Part 4 - Exploration
Onwat bends and shrugs her shoulder. The loops of rope fall to the ground. From the folds of her clothing another miracle emerges. In another time it would have been called an arborist’s pulley, but trees too big to climb are a thing of the past. Onwat feeds the rope through the pulley and hooks the mechanism over rebar buried within the concrete. Her hands works some of kind of magic too fast for Tikri to follow and she slips a knotted harness between her legs and over her waist. She pulls against the rope, testing the hold and with a few steps backward disappears from Tikri’s view. He creeps closer to the edge. Onwat looks up and smiles.
“This should be interesting. Pull me back up if I don’t call up to you in two minutes.”
Onwat slips from his view, the rope hissing through the pulley in fits and starts as she makes her way to the bottom of this mystery. Tikri hears a muffled thump and Onwat swears.
“I’m OK. Two minutes”
Tikri scans the horizon and starts counting. The seconds drag and he thinks about the wonders of Before he has seen at TV Time. What artifact would he most wish for? Nothing that needed electricity. He was wiser than that. Maybe a bicycle. He had always imagined what it might be like to move between settlements, helping share stories and knowledge. But most bicycles ended up with Minders or Traders, not in the hands of Diggers. There were some places where they had horses according to the idle gossip of the night market, but Tikri doubted it. Not many animals had survived the End Times. Especially not the big, edible ones. Not that he expected Onwat to find a horse.
He hears Onwat from below.
“Tikri. Pull up the rope.”
He feels a tug, the rope’s tension releases and returns, less than before. Tikri pulls up the rope hand over hand and drags a small white plastic bag to the top of the hole. He leans over and pulls it clear, concrete dust falling into the dark.
“Now the rope. Back down”
He unties the rope from the bag, throws both ends back to Onwat. Tikri looks at the plastic bag in his hand. On the outside is writing ‘Wallets and Watches’. He peeks inside. Some sort of small box holding a book without pages, odds and ends he does not recognize, tubes that that glitter in the sunlight. He reads the side of the box.
What is a ‘phone cover’ for, wonders Tikri?