Vectors

by Charles Sheffield

  She hesitated. "From the dam and turbines at the head of the valley, doesn't it? The water turns the wheels and the wheels drive the generators."

  "That's what we're told. But if my estimates are right, all those generators produce less than a hundredth of what we use. Where do we get the rest of it? There must be a tremendous energy-producing plant near here, but you never hear a word about it."

  "Don't harangue me. It's not my doing, Carl. Anyway, does it matter? The important thing is that we have the energy we need."

  "No, it's not. I thought you would understand. We are given simple, pat pictures of the world. They may be enough for somebody who has trouble mastering the multiplication tables, but they aren't the full story."

  She nodded thoughtfully. "I can't say I really understand you, but I do believe you." She walked about the living-room, setting their wet clothes out to dry. "If you think there may be answers in the forbidden books, I'll get mine for you. I keep it hidden in the attic."

  The book she produced was well-preserved and entitled simply 'The Feynman Lectures on Physics.' The language was archaic, more wordy yet less formal than the modern axiomatic instruction texts. Carl settled down in front of the window, with Sarah reading over his shoulder. After ten minutes or so she left him and began to prepare a meal. He was gone, off in a rapt concentration of his own. "Ten leagues beyond the wide world's end," thought Sarah, and smiled to herself as she prepared meat, herbs and vegetables and set them on the stove.

  The smell of cooking finally got through to Carl where words could not. He had sat like a statue for four hours, moving only to turn pages. Sarah moved quietly about the house, cleaning and cooking, and from time to time stopping to read a page over his shoulder. At last he lifted his head, sniffed, stretched, and shivered all over like an animal. He looked about him as though he had just entered the room. Sarah came to his side and felt his hand.

  "I thought so. You're frozen. You should have moved about, instead of sitting all that time in one position. Come on, move over here and let's get some hot food into you."

  They moved closer to the fire. Sarah dimmed the light and put barley bread, beer, plates and a big beef casserole onto a low table between them. She watched in silence through Carl's first two helpings, then looked at him and raised her eyebrows.

  "Well, are you going to tell me what you've been doing? Or is it too hard for a simpleton like me to understand?"

  Carl was startled, then apologetic. "Sorry, I was still thinking about what I've been reading. I've just been skimming, but it's clear that there's a whole world that's not taught—avoided—in our schools."

  "Missing subjects, you mean?"

  "More basic than that. For instance, we learn that atoms are indivisible. Now I find from this book that there is a whole world of structure inside an atom. The things we use every day—computers, televisions, things like that—depend on the 'sub-atom' world, and can't function without it. So somebody must know about and use the knowledge. I'm wondering what else there is that isn't taught. This book was written around 1960. What else happened between then, and the founding of Redmanism? That was seventy years later."

  He pushed away his plate and sat dejected, hands loosely hanging between his knees. "So much for the things I thought I knew. Now, I don't know if anything I've learned is true." His tone was bitter. "I just don't know what to do next. I can't go back to Briarsford, to be fed on bits and pieces, not knowing what's true and what's nonsense. Poor old Nielsen, with his 'great absolute truths.' I'm sure he believes it. He's a stooge, and he has no idea of it. I can't live like that."

  Sarah sat silent, sympathetic. At last she went again to the stove, made two mugs of spiced tea, and handed one to Carl. "If you'll take my advice, you'll sleep on it before you decide anything. A big shock never looks the same the next day."

  She placed her mug on the hearth in front of her, then settled herself with her back against Carl's chair, hugging her knees and looking at the flickering flames before her. Her voice was soft. "I remember when my uncle gave me a copy of Shakespeare's sonnets. I'd never seen them before. I read myself into a stupor that night, and I thought the world could never be the same again. It never has been the same, quite, but next morning"—she shrugged, ruefully—"there it was, pretty much back to normal. Same old world."

  She went on chatting casually about her past, drawing Carl bit by bit into the conversation. Little by little, the food, warmth, firelight and her calm manner unknotted him. He moved from his chair and they sat side by side on the tawny rug, watching the changing red tableau of the fire. Their conversation slowly died with the ebbing flames.

