A is for Astonishing

I decided to kick off the start of this month of blogging insanity with a prompt.  The word prompt for today's entry came from my friend Copper.

Woven in among the cords of thread in his grandmother's kitchen rug and nearly hidden by a heavier blue cord was a single silver thread, almost metallic, that didn't quite seem to belong.

"What's this, Grandma?"  Tollie had asked once when she was small and inquisitive.

"The rug. Now, Tolliver Elizabeth, get your grubby hands off my kitchen rug and over to the sink for a good scrub with soap and water.  We've got cookies to bake."

Outside the walls of that small house, time and the world turned.

The rug was passed on to Tollie's mother, and then to her, and then to one of her granddaughter's.  No one seemed particularly intrigued that a kitchen rug could stand up to such regular and repeated abuse as languishing under foot on the kitchen floor of five generations of Martins. It was just "Nana's rug", and she had been good at making stuff that lasted.

Eventually another three or four generations of Martins on, Caden Elias thought perhaps it ought to be donated to the National Museum. It was in such good  shape for an "old thing" and a relic of "before".  The curator thought it looked like a piece of art, so he logged it in the annals with a asterisk to come back for examination and then stored it in the basement archives.

Several generations on from that a lowly textile art student, searching through the archives for anything interesting that might be of use for her thesis on textile art remnants from old earth, pulled it out and took it to the university for study.  Her boyfriend (a physicist) happened to stop by when she had it out and became fascinated by the silver thread.  He did some investigating (and with a bit of subterfuge performed a few tests as well).   Only then did the truth of the silver thread come to light.

The missing Epythelius Cord that was unreproducible and whose mysterious loss had stranded their star ship colony on Megasus when it had originally only been planned as a month long refueling pit stop.  Many of the colony had built a community while the engineers worked out an alternative. (It had taken several months.) 

Even more surprising?  The rug turned out to be the handiwork of the captain of that flight, Star Captain Elizabeth Martin, who had stayed behind with the starter community when the ship had eventually flown on without them.