Into the New Millennium: Trailblazing Tales From Analog Science Fiction and Fact, 2000 - 2010 (16 page)

Buridan tells him how the market provost had seen the cheating of the butcher. "And a sailor, high upon a mast, may spy landfall—or another ship—from a greater distance. So also, a captain approaching battle. Perhaps herbalists may study a woodland to see if the herbs they desire be there or no, and so save themselves the trouble of a fruitless walk."

"But I meant what use it may serve in science."

"Why . . . none I can think of. But you must tell them of this in Oxford."

"Surely! It presents a pretty problem in
perspectiva
!"

"No, Will. I mean, England himself must know of it. If the battle-captains of England and France can each spy the other's movements well before the contest is joined, there can be no more surprise on the field; and since success in war depends much on surprise, this device will make war that much less likely."

Heytesbury agrees. Although it is of no matter to him whether Plantagenet and Valois make war on each other, it sometimes happens that the common folk come to harm, the Peace of God notwithstanding.

Later, Nicole tells Albrecht and the Saxon shrugs. "It makes naught," he says. "If a captain cannot find victory through surprise, he will do so through numbers. When all own a
blickglas
, armies will but grow greatah."

The day comes at last.

Albrecht has suggested that they test both the same
quantity
of gravity and the same
intensity
of gravity. So they have made three balls: a steel sphere, a second possessing twice the weight, and a larger fashioned of wood but of the same weight as the first.

Heytesbury sends Oswy off to fetch a balance beam while Albrecht and Nicole arrange a table with pen, ink, "scrape-paper" that can be razored for re-use, and crack-pots to hold the paper down in the breeze.

The Paris Master, for his part, watches with growing excitement. This is it. This is the thing. This is what all of them—The Wonderful Doctor, The Angelic Doctor, The Universal Doctor, Pilgrim Pierre—had been striving toward. Not merely experience carefully noted, but experience artfully arranged. Bacon's
experientia optima
.

He stands like a man afflicted by a basilisk while about him his students direct the servants filling and carrying the flasks to where Heytesbury has set his balance beams. When the first ball—the smaller steel ball—rolls down the ramp, Buridan tells off the time using his own pulse, well aware that it races from the drama of the moment. The ball attains each mark at equal heartbeats. He studies Albrecht. The long, lean Saxon pretends to stoicism, but Buridan sees his hands clench and unclench as he waits for the results. Heytesbury writes some numbers on scraped paper and hands the flasks to Oswy to empty back into the basin.

The next ball is the wooden one—larger than the first, but of the same weight so that its
gravitas speciens
is less. Heytesbury has expressed
gravitas speciens
as the ratio of the total gravity of the body to its volume. If velocity is proportional to the difference in specific gravity between the body and the resisting air, this ball ought to roll slower.

Heytesbury announces the result, to the surprise of the students and masters and the indifference of the servants. (Rolling balls? Weighing water? It is all one to them with the madness of scholars.)

Two balls with equal
quantities
but differing
intensities
of gravity have fallen in the same time. Now it is the turn of the larger steel ball. This one possesses twice the gravity of the first. Nicole hands it up to the servant sitting atop the ladder. He and Albrecht ensure that the master faucet is closed before they open the others. They lay the cam lever in place so that when the ball is released, the master faucet will open. If Aristotle is correct, this ball will fall in half the time as the first. If not, then Philoponus is correct.

The others watch with their breath caught, but Buridan already knows what the result will be. Albrecht's intuition is correct. If anything, the young Saxon had not gone far enough. All heavy bodies must fall at the same speed, regardless of the longitude
or
the latitude of their gravity.

But if the principle governing their fall is constant, it cannot inhere in the spheres, which are varied, for a variable thing cannot cause a constant result. But if not
gravity
, then what?

The ball rolls; the water runs into the flasks.

"
Fui
," Buridan whispers, "
et vidi experiri
."

