"Where I come from, there is a yearly set of prizes given to those who are judged to have made the greatest contributions to an understanding of the world around us, and the greatest contributions to literature, medicine, and peace. To win one of these is a greater honor than to, say, be the chief administrator of the United Nations. It also pays well. With training, I think Piotr could win the prize in mathematics."
"Yours must be a wondrous land."
"There is much good about it, but also much bad. This land has much to be said for it."
"Yet you came here."
"It wasn"t exactly voluntary. Still, I can"t say that I regret it. I think I"ve found a home here."
"A home with Krystyana?"
"No. Please understand that I like Krystyana. She"s a fine girl, an intelligent girl and competent at whatever she sets her mind to. And-I hope you aren"t offended by my saying this-she"s a wonderful bed partner. But, dammit, she"s fifteen and I"m thirty-one! I"ve had seventeen years of formal schooling and she"s had about three months! There"s too big a gap between us to consider marriage. Marriage should be a thing between equals. Krystyana and Piotr and I would all be better off if they would get together."
"Do they know your feelings about this?"
"I think so. I"ve tried to be obvious about it."
"But you haven"t actually talked with them about it," she said.
"No, I guess I haven"t. Sometimes it"s hard..."
"Would you object if I talked to them?"
"Object? I"d be forever grateful!"
"Then I will see what I can do."
She tried, but nothing came of it.
The next day we were back in Three Walls, and the day after was a normal working day. The country folk knocked off work for two weeks around Christmas, but the people at Three Walls had mostly been recruited from a city. City folk worked whenever work was available, and there was plenty for us to do.
Winter is the best time of the year for logging, the wood is drier and the logs are easier to move around on the snow. Also, the tops of the fir trees were about the only fodder the outdoor animals were going to get.
Besides the six dozen bucks left over from the fall"s hunt, we had a thousand sheep in the valley. All of them ewes.
I got a lot of ribbing about that, the gist of which was that I didn"t know that rams were needed to make little sheep, but I didn"t care. I happened to remember that sheep have a five-month gestation period. Any ewe you buy in December is pregnant if she"s going to be. And sheep are s.e.xually mature in six months.
Next year we"d have plenty of rams. I think.
Well, I had one ram in another, much smaller herd. If he fell over dead from exhaustion next breeding season, I"d have to buy some more in a hurry.
We kept the sawmill going all winter, with sixty women walking back and forth on that huge teeter-totter.
The main wooden buildings were up, but we needed lumber for furnis.h.i.+ngs.. s.h.i.+pping containers, barrels, and so on.
Some construction went on as well. The c.o.ke ovens were drylaid sandstone, so there wasn"t any worry about mortar freezing. But putting in foundations was difficult.
The big problem was the lack of decent artificial light. By Christmas, we were down to about six hours of daylight. Most Americans don"t realize just how far north Europe is. Southern Poland is farther north than Lake Superior, and our seacoast is farther north than the sh.o.r.es of Hudson Bay. A high lat.i.tude means a large yearly variation in the length of the day.
Mining went on continuously, of course: it was always dark down there. It was also fairly warm in the mine, and coal mining came to be the job everybody was trying to get. I hoped that Count Lambert wouldn"t hear about it.
But even when the weather was good, which wasn"t all that often, we were lucky to spend seven hours a day working.
Well, if you can"t spend, invest!
I set up a school for the adults. A school for the children was already being taught by two of Lady Richeza"s women, so once the children"s school was out, the adults took over. Most of my people couldn"t read, write, or do simple arithmetic.
By spring they could. That"s not quite the accomplishment that it sounds, because Polish is an easier language to learn than English. Polish is absolutely phonetic in its spelling, rather than nearly random as English is. Every letter has a distinct sound, and there are no silent letters. You spell it exactly as you speak it. Learning to spell in English gave me nightmares.
Many Americans who write use spellchecking programs in their personal computers, since the English- speaking peoples can rarely spell their own language. When I got back to Poland after my college days, none of my Polish friends would believe me when I told them this. They thought that I was telling an ethnic joke!
