look for and the majority of the pile for the historian’s attention was made up of those thick, dirty volumes. Taylor had found an entire box of logs from IT. The green fabric covers hid a surprising array of information about IT’s past, including the almost unbelievable number of computers that used to be in active use. At one time, more than six thousand computers had hummed throughout the silo. Now they had, at best, two thousand.
It was at the end of another long day of dust, sneezing and endless books and records that they gathered at the table. It was quickly becoming custom that Greta gave them an update on her progress to close the day’s work. She had drawn rough timelines on one of her chalkboards and tried to match dates along those various lines using the references they brought her.
Greta filled them in on the various tiny additions to the timeline, but soon she started to look nervous, even twitchy. What Marina noted even as she realized that Greta’s discomfort was increasing was that all of the six lines representing distinct dirt farms were now connected by a single line at one point. She peered at it but couldn’t make out the numbers from this distance. What she could tell was that it wasn’t as far back as it should be if it referred to First People or First Heroes.
Greta retracted her pointing finger back into her fist as she reached the line and gave a little cough. When she extended her finger again, it was pointing directly at the joining line for all the various timelines. She ran it down the jagged path that joined them and said, “And this appears to be the events outlined in the time of the First Heroes.” She paused as they all gaped at her. She looked uncomfortable and added, “But I can’t be absolutely sure of it.”
Taylor rolled his eyes but focused immediately again on the timeline. He was closest to it and had the youngest and best eyes of the three listening to Greta. He said, “But that is what, maybe a hundred and twenty years ago. That isn’t possible. Is it?”
Greta somehow managed to combine a nod and a shake of the head into the same motion. It was the picture of uncertainty. Marina stepped toward the board and looked for herself. She found the burial of Graham directly on the line connecting three of the timelines. She pointed to it and asked, “How did you get that? I didn’t find that.”
In response, Greta dug through the pile of open books spread across the table. She retrieved one that Marina had put into the interest pile the day before. It was the one with the strange misspellings and handwriting. “I found a similar problem, though not as bad as this one, in several of the other books. They all seemed to last about the same amount of time. So I went back to the original book you found the burial record in and found this.”
She pulled out the book in question, the one they had started calling the Burial Book, even though all the other farm books also detailed burials, toward her on the table. It was already open to the burial page. All of them had looked at it so many times they had the shape the entries made memorized. She flipped it forward a few pages and pointed to the entries. “If you look at this one closely, you’ll see the same thing. The handwriting isn’t much changed, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense when you try to read it,” she said.