All the root syllables, repeated by Kibi and Sata after Manessa spoke them, were easy to pronounce. As the two girls sat side by side in the passenger area, the ship would show them the meaning in pictures on the large display screen, then use the root in a variety of words. The root syllable always had the same meaning from one word to another, and its position in the word indicated noun, adjective, verb, or adverb.
The golden ship could not speak a word of their native tongue. The steward and navigator finished each lesson feeling very honored that they were beginning to have some verbal contact with the mysterious being that was their ship, their new home, and, along with Ilika, their teacher.
When the lesson ended, Kibi and Sata thanked the ship with a word they already knew, Sata went to the galley to scrounge for a snack, and Kibi touched a control on her console to lower the big table. Just then, Ilika and Rini came in from studying something while sitting on the sand dunes, Mati finished a simulation and shut down the pilot’s console, and Boro appeared in the lift, a strange tool with blinking lights in one hand.
“It made me handle a steep descent,” Mati grumbled as she carefully lowered herself into a chair, “like the one we did into the ocean, but with only level one thrusters.”
NEBADOR Book Four: Flight Training 2
“Is it possible?” Boro asked, putting his tool in a little cabinet at the engineer’s station.
“Barely, on my fourth try. I hate crashing!”
“I wouldn’t want a pilot who liked crashing,” Ilika said with raised eyebrows.
Rini laughed out loud as he sat down and handed Mati a cracker with bean spread. She couldn’t help but smile.
“I’m doing simulations too,” Boro announced, plopping into a seat. “I try to align the anti-mass field inducers and Manessa tells me how far off I am.
Sometimes I forget we’re using base eight, I make an adjustment, and it’s worse than before. I’m mad at myself for a moment, then laugh and start over.”
Sata scrunched her nose. “Ilika, it’s weird not having any nines or tens.
Why do the Nebador Services use base eight, instead of base ten like our kingdom?”
Ilika stuck his thumbs up and wiggled them. “We have thumbs we can count with. Most people don’t. Base eight is also easier for Manessa, and easier to use with common fractions like half and quarter. All around, it’s easier for everyone.”
Sata’s face scrunched as she struggled with the idea.
“Remember,” Ilika added, “we still have all the same number values, we just count them a little differently. Your old nine is our eleven, your ten is our twelve.”
After a pause, Kibi jumped in. “Me and Sata finished lesson seven.” She broke a large cracker and gave half to the navigator. “How long ‘til we can start speaking Manessa’s language?”
“As soon as you two have a good head start, through lesson twenty, then everyone starts. You and Sata will always be a little ahead because of your jobs. It would be too hard to make the transition if I was the only one who knew both languages. Actually, I’ve already taught you about fifty words.”
“We’ve noticed!” Mati said with a grin. “Every time you tell us about something that couldn’t possibly have a word in our language, we get one of yours. We can tell because they’re easy to say, and totally unlike words we already know.”
NEBADOR Book Four: Flight Training 3
Ilika smiled. “The language of Nebador was designed to be easy. Some of the people who speak it can only make about half the sounds we can. But I think we need a change from brain work . . .”
They all nodded.
“. . . so let’s do some altitude training after our snack settles. We’ll start at one hundred meters.”
After a moment of thought to convert the base and unit, Rini said, “Two hundred something feet. That’s only a little higher than the dunes!”
“Yes,” Ilika confirmed, “but it feels very different when you’re outside the ship.”
Boro swallowed. “Did you say . . . outside?”
For half an hour, everyone played in the dunes and wondered how they could possibly do altitude training on the outside of their ship, currently a golden sphere about seven meters across. Mati got a ride on Boro’s shoulders to the top of the highest dune, then slid down the steep slip-face, squealing with delight all the way down. Kibi tumbled down a gentler slope, then shook the sand out of her hair. With a far-away look in her eyes, Sata stood on the tallest dune and looked west at the cloudy sky over her kingdom.
When Ilika returned to the ship, the rest followed, and could see it change shape before their eyes. It became much flatter, with the outer edge very close to the ground. Five seat-like indentations appeared, equally spaced around the rim. Ilika stepped back outside.
“Your minds might be ready for this, but your bodies may have a different reaction.”
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“Yeah, like mine the first time we flew,” Boro admitted, shuddering at the memory.
