Engine City (4 page)

“My name is Luke Sejanus,” the scholar murmured, “president of the Academy of Sciences.”

He turned, threw out an arm with a practised flourish, and announced: “My lords, ladies and gentlemen, I present our distinguished visitor, Grigory Andreievich Volkov! Cosmonaut of the European Union, colonel in the European People’s Army, Hero of the European Union . . . ”

He rolled on through a list Volkov’s achievements, including the succession of his business ventures on Mingulay and Croatan, several of which Volkov had thought he had taken to the obscurity of a marked but empty grave in the centuries during which the Cosmonauts had concealed their longevity. He had, however, mentioned them to Esias.

Esias had taken a vacant place at the end of one of the lower rows. Volkov glared at him; Esias smiled back.

Sejanus stepped aside, sat down in the front row, and added his expectant face to a thousand others. Volkov swallowed hard and wished there was a glass of water in front of him. Or vodka.

“Thank you, President Sejanus. My lords, ladies and gentlemen, I am honored to stand before you. What is unusual about my life is not what I have accomplished—though I can look back on it with more satisfaction than regret, thanks be to the gods. What is unusual about my life is . . . its length. I am here to show you how you too can live as long a life, and in health and vigor—even those of you who are already old.

“To show you, not to tell you. I am sorry that I cannot tell you. In the third and fourth decades of my life, I consumed many drugs and medicines that promised to preserve youth. As you can see, one of them, or some combination of them, worked. I do not know which, and because the formulae of these medicines were commercial secrets, I would be unable to reproduce it even if I knew which nostrum was, in fact, the panacea. I and the other Cosmonauts have consulted among ourselves, and we have failed to discover which medicine or medicines we had in common.

“What I can do, however, is this. I can show you the method by which you can independently discover the nostrum—the elixir—for yourselves. This would involve extracting material from my body and analyzing it—finding out what molecules are in my blood, for example, that are not in the blood of others. Possibly one or more of these molecules would provide a clue. Or perhaps you might find something unusual in the structures of my cells—I do not know, but that is what I would expect. At the same time, I can give you a list of the types of molecule which are known to have been used in the various medicines, and the parts of the human cells which these medicines were intended to—and were known to—affect. These could be tested on short-lived animals—rats and mice, let us say—then on monkeys, and finally on human volunteers. Many experiments would be necessary. Their results would have to be scrupulously recorded and carefully examined.

“It might be a long process. It might be costly. But we would have, to encourage us, the priceless knowledge that what we were attempting was possible, that it had been done once, and that it could therefore be done again.

“Thank you.”

He bowed, and stood aside as Sejanus returned to the podium.

Esias was nodding and smiling; almost everyone else seemed lost in thought.

“I shall now take questions,” said Sejanus, looking as though he had some himself.

A middle-aged man near the front stood up. “Theocritus Gionno,” he introduced himself, obviously unnecessarily for most of those present. “Chairman of the Department of Medical Sciences.” He preened his robe for a moment. “In recent days, the Trader and Elector Esias de Tenebre has provided us with evidence for Colonel Volkov’s remarkable, nay, extraordinary, claim. We have all had an opportunity to acquaint ourselves with it, and we must, I think, admit that it is extraordinary evidence. Documents of undisputed provenance, photographs, fingerprints. . . . Likewise, we and our predecessors have had many years indeed to examine such evidence of the level of scientific knowledge prevalent in the Solar System at the time of the, ah,
Bright Star’s
departure as has trickled in over the past two centuries. We have no reason to doubt the possibility of the treatment of which the Colonel has spoken.”

He cupped an elbow in one hand, his chin in the other, and gazed around the auditorium.

