My Mind is Made Up

© 2014 Mr. David R. Dorrycott

Chapter Six

Just as Charlotte had warned, Mrs. Martin refused to believe that I had done the work without Mary giving me the answers. As the Doctor had decided that I could return to school the next Monday Mar. Martin sent a note warning me that I was going to be tested, while she watched. There would be no cheating allowed in her classes, not even once.

So Monday morning I walked with my sisters to the main road and waited in the very early morning air for the school bus. It wasn’t really a school bus, but a normal city transportation bus that was used to take we ‘farmers children’ to the school, then another would take us home. While we were in school it would travel the city on its normal route, taking paying passengers around town. While we were riding I looked out where

Purdue University should be even this early in the states history. There wasn’t any university I suddenly realized, there were no buildings either. There was nothing but a fifteen mile wide circular lake, a lake that had obviously been there a long, long time. Heather’s memory told me that it was called Volcano Lake, my memories told me it was an impact crater, only a few minutes contemplating informed me that the impactor had to have been around three or four thousand feet in diameter, depending on how fast it was going when it hit, what it was made of and the angle of impact. Certainly I wouldn’t have wanted to be within a hundred miles of it when it hit.

Finally the bus rolled in to what looked more like a prison than the schools I was used too. Heavy brick walls, line upon line of faceless windows and more stonework than one could take in at one time. Eventually I would learn that this style of school building was the norm, not the exception. Even so, it made the average child feel depressed upon entering it, as even the interior walls and floors were brick and concrete. My new memories told me that my classroom was on the third floor, on the right, half way down the hall. Almost exactly opposite of where my sisters classroom was. Even though the building served a quarter of the entire county, due to the influenza that ran rampant during and after the Great War population density was so low that less than two thousand children attended school and many classrooms were still unused. So instead of attending a different classroom for every subject, as had been planned, everyone stayed with the same teacher, except for physical education, or Gym as it was currently called and ‘career education.’ Typing for girls, wood or metal shop for boys. It was felt that these were the only acceptable professional careers for children in this day and age.

When I walked in Mrs. Martin simply pointed at me, then a desk that had been moved next to her own, I would be sitting with my back to the class. That was embarrassing enough, then when class was called into session she explained to the entire class why I was being ‘punished.’ That simply made me feel even worse. Finally a large stack of papers were placed on the desk I was sitting at. “You won’t mind taking these tests Miss Baker, now will you?” she asked. It was an open challenge, ‘I believe you cheated on the work I sent to your home’ was the obvious subtext. So I just nodded, took several well chewed but sharp pencils from my book bag and started in, remembering to put my name and the date (which was on the blackboard in front of me as always) on the top of each page. Finally I started reading the pages, it was going to be a long day, even for me.

So went the day, my working through each page while Mrs. Martin taught class. Obviously I could have finished quickly, that though would have turned too many eyes upon me which was something that I really didn’t want, thus I worked at a pace that I felt a sixteen year old farm girl who had been hiding her intelligence would manage. Even so, a few questions had me stumped, I had read the History text but not enough appeared to have stuck, it was the same for Geography as certain nations were noted that I never had heard of before. Though most things were named pretty much the same as they were in my world, another odd fact I noted, there was just enough drift to cause me problems. For example, Australia was called Nova England while New England was called Plymouth. It was then that I realized that I was going to have to turn to and really learn this new world, the original Heather really hadn’t paid attention. Why? Her memories had already told me the answer to that, due to her Grandmothers interference in her life, young Heather had been going for her M.R.S. degree, not a High School diploma. So I slogged through, stopping only for lunch, Mrs. Martin had already arranged that I be excused from P.E. and the typing class, a class Heather... I was also failing. The truth was, if I didn’t buckle down and address Heathers grades she/I would be repeating the next year, though a memory surfaced explaining that Heather had intended to be married before the next school year, as at age sixteen (seventeen before the next school year) she no longer had to attend school by law and, by the same laws, was already considered a full adult. Since I now owned Heathers body and life, I intended to buckle down and make something of it more than a baby factory.

Taking a short break I looked down at the natural purple of my hands and wondered for the unknown number of times, why couldn’t Heather have been a boy? At least if I had ended up in a boys body I would have had a lot more options in this day and time. As it was, I was probably just as limited in this reality as I would have been in my own reality. More importantly, why had I ended up in a completely different reality than the one we had aimed for? Had poor Heather died in every reality that she had lived in, or was this just one of those that she did die in, where in other realities she didn’t make that misstep. There was a graduate thesis in that question, in about a hundred years or so, certainly I could start the notes for it as a side project once I was living on my own.

