Forty Six

Solomon and Fyndraxis had run out of things to talk about. The topic of Physics took a while to be exhausted, but they managed to do it. After those depths had been plumbed, they moved on to matters of theology. Which for Solomon, was still Physics. He was a zealot. Everything for him always came back to gravity, which was his deity. He wasn’t wrong, it did connect everything and it was a fundamental force of the universe. Whether it merited worship was a matter that was up for debate in Fyndraxis’ mind. So they did debate it. Extensively.
Solomon would look at something like a stew cooling in a pot and see his god hard at work. All of the ingredients in it would be sorted according to weight and density. The fat at the top could be skimmed and used for other purposes. That was his god. On the rare occasion that he saw the sun come up, he witnessed his god performing miracles. Not only was the earth in the sun’s gravitational thrall, but the process of fusing hydrogen into helium was powered by gravity and that made the earth habitable and abundant. The simple act of spilling whiskey was a religious epiphany for this fucking guy.
It became tedious for them both. So Solomon, in his wisdom, after his blood alcohol level was to his liking and he had deep breathed himself through at least two panic attacks would take Fyndraxis out for a walk. On these walks they would go about the little village that he had stewardship over and pick somebody to check in on and give the personal touch that made him such a beloved figure.
On this day in particular, they headed out of the village and hiked up to a set of out-buildings that Roxy had claimed for the practice of her vocation. Roxy, for a lack of any better term, was a chemist. The reason that she chose the buildings outside of the village to work in was because her chemistry smelled incredibly bad.
Today she was making glue, but she could frequently be found making things like soap, various waxes, fibers, and composite materials. Her workshop was a graveyard of animal parts set out to dry in the mountain air. Things that were normally discarded in the slaughtering process were the things that brought her joy. Sinew and gut were festooned about her workspace and lent it its distinctive smell.
Solomon, being constantly hungover, barely held his breakfast whiskey down as he approached the shop. They were greeted by Roxy, who was a diminutive woman of about thirty years. Her slight frame and gentle voice seemed to be cleverly concocted to make people underestimate her. Watching her lift a simmering pot of sinew glue almost as tall as she was with very little effort gave a hint to the strength that she hid under her baggy clothes.
She was the owner of a very distinctive nose that made her look a bit like a mouse. Not to say that she was unattractive, quite the opposite. She held a unique beauty that defied traditional standards. Where a classical beauty would be praised for their symmetry, it was the unique asymmetries working in unison that kept her bed warm at night.
The sinew glue that she was making was one of the things that the G used profusely. They spent their summers not only preserving food, but also making warm clothes and doing other preparations for the winter to come. The main goal of their summer activities was to be able to ski for as much of the winter as possible.
Skiing was a religious devotion for these people. The simple act of giving yourself to gravity and surviving the process inspired religious ecstasy in them. Even the act of getting to the top of the mountain was symbolic for them. It represented the everyday struggle against the inevitability of death. So on every trip up and down the mountain they symbolically acted out birth, life, and the eventual return to the grave.
The skis that they manufactured were an absolute marvel of engineering, just like their counterparts before the end of the world. Pre-collapse skis were highly engineered combinations of wood, plastic, carbon fiber, fiberglass, and various metals all bonded together with space age adhesives. With most of those materials unavailable, the G had to get creative.
Wooden skis are garbage waiting to be mounted on the wall of a chalet as decoration. Every metric that we use to judge a modern ski with, they would effectively score a zero (except for maybe torsional rigidity). Things like flex, ability to hold an edge, vibration dampening, are all awful when you choose to make a ski out of wood alone. Sure, you can try to carve it into clever shapes that might lend it some dynamic qualities, but at the end of the day choosing to make a ski out of a single material is a stupid idea.
To get a ski to turn properly, you need to get it up on its edge and get it to flex. Once flexed, the ski describes a giant arc that translates your forward momentum into angular momentum. Before you know it, you are traveling in a completely different direction. By cleverly manipulating these dynamic changes in direction, you can negotiate difficult terrain and change a possibly lethal situation into one that is thrilling and in the case of the G, religiously ecstatic.
The real problem with wood as a ski material isn’t lack of flexibility, it is its tendency to break while flexing that is the issue. To get a ski that won’t break on its journey down the mountain, you have to make sure it is thick enough so that under the forces that it will face it won’t undergo a rapid dynamic disassembly. An ideal wooden ski for this purpose would be roughly the shape and dimensions of a 2x4. The dynamic loads that would bend something like that wouldn’t be survivable for a human. How modern skis handled this was through the use of composite materials.
A composite material is what happens when you take two things with different physical qualities and stick them together with so much glue that they effectively act like one unit that combines the qualities of both. Modern skis did this by wrapping a wooden core in epoxy and layers of fiberglass for support. Once these materials are sandwiched together, you get the flexibility of the wood and the resistance to shattering of the fiberglass.The G unfortunately don’t have this luxury, so they have to settle for more natural materials.
Anyone who has seen a bow in action can see that wood can flex and hold weight extremely well. What most people don’t know about bows, is that they are rarely made of just wood, and if they are, the wood is glued in ways that let the grain of the wood enhance the strength and flexibility of the end product. They are composite materials. What is true for bows is also true for skis. The composite skis that the G manufacture are a highly engineered combination of wood, plant fibers, sinew and sinew glue. They work in perfect harmony to make an object that is not only light and strong, but also flexible and responsive.
