Scaevola's Triumph (Gaius Claudius Scaevola trilogy Book 3) (15 page)

More than once, Gaius asked to see Klendor. His idea was that Klendor at least would talk to him. If Klendor could be persuaded to walk with them through Ulsian streets, perhaps other Ulsians would see that the humans and Ulsians could meet socially, and perhaps some would try. In any case, Klendor was the nearest they had to a friend. The Tin Man, however, pointed out that Klendor was too busy. He had experience of close contact with the enemy, and the military needed every drop of information he had.

"Poor Klendor," Lucilla commented.

"The military does need what information they can get," Gaius said, then he nodded towards his sister when he saw her reaction, and added, "but from their track record so far, I have to agree with you. It can't be much fun."

"He's probably being dragged from committee to committee," Lucilla added.

"He is," the Tin Man offered, "although not literally 'dragged'."

"Being an Ulsian, he probably enjoys committees," Vipsania suggested.

"I doubt it," both Lucilla and Gaius countered, simultaneously. They looked at each other, and laughed. Neither had really laughed for some time.

The library was a puzzle. First, its location. It was quite some distance from the city, almost an hour in the high-speed tube, it was on the surface, and it was inside a strange but immense circular mound. The mound itself had transport nodes, and tubes disappeared into its walls from time to time, while on the top of the mounds were strange dome-like buildings. When Vipsania asked what these were, she was informed that these included the defences for the library. Apparently the library zones were amongst the most heavily protected areas on Ulse. If a space vehicle entered the Ulsian atmosphere, and appeared to be heading for a library, it would be warned to correct its course, and if it did not it would be incinerated. Going to the library actually required a permit, and the requirement to use specific tubes, and a visit took all day.

Learning about their new world was interesting, but only for so long. The problem was, without reference points the information was merely overwhelming. They looked up their own planet, and found that the information available was strange. The lists of animals were both familiar and unfamiliar. Some, like lions and elephants, they knew well, but there others that they had never seen or even dreamed about, including one strange one that sat on its hind legs and huge tail, and moved by jumping.

There were recordings of civilizations. There were some familiar scenes, even including the Roman forum, apparently in republican times. There were scenes from Greece and from ancient Egypt, when the great temples of Karnak were still being completed. But there were also scenes of strange people with slanty eyes who also built quite immense buildings. Gaius discovered that there were recordings of battles, some familiar, including one of what Issus had actually looked like, some he was aware of, including some from Egypt, and some from the slanty-eyed people with the yellowish skin. There were some skirmishes between tribes of the primitive people from Africa, but then there were more disturbing sights. According to this, humans had not always looked like he did. They had evolved, and there were scenes of how people, if they could be called that, had lived before they looked like people. People who were smaller, whose best weapons were sharpened sticks and stone axes. And before that, people who had distinct ape-like appearances.

Gaius learned from the Tin Man that life evolved, and what he was looking at was the path humans had taken to get to where they were now. The concept of evolution was explained, including how life started from a chemical soup, how cells began, survived the immense changes put upon them by the changing chemistry of the planet, until eventually the environment stabilized and they could learn to agglomerate. They evolved bones, fish developed, the fish evolved to deal with fresh water, learn to breath air, then merge, and eventually become amphibious.

Quite strange monsters developed over time. A very long time previously, even before Ulse had had a civilization, Earth had apparently been populated by giant lizard-like creatures, some of which walked on two legs, and had 'hands' and a huge tail. Some of these were covered in feathers, and, Gaius was informed, birds evolved from some of these. There were images of these creatures, moving amongst vegetation quite different from anything that any of them had ever seen. Some of these animals, it seemed, had been extraordinarily fierce, and there were recordings of a pack of these tearing a quite gigantic creature to pieces. All of these monsters had apparently been removed by a small asteroid crashing into the Earth. There were even recordings of this occurring.

For Gaius, this raised the problem: how did the Ulsians know this, if they were not to travel through space for over forty-five million years? The answer was surprising, and at the same time, chilling. A capsule of recordings had been left behind on the moon, presumably by some previous civilization of space travellers. That capsule had been found because it emitted signals directed at the passing Ulsian space ship. Apparently the capsule had lain dormant for sixty million years, then it activated itself when
it
detected the space vehicle.

All of this, the women agreed, was very interesting, but the novelties began to wear off. They read/viewed translations of what they wished, but this was only interesting for so much of the day. As Lucilla was to observe one day, learning about the settlement of a new planet was very interesting the first time, but an analysis of the same problems on the twentieth planet was, well, starting to lose its shine.

For Gaius, the situation was not quite so bad. He had been guided through a preliminary description of physics. He had learned about numbers, and had gained at least an elementary understanding of calculus and what rates of change involved. He had come to understand gravity, at least at an initial level, so he found the concept of fields at least reasonable. The concept of friction was easy; he had virtually discovered it himself, and the concept of conservation of momentum and angular momentum were, after all, variations of the concepts of eternal motion. But it was when he found out why they were conserved that he felt excited, as if a light had been turned on in a deep cave to reveal a wonderful treasure. One piece of space was the same as another piece, one direction was as good as another. If he were to do something here, or the same thing there, the outcomes had to be the same if the void was the same. It was so simple in concept. It was, he reflected sadly, not beyond the realms of possibility that he might have thought about it himself.

But then again, he had not. If it were that simple . . . And there was the truth. It was so simple when he was told the answer. It was nowhere nearly as simple before he knew the question.

Then he learned about the electric and magnetic fields, one radial and one circular, and how the resultant forces could be used to make motors, propel vehicles, send communications, a dazzling array of uses.

