Plao 1, Plao 2, Plao 3. “Days” were daez, “nights” niots, but weeks did not exist. Instead, each mont was divided into three tenites. Second Plao 2 referred to the second tenite of the second mont of planting.
Years were called sikes, and once Kuznetsov learned that, he quickly found out what year it was—A.T. 301, meaning “301 sikes after the troubles,” which told him nothing at all.
Gradually he acquired a vocabulary and became able to converse.
As soon as he could walk again, he began helping the old man with his experiments, and he made an astonishing discovery. This wrinkled, comic-opera looking gaffer possessed a spectacular scientific genius. He worked without electricity, without engineering—instruments and tools were fashioned with pathetic crudeness—without chemistry, without physics except for an unaccountable precision in lens grinding, and he accomplished miracles.
Kuznetsov also learned that the old man was a person of transcendent importance in this strange land, which was called Lant. He was Med of Lant, and visitors to his laboratory bowed to him as though he were a high nobleman, which he actually turned out to be. Everyone called him the Old Med, an astonishing license with a person of his rank. It indicated at the same time affection, awe, and reverence.
While Kuznetsov’s education went forward slowly, the Old Med was making an astonishing discovery of his own. This young stranger was an ideal research assistant. He was a college-trained engineer, and despite the lack of almost everything to work with, he could build instruments and tools with a precision the old man had not even imagined. Further, in a land where very little was known about anything, the knowledge of even a college undergraduate was beyond price.
The old man quickly gave Kuznetsov honored status as his principal assistant, and, when difficulties arose over what to call him—Kuznetsov naturally didn’t want the same name blighting his existence in this new incarnation—the Med shared a name of his own with him. He called him Egarn.
One fact had been burned into Kuznetsov’s consciousness indelibly. He could never go back. The attempt to return had come within an eyelash of killing him. Wherever he was, and however he had got here, it had been a one-way trip.
He savored his new name—Egarn, he liked the sound of it—and gradually he began to grasp the possibility of a career in this strangely primitive Peerdom of Lant. It was already evident that the Old Med wanted him to continue his research after he died. The newly christened Egarn resolved to accept that legacy as a sacred trust. He would devote his life to advancing the Old Med’s discoveries. Genuine scientific and technological achievement would be impossible with such limited resources, but there were many simple inventions and discoveries he could make that would transform his newly adopted land. Just for a beginning, he intended to give its people the germ theory of disease. If he could find anything to use for wire, he might even invent electricity.
His techniques would be as crude as those of a medieval alchemist, but his alchemy would work. There would be no meaningless dissolving and crystallizing and coagulating such as occupied the old alchemists for entire lifetimes. His discoveries would have genuine value, and his inventions would be aimed at specific needs.
In return, he confidently expected distinctions far beyond anything he had dreamed of at Mount Harwell College. Already he was accorded enormous respect as the Med of Lant’s assistant. As his successor, the highest material rewards a primitive land could offer would be his for the asking or—he had quickly grasped the role of the elite in this Peerdom of Lant—for the taking. He could marry whenever he found a girl he liked. Any daughter of commoners would be eager to mate with the Med of Lant’s assistant. He would pass his days in the Old Med’s comfortable workroom, a rambling log building in a delightfully rustic setting. When he wanted a vacation from work, there would be tramps in the woods with a fascinating, strangely distorted botany and biology to study, rides about the countryside—the Peer of Lant’s own stables provided a horse whenever he wanted one—or an occasional wild porkley hunt with lance or bow and arrow. He never could have achieved such serenity in the frenzy of twenty-first century America. Gradually Kuznetsov—now comfortably answering to the name Egarn—began to look forward to it.
Of course no society, no social structure, offered Elysium, and this one had some ominous imperfections. The old woman with the disfigured face had been mercilessly whipped. Kuznetsov never learned why or by whom, but very early he grasped the fact that Lant’s was a slave economy, and both slaves and commoners could be—and often were—treated with unbelievable harshness.
But the only commoners Kuznetsov came in contact with were the Old Med’s trusted servants. They received not only kindness and consideration but even affection, and they gave a full measure of devotion in return. What happened elsewhere had nothing whatsoever to do with him.
CHAPTER 3
EGARN (2)
The Old Med remained the central figure in Egarn’s life as long as he lived, and they came to love each other dearly. The gift to Egarn of one of the Med’s names actually signified a type of informal adoption. The Old Med would have gladly bestowed both of his names on him, but the society’s rigid class distinctions made that impossible. No one but a born aristocrat could bear two names.
Time passed, and Egarn learned to live and survive in a primitive society where technology and scientific thought had reverted to their medieval infancies—with one puzzling exception. The Old Med’s knowledge of optics vastly exceeded the college physics Egarn had mastered. Lenses, which were called len, singular, and lens, plural, were ground with a skill far beyond anything Egarn had imagined. Lant’s prentice len grinders had to invest years of hard work to master the rudiments and much longer to become expert.
The most important len was called the Honsun Len. It had a wavy surface that required consummate grinding skill to produce, and it had peculiar scientific properties that were beyond the scope of Egarn’s undergraduate knowledge of physics to describe. This len was the principal component in the odd contraption that had sucked Vladislav Kuznetsov out of the park.
The Old Med had been experimenting with the Honsun Len for years, grinding different shapes and sizes of len on the Honsun Len principle and putting them together in combinations that produced very strange effects indeed, and he conducted experiment after experiment for no other reason than to find out what would happen. One arrangement of lens started fires that almost destroyed his workroom. Another shattered fragile objects. Light flickered from one when it was suspended in darkness—an illumination as fleeting as the flash of a firefly but far more mysterious. The Old Med kept trying different combinations until finally one of them made small objects disappear.
He repeated that experiment numerous times over a period of sikes, but he failed utterly in his attempts to find out where the things went. As he increased the size of his apparatus, he could make larger and larger objects disappear. Then it occurred to him to reverse the lens. This time the opposite happened. Things began to appear out of nowhere—ordinary things, such as rocks and debris, and utterly strange things the med had never seen before. Once an unusual bird materialized before his astonished eyes. It flew about the laboratory until a server accidentally let it escape.
That gave him the idea for the great experiment of his life. He decided to make something vanish and then bring it back. First he tried a young porkley. It vanished, but when the lens were reversed, nothing happened. The Old Med deduced that it had run off when it got to wherever the lens sent it. He tried the experiment again and tied the porkley’s legs together.
This was the pig that landed in Vladislav Kuznetsov’s lap. It also ran off—because Kuznetsov released it—and when the lens were reversed, the strange power they controlled snatched Kuznetsov.
As Egarn,