“However,” he went on, “the method that the Colonel proposes by which we could independently, as he puts it, rediscover the nostrum must surely strike all men—and women!—of science as preposterously cumbersome and, above all, uncertain. This is not how science is done at all! The scientific method is based upon logical reasoning from observation, and from logical analysis of available data. An immense wealth of such data is available to us already. An even greater addition to it has been bestowed on us by the successful expedition of the family de Tenebre, which beyond the memory of the oldest man now living, set forth to bring from distant Mingulay the full fountain-head of that knowledge of which we and our predecessors have long lapped up the veriest drops and trickles. I have every confidence that a few years of careful study and exact reasoning will enable us to deduce the composition of the elixir.”

A low hum of approbation greeted this. Others stood up, one by one, and held forth on the power of logic to reason from old facts to new.

“Let us take for example the theory of evolution,” one man, depressingly young, said. “Could that have been discovered experimentally? No! A thousand years ago, Alexander Philoctetes stood in this very hall and explained to the Academy how in each generation more are born than can survive, how consequently there is a struggle for existence, and how therefore small variations conducive to survival must necessarily be preserved—and so on, in that masterly deduction of the origin of species with which we are all familiar. If Philoctetes had used this vaunted
experimental
method—fossicking about in quarries, no doubt—he would have found the most misleading results in the fossil record, and come up with some theory of successive creations, or spontaneous generation, or such like.”

And more in the same vein. Volkov would have sat with his head in his hands if he’d had anywhere to sit. As it was, he just stood there, feeling his jaw muscles first slacken and then, increasingly, clench.

“Your pardon,” he said finally to Sejanus, “but I must speak.”

Sejanus bowed him to the rostrum. Volkov gripped it and leaned forward.

“I fully understand,” he said, “and deeply appreciate what the sciences of this great city have accomplished by examining and comparing information obtained by your own careful observations and from study of the information won on Earth in the past. You have indeed accomplished great things. But not all, not by any means all, of what anyone can see in this wonderful metropolis was built by such methods. No amount of reasoning, from observation or from first principles, could have built the machines I have seen in the shops, the ships I see on the ocean, the vehicles in your streets, and the crops in your fields. They were designed by the method I suggested, the empirical method, the method of trial and error, of hypothesis and induction as well as—indeed, hand in hand with—deduction. Your mechanics and artisans, your pharmacists and farmers, your fishers and flyers may not be able to tell you the method by which they have so successfully worked, but the fact of that method and its success are surely beyond dispute here. Let us reason and compare, to be sure, when we investigate the discoveries of others. But let us experiment and test when we wish to make new discoveries ourselves.”

As he spoke, he glanced from face to face, and here and there he saw agreement, even—and it thrilled him to see it—enlightenment dawn, but these occurrences were few. The overwhelming mood of the assembly was bafflement, even affront. Theocritus Gionno was simmering, and jumped to his feet as soon as Volkov stepped back.

“Of course,” said Gionno, “many of us here do appreciate the value, and understand the significance, of what the esteemed Colonel rightly calls the empirical or experimental method. Some here have devoted their lives as scholars to such works of the masters Bacon and Popper as have reached us. The commentaries upon
The Advancement of Learning
alone would fill a not insignificant shelf, and those upon
The Logic of Scientific Discovery
a small library. But there are many deep problems with such a method, and until they are resolved, it is best left to guide, consciously or otherwise as it may be, the crude blundering of mechanics, artisans, and herbalists. Such methods are no doubt good enough for them. The requirements of exact science are considerably more rigorous.”

Volkov laughed. He had not intended to, and he saw at once that its effect was bad, but he could not help himself.

“Somewhere in one of the works of science in the de Tenebres’ cargo,” he said into a shocked silence, “you’ll find a quote from a great scientist of Earth, one Poincare, who said: ‘Science advances, funeral by funeral.’ I see that its truth is universal, and I bid you good day.”

“Well,” puffed Esias, having caught up with Volkov in the shade of a cloistered quadrangle, “that did not go down well.”

Volkov ran his hand over his brush-cut hair. “No, it did not,” he said. “My apologies, my friend. I hope I haven’t dragged you down with me. But these scholars, my God! They’d sooner die than think. And they will.”