Ilika smiled. “We’ll take it very slowly, up to one hundred meters today, then slowly rotate. You can practice judging vertical distances.”
“How high can we go, sitting on the outside?” Rini asked, eyes sparkling with curiosity.
Boro moaned even before hearing the answer.
“Eight thousand meters for short periods. Above that, it becomes dangerous without extra oxygen.”
“Hypoxia,” Boro mumbled.
Ilika nodded and lifted Mati into one of the seats, a little different from the others, allowing her legs to remain straight. The rest hopped into the other seats, and Manessa created a safety bar across each of their laps.
“Your goal is to convince your bodies what your minds already know, that Manessa can hold you up, and that you can be just as safe and happy in the air as on the ground.”
Ilika disappeared into the hatch, and they soon felt the golden ship float upward. Each student, facing outward on the rim of the ship, could not easily see any other. Except for the feel of Manessa’s warm hull under and around them, each was alone, slowly rising into the air to the height of the dunes, then a little higher.
Boro was fine . . . until the ship started slowly rotating. He tried very hard to keep his stomach under control, but finally gave up and leaned over the edge.
Soon the ship ceased rotating and lowered back to the ground. Kibi hopped out of her seat, a smile of pride on her face. She took one step forward and immediately fell sideways onto the sand, her head spinning and her stomach threatening to do the same.
Boro didn’t say anything as he kicked sand over the mess he had made, but he felt much better knowing he wasn’t alone.
“I’m glad you’re all handling your tools and instruments very carefully,”
Ilika said as they talked about the day’s accomplishments after dinner.
“Tools don’t grow on trees,” Boro pointed out.
NEBADOR Book Four: Flight Training 5
“All my life people told me that if I ever lost my crutch,” Mati began, “I wouldn’t get another one. I’d just die, right there, wherever I was.”
The others paused to feel what their friend and pilot had experienced.
Even though Boro, Kibi, and Rini had also been slaves, Mati’s dependence on her crutch, and other people to help her, nearly made them shiver.
“At the inn, we used scrub brushes until there was hardly a bristle left,”
Sata shared. “Even when the bristles were all gone, my mom hated to throw them in the fireplace.”
“So now I have to ask a very serious question,” Ilika began. “How would you treat your tools if they did grow on trees?”
A long silence lingered.
“My instruments are part of Manessa,” Rini said thoughtfully, “and I know she can feel things.”
Kibi and Mati nodded.
“Other opinions?” Ilika asked.
“I could never trust my life to something, or someone, that I didn’t respect,” Boro asserted.
“We’ll have to trust Manessa . . . and all her tools and things . . . with our lives all the time,” Sata began, “and we’ll usually be a lot higher than a hundred meters.”
Ilika nodded. “Most people treat their tools like dirt if they can easily get new ones. But if anything . . . or anyone . . . is beneath your respect, then you are not ready to travel among the stars.”
“And,” Rini added with a finger in the air, “that would mean we couldn’t be in the Nebador Services!”
Ilika
smiled.
“You tested us about that a long time ago, didn’t you?” Kibi asked.
“Oh, yes. The puzzle. The gold coins. Even our faithful little bronze pot.”
“And my donkey,” Mati added.
“I’m glad you mentioned Tera. She’s obviously a sentient creature, with perception and feelings. The bronze pot has no feelings. There may come a time, like if it had a leak, to melt it down and make a new one. Buna may have to get a younger donkey someday, but she won’t kill Tera. She’ll probably just let her tag along, eat grass and enjoy the rest of her life, but not do much
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work.”
“So . . . where’s the dividing line?” Boro asked.
“Most people draw the line very close to their own skin. If someone is in their own family, maybe their own class of people, they get respect. Anyone or anything else is treated as an object.”
“That’s . . . the wrong place to draw the line,” Kibi said with a soft but sure voice.
“If you can’t see the feelings in a donkey, a ship, or a delicate tool, then it’s just as easy to not see them in your brother or sister when you can profit by treating them badly.”
“I remember how Rini and Kibi didn’t hurt the wolf,” Mati began, “after he was asleep and no longer dangerous.”
“He deserved as much respect as we could give him!” Kibi said with strong conviction. Then she softened. “At least . . . without being eaten.”
