The Far Side (43 page)

“Things are better now,” Kris told her friend.

“I wonder.  Chaba is obviously more comfortable having someone looking after her than she is being independent.  How many hundreds of years can you live like that and not have it affect your psyche?  Did we really do ourselves the favor we thought we did when we ‘liberated’ women?”

“I think so,” Kris replied positively.  “I know my mother thinks so.”

“Yeah.  But happiness is a warm blanket, too.  I’m not exactly ancient at the moment, but I have noticed one or two things in my life -- like different strokes for different folks.”

“That’s true.”

“All my life, I’ve thought most of my peers were brain-dead stupid, stuck in low gear without a hope of ever making an impact on the world.  Me?  I wanted to rock the house!  I wanted everyone in the world to know my name.

“And now three people who I had no grief with are dead at my side -- and there’s something like twenty Tengri that we killed.  I tell you Kris, in just a matter of a few hours, I have become the world’s biggest fan of laissez-faire and ‘whatever floats your boat.’”

“Andie, we didn’t go for them.  They came after us.”

She looked at Kris, her head cocked to one side.  “Kris, do you know what the corollary to my idea of laissez-faire is?”

“No,” Kris said wearily, “but I’m sure you’ll educate me.”

“Yeah.  It’s ‘I ain’t going to mess with you if you don’t mess with me.  Fuck with me and I surely will fuck you!’”  She smiled like a hungry tiger.  “Laissez-faire with teeth.”

Kris shook her head, not sure what to make of it.

Ezra and Melek came over to them and sat down.  “Melek wants a quick idea of how a ship can sail against the wind.”

Andie grimaced.  “That is so hard to do unless you can see it.  It isn’t intuitive at all -- which was why it took so long to figure out, even if once they did, they made many quick improvements.  How far are you going to get trying to describe resistance, momentum, vector math, and all of that?”

“You can’t tell it simple?  I’ve just heard it’s possible -- I never knew how it worked.”

“A boat travels through the water -- it has momentum, do you understand?”

“Sure.”

“Wind pushes it, right?”

“Sure, it just doesn’t make sense how you can go upwind.”

“You cheat.  A sailboat has a keel, usually -- a big fin that sticks down into the water, adding resistance when the boat is traveling in line with the keel and a lot of resistance if it’s not moving straight ahead.  I might also add, some boats don’t have so much deep keels as heavy ones, using the boat’s volume to provide the necessary resistance.

“Think of a watermelon seed you squeeze between your fingers.  You push down with each finger, and the seed zips off in another direction entirely, controlled by friction and limited in what direction it can go.  But, in spite of the fact that you’re pushing down, because of the shape of the seed, there’s a lateral component in which way it goes.  Since it can only go one way, that’s where it goes.

“A sailboat ‘squirts’ through the water the same way.  The wind and the sail meet at an angle, the ship is sailing at an angle to the wind, and it is passing through the water in another direction -- the sum of the vectors.  Do you understand?”

“Yeah, vectors are used a lot in artillery computations.  Christ!  Explaining it to someone like Melek and Collum!  Jesus!”

“Like I said, it’s a lot easier to show someone.  Once you get the hang of how it works, it becomes almost instinctive for most people.  Some people are naturals as well, and they can really make a boat hum.”

“So, why can’t it be scaled up?”

“You ever see a picture of a schooner or frigate under sail?”

“Sure.”

“There are a zillion sails, and more important than that, ten zillion ropes to move the sails around.  A little sailboat has one sail, a couple of ropes, and it’s brain-dead simple.  A big sailing ship?  I don’t have a clue how to design sails for one.”

“They already have ships with sails, although mostly they just have one mast.”

“Yeah, the single mast thing went out the window the first day someone figured out how to go upwind.  You’re not sailing straight downwind -- thus you spread more sails, you catch more wind, because the ship is at an angle to the wind.  I kid you not, Ezra -- this is as tough as rocket science.”

