Polyclitus had apparently decided that the “brutal” pace they had been on before was now the standard marching speed for the Caravan. Mazelton spend most of his time in the wagon, only hopping off to stretch his legs. More to keep the wounds from healing too tight than any real urge for exercise. His arm was still in a bad way, but it was getting better. The swelling was down, and he could almost feel the bones sintering together again.

Mazelton had tried to keep focused on his polishing. The dirt basic cores he was making wouldn’t improve his skills any, but he could improve his speed and efficiency. Less wastage by better self control. It was something to keep the mind busy, because the land offered nothing in the way of distractions. Nothing.

The trail led them directly through a grass covered ruin, picked over and prospected innumerable times by innumerable people, and in Mazelton’s semi-expert opinion, there would have been nothing there to begin with. Decent sized town, but it was in the middle of nowhere on a viciously fast and narrow river. Totally unnavigable for boats. It would have been a nightmare to ford had it been even a bit deeper. As it was, the water barely came up to the axles on the wagons. How much could the town have developed? What great secrets could be hidden in rural farm country?

Duane wasn’t having it. He firmly shook his head and pointed at a berm running along the riverbank. It looked… well, like a very straight berm running along a river bank. So generic as to be unnoticeable. He gave Duane a questioning look.

Duane gathered himself for a moment. “Caravan on rails.” And that was all there was to be said about that.

Mazelton had to think about that one. He had some recollection that some civilizations used rails for transportation, but he didn’t really recall how that worked, exactly. You could put a cart on rails, he supposed, and have aurochs pull it. Or cheves, perhaps. Oh, or you could hook an enormous number of people on two wheelers, have them pedal the loads along. He didn’t know exactly how that would work, but he could kind of see it.

He really tried to see it. Boredom was no longer a strong enough term. This was something else, bordering on madness. He could see the madness growing in the caravan, it wasn’t just him. The total lack of stimulation as the caravan rolled across the plain made people try to find distractions. People were picking fights out of boredom, or trying dumb stunts. A totally ordinary hill would be the subject of a thousand pairs of eyes for hours on end. Speculation would fly breathlessly about what might be on the other side. Trying to figure out which patches of dirt were a little too flat and straight was clearly the boredom-madness of a sophisticate.

The tips of the wild grasses were yellowing. It felt like summer should have barely started, but they were yellowing all the same. Polilclitus kept the wagons going an extra half mile, so they could stop next to a pair of ponds. Not very big ponds, and Mazelton felt a chill as he watched the water levels drop with every gulp from the aurochs and every pail scooped up by an emigrant. They would be totally dry within a month, he reckoned, maybe less.

Policlitus took the initiative to remind people that if they wanted to start a fire, be sure and clear the area first. It wasn’t wildfire season yet, but better to build the habit now.

Mazelton looked around and shook his head. What the hell were they going to burn? The last tree was five miles back.

He nearly spit out his tea when he saw people breaking out stockpiles of collected wood from their wagons. Some people had even packed charcoal. Heat stones, people! HEAT STONES! Safer, more reliable and easier to carry. He shook his head. Incomprehensible.

Mazelton had noticed that birds tended to flock around the wagons, particularly the Nimu Caravan wagons. All the dead insects on the ground and lack of preditors made for prime hunting. He was a bit worried about that- all the accumulated heat couldn’t be good. Still, nothing he could really do about it either. He watched them flit around, dun colored, some “livened” with blacks and flashes of white.

He could do sparrows and city doves. All raptors were generally filed under “hawk,” and he could sort out geese and chickens too. He felt that he could make a creditable stab at “vulture” though he wouldn’t put money on it. These little chirp chirp small brown birds, however, were a complete mystery. Some had short, triangular beaks, some long, pointy beaks, and some split the difference. Now why on earth was that?

“Mother Moon protect me, I am losing my mind.”

“Another heritable trait of the Ma clan?”

Mazelton smiled in relief.

“Talking to me again, Madam Lettie?”

She grimaced a bit at that.

“It’s pretty nasty watching someone do surgery to themselves. Not fun at all.”

“People do it all the time, though?”

“Generally not to themselves, they don’t. And no offense? But watching you braise yourself to prevent a possible serious infection was worrying.”

“Huh. It honestly seemed like the only sensible thing to do. Debilitated equals dead in these parts.”

Madam Lettie raised a finger to punctuate a retort, but her nail seemed to deflate her instead.

“I think I am going mad too. I came over because you are a reliable source of good conversation and I am picking an argument for no reason.”

“Do you know what these birds are? I am quite sure they aren’t ducks.”

“You are a duck expert?”

“I have had the privilege of observing some excellent ducks in the past.”

Madam Lettie laughed, the wailing shriek of good humor piercing the air with vindictive power.

“That is right, they can’t possibly be ducks.” She agreed.

“You are distracting me.” Lettie said. “I had an actual topic to discuss before coming over. Ah. Have you looked at the terrain around here?”

“What else could I have looked at?”

“Notice anything?”

“No. Literally nothing. Nothing whatsoever. Some bits are flat, some bits are hilly, the grass is drying out. That is the totality of this environment.”

“Oh come on! Where is that famous Ma paranoia?”

“We had it killed, as it was almost certainly plotting against us. Examples must be made. What am I not seeing?”

“The grass is different.”

Mazelton pulled up a strand of tough, woody grass. It didn’t come without a fight and eventually he had to twist it around and around until he could eventually snap it off. In his expert opinion, having seen several million blades of grass-

“This is grass.”

