“Abigail’s looking more appealing by the second,” Frigate said.
Farrington and.Rider laughed, and Frigate moved on.
For a while, he stood by the dock area. This was a shallow bay which had been hacked with much labor out of the bank. Stone cut from the base of the mountains had been carried down here and used to line the shore. Wooden docks had been extended from the bank, but these held mainly small catboats, lugboats, and catamarans. Two giant rafts with masts were tied up here, too. These were used for dragonfishing. A number of warcanoes, capable of holding forty men each, were beached near the rafts. Canoes and rowboats were putting out now for fishing. By noon, The River would be heavily salted with small and large boats.
The Razzle Dazzle was too large to fit within the piers. It was anchored near the mouth of the bay behind a breakwater of large black rocks. It was a beautiful ship, long and low, built of oak and pine. There wasn’t a nail in it, and the pegs had been cut with flint. The sails were made of treated outer skin of the dragonfish, so thin they were translucent. The oaken figurehead was a full-busted mermaid holding a torch.
The ship was a wonder, and the wonder was how its crew had managed to avoid having it taken from them. Many had been murdered for much lesser craft.
Feeling anxious, he walked past Farrlngton and Rider. The interviews were by no means over. Word had gotten around, and now there were about twenty men and ten women waiting in line. If this continued, the questioning might take all day. There was nothing he could do about it, so he shrugged and went back home. Eve was gone, which was just as well. There was no need to tell her what he was doing until he found out if he was leaving. If he was turned down, he’d say nothing to her.
Part of his duty as a Ruritanian citizen was to assist in alcohol-making. He might as well work off a half-day today. The labor would help keep him from worrying. He walked through the passes between the hills until these gave out. There were four more hills to climb, each increasingly higher. The trees were thicker here; the huts, fewer. Presently he was on top of the highest hill, which was at the base of the mountain. Its smooth stone ran straight up for an estimated 1228 meters or about 6000 feet. A waterfall thundered about 91 meters or 100 yards away, spilling thousands of liters a minute into a pool. From this, the water ran in a broad channel which would thread a course through the hills to The River.
Frigate passed by the fires, the wooden, glass, and stone equipment , and the odor of alcohol. He climbed up a bamboo ladder until he was on a platform placed against an area of stone from which lichen had not yet been removed. He reported to a foreman, who gave him a chert scraper. The foreman took from a rack a pine stick with Frigate’s initials cut into it. It bore alternating horizontal and vertical lines, the former indicating the days he’d worked, the latter the number of months.
“Next year you’ll be using a stick to scrape off the stuff,” the foremen said. “We’ll be saving the chert and flint for weapons.”
Peter nodded and went to work.
In time, the supply of flint would be exhausted. Technology on The Riverworld would go backward. Instead of progressing from a wooden to a stone age, humanity would reverse the procedure.
Frigate wondered how he was going to get his flint-tipped weapons out of the state. If he sailed on Farrington’ s craft he would, according to the law, have to leave his precious stones behind.
The time put in by Frigate on this work was estimated by the foreman. Except for the sun, there were few clocks of any type. The little glass available was used in the alcohol-making process, so there were not even hourglasses. For that matter, the sand used to make the glass had been imported from a state 800 kilometers down-River. That had cost Rumania several boatloads of tobacco and booze and piles of dragonfish and hornfish skins and bones. The tobacco and alcohol had been contributed by the citizens from their grails. Frigate had given up smoking and drinking for two months during this time of sacrifice. When it was over, he continued his abstinence from smoking, trading his cigarettes and cigars for whiskey. But, as had happened on Earth and here, he had slipped back into the arms of Demon Nicotine.