Chapter 17 – Skipping Through the Ages

Only one goblin during the night, and a good amount added. We woke to find a decent-size hole worried in a weak corner of one of the enclosed shelters where one of the goblins had apparently been dragged away in its sleep. The others were starting to get restless in the mornings. While they didn’t seem to lament the loss of any single goblin, they also didn’t like the idea of getting picked off in the night.

Somewhat selfishly, my primary concern was that it might happen to one of my taskmasters, whose specialty of keeping other goblins on task and making them better at their work contributed hugely to my ability to multitask. Still, we’d added 8 additional members. I’d been doing some tracking, and it seemed like the increases were loosely based on the amount of sleeping mounds. Goblins would only form a mound with a minimum of 12 members, no more than about 20. Each independent mound would produce 1-3 more goblins per night, which meant we’d gotten pretty lucky by getting 8 goblins out of 3 sleeping mounds. I decided to re-work the shelters for max efficiency so that the mounds would only be able to hold about 15 goblins to ensure distribution to the maximum number of mounds. That should optimize reproduction without resulting in undersize piles.

With 45 members total, I could split the tribe evenly between my three task-masters. There was safety in numbers, after all, and fifteen goblins with crossbows, spears, and cleavers would be much safer than just 10 or 11.

I checked on the juvenile stone-sloth as well, and found it still asleep in its new pen, untouched by whatever was preying on the goblins. I got the feeling that a lot of predators wouldn’t think the juice of dealing with the clay-reinforced hide of the sloths was worth the squeeze. Goblins were level 1 and practically defenseless.

Buzz brought Sally and Neil over for the morning round-up. I sent Neil off right away with the hunters, who took their assorted slingers, wildlife disguises, and fishing poles. I had them go west, away from where we’d seen the javeline. I wasn’t going to mess with the boar-men quite yet. I also wanted them to bring back more hides for tanning. Buzz had his wall project, though his eyes got a bit greedy when he saw the stack of bricks Sally had cured.

“Sorry, Buzz,” I said. “I need those for another project. But we’re going to be making more. A lot more. In fact, I want you to send two of your crew over to the pond and just have them make as many bricks as they can.”

With just Sally left, I pulled out another set of charcoal sketches I’d whipped up the night before while the stone sloth roasted. My chief engineer’s eyes got as big as dinner plates when she saw that I had drawings, and just about snatched them out of my hand. She looked through, eyes keen as she absorbed details of the structure. She chittered for her crew, and started squawking and directing traffic as they scrambled to arrange lumpy, mis-shaped bricks into a tower about two meters high and slathered them with muddy mortar.

In the meantime, I tinkered with a design of my own using a few of the gears and a crank, along with a stretched hide and a stone drill. When the last brick was put on top, the engineering crew busied themselves loading the bottom with fuel and tinder and carefully tossing in coals from last night’s fire.

Not exactly an accurate description. Really, it was a forced-air kiln. You see, fire requires two things—fuel and oxygen. You add more fuel, you get a bigger fire. But you add more oxygen, you get a hotter fire.

Sun-dried clay is useful for cups, bowls, jars, and containers. And I had a couple of those drying in the sun the previous night, which had finished by the morning. Primitive cultures on Earth had used clay for a huge number of applications, even things like recording history. In fact, the earliest known recorded message was a business transaction, for Barley, if I remembered my Econ 101 class. Which reminded me, I needed to consider some fermentation science eventually if I wanted my goblins to really celebrate my rule.

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But I digress. One of the interesting properties of silica clay is that if you fire it in hot—like, ridiculously hot—temperatures, it turns into something between a glass and a crystal, called ceramic. You need a lot of air for this, and a lot of fuel because forcing oxygen through that fire causes it to devour fuel like your fat uncle at Thanksgiving going through the sweet-potato casserole.

While you were at Thanksgiving, you might have seen some of your grandmother’s old dishes kept in a big case, and heard that they were ceramic, and associated it with tissue-thin delicate cups and plates that never actually got used because they were too special. And that probably gave you, as well as most other people, the wrong idea about the material science behind ceramic.

