Moon Flower (34 page)

“Birds fly, don’t they?” Lang pointed out.

Mutu scratched his head and looked perplexed. “Yes, that was what I thought too. I suppose he meant things that aren’t alive, and are heavier than air.”

“Why should it make a difference?”

“I don’t know.... So how do you do it?”

Lang thought for a moment, then picked up a knife, held it a foot or so above the table for a second, and then let it drop. “First, ask yourself why things fall down,” he said. The way of thinking was obviously new, and Mutu had no ready answer. Lang reached out and gave him a short but firm shove on the shoulder, causing him to move sideways. “Feel that? It’s called a force, right? When you apply a force to something, it moves — just as you did.” He picked up the knife again. “So here it is not moving. I let go of it...” He repeated what he had done before. “And it moves. So it must have felt a force.” He picked the knife up again and held it out, inducing Mutu to take it. “See, you can feel that force yourself. It’s what’s called weight.”

“So where does it come from?” Mutu asked. Lang thought that maybe he was beginning to understand why Dad had taken a break. He pointed downward at the floor. “The ground does it?” Mutu said.

“Everything. The whole world underneath it. All of Cyrene. It draws things to itself. Did you ever see a magnet?” Mutu nodded. “Same kind of thing.”

“How does it do that?”

“I don’t think anyone really knows.” In any case, Lang didn’t.

Mutu ate in silence for a minute or so. Lang let him think about it. The eggs had something of a fishy taste but were okay. The sausage was strong and spicy. Lang had watched Fiera making it herself the evening before.

“It still doesn’t tell me how you make something fly,” Mutu said finally.

“We said that Cyrene exerts a force on things that pulls them down, right? Well, then all you have to do is find a way of creating another force, acting up, that’s stronger.” Lang showed the knife, tossed it upward a few inches from his palm and caught it again. “See, I did it right there.”

“But it fell down again. You’d need something that acted all the time,” Mutu pointed out.

“Well, that’s what you have to figure out,” Lang said. “Birds did.” He took another mouthful of his meal while Mutu thought some more, and then added, “Here’s a piece of advice. Never look at a problem and say, ‘It
can’t
be solved
because
...’ Like, ‘You can’t make it fly, because it needs a force pushing it up all the time.’ That’s negative. Instead, you need to say, ‘It
could
be solved
if
...’ So, ‘Hey, we could make it fly if we found a way to produce a steady force that pushes up.’ That’s positive. Get it?... So there’s something to tell your professor if he ever comes back this way again.”

Mutu seemed to decide that it was enough deep thinking for the time being. “So is that what you do, Jeff?” he asked. “Make bird carriages?”

Lang shook his head. “No. That was just something I picked up.”

“So what do you do?”

Lang rubbed his eyebrow with a thumbnail, unsure how to answer. “I help protect people from others who might try to damage their work or steal it,” he said finally.

“You mean like a guard?”

“Close enough,” Lang said, and let it go at that.

After they had finished eating, Mutu insisted on taking Lang to the nearby house to meet Holgath, the smith. He said Holgath made tools and implements and knew all about forces, and Mutu was sure he would be interested in the things Lang had said. Lang suspected it was more to show off the alien guest from Earth; or maybe Mutu thought Lang would tell Holgath how to make a flying carriage. In any case, Lang was happy enough to go along.

They found Holgath at work in the forge, thick-armed and brawny, clad in a leather apron and wearing a headband stained with soot and sweat. Although he looked the image of a smith and could almost have been taken from a Terran history book, his house and the general condition of the workshop and its fittings didn’t quite fit. Like other artisans, the blacksmiths of Terran history books and folktales eked a meager existence typically on the borderline of poverty, and lived in surroundings to suit. While unpretentious, Holgath’s house looked solid, comfortable, and well maintained. His shop was well built and contained ample equipment of good quality. Cyreneans didn’t try to gouge each other or profit excessively at the cost of another’s ruin, Lang had learned from Orban during his short stay in Revo. How anything like that could be made to work, he had yet to comprehend.

