Chapter 37

Looking to the rear, she expected to see the back wall of the cavern behind the storage room.

It was not there.

Instead, the blackness continued unabated. She could not even see any fallen rocks and rubble that might explain the missing wall that should have been there. She took a few paces forward towards this enigma, to direct her attention further back.

Nothing, except a repeat of the wall she remembered at the side. That was most peculiar.

She ventured further, hoping that the oil reservoir in her lamp would not give out if she went much farther back. She had forgotten that she had two lamps with her.

It was almost like deja vu, in that what she began to find was the same as many yards back. She pressed on, and to the same side as before, she caught a glint of a water surface.

Surprised, she swung away from there and took some paces away from the water pool. That brought into view another wall, sticking out from the back in the same way as the storage room did back there. She moved over to the wall, and quickly found a squared off corner just like she had seen by the storage unit earlier. She followed the vertical wall that led away from her and the corner, and shortly found words marked on this wall.

She saw that they were the same words as on the storage room door, and the same knife keyhole was there as well; weird, she thought.

She was pretty sure she hadn’t ended up back at the storage room, but ... She decided to test it out, and inserted the knife blade, then turned. The door opened, spilling out the bright light, so she waited for her eyes to adjust, then looked inside.

It was just as before: the laden shelves, the bags on the floor, the chest of drawers.

The drawers had an envelope lying on top. Suspicious, she opened the envelope and found the same letter as before.

It was the same blasted room! Dammit to hell, she told herself. I must have got turned round in the dark, and found myself back here again.

She exited, closed the door, and withdrew the knife from the lock. Almost unthinkingly, she ran the point of the knife under the words as she reread them, leaving a scratch visible. She shrugged. No-one would notice.

She retraced her steps VERY carefully to the pool and moved towards the cave mouth. Her footsteps continued as she made her way into the dark beyond the pool. Her confidence began to return, for she was sure that a few steps on, she would encounter the wall she had followed at first.

She didn’t. The blackness continued, despite her oil lamps, and then she was shocked to see a glimpse of the water in its pool ahead.

That made no sense, damn it all to hell. It was sure time she was getting out of here. She stepped onward through the dark, then spotted a wall opposite to the water.

That wall, should not be there, if her navigation was accurate. Annoyed, she stepped over to the wall looming out of the dark, and found it was almost like the side wall of the storage room. Frowning, she continued outwards towards the outer cave, but came to another squared corner.

This was becoming beyond weird, she told herself. Just to check her senses, she moved along the frontage and sure as hell, the lock with its words were there. She stared at them in a mixture of fright, confusion, and annoyance.

As she stared at the words, another fact penetrated her skull. There was no scratch line under the words. Good God! Had the wall excised her scratch? How could it do that?

Impossible; it was only a few minutes.

She did not know what was going on, but decided she must get out of here before something else odd happened. She turned 180 degrees, so she knew she was facing out towards the lit section of the cave and squinted to see if she could see any light reflection on the walls of the cave. They were too far away for her to manage that, so she took hold of herself and marched forward, lamp in hand, watching for one or other side wall to appear in her vision.

Fairly quickly, if her perception of time was on the ball, she saw a wall to one side, and it had a tiny amount of outside light reflected from it. She relaxed a little.

This gave her a direction, and she walked round the bend to where there was more light in the distance. She stepped towards it, and in a few moments she was walking into the front cave. Standing there were Raka and John, and she broke into a run as she hurried to their welcoming arms. John was first to speak.

“Well, Jean, what did you find? Any damage; rockfalls or what?”

Jean found herself at a loss for words. She did not know what she could say without sounding like a frightened girl. Instead she took a deep breath to steady herself.

Raka took on the task of speaking.

“You look a bit white-faced, Jean. Did something happen to you? Bump into a fallen rock, or step into a hole? What worried you, woman?”