But we had enough people around who could teach arithmetic and reading. Aside from monitoring things, teaching a course in first aid, and tutoring Piotr in math, I had a fair amount of time to myself, which was wonderful.
I could close the door of my new office, sit down on my new armchair, put my feet up on my nice new desk and do some serious thinking. Mostly about standards. The weights and measures of the Middle Ages were a vast agglomeration of random events. Length was measured in feet, yards, cubits, spans, hands, fingers, miles, and days. Not only was there no agreed-on relations.h.i.+p between those units, but the size of the unit varied from place to place. A Cieszyn yard was not equal to a Cracow yard which was not equal to a Wroclaw yard.
It even varied from commodity to commodity. Fine velvets, for example, were sold by the Troy yard, which was shorter than all of the above. And these weren"t minor differences of a few percent. The Wroclaw yard was half again longer than the Cracow yard.
Weights were in even worse shape. Cheese, wheat, and oats were all sold by the quarter, for example. A quarter of what, you ask? Why a quarter of cheese, wheat, or oats! There was no "whole" or "half." But a quarter of wheat was more than five times larger than a quarter of cheese, which was maybe a hundred kilos. And a quarter of oats was bigger than both of the others put together. And of course a quarter in one city was not equal to a quarter anyplace else.
Well, a pint of milk weighed a pound, but milk is the stupidest standard possible. The specific gravity of milk varies by at least five percent, with the richest milk being the lightest. It spoils quickly, so there is no possibility of having a standard jar of milk somewhere. Yet this didn"t seem to bother anybody but me. Of course, if a merchant sold short weight, he might get hung, but you never got any complaints out of him after that.
The Church had been working on calendar reform for a century, and things in Poland were not really absurd. At least we all agreed on which day was Sunday and what year it was. From what a merchant friend, Boris Novacek, tells me, in Italy it is possible to leave Venice in 1232, get to Florence in 1233, then go to Milan in 123 1.
Some people started the new year on Christmas, some a week later, and some on March first. For them, December really was the tenth month.
Well, we had a standard yard. Given my own choice, I would have preferred to use a meter, but my liege lord had specifically ordered me to use his yard, the distance from his fingertip to his turned-away nose.
This was shorter than a meter and slightly longer than the American yard.
And we had a base-twelve numbering system. This was something that was sort of done to me at first, but I soon saw the advantages of the duodecimal system. Since twelve has more factors than ten, you run into infinitely repeating decimals less often. It often takes fewer digits to express large numbers and math just becomes easier to do.
Since last winter, I had been carefully copying down every constant I could remember, and already I had several pages of them. The distance from the Earth to the Moon and to the Sun. The specific gravity of aluminum and how many centimeters to the American yard and all sorts of things. An engineer needs thousands of numbers, and much of what I did not remember, I could interpolate.
Playing with numbers and all the constants, I was delighted to discover that a thousand (that is to say, 1728 in base ten) of our yards was almost exactly equal to an American mile! The American mile is almost equal to the old Roman mile, which was still somewhat in use.
So, a dozen yards was a dozyard. Twelve dozyards was a twelmile and twelve of these was a mile.
Going down, one twelfth of a yard was a twelyard. Divide that by twelve and you had a dozmil, and a mil was about half a millimeter.
Another nice accident that happened was that a cubic yard of cold water weighed slightly under an American ton, and a thousandth of that, or one cubic twelyard, weighed just over an American pound. This gave us a standard of weight and volume. We had a ton, a pound, and a pint, which was the volume of a pound of cold water.
In a few days, I came up with a complete set of weights and measures, all based either on our yard, or in the case of my electrical standards, on Avogadro"s number. Our amp was actually related to the number of electrons flowing.
The medieval day was divided into twelve hours, as was the night. But the day was measured from sunrise to sunset. This meant that an hour on Midsummer"s day was three times longer than an hour on Christmas day. This made paying people by the hour a little silly. In fact, most men were hired by the day, and were paid half as much in the winter as they were in the summer.
We obviously needed a clock, but when I set out to build one, I was annoyed to discover that I couldn"t remember how an escapement worked.