That night, the Paris Master cannot sleep. Restless, he rises and paces his room. From down the hall, the sound of Heytesbury's snores. Through the window, the more silent sounds of night. A dog barks somewhere. An owl swoops in a hush of feathers on some incautious mouse.

Earths and waters fall; airs and fires rise. That much is certain. Put dirt and water in a jar and shake it until everything is mixed. Then set it aside. Soon, the air will layer on the water, and the water on the earth. So has Aristotle's hypothesis of natural place been demonstrated by contrived experience.

It is not reasonable that all bodies, of whatever weight, seek their natural place at the same speeds. Yet, he has seen for himself that it is so. And now that he has seen the matter, as it were from a different perspective, he wonders why so many people had thought otherwise for so long. Take two identical bodies and drop them side by side. They will fall with the same speed. Now let them fall closer to one another, and the same result would obtain. Now let only the most minute gap separate them, and still they fall at the same speed. What nonsense to suppose that if they were now joined the joined body would suddenly fall twice as fast!

He picks up the optical tube and smacks his palm with it as he paces.
I will become as bad as William for pacing
, he thinks.

"Suppose,
secundum imaginationem
," he wonders aloud, "that God has annihilated all material in the sublunar region. . . ." He checks himself, recalling his own reasoning that motion in the perfect and unchanging celestial realm is due to the same impetus as violent local motion. "Suppose God created a void space," he amends his thought experiment. "And suppose there is a single part of earth introduced into it." The particle of earth should move to the center of the world—but
where would that center lie?
Wherever the particle is. So it would not move, unless it already had a motion, in which case it would continue to move indefinitely. So let it be at rest. Now let God introduce a second part of earth at rest elsewhere in the world. What manner of motion would result?

Would the second particle of earth rush to the first; or the first to the second? But Nicole has told him of the relativity of motion—an inspired insight! There is no privileged place, so . . . Would each particle rush toward the other, as Aristotle taught different Worlds would do?

Buridan pauses by the window. The night air is cool. A full moon casts everything below into a faerie light of soft, gray shadows. He extends the optical tube and spies on the night. He sees a ghostly dog—perhaps the one he had heard barking earlier—and follows it until it disappears around a corner. On the next street, the night watch patrols. Buridan follows them with the look-glass as they appear through one alleyway after another. Their helmets glow creamy-white in the moonlight. He comes to a lighted window, and sees within a young man and a woman in apparent discord.

Time for bed, he thinks and turns away.

But, no. Perhaps one more, something to gaze on before sleep. He scans the shadow-gathered night and spies topping the church of Our Lady of Paris, the smooth, perfect face of the Moon upon the lunar sphere.

He turns the optical tube to spy it.

So began the
Anno Mirabile
, pregnant with all the years that followed:

Albrecht's observation of the phases of Venus, Oresme's experiences with steam jets, and his blending of impetus and inertia into three natural laws of motion. Buridan's debates with Blasius of Parma and Nicolas of Autrecourt. The printing machine of Georges of Paris. The publication of Oresme's heliocentric system of the world on the very day he was consecrated Bishop of Lisieux. Buridan's famous visit to Avignon and his demonstrations to his old friend, now Pope Clement VI, and to Guy de Chaulliac, the pope's physician, during which he confounded his Aristotelian opponents in those public
obligatios
later titled "Dialectic Concerning Two World Systems."

Later still would come deChaulliac's
small-seer
and the incredible discoveries he made during the Great Death; Marsilius of Inghen's infinitesimal algebra; Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa's quicksilver thermometer and his creation of the first authentic vacuum; Da Vinci's discovery of Uranus and his investigations into electricity with batteries and twitching frogs; Francis Bacon's telephone; and the amazing plethora of inventions—from light bulbs to moving pictures—that spilled from the workshops of the acerbic Galileo Galilei. And not least of all, in 1682, the successful landing on the Moon of the rocket ship
Buridan
, flown by Captain Sir Isaac Newton, and propelled thither by the self-same forces first described by Oresme in his
Experientia cum sufflatores
.

