Chapter 17

"Wonderful, Roxanne. Isn't it wonderful, Hasan? You are going to be a father again, dear."

John Wells looked Hasan in the face. "Hasan! You and Roxanne? I hope you are going to make an honest woman of her!"

Hasan, looking shell-shocked, automatically mumbled, "Yes, of course," at which Tracy said, "Congratulations, Roxanne. Welcome to the family as a wife to Hasan. You have been close to us for a long time, and we have slowly become a family, together. Now Hasan has agreed to make a formal recognition of you as a member of this family, as a wife: just as it should be, my dear."

John jumped in "Well done, Hasan. I thought you and Roxanne looked likely to get together. Now you can have two wives, like me. Make sure you treat them equally well, Hasan."

Hasan stared at Tracy, sussing out that he had been levered in to this position without having time to think about it. Then he came to the conclusion that he would eventually have made the same decision, as he did not want his child to be born out of wedlock. He stepped forward towards Roxanne, and opened his arms. "Will you marry me, Roxanne my dear? Marry me and Tracy?"

Roxanne's eyes lit up and she rushed into his enveloping arms. "I will do so gladly, Hasan my love." The tears welled up in her, and she sobbed onto his chest. He held her tight, and Tracy came round to pat her on the shoulder.

"I know what it is like, Roxanne, when the man you love asks you to marry him. It is a very special time. Tears are natural."

Roxanne turned her head towards Tracy. "Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. You are a wonderful lady, Tracy."

Hasan interrupted, "You have it right there, Roxanne. She is, is my Tracy, but you can be wonderful too. You ARE wonderful, I have realised. It is time I treated you more like my woman instead of my employee."

"But I AM your woman, Hasan. I want always to be your woman."

"Roxane, This is all very sudden for me, but I truly desire you to be my wife, just like Tracy. She obviously has no objections."

"None, my husband," said Tracy.

"Then let it be so. John, please be my Best Man, and organise this for me. You are the one who knows the rules here."

As John started to reply, saying, There are forms you have to fill out, Hasan, so see the Registrar, who is also the clergyman you need," Penny walked in the living room door, saying "The kids are having a ball through there," then sensed the changed atmosphere. "What's going on? Gloria, Muriel? Can you tell me?"

Gloria responded, "Hasan has just invited Roxanne to marry him."

"Why? What brought this on?"

"Roxanne is pregnant, Penny. Hasan is the father."

"Oh. I see. You mean Hasan and Roxanne have been lovers? And of course, here they can be married as well."

Gloria was cautious. "In a way, you are right, Penny. Roxanne has for a long time admired Hasan, but as the family nanny, back in Sudan, she could not take that further. An employee, on Earth, would not be permitted to embark on any relationship."

Penny was perturbed by this revelation. "But historically, on Earth, employers and their female employees in the home often had an illicit relationship."

"Perhaps so, Penny, but that was mostly in Europe, and definitely not to the benefit of the female involved."

"That is so. So nothing happened until they got here, and then Hasan took advantage of her?"

Tracy was incensed. "NO, young lady. My Hasan is not like that. Roxanne's situation changed when we arrived. She was now regarded as an equal, on New Eden, and I – I – was the one who engineered their coming together which resulted in this pregnancy. I have a great deal of respect and love for this young lady, and Hasan has, too, so now we can become a complete family unit."

"Ah, so Roxanne WANTED to marry you and Hasan? Just like me with John, Gloria and Muriel?" This popped out before she realised she should not have said anything, for Tracy pounced on her words.

"Penny? What are you saying? Are you going to marry John and his wives?"

John jumped in now. "Not quite, Tracy. Penny announced that she wanted to marry me and the girls, but we have put her off for now, to give her a breathing space, and to embark on her studies. She is doing economics at the College, and teacher training as well, so once she graduates, we can reassess her position."

Penny was determined now to make things clearer, from her point of view.

"However, I have made the first step towards the marital condition, after Gloria and Muriel made sure I was protected from pregnancy."

Hasan stared at John. "John? You have been bedding this teenager, this young girl already?"

Penny declared, "I am not a young girl! I am almost eighteen, and old enough to know what I want in a man; and John is exactly what I want! This enforced delay is acceptable, because I know they mean well for me, and want me to be an educated woman, married or not. BUT, I mean to learn how to please a man, this man who may become my husband. It is my choice, not forced on me."

John spread his hands and looked back at Hasan. "You see? Do you think I had a chance of resistance, Hasan? With all three of them ganging up on me? You gave in with just Tracy's connivance, didn't you?"

Hasan looked sheepish. "You have got me there, John. I gather it is all acceptable here, though - more than one wife?"

"It is, old friend. The main difference is that you are less in control than before. The ladies will take charge and run things; you have to learn to go along with them, and things will be fine, believe me."

Hasan sighed, and looked back at Tracy, who grinned and then deliberately smiled evilly at him, sticking out her tongue. He swung his eyes heavenwards, then told John, "I see exactly what you mean, John," but leaned over and gave Tracy a loving kiss, before hugging her to him. "I love you, Tracy Abdin," He whispered to her.