A grandfather clock has a weight which drives a series of gears that turn the hands. The speed of this turning is controlled, slowed down, by a pendulum. The escapement connects the pendulum to the gear train. It must also impart a little energy to the pendulum to make up for friction losses. I couldn"t sketch one that I could convince myself would work.
I was hard to live with for three days and then designed a new one. On the fast end of the gear train, I put a large drum with a zigzag groove running around it. A small wheel attached to the pendulum ran back and forth in the groove.
The gears facing the way they have to, this meant that our pendulum didn"t swing from side to side. It swung forward and back. Also, it didn"t go tic-toc-tic. It went fump-fump-fump. But n.o.body here had ever seen a grandfather clock, so I didn"t hear any Polak jokes.
I also came up with a new system of time. Staying with the base-twelve standard, we had a twelve-hour day, rather than the usual twenty-four hour day. The clock was reset occasionally so that zero happened at dawn. This was at the nine o"clock position of a modem clock. At the equinoxes, three was at noon, with the fat hand pointing up, and six was at sunset. Midnight was nine, with the fat hand pointing down.
There were four hands on the face, each moving twelve times faster than the one before. After the fat hand, which showed hours, there was a longer arrow for dozminutes, a wiggly hand that showed minutes, and a thin straight hand for twelminutes. Or, you could say that the fat hand went around once a day and the skinny hand went around once a minute. Just remember that our hour was a hundred-twenty modem minutes long, and our minute was as long as fifty modem seconds.
When I got it built, using parts I had made at the bra.s.s works, I a.s.sembled them in the coffin the carpenters had made for me. I hadn"t bothered trying to make anything small, and that coffin was a nice piece of furniture, even though I got sick of looking at it in my bedroom. I had a built in closet and a chest of drawers, anyway.
It took about a week of TLC ("Tender, Loving Care" in the colorful slang of American engineers) to get it working reasonably well, and it never was accurate to more than one percent, but it was good enough. It had to be oiled daily (goose grease seemed to work best) and the weight raised just as often, but what the heck.
I set the clock up by the south wall of the dining room, so the fat hand, which had a little sun on it, moved about with the position of the sun. People seemed to have very little difficulty reading it, or picking up the concept of standard time. I simply said that we would start work when the fat hand was here, eat dinner when it was there, and stop work when it was over there. Krystyana made sure that the kitchen staff served our meals according to the clock, and that was that. There are advantages to being a medieval lord. No committees!
Our system of measuring angles naturally followed from this clock. Imagining a horizontal line drawn through the axle of the hands, you called out an angle as though it was a time of day as shown by the fat hand. A three o"clock angle was a right angle, and all angles were measured clockwise rather than counterclockwise, as is the modem way of doing it.
I also designed a calendar, with four thirteen-week quarters and no months at all. New Year"s Day happened on the winter solstice, and wasn"t a day of the week. That is to say, it went Sat.u.r.day, New Year"s Day, Sunday. On leap years, there were two New Year"s Days. This meant that the calendar for every year was the same, and should reduce confusion considerably. But I tabled it because I decided that I couldn"t get away with it.
I could get away with designing a system of weights and measures because there were so many of them that one more didn"t make much difference. I could design a new clock because n.o.body had ever seen a clock before, not in Poland, anyway. But the Church had spent centuries fumbling with the calendar and it would take someone with a lot more weight than I had to push a new system through. Maybe once I beat the Mongols.
Toward the end of January, I made my monthly visit to Okoitz. It was part of my contract with Count Lambert.
I got there early in the morning, since my mount, Anna, can travel farther in half an hour than a peasant family can walk in two days.
There was a commotion in the bailey when I got there, and Count Lambert waved me over to one of the peasant"s rooms on the outer wall. "Some trouble here, Sir Conrad. Perhaps you should look at it."