What happens next.

If you stand on the mountain peak of any great age and gaze toward the past, you may spy in the purpled west the jagged range of another great age.

But what if you look to the east?

Barry B. Longyear

I had originally intended these narratives to address the more significant inquiries Guy Shad and I worked in our time together in the Exeter office of Artificial Beings Crimes. An incautious comment I made in my chronicle of Shad's death in "The Hangingstone Rat," however, touched upon my suspicion Shad might have his rescued engrams imprinted temporarily on a celebrity look-alike bio of British actor Nigel Bruce while his mallard duck replacement meat suit matured. Nigel Bruce, of course, was known primarily for his role as the bumbling Dr. Watson in the grayscale Sherlock Holmes vids of the mid twentieth century. I deduced this attire would amuse Shad to no end due to my police replacement bio strongly resembling Basil Rathbone, the actor who played Sherlock Holmes in the same series.

Since Shad regarded me as something of a foil for his humor, due to his former career as the American comic advert insurance duck on the telly, he could not possibly resist the opportunities for silly situations with us thus configured. This aside in one of my accounts, however, produced a rash of queries about the cases we worked thus resembling Holmes and Watson,
neé
© Rathbone and Bruce. Not just the facts, mind you. These inquiring minds wanted to know down-to-the-last-flipping-detail, please and thank you very much.

Shortly after he moved into his new feathers, I discussed it with Shad. As always he had little interest in anything not involving movies, acting, his feline friend Nadine, or solving the current case. When I pointed out to him that the original Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Aurhur Conan Doyle were narrated by Dr. Watson, hence rightfully Shad should author our adventures so made up, he looked up from his case file and said, "You know, Jaggs, despite my many quills, I've never been much of one for writing."

We were on three matters together with Shad in his Watson meat suit. The first of these inquiries I have titled "The Purloined Labradoodle." This inquiry initially had nothing to do with Watson or a Labradoodle. It initiated actually in relation to improperly imprinted puppies, an imprisoned parakeet, and a parrot profoundly perturbed.

"Limp stone," muttered the parrot darkly.

I finished stocking the shelves in back of the small shop counter with boxes of birdseed, tins of dog food, and little packets of catnip. The counter and display case were festooned with colorful leashes of assorted sizes; plastic bones; rubber mice; squeaky toys; scratching posts; king–, queen–, and knave-sized pet beds and such. The walls were hung with posters concerning the various hideous diseases cats and dogs could contract, complete with expensive preventative treatments that could be purchased right here, should the shipments ever arrive. Shad and I, you see, were undercover operating a pet shop in The Strand, Village of Lympstone, east bank of the River Exe south of Exeter, Devon. I was the pet shop owner and DS Shad had traded his cherished Nigel Bruce meat suit in on what budget-strapped ABCD had left over in the way of undercover pet bios: a rather timeworn parrot.

We were, as it happened, an insignificant part of a rather large task force attempting to crack down on a UK ring of swindlers who were representing real household pets as amdroid bios capable of taking full human imprints with rather appalling consequences for bargain seekers who would lose a good bit of their savings, all of their natural bodies, and most of their minds in the process. The main thrusts of the task force effort were in London, Manchester, and Bristol. Shad was being cranky on two accounts: first, because he felt we had been left out of the big show; and second, because he wasn't getting to do his Dr. Watson, which he really wanted to do.

Nevertheless, the pets used by the perpetrators came from somewhere and covering pet stores was a logical investigative consequence. From what we could observe from our post in Lympstone, though, it didn't appear to be a well coordinated operation—something Shad was beginning to refer to as a "clusterbugger." In any event, we were on our third day of operations and our shipments of kittens, puppies, and much of our equipment and supplies had yet to arrive. No bait, no customers, no suspects. I looked from the window at the quaint village street, and it was raining. There went our chance for someone blind drunk mistaking us for a tube station and wandering in.