Eric Flint: Time spike

Jenny, what-exactly-is a 'year'? It was three hundred and sixty-five days where wecame from, sure." He waved his hand airily. "I will graciously ignore the additional fraction of a day that required a leap year on occasion. But you're presuming a constant day-and we know the Earth's rotation slows down, as time goes by. He tapped his watch.

"That's why we have to keep adjusting these things, each and every damn morning. The day's shorter. You see my point? Sure, it's been three hundred and sixty-five days. Three hundred and sixty-fiveshorter days. Who knows how many days it takes to make a year, in the Cretacean Here and Now?" His expression got a little smug. "Ask me in a couple of years, though-however many days that takes-and I'll be able to tell you." Andy leaned over the side of the former watch tower, that had been turned into a favorite picnic area for most of the time and was reserved for the colony's cabinet in session when they wanted it, and looked at the pile of stones some distance away.

"Isthat why you've got those poor kids building Stonehenge for you?"

"Poor kids, my ass. They love it." They probably did, at that. Except for Brian Carmichael's church, nothing captivated the immigrants who kept trickling into Schulerville more than Jeff's various science projects. Of course, Andy was all but certain that most of Edelman's students had their own religious interpretation of what he was doing.

He knew for a fact from Kevin Griffin-who'd become almost fluent in the main immigrant dialect-that the term usually applied to Edelman was the same term applied to Carmichael and Elaine Cook. "Shaman" was the closest translation. Hulbert cleared his throat. "Uh, folks. If the esteemed parties present would tear themselves away from idle speculation, can we please return to the subject which Mr. President plopped before the cabinet." He looked at his watch. "I'd like to settle this before the wedding, if we could." "Fair enough," said James Cook. "I propose we accept my advice as a formal proposal. Or if you want to get fussy about it, I recommend somebody else makes it a formal proposal." Technically, Cook didn't have any formal cabinet post, just as Geoffrey Watkins didn't. They sat on the cabinet ex officio, as the respective heads of the two other political entities who made up the confederation: in his case, Boom Town, and in Geoffrey's, the Cherokee town of Saluka. But, especially in Cook's case, that was a technicality. With Watkins, there was more substance to the distinction. As friendly as they were, and as closely connected as they'd become, the Cherokees still maintained a certain distance.

Residual wariness, if nothing else. Andy couldn't blame them, given the history involved. Even though he knew, and so did Watkins, that there was no chance at all of that history being repeated in this world. In the North America they'd come from, the Cherokees-the other Indian tribes, perhaps even more so-had simply been overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of Europeans who kept arriving, and their offspring.

Eventually, although it had never really vanished, their culture had gotten pressed flat under the weight. That couldn't possibly happen here. If anything, Andy thought the cultural adaptation was tending at least as much in the other direction. Besides, as far as sheer demographics went, the residents of Schulerville and Boom Toom and Saluka wereall minorities. Small minorities, at that. As time passed, they'd discovered more and more villages of pre-Mounds Indians-and, just four months ago, had finally stumbled across the Mounds culture.

Thirty-five miles away, it turned out, the Quiver had deposited Cahokia itself. The Mounds people didn't call it that, of course. They called it something Andy still couldn't pronounce, no matter how hard he tried, and neither could anyone else in the cabinet except Watkins.