John decided that actions spoke louder than words, and pulled Jean into a comforting hug, just holding her steady, so she could step out of the hug if she so wanted. She stayed where she was, afraid to move, and shivered.

John absorbed the shivering and pulled her closer to his torso, saying comfortingly, “It will be all right, Jean. We all have times when we don’t know what is happening to us; it is scary, even when we know it shouldn’t be. Raka, will you get Jean a fur to wrap round her until she warms up? The poor lass is cold and shivery. Perhaps we should get her out into the sunshine and warmth.”

When Raka set off to get a warm hide, Numa marched up to John.

“What in the name of the Earth Mother have you done to that woman, John? She looks terrified!”

John lifted a hand from Jean to motion to Numa to stop her complaint.

“She had a fright in the cave: I don’t know what, but we will find out. Do you want to talk to Chief Numa, Jean?”

Jean heard Numa’s title spoken, and at once switched back to agent mode, stiffened up and reported.

“Apologies, Chief Numa. I got lost in the dark, started imagining things, and that scared me.”

Numa knew about the dark, but it did not scare her, so she was puzzled.

“What do you mean by imagining things, Jean?”

The woman spoke through her almost forgotten tears. “In the nearly dark, I thought I had arrived at the storage room, but twice! I was disorientated, and I even saw a scratch on the door disappear. That would frighten anyone!”

Numa expressed surprised. “I thought a mature woman like yourself would not have that problem. How could you get lost, when you were holding the string all the time?”

Jean’s hand flew to her mouth in realisation of her error. “I forgot the string!” she exclaimed, speaking mostly to herself. “I dropped it when I got to the storage room door lock the first time, and never picked it up again. I forgot all about it in my excitement. That was probably what caused me to get lost. I thought I was walking further back beyond the storeroom, but somehow I got turned around.”

“But you had your oil lamp and a spare in case you needed it. With that light, how could you get turned round so easily?”

“I ... I don’t know!” she declared tearfully. “I thought I was further back, when I found the storeroom lock again. I opened it, to make sure, and I was right: everything was the same inside, right down to the letter in the envelope.”

“You read the letter, Jean?” John asked her.

She nodded in confirmation. “I did, the first time I went in, then put it back in the envelope. I laid it down carefully on the middle of the cabinet top, facing the front, just to make it neat and tidy.”

John asked as well, “Did you have to tidy it the second time you saw it?”

“What a peculiar question? I didn’t notice. I only looked to see that it was the same contents, and it was, so I closed the door again. That was when I happened to scratch the surface below the words, with the point of the knife; it wasn’t intentional!”

Numa had not heard of any scratch, so demanded, “What’s this about a scratch, girl? Who cares about a scratch on the wall?”

“But, Chief, when I got back again to the door, the scratch was gone!”

“Hmmph! Now that is imagining things, all right; but seeing the wall at a slightly different angle, the scratch could be easily missed. with all that terror affecting your mind. You need to get over your shock, my dear, and you will be fine. I can see it was not fair of me to expect you to go there alone. Two people together are not going to get into such a muddle in their heads.”

Jean was recovering swiftly, and promised. “As soon as I get over the fear, Chief Numa, I am prepared to return and do the job properly.”

John said, wonderingly, “But you did the job, Jean. You established that there was no rock fall, and that everything was as it had been before. All that is missing is the explanation for the noise we all heard. It sounded like rock movement, but from what you report, there was no difference, except in your mind.”

“Now that I look back on it, John, I am not so sure it was all in my mind. I was so certain of my direction, until I found the storeroom for the second time. I even seemed to find the water pool again, further back. It felt most peculiar to apparently find two identical pools, and I had all sorts of imaginings until I opened the lock and found it was the same room after all. That was when I realised I had got turned around and had lost my bearings.”

John was conflicted but decided that from what had been found, it was acceptable to mount a further exploration into the darkness. He put this to Numa.

