Ridenour and his colleagues were held to the Temple of Sky, where talk went on endlessly with the powers that were in the Davidstar. The xenologist groaned when his unoccupied followers were invited on a set of tours. “If you were trained, my God, what you could learn!—Well, we simply haven’t got any more professionals to use here, so you amateurs go ahead, and if you don’t observe in detail I’ll personally operate on you with a butter knife.”
Thus Flandry and one or another companion were often out for hours on end. Since none of them understood the native language or Eriau, their usual guide was Isinglass, who had some command of Kursovikian and had also been taught by the Merseians to operate a portable vocalizer. (The land tongue had been gotten gradually from prisoners. Flandry admired the ingenuity of the methods by which their technologically backward captors had kept them alive for weeks, but otherwise he shuddered and hoped with all his heart that the age-old strife could indeed be ended.) Others whom he got to know included Finbright, Byway, Zoomboy, and the weise Frau Allhealer. They had total individuality, you could no more characterize one of them in a sentence than you could a human.
“We are glad you make this overture,” Isinglass said on first acquaintance. “So glad that, despite their helpfulness to us, we told the Merseians to keep away while you are here.”
“I have suspected we and the landfolk were made pieces in a larger game,” added Allhealer through him. “Fortunate that you wish to resign from it.”
Flandry’s cheeks burned inside his helmet. He knew too well how little altruism was involved. Scuttlebutt claimed Enriques had openly protested Hauksberg’s proposal, and yielded only when the viscount threatened to get him reassigned to Pluto. Abrams approved because any chance at new facts was good, but he was not sanguine.
Nor was Byway. “Peace with the Hunters is a contradiction in terms. Shall the gilltooth swim beside the tail-on-head? And as long as the green strangers offer us assistance, we must take it. Such is our duty to the cities and our dependents.”
“Yet evidently, while they support us, their adversaries are bound to support the Hunters,” Finbright said. “Best might be that both sets of foreigners withdrew and let the ancient balance return.”
“I know not,” Byway argued. “Could we win a final victory—”
“Be not so tempted by that as to overlook the risk of a final defeat,” Allhealer warned.
“To the Deeps with your bone-picking!” Zoomboy exclaimed. “We’ll be late for the theater.” He shot off in an exuberant curve.
Flandry did not follow the drama which was enacted in a faerie coraloid grotto. He gathered it was a recently composed tragedy in the classic mode. But the eldritch grace of movement, the solemn music of voices, strings, percussion, the utter balance of every element, touched his roots. And the audience reacted with cries, surges back and forth, at last a dance in honor of author and cast.
To him, the sculptures and oil paintings he was shown were abstract; but as such they were more pleasing than anything Terra had produced for centuries. He looked at fishskin scrolls covered with writing in grease-based ink and did not comprehend. Yet they were so many that they must hold a deal of accumulated wisdom.
Then he got off into mathematics and science, and went nearly delirious. He was still so close to the days when such things had been unfolded for him like a flower that he could appreciate what had been done here.
For the People (he didn’t like using the Kursovikian name “Siravo” in their own home, and could certainly never again call them Seatrolls) lived in a different conceptual universe from his. And though they were handicapped—fireless save for volcanic outlets where glass was made as a precious material, metalless, unable to develop more than a rudimentary astronomy, the laws of motion and gravity and light propagation obscured for them by the surrounding water—they had thought their way through to ideas which not only made sense but which drove directly toward insights man had not had before Planck and Einstein.
To them, vision was not the dominant sense that it was for him. No eyes could look far undersea. Hence they were nearsighted by his standards, and the optical centers of their brains appeared to have slightly lower information-processing capability. On the other hand, their perception of tactile, thermal, kinesthetic, olfactory, and less familiar nuances was unbelievably delicate. The upper air was hostile to them; like humans vis-à-vis water, they could control but not kill an instinctive dread.
So they experienced space as relation rather than extension. For them, as a fact of daily life, it was unbounded but finite. Expeditions which circumnavigated the globe had simply given more weight and subtlety to that apprehension.
Reflecting this primitive awareness, undersea mathematics rejected infinity. A philosopher with whom Flandry talked via Isinglass asserted that it was empirically meaningless to speak of a number above factorial N, where N was 75 the total of distinguishable particles in the universe. What could a larger number count? Likewise, he recognized zero as useful notion, corresponding to the null class, but not as a number. The least possible amount must be the inverse of the greatest. You could count from there, on to NI, but if you proceeded beyond, you would get decreasing quantities. The number axis was not linear but circular.
Flandry wasn’t mathematician enough to decide if the system was entirely self-consistent. As far as he could tell, it was. It even went on to curious versions of negatives, irrationals, imaginaries, approximational calculus, differential geometry, theory of equations, and much else of whose Terran equivalents he was ignorant.
Physical theory fitted in. Space was regarded as quantized. Discontinuities between kinds of space were accepted. That might only be an elaboration of the everyday—the sharp distinction between water, solid ground, and air—but the idea of layered space accounted well for experimental data and closely paralleled the relativistic concept of a metric varying from point to point, as well as the wave-mechanical basis of atomistics and the hyperdrive.
Nor could time, in the thought of the People, be infinite. Tides, seasons, the rhythm of life all suggested a universe which would eventually return to its initial state and resume a cycle which it would be semantically empty to call endless. But having no means of measuring time with any precision, the philosophers had concluded that it was essentially immeasurable. They denied simultaneity; how could you say a distant event happened simultaneously with a near one, when news of the former must be brought by a swimmer whose average speed was unpredictable? Again the likeness to relativity was startling.
Biology was well developed in every macroscopic facet, including genetic laws. Physics proper, as opposed to its conceptual framework, was still early Newtonian, and chemistry little more than an embryo. But Judas on Jupiter, Flandry thought, give these fellows some equipment tailored for underwater use and watch them lift!
“Come along,” Zoomboy said impatiently. “Wiggle a flipper. We’re off to Reefcastle.”
En route, Flandry did his unskilled best to get an outline of social structure. The fundamental Weltanschauung eluded him. You could say the People of the Davidstar were partly Apollonian and partly Dionysian, but those were mere metaphors which anthropology had long discarded and were worse than useless in dealing with nonhumans. Politics (if that word was applicable) looked simpler. Being more gregarious and ceremony-minded than most humans, and less impulsive, and finding travel easier than land animals do, the sea dwellers on Starkad tended to form large nations without strong rivalries.