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III

The What Cheer sat in a field a kilometer north of Aesca. By now thousands of local feet had tramped a path across it; the Ivanhoans were entirely humanlike in coming to gape at a novelty. But Captain Krishna Mukerji always rode into town.

"Really, Martin, you should, too," he said nervously. "Especially when the situation has all at once become so delicate. They don't consider it dignified for anyone of rank to arrive at the, er, the Sanctuary on foot."

"Dignity, schmignity," said Master Polesotechnician Schuster. "I should wear out my heart and my rump on one of those evil-minded animated derricks? I rode a horse once on Earth. I never repeat my mistakes." He waved a negligent hand. "Besides, I've already told the Consecrates, and anyone else that asked, the reason I go places on foot, and don't bother with ceremony, and talk friendly with low-life commoners, is that I've progressed beyond the need for outward show. That's a new idea here, simplicity as a virtue. It's got the younger Consecrates quite excited."

"Yes, I daresay this culture is most vulnerable to new ideas," Mukerji said. "There have been none for so long that the Larsans have no antibodies against them, so to speak, and can easily get feverish. . . . But the heads of the Sanctuary appear to realize this. If you cause too much disturbance with your comments and questions, they may not wait for us to starve. They may whip up an outright attack, casualties and the fear of a punitive expedition be damned."

"Don't worry," Schuster said. Another man in his position might have been offended; a first-year Polesotechnic cadet was taught not to clash head-on with the basics of an alien creature, and he had been a Master for two decades. But his face, broad and saber-nosed under sleek black hair, remained blandly smiling. "In all my conversations with these people, feeling them out, I've never yet challenged any of their beliefs. I don't intend to start now. In fact, I'm simply going to continue my seminar over there, as if we hadn't a care in the universe. To be sure, if I can steer the talk in a helpful direction—" He gathered a sheaf of papers and left the cabin: a short tubby man in vest and ruffled shirt, culottes and hose, as elegant as if he were bound for a reception on Earth.

Emerging from the air lock and heading down the gangway, he drew his mantle about him with a shiver. To avoid eardrum popping, the hull was kept at Ivanhoan air pressure, but not temperature. Br-r-r, he thought. I don't presume to criticize the good Lord, but why did He make the majority of stars type M?

The afternoon landscape reached somber, to his eyes, as far as he could see down the valley. Grainfields were turning bluish with the first young shoots of the year. Peasants, male, female, and young, hoed a toilsome way down those multitudinous rows. The square mud huts in which they lived stood at no great separation, for every farm was absurdly small. Nevertheless families did not outgrow the capacity of the land; disease and periodic famines kept the population stable. To hell with any sentimental guff about cultural autonomy, Schuster reflected. This is one society that ought to be kicked apart.

He reached the highroad and started toward the city. There was considerable traffic, food and raw materials coming from the hinterlands, handmade goods going back. Professional porters trotted under loads too heavy for Schuster even to think about. Fastigas dragged travois with vast bumping and clatter. A provincial Warden and his bodyguard galloped through, horns hooting, and the commoners jumped aside for their lives. Schuster waved to the troop as amiably as he did to everyone else that hailed him. No use standing on ceremony. In the couple of Earth-weeks since the ship landed, the Aescans had lost awe of the strangers. Humans were no weirder to them than the many kinds of angel and hobgoblin in which they believed, and seemed to be a good deal more mortal. True, they had remarkable powers; but then, so did any village wizard, and the Consecrates were in direct touch with God.

Not having been threatened by war in historical times, the city was unwalled. But its area was pretty sharply defined just the same, huts, tenements, and the mansions of the wealthy jammed close together along the contorted trails that passed for streets. Crowds moved by bazaars where shopkeepers' wives sang songs about their husbands' wares. Trousers and tunics, manes and fur, glowed where the red light slanted through shadows that were thick to Schuster's vision. The flat but deep Ivanhoan voices made a surf around him, overlaid by the shuffle of feet, clop of hooves, clangor from a smithy. Acrid stenches roiled in his nostrils.

It was a relief to arrive at one of the Three Bridges. When the Sanctuary guards had let him by, he walked alone. Only those who had business with the Consecrates passed here.