He learned that all matter ended up as discrete entities: molecules, then atoms, just as Democritus had supposed. And as Lucretius had surmised, atoms were eternal, and what they made depended on how they were joined together, except there were so many different ones. The amount of matter was constant, as was the amount of energy. Then he learned that atoms were divisible, that electrons went around nuclei due to the electric field, and the nuclei themselves could be smashed into pieces. When molecules were broken and their atoms reformed, energy was available; that was what drove a fire. Then he learned that mass and energy were equivalent, and by smashing nuclei, and then quarks, increasingly large amounts of energy were available.

Within the generalities, the Ulsians were sufficiently impressed by Gaius' progress, they tried to take things further. Velocity was distance over time, but time depended on velocity. Go to the speed of light, and time stopped. That was why Earth would never be recognizable if he were to go back. Then there was the concept of action. In a sense Gaius could understand that. In free motion, this was minimized; in the absence of a force a particle travelled in a straight line between two points at constant velocity , or on a circle, ellipse or hyperbola in an inverse square field. Aristotle himself had alluded vaguely to something like this.

Nobody was quite sure how much of the next part Gaius really understood. There was a field that started and stopped on electric charge and hence that which crossed a hypothetical surface equalled the charge the surface enclosed. That was why it was inverse-square; the surface area increased with the square of the radius, and that field was independent of the uncharged material between the charges. But the force was not, for the field put strain into that which was between the charges, even if that were a void, and strain represented stored energy. The energy of an interaction between two charges therefore depended on how much strain lay between the charges, for the energy had to be conserved. The magnetic field, on the other hand, was a circular field and had no ends, and in most cases did not interact with matter to any great extent, the exceptions being materials like iron and charged objects if they were in motion.

The conservation of momentum and angular momentum depended on one piece of void being exactly equivalent to another, which, to a point, it was. The conservation of energy depended on one piece of time in the void being exactly equivalent to another, which, to a point, it was. But in reality, if these points were small enough, the void that was supporting a field was seething with activity. For the tiniest of fleeting instants incredibly small particles came and went, or, if one preferred, there were energy fluctuations that were very localized in time and space, and for those brief periods of time, one extraordinarily small piece of void was not equivalent to a similar sized piece of void adjacent to it. Thus on a small enough scale of time or distance, conservation did not occur. Action was not smooth and continuous, but rather it could only change discretely. Oddly, Gaius had less difficulty with this than expected, perhaps because Aristotle had emphasized action rather than energy, even if he had not quite defined it properly, and Aristotle had not discussed whether it was or was not continuous. Even more importantly, Aristotle had stated that nature abhorred a void. Indeed, this seething void was not unlike Aristotle's substratum, and Gaius had little problem in considering that tiny entities were continually coming into being and then passing away. He even had strangely little difficulty in accepting that the edge of a sufficiently small object was not an edge at all, but rather a blur as bits of the edge were continuously coming into being and passing away, sometimes in the particle, sometimes part of the void. That this was the mechanism that fields held particles together was greeted almost like an old friend, although of course the recognition was of kind, and not of the underlying mathematical complexities. And while the mathematical complexities placed a great limitation on what comprised 'understanding', the fact that he could genuinely come to grips with the underpinning importance of action across a wide range of physical phenomena surprised most Ulsians.

This was quite an achievement. The fact of the matter is that despite, or because of, our education system even now most Ulsians have no comprehension in any form whatsoever about quantum theory . . .
(M)

While Gaius was amazed by the knowledge available to him, he also recognized that his reading was for interest only. He was never going to use it, for while he could follow to some extent brief general descriptions, his ability at mathematics left him to limit himself to general reading. He was also affected by the boredom affecting the women. If they wanted to go somewhere, he usually had to accompany them. They visited sites, they began to learn their way around the parts of the Ulsian city they were permitted to visit, but after a while the novelty of this wore off. They visited their site for picnics, they lived a life of almost complete luxury, in which everything they wanted was there before them. Their only problem was, there was nothing to do.

Chapter 10

The Terrans were informed that the trial would commence in six days. Their presence would not be required, and the case would proceed in the same way whether or not they were present. Did they wish to attend?

They did. If nothing else, it would break the boredom. The three Terrans were then informed they would be permitted to view proceedings provided that they remained silent at all times, unless a question was directed towards them by the judge. There was to be one exception: Gaius would be required to make a speech to the court. He must make it in Latin; there would be an automatic translation into Ulsian.

"That makes no sense," Lucilla said, when the droid that had invited them had left. "First they say that the trial will be totally unaffected by our presence, then they say Gaius has to make a speech?"

"It makes sense if there are two trials there," Vipsania suggested. "The speech may be used to help decide what to do about us."

Gaius stared at her for a moment, then suddenly realized what was happening. "Yes," he said slowly. "By making a speech to judge the accused, we judge ourselves."

"Then you'd better write a good speech," Lucilla said in a chastising tone. "I suppose now you wished you'd taken more notice of your rhetoric classes!"

Gaius refused to acknowledge that he had not been paying the attention he should have paid in his youth, but he did begin to have the first nervous reaction in his stomach.

* * *

The day of the trial arrived. The Terrans had each tried to imagine what the court room would look like; they had each imagined some sort of grandiose room, with huge pillars, imposing decorations, with symbols of power, justice, whatever, liberally scattered around. What they found was the exact opposite. It was of only moderate size, although there were cubicles on an upper level, the walls were a uniform grey, there were no windows, and the furniture was Spartan. There were no decorations, other than the Ulsian words corresponding to 'Ulsian High Court' written above the Judge's seat.