Some of my friends can be seen in the distance here, about a kilometer away, just under the closest world that orbits this one. It was the first to rise, and sensors are already showing water rising to the level of the module. That puts the water level at almost a hundred meters above the normal level, and this is with only one of the closer worlds and one of the stars. There will be dozens of worlds in this conjunctions, and all three stars. This is just getting started.
Looking at my simulation of the conjunction, part of it is going to be in a twilight of various eclipses. It will be beautiful, if the tide it also brings wasn't so dangerous to us. The next world out should be rising in the next few hours. We have been resting, and my friends have continued their trek while I took some observations and did some testing. The amazing bit here is the tree, if that is in fact what it is. It is more than ten kilometers tall, given that it is more than fifty kilometers away, it might actually be taller.
My friends state that after the tide, as we head back to the cove, that the tree will be covered in green. At least that is the description in their book. I would call it a chronicle, and is much like my own log entries. It documents their stay on this world since their own ship crashed. I've tried to estimate the time, by playing the simulation back in time, and based on the description of the tides that they have experienced. I am guessing that they have been on this world for between seven hundred and a thousand standard years.
The question I've had to ask myself is why they haven't improved their situation beyond subsistence. I have not come to a good answer to that. They have maintained the knowledge of where they were from, how they got here, who they were, to an extent. It is at least recorded in their book. A book made of materials that are very much of a tech equivalent to what I have. Yet, if they have maintained that, why were they not able to do more than survive as they have, and why have they not improved their situation.
Frydai proves that they are not stupid, and yet it is as if most of their more educated persons were lost. The actual crew, and the survivors were passengers, perhaps colonists that lacked the education of the crew. I know that, were it not for the extensive training I received before the launch of the Viteză Furie, I would be utterly helpless in most of the situations I have come across. With the education I had, I probably would have ended up like them. Surviving, but likely not more than that.
I have decided that this will be part of how I help them, how I make up for what I did so thoughtlessly. I am going to open a school. We'll start small, but with the rate at which Frydai has learned, I expect it'll expand quickly. The initial focus will be on farming, followed by some fishing, animal husbandry, and other such skills. After that, we'll start adding, for those that show the aptitude, math, science, engineering, medicine, etc... I can make the difference, and just maybe, help them reclaim what they lost. Not in this generation, but in few generations on.
Out trek to the mountain is actually several days in, and we still have a good week to go before we reach the base of the mountain. Their book, and my simulations, say that the real weight of the tide won't hit until the fifth world rises ten days from now. That is when we need to be nearing the top of the mountain. Everything looks good so far to be ahead of that pace by two days.
I just wish I had more data so I could properly estimate the height of the tides. I'm making guesses, because I don't yet have detailed enough measurements of the strength of gravity of the orbiting worlds against this world, though it is clearly significant, they are also so much farther away than they look, because they are so large. This world itself being so much larger still. After this double tide, because it will be a double, and the measurement I'll be able to make, my simulations will be far more accurate. At least within a few hundred meters or so.
Time to catch up with the tribe. They're a good five kilometers ahead now, but they're walking, whereas Frydai and I are on my rover. I have a pair of drones keeping an eye on them as well. Still, the wheeled carts we built over the last few days before heading out have really made a difference. Frydai's idea to use a team of squirells to pull them didn't work out, at least not this time, but they had not been using them as anything but food animals, so they were not trained. Even then, the carts alone have improved the time we are making. The elders, youngest children, and a few sick or injured, along with the supplies ride on the carts, which are pulled by the rest in shifts that Frydai worked out so that everyone has a turn at it, even he and I. He drives the rover while I pull a cart. I have to do my part.