The Great Takeover of the Place.
51. Rain.
The two travellers continued onwards towards the lowering sun as they gradually climbing the valley side, moving up through the catchments of first the Grove By The Lake Of Gems cantref, then Further Up The Hillside and Last Stop Before The Pass. Rhia pointed out how each of the cantrefi managed their own watershed, from the hill top above, to the river in the valley bottom. This allowed for the design of their individual water trapping and storage systems, unique to each locality, so dependent on the particular lie of the land, the rock and soil types and a range of other variables.
“Its one of the things that makes each cantref unique," Rhia told him, "But still similar. Then of course every cantref has a unique community of different folk with different skills and experiences. So you put that together with each unique landscape and a specialism emerges, something that your cantref can do relatively easily, compared to the others. Then you've got something that others need, that you can trade.”
“But you're all still gardeners?” Trueman could still make out small, dense plots of vegetables above and below the trail, separated and sheltered by rows of soft fruit and hedges.
“More or less,” she laughed, “though not everyone wants to or is able to. Doesn't matter. There's plenty of other stuff to do and there's usually plenty of folk ready to take on an additional patch to grow stuff on.”
As the dusk began to deepen, the valley sides steepened and closed in and Trueman saw they were coming to the pass. Looking back, the plume of smoke, now distant, was still visible as a thinning grey smear. Ahead, to the west, Rhia had been keeping an eye on the sun as it now dipped behind clouds that were piling up into billowing mountains with dark undersides;
“That's going to reach us in a couple of hours,” she sighed, resignedly, “And there's another challenge. We'll have to find to shelter before it hits.”
Trueman was puzzled by her concern.
"Its just a bit of rain," he said, "Isn't it? Surely no harm in getting wet; its warm enough, after all?"
Her laugh was not reassuring.
They managed the pass in lower gears, pedalling steadily, the bike batteries by now nearly fully discharged. The ridges to either side fell back, revealing a broad, mixed landscape before them, of trees, scrub, lakes and ponds. A last few beams of the setting sun managed to find their ways through the swelling clouds, casting long shadows and scattering glittering reflections across the surfaces of water. Trueman had to stop to take it in.
"We have to get a move on, Grandpa," Rhia urged. She pointed into the middle distance, perhaps a mile or two ahead, where the turf roofs of round houses could just be made out against trees and shrubs "We need to get to High On The Hills Cantref before it starts."
“Are we going to get wet?” Trueman asked.
Rhia looked at him and just laughed then pushed away and began to pedal hard, rapidly picking up speed. Trueman thought it best to do the same, wobbling a little as he picked up speed but he found it hard work; his bike's battery seemed to be more discharged than his granddaughter's and he was soon panting with the effort.
They crossed an undulating landscape, a mix of dense thickets and copses of trees separated by wider areas of rough grazing and bog. A herd of deer threw up their heads at their approach and trotted away. Some hairy cattle with long, curving horns were up to their hocks in the wet hollows.
All the while sky continued to fill with cloud, great masses piling in from the west. The air itself seemed to darken and a sense of ominous foreboding began to build in Trueman. Rhia was now some distance in front of him, despite his best attempts to maintain her pace. there was a flicker of lightning that, although distant, cast sudden black shadows from every tree and bush. Then a dull rumble that rolled out of the black sky and over them.
It was a great relief for Trueman to at last see the buildings of the cantref clearly and Rhia almost there. She stopped and turned to him, beckoning for him to hurry.
"I'm doing my best," he muttered, wobbling more now as the INCO legs tired; he'd obviously not done any training on pushbikes, thought Trueman, the muscles for pedalling were just not there. Still, nearly there now.
He didn't quite make it in time. With a hundred metres to go the first few drops were huge, a thwack as they hit the track, each one leaving a large wet patch. Then one caught Trueman on the top of his head and his hair was soaked instantly; the water running down around his ears. Now it really started, the thwacks became a drumming then a thunder, individual drops falling so fast that they appeared to be drawn out into solid lines that bunched together.
