John Ringo - There Will Be Dragons

“Yes, milord,” Sheida said shaking her head. “I hear and obey.”

“Something else to remember,” Myron said with a thoughtful smile. “What applies to us, applies to Paul and company. Who is advising them?”

“Farming is going to be our biggest problem,” Paul said gloomily. “With that bitch Sheida’s attacks we can’t move food around. And people are going to start starving soon.”

“Well, I have some ideas on that,” Celine said. “I think we can handle it quite readily. It all comes down to Chansa.”

“What do you mean by that?” Chansa asked harshly.

“Well, farming’s not exactly what you call difficult,” Celine said, waving her hand. “People have been doing it since they chipped stone after all. But the people who make up the refugees are weak and don’t know how to work. They’re all lotus-eaters, agreed?”

“One of the greatest problems with the world that was,” Paul said, nodding his head. “They shall learn to strive again, learn to work again and thereby learn true freedom again.”

Celine glanced at Chansa to see his reaction, but the giant was simply looking at Paul with a furrowed brow. Wondering exactly how much history Paul knew, Celine cleared her throat delicately.

“Are you perhaps saying something like, oh, ‘work will make you free’?”

“Why, yes!” Paul said, nodding and smiling as his frown cleared. “That’s it exactly!”

“Oh, well,” Celine said weakly. “In that case. Uhmm, where was I?”

“Farming’s not difficult.”

“Ah, do a minor modification to the refugees. Make them more resistant to physical effort, conditions, food quality. Perhaps a bit less… mentally refined; farming can be very boring work. Do a bit of selective memory work so that they are not so depressed by current conditions. Just generally… tweak them to make them more suited to the modern environment.”

“So what you’re saying is you want to make them dumb?” Chansa asked, with a raised eyebrow. “Is that how you see me?”

“No, not at all,” Celine replied smoothly. “I just want to make them strong . And… tough. Capable of surviving better than standard humans.”

“We are trying to escape Change,” Paul pointed out, frowning.

“Oh, this isn’t really Change, ” Celine said. “Just… tweak-ing.”

“That will take energy,” Chansa said. “Where are we going to get it?”

“We can take it from their own bodies,” Celine replied immediately. “There is a program to enhance ATP conversion. It will leave them initially weak, but food and work will help them to recover.”

“I did not take the course that history set before me to turn the human race into moronic drones,” Paul intoned.

“No, you didn’t,” Celine hastened to agree. “But this increases their chances of survival and when the war is done we can change them all back.”

“Ah.”

“And loyalty conditioning,” Chansa said. “And touch up their aggression. I need foot soldiers.”

“Loyalty conditioning?” Paul asked, seeming to be perplexed by the sudden change.

“For soldiers it’s all you need,” Chansa replied. “And some aggression. Like farming, soldiering does not require much in the way of brains.”

“And some basic skills,” Celine added, making a note on the paper before her. “Soldiering and farming are pretty simple. We’ll give them the baseline skills for each. They’ll all know how to plow and… well other things.”

“That should work perfectly,” Paul said, looking at his steepled hands. “Perfect.”

“The problem is, Myron, that all these refugees are weak-armed, weak-hearted do-nothing lay-abouts,” Talbot said disgustedly.

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” Sheida replied. “They’re all in good basic condition, much better than the average farmer in history. Just point out to them that the alternative is to starve. We’re not going to be giving food away, they’re going to have to produce it on their own. They either produce it or they die. And so do we.”

“Lovely,” the smith snorted into his pewter mug. “It may sound like I’m blithe about this but I’m not. They don’t have any skills and they’re not used to hard day-in and day-out manual labor. The last time this was tried a quarter of the population died.”

“When was that?” Myron asked.

“Pol Pot, Cambodia,” Edmund said. “Just a tad over two thousand years ago. He’d just won a civil war and decided that all the people of the cities were to move into the country and work the land. A quarter of them, three million people, died. Many of them from being beaten or killed by thugs, but most of them from starvation. There was a similar situation in the same area a few decades before, and that one killed even more people. And those groups at least had the concept of work.”

“And it’s possible that a quarter of this population will die,” Sheida replied sadly. “But if food isn’t produced, all of them will die. And there aren’t any farmers.”

“Think they can learn it, Myron?” Edmund asked with a jerk of his chin.

“It’s best if you’re raised to it; that way you don’t consider working day in and day out every day of the year to be hard,” Myron replied with a grim chuckle. “Otherwise…”

“I guess you’ll just have to do a lot of classes,” Talbot said, taking another sip of beer. That, too, was going to be in short supply soon; they’d have to concentrate on wheat over barley for the time being. “Me too,” he added with a grimace.

“You need to be running things, not beating out sword blades,” Sheida corrected.

“Well, I don’t know how much time I can take training people and also run the farm,” Myron noted. “And if I don’t run the farm nobody will be eating next winter. Not to mention the fact that I can’t be everywhere at once.”

“What about Charlie and Tom?” Sheida asked.

“Well, what about them?” Myron replied. “They’re both ready to take over, but they’re also wanting their own farms…”

“Set one of them to be the instructor?” Edmund asked. “Maybe something like an agricultural agent.”

“Mayhaps. But he could be growing food himself.”

“I’ve come up with a way to have a sort of… roving instructor,” Sheida said. “A widely roaming one. It would have some problems associated with it, among others not being home much. Ask them if one of them would be interested. Lots of travel.”

“Okay,” Myron said dubiously. “Honestly, Tom probably would. He likes the theory of farming, but he doesn’t really like the work if you know what I mean.”

“In the meantime we’ll get the familiarization program going,” Edmund said. “Most of them will end up having to farm. But you need more than farmers. Especially if this lasts as long as it looks like it might.”

“Something else to put on the list,” Sheida said, making a note. “If it works here, we’ll pass the information around and see what comes of it.”

“One other thing, Sheida, this is a war. That means that when we start supporting you, Paul will probably find groups to attack us.”

“Yes, he will,” the council woman replied. “And I’ll help you to the extent that I can. But…”

“Well, the good news is I may not know shit about fighting a Web war, but if they have a ground force commander that’s my equal, I will be very surprised.”

“Clothing,” Roberta said. Tom’s partner was the village seamstress and it was one of the first points raised when the three went back to the meeting. Sheida’s avatar had stayed since the other avatars stated that the groups they were monitoring were still mostly spinning their wheels. Raven’s Mill’s plan of setting up an apprenticeship familiarization had been passed through the avatars and was meeting with mixed reactions.