Creative Commons – The Plainsrunner – Chapter Twenty-Nine

Continuing the serial release of The Plainsrunner under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license – (CC-BY-SA).

Tallgrass continues his education..

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Chapter Twenty-Nine – Education

School was good for Tallgrass, now that the bullies were taken care of. He felt a little uncertain about that. He thought maybe he should have handled it more on his own rather than relying on his mother and other grown-ups. She herself had told him that he would be facing things like that his whole life, so maybe he should be learning how to do it on his own. But now she was telling him that this was part of the learning, and that one of the things he learned was that it’s good to have friends to help you. “You were outnumbered,” she said. “We were just evening things up.”

That was good enough for Tallgrass. She was the smartest person he knew, so he accepted her explanation. He was sure he would understand it better as he grew up and learned more. For now, though, he had other learning to do. He enjoyed the reading and the arithmetic, although Sage already had him started on them before he went to school. He found out that that wasn’t the case for most of the children, and he soon learned that they didn’t appreciate him “showing off.” He stopped volunteering answers every time the teacher asked, and waited to be called upon, and everyone was happier.

It was a lesson worth learning because the situation was replicated with every subject they studied. Either he already knew a lot about it from his mother or from his own reading, or as soon as it came up he went to the library and got into it. His performance in the requirements – tests and other assessments – was always more than adequate. Academically, his school career was brilliant. But he tried to not let that set him apart socially. He was always ready to help the other students, but unless they showed an interest, he never went beyond the school curriculum. And if they marveled at his grades, he just shrugged and said, “My mom helps me.”

As for the other students, most of them came around in time. There were a few who could never accept him, or his friend Seagrass, because they were outsiders. Never mind that they were both born in the city, they weren’t born to the right people. And there were some who resented him because he was smart, even though he went out of his way to not show off. He was smart and they weren’t, and they blamed him for that. Another lesson for Tallgrass: you can’t please everyone.

Every year they put him forward for things. Class president. Captain of the debating team. Star in the school play. He turned them all down and eventually they stopped asking, but it took a while. It was obvious to them. He was smart, good looking and athletic – all his youthful running paid off – and he was likable. They didn’t understand why he didn’t fulfill their expectations. He made excuses, like he was too busy. He made rationalizations, like someone else should have the chance. But the real reason was that he just didn’t want to. He had a visceral reaction when faced with it, then had to find reasonable explanations afterward. Somehow he knew that putting himself above and in front of people was not for him.

Something he did go in for was the polo team. Right from the early years when it was just a mass of yelling kids whacking a little ball and various painful body parts with short mallets, all the way up to very good university teams, Tallgrass was always one of the first to sign up. When he was talking to Sage one day about his affinity for the game, she said, “Well Tally, you do a lot of running in that game, and you are a Plainsrunner after all.”

He never forgot that. In spite of the continuing discrimination, he always proudly embraced his heritage. Sometimes it might have been easier to pretend, but he never took the easy way. After all, his mother was a Plainsrunner, and as far as he was concerned, she was the greatest and bravest person in the city, maybe the world. The more he could be like her, the better.

As the school years progressed, his educational horizons expanded. Now, in addition to the basics, he was learning about bigger things. There was the geography of his world. He already knew it was a planet among others orbiting an orange dwarf star. His mother the astronomer told him that. Now he was learning more about it. Along with the geography came the geology and the geopolitics.

“There’s just one big continent,” he was telling her over dinner, “and one little one. Other than some volcanic islands and atolls, that’s it.” He was excited and, even though she already knew most of what he was telling her, she let him continue without interruption or correction. “And the little one is going to crash into the big one in about ten million years.”

“Oh my,” she said. “That will be a big crash.”

They had a good laugh at that, before Tallgrass explained how slow the collision would be. “Not even as fast as our hooves or fingernails grow. All it’s going to do is make a new mountain range. Or at least that’s what my teacher says.”

“Is that all?” she said with a smile. “And then we’ll have one big continent. I wonder what that will be like.”

“That’s what I asked,” he said.

“And what did they say?”

“Not much different from now, really. The continent is already so big that the changes will be minor.”

“That makes sense,” she said. “Some small changes to the ocean currents, maybe.”

“Yes,” he said. “And the atmosphere too, she said.”

“Your teacher.”

“Yes. But it won’t change the climate that much, other than right where they come together. Our continent will still be mostly desert.”

“Because it’s mostly too far from the ocean for the rain to reach it, right?”

“That’s right. We have wetter climates near the coast, then a wide band of grasslands, then the desert in the middle.”

“And that’s why we only live around the outside, isn’t it?”

