So I looked with fascination at those people in their mobes, and tried to fathom what it would be like. Thousands of years ago, the work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same every day, in organizations where people were interchangeable parts. All of the story had been bled out of their lives. That was how it had to be; it was how you got a productive economy. But it would be easy to see a will at work behind this: not exactly an evil will, but a selfish will. The people who’d made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story. If their employees came home at day’s end with interesting stories to tell, it meant that something had gone wrong: a blackout, a strike, a spree killing. The Powers That Be would not suffer others to be in stories of their own unless they were fake stories that had been made up to motivate them. People who couldn’t live without story had been driven into the concents or into jobs like Yul’s. All others had to look somewhere outside of work for a feeling that they were part of a story, which I guessed was why Sæculars were so concerned with sports, and with religion. How else could you see yourself as part of an adventure? Something with a beginning, middle, and end in which you played a significant part? We avout had it ready-made because we were a part of this project of learning new things. Even if it didn’t always move fast enough for people like Jesry, it did move. You could tell where you were and what you were doing in that story. Yul got all of this for free by living his stories from day to day, and the only drawback was that the world held his stories to be of small account. Perhaps that was why he felt such a compulsion to tell them, not just about his own exploits in the wilderness, but those of his mentors.
We at last reached the fueling station. Yul deployed his traveling kitchen and began to make supper. He made no formal announcement that he was coming with us, but this was obvious from the way he talked, and so after a while Gnel went into the station and struck a deal with the management for Cord to leave her fetch parked there for a couple of weeks. Cord began to move things from her fetch into Yul’s. As he cooked, Yul observed this procedure closely, and soon began to complain, in a joking way, about the enormous volume of unnecessary clutter that Cord was, according to him, stuffing into his home-on-wheels. Cord soon began to volley the abuse back at him. Within about sixty seconds they were saying amazingly rude things to each other. I couldn’t take part in their banter any more than I could get between two persons who were kissing or fighting, so I drifted over to Sammann.
“I found that rocket speely,” he told me. “You were right about its being big. That’s one of the largest rockets going nowadays.”
“Anything else?”
“The payload,” he said. “Its shape and size match those of a vehicle that is generally used to carry humans into space.”
“How many humans?”
“Up to eight.”
“Well, is there any information about who is on board, or why they’re going up there?”
Sammann shook his head. “Not unless you count the absence of information as information.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“According to the Powers That Be, the vehicle is unmanned. It’s a test of a new system. Under syndev control.”
I gave him a look. He grinned and held up his hands. “I know, I know! I’ve made inquiries on a few reticules known to me. In a few days maybe we’ll have something.”
“In a few days we’ll be at the North Pole.”
“In a few days,” he said, “that might be a wise place to be.”
The next morning, after a large breakfast prepared by Yul and Cord, we started the journey north. Cord’s fetch stayed behind. Our caravan consisted of the Crade vehicles, that of Yulassetar containing most of the gear, that of Ganelial carrying his three-wheeler in the back.
The first leg was north and downhill to the coastal plain, a turn to the right when we neared salt water, and then a long sweeping leftward curve as we skirted a gulf of the northern ocean. At the head of that gulf lay what had been the greatest port in the world for a couple of centuries back in the First Millennium A.R. when the water had stayed ice-free all year round. Because of its location it had later become the “shallowest” of all ruins—the easiest to mine. Most of its great works—its viaducts, seawalls, and bridges—had been hammered apart by scavengers who had extracted the reinforcing bars buried in the synthetic stone and shipped the metal to places where it was needed. The rubble-mounds were forested with immense trees. The only remaining structure from that age was a suspension bridge over the great river that emptied into the head of the gulf; it was high enough above sea level that the resurgent pack ice had not crushed it. At this time of year there was no ice to be seen, but it was easy to make out the scars it had left along the rubble-banks. This port-ruin now functioned as a fishing village and drummon stop. A few hundred people lived here, at least in the summer. Once we left it behind and struck inland, heading almost due north, we saw only scattered settlements, which thinned and failed as we climbed into forested hills. We then descended into an unmistakably different landscape: taiga, a country too dry and cold for trees to grow much higher than a person’s head. Almost all traffic had vanished from the highway. We drove for an hour without seeing any other vehicles. Finally we stopped in a rocky place near a river, pulled our vehicles round to where they couldn’t be seen from the road, and slept in our suitsacks.
The next morning, the brand-new stove we had bought after leaving Samble stopped working. If Yul hadn’t joined us, we’d have spent the rest of the trip eating cold energy bars. Yul, looking quietly triumphant, produced a thunderous breakfast on his battery of roaring industrial burners. Watching his cousin work, Gnel seemed proud, if exasperated. As if to say, look at what fine people we can produce when they stop believing in our religion.
Since there was almost no traffic on the road, I took driving lessons from Yul while Cord dismantled the stove. She diagnosed the problem as a clogged orifice, attributable to gunk that had precipitated from the fuel during the cold night.
“You’re fuming,” she pointed out a while later. I realized that I had withdrawn from the conversation. She and Yul had been talking, but I hadn’t heard a word of their conversation. “What is the problem?”
“I just can’t believe that in this day and age we are having a problem with chemical fuel,” I said.
“Sorry. We should have bought the premium brand.”
“No, it’s not that. Nothing for you to be sorry about. I’m just pointing out that this stove is four-thousand-year-old praxis.”
Cord was nonplussed. “Same goes for this fetch and everything in it,” she said.
“Hey!” Yul cried, mock-wounded.
Cord scoffed, rolled her eyes, and turned her attention back to me. “Everything except for your sphere, that is. So?”
“I guess because I live in a place with almost zero praxis, it never occurs to me to think about such things,” I said. “But at times like this, the absurdity hits me between the eyes. There’s no reason to put up with junk like this. A stove with dangerous, unreliable chemical fuel. With orifices that clog. In four thousand years we could have made a better stove.”
“Would I be able to take that stove apart and fix it?”
“You wouldn’t have to, because it would never break.”
“But I want to know if I could understand such a stove.”
“You’re the kind of person who could probably understand just about anything if you set your mind to it.”
“Nice flattery, Raz, but you keep dodging the question.”
“All right, I take your point. You’re really asking if the average person could understand the workings of such a thing…”