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empty eye-sockets met her gaze. She turned abruptly and motioned for them to
follow her. She opened the wide doors of a shed near the gate, sliding the
doors along polished tracks. "I can show you more of Sitnalta."
In the dimness of the shed, Mayer pushed and tugged a large wheeled
contraption, a steam-engine car, out onto the hex-cobbled street. When no one
moved to assist her, she shouted, "Don't just gawk at me, you barbarians! Help
me get the vehicle out. Great Maxwell! How do you expect us to travel?"
As Vailret helped push, the iron-shod wooden wheels of the vehicle
rumbled on the cobblestones. In the full light, Vailret thought the machine
looked magnificent. A shining silver boiler took up most of the car's back,
but the chassis rode low to the ground, balanced so that the heavy
water-filled boiler did not lift the front wheels up in the air.
Mayer touched the metal of the tank and jerked back her hand, blowing
on her fingers. "Good -- pressure's still up, and the fires are burning.
Someone must have just used it." She dumped coal from a bucket into the orange
maw of a furnace beneath the water. Steam hissed out of a pressure valve in
the back of the boiler.
"Come on, seat yourselves! We're wasting the pressure buildup."
Delrael hobbled to the side of the vehicle and swung his stiff leg up
into the seat. Paenar climbed in without any assistance after Bryl had led him
to the car. Vailret hopped in the back, near the boiler.
Even before they had settled in, Mayer twisted a crank that released
steam through the piston chambers, turning the gears. She jerked locking pins
out from the wheels, and the car rattled forward over the cobblestones.
Vailret grinned in excitement. Thick white steam belched from the mouth
of their smokestack. Mayer pulled a rope that caused a shrill whistle to
blast, hurting their ears. The steam-engine car clattered over the streets.
Mayer wrestled with two steering levers that pulled the front wheels one way
or the other.
"This is marvelous!" Vailret said. "It's like magic."
Mayer corrected him sharply. "Not magic -- technology."
The pressure valve in the back of the boiler popped open, shrieking out
excess steam, and then closed itself again. Paenar sat in silence, bouncing up
and down as the car rumbled along the cobblestones.
The steam-engine vehicle traveled too swiftly for Vailret to take in
all the wondrous things around them, but Mayer pointed out the more prominent
structures.
"We create all of our materials there, in the manufactories." She
pointed to massive buildings where smoke stacks dumped thick steam and black
smoke into the air. "That one makes ingots of steel for us to use in our
inventions. We also harvest natural gas from underground, and mine minerals
from the sea. You'll find a great deal of gold used in some inventions, since
gold is abundant in the sea water."
As the car passed by, other Sitnaltans stared at them from the windows
of tall buildings. Mayer pointed at the web of wires stretching from house to
house, connecting all the buildings together.
"Over those wires, I was able to inform all of Sitnalta of your
arrival. Instantly." Mayer smiled to herself.
"I could do the same thing with a sending or a message stick," Bryl
countered.
"But you would need magic. Our telegraph runs on _electricity_."
"And he should be ashamed of using magic?" Vailret said.
"I certainly would not be proud of it. The Sorcerers nearly destroyed
Gamearth with century after century of their senseless wars. And then they
abandoned us with only a few worthless Sentinel representatives to help out."
She turned and looked up at the tall buildings. "All you see here in
Sitnalta _we_ have done. Human characters -- with no help from Sentinels.
Magic may be the crutch of the Sorcerers, but we have developed science, we
have invented tools and machines to do everything the magic used to do. We
have discovered the true scientific Rules by which the world works. We can
well be proud."
Bryl muttered to himself. "I'd like to see her create the Barrier River
with a machine!"
But Vailret gazed around in awe. What she said struck him on a sore
spot -- these were human characters, and they had accomplished much of what he
had always thought impossible. Perhaps he could learn from them, study how
they worked their miracles and be able to create a different kind of magic by
himself. Even without Sorcerer blood.
Mayer pushed down on a pedal at her feet and released another lever,
bringing the steam-engine vehicle to rest. Vailret heard a different hissing
that had been hidden by the din of their own car. "Look there!" Mayer pointed
down another side street. "One of my father's inventions."
They saw a three-wheeled contraption with a wide spinning brush under
its belly. The machine chugged along, driven by a smaller steam engine,
hissing and whistling to itself from its pressure valves. The wide rotating
brush scrubbed the cobblestones, devouring all the dirt and grit from between
the cracks.
"Sitnalta has ten of those machines to keep our streets clean."
She released the foot pedal, engaged the gears once more, and they
rolled onward.
The vehicle reached a broad rectangular plaza that stood empty in the
early afternoon. An ornate fountain spurted in the center of the square,
running an elaborate water clock. Mayer pulled the steam-engine car to a halt
and squinted at the level of water in the clock. She locked the pins in the
wheels and hopped out, running around to the back of the boiler and opening a
red valve that spilled the excess steam pressure into the air. The car made a
sigh as it shut down, but steam burbled out of the smokestack for several more
minutes.
Vailret could think of nothing to say; his mind had been overwhelmed by
the marvelous sights and Mayer's enthusiasm. He climbed out of the car and
went to the fountain to see better, staring at the spraying water and at the
clock. His ears still rang from the steam engine's loud noises.
In the pool four large, clumsy-looking mechanical fish puttered around
and around in perfect circles. He stuck his hand in the water, but the
mechanical fish paid him no heed.
"The leaders of Sitnalta will be here momentarily," Mayer said.
"The leaders?" Bryl asked. "Who runs the city?"
"The people of Sitnalta decide for themselves what we will do. We are a
weighted democracy. Each character has at least one vote, but those who have
done the most for Sitnalta have the most votes. It is very fair -- the ones
who work hard for our city have a significant say in the decisions we make,
and those who have done little, say little. In an ordinary democracy, the vote
of a vagrant is valued as highly as that of a great inventor. And that just
isn't logical."
"Why don't you tell us how you determine these weighted votes?" Paenar
seemed to know the answer already.
Mayer looked at him as if he had asked something obvious. "By the
number of inventions a character has contributed, of course. My father Dirac
has designed seventy new inventions for the betterment of Sitnalta, and
therefore he has seventy votes. I have five, soon to be six."
"But what about the characters who aren't inventors?" Bryl asked.
Mayer snorted. "Useless people -- who cares what they think?"
Paenar smiled to himself.
At some unheard signal, dozens of characters emerged from the doorways
of buildings around the square and filed toward the fountain. They stared at
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