Aha! A hot spring!
It’s not very big, but the water is fresh. Pumped up from far below ground. Taking this into account and the nearby mountains and coast, its safe to say I’m near some sort of fault line. Hopefully earthquakes aren’t as common here as on Earth.
The rocks around the spring are shiny, I’d bet this water is filled with minerals from below. It's uncomfortably hot to drink, I’ll have to get something to let it cool down in before I use this as my main drinking source. I was just wondering what it would be when I spotted a patch along the edge of the water. Clay.
I'll tell you, this stuff is what builds societies.
Don’t get me wrong. Everything I learned in my travels, about science and technology, will come into play. But I can’t forget where I came from either. I was born in a nomadic tribe on Cirso. There were many things you had to know if you wanted to survive. And those things still hold true here.
My elders taught me a lot, including how to find and work with the materials around you. Especially clay.
I've made two pots, one smaller, with a lid, and one larger, like a bucket. Though I was a bit rusty, I got them as smooth and round as I could. Instinctively, I picked up a stick, for a moment I couldn't remember why. Then the memories came flooding back.
Not many tribes had their own names, you didn’t exactly need one when “The Tribe” would do. But everyone had names for the other tribes and people around them. The Casters called us the Polluts, the Yetnus called us the Unuis, and when the humans came, they called us the Cross-Diamonds.
Humans like to organize things, especially life, and especially sentient life. Their scholars and historians were no different. On Earth, they group ancient cultures by their style of pottery, often because it's the only thing left of them after millennia. They carried those views with them when they were sorting through the tribes of Cirso. My tribe and the ones around us were part of the Diamond culture. An offshoot of the earlier Spiral-Lip culture that had migrated from the east. Of course we didn’t know any of that at the time, but it all makes sense when I look back. A few of our tales mentioned a place called Yallub, to the east. Our ancestral homeland watered down by generations of oral tradition, I'd bet. We decorated our pots with diagonal lines, resembling diamonds (more like a pineapple), with a small cross in the middle of each. On the rare occasion I would see a pot from somewhere else, it would have the same diamond pattern, with a different symbol.
Of course any Elder still around is likely too bitter towards anything human to view these facts as anything less than an attack on our way of life. But I find it enlightening to look at your own ways from an outsider's perspective.
That said, in the end I can still think of myself as a proud Cross-Diamond, and I decorated my pots accordingly. If some archeologist familiar with the tribes of Cirso roots through this place in a thousand years, I hope they end up thoroughly confused.
I dug a pit for the pots, placing them on the bottom and surrounding them with dry tinder and sticks. While they were cooking, I went to get the replicator.
Do me a favor, reader. Find the contact for the one who designed the 12-88 Quadruped Replicator and write them a letter from me thanking them for adding wheels.
When I’d finally pushed it back to the spring, I sat down to rest and wait for the firing to finish. Once it was mostly burned out, I gave the pots a test in the water. The Elders would be proud.
I was glad to finally get myself a somewhat cool drink. The small one will be my water bottle until I can make something better. The bigger one will be my bucket.
I worked until the sunset, scooping up water and pouring it in the replicator. No doubt the minerals from the spring will go a long way towards making my next body.
Tomorrow, I'll have to think about setting up shop.