Thirty-Two: A Different World

“There was a long argument about that in the old world,” said Eleen. We were supposedly 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 that about the second time one of us gave her a blank look. “One side used to say that math was universal, so every species 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 her knuckles 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 Core 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 can’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 wild dogs trying to eat you, 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 hundred people in Meriga who can do 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 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 hundred years for both sides to figure out that these complicated relationships they were finding in the other side’s signals were what the other side 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. “Turns out they mix up something the consistency of thick paint out of complex 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 on this planet 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 at the table 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. “Not that anything has mentioned. 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 at all.”

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

That happened this afternoon, and I spent most of the rest of the day reading the paper she and Tashel Ban found somewhere hidden away in the computer. At this point I’ve read enough papers from the Star’s Reach project 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.

The funny thing is that the part of my story I want to tell next involved those same words, and it happened when we got to Proo. That’s where the Cago Canal ends and the Misipi Canal starts up toward Rocalan and the upper Misipi, and it’s also where the riverboats that work the Ilanoy River pick up passengers and freight for the run down to Sanloo and Memfis. We had two days in Proo, partly because there were fifty or sixty canal boats waiting to be unloaded there, and we had to wait our turn; and partly because the riverboat Plummer wanted to take hadn’t finished its run upriver. So Berry and I slept on the boat, visited the town, drank beer with the other boatmen, hauled and carried cargo once it came our turn, and generally got along fine.

The captain of our boat—no, I never did ask his name, or hear anybody else say it—waved me into the cabin after we’d finished loading up for the trip back to Cago. “You know,” he said, “you and that boy of yours did well. There’s not much to be made walking a mule down the towpath, but if you ever need someplace to lie low and stay fed the while, you could do worse.” With a motion of his head toward the foredeck: “You run with him, you’ll need to lie low now and then.”

He meant Plummer, of course. I would have given him a handful of marks just then to find out what he knew about Plummer, because I was already pretty sure that there was a lot more to the man than the traveling medicine seller he claimed to be, but something in the captain’s face told me that asking any questions was a bad idea and getting any answers wasn’t going to happen any time this side of forever. So I laughed and said, “I noticed that.” We talked a little more, about nothing in particular, and then I went back on deck and got to talking with some of the other boatmen about nothing in general.

That was the day before the Jennel Mornay got to Proo. That was the name of the riverboat Plummer wanted to take, and in case this ever gets read by somebody from the Neeonjin country , I should probably say that Jennel Mornay was a famous soldier on the Presden’s side in the Third Civil War. He was a tough old cavalryman with mustaches out to here, who fought his way downriver from Rocalan to Sanloo in the face of everything the Western Allegiancy could throw at him, which was a lot, and when he was done the final battle at Memfis was pretty much a foregone conclusion. I got to know his face on the trip down the river, because they had a big painting of him in the main cabin.

Still, that’s getting ahead of my story a bit. That morning, the morning the Jennel Morney came, we said our goodbyes to the canalboat captain and went with Plummer to the Proo levee where the riverboats docked. It wasn’t quite solid people from the water right up to the warehouses, but that’s because there was plenty of cargo too. There were three big packet boats already sitting with their noses to the levee, roustabouts loading and unloading barrels and sacks and crates, and passengers getting on or off their boats. Everybody was talking or yelling, the crew chiefs were blowing on their whistles loud enough to make their brains spray out their ears, steam was hissing from the boats and you could just hear, under it all, the churn-churn-churn of the big stern wheels keeping the bows pressed tight up against the shore.

Plummer pointed and said something neither Berry nor I could hear, but we both figured out at the same time that “follow me” was part of it. That meant heading through the middle of it all and most of the way out the other side, to the end of the levee where the warehouses were small and rundown and the roustabouts, who were mostly just sitting around, looked like they’d had a lot of better days. Finally Plummer stopped and so did we; the noise was still loud enough that we could barely hear each other, so we stood there and waited for a while until finally Plummer pointed again.

That’s when I first saw the Jennel Mornay, and after looking at the packet boats, well, let’s just say it was a bit of a disappointment. The plan was the same—one paddlewheel astern, one smokestack around the middle, boxy pilothouse on top of boxy cabin deck on top of boxy freight deck—but it was half the size and twice the age, and showed it. I didn’t know yet that most of the river trade runs on smaller boats like the Jennel Morney, and they don’t make enough money for the white paint and the big crews and all, but if you grow up in the Tenisi hill country and the only riverboats you ever hear about are the big white-painted ones with the fancy carvings all along the roof, let’s just say that a boat like the Jennel Mornay is not going to impress you, and leave it at that.

