"About what?"
"She said that Scapula thinks that hunting is all about chewing on stuffed clothes now because of what we did to the scarecrows. So she's gone back to the Yukon with Scapula and is going to teach her how wolves really hunt."
"They flew up on their own?"
"Sure. Wolves have an excellent sense of direction."
"So now you're bored."
"Yeah, I kind of miss her."
# # # # # # # #
"Why do you have a crane in your head, Momaka?"
"That's the image I think about a lot. It helps me to be calm, to be patient and to be content with my life."
"A crane is like that?"
"A crane stands motionless in the water and waits and waits. When a fish swims by, the crane strikes quickly and without warning. I like cranes."
"Do you put her in your head all the time?"
"I put her there when you came by. I figured you'd be peeking in."
"Sorry. I couldn't help wondering who you were."
"You don't want to peek into my mind, Little Gem. You wouldn't like what you found there."
"You know when I'm peeking?"
"It's not nice to peek into people's minds, Winnie."
"I know. It's just that..."
"You're bored."
# # # # # # # #
"Can I see those needles that you stuck in me? Mom told me that you helped me get better. I don't think that I thanked you enough."
"You did. When you hugged me that next day. I'll get the needles."
[We'll skip through the lesson that Momaka gave Winnie on acupuncture points. When Winnie explained it to me, I have to admit that it went way over my head.]
Momaka inserted a needle into Winnie's forearm and manipulated it.
"I don't feel a thing."
"Sometimes it can be painful. Most of the time, I can insert a needle so that you wouldn't know."
"Do that. In my back where I can't see you working." Winnie whipped off her T-shirt and lay down face first on the grass.
# # # # # # # #
"How many needles have you put in now?"
"Fifteen."
"I don't feel any of them."
"I'm going to spin one of them. Tell me if you feel anything."
"I have a tingling in my left big toe. You have a needle through my shoes?"
"No. They're all in your back."
"Can I put one in?"
"Yes, of course."
Momaka took all the needles out of Winnie's back and placed them in a tray for sterilization later. Winnie sat up, and was going to start on Momaka's arm with a new needle right away, but Momaka told her that she should put her top on first.
"But you're a girl too," Winnie said.
"I'm an older woman," Momaka corrected. "A woman that is almost a stranger to you. Sexual predators can come in both genders. You should never be partially undressed near any stranger."
"But I know you. I saw your crane."
"Look there now."
"Whoa! What does that thing do when it's not scaring little girls?"
"It minds its own business is what it does."
"Seriously? What is that thing?"
"Seriously. Stay out of my head! And put your top on."
# # # # # # # #
Winnie learned several places where the needle could be inserted that would create interesting effects.
"Some of these are the same places where I put my fingers when I'm healing," Winnie said.
"That would make sense. You use your fingers somehow to heal. I use needles. We might be using the same process."
"Can I put some needles into your back?"
"No. Not there. But you can learn about the hand."
# # # # # # # #
"Still bored?"
"No. Do you have a study bot that I can borrow?"
"Yes, I do and you may."
"Momaka, does your bot explain what would happen if you put a bunch of needles in, connected their tops up so that they were all linked together, and then passed a little electrical energy through them all?"
"No. It doesn't have anything like that at all. I don't believe anybody has ever done that. It could be dangerous. It could fry your eyeballs."
# # # # # # # #
While Winnie was learning about acupressure points in her hands, Double-Tom and Mr. Stu were standing at the front of their cells waiting to be released for supper. Mr. Stu had asked D-T how his young lawyer had fared with his argument about the murdered people being already declared dead.
"The ruling came back way earlier than the wolf-boy had expected. Nobody had filed a missing persons report either at the time they disappeared or at the end of seven years. The judge ruled that capital crimes outweighed that law anyway. The prosecutor had two precedents that would give them a slam dunk, at least as far as my lawyer was concerned."
"Did he tell you what those precedents were?"
"Something about a Lewis and another about a Paulson? I wasn't paying much attention."
"You should start paying attention. Those cases are very obscure. Somebody is going to considerable work to drag you into a courtroom."
"Their witness is a fake."
"That doesn't mean you won't be convicted. Do you know who is going to prosecute your case?"
"No."
"Did you ask?"
"No. Why?"
"Because knowing who is prosecuting your case might give you some hope, for example if he has a secret that he's hiding."
"I'll ask the teenage werewolf next time I see him."
"How's your agility?"
"Good. Why?"
"I was just wondering how easily you can bend over and kiss your ass goodbye. That's what you'll be doing."
"Do you have anything else up your sleeve?"
"Not on the little bit you told me about the alleged murders."
"I wasn't there. I'm completely innocent."
"You should stick with that. It'll work."
# # # # # # # #
They were back from dinner. D-T had come back from one direction, Mr. Stu from the other.
"How come you don't eat in the mess hall?"
"They don't want me fraternizing with the prisoners. They're afraid that if prisoners find out I'm a good lawyer, they'll soon be lining up at the gates waiting to receive their pardon and leave."
"You're that good?"
