You can do a lot with slide rules and Babbage Engines, especially if that’s all you’ve got and you have no choice .
Eyrie of Speaking to Aliens
Third Speaker to Aliens laid the sheaf of paper, still damp from the Enumeration Engine’s printer, before First Speaker to Alien’s perch. That duty done, he stretched his wings broadly, stiff from the many hours in the machine noise of the Engine Room. A quick preen removed some of the oil spray working around those machines deposited on the feathers.
Normally, to appear so before one’s superior in the Flock hierarchy would be at least bad manners, bordering on outright disrespect. The Eyrie ran by its own rules, and First Speaker cared much for timely results and much less for appearances. His place close under the Ringlord’s wing allowed him wide airspace in such matters.
First Speaker adjusted the corrective lenses clamped to his beak, and turned his attention from the half-wing-length slide rule by his perch, and the work in progress. Like the universe, the language of the Portal Builders did not forgive lack of precision. Neither did First Speaker.
“Third Speaker, what prey do you bring?” he asked.
“The refined description of the extrusion mechanism of the Ring repair machines, First Speaker.” Third Speaker held himself upright, for all that it had been a long hunt in the machine rooms.
First Speaker laid aside his work and took up the sheaf of paper, taking up a fountain pen. Third Speaker took his own pen from his chest pouch and readied himself to make notes upon his own copy of the print. Only a few claw-counts of minds among the People could put meaning to the notations on those sheaves of paper.
First Speaker stayed ever on the wing and watchful for those who might be added to that number, but he hunted a wide plain with thin pickings.
The work on that sheaf constituted the keystone of a Contract deliverable which would add a little more coin to the People’s account with the Portal Builders. It was a wing stroke in a long climb, to gain that credit and in the process to learn more. In turn they could use some of the credit to learn still more so they might better understand the universe in which the Ring floated, to the benefit of their own chances of survival.
To most, of course, the Ring would always bask in the light of the Lifegiver as it always had. The wreckage the First Flock’s space explorers had found put the lie to that easy-gliding assumption. Of the many Rings which had once basked in the light of the Lifegiver, it alone survived. Why so many had died and the People had been spared Ringlord deemed a question worth any effort to answer it.
His check of the Third Speaker’s work found it a worthy prey fairly taken, and First Speaker sent him to his nest on the wall and the care of his mate.
Be First to Comment