Trueman flinched as the rain pounded his body and found he was looking into something like a waterfall. He could no longer see Rhia or the buildings of the cantref and even the track right in front of him had become an indistinct, rippling blur. At least the rain is warm, he thought, stepping off the bike and beginning to push in what he hoped was the right direction, his eyes creased almost closed. The rain battered him, so much so that he hunched over, trying to minimise the area of exposure.
He stopped and shielding his eyes with a hand cupped over his brow, tried to make out where he was. He was actually having difficulty breathing without inhaling rain. He could still see his feet but the track was already invisible beneath several centimetres of water. He began to feel a genuine concern at his predicament; surely he could just keep going the last dozen or so paces to Rhia and shelter? But if his direction was out, he might end up in a bog!
He jumped as a hand grabbed his wrist and then a blur appeared that could only be Rhia. She tugged at him and he found a rope in his hand and began to follow it. From then it was only a few more wet minutes before the pressure of the rain vanished and he found himself under a veranda with Rhia looking at him with some amusement.
"Yes," he gasped, "I did get wet."
Once he had dried out and wearing spare clothes provided by High On The Hills cantref, Trueman and Rhia were led under covered walkways towards a guest roundhouse. Between the buildings, the thunder of rain, even on turf roofs and the constant splashing, made talking pointless. The view from either side of the covered way was still impossible, still like looking into two waterfalls and although the walkways were boardwalks, raised a hands breadth above the ground, the rising water was already lapping over the edges.
Trueman found his thoughts turning to that fire site, imagining cascades of water plunging down the slope, carving out great gullies and depositing tons of soil in the valley bottom, into the river and out to sea. It was like a much larger version of his own disastrous attempts to dig his food garden, back at The Little Big Farm.
An aerial river, Rhia said, when they reached their shelter for the night or longer and the drumming of the rain had lessened sufficiently to make conversation possible. A stream of warm air, she explained, arising in the tropics, heavy with moisture, compressed and channelled by strong winds, rising as it reached the coast and cooling rapidly, the moisture condensing into rain that poured out incessantly, continually replenished by the humid current.
The cantrefi had provided simple food as well as the change of clothes and they were introduced to two other visitors and ate some bread, cheese and salad together.
These two presented themselves as Cai and Cerys, visiting educators and maintenance technicians. Trueman was puzzled, initially unable to discern either sex or gender but that minor confusion (they were both dressed the same), became immaterial when they told him they were on a tour presenting the latest methods of providing local scale, resilient network connectivity both within and between cantrefi.
"So you don't have to rely on ARPANET!" Trueman exclaimed, then slapped his forehead, remembering where he was in time, "I mean, you're not dependent on the Interweb thing.1"
Cerys and Cai exchanged looks and grinned.
"Yep," Cai explained, "We use cheap, computer-on-a-chip boards like this Strawberry Psi," he waved the little device towards his avid listener. Cerys took over.
"Then we use travel routers and solar panels, or batteries and radio hardware to create mesh networks that can transmit text messages miles away with no cellular signal, no Wi-Fi, no infrastructure."
Trueman wasn't familiar with some of the terms but felt he could see where this was going.
"You're describing individual devices that mesh together to create a wider network!" He was excited and the others picked up on his enthusiasm.
"Yep, dude!" Cai stepped in, "Depends on the environment but even the cheapest long range hardware can broadcast up to three miles in an urban area or up to ten miles in rural areas with direct line of sight."
"That’s node-to-node distance," now it was Cerys's turn, "With multiple nodes in a local network you can extend the range even further. Because mesh nodes automatically join the network and act like a relay, the more nodes, the more theoretical distance you can cover and the more people who can have access and communicate!"
"And the cantrefi are only a mile or so apart," Trueman jumped in, "So each cantref is a node in the mesh network. Simple! Brilliant!"
Cerys and Cai exchanged delighted smiles and then turned back to watch Trueman examining the tiny Strawberry Psi computer with a look of mixed astonishment and excitement on his face.
"What language do you use to programme them?" He asked.
Cerys slid a small screen across to him and as Trueman began to scan the document his smile grew.