"The Japanese believe so. It's why they've never had to spend a day in jail."
"But here you are."
"The case is against me personally. The province is trying to force me to incriminate my bosses. It's not going to work."
"What did you do?"
"Nothing. I'm completely innocent."
# # # # # # # #
"Where do you eat that gives you goodies for dessert?" D-T was watching Mr. Stu scarf down delicious looking chocolate-covered desserts.
"Prison guards' mess. I sit in their kitchen for my meals."
"Is the food good?"
"Excellent meals. These desserts are even better. I'm allowed to finish off whatever is left. Usually there aren't any leftovers."
"Their cook is that good?"
"Yes, I am."
"That's your job?"
"Lunch and dinner. They keep me cooking in their mess all day long."
"Did you ever think about adding a little something to their food? Just a mild case of food poisoning?"
"They thought of that. They make sure that I eat the same food."
"How much longer are you here for?"
"A month? Two? I'll be gone long before they fry your eyeballs."
# # # # # # # #
"That Japanese lady who visited you a month ago – is she your lawyer?"
"My assistant. She's not a lawyer. I use her to pass messages and do a little shopping for me. She's good at that."
"I saw you sitting with that little aboriginal girl."
"Winnie. My niece. Sweet girl."
"Does she hold
your hand often?"
"She was trying to cheer me up. She was concerned about her Uncle Stu."
Back to the Table of Contents
Chapter 17
It was the first week of March, and Dreamer and Wizard were visiting the satellite compound. William had told Wizard that he might have some good news to share this evening and why didn't Wizard and Dreamer come down and help them celebrate?
It was four o'clock and Mac had started preparing the supper meal. Usually the men were back by then and dinner meals were their job. But Mac knew that they were finishing an experiment and didn't mind. With Dreamer in the compound, they had lots of people to help take care of the babies. Wizard and I were playing 52-Card Find Me and he was losing badly. This is the game where all the cards in a deck are placed face down on the floor. A player gets to turn over one card and then tries to turn over another card that had the same number or royal person on it. If she could pair them up, she got to keep both cards. Wizard may have been letting me win, but I didn't think so at the time because he was getting kind of red in the face. I told you that I had a good memory.
We heard a bunch of clanging noises and the men burst through the door. Wolf was banging two sheets of titanium together and William and my dad began making wolf howls into the air. "We did it!" William screamed, pulled Melissa into his arms, and actually threw her into the air. He turned around a full circle while she spun her way down back into his arms. Wolf was holding Mac high in the air and she was raining kisses down on him. My dad was hugging my mom but not as hard as the others were hugging since she was pregnant. Then they all started jumping up and down and the air got blue.
I don't know what it's like in the society that you live in, but in my experience, teenagers curse frequently. Not always in anger; sometimes in pure ecstasy. All six of the people jumping up and down in joy were teenagers. Need I say more? I remember turning on my pinky-ring camera when they started. We had a swear jar in the kitchen, and if people swore, they had to put a piece of paper with their name on it into the jar. When it came time to do some nasty chore, somebody would draw a slip from the swear jar. If no slips of paper were in the jar, they'd make me do the job. With the number of swear words I was recording, I wouldn't be doing any nasty chores for a long, long time.
I think they were trying to teach me that swearing was bad. It didn't work. I'm in my eighties now and do appreciate that there's a time for exuberant transgressions into utter vulgarity. I'm going to write down exactly what I recorded so that you can appreciate how happy everybody was.
[Censor's Note: Five paragraphs have been deleted for reasons of vulgarity. Citizens reading this book are cautioned that this author has shown a disdain for public order in the past and you are advised not to encourage her in her lawlessness by downloading any more of her books.]
# # # # # # # #
"Let's see it," Mac said.
So they all sat at the kitchen table while Mac hurriedly turned off all the cooking. The men just sat in their chairs – pretending to examine the spacing of the little holes in the ceiling tiles.
"Who has it?"
"Guess," William said.
The moms huddled.
"Sweetie, probably," my mom said first.
"No. Too obvious." Melissa said. "I vote for Honey."
"I'd vote for Glump to spread the vote out, but I really do think that Sweetie has it." This from Mac.
"What are you talking about?" Dreamer asked.
"We had to make sure that we had different nicknames for our hubbies so that we wouldn't get all confused when we called them. Sweetie is Melissa's nickname for William, Honey is Mac's nickname for Wolf, and Glump is Yollie's name for TG."
"What's a Glump?" Wizard asked and everybody looked at my mom.
"It's the sound that you make when you are surprised by something wonderful and you make a hard swallow. Like in I don't believe what I'm seeing. Glump."
Wizard and Dreamer continued to look at my mom.
"It's the sound I made when I first saw TG on the mountainside."
"That's so sweet," Dreamer said. "Do the boys have nice nicknames for you?"
TG answered that question. "They vary. Right now, we do have some nicknames for certain people. Melissa, for example, with her current physical condition..."
"Don't go there," Melissa interrupted. "You really do not want to go there. William, you have been nominated as the suspected keeper of the grand prize. Show us what you've been working on for the last half year."