Esias chuckled. “Some of them. Perhaps not all. Let us proceed to the refreshment patio and wait there, in as dignified a fashion as we can muster, and see if there are any exceptions to the rule.” He clapped Volkov’s shoulder. “The scientific method!”

“I don’t want to hear those words again for a week,” said Volkov. “But you’re right. And I’m parched.”

They sat at a table under an awning and gulped one glass and sipped a second glass of what Esias insisted was beer. Volkov knew better than to press the point. He relaxed and watched the students, at the other tables or walking in the quadrangle. Apart from the black bat-sleeved short robes they wore like overalls, they looked on the one hand like younger versions of the Academicians, and on the other like students everywhere, alternately earnest and relaxed. The proportion of female students was a good deal higher than it was among the scholars, though nowhere near parity. What a bloody waste, Volkov thought. Changing that alone would speed up development.

“You know,” said Esias, “you may be underestimating the Academy. They are not dullards. They have millennia of experience behind them of teasing out unexpected implications. Your journey here will not be wasted. It may take them time, longer than you might wish, but the knowledge we have brought back will be assimilated and extended.”

“All right,” Volkov said. “Let the Academy rummage through books if it wants. What I’m more concerned about is the other institutions. Are they as hidebound? Because time is what we don’t have. If the aliens turn up before this place has a space defense capability, then the question of longevity is, you might say, academic.”

“Ah yes,” said Esias. “The aliens.” He glanced around. “I think any allusion to that matter is best . . . postponed, until we can put it before the Electorate—in the first instance, the Defense Committee of the Senate.”

Volkov smiled. “That’s how it was done on Earth. The consequences were not good.”

“Oh,” said Esias, looking over his shoulder again, “you won’t find any of that paranoia here. You’ll see.”

But Volkov was only half listening; he was gazing away to the shade of the quadrangle, from which a dozen or so black-gowned figures had emerged blinking into the sunlight and were making their way over.

Hardy Man

LEMURIA BEACH WAS
the worst place in the world, and Elizabeth Harkness was happy to be there. She trudged along the shingle shore, her head down and her left shoulder hunched against the knife-edge wind off the sea. Hooded parka, quilted trousers, fur-lined gloves and boots weren’t quite enough, especially when she had to push her hood back or take her gloves off. Big smooth pebbles ground against each other, and dried wrack crackled under her soles. Seabats screamed as they wheeled overhead. Behind all the sounds, the white noise of the white water filled her ears. The abandoned whaling station where she and Gregor Cairns had parked the skiff was a couple of kilometers behind her, its rusted boilers tiny at this distance, like some wrecked laboratory apparatus. Gregor had chosen to spend the morning hacking fossils from the foot of the cliffs, the same hundred-meter-high rockface that rose to her right. Elizabeth was intent on finding more recent signs of life. Although the season was what passed for spring in these latitudes, there wasn’t much: Seabat roosts whitened the cliffs, and the occasional wind-dried corpse of a failed fledgling would be caught on the windward side of a boulder; on the lee side of boulders, lichens spread out their wrinkled mats of grey and orange; on the lichens, tiny red arthropods scurried like the dots before a bloodshot eye; and here and there a drift of soil sustained a small tough flowering plant, white as the sea’s froth.

The sea itself, choppy in the wind off the ice-capped polar ocean a thousand kilometers southward, was a more hospitable abode of life than anything the island could offer. Every seaward glance couldn’t but take in, somewhere between the horizon and the shore, the plume of hot breath from a spouting whale. Seabats of several species, from the tiny watershears skimming the wavetops to the three-meter-spanning alcatrazi gliding high above, patrolled and plunged to pillage the inexhaustible shoals that thronged the waters below. Every so often, about five hundred meters out from the shore, the black bullet heads of seals or sea-lions or some such seagoing mammal would pop up, peer around in a disconcertingly human manner, then disappear again in a humping curve of back.