“There isn’t anyway you can keep it simple?” he pleaded with her.

“I can do a connect-the-dots version -- a cookbook solution.  It won’t be elegant, it won’t do much more than show them it can be done.  Beyond that, they are going to need some decent seamen to make it work.”

“Please, do that.  I’ll explain as best as I can.”

Andie handed Ezra one of the tablets of paper.  “If he knows what one of their ships looks like, the smaller the better, he should draw it.”

That took about twenty minutes, with Melek talking to one of the privates from his squad from the observation post named Zerga.  The man had a little trouble understanding the idea of drawing a ship, and he had no idea why he should do it.  Kris wasn’t sure what Melek told him, but there was no doubt that after that, Zerga bent to his task with a will.

When he was finished, Andie flipped the page and then quickly made a half-assed copy of the original drawing, although without the sail.

She sketched a boom with a triangular sail, showing how to hook it to the mast.  Then she drew a rounded fin, “Wood,” she told Melek.  “Heavy wood.  Very thick, heavy.”

He nodded that he understood, and she showed the keel fin attached under the ship.  “Get ship moving, downwind, okay.”

“Okay.”

“Change ship course, a little into wind.  Change sail so not directly in the wind.  Pretty soon, good sailor figure out how to go against the wind.”  She grinned at Ezra and added in English, “Triangular sails create their own wind... it’s not something you can easily do on a large ship, but on a small boat, it’s something to see.  The wind blows at five miles an hour, and you zip along at seven.  Scary as shit, I imagine, if you don’t understand.”

“What do you mean, it creates its own wind?”

“It makes an airfoil, like a wing.  You get a pressure difference between one side of the sail and the other.  The air along the back side of the sail has a shorter path and goes faster.  On the other side, the air has a longer path and goes slower -- this creates suction -- lift in an airplane.

“Like I said, none of this is intuitive.  You need a lot of math.”  She frowned.  “Speaking of math -- do they understand addition and subtraction?  Multiplication or division?”

“I’ve never asked,” Ezra said.  “I learned to count,” he paused.  “I’ll bet they don’t have zero -- he always starts counting at one.”

“And you routinely count, zero, one, two, three right?” Andie said sarcastically.

“Ah, no, now that you mention it, I don’t.  Let me see.”

There followed a discussion that Kris could at least understand for a change.  No, they didn’t do much in the line of addition and subtraction.  Multiplication was a matter of adding up a number over and over, and usually involved “counting beads.”  Belts that some people carried, with small copper beads -- they had been, Melek explained, where the copper had come from for the arrow caps.

It worked a lot like a simple abacus and was of only passing interest to Andie.  “Let’s see what their numbers look like,” she asked Ezra, who had Melek write them down.

At least Andie had learned not to turn up her nose when they were just a little primitive.  “Yeah, like the Romans, even down to some of the same short cuts.  Different symbols, but conceptually the same.

“So, Ezra, do we reform their numbering system as well?  Throw in zero?”

“In for a penny, in for a pound,” he quipped.  “We might as well.”

It turned out to be a lot harder to do than to get them to accept crossbows.  Sure, Andie’s numbers were simpler than theirs, and yes, it was easier to deal with.  It wasn’t until she was showing how to add a column of numbers together that Collum perked up.  He’d been watching for some time, saying nothing.  Now he was excited.

His words tumbled out enthusiastically, and Melek laughed and explained more simply to Kris, Andie, and Ezra.  The King, according to Collum, had to employ a lot of men who kept track of numbers so that he knew what was going on in the kingdom.  The King frequently complained that the number men were almost more trouble than they were worth.  They were always arguing about some of the numbers, occasionally coming to blows.  They ate well, they lived well, all on the King’s dime... and their numbers seemed to grow every year.  If nothing else, Collum told Andie that this would mean a lot of the “number men” could go find something useful to do -- and that would make the King a very happy man indeed.

