Star's Reach

by John Michael Greer

  I remembered just in time that Plummer’s friends didn’t use names. “Sure. Anything I ought to know?”

  “Just keep Sal on the towpath and we’ll be fine.”

  By the time we were in the lock, I’d gone forward, gotten introduced to Sal the mule, sorted out which of us was boss, and got her harnessed up. Once we were ready to move again, Sal and I headed down the towpath, and pretty quick she settled into the same steady plod as the other mule, whose name was Josey. I got to know both of them pretty well over the days that followed, because that’s how I paid my way down the Cago Canal. Night and day, the boat kept moving at mule’s pace, a couple of boatlengths behind the boat ahead and in front of the boat behind, and night and day the captain and I spelled each other, four hours on and four hours off.

  The only breaks in that slow pace were when we lined up at a lock, or when we pulled into a wide place to load or unload something at one of the little towns that lined the canal. That latter was a break only in a manner of speaking, because it was me and Berry who did the loading and unloading, and none of it was particularly light. We hauled out kegs of nails and wood screws, crates of shovel and hoe and rake heads, all the metal parts and machinery for a wind turbine some farm family had saved up a couple of years of profits to buy, and boxes that had stocky brown jugs of Genda whiskey in them; we replaced it all with barrels of oranges and molasses, bottles of rum, and twenty-keelo sacks of corn and millet from Ilanoy farms. Still, what ruinmen haul on the job is no lighter.

  All considered, it was a pretty good time, and the fact that I didn’t know the first thing about canal boats before I’d started the trip gave it a bit of interest, too. There aren’t a lot of canals down in Tenisi, but they’re all over the northern part of Meriga, from Nyork west all the way to the Misipi. I asked Plummer about that once, when we were sitting on the roof of the cabin and Berry and the captain were doing their half of the work.

  “The canals? They’re quite old,” he said. “They came before the old world, or what most people remember as the old world. Most of them were abandoned when fossil fuels came to power everything, and had to be dug out and fitted with locks again afterwards. That started after the Third Civil War, and it’s still going on; if I recall correctly, there are two canals being reopened in Hiyo as we speak.”

  “That was generous of them,” I said. “The ancients, I mean.”

  He glanced at me, took a long swig from his whiskey bottle. “As far as anyone knows, they never thought twice about it. Once they had their cars and planes, they no longer needed the canals, and—” A shrug. “That was that.”

  “No, I meant it. At least they dug the things out in the first place.”

  “I suppose that’s—“ Plummer stopped halfway through the sentence, and a moment later I saw why. There were soldiers, a long line of them, crossing a big stone bridge up ahead of us. We got off the roof—you have to get down most times when a canal boat goes under a bridge—and watched the soldiers march past as we got closer to the bridge.

  We were almost under it when the end of the line came past, and there was a captin on horseback right at the back. He glanced at us, looked up and down the boat, then looked straight at me. “You with the hat,” he said. (I was wearing one, a cheap straw hat I’d bought for a couple of coins in one of the little towns along the way.) “Care to make a better wage than you’re getting now? The jennel’s looking for soldiers.”

  We had enough soldiers in Tenisi that I knew what to say. “Born with a bad foot, Sir and Captin. I can just about keep up with a mule.”

  He considered that. “Too bad. If you’ve got friends who might be interested, tell them Jennel Tarl’s hiring, a hundred marks for signing even if they’ve never touched a gun before.”

  “I’ll tell ‘em, Sir and Captin,” I said, and the man nodded and spurred his horse after the line of marching men.

  The damp black shadows under the bridge slid over us then. After we came out the other side, I got back onto the roof and looked over my shoulder. “I wonder what that was about.”

  “Something we’ll see quite often in the next few years, I fear,” Plummer said. He drank more whiskey. “An aging presden and no heir is a recipe for trouble, and that means soldiers: for the loyal, the ambitious, those who simply hope to survive. And when she dies...”

  He wasn’t looking at me that time, either, but I had the same feeling again as though he was watching me, seeing how I would react. I didn’t have the least idea what to say, and I didn’t really want to say much of anything, either. What Plummer had said a bit earlier about the Third Civil War suddenly made me notice that my time was a lot better than fifty or a hundred years ago or, well, pretty much any time since the old world started to come apart.

  Not that long ago, there hadn’t been long lines of canal boats moving iron and oranges and grain from one side of Meriga to the other, and for that matter there hadn’t been enough iron and oranges and grain, or much of anything else, for a lot of people all through that time. When Sheren died and left the presden’s office for others to fight over, I wondered, would it be back to that? I didn’t want to think about it just then, but the idea was hard to chase from my mind. As I write all this, here at Star’s Reach, it still is.

  Nineteen: A Different World

  “There was a long argument about that in the old world,” said Eleen. We were supposed to be eating lunch, but nobody was paying much attention to the bread and soup, and Tashel Ban wasn’t even pretending. He was over by the printer, muttering bits of hot language under his breath when the thing tried to jam.

  “About numbers?” Berry asked.