Still, we shouldered our bags and got in line dutifully behind Plummer, I paid our fare—you can work for your fare aboard a canal boat, but riverboats burn peanut oil and that doesn’t come cheap—and we crossed the landing stage, which I found out a few days later is what they call the ramp that gets swung over from the bow for passengers to board. A rickety stair led up from the freight deck to the cabin deck, where the purser looked at our tickets and waved us over to a couple of cabins over on the port side. They were cramped little rooms and I wouldn’t call them clean, but Berry and I slept in much worse on the long road from Shanuga to Proo, so we didn’t complain. We got our bags stowed and locked the cabin door and went back out to see whatever there was to see.

There were twenty cabins and maybe fifty people to fill them, and at least as many more who couldn’t afford cabin fare and would be sleeping all anyhow down on the freight deck, in among the barrels and sacks and wooden crates the roustabouts were hauling on board to replace what other roustabouts were hauling off. From the walkway that went all around the cabin deck, I could see most of Proo, the little bustling town near the water and the ruins reaching far back into the farm country behind it. The pilothouse of the nearest of the big white packet boats, which went up almost twice as far above the water as the Jennel Mornay, seemed to be looking down with the kind of raised eyebrow look a Circle elder gives a ruinman who’s made the mistake of crossing her path. After a few more minutes, the packet boat let out a whistle, the paddlewheel at the stern slowed, stopped, and then started turning the other way, pulling her stern first out into the river. It was a gorgeous sight, everything a Tenisi farm boy could hope for in a riverboat; it’s just that this particular Tenisi farm boy was on the wrong boat.

Still, when the last of our cargo was on board and the Jennel Mornay’s whistle sounded, it was still a sight to watch as we pulled away from the levee, backed out into the river, turned and started downstream. Ugly little thing though it was, the Jennel Mornay handled well, and before long we were churning down the river at a fair pace.

Plummer came out onto the walkway about the time Proo got lost behind a bend of the landscape behind us. “A pleasant day,” he said, “made even more pleasant by the number of kloms I would otherwise have had to walk. I hope the two of you find the boat agreeable?”

I wasn’t going to tell him that it looked like it got put together out of what was left over when the other boatbuilders had taken their pick. Still, he must have seen it in my face, and laughed his dry little laugh.

“There are advantages,” he said, “to a riverboat that doesn’t attract rich passengers. Even so, I trust that neither of you play cards or dice.”

“Not usually.”

“I recommend avoiding it altogether here. I’ve heard that someone once brought honest dice on board a Misipi riverboat, and the Misipi itself rose up and refused to let the boat pass until they were thrown overboard and replaced by the usual kind.”

A man standing against the rail near us heard this, and burst out laughing. “Good,” he said. “That’s good.” Then, turning: “Well, Mam Gaia’s bright green underthings! Plummer. Good to see you again.”

Plummer beamed. “Likewise. This,” he said to Berry and me, “is Slane, an old friend of mine. Slane, Trey and Berry are more recent friends. You’re headed to Memfis, I would guess.”

“Or wherever.” He looked me up and down, glanced at Berry, blinked, and looked again. “You?”

“I have business in Sanloo,” said Plummer. “These two? Memfis and points west.”

By then I’d taken as good a look at Slane as he’d taken at me. He had the sort of clothes that seem expensive but aren’t, and the sort of look that seems casual but isn’t; if he had dice in his pocket, and I guessed he did, the river probably wouldn’t rise up and stop the Jennel Mornay.

“Fair enough.” To Berry and me: “You two been to Memfis?”

“Not yet,” I told him.

He seemed to think that that was funny, and cuffed me on the shoulder. “Good. That’s good. You’ve heard of Dell, haven’t you? Memfis is Dell’s home town. Fact is, he’s a good friend of mine.” He laughed again. “You’re from, where, Joja or east Tenisi?”

“Shanuga,” I said, impressed despite myself.

“I rarely miss a voice. Well, Trey from Shanuga, the Misipi Valley’s a different world, and Memfis makes the rest of the Misipi Valley look like the Tenisi hills. It’s an easy place to get into trouble. Still, don’t you worry; you’re a friend of Plummer’s, you’re a friend of mine—and Dell’s.” Another laugh, and right then the whistle sounded up above the pilothouse—we were coming up on some little town, I forget the name of it, where the Jennel Mornay had a stop to make—and his laugh got caught up in the screech of the whistle and spread from one bank of the river to the other.