“Numa, based on what Jean found through her bravery, it seems that there is no major danger back there. Would it be all right with you if I and Raka, or I and Jean, or all three of us, were to go back and check out what is what, in a less strenuous frame of mind?”

Numa pursed her lips then agreed. “It seems that Jean has shown that there is no obvious danger for now, so you can organise a second exploration back there, but not one person alone; do you hear me?”

“I find that a suitable restriction, Numa. I will ask Jean and Raka what they think, before we make any decisions.”

At this point Raka appeared with a thick-furred warm hide for the other woman, and she wrapped Jean in it, loosely. Jean gave her a thank-you look, and pulled it tight about her body. She turned to face John again, and told him, “Thanks, John, for the cuddle. I needed to be held for a little, to recover my equilibrium, and now Raka has helped warm me up. That cave is cold, you know, Raka.”

She had forgotten that Raka would not understand her words, but curiously, on this occasion she did, and Raka failed to notice that the translation nanites were starting to work; at least intermittently. Jean also failed to notice that she had been understood.

Raka giggled, “Yes, I know that too well, but John doesn’t seem to be very aware of the cold. He has plenty of fat around his body, I think!”

John pretended to be shocked at this claim. “I am all muscle, my girl! Not an ounce of excess fat on my body.”

Raka frowned. “An ounce, John? What is that?”

“Sorry, pet. A measure, meaning a very small amount. Some day, we will need to set up standards of measurement for weights, lengths, and other quantities such as for liquids. Paces are too vague for distances, and heights and depths are even worse for measuring without standards.”

Raka pushed a little more. “Why do we need standards, John? Surely what we have is quite sufficient for what we deal with, in the amounts we deal with?”

John corrected her assumption. “Take our soap production, Raka: We have to make bars of soap to be the same size every time, so that all our customers know that what they get each time is the same quantity. When we allow other tribes to make the same soap, we need to say what size the bars have to be, so we are all consistent, no matter which tribe is producing the soap. There may be a time when we get a big order to our tribe, and don’t have enough bars ready to send. If the bars are identical, we can fetch what we need from the Farfarers, and make up the order for sending to the customer, without concerning ourselves with different sizes.

Get the idea?”

“Yes. I like the concept of making them all the same. But, wait, the ones from the Farfarers might have a different scent to them, and not be what the customer wants.”

“So, we standardise on the scents as well. We specify the amount of scent to be used, and we agree on the name for the scent, such as lavender or honeysuckle or mint. The quantity of scent will be reflected in the soap, thus we need to specify that along with the size of bar. If we need extra, we can simply tell the Farfarers the scent wanted and the number of bars, and we will get what we wanted.”

She took this a stage further. “Do we want the people we trade with to do the same with their products?”

“Good thinking. As far as possible; though when it comes to living things such as fish or crabs, you can only use rough sizes, like small, medium or large. If it is a supply of a special wood, such as for bows, we can utilise exact lengths and widths – the thickness of the log, but if it is something made from wood, it will be the usefulness or beauty of the object that is the determining factor for value.”

“That is sensible, I agree,” said Raka. “We can offer moccasins in small, medium and large sizes for they require varying amounts of hide for making them, and varying amounts of time to make them, even when it takes the same number of stitches. Adult stitches have to be tighter due to the additional pressures involved.”

“Yes. Time to make is an important aspect. A well-made bow takes a lot to time to make, so is worth more in trade. A child’s bow, for learning, is quickly made, so less valuable in terms of time and wood.”

Numa interrupted, “As Chief, I want such standards to be produced and recorded, so we can go back to the original, to check that examples made elsewhere are accurate. Can you arrange for that, John?”

“Yes. It is an idea that was used in my home time. We set up standard weights and measures, and these were the examples to which all other measures were compared. For example, someone baking bread would have to make a standard size of loaf that all would accept as what people would expect for their trade. It is easy to come along with a bread measure and test some bread that has been put out for trade. If a loaf of bread was not correctly sized, the baker would suffer a penalty to stop them cheating the customers.”