Since he had time to kill until Xorin returned, he offered to lend a hand. Holgath gave him some long tongs to hold several heavy work pieces on the anvil while Holgath hammered a punch to make holes through the heated sections. Mutu worked the bellows and demonstrated other skills that he had doubtless picked up as a part-time apprentice. Lang used the opportunity to try and find out more from Holgath about how the system on Cyrene worked. Before Holgath could really understand the questions, Lang had to outline to him the basics of business dealings on Earth. Holgath took a swig from a leather water bottle hanging to one side, mopped his face with a cloth, and looked dubious.

“Everybody tries to take as much as they can get from everyone else, and give as little in return as they can get away with,” he said, summarizing his understanding of what Lang had told him.

Put that way, it didn’t make Lang feel too comfortable. “To maximize their self-interest,” he confirmed.

“But what about the interests of everybody — the world as a whole?”

“The theory is that if everyone takes care of their own part of it, then the best deal that you’re probably going to get will emerge out of it all,” Lang said.

Holgath thought about it while he replaced the stopper and hung the bottle back up. “How can that be?” he asked at last. “Everybody cannot gain. There must be some who lose — who receive less than what they produce is worth.”

Lang shrugged. “There’s no way to avoid that.”

“But then why should they want to do anything at all — unless they are made to? You would have to force them through violence. The only other way would be to take over all the property and leave them owning nothing but their labor, so that unless they work on your terms, they will starve.” Mutu had stopped what he was doing and was listening with horrified expression. Lang could only shrug again. “Is that really how it is on Earth?” Holgath asked.

“Well, how is it here on Cyrene?” Lang replied, deflecting the question. It wasn’t as if he had ever given much thought to such things himself.

Holgath frowned. It seemed to be something that he had always accepted and never had to put into words before. “A man works because it is in his nature to want to be useful and respected,” he replied finally. “Is it not natural that I should look for a way to repay what the world provides for me, and find a place in it that I am respected for? I wish for my neighbors to live well and be friends, and they wish the same for me.”

“Even to the point of not getting the most for yourself that you can?” Lang wasn’t sure he could buy this.

Holgath shook his head. “To glorify myself and deprive another of his living? No.” He picked up his hammer and punch to resume.

“You’re saying that people here will work for the satisfaction of it? Simply out of some sense of... of gratitude? A kind of social obligation?”

“Yes. It’s how they make their contribution to creating a better life for everyone.”

Lang looked at Holgath skeptically. “I think Terran nature must be a bit different,” he said.

Holgath waved the hammer at the work piece that Lang was positioning with the tongs. “Then why are you helping me with this, what we are doing right now?”

“This is a personal thing,” Lang said. “But how do you get a whole world to think that way?”

“What do you mean, ‘get them to think that way’? It isn’t something you have to explain. Do you have to tell people how to breathe? It’s something that everyone feels.”

“Not on Earth, apparently,” Lang said.

“Well, I don’t know anything about that. It sounds as if something is missing from Earth.” Holgath positioned the punch and measured the swing with his eye. “But on Cyrene it is something you would know.”

Xorin returned shortly before midday with the news that the carriage had stopped the day before at a house some miles downstream and crossed the river via a ford. It was heading for the road that led north into the Harzonne region. The shortest way to follow it would be to cross on the ferry here and go west, which would bring them to the same road but from the opposite direction.

They walked the two horses onto the flat-bottomed craft, and Mutu made a fine show of his prowess in poling them out from the shallows and then sculling across the deep portion in the river’s center. While Xorin was chatting with Mutu in the stern, Lang made his way forward past the horses to stand brooding to himself at the prow. He looked again at the forest, the hills, and the wide, flowing body of the river. He thought of Marc and Jerri somewhere ahead of him, that he had joked with, listened to, shared stories with all the way from Earth, and the kind of life that they had struck out to try and find for themselves in this new world where so much felt oddly “right,” and yet was filled with such strangeness and wonder. And he thought of the people behind him who had sent him on his mission, and the world and everything about it that they represented.

