Castaway Planet (24 page)

“Mmm-hmmm,” Caroline agreed absently. A few moments went by, and then, without warning, Caroline leapt into the air with a shout of triumph that startled them all, especially coming from the usually reserved and controlled Caroline.

“What?” demanded Sakura. “What is it?”

“It’s
limonite!
” Caroline shouted, her face in a broad grin. When the others, including Laura, blinked at her blankly, Caroline laughed. “It’s
bog iron
, everyone.”

“Bog . . .” Whips went rigid, even as Laura felt a rising joy in her own heart. “You mean it’s
iron ore?”

“Twenty-seven percent iron!” Caroline confirmed, and laughed again, seeing answering smiles dawning all around her. “Forget wreckage and fire-hardened tips and the Paleolithic—welcome to the Iron Age!”

Chapter 37

“Listen to that wind howl,” Whips muttered.

“Nasty,” Sakura agreed, and winced as a particularly savage gust rattled the shutters of Sherwood Column. “Is this a hurricane, Mom?”

Her mother, across the kitchen from her and Whips, nodded. “That’s what we think. We’re drifting around the right latitudes for hurricanes, and the wind out there is easily over a hundred and forty kilometers an hour.” Rain hammered the shutters and something more substantial rapped loudly as it smacked the column’s side. “There will be more than a few trees down from this.”

“Is . . . is our house going to be okay?” Hitomi asked nervously, peeking in from the stairway.

“Don’t worry,” Whips said with a luminescent chuckle. “This thing was meant to take a
lot
worse. Even with the holes we’ve put in it, it’s going to be just fine.”

“He’s right,” Sakura reassured her sister. “This is like reinforced concrete, like a tower back home. Wind’s not going to hurt it.”

“Okay!” Reassured, Hitomi scampered back upstairs.

She turned her attention back to the gently boiling concoction on the fire, stirring it. “It’s getting thicker.”

“I don’t doubt it will thicken. The question is what we get out of it when it’s boiled down enough—which should be pretty soon.”

She looked over at the assortment of plants and fruits on the table. “I think this one will work. We’ve got other candidates, of course.”

The current project was an attempt to make a concentrated sweet syrup, or possibly even sugar, by boiling down the juice of the sweetest plants they’d found. Knowing that Earth plants from sugarcane to maple trees to beets could be used to make sugar, Sakura was pretty confident that they could get sugar out of at least one, and maybe several, of the plants available on Lincoln.

This particular batch was using pearberry, which of course looked like pears but were small berries about the size of blueberries, and tasted to Sakura rather like kiwi fruit with a hint of cherry. They were quite sweet and so she thought there should be enough sugar in them for this purpose.

With the storm going on, almost everyone was doing something in the kitchen. It was lower down, warmer, and large, and there were plenty of projects to work on in the area of improving cuisine. The big outdoors projects, like iron and ceramic works, obviously couldn’t move forward in this weather.

Sakura caught a whiff of sharp odor from across the kitchen, smiled. “Is that working?” she asked her mother.

“I think so.” In the container—made from a small blockcrab shell—was a mass of slightly off-white material. What made it impressive was that it was now near the top of the container, and what had been put into it—an hour or two ago—had been much smaller.

“Yeasts are very common, not just on Earth but other compatible planets,” Akira sad with a nod. “Which is another of the points the panspermians like to use to push their hypothesis. But it took a while to find one that worked for bread.” Dad gave Mom a quick kiss and then went towards another niche. “I think that our first batch of vinegar is almost ready, and that means pickling and other things—not to mention a very good cleaner for various uses.”

She hadn’t realized that vinegar took a two-step process to make; somehow she’d always thought it was what naturally happened if you left things like apple juice to go bad, but her father and mother—and the references in their omnis—had shown that the key ingredient, the acid, came from a breakdown of alcohol-containing material, which meant that you
first
had to ferment your fruit juice, and
then
have it turn into vinegar.

Now that they could do both, that meant maybe wines and things like that (more an interest for Mom and Dad) but more importantly if they could figure out a still, concentrated alcohol which would have a lot of uses. Plus, as Dad said, the vinegar meant pickles, and the thought made her mouth water. She hadn’t had a pickle since the dinner before the disaster, and she loved pickles. Sakura hadn’t let herself think about pickles since the crash, because they were just about the worst thing to miss: completely nonessential, and impossible to make without a lot of work.

“Dad . . . can I try?”

“What? Oh, the vinegar?” He looked into the covered container. “Well . . . doesn’t seem to be anything dangerous in it. Your mother and I have watched that closely. So, I suppose so.”

She left Whips to stir the thickening pearberry juice and went over to her dad. “You made it from the opals, right?”

“Right.” Opals, or more correctly, Hitomi’s Opals, were an iridescent fruit Hitomi had found and brought to them because it was so pretty; they had also proven to be very sweet and common in certain parts of the forest. If the pearberries didn’t work out for syrup, Sakura planned on trying a batch with the opals.

The sharp smell from inside the container set her mouth to salivating. Some people hated the smell of vinegar, but Sakura loved it, and this smelled . . .

