Tycho had spent his share of time in conferences, both phys-side and sys-side. They all came with their exciting parts and their boring parts. They all came with peaks that left him completely rapt, and valleys that were so excruciatingly boring that he had, on more than one occasion, feigned illness to step out of a talk or away from a panel discussion or a lecture.
This was different, though.
-It wasn’t that it didn’t have its peaks and valleys, for it surely did. There were more sciences, he had been reminded several times, than astronomy. He knew it, too. There was no reason that the LV and home System would not benefit from a knowledge share on biology or language, and certainly there could be much to learn about the construction of an embedded world.
+It wasn’t that it didn’t have its peaks and valleys, for it surely did. There were more sciences, he had been reminded several times, than astronomy. He knew it, too. There was no reason that the LVs and home System would not benefit from a knowledge share on biology or language, and certainly there could be much to learn about the construction of an embedded world. All that knowledge, all that history — so many centuries! — was enough to convince him of the reality of the Artemisians, or at least enough that he could drown out that niggling voice in the back of his head thinking in terms of dreams. There was more than enough to learn, so that wasn’t it.
It was that, even during the boring parts, there was Stolon sitting directly across the table from him, the thirdracer looking just as antsy and restless as he felt. He knew that he and Stolon could talk for hours about the stars, that they would if only given the chance, and yet he had to sit here and, however rightfully so, listen to Why Ask Questions grill the Artemisians on parallel evolution.
Throughout the talks, no matter the science, there lay a thread of five thousand years of history. Hundreds of years would go by, and then a sudden jump in knowledge. Biology, language, astronomy, psychology, physics; sciences hard and soft would wind up with sudden injections of knowledge throughout each of the convergences.
Except, he kept finding himself thinking. That’s not all.
It would be of no surprise for a sudden leap of knowledge to occur every handful of decades. Some new way of looking at the world brought about by some spurt of genius, even in the functionally infinite.
What was surprising was these renaissances in all sciences that had happened a total of five times that he’d counted so far. Three for convergences, that made sense, but what of the other two?
-This wasn’t supposed to be his job. This wasn’t supposed to be any of their jobs, here in the DMZ. History as a topic belonged to the emissaries sent to Artemis.
+This wasn’t supposed to be his job. This wasn’t supposed to be any of their jobs, here in the DMZ. History as a topic belonged to the emissaries sent to Artemis.
And so he sat and he waited until there was a time that he could speak, and even when he probably should have been paying attention, he spent much of his effort on trying to figure out how best to word his question in such a way that wouldn’t get him in trouble with the Artemisians or, worse, True Name.
His cue came in the form of Why Ask Questions racking her sheets of notes into a neat pile before slouching back in her chair.
“I have a quick question about science in general, if I may,” he said, preempting comments from any of the others.
@@ -66,7 +66,7 @@“Well, I’ll leave the politics to you all,” he said, grinning and shaking his head. “I’m going to write my own note while we have a bit of time.”