rix_scaedu

I wrote this to aldersprig's prompt "The long log of winter, the long ice of summer. "

Hammerdore is inland and land bound, free of coastal influences, so our warm season is hot and our cold season is very cold.  In the early warm season we cut the great, tall loerkas trees of the forest for logs to fuel our cold season fires and then dig up the stumps, leaving clearings in the long, dark woods that we plant with loerkas saplings to grow in time for our grandchildren or their grandchildren to fell again.  In the coldest part of the cold season we cut ice from the river and store it underground in dugout ice-houses so we can have coolness in the hottest part of the year.

My grandmother, when she visits from the First Place cannot understand why we bother with replanting, why we don’t just clear fell the forest and why we don’t use power for heating our buildings in the cold and cooling our food in the warmth.  Mind you, my grandmother’s generation expects that we will return to space in my lifetime, that we will leave this world they were wrecked upon and return to their home.

That, of course will take metals to repair their ship.  Metals that have to be dug out of the ground, crushed out of rocks and then purified before being worked.  Processing metals takes power.  We have power but not enough for both processing metals and for indoor climate control.  We prefer to use the power on metal processing.  The two older generations say that my generation is impatient because we want to get the mining and the metal processing done as quickly as possible.  Of course we know that once my grandmother’s generation is gone we won’t have the skills to repair the ship.

The engineers have done their best to teach us but they lack too many books and too much equipment.  Anyone else with skills and knowledge to pass on to us has the same problem.  As a result, my generation knows less than the previous two.

My grandmother expects that our family will return to the stars, I don’t.  If we can repair the ship, I don’t think we’d all fit on it.  I’d miss my older kin but, so they could return to their home, I would volunteer to stay here, on my home.