I scratch my chin. “From lye and fat? I don't know. I mean, lye is a strong corrosive. It can give you bad chemical burns. And you could probably disinfect all kinds of metal objects with it. Except, they would rust like crazy afterwards.”
Delyah nods thoughtfully. “Lye and fat are useful, sure. But there must be other things out in that jungle. Substances, chemicals. Things you can combine to make stuff. Because I honestly didn’t know we had come this far. This soap of yours is next level for us. This is not hunting and gathering. This is industry.”
I lift my gaze and look towards the edge of the woods, a hundred yards away from my work area. As always, the sight of the huge trees and the deadly darkness underneath them makes a shiver go down my spine. “I guess there might be chemicals out there.”
“There must be,” Delyah says easily. She's married to a caveman and has no fear of this planet, not even the jungle. “Okay, talk to you later. I think I just had an idea, and it concerns you. Nothing bad, don't worry. Fantastic work on the soap, girl. I haven't seen a lot of things boost morale like that before. We needed that.”
She squeezes my shoulder and sashays off. In the distance, her husband Brax'tan follows her with his eyes, always knowing where his wife is, even when he's busy gutting the carcass of a huge dino he's hunted. Not from jealousy, but from a deep need to keep her safe. That's the way they are.
I toy with my own piece of soap. What would it be like? To have a guy like that to cling to, in both the bodily and the mental sense? Pretty good, I imagine.
Leaning my hip against the flat-topped boulder that is my lab, I look around the village. It seems to change every day now. We have cleared about two acres of jungle, and there are houses and forges and storage sheds everywhere. It's pretty orderly, with straight streets and large patches of dirt where we grow trees for their fruit, bushes for their berries and nuts, herbs for various uses, and even new enclosures for Tamara's and Heidi’s project to keep the most useful animals as livestock.
All around it is the fence, which always looks so puny to me, and which the guys freely admit will only keep out the smallest dinos.
It looks much the way I imagine a medieval village would, not at all like the Stone Age cave we were in just a year ago. There are kids, too, toddlers and babies that were born on Xren and have no other home. Their parents are young and full of energy, milling around while doing the things that need to be done in any village and making everything better for us all. Everything is organized; everything gets a little easier each month. We’re setting up a real society for the future.
Because that's the way we must think now. The spidermonkeys are keeping us from getting into Bune, the crashed spaceship that contains another intact spaceship we think can bring us back to Earth. But while the dragons are here, the spidermonkey chief won't let us leave. He says we have to chase the dragons away before he’ll let us enter Bune again.
And even if we could leave Xren right now – how many of the girls would do it?
The unmarried girls like me would. I'm sure of that.
The married girls? Maybe some would. If they could bring their alien husbands and half-alien kids. But even then, many of them would hesitate. Because once we get back to Earth, there will definitely be some questions from the authorities before we can go about our normal lives. Serious questions that go right to the heart of our happiness and our very existence.
Any couple like Delyah and Brax'tan or Sophia and Jax’zan would have to expect a long separation, including from their kids. Because bringing aliens and hybrids back from space? Not something that's ever happened on Earth. The government would have to be absolutely sure that they don't bring back diseases or that the alien husbands aren't the bad kind of alien. Earth scientists will be sorely tempted to examine the hybrid children very, very carefully, too. For the married girls, coming back to Earth will be an absolute hell that may last for years. Or even forever.