She stopped, then, embarrassed. He could see how her head lifted and nostrils dilated, as if resenting him. After all, he thought, she came from a breed which for centuries had given, not received charity.
So he chose his words with care: “It has been less our virtue than our good fortune, Doflita. We suffered less than most in the War of Judgment, and the fact of Judgment, and the fact of our being chiefly Islanders prevented our population from outrunning the sea’s rich ability to feed us. So we—no, we did not retain any lost
ancestral arts. There are none. But we did re-create an ancient attitude, a way of thinking, which has made the difference—science.”
She crossed herself. “The atom!” she breathed, drawing from him.
“No, no, Doflita,” he protested. “So many nations we have discovered lately believe that science was the cause of the old world’s ruin. Or else they think that it was a collection of cut-and-dried formulas for making tall buildings or talking at a distance. But neither belief is true. The scientific method is only a means of learning. It is a. . . a perpetual starting afresh. And that is why you people here in Meyco can help us as much as we can help you, why we have sought you out and will come knocking hopefully at your doors again in the future.”
She frowned, though something began to glow within her. “I do not understand,” she said.
He cast about for an example. At last he pointed to a series of small holes in the balcony rail. “What used to be here?” he asked.
“Why . . . I do not know. It has always been like that.”
“I think I can tell you. I have seen similar things elsewhere. It was a wrought-iron grille. But it was pulled out a long time ago and made into weapons or tools. No?”
“Quite likely,” she admitted. “Iron and copper have grown very scarce. We have to send caravans across the whole land, to Támico ruins, in great peril from bandits and barbarians, to fetch our metal. Time was when there were iron rails within a kilometer of this place. Don Carlos has told me.”
He nodded. “Just so. The ancients exhausted the world. They mined the ores, burned the oil and coal, eroded the land until there was nothing left. I exaggerate, of course. There are still mineral deposits here and there. But not enough. The old civilization used up all the capital, so to speak. Now sufficient forest and soil have come back so the world could try to reconstruct the machine culture—except that there aren’t enough minerals and fuels. For centuries men have been forced to tear up the old artifacts, if there was to be any metal at all. By and large, the knowl
edge of the ancients hasn’t been lost; it has simply become unusable, because we are so much poorer than they.”
He leaned forward, earnestly. “But knowledge and discovery do not depend on wealth,” he said. “Perhaps because we did not have so much metal to cannibalize in the Islands, we turned elsewhere. The scientific method is just as applicable to wind and sun and living matter as it was to oil, iron, or uranium. By studying genetics we learned how to create seaweeds, plankton, fish that would serve our purposes. Scientific forest management gives us adequate timber, organic-synthesis bases, some fuel. The sun pours down energy which we know how to concentrate and use. Wood, ceramics, even stone can replace metal for most purposes. The wind, through such principles as the airfoil or the Venturi law or the Hilsch tube, supplies force, heat, refrigeration; the tides can be harnessed. Even in its present early stage, paramathematical psychology helps control population, as well as— No, I am talking like an engineer now, falling into my own language. I apologize.
“What I wanted to say was, that if we can only have the help of other people, such as yourselves, on a world-wide scale, we can match our ancestors, or surpass them. . . not in their own ways, which were often short-sighted and wasteful, but in achievements uniquely ours—”