like A.I. You know about that? What it means?'
'I'm afraid I've never heard the term.' Silk had been slapping Crane's wrapping against one of the rack's upright members. He put his foot on the transverse beam again and rewound the wrapping.
'It's just fancy talk for learning stuff. Everything I do, I learn a little better from doing it. Suppose I take a shot at one of those gods. If I miss it, I learn something from missing. If I hit it, I learn from that, too. So my shooting gets better all the time, and I don't waste shells firing at stuff I'm not going to hit except from dumb luck. You do the same thing.'
'Of course.'
'Nope! That's where you're wrong, Patera.' Hammerstone waggled his big steel forefinger in Silk's face. 'There's a lot that don't. Take a floater. It knows about not going too fast south, but it never does learn what it can float over and what it can't. The driver's got to learn about that for it. Or take a cat now. You ever try to teach a cat anything?'
'No,' Silk admitted. 'However I have-I ought to say I had-a bird that certainly appeared to learn. He learned my name and his own, for example.'
'I'm talking cats particularly. Back in the second year against Urbs, I found this kitty in a knocked-out farmhouse, and I kept her awhile just so's to have something to talk to and scrounge for. It was kind of nice, sometimes.'
'I know precisely what you mean, my son.'
'Well, we had a big toss gun sighted in up on a hilltop that summer, and when the battle got going we were firing it as fast as you ever seen anything like that done in your life, and the lieutenant hollering all the time for us to go faster. A couple times we had eight or nine rounds in the air at once. You ever man a toss gun, Patera?'
Silk shook his head.
'All right, suppose you just go up to one and open up the breech, cold, and shove a H.E. round in there, and shoot it off. Then you open the breech again and out comes the casing, see? And it'll be pretty hot.'
'I should imagine.'
'But, when you're keeping six, seven, eight rounds in the air all at once, that breech'll get so hot itself that it'll practically cook off a fresh round before you can pull the lanyard. And when that casing pops out, well, you could see it in the dark.
'So we're shooting and shooting and shooting, and hiking up more ammo and tossing it around and shooting some more till we were about ready to light up ourselves, and we got a pile of empty casings about so high off to the side, and here comes that poor little kitty and decides to sit down someplace where she can watch us, and she picks out that pile of casings and jumps right up. Naturally the ones at the top of the pile was hot enough to solder with.'
Silk nodded sympathetically.
'She gives a whoop and off she scoots, and I didn't see her again for two-three days.'
'She did return, though?' Silk felt somewhat heartened by the implication that Oreb might return as well.
'She did, but she wouldn't get anywheres near to one of those casings after that. I could show it to her, and maybe push a paw or her nose up against it to prove it was stone-cold, and it wouldn't make one m.o.a.'s difference. She'd learned those casings were hot, see. Patera? After that, she couldn't, ever learn that one wasn't, no matter how plain I showed it. She didn't have A.I., and there's people that's the same way, too, plenty of them.'
Silk nodded again. 'A theodidact once wrote that the wise learn from the experiences of others. Fools, he said, could learn only from experiences of their own, while the great mass of men never learn at all. By which I imagine that he meant that the great mass had no A.I.'
'You're right on target, Patera. But if you've got it, then the more experience somebody's got, the higher up you want him. So Sand's a sergeant, I'm a corporal, and Schist is a private. You said you had a couple questions. What's the other one?'
'Since we have a walk ahead of us, perhaps we'd better begin it now,' Silk suggested; and they set off together, walking side-by-side down the wide aisle between the wall and the rearmost row of racks. 'I wanted to ask you about Pas's provision to keep the cities independent. When you described it to me, it seemed eminently sound; I felt sure that it would function precisely as Pas intended.'
'It has,' Hammerstone confirmed. 'I said I thought it was pretty smart, and I still do.'
'But afterward, we spoke of a soldier such as yourself engaging three bios with slug guns like his own, and about the Civil Guard, and so forth. And it struck me that the arrangement you'd described, admirable as it may once have been, can hardly prevail now. If Wick has three thousand five hundred soldiers and our own city seven thousand, our city is twice as strong only if soldiers are the only men of value in war. If Guardsmen to the number of ten or twenty thousand are to fight as well-to say nothing of hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens-then may Wick not be as strong, overall, as Viron? Or stronger? What becomes of Pas's arrangement under such circumstances as these?'
Hammerstone nodded. 'That's something that's worrying everybody quite a bit. The way I see it, Pas was thinking mostly about the first two hundred years. Maybe the first two hundred and fifty. I think maybe he figured after that we'd have learned to live with each other or kill each other off, which isn't so dumb either. See, Patera, there weren't anywheres near so many bios at first, and they weren't big on making stuff. The cities were all there when they come, paved streets and shiprock buildings, mostly. Growing food was the big thing. So when they made stuff, it was mostly tools and clothes, and mud bricks so they could put up more buildings where Pas hadn't put any but they felt like they needed some.
'Stop right here, Patera, and I'll show you in a minute.'
Hammerstone halted before a pair of wide double doors, standing with his broad body in front of the line at which they met, clearly to block Silk's view of some object.''
'Like I was saying, back three hundred years ago there wasn't all that many bios. A lot of the work was done by chems. Us soldiers did some, but mostly it was civilians. Maybe you know some. They don't have armor and they've got different software.'
'They're largely gone now, I'm sorry to say,' Silk told him.
'Yeah, and that's one place where I feel like old Pas sort of slipped up. Me and a fem-chem could make a sprat. You know about that?'
'Certainly.'
'Each of us is hardwired with half the plans. But the thing is, it might take us a year or so if we're lucky, maybe twenty if we weren't, where you bios can do the main business any night after work.'
'Believe me,' Silk told him, 'I wish with all my heart that you were more like us, and we more like you. I have never been more sincere in my life.'
'Thanks. Well, anyhow, after awhile there got to be more bios and the tools were better, mostly 'cause there was still a lot of chems around to make them. Also, there was quite a few slug guns floating around in all the cities that'd had wars, 'cause the soldiers that had owned them were dead. A slug gun isn't all that tough to make, really. You got to have some bar stock and a lathe for the barrel, and a milling machine's nice. But there's nothing a milling machine can do that somebody careful can't do about as good with a set of files and a hand drill, if he's got the time.'
Hammerstone included the entire armory m a gesture. 'So here we are. Not near as steady as we used to be, and all set to lay the blame on poor old Pas the first time we lose.'
'It seems a pity,' Silk said pensively.
'Chin up, Patera. Right here's the best thing I got to show you, you being a augur, so I saved it for the last, or almost the last, anyway. Have you ever heard of what they - call Pas's seal?'
Silk's eyes went wide with astonishment. 'Certainly I have. It's mentioned in the Pardon. 'Do my will, live in peace, multiply, and do not disturb my seal. Thus you shall escape my wrath.' '
Hammerstone threw back his head in another grin. 'Have you ever seen it?'
'Why no. Pas's seal is-to the best of my knowledge at any rate-largely a metaphor. If I were to shrive you, for example, anything I learned during your shriving would be under the seal of Pas, never to be divulged to a third party without your express permission.'
'Well, have a look,' Hammerstone said, and stepped to one side.