So they kept using the term Cahokia as a practical convenience. By their current estimate, between thirty and forty thousand people had wound up in the Cretaceous, of whom more than ninety percent were Indians from somewhere in the centuries before the arrival of Columbus. True, disease was hitting them pretty badly already. But Jenny didn't think they'd be hit nearly as badly as had happened in the world they came from. If nothing else, there was no smallpox. And most of the villages within fifteen or twenty miles of Schulerville had accepted Jenny, Susan Fisher, and the other nurses-James Cook too, in a pinch-as shamans. They'd readily follow their advice, at least on medical matters. That helped a lot too. "I'll make it a formal proposal," said Jenny. "And I agree with it." Hulbert scratched his jaw. "I dunno. I'd trust Bostic as far as I could throw him." James rolled his eyes. "Rod, who said anything about 'trust'? Bostic sure as hell didn't. I spent five full days in his town, dickering with him and getting the lay of the land, and I can assure you the word never crossed his lips once. His point, though, is that we have no objective reason to quarrel with him; and he doesn't, with us. So why not make it a formal treaty?" Hulbert kept scratching his jaw. Cook tightened his. "And if that doesn't move you, maybe this will. I wasthere, Rod, you weren't. If we pick a fight with him-don't have any doubt about this-we'll be starting a war with all of his people. You keep thinking of Danny Bostic as a criminal and a gangster, but for those people he's their hero. He's fucking Beowulf, I kid you not. The valiant warrior from distant parts who showed up with a handful of stalwart companions and took care of the monster who'd been ravaging their villages." Cook's irritated look was replaced by a mischievous one.

"He did it the same way you did, by the way. Dug a big pit and served himself up as tyrannosaur bait." That piqued Hulbert's interest, naturally. "No kidding?" "Allosaur bait," Edelman said wearily. But that was a battle he'd lost months ago. Whatever the huge theropods might "really" be, everyone except him had long ago decided that "tyrannosaur" just plain sounded better. "Yup, no kidding." Cook's expression got more mischievous still. "He even made the same silly mistake you did. Took the time and effort to line the bottom of the pit with sharpened stakes." Rod chuckled, a bit ruefully. He and his hunters had spent days getting those stakes ready. And had then discovered-which he admitted he should have realized from the beginning-that the stakes were pointless. A complete waste of time and effort. No land animal who ever lived, be they never so fierce and ferocious, could survive a plunge into a fifteen-foot deep pit. Not when they weighed better than six tons. Most of the stakes had just splintered, without ever piercing the monster's thick hide. It mattered not at all. Half of its bones had been broken, including its spine, its hip, one leg, both arms and its lower jaw. All they'd had to do was wait by the side of the pit until it finally died. "But that was about the only mistake he made. A dumb gangster would have tried to take over by force. Bostic just did his heroic deed, made modest hero-like noises, and bided his time. The only problem he ran into was that all three of the chief's eligible nieces started quarreling over him. That took a while to sort out. But, eventually, it did." Nieces, not daughters. Like all of the Indians they'd encountered, including the Cherokees and the Cahokians, the village societies were matrilineal. Descent ran from mother to daughter, not father to son.

And while males always occupied the position of chiefs and-in the case of the Cahokians-the top priests, their own lineage was reckoned through the children of their sisters, not their own. Which meant that when the current chief died, Danny Bostic was in line to succeed him.

So were several other men, of course, but the tribe would decide among them-and what tribe in its right mind was going to pick anyone else for chief, when they had Beowulf sitting right there? Andy thought it wouldn't take more an a generation-two, at the most-before matrilineality became established custom in Boom Town also. The population of that town was still overwhelming ex-convict. The final deal Andy and Cook had worked out concerning the surviving prisoners had been that the Boomers would nominate people for a pardon, and a committee of guards appointed by Andy would make the final decision-but they could only decide from the list presented by the Boomers. Balance of powers, so to speak. Then, there'd be a sort of parole that would last for somewhere between six months and six years, depending on the inmate involved, although it could be shortened if the Boomer panel and the guard panel jointly agreed. During that stretch of time, the parolees were under one and only one restriction: they were forbidden in Schulerville and Saluka. They had to go live in the new town the Boomers created-or anywhere else, for that matter, but almost all of them wound up in Boom Town. In essence, the Boomers had wound up being the confederation's parole officers. And they were parole officers whom it wasreally tough for an inmate to fool. They knew every trick in the book. After a few months, the guards had gotten confident enough about the situation that the pace of releasing prisoners speeded up a lot. There were only a hundred and forty-six inmates still locked up in the cells, and the truth was, except for a handful those men would probably stay there the rest of their lives.