The Trammina River cut straight through town, oily with the refuse of a hundred thousand inhabitants. The bridges were arcs of a circle, soaring in stone to the island in the middle of the water. (Falkayn had relayed from Rebo the information that you were allowed to use up to one third of the sacred figure for an important purpose.) That island was entirely covered by the enormous step-sided pyramid of the Sanctuary. Buildings clustered on the lower terraces, graceful white structures with colonnaded porticos, where the Consecrates lived and worked. The upper pyramid held only staircases, leading to the top. There the Eternal Fire roared forth, vivid yellow tossing against the dusky-green sky. Obviously natural gas was being piped from some nearby well; but the citadel was impressive in every respect.

Except for what it cost those poor devils of peasants in forced labor and taxes, Schuster thought, and what it's still costing them in liberty. The fact that thousands of diverse barbarian cultures existed elsewhere on the planet proved that Pharaonism didn't come any more naturally to the Ivanhoans than it did to men.

White-robed Consecrates, most of their manes gray with age, and their blue-clad acolytes walked about the pyramid on their business, aloof in pride. Schuster's cheery greetings earned him little but frigid stares. He didn't let it bother him but bustled on to the fourth-step House of the Astrologers.

In a spacious room within, a score or so of the younger Consecrates sat around a table. "Good day, good day," Schuster beamed. "I trust I am not late?"

"No," said Herktaskor. A lean, intense-eyed being, he carried himself with something of the martial air of his Warden father. "Save that we have been eagerly awaiting the revelation you promised us this morning, when you borrowed that copy of the Book of Stars."

"Well, then," Schuster said, "let us get on with it." He went to the head of the table and spread out his papers. "I trust you have mastered those principles of mathematics that I explained to you in the past several days?"

A number of them looked unsure, but other shaggy heads nodded. "Indeed," said Herktaskor. His voice sank. "Oh, glorious!"

Schuster took out a fat cigar and got it going while he squinted at them. He had to hope they were telling the truth; for suddenly his little project, which had begun as a pastime, and in the vague hope of winning friends and sneaking some new concepts into this frozen society, had grown most terribly urgent. Last night Davy Falkayn radioed that shattering news about wheels being taboo, and now—

He thought, though, that Herktaskor was neither lying nor kidding himself. The Consecrate was brilliant in his way. And certainly there was a good foundation on which to build. Mathematics and observational astronomy were still live enterprises in Larsum. They had to be, when religion claimed that astrology was the means of learning God's will. Algebra and geometry had long been well developed. The step from them to basic calculus was really not large. Even dour Sketulo, the Chief of Sanctuary, had not objected to Schuster's organizing a course of lectures, as long as he stayed within the bounds of dogma. Quite apart from intellectual curiosity, it would be useful for the learned class to be able to calculate such things as the volumes and areas of unusual solids; it would make still tighter their grip on Larsum's economy.

"I planned to go on with the development of those principles," Schuster said. "But then I got to wondering if you might not be more interested in certain astrological implications. You see, by means of the calculus it is possible to predict where the moons and planets will be, far more accurately than hitherto."

Breath sucked in sharply between teeth. Even through the robes, the man could see how bodies tensed around the table.

"The Book of Stars gave me your tabulated observations, accumulated over many centuries," he went on. "These noontide hours I have weighed them in my mind." Actually, he had fed them to the ship's computer. "Here are the results of my calculations."

He drew a long breath of tobacco smoke. The muscles tightened in his belly. Every word must now be chosen with the most finicking care, for a wrong one could put a sword between his guts.

"I have hesitated to show you this," he said, "because at first glance it seems to contradict the Word of God as you have explained it to me. However, after pondering the question and studying the stars for an answer, I felt sure that you are intelligent enough to see the deeper truth behind deceptive appearances."

He paused. "Go on," Herktaskor urged.

"Let me approach the subject gradually. It is often a necessity of thought to assume something which one knows is not true. For example, the Consecrates as a whole possess large estates, manufactories, and other property. Title is vested in the Sanctuary. Now you know very well that the Sanctuary is neither a person nor a family. Yet for purposes of ownership, you act as if it were. Similarly, in surveying a piece of land, you employ plane trigonometry, though you know the world is actually round. . . ." He went on for some time, until he felt reasonably sure that everybody present understood the concept of a legal or mathematical fiction.