Raka was interested in the practicalities. “Where would you keep your standard measures, John?”

“In my time, each nation kept its version of the standards at our near its capital city – the tribe where its leader was based. All over the world, nations agreed to use the same standards, so that trade between nations could go ahead without quibbles over sizes, shapes, weights, and so on. That is why I would like us to start having standards. With a bit of luck, other tribes will see the benefit and we can all agree on one set of standards for the future.”

Raka had an idea. “John, does that mean that everything in the storage room will have been made to such a set of standards?”

“Now that you mention it, I suppose that will be so. Medicines and cosmetics will all have been made with ingredients that were produced to a standard of purity; tools and weapons made of metal would have been produced with steel – a variety of iron – of a specified quality. Practically all materials would have to be made to a minimum standard, so that the material would behave according to the specification laid down for it. The same goes for seeds; they would have to be produced and stored according to specified standards, so that most of the seeds can be guaranteed to germinate and grow.”

“So that means we can expect a lot from whatever is in that storage room?”

“Certainly. Everything should be well made and able to do the job they were designed for. If there are bows included, they will all be identical in looks and performance. Any arrows or crossbow quarrels will again be identical to each other, as they have been made by machine – that means all made with the same tools and in the same way, so they end up all the same.”

“So if I find a dagger there, it will be exactly the same as any other dagger from the same source?”

“There you have it, Raka: identical, just like twin children.”

“Twin children? You can get two children the same? How do you do that?”

John tried to explain in a simple way.

“To form a baby, you need an egg from the woman: you produce one every month inside your womb. A man’s sperm – his spend, that goes inside you – provides the other half of the baby, when the two meet in your womb. Occasionally, the mother releases two eggs at the same time. If that happens, and both are found by different sperms, you end up with non-identical twins. In the case of identical twins, when the egg starts to develop after being fertilised by a sperm, it might for some unknown reason split into two eggs, and you end up with two identical babies in the womb.”

Raka’s eyes widened. “John, you seem to know an awful lot about women, babies and birth; far more than the wise women of the tribe seem to. Is that to do with your learning, your education?”

“It is. If you are going to assist with childbirth, it helps if you know about what is happening with twins, and why they are there. Some tribes have assumed there was something wrong if a women has two babies together, but it is a natural process; just not common.”

Raka informed John, “I was thinking about Jean’s experience in the darkness. It is almost like being inside the body of a woman about to give birth. On that basis, would the noise be the room splitting into two, just like with human eggs?”

John laughed at the idea. “Hardly. If it has split in two, you would expect to find two rooms side by side.”

“Why couldn’t it be two rooms, one behind the other?”

“That is just as logical, but rooms don’t act like eggs, Raka. A room is a solid object, not a flexible thing like an egg.”

“But where did the first room come from?”

“It was sent by a machine back in my time. That machine copied the room back to here, and here it is.”

“So what was to stop it copying the room for a second time?”

This stopped John in his tracks, and he thought about it. Finally he spoke.

“In theory, it could happen, if the machine went wonky, but the people back there were going to shut it off.”

“And what if instead of shutting it off, they started it up again by mistake?”

John was struck with the mental picture of a man told to shut off the machine, and saying, “Which button is it? This one?” and pressing a repeat button instead. He chuckled at such absurdity, then considered that such stupidity had happened in the past, which was why ICBM missiles had to have two persons involved in firing a missile, to check that instructions were followed correctly.

He admitted, “It could possibly happen that way. Certainly, such a scene would account for Jean finding two doors to the store room. Possibly it was two doors to two storerooms. We really need to get in there to check out the possibility.”

Numa announced, “It is meal time, John. Raka and the other ladies have tasks to complete before we eat, so get out of her way, my man.”

“Yes, dear,” John submitted, and went off to consider the options for the back cave.

