Or maybe he had misunderstood?
Maybe completely misunderstood why it was there and where it had come from?
Maybe it had nothing at all to do with Ah-na?
If it had been sent to search for her, why send something that seemed incapable of moving from the spot where it had settled?
He had just decided that he could not afford to waste more time watching nothing happening when he needed to hunt when somethingdidhappen.
Various sounds began to emanate from within the thing, of metal scraping upon metal and a series of clicks and whirrs. Abruptly the machine closest to him seemed to split. The broken pieces began to rotate and change positions with other pieces, making the sounds he had heard before. Within an hour the thing was totally transformed into something else entirely, looked nothing at all like the sleek, aerodynamic projectiles that had arrived.
And then the thing began to move a very great deal.
Utilizing the four enormous wheels that had appeared from within the capsule, the thing began to push a large, flat plate along the ground. As it did so, it tore the plants growing there up from their roots, pushed rocks as large as he was tall, and made mounds of the dirt and rocks and uprooted plants.
After staring at it with a mixture of fascination and horror for some time, he finally shifted his gaze to the companions of this machine. He saw then that the other things that had landed had also transformed into machines, some that were similar to the first and some that were completely unique.
Stunned, mesmerized, he stood watching these alien things tearing up the plateau and completely transforming the appearance of it for a very long time. Finally, thoroughly confused, he left the things to their work and went to check his snares to see if he had been fortunate enough to catch supper or if he would have to comb the woods for something he could kill to eat and to feed his Ah-na.
He was in luck. Providence had definitely smiled down up on him because there were two fatpodunksin the snares he had set and nothing had stolen them from him in the time he had wasted watching the alien things tear up the plateau.
They must be building machines, he decided when he had cast around his memory for something from his parents’ time that seemed to match what he had seen. They had told him that that was how the old cities were built—by great machines that did the work of many individuals.
But he had not seen beings inside to control them.
He did not know what to think of that.
* * * *
Annika decided if she didn’t take over the job of cooking, she wasn’t going to last much longer. Insanity from sheer boredom was starting to set in. She didn’t even have anything to look at most of the time because Zhor was convinced she was going to try to take a swan dive off the damned cliff if he left the door open.
She spent a lot of time sleeping—some time pacing the place restlessly and less time exercising pointedly to keep in shape. She’d prowled the place, snooping to combat boredom enough times that she not only knew every inch of the place and everything in it, she was pretty sure she’d figured out how they’d managed to funnel running water through the latrine and into the food cooking/preparation area.
Boredom was only part of the reason she decided to take over the cooking.
The other was that Zhor was quite possibly the worst cook she had ever encountered.
She didn’t know how he had survived onhiscooking!
Either he’d had someone else cooking for him until recently, or he had no sense of taste whatsoever!
Notthat she was a great chef! Up until she’d tasted Zhor’s efforts, she’d thoughtshewas the worst cook ever!
Of course, no one really cooked anymore. Her mother had lamented that fact often enough it was a hard history lesson to forget.
Inhertime, people had started with the basic ingredients—at least part of the time. Once the economy got to be shit and everybody worked if they weren’t sleeping just to be able to feed themselves, convenience cooking had become a trend—food already prepped and ready to throw into the oven for cooking. Then the heat-and-eat had advanced to a point where they were able to produce food at a level above just tolerable and people had begun to rely more heavily on that.
What had really killed cooking, though, was the combination of bad, bad economy, overpopulation, and dwindling resources.
Eventually, food had become such a precious resource that it couldn’t be left to people to prepare it themselves because they had the tendency to waste more than the hungry masses could afford. People would begin starving in droves if something wasn’t done. So they began to ration it. Then it had been prepared, portioned, and distributed by age and gender—on Earth and all of the colonies that had limited resources like Earth did now.
It wasn’t even possible to get the ingredients you needed to make a dish from scratch anymore so her mother hadn’t had the wherewithal to teach her if she’d wanted to. All she could do was bemoan the loss of an important skill and try to explain the process with words and pictures.
Shehad been taught survival cooking, however, as part of her training.
A skillnotto be confused with the art of preparing the fabulous cuisine her mother claimed was common in her youth, but absolutely essential to survival on alien worlds.
Despite every effort to make space exploration and travel as safe as possible, accidents happened. And if anyone that worked for the company happened to be fortunate enough to crash on a planet that was at least minimally life sustaining—meaning breathable air, water, survivable temperatures and pressure—they needed survival skills to hang on until they could be rescued.