This entire scheme would not be possible without people like Roxy. Here at the end of the world, you can’t just nip out to the store and grab some sinew glue. An animal needs to be killed and butchered in the correct manner. Sinew needs to be harvested and preserved. Once this sinew is preserved, it needs to be simmered in a vessel that can not only hold liquid, but withstand the heat of the process. Precise control over fire needs to be maintained so as not to burn the glue. What Roxy did on a daily basis was the culmination of generations of knowledge and effort.
This means that Roxy isn’t just appreciated among the G, she is venerated as a high priestess. The magic that she wields makes not only skiing possible, but also everyday trivialities like washing your hands or having a waterproof coat a reality.
“Morning, Roxy,” Solomon said as he entered her workshop, “working on anything fun?”
“Afternoon, Solomon,” she corrected offhandedly, “just finishing up a batch of glue, but I’ve been thinking about horn lately.”
“Oh yeah, in what way?” the King asked, interested.
“I want stiffer boots this winter,” she stirred her glue with an enormous paddle, “I’ve seen horn used on skis to try to stiffen up the tails, but I think that having a little bit more support in a boot might be a good idea. Horn is light and strong and just a touch flexible, so making a boot with a horn tongue might be what I’m after.”
“I think that Lange is headed up valley sometime this week to trade with the shepherds. I’ll talk to him and see if he can grab some for you,” Solomon repeated this under his breath in an attempt to make it stick in his head.
“That’d be great, thanks,” She said this as an obvious term of dismissal. She was a busy woman and her glue was reaching a tricky stage where it could burn easily, so Solomon took his cue and headed elsewhere.
Their next stop was the still. This was where Solomon would have his first public drink of the day. It was after noon now, and that was an appropriate time to start getting drunk enough to throw yourself off a fourth story balcony.
The still was kept in another far flung out building. It was a fire hazard, so it was kept far away from anything important. The still itself was about fifteen feet tall and made exclusively of copper. This was a pre-collapse artifact, but it was well maintained and still did quite a good job at pumping out liquor.
The man who ran the still was probably the oldest person Fyndraxis had seen in this age. This man, probably in his sixties, was of medium build with a shock of gray hair. A gray beard did a pretty good job of hiding a deeply lined face. He probably had a name, but Fyndraxis never caught it. Everyone just called him Grandad, and left it at that.
Solomon had talked to Fyndraxis about his love for the still and the physics it demonstrated. He was fascinated by the fact that it was another thing that made his god real. It used heat to separate alcohol from water and turn it into vapor, and in this process it was released from gravity’s domain. Alcohol has a lower boiling temperature than water, so this is a very handy way of separating the two. Once the alcohol is free from the pull of the planet, it can be cooled and condensed. When it is back in that form, gravity takes over once again and pulls it down into a separate catch. Through this process, thanks to their deity, the G are able to turn undrinkable toilet wine into something that pretty much passes for moonshine.
When they caught up with Grandad, he was out in back of the building where the still was. He had a bowl of liquid and he was setting fire to it and saying some sort of prayer. He was burning off methanol. When somebody is making toilet wine, the yeast that handles the process of turning sugar into Ethanol does a pretty good job. Not the best job though. Some of the sucrose and glucose that are in the wine are turned into methanol by mistake.
Ethanol will get you very drunk if consumed in a reasonable manner. Methanol on the other hand will make you unquestionably dead when consumed in almost any amount. The fact that you go blind in the process adds a distinct flavor of cruelty to an otherwise fatal situation. Luckily, gravity is there to bail the G out once again. Methanol has an even lower boiling point than alcohol, so when the still starts spitting interesting chemicals out thanks to gravity, the first thing you get is methanol. This is called the head, and it is burned for entertainment or religious reasons. There are also some pretty useful practical things you can do with it, so Roxy tries her best to grab some before Grandad burns it all.
Solomon bid Grandad a good day and was offered his customary drink. Grandad joined him in this ritual. They both claimed it was purely to test the quality of the stuff they were running their little economy on. Between the two of them, they had an encyclopedic knowledge of moonshine quality running back at least ten minutes.
Solomon, after saying goodbye to Grandad and having one more drink, went off in search of Lange. When they found him he was, in his words, “scoping out wood”. Which involved looking at neatly stacked six foot logs and trying to imagine what was going on inside them.
He was obsessed with ski shape and he tried out something new every season. He spoke constantly about rocker and camber and things like early rise. This summer, he had decided to make what he was calling powder hounds. These skis, according to him, would undoubtedly provide him with a winter full of perfect runs. Because he was so obsessed with ski shape, he assumed that everyone else was as well. There was little doubt that the G were all obsessed with ski shape to some degree, but speaking about it constantly and at length ended up being a chore that one undertook when conversing with Lange.
Something had happened to Lange’s face a long time ago and it hadn’t quite healed right. He was missing teeth on the right side of his face and he had an eye socket that drooped a bit. Fyndraxis had a pet theory that one night he wouldn’t shut up about some skis he was designing in his head and somebody beat him senseless. What had really happened, was he had had a close encounter with a tree while communing with his god and ended up in a coma for a month.
While he wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed and quite possibly the victim of a traumatic brain injury, he meant well, and Solomon relied on him to do some pretty heavy stuff. He was a sort of de facto foreign minister. Everybody else was usually really busy, so he was free to go and handle trade negotiations and small diplomatic matters with the rest of the valley.
Solomon relayed Roxy’s request for some horn and was very clear that he didn’t mean antler. Lange acknowledged the request and said he should have her horn by the end of the week with any luck.
Then it was back to Bird’s yurt to drop off his charge. Fyndraxis had been spending his afternoons alone as of late. Bird wouldn’t return until after dinner. Sometimes she would totally miss Aprés. She had some sort of project that she was working on that apparently was none of Fyndraxis’ business.