She firmly squashed her rising enthusiasm. Sure, it might have the acetic acid content, but the other components could make it terrible. With trepidation, she took one of the small spoons, dipped it in, and dropped some on her tongue.

An instant burst of puckery sourness spread joyously throughout her mouth, with a faint burn and fruity notes that echoed the opals from which it had been made. She paused, savoring it, and resisted the urge to get another spoonful; instead she just licked what was left off the spoon. “That’s perfect, Dad!”

He laughed. “And you can’t wait for us to start pickling things, can you?”

“Nope. Let’s start today!”

“Hold those horses. This batch will be for flavoring. Dressings, maybe cooking, too. Now that we know it works, we’ll start making more.”

“Sakura, this is really getting thick. You want to test it?”

“Coming!” She ran back to Whips, seeing the liquid now boiled down significantly and not swirling as water but trailing slowly. “That sure looks like syrup to me.”

She dipped her spoon in the boiling liquid and pulled it out, blowing on it. For a few moments it seemed to just sit there, but then she saw a faint but unmistakable clouding in the yellow-orange stuff. “I think this might just be working!”

Popping it into her mouth, she was rewarded with a concentrated fruity sweetness, and—for a moment—an unmistakable almost-sandy texture that dissolved away. “Gentlemen, we have achieved
sugar!
” she shouted.

“Now it’s my turn to try!” Akira said, crossing to their place in two strides. Sakura felt her own grin widen almost painfully as she saw her father’s near-ecstatic expression upon tasting it. Dad had the sweet tooth of the family.

“You could not have timed that more perfectly,” her mother said.

“How so?” Whips asked.

“Well, I hadn’t said anything because I didn’t want to get any hopes up—or get us anticipating something that didn’t work out. But now that it looks like this loaf of bread will actually
be
a loaf—a risen loaf—I want to give a slightly delayed birthday party for Hitomi. We can make something like a cake, or maybe pancakes and syrup, for a special treat—”

“Oh, that’s a great idea, Mom!” Hitomi and Melody were the only ones not in the kitchen at the moment. They were cleaning the upstairs rooms (and probably playing, which was likely to make the cleaning a bit haphazard). “We’re almost finished with the next Jewelbug adventure, too. If Whips, me, and Mel take the time tonight, I think we could finish it and have that be her big present.”

“And I think I could probably finish up her new driftseed carder by then,” her father said. “Not much of a present, maybe . . .”

“She’ll love it,” her mother asserted firmly. “Hitomi, fortunately, hasn’t ever quite reached the point where she thinks work and fun have to be separated, and she really likes things like that kind of singleminded work that, honestly, drives me insane.”

“Okay, so it’s settled!” Sakura and Whips lifted the syrup off the fire and scraped it into a large, solid pipestem container at the side. She painted it around the edge with the thicker remains of the syrup—the skin that had formed around the edges of the boiling part—and wrapped a barkcloth top over it. “Okay! That’ll keep for a while, I think.”

She and Whips moved over to join her parents, and Caroline, who was cutting capy meat into thin strips for smoking. “So let’s plan the best Lincoln celebration ever!”

Chapter 38

“Can’t I look yet, Mommy?” Hitomi asked.

“Almost, honey,” Laura said, unable to restrain her smile. “Just another couple of steps . . . there we go . . . ready . . . okay, open your eyes!”

Hitomi’s eyes opened just as everyone shouted “
Surprise! Happy birthday, Hitomi!
”

The youngest Kimei’s hazel eyes widened in incredulity as she stared at the table, with what looked like . . .

“A . . . a birthday cake? With
candles
?”

“As close as we could come to a cake, yes, honey.” The family burst into a rendition of “Happy Birthday,” and the still-astonished little girl was guided to a seat at the table, staring in wonder at the seven glowing flames. Laura gave her a hug. “Now make your wish and blow out the candles.”

Hitomi closed her eyes tight, then opened them and with impressive force blew out every candle with a single breath.

Everyone laughed and clapped, and Hitomi grabbed one of the candles off the red-and-blue-streaked cake. “Ow! It’s a real candle! Where’d it come from?”

“We’ve been rendering tallow from the capys and a couple other animals for soap, and once we got enough of that I remembered that books often talked about tallow candles,” Akira said, and kissed Hitomi’s forehead. “And what better time to try it than for a birthday?”

“Wow.” Hitomi said. “So now we can have light when we want it, even better than the fat lamps you made.”

Laura smiled, feeling proud and happy that even Hitomi appreciated what that meant. A tiny part of her noted with bemusement how awestruck everyone—including her—felt at achieving something that would have been so laughably trivial to her a year or so ago. “Now, let’s cut your cake.”

Hitomi nodded, somewhat shaggy golden hair bobbing with the motion. They still had a ways to go with their barbering skills.
“It’s . . . like a stack of pancakes?” Hitomi said as she took a closer look at the cake.

“Making a good real cake takes something like eggs, and real frosting . . . well, we haven’t figured out all the things involved yet. But this is good enough, isn’t it?”