After the midday meal, it was decided that John and Raka would return with Jean to the darkness and establish what the true facts were about the storage room, Was there just one, or was there more than one now? John and Raka loaded themselves with hanks of string, as many as they could collect, so that however far the cave went, they would have that lifeline return route to follow. Jean was tasked with carrying ten oil lamps with installed wicks, plus a gourd full of oil for refilling the lamps if they had to go far into the dark. They didn’t bother with food supplies, and the pool would supply them with any water they needed to drink.

They set off, and the trio slowly wound their way to the site of the storage room with its door facing the outside. John checked the space around the lock, and found no scratches. Instead, he marked a single vertical scratch beside the lock, to indicate the number one.

John asked, “Do you want to check inside, Jean?”

“I don’t think we need to, John. We are all certain that this is the storage room you found. It is now marked, so we can go on and look for anything else beyond.”

Raka laid down another section of her line, and laid on top of it a stone she had brought in with her, just to weight the string down as they moved farther back.

They moved past the corner of this wall face, and stepped beyond, looking for the back wall that should be there after about thirty feet. They were past that distance before they noticed something odd There was another corner, and what seemed to be a back wall of the large storage room.

“Raka?” exclaimed John, “This seems new.”

“I agree. Let’s step forward carefully, as this is new to me and to you. This may be where Jean got disorientated. Jean? Are you with us for this part?”

“I am sticking close to you pair!” she fearfully emphasized.

They moved further back, and shortly John spotted a glimpse of water: the pool, or another much the same. Before long their steps took them into sight of another facing wall, and it had the words in the middle of it. Next to the words was a shallow groove in the rock: the scratch Jean had told them about, that had appeared to vanish.

John told Jean, “This looks like your scratch, Jean; so there appears to be a duplicate of the storage room. We had best open this one and see if it seems a twin to the other one. You both agree that this is not the original storage room we encountered earlier?”

Raka and Jean both declared, “Yes. We have found a different one.”

John inserted his knife blade and turned the lock. The door swung open and the lighting appeared. They walked in and looked around. It seemed the same.

John suggested, “Why don’t we make something different here, so we can say the interior is changed? Any ideas?”

Jean offered, “Place the envelope at the back of the cabinet top, instead of the middle where it is now?”

Raka mentioned the bags of seeds on the floor: Why not move one of these, so that it is nearer the door, on its own?”

John was happy to accommodate bot suggestions, and made these changes.

“Right. We have two changes in this room. When we go back, we check the original storage room to see if the same changes exist there.”

They exited, and John marked two vertical strokes beside the lock, to show it as room two.

“Ready to see if there is any other room farther back yet?”

Raka told him, “Wait until I get this line down and weighted. And John? I need your coil of line, for my coil is nearly all used. I’ll have to tie yours on at the end shortly.”

They ventured farther back, and again discovered there was no back wall, just a repeat of the pool, and then the room with its door and lock. John unlocked this door and they examined the interior.

It was laid out exactly as the first room, and the envelope was centred on the cabinet, not pushed to the back; and the bag of seeds was in its original position.

This proved that the room was a duplicate of room 1. When they closed it, John marked the lock with three equal vertical and parallel strokes, in a Roman numeral 3.

He challenged the two women,”Do you want to go farther back again, or can we assume that there are rooms as far back to match the number of rumbles of noise? That could be up to ten or so rooms, and ten or so pools of water.”

Raka said, excitedly, “And ten libraries of books, so we don’t just have one of each book??”

“That would be a logical assumption, Raka. I like that conclusion, too.”

Jean noted, “If there are more pools, that boosts your water supply for the future. If there are all those rooms, that means ten times as much of everything we were intended to get, but I am sure it all happened by accident.”