  “About math.” Scholars usually say “mathematics,” but Eleen stopped saying that the second or third time one of us gave her a blank look. “One side used to say that math was universal, so every intelligent species in the universe would end up understanding it the same way. The other side said no, mathematics are just the way our brains work, and so every species would have its own math. In the old world, most scholars agreed with the first side, but the other side was right—at least about the Cetans.”

  “But how did that stop them from figuring out what the Cetans were saying?” I asked.

  “Because the first messages we sent them were all about numbers.” She rapped on the table: once, twice, three times, five times, seven times. “What do those have in common?”

  “They’re prime numbers,” Berry said at once. Eleen gave him a startled look, and he went on, as though he was embarrassed: “My teacher at Nashul taught us about those.”

  “Good,” Eleen said. “Yes, and that’s one of the things they sent the Cetans, because they figured that any intelligent species ought to recognize them—but they didn’t. Meanwhile they were sending us the equivalent in their math, expecting us to recognize them, and we didn’t. It took a hundred years before anybody on either side realized that the problem was that we think in numbers and they don’t.”

  I tried to get my thoughts to fit around that one. “They don’t even count on their fingers?”

  “Cetans don’t have fingers.”

  “Well, but—”

  “But that’s just it. We’re born with so many fingers—five, most of us—and we live in a world where things come in nice neat packages you can count: four oranges, ten trees, things like that. They don’t. If a Cetan wants to grab something—” Her hand mimed flowing outwards. “—it grows as many fingers as it needs, and when it doesn’t need them, they go away. Everything that matters to them is like that. That’s why their math starts from flows, not from numbers.

  “We’ve got math that can handle flows. It’s called calculus, and there are maybe a few hundred people in Meriga who understand it, but we’ve got it. They’ve got math that can handle numbers. It’s very advanced math to them—as far as anyone here could figure out, they got there by imagining what happened when a flow got slower and slower, until it approached what we call zero—but they can do it. It took close to a h
undred years for both sides to figure out that these complicated relationships they were finding in each other’s signals were what the others thought was very simple, basic, easy math.”

  “Their technology is the same way,” Tashel Ban said, coming to the table with a stack of papers in his hands; the printer had finally given up jamming and done its job. “After the math issue got sorted out, the people here tried to explain to the Cetans how we build radios, and asked them how they did it.” He handed me my copy, and I glanced at the words on the top of the front page: BRIEFING PAPER 4: OVERVIEW OF CETAN MATHEMATICS AND TECHNOLOGY. “It turns out that they mix up something the consistency of thick paint out of metal salts and start putting it down in layers on a base, sprinkling in other compounds here and there, and letting it dry a bit more or less as they go. When it’s done, it’s a solid mass that takes in radio waves and electricity, and puts out the magnetic fields they talk with, but nobody here could figure out the details. The interesting thing is that they couldn’t make sense of our circuits either—the way we split up current into different resistors, capacitors, tubes, and so on doesn’t make any sense to them, and their math can’t follow it.”

  “Can their radios,” Thu asked then, “do anything ours cannot?” Everyone else looked at him. He hadn’t spoken yet in the discussion, because he didn’t need to. Anything we found out about Cetan technology brought us closer to the choice between his alternative and Tashel Ban’s. That wasn’t a choice any of us wanted to make in a hurry, if we had to make it at all.

  Tashel Ban answered after a moment. “Nothing any of the papers has mentioned so far. Electrons and radio waves work there the way they work here—at least, that’s the theory, and there’s nothing to suggest otherwise. It’s just the way they understand radio, and the math behind radio, that doesn’t make sense to us.”

  “Nor should it,” Eleen said. “It’s a different world.”

  I read the briefing paper right then, even though my soup was getting cold. At this point I’ve read enough papers about the Cetans that I can follow them pretty well even when I don’t know what they’re talking about, and this was no different; I couldn’t tell you a thing about most of the technologies the paper mentioned, but there were two things that came through. One was that the Cetans can do pretty much the same sort of things that we can, but trying to figure out how is the sort of thing that makes scholars jump in the river and drown themselves.

  The other thing was that the Cetans don’t seem to do the things that the old world did and we don’t do any more. The scholars who wrote the paper weren’t sure whether that’s because they hadn’t figured out how, or because there’s no way to do those on Tau Ceti II, or because Cetans have more common sense than human beings do, but the Cetans don’t seem to have cars or airplanes or anything like them. They get their electricity from sunlight and wind and water—well, gasoline, but there it’s the same thing—the way we do, and they aren’t lobbing any false stars up into the sky or building nukes or anything like that. Why is hard to say, because Eleen’s right; it’s a different world.

  We finally ate lunch, and then the rest of us told Eleen and Tashel Ban that it wasn’t going to do anybody any good if they worked themselves to death, and they agreed to take a day or two off. Berry, who’s been learning how to run the computer from Tashel Ban, promised that he’d keep an eye on it in case anything happened, and the rest of us bullied the two of them into getting some rest. I don’t know whether Tashel Ban slept, since he wasn’t the one I was supposed to bully, but Eleen did the sensible thing, settled down on our bed and slept until dinner.