Still there was Mrs. Martin, when I paused to look at my hands she stood, came to me and roughly grabbed my wrists. Jerking me nearly out of my seat the much older teacher roughly searched my hands and arms, finally releasing them after making certain that I hadn’t written cheat notes on my own flesh. There were going to be bruises I was certain, Mrs. Martin was a very strong woman after all and that reminded me that I had best get back into practice with the martial arts that I already knew. Getting jumped, beaten or raped was a very strong possibility, Heather did have a very nice chest after all and the boys did notice.

And there went my first day back in school, spent entirely in the classroom with Mrs. Martin, stuck in the front of class in the desk of shame taking every test for the school year. Yes, Martin had apparently outdone herself this time, I went home with a cramping hand and bruises on my wrists, but I finished every one of those tests. What the day did though was show me where Heather, and I, were the weakest. That being history and geology, so as soon as I entered the house I sat in ‘my’ chair, pulled out those two books and started reading them again, from the first page. Mother said nothing, Grandmother tsked and whispered that ‘wives don’t need to know those things.’ Father of course was still out in the fields, it wouldn’t be until just before supper that he would arrive.

So I read, discovering an awful lot of differences between my world and this one. Of the most shocking was that there was no Canada, that nation had lost the war of 1775 when the English had simply abandoned them and left. France had successfully invaded Ireland, meaning that troops and ships were needed back home, the ill prepared Canadian army, such as it was, folded to the Continental Army in two days of rather bloodless fighting. That sounded a lot like most Arabic armies to my memory, one shot and half the enemy surrendered, while the rest ripped off their uniforms and ran. I think in Canada’s case though the English Army simply never trained them right. You honestly cannot expect a badly trained green army to stand against a bloodied veteran army, especially one using tactics that you had never heard of.

Ireland though was recaptured after very bloody fighting, the French beaten back to their own country but by then Canada was now the states of Richmond, Martha, Montgomery, Lancaster, Boston, Northwoods, Atlanta and Bear Island. Every French named town, city, landmark etc. had been renamed after 1865 as the French had done nothing to help America in this worlds revolutionary war, while supporting the South later in our own civil war. That war pretty much unfolded like it did in my world, except Stonewall Jackson survived, the South getting crushed like before though when things started going bad the Confederacy did invade and take a slightly larger Cuba. It was still a Confederate stronghold even today in 1920, an independent nation where English was the official, and only language, though slavery was as illegal as it was in the Imperial States. Slavery hadn’t been the real, or even a major reason that the Civil War occurred anyway, it was mainly Economic and social differences between the North and the South and States versus Imperial rights, though slavery and ablution were a distant third and fourth, with the election of Abe Lincoln being a very distant fifth. Slavery had already been on the way out as people began to realize that it was cheaper to pay people than to buy them to do the work.

I noted also that the Great War had ended in 1919 with Germany now occupying all of France and everyone else sitting and steaming about it, but the Kaiser had somehow made it stick. Then there were the geological differences, South and North America had never connected as it did in my world, there was an open water between the two that reached about from Colombia to Nicaragua, about nine hundred miles of open water averaging five hundred feet deep with the occasional small island. That certainly meant for a heavily traveled series of shipping lanes, and the occasional pirate.

There were certainly other changes, the Kingdom of Hawaii, there wasn’t any New Zealand, Tasmania was a part of Australia, Indonesia was nothing more that random islands and such. So was this world more or less geologically active I asked myself, then I saw the massive lake in Bavaria, Germany. Known as the Nördlinger Ries in my world and only fifteen miles in diameter, here is was at least a hundred miles in diameter and completely filled with water as the Wörnitz river flowed into, and out of it. Again, this lake was listed as volcanic in origin, but to my eyes it was obviously an impact crater.

No, not more geologically active I realized as I started seeing the patterns on my books maps, this planet had been heavily impacted, very heavily impacted and the fact that everyone took these impact craters as volcanic in origin told me two important things. One, these impacts had happened millions of years ago and two, there hadn’t been a reliably witnessed impact since this race became sentient. And just what did these people call themselves? Humans, goes to figure, right?

I seriously needed more information, a lot more than these High School books were giving me, I needed serious time in a good library. About then mother mentioned that it was getting time to prepare for dinner, so off went my books to my bed while I helped set the table and bring in what mother had made. Oddly, though some foods looked different, they all tasted very good.