An entire family was lying in the bailey on the usual straw mattresses. They were all dead, with not a mark on them. A man, his wife, and four children lay peacefully as if asleep, their bodies cold and stiff. A fire had burned itself out, but these huts had straw roofs and the walls weren"t all that well-sealed. I didn"t see how it would be possible to asphyxiate in there. It hadn"t been particularly cold, so I doubt they had all frozen to death.
Food poisoning? I"d seen a woman get ptomaine once, and there had been nothing peaceful about it. There had been vomit all over the place!
Some disease? That had to be it, but I"d never heard of a disease where the person didn"t even know he was dying. I came out and said, "I"m mystified, my lord. All I can imagine is some disease. Once these people are taken care of, have sulfur burned in there. b.u.m all their food stores, on the off chance that they somehow poisoned themselves. In fact, I"d suggest that you have all their belongings burned."
"And fire up your sauna. After they"re buried, and get that done today, everyone who has touched the bodies should clean themselves thoroughly. But all that is simply a precaution. I really don"t know what killed them." Since I had touched the corpses, I stooped and washed my hands with snow.
"It shall be as you say, Sir Conrad." Count Lambert nodded to one of his men, who went off to make arrangements. "There has been a lot of talk about witchcraft lately. Do you think ... ?"
"No, my lord, I don"t. Any so-called "witches" around are just a bunch of crazy old ladies. If they would eat properly, most of them wouldn"t be senile."
"But everyone knows about witches!"
"Tell me, my lord, why is it that every witch you hear about is a poor miserable old hag? If they really had magical powers, wouldn"t they make themselves into beautiful wealthy young women?"
"You have a point there. I"ll keep an eye out for beautiful young grandmothers who are rich."
"Do that, my lord. Who were these people?"
"You don"t recognize them? That"s Janina"s family."
Janina was one of the girls that I took with me to Three Walls from Okoitz. She was running the store there and was a close friend.
"My G.o.d. It"ll be rough telling her. Her whole family."
"Not quite. Her little sister-Kotcha, I think she"s called-had supper and spent the night with one of the other families. The poor child is in a very bad state."
I remembered the kid now. Last winter she had become a good friend of Anna"s, and together they had hauled logs in the snow. "Perhaps she should come back with me to Three Walls, my lord. She could live with Janina."
"A good thought. We will ask the child about it after the funeral."
I never did find out what killed those people.
Interlude One I hit the STOP b.u.t.ton.
"So what killed them, Tom?"
"I don"t know. I can check it out if you wish."
He turned on a keyboard and began typing.
"With all our technology, why hasn"t somebody developed some decent artificial-intelligence programs? It can"t be all that difficult. Then you wouldn"t have to use that silly keyboard," I said.
"Such programs have been developed. I"ve just forbidden their use. Machine intelligence is dehumanizing to the people that use it. I like people and I want to live in a human world."
"Aren"t you exaggerating a bit?"
"I don"t think so. The ballet they put on last night. Did you enjoy it?"
"Sure. It was great. What does that have to do with computers?"
"Everything. That whole show could have been simulated by a computer and displayed in one of our tanks to a degree of accuracy such that you couldn"t tell if it was real or not. Would it have been the same?"
"Hmm ... No, somehow I don"t think so, but I"m not sure why."
"Well I am. What makes ballet or any other art form worthwhile is the fact that it is done by people. When you watched the dancers, you were putting yourself in their place, imagining what they were thinking and feeling. A recording or transmission of that performance would not have been as good, because you would have been farther removed from the people doing it. A mere computer display of the same show would have been absolutely worthless."
"But if you didn"t know-"
"Maybe you could have been fooled. But you would have been angry when you found out. Back to that dead family. It was an onion mold got them. Toxin 8771 from mold 15395, extinct in 1462. The really deadly ones don"t last very long. Killing your host, or the people who cultivate your host, is bad ecology and not good for your own survival."
He hit the START b.u.t.ton.
Chapter Three.
My monthly two-day visits to Okoitz were used to supervise the construction there, but just then there wasn"t much to do. The cloth factory was shut down until spring. Without gla.s.s or a decent light, the only way you could work indoors was next to an open window, a little rough in this weather. At that, you could only get in six hours a day in good weather.