“Yep. Great. What kind of grass?”

“Prairie grass?”

Lettie sighed dramatically.

“Greensmithed prairie grass.”

Mazelton frowned and looked around.

“This would have been decent farmland, with enough population or machinery to support it. Not an excessive amount of water, so likely cereal crops. You need a lot of hectares of land to make that viable.” He trailed off.

“Prairie grass has a lot of functions in an ecosystem. A lot. So anyone looking to do some ecosystem remediation around here might well start with prairie grass and its little microbial friends. Suitably adjusted for local conditions, of course.” Lettie said.

Mazelton frowned.

“Last apocalypse was a gray goo outbreak.” He gave Lettie a look. “Which you would know more about than me. But it shouldn’t have screwed the ecosystem, particularly, or at least not more than it already was. And none of the big civilizations this epoch have been all that big. And they have had a paranoid dislike of machinery. So this wouldn’t have been farmed for several thousand years or more. Nature should have taken over without any outside help.”

“And yet we are surrounded by this clearly manufactured grass. So either someone had something they wanted covered up here in the current epoch, or they had something they wanted fixed in the last one.”

“I don’t suppose you can date it?”

“Not really, no. Not without something to compare it to. But given that we have been seeing slave machines from the Nacon civilization that were all recent manufactures, I have some suspicions.”

Mazelton looked around with growing horror.

“You don’t mean…”

“I don’t know for certain, of course. But you saw those hills that looked like some sort of weird weapon strikes. The Two Souled running into major numbers of these machines. The push to migrate west, out of this region.”

“And the fact that the machines are likely new manufacture…”

“This would have been a middle of nowhere farming region for the Nacon. Endless miles of nothing much farms. All of which would have been heavily automated, with maybe two or three farmers living on site.”

“A Ghast machine. Ælfflæd protect us, I always thought that was a myth.” Mazelton breathed out, trying to keep the growing fear down.

“Wouldn’t a good Dusty have begged the protection of Mother Moon?” Lettie teased lightly.

“And the strength of Father Sun to survive it. I’m not a very good Dusty. And I know that the best thing to protect from Earth Demons is the Ælfflæd.”

Lettie looked out across the waving grass. Mazelton wondered what it was like to be so painfully aware of the life around you. Shouting its lineage at you. It would have annoyed him to death.

“You know, the Pi clan is divided on the existence of the Ælfflæd. Some hold that it is an old folk superstition that grew into an actual religion. Supported in large part by the Ma, as a means of indoctrination and control.” Mazelton nodded. That did sound like something they would do.

“But there has been enough evidence to suggest that there are entities that exist, so alien that we have a hard time even understanding them as alive or sentient, that have been called Ælfflæd, and the religion grew up around people with the ability to actually contact these… aliens.”

“Which are you?”

“I don’t know. More the former than the latter, but the more I talk to you, the more I wonder. You?”

“They are real. Alien. You and I have more in common with this grass than we do with the Ælfflæd. But they are real. And sentient.”

“You have seen one?”

“No one has. But I have seen their ghosts on this side of the membrane of the universe. I danced with one, once.”

“Oh? Good dancer?”

Mazelton spun the grass around his finger, and wondered how to answer that.

Mazelton made cores. He made so, so many cores. His fingers had gone almost numb. He had joked that he could carve a light core asleep, but now, as he jerked himself away, he discovered that it was actually true. The core in front of him was perfect. It was still an utterly basic light core without so much as a color change function, but it was perfectly carved. His own core was almost sputtering from overuse. He would have to absorb a small mountain of heat to make it up.

He looked around, wondering if there wasn’t some sort of reactor buried twenty smoots directly below him. The Nacon civilization, from what he knew of them, was savagely divided between castes. The nobility were practically another species than the commoners, having partially fused themselves with dry minds. The plebian Nacons… it was hard to say what they understood, exactly. Certainly they had more information immediately available to them than anyone in this epoch. But that knowledge was carefully and deliberately engineered to produce outcomes that the ruling classes found desirable. A certain type of person would tend to encounter certain articles, entertainments, people, who would either plant an idea or support existing prejudices in line with the grand, multi-generational projects of the aristocracy. After all, the meat might die, but the dry mind would live on indefinitely. With care.

Mazelton shook his head. A lot of this was speculation and partial records. Even the Ma clan records of this time were not as complete as anyone would like. The Nacon being firm believers that the “correct” version of history was the only one needed.

Mmm. The Pi clan’s connection with the Nacon civilization was always a bit controversial too.

A ghast machine. A dry mind awakening, restarting the machinery to rebuild the “glorious” Nacon Empire. Oh wait, did they call it an empire? No, they had some other word for it. Amounted to the same thing, though.

Was there a way to defend against it? Mazelton ran through the usual options on his fingers, starting from the core bombs that could remove entire cities from the map to making high energy weapons widespread. One by one they were discarded. He was just one polisher, and not a very accomplished polisher at that. The only way to defeat such a slave machine army was with another, bigger, even better equipped army. Then you had to find where they were being made, destroy it, then find the mind behind everything, destroy that, THEN pray that it had no backup facilities prepared.

On the one hand, it was still a one on one fight, man versus machine. On the other hand, it didn’t have hands, it had unknown numbers of heavily armed murder machines with twin mounted slug launchers. He had one crummy single shot short range weapon.

Mazelton shook his head and his heart ached to be on the other side of the Ramparts. With Danae. Where everything was quiet, and nothing hurt.