tools to maintain them. Nothing about Spadoni or... he didn't know a proper name for 'prole guns.'
Better not try CARAVAN*SPADONI*SUPPLIES. A computer might be told to alert somebody. Try
CARAVAN*2739*SALES
This year's outgoing. Speckles and spices. Basic farming and clothmaking tools, and some half familiar terms that were also tools. Cookware: not the magical stuff nothing sticks to. Toys and shells and other luxury goods. Preserved meat, root vegetables, spices, some of which had been sold to Wave Rider. Nothing much to learn.
CARAVAN*2739*PURCHASE
This year returning: clocks and paint and Begley cloth. Spices again, and salt. Shire tea. Smoked fish from Haven. Whiskey, liqueurs, and cheeses. Wave Rider kept some of these in stock.
For twenty-seven years he'd watched and eavesdropped on caravan merchants, merchants from Terminus and Destiny Town, and the Winslow clan. He had a very good idea what passed along the Road, and Wave Rider was involved in all of this. Except- Prole guns. Replacement, purchase, maintenance: nothing at all. And speckles. If the route involved middlemen, he'd have seen something. The sterilized seeds must go straight from the Windfarm to wherever along the Road they did their loading.
He went back to CARAVAN and opened
ORIGIN*CARAVAN
In Will Coffey's vision, now more than two centuries old, caravans
were not for commerce, not for making wealth. They were a way to deliver speckles to Spiral Town. The impression would be that Spiral Town was the peak of civilization on Destiny; that sophistication dwindled with distance down the Road.
We've been swindled. The greed of merchants, is that a lie too? or a game the merchants play to entertain themselves?
A later entry: The caravans are working! They serve as recreation for some, for some a way of life, a forum for courtship for some, but for all a hedge against the danger of inbreeding. They allow us to learn more about the only other sapient species ever found. They maintain the stability of our control experiment.
All that vastness of stars staring down at us, and it's just us and the Otterfolk? But Argos might have heard more from Earth by now.
- Control experiment?
Base One, now Spiral Town, was to retain technology that was too heavy or fragile to transport. Visiting caravans would purchase the use of what they hadn't already stolen: paint and clocks and Begley cloth and, in later years, handcrafted work. .
A generation later they teased the paintmaker system into duplicating itself. On their next circuit they bought the duplicate from puzzled Spirals.
They didn't bother with the clock factory, but they tried it again with the Begley cloth weavers.
Jeremy read the results in bitter amusement. The little mechanical spiders in the walls and roof of the Apollo Caverns could be snatched by handfuls. Spirals never interfered. But they wouldn't dig anywhere else! Of course it was a safety measure, a part of their program. One wouldn't want mechanical vermin eating caverns into every hill and mountain on Destiny. But where was the damn code? Stored in the teaching tapes? Or lost with Argos?
CARAVAN*GENEOLOGY
A handful of listings.
CARAVAN*GENEOLOGY* Shire restricted material. Access code?
CARAVAN*GENEOLOGY*Twerdahl T0~~ restricted material. Access code?
CARAVAN*GENEOLOGY*Tail Town restricted material. Access code?
Somebody somewhere was keeping genealogical records, and keeping them hidden.
He'd seen an ominous degree of continuity in the families that held the wagons. He remembered three generations in ibn-Rushd wagon. Outsiders not welcome? How could he learn?
AVALON
restricted material. Access code?
SPACE*SHUTTLE
Designs, vidtapes, test results, wow!
Six crashes in fifty-one years. No deaths mentioned. A vivid description of the tenth flight by the first humans to orbit. Say what? He'd read it and failed to believe it. He had to go back for it- The shuttle didn't have a pilot on board.
It was flown by onboard programs and a pilot on the ground. A box of varied design but rigidly exact size fit into the shuttle's rectangular cargo space. One such box was a cabin for two passengers and an array of tools.
Passengers had flown twice. That first pair of women went up to repair a satellite. The second pair... something political.
Jeremy felt massive disappointment. Had Mustafa ever said that he'd gone into space personally? He couldn't remember. But he'd daydreamed, from time to time, of persuading Mustafa to help him stow away aboard a shuttle. The space wasn't even there.
Harlow's words didn't make sense together. Maybe he'd remembered wrong. Try it anyway:
HYDRAULIC*EMPIRE
A political entity that controls its citizens has controlling the flow of water.
'Tuck my bird.'
'What?'
'Sorry.'
It was no trivial thing. Thousands of years of Eastern despotisms had been of that nature. Water was life. Dig a canal system, guard the canals. If a town opposes the government, block the canals, dam or pollute the river, confiscate the wheat or rice.
Two towns in a drought? Strip one of food, send it all to the second. Gain the second town's support; make deadly enemies of the first, but it won't matter, they will die.
Hydraulic empires never died. No matter how far they slid into decadence, they lived on until destroyed by barbarians beyond the border.
Hydraulic empires grew with the rising level of communications and transport. On Earth a moment came at which one government could rule the world, forever. Afterward the United Nations controlled not just water, but communications via comsats, electric power from sunpower satellites, and every resource that could be labeled 'limited.' The United Nations in its last days had launched the Avalon expedition- Last days?
He skimmed, picking it up little by little.
Ah. They'd grown their own barbarians. They'd been brought down by a coalition of populations throughout the solar system, each as great or greater than the population of Destiny. There followed two hundred years of stagnation before one civilization stretched from Sol to the far comets, one empire with a stranglehold on... what?
Reading between the lines- Everything. The Web controlled everything that flowed. Water, hydrogen, information, diet supplements, placement of orbiting habitats, and kinetic energy. Especially kinetic energy. What moved through interplanetary space averaged twenty klicks per second. Fusion explosions were nothing compared to that. Every habitat in motion within Sol system was assigned its orbit. Keep to it or be treated as a meteor.
In a spasm of creativity the Web had launched Argos and a third expedition- restricted material. Access code?
The thrust of the lecture was that Sol system had become one vast resource-control empire, sluggish, but able to make long plans. There weren't any barbarians because there was no outside. A million years from now it would still he in place.
Outsiders and their barbaric ideas would not be welcome in Sol system.
There was no home to return to.
'Jeremy.'