Something deeper down inside than the person he normally thought of himself as being seemed to be taking control. He slid his hand inside his tunic, drew out his compad, and stared at it. There was really nothing to decide or think about. The decision was already made. He dropped it over the side. Perhaps it was a lingering preservation instinct that made him hesitate a little longer over the machine pistol. There was no telling where he might find himself well-served by something like that on an unknown world full of who-knew-what kinds of unsuspected perils.

But already another instinct was telling him that if he was going to begin a new life, the only way was to do it with total commitment and completely, without hedging bets or a precautionary foot left planted in the world that he was leaving.

He let the weapon go, and watched it disappear beneath the slow, black waters.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

It was decided that Chev would stay for a few days at Linzava before departing back for Revo to return the carriage and resume his duties in the service of Vattorix. Eckelan and two others would travel with him as far as Doriden, where they wanted to study Wolaxal’s steam-engine project. In the meantime, a priority for the three Terrans whom he had brought to Linzava would be learning to ride. They couldn’t expect carriages to be made available every time they needed to travel any distance, and so the sooner they were able to become independent in this respect, the better.

After all the traveling and then staying up into the night to see Wade’s demonstration, it was late morning by the time they were up and about the next day. As promised, Wade took them back to the lab and performed some tests of the A-wave detector that he had constructed. The accompanying discussion revolved around the physics to begin with and was primarily between Wade and Shearer; but then Uberg widened it to encompass more of the botanical issues, which drew Elena in, and soon the four of them were engrossed in technicalities that Nick had heard before, and which were mostly lost on Jerri. The theorizing and debating continued through lunch, by which time it had become clear that this was only the beginning. Nick suggested to Jerri that they could leave the others to it, and he would show her around the place. At the same time they could take Nim out and give him a chance to start getting to know his way around. Jerri’s head was spinning, and she gratefully agreed.

They omitted the upper part of the original house, which was reserved as private rooms for the residents. After a tour of the library, sitting rooms, and other parts of the ground-floor level, including a look around the kitchen, they exited into a herb and vegetable garden at the rear, behind the laboratory extension. The fission module that had been “borrowed” from Revo base was housed in a low, bunkerlike cellar adjoining it. As with the ones that she and Marc had seen previously, Jerri found nothing remarkable about it as far as appearances went — a dome-topped cylinder with electrical hardware connecting to a panel of switchgear and indicators. A short distance away, practically hidden by the surrounding trees, they came to a low-roofed log-built structure that was more interesting, if noisy. It was practically a small factory inside, with Cyreneans applying themselves to a variety of tasks, directed by a sprinkling of Terrans. In one corner, a home-built machine powered by a Terran electric motor was pulling copper bars through a series of progressively smaller dies and winding the resulting wire onto a spool. A dozen or so finished spools were stacked nearby.

“It’s amazing how easy it is to take an infrastructure for granted,” Nick commented as they watched. “It’s all very well having the fission can next door putting out juice, but what do you do with it? Make motors to drive things? But to that you have to have wire, insulation, castings, bearings. You can’t just call your local supplies merchant here. They’re planning on putting another of whatsisname’s steam engines into a mill and foundry down in Ulla. That should make a big difference. It’s the reason why Evan wants some of his boys to get involved in the project at Doriden.”

They watched a simple grinding head putting the finishing touch to the lead screw for what Nick said would be a more accurate lathe than anything the Cyreneans had at present. In another room, a Terran who looked Asiatic was talking chemistry at a demonstration bench and chalk board in front of a group of about a dozen.

“It’s not a matter of trying to compete in terms of scale,” Nick said as they came back out and began following a trail through the trees to see the preparations being made for a new building on the slope above. “Evan knows they could never match Earth in volume, even at this distance. It’s more a question of spirit. If you can get the Cyreneans believing in themselves, their own nature will do the rest.” He snorted. “Then maybe one day they’ll be building their own starships and exporting their system to replace the ruins of what’s left of ours.”