It also punched holes in thousands of trees that would otherwise have been good timber. When I complained about this, Barb said that there wasn’t any way to be sure exactly how far up the surface was, and it was better to be safe than sorry. The damage was done, and it wouldn’t be repeated, so I let the matter drop.
The architect calculated that once the system filled with water, if the island suffered from a total drought for twenty years, we would still have plenty of water for all of our needs.
Personally, I think Barbara just liked digging tunnels.
Another crew was working with the logs we’d collected during the ground clearance. There wouldn’t be time to season the wood properly before we turned it into furniture, doors and window shutters, but any seasoning was better than none, so we got on it soonest.
Our “saw mill” looked like a long, aluminum sawhorse that you set up above the log you were planning to turn into boards. Up to sixteen temporal swords fit on a wheeled trolley that ran along the bottom of the long beam of the sawhorse. Pulling the trolley the length of the horse sliced the log into nice, smooth lumber.
The hard part was stacking the wood in neat, rectangular piles so it would dry out properly.
* * *
Despite the long hours we all put in, it wasn’t all work, not by a long shot. Every Smoothie can play at least one musical instrument, and most of them brought one along. Being ungodly cooperative, group singing came naturally to them. Furthermore, Barb was a world class ballerina, and her friends weren’t far behind her.
The sea was full of fish, and there was plenty of game on the island, from wild pigs, birds, feral goats and cattle, to sea turtles. Ian claimed that many of them had been put on these islands by Christians to feed shipwrecked sailors, and to give the cannibals something to eat besides each other.
The trick with the cannibals hadn’t worked. Apparently, once you develop a taste for human flesh, nothing else quite makes it.
The Killers liked to hunt and fish, so we didn’t have to live on the canned food we’d brought along. A bakery, a brewery, and a still were among the first things they got going, and weather permitting, we usually ate around a campfire.
With the Killers providing the food and drink, and the Smoothies the entertainment, a very good time was had by all.
* * *
When there was nothing else for Barbara to do but cut the canal that would connect our harbor to the sea, she warned us, and we all knocked off work to watch. She had already cleared the canal down to a few inches above the high tide level.
The tunneler was sealed against both a hard vacuum and high pressure, and was as sturdy as a submarine, so taking it into the water wasn’t what bothered me. I was having visions of the sea water driving her backward into the harbor, and smashing her against a pier or something.
Most people just don’t realize the force of moving water. Thousands of people are killed in floods every year all around the world, but very few of them actually drown. Most often, they are ripped to naked pieces by the force of the water smashing them into things.
But Barbara insisted on doing it herself, and out-arguing her was a lot like out-stuborning a cat. You can do it, but it usually isn’t worth the effort.
She got the tunneler into position on a notch that she had cut earlier for the purpose. She swung her wings out to their full thirty-two foot width, and took off at about thirty miles an hour. She ran out of stone to drive on about the time she hit the beach, but that didn’t slow her down. She just pressed on regardless, eating up prodigious amounts of rocks, sand, and then water. She didn’t even stop when she was completely submerged, but continued on with the water flowing over and around the big wings.
With hindsight, I can see the wisdom of her actions. She had to get out and away from the backwash she was kicking up. At the time she scared the shit out of me!
Watching her, I almost missed the start of the hydraulic show she’d kicked up. Water gushed up her recently cut canal at what must have been sixty miles an hour. It made a spectacular waterfall as it splashed down into a harbor that you could hide a five-story building in.
In a few minutes, Barb and her tunneler drove up onto the beach. She shut down the shovels, folded her wings, and hurried back to see the waterfall she’d made. She needen’t have rushed. The harbor was more than six hours filling up. Only then, when the rapid flow had ceased, was it safe to go back and cut the channel wider and deeper.
* * *
We spent another two months getting the town pretty much finished. The buildings were all up, with walls and roofs, and had doors and window shutters, but were lacking glass windows, and were mostly without furnishings. They were connected to the sewer tunnels, but not to the secret passageways that would let our agents and historians communicate with the modern libraries and work rooms in the basement of the castle. The secret entranceways would be installed later on an “as needed” basis.
The castle had four floors, stairways, inner walls, partitions, and nicely arched ceilings, but was still pretty bare inside. The drawbridge was in, spanning the moat, but we didn’t have the chains and mechanisms needed to draw it up. The moat was still dry, except for some rainwater. The wells were in, but we didn’t have the pumps or the windmills to bring up large quantities of water.
Barb had talked the architect into letting her put a seawater moat all around the town, and this meant that we had to put in drawbridges at each of the town’s three gates. They didn’t work yet, either. Ian came up with a system of two floating check valves that, with the action of the tides, kept the water in the moat circulating in a clockwise fashion, keeping it fresh.
Next, somebody made the mistake of telling her how a fish weir worked, and the area near the town soon sported two big ones. We soon had more fish than we could eat. The ones we couldn’t eat were eaten by the bigger ones, and nature took its course.
Then, she decided that she didn’t like the way the town was situated in a notch cut into the surrounding hills, so, without informing the rest of us, and working at night, she had eliminated the hills. She didn’t even let us save the lumber. Except where it abutted the cliff, with the castle above, the town was now surrounded by a smooth, stone plain. I suppose that this was good, from the standpoint of defense, but esthetically, well, it looked like the parking lot of a big shopping mall. How she was planning to get some soil and plants growing there was beyond me.
She just liked playing with that tunneler.
To keep her out of further mischief, I had the architect draw up plans for a road system that she could cut through the whole island, and that had kept her busy for months. We rigged a temporal sword to the front of the tunneler, and cobbled up a bulldozer blade for the front of it so she could cut the trees and push the logs off the roadway, rather than sending them to wherever such things went when we sent them elsewhere.
I made her promise to stay inside of her beloved machine whenever she was outside the town walls, so the natives couldn’t hurt her. They never tried to. If they were still out there, we didn’t see any of them.
To look authentic, the castle and the forts guarding the entrance to the harbor needed dozens of ornate, eighteenth-century cannons, which we didn’t have yet.
Only the Red Gate Inn was really complete, sitting on the town square, with the big fountain in front of it. The fountain was empty, but we didn’t have any horses that needed to drink from it anyway. At least Ian claimed that that was what public fountains were really for, originally.
You’d think that I would be the one who wanted a good bar in operation, but no, it was Ian who pushed the inn into completion first, even ahead of the church across the big square.
He explained himself one night in the common room of the inn.
“I’ll get the church finished, don’t worry about it. But right now, I’m the only one here who would use it, and I can pray just fine in my room.”