Part 19 (1/2)
Li walked over to the window and gazed out at Peking's soaring panorama of towers, bridges, terraces, and arches, extending away all around, above, and for hundreds of meters below. ”How did Gravmas start?” he asked his father.
”Hmph!” Xiang snorted as he moved to stand alongside the boy. ”Now isn't that typical of young people today. Too wrapped up in relativistic quantum chromodynamics and multidimensional function s.p.a.ces to know anything about where it came from or what it means. It's this newfangled liberal education that's to blame. They don't teach natural philosophy any more, the way we had to learn it.”
”Well, that kind of thing does seem a bit quaint these days,” Li said. ”I suppose it's okay for little old ladies and people who-”
”They don't even recite the laws of motion in school every morning. Standards aren't what they used to be. It'll mean the end of civilization, you mark my words.”
”You were going to tell me about Gravmas . . .”
”Oh, yes. Well, I presume you've heard of Newton?”
”Of course. A newton is the force which, acting on a ma.s.s of one kilogram, produces an acceleration of one meter per second per second.”
”Not a newton. The Newton. You didn't know that Newton was somebody's name?”
”You mean it was a person?”
Xiang sighed. ”My word. You see-you don't know anything. Yes, Newton was the messiah who lived two thousand years ago, who came to save us all from irrationality. Today is his birthday.”
Li looked impressed. ”Say, what do you know! Where did this happen?”
”In a quasi-stable, in a little town called Cambridge, which was somewhere in Britain.”
”That's in Europe, isn't it?” Li said.
”Oh, so you do know something.”
”My friend Shao was in Europe last year,” Li went on distantly. ”His parents took him on a trip there to see the ruins. He said it was very dirty everywhere, with the streets full of beggars. And you can't drink the water. It sounds like a strange place for a civilization like ours to have started from.”
”Strange things happen . . .” Xiang thought for a while. ”Actually, according to legend, it didn't really start there.”
”What?”
”Gravmas.”
”How do you mean?”
”Supposedly it was already a holiday that some ancient Western barbarian culture celebrated before then, and we stole it. It was easier to let people carry on with the customs they'd grown used to, you see.
. . . At least, that's how the story goes.”
”I wonder what the barbarian culture was like,” Li mused.
”n.o.body's quite sure,” Xiang said. ”But from the fragments that have been put together, it seems to have had something to do with wors.h.i.+ping crosses and fishes, eating holly, and building pyramids. It was all such a long time ago now that-”
”Look!” Li interrupted, pointed excitedly. Outside the window, a levitation platform was rising into view, bearing several dozen happy-looking, colorfully dressed people with musical instruments. The strains of amplified voices floated in from outside. ”Carol singers!” Li exclaimed.
Xiang smiled and spoke a command for the household communications controller to relay his voice to the outside. ”Good morning!” it boomed from above the window as the platform came level.
The people on board saw the figures in the window and waved. ”Merry Gravmas,” a voice replied.
”Merry Gravmas to you,” Xiang returned.
”May the Force be proportional to your acceleration.”
”Are you going to sing us a carol?” Xiang inquired.
”But of course. Do you have a request?”
”No, I'll leave it to you.”
”Very well.”
There was an introductory bar, and then,
”We three laws of orbiting are, Ruling trajectories local and far.
Collisions billiard, Particles myriad, Planet and moon and star.
O-ooo . . .”
KNOWLEDGE IS A.
MIND-ALTERING DRUG.
I sometimes suspect that one of the reason writers write is that it gives them an excuse to do the research. In an age when people are constantly being urged to be goal-oriented and efficiency-conscious, and get sent by their firms to seminars to learn how to manage their time, it's easy to develop a guilt complex over reading anything other than a company procedure manual. But I find the most enjoyable reading is that which is purely for fun or out of curiosity-with no conceivable relevance to making money, furthering one's career, or with any other such redeeming quality whatsoever. One solution to any residual guilt from company indoctrination is to be a writer. Then it becomes possible to relax and enjoy whatever one pleases, rationalizing it by the thought that ”Who knows? I might need if for a book one day.”
I remember once, when I was in my teens, a friend accused me of never being bored by anything-which can be an unforgivable aberration among teenagers. I had never thought about that, but it seemed worth investigating. I resolved, therefore, that to test the allegation, I would force myself to read for one hour on the dullest subject I could think of. I couldn't think of anything that sounded more dull than Greek architecture, and so, when I was next in the public library, I took down a couple of formidable-looking tomes on the subject and steeled myself. It turned out to be fascinating, and I ended up staying until closing time.
It's easy to get carried away, sometimes. Voyage From Yesteryear featured a huge, fusion-powered s.p.a.cecraft, with a population of tens of thousands, that traveled to Alpha Centauri, the nearest star to us.
The entire structure rotated to simulate gravity, and at one point I was writing a part of the story that included a conversation between a boy who was born during the voyage, with no experience of planetary gravity, and his father, who grew up on Earth. To the boy it was self-evident that a thrown baseball moves in a straight line, and the hand of the catcher is carried in a curve by the spin of the s.h.i.+p to intercept it; but the notion of something going up, reversing, and coming down again made no intuitive sense at all. Then, having written that much, I found it difficult to convince myself that a baseball trajectory as seen by somebody on the inside of a spinning structure would look like the curve of one thrown up from the ground on Earth. I spend a whole week deriving from first principles a set of equations to transform curves from fixed to rotating coordinates and drawing graphs of the results-the simulation of ”real” gravity turned out to be surprisingly close. Then, of course, I had to write the procedure into computer programs ”in case I need to do it again some day” (I never have). That took another week. And after all that, when I finally edited the draft, I deleted the paragraphs in which the conversation took place, because by that time it didn't seem so important.
The Proteus Operation required a lot of research into modern history and World War II, the beginnings of nuclear physics and the Manhattan Project, and on the biographies of the several real-life people who appeared in the story. There was a six-month gap between my writing the prologue and Chapter One-a result of getting carried away again.
When I was writing Inherit the Stars back in England, I received a lot of help with background material from my customers. One of them was a physicist at Sheffield University, called Dr. Grenville Turner, who used one of our computers to a.n.a.lyze moonrock samples from the Apollo missions. On one occasion, while we were eating lunch on the campus lawns, I mentioned the idea of having the moon captured by the earth, as is described in the book. Gren though for a while as he munched a sandwich, and then said suddenly, ”You're dead! It won't work.”
”Why not?” I asked him.
”Stromatolites.”
”Never heard of them.”
Stromatolites turned out to be a kind of fossil coral found in Australia that preserves records of the tides from hundreds of millions of years ago. Stromatolites show that lunar tides have existed since the beginnings of Earth's history, and therefore the moon couldn't have arrived comparatively recently in the way the book said. I eventually managed to fudge that around in such a way that it actually became supporting evidence for the capture theory, but the reason I mention it here is that it led me off into a new line of research on the ancient Earth and the processes that have shaped it into what it is today. I believe that much of this kind of thing is taught in schools these days, but it was all new and fascinating to me, because, as you may recall, the curriculum that I took hadn't been updated since the days of King James the whichever. Some other readers may not have met this in school, either. So, for them-or maybe anyone interested in finding out if they can be bored, if it sounds like that kind of subject; but they may get a surprise-here is a distillation from the notes I compiled. They're not doing anyone much good in the bottom of my filing cabinet.
EARTH MODELS-ON A.