"I don't even require one," Silk assured him. "It was an idle and ill-advised question, one that I should never have asked."
"To start with, you're right. Just about all the basic hardware's the same, but the software's different. There's a lot that a corporal has to know that a major doesn't need, and probably the other way 'round, too. You ever notice the way I talk? I don't sound exactly like you do, do I? But we're both of us speaking the same shaggy language, begging your pardon, Patera."
Silk said carefully, "I haven't noticed your diction as being in any way odd or unusual, but now that you've called my attention to it, you're undoubtedly correct."
"See? You talk kind of like an officer, and they don't talk as good as privates and corporals do, or even as good as sergeants. They use a lot more words, and longer words, and nothing's ever said as clear as a corporal would say it. Why is that? All right, next time there's a war, Sand and me are going to be doing this and that with Guards, privates, corporals, and sergeants, won't we? Maybe showing them where we want their buzz guns set up and things like that. So we got to talk like they do, so they'll understand and so we'll both be fighting the enemy and not each other. For the major, it's the same thing with officers, so he has to talk like them. And he does. You ever tried to talk like I do, Patera?"
Silk nodded, shamefaced. "It was a lamentable failure, I'm afraid."
"Right. Well, the major can't talk like me either, and I can't talk like him. For either of us to do it, we'd have to have software for both speech patterns. Trouble is, our heads won't hold all the crap that's floating around, see? We only got so much room up there, just like you do, so we can't spare the extra space. Out where the iron flies, that means the major wouldn't make as good a corporal as me, and I wouldn't make as good a major as him."
Silk nodded. "Thank you. I feel better now about the way I speak."
"Why's that?"
"It's troubled me up until now that the people of our quarter don't speak as I do, and that I can't speak as they do. After hearing you, I realize that all is as it should be. They live-if I may put it so-where the iron flies. They cannot afford to waste a moment, and though they need not deal with the complexities of abstract thought, they dare not be misunderstood. I, however, am their legate- their envoy to the wealthier levels of our society, where lives are more leisured, but where the need to deal with complexities and abstractions is far more frequent and the penalties for being misunderstood are not nearly so great. Thus I speak as I must if I' am to serve the people that I represent."
Hammerstone nodded. "I think I get you. Patera. And I think you get me. All right, there's other stuff, too, like A.I. You know about that? What it means?"
"I'm afraid I've never heard the term." Silk had been slapping Crane's wrapping against one of the rack's upright members. He put his foot on the transverse beam again and rewound the wrapping.
"It's just fancy talk for learning stuff. Everything I do, I learn a little better from doing it. Suppose I take a shot at one of those gods. If I miss it, I learn something from missing. If I hit it, I learn from that, too. So my shooting gets better all the time, and I don't waste shells firing at stuff I'm not going to hit except from dumb luck. You do the same thing."
"Of course."
"Nope! That's where you're wrong, Patera." Hammerstone waggled his big steel forefinger in Silk's face. "There's a lot that don't. Take a floater. It knows about not going too fast south, but it never does learn what it can float over and what it can't. The driver's got to learn about that for it. Or take a cat now. You ever try to teach a cat anything?"
"No," Silk admitted. "However I have-I ought to say I had-a bird that certainly appeared to learn. He learned my name and his own, for example."
"I'm talking cats particularly. Back in the second year against Urbs, I found this kitty in a knocked-out farmhouse, and I kept her awhile just so's to have something to talk to and scrounge for. It was kind of nice, sometimes."
"I know precisely what you mean, my son."
"Well, we had a big toss gun sighted in up on a hilltop that summer, and when the battle got going we were firing it as fast as you ever seen anything like that done in your life, and the lieutenant hollering all the time for us to go faster. A couple times we had eight or nine rounds in the air at once. You ever man a toss gun, Patera?"
Silk shook his head.
"All right, suppose you just go up to one and open up the breech, cold, and shove a H.E. round in there, and shoot it off. Then you open the breech again and out comes the casing, see? And it'll be pretty hot."
"I should imagine."
"But, when you're keeping six, seven, eight rounds in the air all at once, that breech'll get so hot itself that it'll practically cook off a fresh round before you can pull the lanyard. And when that casing pops out, well, you could see it in the dark.
"So we're shooting and shooting and shooting, and hiking up more ammo and tossing it around and shooting some more till we were about ready to light up ourselves, and we got a pile of empty casings about so high off to the side, and here comes that poor little kitty and decides to sit down someplace where she can watch us, and she picks out that pile of casings and jumps right up. Naturally the ones at the top of the pile was hot enough to solder with."
Silk nodded sympathetically.
"She gives a whoop and off she scoots, and I didn't see her again for two-three days."
"She did return, though?" Silk felt somewhat heartened by the implication that Oreb might return as well.
"She did, but she wouldn't get anywheres near to one of those casings after that. I could show it to her, and maybe push a paw or her nose up against it to prove it was stone-cold, and it wouldn't make one m.o.a.'s difference. She'd learned those casings were hot, see. Patera? After that, she couldn't, ever learn that one wasn't, no matter how plain I showed it. She didn't have A.I., and there's people that's the same way, too, plenty of them."
Silk nodded again. "A theodidact once wrote that the wise learn from the experiences of others. Fools, he said, could learn only from experiences of their own, while the great mass of men never learn at all. By which I imagine that he meant that the great mass had no A.I."
"You're right on target, Patera. But if you've got it, then the more experience somebody's got, the higher up you want him. So Sand's a sergeant, I'm a corporal, and Schist is a private. You said you had a couple questions. What's the other one?"
"Since we have a walk ahead of us, perhaps we'd better begin it now," Silk suggested; and they set off together, walking side-by-side down the wide aisle between the wall and the rearmost row of racks. "I wanted to ask you about Pas's provision to keep the cities independent. When you described it to me, it seemed eminently sound; I felt sure that it would function precisely as Pas intended."
"It has," Hammerstone confirmed. "I said I thought it was pretty smart, and I still do."
"But afterward, we spoke of a soldier such as yourself engaging three bios with slug guns like his own, and about the Civil Guard, and so forth. And it struck me that the arrangement you'd described, admirable as it may once have been, can hardly prevail now. If Wick has three thousand five hundred soldiers and our own city seven thousand, our city is twice as strong only if soldiers are the only men of value in war. If Guardsmen to the number of ten or twenty thousand are to fight as well-to say nothing of hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens-then may Wick not be as strong, overall, as Viron? Or stronger? What becomes of Pas's arrangement under such circumstances as these?"
Hammerstone nodded. "That's something that's worrying everybody quite a bit. The way I see it, Pas was thinking mostly about the first two hundred years. Maybe the first two hundred and fifty. I think maybe he figured after that we'd have learned to live with each other or kill each other off, which isn't so dumb either. See, Patera, there weren't anywheres near so many bios at first, and they weren't big on making stuff. The cities were all there when they come, paved streets and shiprock buildings, mostly. Growing food was the big thing. So when they made stuff, it was mostly tools and clothes, and mud bricks so they could put up more buildings where Pas hadn't put any but they felt like they needed some.