  At dinner Tashel Ban and Thu swapped stories about Jinya pirates they’d tangled with, and everyone else ate and drank and hoped that we wouldn’t find anything that would force the two of them to take care of their argument the old hard way, knife in hand, in a chalk circle four meedas across. We lounged around for a while, talking about nothing in particular, and then Eleen and I went to the room we share and things pretty much followed from there.

  Afterwards we lay curled up around each other, feeling warm and comfortable and not saying much for a while. I was hoping Eleen would fall asleep, because I was pretty sure she still needed more rest, but instead she shifted and said, “All those books about flying saucers.”

  “What about them?”

  “I can’t help thinking about the people who spent their lives waiting for the aliens to land, back in the old world. There were millions of them, you know.”

  I didn’t, not until then. “The government had that many people fooled?”

  “It was more than that.” She settled on her back. “There’s a thing called the Big Bang effect.”

  “That sounds fun,” I said, and kissed the nearer of her breasts. She laughed and said, “Not that kind. In the old world, right up until a few years before it ended, scholars believed that the whole universe started out with a big explosion: the Big Bang.”

  I gave her a puzzled look. “How could that be the beginning? If there’s an explosion, you have to have something to explode first.”

  “I know. That’s what they thought, though, and they had reasons for it. Did you ever hear something go by you fast, making noise?” She moved a hand past my head and whistled, and the whistle dropped from high to low as the hand went by.

  “Sure.”

  “That’s called the Doppler effect—the way the sound is higher in pitch when it’s coming toward you, and lower when it’s moving away. The same thing happens with light, and when scholars studied the stars, they found that the light from the stars is redder—lower in pitch—than it would be if they were still. So they figured all the stars are flying apart, like bits of stuff from an explosion. Do you see?”

  I nodded. “But...”

  “There’s more. There was also a theory about the way the universe was put together, written by one of the most famous scholars back then, a man named Einstein. There were many ways to make the math in the theory work out, but the simplest way only works if the universe is getting bigger.” I gave her a baffled look, and she went on: “Again, think of an explosion. Something small gets much bigger.”

  “But...” I tried again.

  She put a hand over my mouth. “And some scholars figured out that outer space had just a bit of heat in it, more than they thought it should have, and they decided that the heat was left over from the explosion. So everyone thought, well, the stars are moving away from us, and the theory of relativity works best in an exploding universe, and here’s the heat from the explosion—it’s got to be true.”

  She took her hand off my mouth, and I said, “But none of those proves that.”

  “Of course not.” Then, smiling: “Why not?”

  “Because something else could have caused each of those things.”

  “Exactly.” She kissed me, then said: “If A causes B, and B shows up, that doesn’t prove that A must have happened—not unless you know for certain that A’s the only thing that can cause B. People forget that. They forget it all the faster if A can cause B, and C, and D, and all three of those things show up—it’s easy to think that A’s got to be the cause.

  “Then if things come up that don’t fit the model, people don’t weigh things evenly; they don’t say, B and C and D suggest that A happened, but E and F and G and H suggest that it didn’t. They take each piece of contrary evidence one at a time: here’s E, but E by itself doesn’t outweigh B and C and D, and neither does F by itself, and so on. So you can end up with far more evidence against a theory than for it, but nobody notices, because they’re taking the evidence for the theory all together, and the evidence against the theory as though each piece stands all by itself. That’s what scholars nowadays call the Big Bang effect.”

  “So how did they figure out that the Big Bang didn’t happen?”

  “A scholar figured out that there’s something else that makes starlight look redder when it comes from further away. It wasn’t the Doppler effect after all. Th
en another scholar took a second look at Einstein’s theory, and it turned out that some puzzles that nobody had been able to solve were easy to work out once you realized the universe wasn’t getting bigger. The heat had other explanations, too, but nobody had time to figure out which was right, because that’s as far as they got when the old world ended.”

  “There must have been a mother of a lot of embarrassed scholars.”

  “It was much worse than that.” Her face went somber. “The Big Bang had become the foundation of half a dozen sciences. People spent their entire lives working on theories that depended on it—and suddenly there they were. I don’t think any of them killed themselves, but there were scholars who kept on insisting that it was all wrong and the Big Bang was real until they went back into Mam Gaia’s belly. It was that or admit that they’d wasted their lives.”

  I realized then where she was going with all this. “And the people who believed in the aliens made the same kind of mistake.”

  “Yes, but there was even more reason for them to make it. I was taught that the people who believed in flying saucers thought the aliens were about to land and solve all our problems for us. When the old world was ending, most people hoped that something like that would happen—that somebody would somehow fix everything, so that the old world didn’t have to end. So every light in the sky, and every story about—what was that place in the desert?”

  “Roswell.”

  “Yes. Every story about Roswell, every faked picture and faked sighting the government put into circulation, and everything else, had to add up to aliens visiting Mam Gaia, or the last scrap of hope they had was gone.” She shook her head. “So they waited, and waited, and waited, and the flying saucers never landed. For all I know there are still people waiting for that, the way the Old Believers wait for their god to come back.”

  I thought I could name at least one who was still waiting for the aliens, but right then Eleen turned to face me and reached for me. “Waiting?” she asked.