“It’s great, Mommy! I don’t care how it’s built!” Hitomi sliced through the cake with Laura’s guidance, then pulled the knife away and did the second cut—very neatly—by herself. “Can I . . .”

“Of course you can, honey. It’s
your
birthday.”

Reassured that she wasn’t being greedy, Hitomi moved her piece of stacked-cakes birthday cake to her nearby plate; as the others cut their pieces, she grabbed a spoon and took a bite.

Her eyes widened again, and she said—somewhat muffled by cake—“It’s good!”

Laura agreed. The driftseed pancakes had come out well—after she’d wasted half a bowl of laboriously manufactured flour experimenting on the exact thickness and method of whipping air into the batter. But it was Sakura’s pearberry and opal syrups that really made the cake into a treat. She could see Akira restraining himself with heroic resolve from eating two slices right away.

“One piece for now, everyone,” she said. “As soon as we’re done with those, it’s time for the birthday girl’s dinner!”

Sakura jumped up. “Got to check the roast!” She ran over, glanced inside the firebox, then grabbed triple-thickness barkcloth potholders and pulled out the largest of their pans, with a dark-red and black something on it. As it came into the light, Laura could see that it looked like a rib roast from a very large capy, but the color was very different from the others, and the
smell
that came wafting out . . .

Akira laughed at her expression, and did a little dance with Sakura at everyone else’s surprise. “Snuck it past you, did we?” Akira said, grinning.

“What
is
that?” Laura asked.

“Capy, of course, but with a glaze of pearberry syrup, salt, Lincoln pepper, and our very own opal vinegar,” he said proudly.

“It smells
totally bestest
, Daddy!” Hitomi said.

“Um . . . Akira,” Whips said hesitantly.

“Don’t worry, Whips,” he said with a smile. “We’ve got another one just for you, without the pepper or syrup.”

Laura smiled. Akira wouldn’t forget important things like that. The “Lincoln pepper” was a seed from a smooth-barked, slender tree that had a high concentration of something very like Earth’s piperine, which was responsible for the spiciness of black and white pepper. This made it a tasty spice for humans, but unfortunately piperine and its close relatives were toxic to Bemmies. Whips himself also wasn’t terribly fond of sweet things, but did like acidic flavors.

The capy roast was incredible. Laura tried to remember when she’d tasted anything so good, but couldn’t. “Honey, this is just . . .”

“
Bestest
bestest!” Hitomi said firmly.

“It really is, Dad, Sakura,” Caroline said, wonder in her voice. “I’d almost forgotten what food can taste like when it’s prepared with different flavorings.”

“We’re just getting started!” Melody said emphatically. “There’s got to be
dozens
of spices and flavorings we can find here, if we keep looking.”

And she would keep looking, Laura thought with pride. One good thing about Lincoln was that their constant struggle had brought Melody a long way from her habitual laziness. Oh, it was still her natural state, but now she had come to enjoy showing off what she could
do
as much as what she
knew
, and that made a huge difference.

Hitomi’s birthday dinner was a deliberately huge feast. There were fresh opals and smoked platefish, minimaw, and blockcrab; a salad with emerald seaweed, brushweed, and green filegrass, sprinkled with sweetened vinegar; steamed older filegrass stems, which were sort of like asparagus crossed with water chestnuts; and of course more of the birthday cake. Laura ate until she simply couldn’t eat any more, and saw even the ravenous Sakura slowing down.

“And now,” she said with a smile at the birthday girl, “presents!”

As she had expected, Hitomi was actually ecstatic at the new carder when she unwrapped it from its barkcloth coverings, and she appreciated the extra clothes that Caroline and Melody had finished in time for the birthday party.

“Hitomi,” Sakura said with a grin, “have your omni do its update.”

Hitomi did, and suddenly squealed in glee. “A new adventure! A new Jewelbug adventure!”

“Happy Birthday!”

Hitomi bounced up and hugged Sakura, then Whips, then Melody, and around to everyone else, ending with Laura. Laura hugged her back, tightly.

“Mommy, can I play?”

Laura laughed, as did everyone else. “Of course you can. All you want, today.”

Hitomi looked around, and straightened, and for a moment she looked a lot older than the seven she now was. “Thank you. Thank you, everybody, so much. I know how hard all this was to make . . . and this is the best birthday
ever.
”

She was getting older, Laura thought, another sting of maternal pride causing her eyes to water.
And still herself.

Hitomi sat down to play Jewelbug, and the others started to clean up.

She leaned over to Akira as they started washing dishes. “Somehow, it really feels like a home now.”

“Because we’ve gotten enough ahead to have a real celebration? Yes. Oh, we have so much more to do, and so many more things could go wrong,” he looked momentarily distant, “like that other island that’s getting a bit close, but . . . yes. We can live here. We’ve survived many dangers, but in spite of them we’ve started to build a little civilization here. If we’re never found . . .” He shrugged and smiled. “We’ll still make a very good run of it. We will have pottery and iron and steel soon—pottery in a week or three, iron and steel in a few months, perhaps. We lost almost everything . . .”

She hugged him, knowing exactly what he was going to say; she finished with him, “. . . but not the most important things.”