"But," he managed, "This is so straightforward. I could learn it easily!"
Cerys and Cai exchanged looks and said, simultaneously, "Our work here is done!"
It rained all night, lessening gradually with occasional increases in intensity, seemingly timed to catch Trueman each time he ventured out to answer the call of nature.
In the morning, he went to look for his granddaughter and found her, arms folded, staring out of the window where the veranda was still shedding water at such a rate that the shrubs and trees just a few paces distant were only vague, flickering colours, without discernable shapes.
She looks worried, he thought.
"Is everything alright," he asked, trying to make the INCO voice as gentle as he could; it came out sounding a bit like a vague, lisped threat but Rhia turned to him and smiled putting a hand on his arm.
"I'd just like to get going again," she said quietly.
"What's the rush?" He asked, "Is it so urgent?"
"We don't know. It's our other traveller, Learner," she looked him straight in the eyes, as if to read his reaction.
Trueman was taken aback and gasped.
"Still alive," he managed after a moment. "He's still alive."
"He's been lost to us, for months, some sort of coma. He is old but it was as if he'd just given up," Rhia explained. "We thought he was dying and then, without any warning, he woke up, about the time you hooked up in the World Games Stadium. Said it was something to do with you, that you were really here this time, not some INCO faking you, wanting the password to the book."
Trueman didn't need to ask which book.
"But he's so weak," Rhia continued and there was a hint of desperation in her voice. "We don't know how long he can keep going and he says he has to see you before-" she broke off for a moment. "If he dies before you meet, we don't know what will happen."
She finished and turned back to the waterfall of rain. Trueman felt compelled to move towards her; he tentatively put a hand on her shoulder and when she leaned into him, felt an unexpected pride and sense of closeness, as of family.
The drumming of rain on the veranda roof increased to a thunder.
Before they made their farewells, Trueman couldn't resist asking the two techie gardeners a question.
"I'm sorry to ask this," he began, "But do you think there's, well, any real hope of getting out of this awful mess?"
Cai was first to answer.
"Nah dude, not a chance, we and everyone else are well and truly stuffed!" He was adamant.
"Yes, of course there's hope!" Cerys went next, "Although it might look pretty rubbish, everything is coming together really well."
They looked at each other.
"She's right," Cai freely admitted, "There's so much going on at an underground level, its inevitable it'll all come right!"
"He's bang on," Cerys responded immediately, grinning, "We're on an increasingly rapid descent into the maelstrom!"
They looked at each other, smiling, then back to Trueman. He gave a deep sigh.
"Probably best to just try and keep an open mind then," he said.
The two pulled him into a group hug which he wasn't expecting. When they separated, Cerys and Cai looked most satisfied.
"Indeed,” they announced in unison, “Our work here is done!"
Many thanks for reading and a warm welcome to new subscribers. If you choose, you can catch up on earlier episodes of Konsk: The Great Takeover of the Place from my Home Page. Under the fiction tab you’ll find a pinned post that contains links to the various chapters. Till next time, stay dry. Hwyl! Chris.
There are a number of ways of creating resilient local communication networks that work independently of conventional infrastructure and keep working even when everything else doesn’t. Ideal for emergencies such as natural disasters, during protests, or in areas of military or state occupation. Messages can be encrypted and can be sent to broadcast channels or directly to other devices and users like a DM or a traditional text message.
If you are interested, you can download a document giving guidelines for post-disaster resilient communication. The authors provide a survey on the usage of multihop ad-hoc networks in disaster management, such as Mobile Ad-hoc NETwork (MANET) and Vehicular Ad-doc NETwork (VANET). A more detailed explanation of the method that Cerys and Cai are touting can be found here:
And you might like to check out SolarPunk Stories.
In the description above, Cerys and Cai using fictional Strawberry Psi’s rather than the real and excellent mini-computer, the Rasberry Pi, the cheaper versions of which cost under £30 and are a lot more powerful than the computer that got the Apollo spacecraft to the moon and back and they’re easier to program. No wonder Trueman was excited.