Chapter 7

My new world seemed to mostly be land mass, with a few large bodies of water here and there, the size of a middling state. There was no moon, so the weather was steady year round, with no tipping of the circular orbit. This meant that the icy regions at the poles were permanent and unchanging, with no seasonal warming. (This didn’t mean no temperature fluctuations at all, as all solar bodies have periodic fluctuations in energy.) The up-side was, when you reached the temperate latitudes, the climate was always seasonal and the growing season was year round, and in fact it was only the stars in the sky that indicated any passing of the seasons at all.

Mostly wilderness, human habitation was widely scattered in tiny clusters along rivers and roads of sorts. People seemed to stay in general regions for the most part, and why not, any place was much like any other place, aside from tiny mountain ranges and Great Lakes sized bodies of water here and there. And there was almost certain to be an example of each within any given region.

The other side of this coin was that if a local leader made too many annoying rules the folks could always move away, to an established community or to some place not inhabited yet.

If you were an explorer type, you could head north to the eternal frozen realm, and battle giant ferocious furry monsters. But furs were of no use to anyone here. Most of that suicidal adventurism had been bred out of the population long ago.

I didn’t understand at first why the population had remained so low, but eventually I discovered the reason. There were no domestic animals aside from the occasional adopted chick or kit. If meat were to be had, it was hunted, not husbanded. This further meant all agriculture was human powered, limiting population growth. It wasn’t much more complicated than the slash burn and re-plant procedure used among the jungle giants back on earth.

Besides, there was no reason for large population centers, who would want to be so crowded? Folks tended to move on if a place grew too much, all the more so because of the primitive sanitation practices. It wasn’t like a house was so special, with no running water or electric, just a fireplace, (for cooking not warmth) a few walls and a roof. The bed was a two foot high shelf, with a pile of dried vegetation for cushioning, and a light covering. The days and nights were all of a temperature.

Just because the populace were naked, didn’t mean they were ignorant or savages. I hadn’t meant to give that impression. I had learned an immense amount of herbal lore from Shenne, and they did have commercial writing, shorthand for commodities, trades, numbers, quality. Just no fiction aside from storytelling, which as you might imagine was, along with gossip, the cultural staple for entertainment.

However, they knew all the materials their world provided, even the rare ones, and all the uses they could be put to. That is, the natural bounty of the earth met all their needs more than adequately, in most cases better than manufactured or created solutions might. Certainly more sustainably.

Aside from a few hilly areas the land was earth, having had no glaciation to scrape up the soil and break up rock, or tectonic plate movements to upthrust and expose the hidden treasures of the earth so building was typically of organic material instead of stone, and metals and minerals were rare. In fact, the sword I had gained was of meteoric nickel-iron, most of this earth’s geology was of impact origin.

Walled towns did appear on the hills at times, but many stony hills had ruins abandoned from when the persons or outfit paying the worker’s wage to build it ran out of money, and attempted to use coercion instead of honest pay whereupon the workers and their families melted away into the trees.

It was ingrained into their very psyche through stories heard since infancy never to build a trap (cell) that couldn’t be escaped from. It was expected that every box built room would have a hidden exit, much as prairie-dog den always has a back door.