"What has this to do with astrology?" asked someone impatiently.

"I am coming to that," Schuster said. "What is the true purpose of your calculations? Is it not twofold? First, you wish to predict where the heavenly bodies will be with respect to each other at some given date, since this indicates what God desires you to do at that time. Second, you wish to uncover the grand plan of the heavens, since by studying God's works you may hope to learn more of His nature.

"Now as observations accumulated, your ancestors found it was not enough to assume that all the worlds, including this one, move in circles about the sun, and the moons in circles about this world, while the heavenly globe rotates around the whole. No, you had to picture these circles as having epicycles; and later it turned out that there must be epi-epicycles; and so on, until now for centuries the picture has been so complicated that the astrologers have given up hope of further progress."

"True," said one of them. "A hundred years ago, on just this account, Kurro the Wise suggested that God does not want us to understand the ultimate design of things too fully."

"Perhaps," Schuster said. "On the other hand, maybe God only wants you to use a different approach. A savage, trying to lift a heavy stone, might conclude that he is divinely forbidden to do so. But you lift it with a lever. In the same way, my people have discovered a sort of intellectual lever, by which we can pry more deeply into the motions of the heavenly bodies than we ever could by directly computing circles upon circles upon circles.

"The point is, however, that this requires us to employ a fiction. That is why I ask you not to be outraged when I lay that fiction before you. Granted, all motions in the sky are circular, since the circle is the token of God. But is it not permissible to assume, for purposes of calculation only, that they are not circular . . . and inquire into the consequences of that assumption?"

He started to blow a smoke ring but decided against it. "I must have a plain answer to that question," he said. "If such an approach is not permissible, then of course I shall speak no more."

But of course it was. After some argument and logic-chopping, Herktaskor ruled that it was not illegal to entertain a false hypothesis. Whereupon Schuster exposed his class to Kepler's laws and Newtonian gravitation.

That took hours. Once or twice Herktaskor had to roar down a Consecrate who felt the discussion was getting obscene. But on the whole, the class listened with admirable concentration and asked highly intelligent questions. This was a gifted species, Schuster decided; perhaps, intrinsically, more gifted than man. At least, he didn't know if any human audience, anywhere in space or time, would have grasped so revolutionary a notion so fast.

In the end, leaning wearily on the table, he tapped the papers before him and said from a roughened throat: "Let me summarize. I have shown you a fiction, that the heavenly bodies move in ellipses under an inverse square law of attraction. With the help of the calculus, I have proved that the elliptical paths are a direct consequence of that law. Now here, in these papers, is a summary of my calculations on the basis of our assumption, about the actual heavenly motions as recorded in the Book of Stars. If you check them for yourselves, you will find that the data are explained without recourse to any epicycles whatsoever.

"Mind you, I have never said that the paths are anything but circular. I have only said that they may be assumed to be, and that this assumption simplifies astrological computation so much that predictions of unprecedented accuracy can now be made. You will wish to verify my claims and consult your superiors about their theological significance. Far be it from me to broadcast anything blasphemous.

"I got troubles enough," he added in Anglic.

There was no uproar when he left. His students were as wrung out as he. But later, when the implications began to sink in—

He returned to the ship. Pasqual met him in the wardroom. "Where have you been so long?" the engineer asked. "I was getting worried."

"At the lodge." Schuster threw himself into a chair with a sigh. "Whoof! Sabotage is hard work."

"Oh . . . I was asleep when you came back here for noon, and so did not tell you. While you were out this morning, Davy called in. He is on his way back."

"He might as well return, I suppose. We can't do anything until we get an okay from on high, and that'll take time."

"Too much time, maybe."

"And maybe not." Schuster shrugged. "Don't be like the nasty old man in a boat."

"Eh?"

"Asked, 'How do you know it will float?' Whereupon he said, 'Boo!' to the terrified crew and retired to the cabin to gloat. Be a good unko and fetch me a drink, will you, and then I'm going to retire myself."

"No supper?"

"A sandwich will do. We have to start rationing—remember?"

 

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