Finally the sun was truly down, and everyone turned in with just the usual guards walking around the camp.  Come morning, the men assembled early, making sure their weapons were ready, had a hasty meal, and just as it was light enough, set off.

Kris hated to see Ezra go.  She felt naked without him around and didn’t like the feeling at all.  Next time she vowed, she was going to have a rifle of her own and hell of a lot more than three magazines!  Andie agreed with her, entranced with the idea that Ezra was carrying a version of the SG-1 P90.

They kept a good watch, although Ezra had made it clear that any attack would likely come after dark.  The Big Moon was delaying dawn, and they peered closely after the sun was free of the eclipse.

Rari pointed northwards.  “Dralka!”

The word startled everyone, and they turned to look.  There was a single dralka, flying very high, perhaps two thousand feet above them.  Nonetheless one of the men lifted his crossbow and fired.  Andie walked over and hit him solidly, but not painfully in the chest.  She shook her fist in his face, then pointed as the bolt arched down, never having come close.

There were a lot of comments from the other soldiers, comments that Kris thought frequently included the word for “short” and that brought a flush to the man’s face.  Corporal Kissom, the man who’d been left in charge of the soldiers, waved at where the bolt had vanished, clearly suggesting the man should go and fetch it.

“Waste of time,” Andie told Kris.  Then she turned to the soldiers and very explicitly told them they would shoot when she told them to shoot and not until she told them.  To Kris’ surprise there didn’t seem to be any objection, not even from the corporal.

Kris returned her gaze southwards, where the party of soldiers with Ezra, Melek, and Collum eventually vanished into a valley a half dozen miles away.

* * *

“This is too slow,” Melek told Collum.

“Captain Dumi doesn’t want to be ambushed, so he goes cautiously,” the Sachem told Melek.

“Yes, to be sure.  On the other hand, it took us a week to come here from the rookery.  At this rate, it’ll take us twice that to return.  We don’t have enough food for a month.”

Collum sighed.  “No, we don’t.  Actually, two weeks is going to be painful.  And already we can see that the water courses are dry for the most part.  Water is going to be another serious problem.

Collum’s face wrinkled in a sly smile, and his voice dropped to be a whisper.  “You’d almost think that Captain Dumi doesn’t want to catch them.”  He looked at the captain who was plodding along just behind the point of the column.

“We should just go back then,” Melek told the Sachem.  “There is too much risk.  Kris fought them and won.  We fought them and won.  Now Dumi has fought them and won.  No one could ask more of us than three victories against the Tengri!”

“You have to understand that going back is the source of the greatest concern for all of us, Melek.  There are none of us eager to see what sort of mess General Flaner will make of things.”

Someone from the rear of the column called, “Dralka in sight to the north!”

Everyone turned to look, and they could see it flying very high.  “This is very strange,” Collum whispered.  “We saw two going south -- where none is more common.  Then three and now one.  All going south.”

“What can they be eating?” Melek asked.  “There isn’t enough food here -- except for us -- to feed one, much less four dralka!”

“Well, they aren’t very smart.”

Ezra had been studying the dralka and started walking off from the column in the direction the dralka’s path would take it.  Captain Dumi came to Collum.  “Tell him that’s dangerous!  If he gets too far away, it might try to attack him!”

Melek laughed.  “I imagine that would suit Ezra just fine, Captain!  Come what may, I think Ezra is intending to kill it.”

“It is too high; nothing can touch one that high.”

Collum laughed.  “So I would have said a month ago.  But now -- now I believe that if Ezra wants it dead, it’s dead.”

The dralka seemed oblivious of the man so far beneath it, flying steadily along.

The thunder came from Ezra’s weapon.  Hard to imagine, Melek thought, that he once feared that sound -- today it was very comforting.

The dralka flinched and another shot was necessary.  The dralka folded its wings and plunged straight down.  “He did it!  He killed it!” Captain Dumi exclaimed.