“Probably,” John agreed. Now, shall we get back to the daylight? We can just drop the string for now, and simply follow the trail back to the front, if you get my meaning! There is not much string left, so we can leave the remainder here. Raka, please thank profusely whichever ladies made the string for us: it is an invaluable asset to have access to.”

“Will do. The ladies will be pleased for it took them hours of hard work. Can we get them something, to say thanks properly?”

“Such as? They have everything they want here, don’t they?”

“Well, no. Each adult tribe member gets a free bar of soap and some shampoo, but the rest goes for trading. We could give them a couple of hands of bars of soap, and the same for shampoo, and they will be better off than all the rest of the women. They will be able to say it was an award for extra work.”

“Good thinking. Do it, with my compliments. Oh, and clear it with Chief Numa, so that we don’t do things without her approval. I’d hate to get on her bad side!”

“I’ll tell her that because of the ladies and their string, we were able to discover more storage rooms that will give us help for ages! She won’t be able to refuse.”

Jean commented, “That is a nice touch Raka; and you too, John. You are being a lot more civilised than I expected for the stone age.”

“Stone age? What is that, Jean?”

“The time we are living in, Raka. My people called it the Stone Age, as it was before metals had been discovered and used. There was an assumption that because you didn’t have metals, you were not very civilised.”

John retorted, “That assumption was just daft, Jean. Just because a society doesn’t have something physical, like metals, doesn’t make them less capable, you know. In many ways, they had to be cleverer, to make the same tools out of flint and other stones. It is an art – flint working. There is a site in England, where flint was mined for many hundreds of years. It is called Grime’s Graves, because of all the pits in the ground. These now shallow pits were once deep mines where families dug with antler picks, searching for flint nodules. There are over four hundred of these pits, up to thirty feet deep and with side passages, in an area the size of a field. One was excavated to find its size, and that’s what they found.

That shows valuable flint was in the stone age. This was work on an industrial scale, five thousand years back.”

“Impressive,” Jean admitted. “Never thought about such things. My education was all about the advantages of progress, but it seems progress is just a relative difference, based on available technology and not the people themselves.”

“Well put, Jean. That means you shouldn’t be put off by any man being a stone age person. It is how he behaves that matters.”

Raka backed him up. “It is true. John is now a stone age man, and he is quite happy to use string and oil lamps for this expedition to the dark.”

John snapped, “I was talking about local men, Raka, not me.”

She smiled sweetly. “Oh, is that what you meant? To me, you are a stone age man, and you do everything for me that I want and need, including giving me my baby.”

“Thank you, Raka ... I think,” said Jean. “I shall include John in my list of possible beaus.”

“Beaus? What the heck is a beaus?” Raka demanded.

“A word from another language, back in my time. It referred to gentlemen who might be interested in you as a future spouse.”

“My goodness, Jean. You have picked up some of John’s more ornate language.” Raka declaimed, then giggled. Jean smiled back. “Actually, I think I have been picking up some of John’s nanos.”

“You mean his pheromones? He has told me about them. No sign of you falling for him yet?” Raka was clear, but Jean had other concerns.

“Perhaps,” she admitted, “but I am more interested in his translation nanos, to help me pick up the local language.”

“Oh, yes. He explained about that; how he and we talk together, and can speak each other’s language. It would make things difficult, otherwise.”

“Yes. Thank goodness you are speaking English, so that I can follow all you say.”

“Really? In my head, I am speaking my own language. You say I am speaking English?”

“Well, as far as I can hear it, I am hearing English.”

John suggested, “Maybe you have been infected enough, so that you are able to hear Raka speak in her own tongue, but you absorb it as English. You are speaking English, but possibly Raka hears you in her local language. Is that so, Raka?”

“I am speaking my local language, and what I hear from Jean is my local language as well. Perhaps Jean has now absorbed enough nanos to make the translation system work for her.”

John nodded. “Sounds like it. Welcome to stone age society, Jean. You are now one of the tribe.”

Jean leaned forward and put her arm round John, to give him a hug.