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had only invited a few 'delegates' from the Council of the Lords. Why take along so many? This was
another problem to be filed away now and thought on later.
"Keeper," came a third voice from the far end of the room. "I have news. There is a new story
sweeping the Plain that it was the Keepers who stole Nakamura's Sword."
The young woman barely managed to suppress her curse of surprise. "Where did you hear this?" she
demanded.
"A Father from the 'hood over by the Brown Hills was passing and slopped at our well for a drink.
He told us. He was traveling from the east."
She nodded to herself in the dark. Andretti is up to his usual tricks: rumor and insinuation. First the
stories that Mitsuyama had stolen the Sword had trickled across the Plain. But no proof had been
produced, so they died out. Now this. It's typical of the tactics the President of the Free Council
employs, she thought. When he doesn't know which of his enemies did something, he simply accuses
them all, indirectly, using lies and innuendos. Rotten bastard! There isn't even any way we can fight back.
We just don't have the communications network Andretti possesses with the 'hoods and the Faithful.
Would anyone believe such obviously idiotic tales? Possibly, she admitted. After all, very few people
know very much about the Keepers, our ideals, methods, and goals. What little the general public does
know is primarily the result of propaganda spread by the Free Council at the time of the Disbanding. And
because the Keepers are required by circumstances to move slowly and secretly, we haven't had much
opportunity to counteract the vicious lies told by our enemies.
Yes, this rumor could seriously hurt the relationship we've managed to establish with the settlers, she
realized. It's still such a tentative thing, based largely on trust. Right now there's nothing to offer but
long-range hopes and danger. If anything disrupts the tenuous faith they have in our good intentions . . .
File it now. Consider it later.
"I thank you all for your news," she said. "Remember to collect everything you hear. Catalog each
item in your mind; correlate it with the store of information you already possess. Look for links,
connections, meanings that go beyond the surface. Thus is Knowledge born."
"Thus do we Know," they responded.
"Is the College ready?" Yolan asked, her voice assuming a ritual tone as she began the real business
of the evening.
"We are ready."
"Tonight we'll start to work on the Newtonian conception of Time. We've already learned the chant
on Newtonian Space, including the basic axioms of Euclidian geometry. Once we have Time firmly in
mind, we'll tackle the concepts of Force, Matter, and Causation. Then we'll be ready to memorize and
understand the chants on Newton's Mechanics."
There was a brief pause as she settled herself on her cushion, carefully arranging the folds of her
gown. She cleared her throat, took several deep, calming breaths, and composed her mind. Then her
voice began to roll out of the blackness, the phrases pouring through the night to wash over their minds.
Every few sentences she would pause and they would repeat what she had just said.
"What is this world that we can know it?
And what are we that we can know?
There was a time when Time was twofold,
one within and one without.
Within was time that had no firmness,
each man beating out his own.
Without was time that all could share in,
absolute, unyielding guide.
Measured off in fine divisions,
hours, minutes, nanoseconds.
Flowing onward, ever forward,
constant current to the future.
Speed, location, all unheeded,
coursing sure and never varied ..."
On and on it went for hours, the chant rising and falling, the united, murmuring replies echoing in the
dark and ringing in the ears. There was a cadence, a hypnotic rhythm that insinuated itself into the mind
and carried it along, impressing itself on the very fabric of the neurons. Synapses closed and opened,
pathways formed and settled in. Memory was born and reinforced. And Keepers came into being ....
By the end of the session, Yolan was exhausted. She closed with the standard admonition to
Remember and then sat silent and weary as the others slipped out, one by one, into what was left of the
night. Eventually, with a brief word of thanks to the host settler, she herself crept off into the darkness.
The grass was tossing restlessly beneath a rising breeze as she walked slowly back toward the
Sisterhood. A storm was coming. She looked to the west just in time to see the lone moon that still clung
to the sky swallowed by a ragged line of inky clouds. It would probably break before she reached her
destination. No matter. The rain would provide her better cover when she climbed the wall. Head down,
picking up her pace just slightly, she ignored the approaching storm and concentrated on the thoughts that
buzzed around in her mind.
They were the usual doubts that plagued her after every session with the College. Perhaps they were
only the result of fatigue. Perhaps they were something more.
Is there really any hope? Or am I just one of a band of blind fanatics desperately trying to keep a
dying thing alive? Is our task even possible, or are we only fooling ourselves?
After all, the science of the Home Planet had been more than a series of chants droned in dark
rooms. It had been an evolving community of concepts and ideas, of problems and solutions, of men and
women working toward understanding.
Here on Kensho all we have left is the language of that community. The day-to-day reality, the
experience of actually practicing science, is gone. We can't experiment or test the ideas to see if they
really do explain the world as we perceive it. We can only sit idly by and intellectually appreciate the
complex structure of abstract scientific theory developed by our ancestors.
But that was contrary to the very nature and purpose of the whole scientific endeavor. Abstract
theory, in and of itself, simply wasn't enough to constitute a science. No formalized system, no matter
how logically complete or coherent, gave any guarantee as to its own empirical applicability. Scientific
theory wasn't an attempt to make 'true' or 'false' statements about the empirical world. At best, it only
referred to such things obliquely and indirectly. One couldn't identify a word with an object, even an
immediately sensed one, in a one-to-one relationship. Things weren't 'this' or 'that.' They were only
'such-like.'
The real meaning of science wasn't to be found either in its own immediate logical or empirical truth.
It wasn't a series of eternally 'true' or 'false' statements. Instead it was a collection of conditionally
'adequate' or 'inadequate' explanations. Scientific theory occupied the crux point between the abstract
and the empirical. Its true meaning and value lay precisely in its explanatory power, in its ability to order
and make sense of the world around us. Even Newtonian mechanics didn't really assert anything about
the 'true nature' of the world. It simply provided a unified form for our description of the world, a form
which changed again and again as better explanatory systems were developed. And a form whose value
lay, at all times, in its usefulness.
But what happened when science was cut off from the world it was meant to explain, when it was [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]