He swivelled towards John and changed the subject, "How about we go through and see how all the children are getting on? Penny seems to think they are fine, but your ward Tabitha is on her own with them. Who knows what they are up to!"

With the cable car system now operating to bring logs across to the sawmill, to get the mill started, the rate of tunnel excavation became of more relevance, and The Personalia applied themselves to this question.

The design for the tunnel, and its exact route, had already been determined, so the fairly obvious course would be to start another tunnelling process from the other end, but that was at the end of a steady slope down the side of the mountain. It was not very practical to work uphill using nanos, so they came up with a solution: Bore a hole into the side of the mountain where the full tunnel would exit. Once such a bore had been excavated far enough in, the operation could be turned approximately ninety degrees, treating this point as the rail tunnel exit, and work back to a meeting with the tunnel coming downwards.

This would leave the final leg, the downslope section along the rock face, to be achieved as a gravity-assisted downhill excavation, with the purely rock debris able to be discarded off the cliff face to the ground far below. It also meant that there was no gentle slope for animals of any kind to make their way upwards, and also that the tracklayers could make their progress from one side to the other of the mountain while the final excavations were still taking place.

The other complication was the crevassed nature of the cliff face. This meant that bridging efforts would be required every time the excavation reached a gap in the cliff face. This bridge would be achieved by a new batch of nanos whose task to was to cement particles together to make a solid arch as the surface for the railtrack to come later.

This of course meant a slowed onward progression of the excavation process, so this part of the tunnel route was begun as soon as the tunnel excavation back towards the crater had gone a few yards into the rock.

By now, with three operations progressing smoothly, the time factor to completion had been drastically reduced, and planning for track laying was able to get underway. The first step was the base for the track.

The Personalia decided to ignore human methods of track laying, and instead use their nanotechnology to affix the rails direct to the flat base of the tunnel. They could do this by exact measurements of the distance between the parallel rails, and in their own way "welding" the rails into the rock. This actually meant making the steel rails and rock base the same integral structure, fixed together at all points of contact, and not just at intervals as with human tracklaying. This worked well because the bases had been excavated to a tolerance far smoother than any human track had ever been laid. It also simplified the parts required, and there was no way the rail could work loose through vibration or insecure track plates.

Installation had to be careful and exact, so the track laying inside the tunnel was relinquished to a team of mechanoids. Preparations were made, but could not be implemented until the tunnel was complete, due to the stream of debris coming out, which would interfere with the rail laying. In another advance preparation, the human tracklayers were promised continuing work at the other end of the tunnel, when the track exited at that point.

Out in the new enclave, work progressed on the stockade, with mechanoids excavating a deep trench around the perimeter of the proposed research station grounds. The only nuisance was when an animal would wander along and slip over the edge, falling into the trench. The mechanoids had to stun the animal before lifting it out and depositing it at a distance.

Meantime, other mechanoids were selecting trees of the desired circumference to be a match for the timber stacked nearby, to become piles in the stockade.

As soon as enough of the trench had been dug out, the first of the long timber logs was carried over by Landership and inserted into the trench, and pushed further into the ground. Another Landership was soon there to add the next vertical log; and this process became continuous, with mechanoids pushing excavated soil back into the hole and thumping it to compact the soil around the timbers. The process was only delayed when the supply of logs was interrupted. When that happened, the Landerships settled on the nearest water supply – the small river – and proceeded to crack water into hydrogen and oxygen with their small-scale fusion reactors.

If the fuel supply was insufficient for the longer operation of these Landerships, another pair of Landerships were detailed down from orbit to take over while the first pair attended further to their refuelling requirements.

The Base ship in orbit gradually became aware of unexpected changes in the detailed images of the enclave prepared for the humans. It took cognisance of the fact that the changes were moving, apparently with some degree of consistency. None was towards the stockade location, but any strange occurrence was to be regretted, it concluded.

It detoured one of the scheduled relief Landerships to go past the location of some of the anomalies, and obtain more detailed images. It did so, and eventually the detailed images came into its data gathering receptors.

The anomalies resolved themselves into a large group of animals - what the humans would call a herd. The herd was moving as a group towards a small river, of which the enclave had a number within it. The ship made calculations to determine the average height and mass of these animals, and soon decided that they were half a metre tall and massed much the same as a domesticated sheep on Earth. In fact, they appeared to be grass-eaters, so were indeed similar to sheep.

The animals had clearly congregated there to take on water supplies, as most animals seemed to require. As it watched, some of the animals stepped into the water, pushed by the pressure from behind, standing up to their bodies in the water. Moments later, one of the animals pushed into deeper water vanished under the surface, and presumably was swept away. Then another of those in the deeper water disappeared, then another, with no signs of a struggle to swim. None of the rest of the herd seemed to be taking note of this, but the Base ship did. One might be an accident, but three was a more deliberate action, probably due to a malign force, possibly another predator.

The predator had to be under the water, either a fish or an amphibian. Correction: either a large amphibian, or a VERY large fish, to take an animal the size of a sheep underwater completely in one powerful lunge. On reflection, the apparent depth of water in the river could not accommodate a large enough fish, unless it was almost a flatfish, so the likelihood was an amphibious creature, as these tended to be of low stature.