"TaDa." William pulled a giant diamond out of his shirt pocket.
Nobody said anything.
"Biggest diamond ever found," William said. "I looked it up."
"Where'd you find it?"
"Wherever you want me to find it, Wizard."
# # # # # # # #
At this point, hungry kids and cooling food dictated that supper had to come before explanations. The diamond was passed around so that it could be felt and admired. William did say that the men had produced smaller diamonds as well, but he wanted to make sure that the process produced big ones, so they had made that their primary objective.
After they thought that all the children were sleeping, the adults re-huddled around the diamond. (I snuck into the space between the fridge and the stove, which made me nearly invisible. Winnie had suggested that hiding place. There used to be plenty of bread crumbs on that floor from the toaster but my mom was now cleaning that spot regularly. This surprised me because she didn't care as much about other dirty corners in our home. But it worked out well for me. They couldn't catch me with bread crumbs on my jammie bottoms.)
My mom had taped the diamond to her finger but it kept falling off. Melissa said that they should start the meeting now, so William pulled an even bigger diamond out of another pocket and began.
"Under natural conditions, diamonds are created deep underground. There are various processes at work, for example volcanic action might play a part. What's important is that diamonds have to be created under extreme pressure and heat. If you were looking for high pressure somewhere on Earth, you'd find it deep in an ocean. The deeper you go down into the ocean, the more pressure you'd feel from the water above pressing down on you."
"Heat in an ocean is found near hydrothermal vents. These are openings in the Earth's crust where water that is heated by volcanic action emerges into the ocean. Ocean water temperature is normally 2 degrees centigrade. The temperature around these thermal vents can range from 60 degrees centigrade to 464 degrees centigrade."
"After the earthquake of '48, geothermal activity off B.C.'s shores increased. We found geothermal vents plus deep fissures directly south of Haida Gwaii in what is known as the Juan de Fuca Ridge. That's where we'll be able to manufacture our diamonds. These two diamonds were actually created in the Mariana Trench south of Japan, but we'll want our diamond production facilities closer to Alberta. The manufacturing processes have been proven now. All we need to do is set up a full production lab near Haida Gwaii."
"But aren't diamonds made out of carbon? Where do you get the carbon from?" Dreamer wasn't aware that there was a second part to the story.
"Good question. We have to start with carbon in a gaseous state, so we went looking for some. Once we had it, we pressure inserted it into titanium molds and sent the molds deep into the Juan de Fuca Ridge. Titanium melts at 1650 degrees Celsius, and the water temperature in the ridge doesn't exceed 400 degrees Celsius so our molds aren't going to melt. Titanium molds under high pressure plus high temperature equals diamonds as big as we want to make the molds."
"How'd you send them that deep?" Wizard asked.
"Sling technology equipped with a sensor looking for a particular depth and temperature."
"How do you know when the diamonds are made?"
"We don't know that for sure yet, Wiz. We left these alone for thirty days. It may take less. We'll learn by trial and error. We'll bring them out of the water by sling technology too. Directly onto
an invisible pallet. We still have to find a way to automate the removal of the diamond from the mold, but that shouldn't be difficult."
"You haven't said where you found the carbon yet, William." Dreamer really wanting to know.
"That's one of the best thing about this project, Dreamer," Melissa answered for him. "William made the diamond appear out of thin air."
"Thick air, actually," William corrected.
# # # # # # # #
This time, my dad explained. "The rotation of the Earth makes for a constant change of air above our production facilities. That air flow above our plant will ensure that there's always going to be new carbon-polluted air coming above our collection zone. We capture that carbon dioxide along with some impurities, put them into titanium molds, and then fire the molds deep into a high pressure, high heat environment. We're also spinning those projectiles at a very high speed which separates the carbon atom from the oxygen atom. The result is that the carbon atoms are deposited on the inside of the mold and pressure of the oxygen atoms keeps the carbon in place while the diamonds form. As the molds come up out of the water with their diamonds, the pure oxygen releases itself into the atmosphere."
"You've started to clean the Earth's atmosphere," Wizard concluded.
"Exactly."
"One diamond at a time."
"Not exactly. Once we're out of the testing phase, there'll be no limit on how many titanium projectiles we can have incubating next to a thermal fissure. We'll actually be able to have an impact on the world's air quality. We could easily be producing 1,000 diamonds a day."
Dreamer thought that if Melissa could swear, why couldn't she?
[Censor's Note: Several vulgar words have been deleted.]
"That's what we thought too," Mac said.
"We're moving real slowly on this, Dreamer," my dad said. "The falling levels of carbon dioxide and impurities in the air should cool the Earth down, but we don't want that to happen suddenly. If we reduce the carbon levels too quickly, we could swing the climate too far. As you know, we have decades of air quality measurements and we'll be taking new measurements every month to guide how many diamonds we produce. Slow, slow, slow is our motto. People won't notice any difference in the skies, but over the years, they may start to wonder why the snow packs are coming back."