“Lovely,” the smith snorted into his pewter mug. “It may sound like I’m blithe about this but I’m not. They don’t have any skills and they’re not used to hard day-in and day-out manual labor. The last time this was tried a quarter of the population died.”
“When was that?” Myron asked.
“Pol Pot, Cambodia,” Edmund said. “Just a tad over two thousand years ago. He’d just won a civil war and decided that all the people of the cities were to move into the country and work the land. A quarter of them, three million people, died. Many of them from being beaten or killed by thugs, but most of them from starvation. There was a similar situation in the same area a few decades before, and that one killed even more people. And those groups at least had the concept of work.”
“And it’s possible that a quarter of this population will die,” Sheida replied sadly. “But if food isn’t produced, all of them will die. And there aren’t any farmers.”
“Think they can learn it, Myron?” Edmund asked with a jerk of his chin.
“It’s best if you’re raised to it; that way you don’t consider working day in and day out every day of the year to be hard,” Myron replied with a grim chuckle. “Otherwise…”
“I guess you’ll just have to do a lot of classes,” Talbot said, taking another sip of beer. That, too, was going to be in short supply soon; they’d have to concentrate on wheat over barley for the time being. “Me too,” he added with a grimace.
“You need to be running things, not beating out sword blades,” Sheida corrected.
“Well, I don’t know how much time I can take training people and also run the farm,” Myron noted. “And if I don’t run the farm nobody will be eating next winter. Not to mention the fact that I can’t be everywhere at once.”
“What about Charlie and Tom?” Sheida asked.
“Well, what about them?” Myron replied. “They’re both ready to take over, but they’re also wanting their own farms…”
“Set one of them to be the instructor?” Edmund asked. “Maybe something like an agricultural agent.”
“Mayhaps. But he could be growing food himself.”
“I’ve come up with a way to have a sort of… roving instructor,” Sheida said. “A widely roaming one. It would have some problems associated with it, among others not being home much. Ask them if one of them would be interested. Lots of travel.”
“Okay,” Myron said dubiously. “Honestly, Tom probably would. He likes the theory of farming, but he doesn’t really like the work if you know what I mean.”
“In the meantime we’ll get the familiarization program going,” Edmund said. “Most of them will end up having to farm. But you need more than farmers. Especially if this lasts as long as it looks like it might.”
“Something else to put on the list,” Sheida said, making a note. “If it works here, we’ll pass the information around and see what comes of it.”
“One other thing, Sheida, this is a war. That means that when we start supporting you, Paul will probably find groups to attack us.”
“Yes, he will,” the council woman replied. “And I’ll help you to the extent that I can. But…”
“Well, the good news is I may not know shit about fighting a Web war, but if they have a ground force commander that’s my equal, I will be very surprised.”
“Clothing,” Roberta said. Tom’s partner was the village seamstress and it was one of the first points raised when the three went back to the meeting. Sheida’s avatar had stayed since the other avatars stated that the groups they were monitoring were still mostly spinning their wheels. Raven’s Mill’s plan of setting up an apprenticeship familiarization had been passed through the avatars and was meeting with mixed reactions.
“We can grow cosilk,” Myron noted. The hybrid cotton that integrated many of the properties of silk was hardy and made excellent cloth, but it was generally considered a hot-weather plant.
“We can also raise sheep,” Bethan said.
“You can get more material per square acre out of cosilk,” the farmer pointed out. “Admittedly, wool is a lot better for cold weather; cosilk doesn’t insulate worth a damn. But I’ve only got five sheep; we’ll have cosilk in abundance long before we have much wool.”
“There’s ferals,” Robert pointed out. “You know what the ridges look like in the summer.” Most of the ferals were from modern sheep stocks that automatically dropped their wool when the weather turned warm. This had originally been a genetic design to eliminate the chore of shearing but with the ferals it meant that for a few weeks in early summer the ridgelines above the valley were dotted with patches of white. Many of the birds’ nests in the area were made of pure wool, finer than the best cashmere.
“You have some?” Edmund asked. “Cosilk that is.”
“Aye, I’ve never grown it but I know how.”
“Cosilk has more uses than clothes,” Robert said. “We’re going to need it for bowstrings, rope…”
“Better hemp for the rope. We can get at least one crop of silk in this year. Carding and spinning though… very manpower intensive. I don’t suppose there’s much chance of some powered carding and spinning plants by the time the crop’s in?”
“When?” Edmund asked.
“By September, say?”
“Maybe, there’s so many draws on the few artisans we have. Put it on the list. What’s the growing season?”
“Off the top of my head I don’t recall. After the ground is good and warm and longer here than down south; it grows better in hot climes, but, then, many things do.”
“Tea,” Edmund grumped. “I’m nearly out.”
“No caffeinating materials at all,” Myron agreed. “I’ve a few hothouse tea plants but not enough to make more than a cup or two a year. No coffee, tea…”
“I can’t believe you guys poison yourselves that way,” Sheida said disparagingly. “Caffeine is horrible for your body.”
“… No chocolate,” Myron continued.
“No chocolate?”
“It’s got caffeine in it,” Edmund said with a grin.
“Well, trace elements,” Sheida replied with a sniff. “But no chocolate?”
“Requires several products that are only grown in the tropics,” Myron said dolefully. “No chocolate. Not until some sort of trade is established.”
“Well that is going to get a priority then!”
“Citrus,” Edmund said, shaking his head. “I’m going to miss citrus. And it’s a good scurvy preventer.”
“That you can grow in Festiva,” Myron replied. “If the weather settles out.”
It had started within a day of the Fall; the weather had closed in and stayed that way. Wind, rain, sleet, rivers flooding. It seemed as if it would never stop storming as all the pent-up fury of weather long leashed was released upon the land.
“It’s going to,” Sheida replied with a shake of her head. “Did you hear what happened?”
“No?” Myron replied but everyone looked interested.
“The program that did weather control was an AI, that I knew, but what I didn’t know was that it was one of the really old ones; it actually predated weather control and was a weather forecasting AI.”
“Damn, that is old,” Myron said as the wind tore at the roof of the pub. “And that means it can predict this stuff?”