Chapter 8

Earth time: 26-Aug-2010 9:36 PM

Aina time: 241 of 1407 12:13 PM

(second month of spring, 25 days after the Festival of the Red Bird)

"Leon, is that you?! You look great!"

"Lois! Hi! Yeah, I've gone native. Like my new outfit?"

"It's different! Mom and dad would probably fall over backwards seeing you like this, after all your years of wearing three-piece suits. I've only stopped in here to grab some munchies for my office. Why don't you join me for lunch?"

"Sure, I'd love to. Let me just grab a bowl. I'll be right with you."

A short time later the two walked out of the community dining hall and started to stroll over to the science lab in the beautiful spring sunlight. "Leon, I haven't seen you since when, the Ice Festival?"

"Oh, I left before that. A few days after we got here from the transfer station, this year's and last year's * marriage * classes * got together and picked a work project. I decided to join them."

"Yes, I remember."

"We've made some really major improvements in the copper mines, about twenty kilometers north of here. It took six months to do it, but we now have ability to start the castings for the dam project, both the turbines and the generators."

"You weren't around for the Red Bird Festival?"

"No. This year's class isn't old enough for it. With my age, I'm sure I could have come, but as a bachelor I just wanted to stay with the part of my team that wasn't getting married."

"The festival was pretty wild stuff. These people really know how to party! A lot of it would have been obscene if it weren't so playful... I was almost tempted to walk around bare-breasting! Va'an did, briefly. What a body! And you should have seen Kara! As leader, she runs the marriage ceremony for the newlyweds. Her ceremonial garments for this are totally open in front, exposing both her breasts and her pregnancy. The crowds kept cheering her on. It was a love fest!"

Leon smiled. "Well, the exuberance didn't end with the festival. You should have seen the couples as they came back to the mining camp. What an amazingly happy bunch of people! My class took a day off to celebrate with them, sitting around and singing songs together..."

"Leon, did you know about their solution to the polygamy issue? It was a big surprise to everyone here, even Kara."

"Oh yeah, I knew. I think it might work out okay, even though all the women who married each other are clearly interested in guys. They call their unions * ahonui * male'ana * "

"A patience marriage? Yeah, waiting a year, I see what you mean... Wow, you as a miner! I could see Mark doing that, but you?! My mind is rebelling. Actually, maybe not. What'd you do, lose thirty pounds?"

"Well, thirty pounds of fat probably. I think I've gained a lot of muscle. It was a tremendous amount of work."

"But your team is a bunch of teenagers... Earth years, that is."

"Yeah. For this year's class, a few have already turned 23, most are still 22. In Earth years, a few are already 18."

"I'm amazed you chose to spend six months with a bunch of teenage kids!"

"Well, I did. We had some needed guidance from the mining guild, but all the work we did ourselves. My classmates were all very mature, acting like young adults, not Earth teenagers. We worked together, ate together, slept together, shared ideas and sang together in the evening... It was the most wonderful time of my life."

"Slept together?"

"Ha! We did have one elderly couple to chaperone us, but they trusted us completely. They would always retire early in the night. And the class returned their trust. There was a modesty barrier at night between the boys and the girls. Absolutely nobody violated it. So amazing, 31 men and 82 women... So different than Earth would have been..."

"I'm still having a hard time thinking of you doing this..." Lois opened the main door to the science lab and held it open for Leon.

"Why? I remember talking with Mayoni when we were still at the transfer station. I learned how people on Aina know about money, but reject the concept! They're a bunch of communists! My MBA degree just isn't that useful here. So I decided to join the class. It was the best decision of my life. Lois, I loved it!"

"But these are the kids who are... Leon! Are you thinking of robbing the cradle? At your age?"

"What? I'm 26 in Earth years... The classes didn't see my age as an issue at all."

"Uh... Are you dating anyone?"

"Well, maybe. One of the girls from last year's class asked me for a date tonight... Her name is Nalani. We spent a lot of time sitting together in the evenings, at the mines... I'm good friends with her wife too, a Paleo woman named Ura."

"Nalani?! I know her! Isn't she in charge of the telescopes?" Lois opened the door to her office. "She's interested in you?!"

"I hope so! And you're right, she's the tribe's astronomer. She works in the day in the dining hall, and she's also an excellent weaver. She made me the clothes I'm wearing now. She's so beautiful Lois, inside and out! Her name means * the * calm * of * the * skies * I'm meeting her late tonight to help bring in the telescope. I'm trying to think how to give her a present, for her Earth birthday."

"Her what?"

"I calculated she was born on August 27, 1991. She'll be 19 later today, in Earth years. I'm trying to think how to give her a present, but nobody owns anything here! How do you give a present to a communist?" Leon finally sat down. "Wow, nice office, Lois! And you rate your own laptop!"

"Yeah. Remember those heavy backpacks Kalea gave each of us to carry when we came to Aina?"

"Uh huh..."

"Well, we now have four Hydra laptops. It's the latest in multi-thread, multi-head laptop server technology. These four laptops integrate our other fifty laptops into a super- computer. All the idle cycles are available on the virtual Hydra machine. It really doesn't take much CPU bandwidth to run the tribe's study periods. Kalea is doing a massive amount of analysis with her quantum modeling of Blue Spirit."

"Four laptops? But there were seven backpacks. We all had one, even mom and dad. What were in the other three?"

"These." Said Lois, as she opened her desk drawer and handed her brother a DVD disk.

"DVDs?"

"Not just ordinary DVDs. Do you know how our fifty laptops all have DVD read and write capability?"

"Sure. I bought them all, remember?"

"Do you know the data capacity of a DVD?"

"I think so. About 4.5 gigabytes per layer, and there are two optical layers on a single side. You tune the laser to read one or the other. Total capacity about 9 GB."

"Each Hydra laptop has a Spectral-DVD read-write drive, with 256 optical layers per disk. Raw capacity is over one terabyte per disk."

"Wow!"

"Kalea was such an optimist! When we got back to Earth and learned of the plague, I was in such shock that... well, I was pretty useless for a while. But Kalea wanted to hope that Aina would be okay. She talked to my parents, and they bought her a gigabit Internet connection and the four Hydras. Her link allowed her to fill up eight of these disks per day. She was buying a million dollars of information from Google's world library database. We gave up about a quarter of the disk capacity to write the data with error correcting information. Gee, Leon, I'm sorry I didn't show you all this when you were in Cider Junction. You must have been there a week before Kara showed up."

"It wasn't your fault. I've never been so depressed in my life. Helping dad with the wind turbine was probably the first useful thing I had done in months... So what's on the disks?"

"There are 160 video disks each storing about 100 feature movies, 160 audio disks each storing about 1000 hours of high fidelity music, and a 160 data disks each storing several hundred million pages of text. It's our core repository of Earth's culture."

"Wow... I see what you mean. Trying to save all this just wasn't on the agenda for Jumpstart."