Ceramic is brittle, sure. It can shear somewhat easily along its crystalline structure. But you can plan around that. And once you do, you suddenly have a material that can be harder and sharper than steel, easily shapeable until its fired, doesn’t need to be mined or smelted, is incredibly heat resistant, and has just a few simple ingredients that you can readily find in a mountainous forest area like the one the goblins were native to. Popular applications of ceramics include things like bullet-proof body armor, precision instruments, turbine engine parts, the bearings in my old prosthetics, oh, and the reentry tiles underneath the space shuttle. You know, the ones that keep it from burning up in the upper atmosphere.

You’re damn right, I did. We were skipping bronze, iron, and going right to pre-industrial. We’d need metal eventually, but ceramics were like a cheat code for a lot of the applications primitive cultures used metal for and could hold us over until I figured out how to access steel. I whistled for Sally and had her assembly team start making raw clay parts based on my designs while the fire warmed up. They went to work shaping clay, making blanks for a few different designs. Knives, spearheads, arrowheads, ball-bearings, connectors, pulley parts, hooks, fasteners, scribes, scalpels, fine hooks, and gears. Everything a budding goblin village needs to speed-run industrial parts manufacturing. The prototypes, if they worked, could be used to make molds from sun-dried clay, and then it was a simple matter to streamline the process of shaping even more tools and components.

While the goblins worked the first clay prototypes, I showed two goblins how to work the impeller. Essentially, the two cranks spun spindles on either side of the kiln’s air intake, and small wooden blades on each one forced air through a channel and directly below the fire. It’s a bit like a bellows, but with a constant supply of air to the fuel source. Not only that, but I’d designed the kiln with a narrow throat at the firing chamber, to increase air flow even further—like a carburetor. It’s counter-intuitive that air speeds up through a constriction, but it does, and it would make the fire hot enough to force the chemical change in the clay. Also the same physics principle that creates lift on the upper side of an airplane wing, if you’re curious.

It was hard work keeping the fan blades spinning. But Sally’s goblins had energy to spare for a new toy. The fire underneath the kiln roared, venting out the top of the furnace in a shimmering column of super-heated air. We had a decent supply of fuel from the days of idle goblins collecting sticks and sawing down small trees that turned out to be inadequate for the wall project. But the kiln would take every branch we could feed it. The heat coming off the bricks was immense.

When I judged it hot enough, I pulled open the front face with a hooked pole. The wave of hot air that came blasting out felt like I had stepped into the furnace myself. I shielded my face while Sally’s team inserted the thin adobe plate with the first of the ceramic pieces. Then the second and third plates went in, and I pushed the door back shut. My fur was matted with sweat already. The insertion team’s fur was singed in places. We needed gloves and protective aprons for this, really.

The goblins on the impellers cranked and cranked, trading off in shifts as the fuel team swept out spent ash and put fresh fuel in. Being king comes with certain privileges, so I sat back and watched the glowing oven

The kiln was really my first major accomplishment. We’d had to fight for the clay, lost goblins in the process, and needed parts and tools to work and shape the clay into better parts and tools that would give this tribe a much-needed leg up in this forest full of things that wanted to kill and/or eat its members.

We kept the fire going into the evening, even after Neil and the hunters returned with fish and fowl and hides and started to cook them. A few even tried holding roasting sticks over the kiln output, but when the first and second bird burst into flames, the effort was abandoned. Even after Buzz finished the wall and sent his goblins out to replace the dwindling fuel stock, we kept the fire going. Sally’s goblins worked in shifts on the cranks and at the fuel, making sure the kiln stayed red-hot into the evening. Finally, as the catch of the day was done cooking (now with containers ready to catch and store the oil and grease for later use), I called for a stop. Sally came over, fur so streaked with soot and grime she looked a bit like Rufus with his black-striped badger fur.

It had taken a whole day to make our first batch of ceramic parts. It would take the entire night for them to cool off enough to remove from the kiln. It was incredibly time, resource, and labor intensive to produce ceramic parts. The morning would tell if it was worth it.