  Afterward, they would never agree as to who made the first advance. Carl claimed that it must have been Sarah, citing his lack of experience as his proof. She always denied it, vehemently. There was one minor awkwardness with clothing, that Sarah turned to a joke as Carl fumbled with and at last broke a fastening. Then a second tense moment, when Carl saw the crucifix on its thin silver chain, pendant between her firelit breasts.

  "Sarah! You follow the Old Religion!"

  "Yes. Does it matter?" She placed her hand softly on him.

  Not then. Nothing mattered then. The world would never be quite the same again for Carl Denning.

  Much later, Sarah rose quietly from the fireside. She brought two heavy blankets, placed one over Carl's sleeping body and wrapped the second one around her. She went to the window and looked out at the night.

  The rain had continued, strengthened. It poured down now in a dark, vertical torrent, dissolving away the hard-packed snow. The night outside was full of the sound of a thousand small streams and rivulets, carrying off the surface water.

  Other images formed in Sarah's mind, and she sighed. Still falls the rain. Dark as the world of man, black as our loss—blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails upon the Cross. But now, of course, it's twenty-one hundred nails. It's still falling, and we seem to have learned nothing. Look at my vows—honor, and faith, and a sure intent—and here I am, playing at Earth-mother. The firelight makes him look so young. What will he think when he sees me in full sunlight? A rag, and a bone, and a hank of hair? That's what I should save my sadness for, instead of brooding here over the weather. Driving rain and falling tears—maidens, of your charity, pity my most luckless state. Oh well, omne animal post coitum triste est—except, I bet, a teenage boy. He'll wake up hungry.

  Sarah stood up, picked two cushions from the window seat, went to the fireplace, placed one cushion beneath Carl's head, lay down beside him and pulled the blanket over them.

  * * *

  "The basic ideas that underlie a civilization are not propagated instantly from their creators to the population as a whole. The process takes time. It was more than a hundred years after Newton's great statements of natural laws when the common man realized that the Universe should be capable of rational explanation, of comprehensible mathematical analysis. The secrets of the stars in their courses could be understood. When that realization dawned, the Age of Reason was born. The population as a whole, without of course explicitly knowing why, became convinced that final truths were knowable, and full explanations of the world were possible.

  "In the same way, the modern great revolutions in human perception of the Universe have slowly percolated through to the masses. Mankind's fundamental thinking has finally reflected these changes, while not fully understanding them. We will be most concerned to trace the effects of the scientific revolutions that began at the end of the nineteenth century . . ."—from 'Fundamental Attitudes in Human Society, 1625 to 2025,' by Jahangir Redman.

  * * *

  "Follow the river south, about twenty miles from here. Then take the road west, where the quarry begins." Sarah traced the route with her finger along the wrinkled map. "Keep on that until you cross the Scar, then head north again, following the Scar. Now then. If you believe the rumors that float around Lukon, about forty miles north of there you will find a 'Processing Center
.' That's the only place I've ever heard of where the Church had definite rules that restrict access—and that's mainly rumors, as far as I'm concerned."

  "But that's less than thirty miles from here," said Carl, dark head intent over the map. "Why not head straight for it?"

  "That would take you over the mountains, through the Lukon Pass. It would be an impossible journey at this time of year—and it's patrolled for most of the year. Wild animals, too, in the winter. I've heard there are bears, and some people say there are big wild-cats up there."

  They were sitting, heads close together, at the table. A small stack of Sarah's most treasured books were at Carl's left hand. He had read some of the poems in them but was not very impressed.

  "There are no rules, Sarah. Nothing that tells you what you can write, and what you can't write. Science is different. It has laws, principles, theorems."

  "That's part of the attraction of poetry—you can go just where your imagination takes you. It's not bounded and confined, the way that science always seems to be. Anyway, poetry has its own rules."

  "I haven't seen any. Where are they written down?"

