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Day 62

Ten Days until Evacuation

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Kai set her rifle against her knee, pointing it up into the air. It wasn't the best way to have it pointed, but an accidental discharge was supremely unlikely even if something went wrong. There was just no other direction to safely have it resting, unless she wanted the barrel on the ground.

The !Xomyi around her did not seem to understand when she told them to be careful of walking in front of it, so she could not lay it across her lap.

A few times she'd even found them trying to peer down the barrel.

The women chattered amongst themselves as they gathered. They took turns using the scanner Brooks had given them, and they had figured out on their own how to work it and even scan new items for it to locate.

Only once had they accidentally gotten into a sub-menu and couldn't find their way back out. They'd brought it to her, asking if they'd upset it, and Kai had shown them how to get back to the main screen. Remotely, then, she'd disabled all other screens except the scan screen; they'd not have problems getting stuck in menus again.

When would they understand it was technology? She had tried telling them that it was just a tool, like a spear or a needle or a scraper. But they didn't seem to understand it.

Or maybe, she thought, they thought those things had spirits, too?

Sometimes when a tool had broken, she had heard them mutter something about the 'keotli being gone'.

"Does it ever get tired?" one of the younger women asked her about the machine.

The atomic battery in it would last at least 75 years before starting to get too low to run the device. She couldn't think of how to tell her that.

"Not for a very long time," she told the !Xomyi instead.

Her name was Soon Mother, and she was very pregnant.

Their information on !Xomyi did not include how long gestational periods were, but Kai had a feeling that soon there would be a new member of the tribe.

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Soon Mother rested often, but still labored. Kai had asked if she would get time off, but the puzzled looks the !Xomyi had given her had made her realize how ridiculous a question that was. There was no 'time off' when you lived at a subsistence level.

Though, she noted, the other women were working harder to cover for her.

The beginnings of society, she thought. Wasn't it often said that when people started caring for each other was when it started?

She also saw in the !A!amo the beginnings of sex discrimination. They had far more defined sex-roles than in the Sapient Union, with only women seeming to gather, and only men hunting.

Their biology seemed at least somewhat comparable to humans in terms of the physical differences between the sexes - somewhat noticeable but not massive. The women tended to be smaller, the men had more muscle.

For humanity, those differences had long since stopped being very relevant; muscle augments leveled the playing field, if one wanted or needed them. Technology, and the society itself, had allowed for the ending of essentially all sexual crimes. Such events, in a developed system, were nearly unheard-of.

While she had yet to see the level of sexual categorization and exploitation that had existed in human history among the !A!amo, seeing the stark roles was still a strange experience.

The women seemed to be taking a break, with the eldest woman, Old Mother, sitting down with the scanner. Two other women, Fisher and Rock Finder, sat down with her, talking softly.

Berry Eater, who her system told her was married to the man Honey Finder, approached her.

She did not ask to sit, her large eyes just flicking to the ground, then back to Kai. That was normally how they asked for such an audience.

Kai gestured with a flat hand, telling her that it was fine.

Berry Eater nestled onto the ground, looking up at her curiously.

"Are you married?" Berry Eater asked her without preamble.

But that was just how they were. Kai smiled. "No, never been."

A ripple of surprise went through the group. "You and Gift Giver are not . . . ?"

"No, we're just . . ." She considered how to explain this. "We're from the same clan." The fact that they still had the physical differences of their ancestors from Earth probably wouldn't mean anything to the !Xomyi, she reasoned, so it was not that strange to say. They seemed to have color and morphological variations that they made little note of.

Two of the children ran up to their mother, the youngest, named Flower, clambering onto her lap.

She absently took from a pocket some pale balls of a mashed root that had been dried. The children both began to eat, and she began to eat one as well.

Kai knew she'd be offered some she could not accept, so she took her own piece of a similar-looking ration from a pouch and started to eat.

A sound from out in the forest caught her attention, and she looked past Berry Eater. Old Mother was also looking out, but dismissed the sound after a moment.

The drones told Kai that a large, placid herbivore had been walking nearby, but they had herded it away without issue.

Predators often followed in the wake of herbivores, so she set the drones to a heightened sensory state, just in case.

Berry Eater shooed away her children.

"I hope that someday you can find a good man," she told Kai, her voice kind. "And you can have many children."

Kai wasn't sure how she felt about her words, but she smiled, and decided to take them in the positive sense they had been meant.

"Thank you," she replied.