“Yes. We could never cross the desert. It’s too big. We can’t even fly across, because no airplane can fly that far without refueling.”

“Hm,” she said.

“What?”

“Impossible you say?”

He grinned at her. This was one of their mental adventures. How to do something that’s difficult, or even impossible. He said, “That’s what they say,” and they settled in for a long, far-reaching postprandial discussion, as they often did. Moonshadow was used to clearing up around them while they hardly noticed. One minute their dirty dishes were there, and the next there was a plate of cookies.

So that was why almost all of their commerce was coastal. Most of the interior was impassable, and what wasn’t was sparsely inhabited by superstitious people who eschewed most modern technology. You couldn’t do enough trade with them to justify building roads, even if they would have allowed it. And they certainly weren’t going to let you build an airport. So their civilization consisted of a ring of settlements around the outside of the continent, the most distant of which were nearly half a world away, farther when you had to follow the coastline. You could get there by boat, which was how most of their goods were moved. You could fly, which is how most people traveled. Or in some cases you could take the coastal road, or what there was of it.

It was an ambitious project, undertaken cooperatively by the many jurisdictions, to build a continuous highway all the way around the continent. What would in effect be all the way around their world. Due to the size of the project, it was still less than half done. The engineering problems were of an appropriate size. Mountain ranges a thousand kilometers across. Long inlets that would mean going hundreds of kilometers to get around them, and prohibitive distances to bridge them. There was one five thousand kilometer section of coast that was all swamp. This was one of the things that fascinated Tallgrass. The more he learned about it, the more interested he got. If he was getting out of school now, he would probably go to work on The Road.

Tallgrass inherited his mother’s intelligence. And his father’s. That’s why Sage selected the Professor to be the father. She wanted her child to have the best chance at having a good brain, and it worked. So he had their curiosity and perspicacity, and he was also drawn to problems, the tougher the better. Or as he put it, the prettier the better. The Road had those in quantity.

A little later he was captivated by the interior. Was it really an impassable desert all the way? Might there not be a spring somewhere, with water bubbling up out of the ground? He thought about that, and how it might happen. It could never rain out there in the middle of the desert. The water vapor could never make it that far from the ocean in sufficient quantities to produce rain clouds. But maybe it could rain in the mountains nearer the coast and then the water could travel underground and come up out in the desert. Or maybe it didn’t come up at all. Maybe it just collected out there in a big underground lake. What did his teacher call that? An aquifer. Maybe there was a big aquifer out there just waiting to be discovered. But how?

You couldn’t get out there on foot. Nobody could carry that much water. You couldn’t fly, because no airplane could carry that much fuel. Not to do it all in one trip, anyway. But maybe you could fly out partway and set up a base that you could stock with fuel. Then go a little farther and establish another base. And so on. In his mind’s eye he could see the bases spreading like dots on a map. Then his view pulled back and he saw how pathetically small and slow it was when compared with the vast interior of the continent.

He was thinking about balloons and blimps and dirigibles, and the logistics of using them, when he heard about the first satellite being launched. The first thing Tallgrass thought about when he heard that was whether the satellite had a camera, and maybe a radar, and if he could get them to look at the desert for him.

It turned out the first satellite was pretty primitive. It was a proof of concept more than anything else. They just wanted to prove that they could get something into orbit. That they could get it there, onto exactly the orbit they wanted, and have it survive. It had a few sensors, for temperature, radiation, electromagnetic fields, and a radio to transmit the information back down. And once the battery died, that was it. They lost contact with it.

That wasn’t the last satellite they launched. It was only the beginning. Within a few years they had several in orbit. They were progressively more sophisticated, with more instruments and more capabilities. They did indeed fly over the interior with cameras and radar, and they gradually built up a picture of the great desert. There was no evidence of surface water anywhere. No springs bubbling up. Not a speck of green to be found. But the ground penetrating radar did find structures in the subsurface that could possibly hold water if any were to reach them. Subsequent satellites were able to show that it had. There was a large aquifer out there under the sand. One question answered for Tallgrass.

By this time his enthusiasm had moved on. Now he was engrossed in everything to do with space. He was approaching the age when he would leave basic schooling behind and move on to a less general and more specialized education. That would mean the university in town here, with Professor Tailor, or something equivalent here or elsewhere. The Professor really wanted him to stay. He’d waited for years for Tallgrass to come to the university so he could at last get to know him better. He was hurt when his son chose to go elsewhere, but at the same time he was proud and happy for him.

Tallgrass had been selected as part of a very exclusive group of students to inaugurate activities at the newly-formed space academy. He would be moving almost a quarter of the way around the continent to a city near the equator.