  "They're not. But they exist. Like the sonnets you read earlier. A sonnet must have fourteen lines of a certain length. If it hasn't, it can still be a poem—but it isn't a sonnet. Writing according to those rules, in a certain form, is part of the pleasure. Look at this." She picked up one of the books. "It goes even further. The poet has written an acrostic sonnet—see, the first letter of each line, read downwards, spells out the name of his mistress. That's a hard thing to do, and still produce a poem that's poetry."

  Carl acted unimpressed—but he put the book in his pocket after Sarah had closed it. "Seems to me the best part of the trick is picking a girl-friend with fourteen letters in her name. In science, now . . ."

  The Scar was not shown on the map. "It's a barren place," said Sarah. "Where the plants don't grow quite right. It's been that way for a long time, since before I was born. One winter, the power failed for three weeks. There was no electricity, and people nearly froze to death. Next spring, the Scar was there."

  Carl looked sceptical. "I can't see how electricity could affect the plants. I'd like to see it, but the way you describe things, the only way to get a look at the Processing Center would be to go over the Lukon Pass, in winter. If it's patrolled when the weather is good, and the southern route is patrolled all the time, I don't see how else to do it."

  "You can't do it. It's not possible. Carl, forget what I've been saying—it's only rumors." She was disturbed by the look in his eye.

  "I can't forget. I'm not going back to Briarsford until I know what's going on. If the answers are at the Processing Center, that's where I want to go. I won't be able to settle down to anything until I get some answers that make sense to me."

  "Not even for . . ." Sarah stopped. She looked again at Carl, leaned back and put her hands to her eyes. As though to herself, she whispered, "If this be error and upon me proved . . ." Then she placed her hands firmly face-down on the table and looked at him again. She sighed. "Give me your meal voucher. Good thing it's unlimited. We'll need at least a week's food. And we'll need back-packs. There's only one tent—it will have to do for two." She smiled. "Sorry, Carl. It's really a small tent. You'll learn the less spiritual side of the female in the next few days."

  Carl hugged her, hard. "For that, Sarah, I'll read a hundred more poems if you want me to. Where did you put my outdoor clothes?"

  The northern track leading to the Lukon Pass was deserted. Thaw and rain were over, and the sky hinted at more bad weather to come.

  * * *

  "You just lost your bet. He wasn't on the hovercraft yesterday, and he hasn't slept at the hostel since the first night in Lukon. Why didn't they report to us?"

  "The Hostel? Why should they? We didn't give them any special instructions. Did you check Denning's food voucher, to see if he's been using it?"

  "And how. He half-emptied a couple of stores—enough food for a couple of weeks. My fault. I didn't have the sense to make it a limited voucher. He could be halfway to Kelso before he needs more food."

  "I'll get a tracer on him, Jason. The patrols should get him easily enough, he can't have gone far in two days. You stay there in Lukon. See if you can find where he spent that second night."

  "Get an aerial survey, visible and thermal infrared, if you can, Luis. Cover all the roads between here and Briarsford. I'll call again tonight."

  It did not occur to them to look north and west. One man, without extra warm clothing and a protective tent, would already have frozen in the mountains. Anyway, there was no way that Carl Denning could have heard about the Processing Center northwest of Lukon. It was an annoyance to have to speed up the recruiting program for a promising prospective scientist, but it had happened before. The search procedures began.

  * * *

  Nine miles along the track to the Lukon Pass, Carl and Sarah came to the ghost town. The old buildings and deserted streets were wild and crumbling, full of gorse and heather. Sarah refused to sleep inside any of the old houses.

  "I know it would be safer, Carl. But it's the thought of all the people who lived and died there, back when this was a thriving town. I don't want to sleep with their spirits."

  "That's nonsense, Sarah. When people die, that's the end of it. There are no spirits, if we sleep outside we'll be colder, we'll have to put the tent up, we'll not be sheltered from the wind—and what about those wild animals you told me about?"

  Sarah shivered. All the same, they slept outside. It was not too uncomfortable. The hollow ribs of the tent supports were inflated using a small cylinder of gas, to produce a firm, triangular prism within a few seconds. Carl looked doubtfully at the thin shiny walls.

  "We'll freeze in this. It's like gossamer."

  Sarah shook her head. "We'll be all right. It's made of passivine. It reflects heat, and it won't conduct it."

  Carl examined it closely. Another thing his science classes couldn't explain. They crawled inside, and he was amazed to find it warm and snug. Physical closeness, forced on them by the size of the tent, was a delight. Carl's education in the ways of the world continued to grow. But outside, the temperature had dropped again and the first flakes of new snow were beginning to fall.

  Before they at last went to sleep, still entwined, Carl had a last, drowsy thought. "What happened to all the people who used to live here, Sarah? Where did they go?"

  She came back from the edge of slumber. "We shrank, Carl. Once, before Redman's time, there were six billion people in the world. Then in the Dark Ages, the number went down to one billion, until Redmanism produced stability. It's steady now, with two billion of us, but there are lots of towns like this. To me, they talk their own language, of old weddings and long-dead dreams."

  Carl was too tired to ask her what she meant, and by morning they had other things on their minds. Dawn was a continuous, formless white, with sky and earth merging into one at the horizon. Eight inches of new snow had fallen and everywhere there was a silent, virgin cover, unmarked by wind or any sign of bird and animal tracks. Travel was impossible. They moved into a well-preserved stone house—Sarah somehow swallowed her fears of its former tenants—and they settled in to await a change in the weather.

  It came after four days, with high winds in the night screaming through the battered roof and blowing the powdery snow into great drifts, sweeping the highlands bare. The next morning, unsure of the decision, they set out again to the north.

  By evening they were in the saddle of the Lukon Pass, tired, hungry, cold and depressed. Their movements had become slow and wooden, full of a deadly weariness. The trip seemed impossible. All day long they had toiled upward, seeing no signs of life except a few moorland birds in their drab winter plumage, flying and calling aimlessly above them, and one winter hare, limping across a rocky ridge a few hundred feet in front of them. Fatigue, bone-aching clear cold, drifts of snow and the relentless, iron-grey ro
cks had drained them. Their minds had become numbed, their bodies uncontrolled. Carl's natural curiosity and Sarah's enthusiasm for natural beauty had gone. They pitched the tent early and crawled into it as dusk approached.

  Inside the warm cocoon they lay close and silent, grateful for food, rest, and companionship. By the middle of the evening, they could talk again, could continue their old, ongoing argument. Sarah was on the defensive.

  "It doesn't pretend to offer certainty of happiness on earth. But it tells me there is something in the universe that is higher than I am, more than present pleasure. The Church of Redman offers nothing beyond itself. It's just a set of rules and rituals to make people feel happy and secure, but there's no soul in it."

  "But most people are happy, Sarah. Isn't that important?"

  "Of course. I know I'm the odd one out. But you are the same, in a way."

  "About science? That's true. Everyone I know—including you—seems to be perfectly content with superficial explanations. Cookbook rules that allow a man to repair a television set or a grav-motor are sufficient. No one cares about basic reasons, as long as they know enough to plug one bit into another."

  "—and I'm telling you that my view of the Church of Redman is like your view of the repairmen. Just a set of instructions, so you don't have to think about life—follow them, and you'll be all right."

  "It's not the same at all, Sarah. The Church offers more . . ."

  The argument went on, hot and endless. But little by little, the bridges were growing between them. When at last they went to sleep, entwined again like two silkworms in their passivine cocoon, Carl realized that he had never before been close to another person in his whole life. All his memories were of the schools. With a sudden insight impossible for him a week earlier, he restrained himself from asking too much about Sarah's past.

  * * *

  "Got him. At last. An aerial patrol spotted two people in the Lukon Pass this afternoon. Who'd have thought anyone would go up there at this time of year? It fits with yesterday's report about the missing school-teacher. She's the reason for Denning's breakout. She's supposed to be a supporter of the Old Religion."