Ilika nodded. “People who have ships on the water or in the air, but treat them as objects, usually drown or crash, and they can never get into space with that attitude.”
“So you mean . . .” Boro began thoughtfully, “the people in our kingdom will probably never fly to the stars?”
“The stars are too far away for a ship built on a world like this. In one or two thousand years, they might begin to explore the other planets in your solar system, but they will have many accidents at first. Exploring the planets takes something most people who work on ships don’t have.”
“Personal power,” Sata suggested.
“Heart,” Kibi said softly.
Rini was quiet for a moment, then whispered, “Wisdom.”
Ilika slowly nodded.
All five crew members-in-training looked very thoughtful as they glanced around at the beautiful interior surfaces and powerful control consoles of their very own deep-space response ship, the Manessa Kwi.
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Deep Learning Notes
The first illustration reminds us who the six crew members were and where their primary work stations were located on the ship.
The first paragraph of the book contains a description of an ideal, easy-to-learn language. Unfortunately, these stories are, out of necessity, written in English, which came into being because the Romans pulled out of Britain in 410 A.D. That left a cultural vacuum, and all the surrounding languages (Latin, French, several kinds of Celtic, and several kinds of German) smashed together to form one of the most complex and difficult languages on our planet.
Landing a ship of any kind, with limited or no engines, is an important skill for any pilot to learn. Helicopters require a constantly-turning rotor to glide.
Fixed-wing airplanes must maintain airspeed or the wings will stall. Water ships, our most efficient form of transportation, have great inertia, and the pilot’s fear is not stopping in time without engines for braking.
Boro’s anti-mass drive, you may recall, is based on the theory that moving electrical and magnetic fields at 90° to each other create Lorentz forces that radiate a form of energy that counteracts gravity and inertia. The engine is called “anti-mass” instead of “anti-gravity” because it works in deep space where there is no external gravity, but the other effects of mass (or physical substance), such as inertia, still cause problems.
We humans are very proud of our opposable thumbs. They allow us to grasp things in ways that most creatures cannot. We have even come to believe that any creature without opposable thumbs cannot become highly intelligent. We then discovered that the creatures on our planet who may be closest to us in intelligence (dolphins and whales) don’t even have arms. We also discovered that the animal with the highest brain-to-body weight ratio (the horse) has only one finger/toe. So perhaps it is not too surprising that the number system of Nebador (base eight) was designed to be usable by creatures
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without thumbs.
Working in another base, like base eight, is only hard when we constantly try to refer back to our own base (ten). If I say that a “hundred” in base eight is a square 8 by 8, that is pretty easy to imagine. If I say it’s 64, I have just ruined the learning process by making it seem “weird.” Everyone knows that 64 does not equal 100!
* * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * *Base 10: 6 7 8 9 10 . . . 15 16 17 . . . 63 64
Base 8: 6 7 10 11 12 . . . 17 20 21 . . . 77 100
Ilika also told his crew that base eight is easier for Manessa, who is sentient but not sapient. Our primitive thinking machines today (computers) use base two, in which the only digits are 0 and 1. It is fairly easy to translate base two into bases four, eight, and sixteen. It is much more difficult to translate it into our base ten.
The most commonly-used fractions:
1/2 1/4 1/8 1/3
Base 10:
.5
.25
.125 .3333 . . .
Base 8:
.4
.2
.1
.2525 . . .
Ilika mentioned that some other people in Nebador can make only about half the sounds that humans can. We are in a similar situation. English is, at its
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foundation, based on German, so our set of sounds (called “phonemes”) is just about complete for speaking German. When we attempt to learn a Latin language (especially French), we have to learn several new sounds, and can easily confuse words with very different meaning until we learn all the new sounds. Some languages, completely unrelated to English, have sounds that are very difficult for us to make, such as the glottal stop in some African languages.
Sand dunes have two sides, a windward face with a gentle slope that sand slowly creeps up, pushed by the wind, and a slip-face, steeper, that the sand falls down when it reaches the top. Because of this, sand dunes are constantly, but slowly, moving in the direction the wind blows.
As an example of base eight, the crew’s first altitude training exercise was at
“one hundred meters.” That’s 64 meters in base ten. A meter is 3.28 feet, so 64 x 3.28 = 210 feet (in base ten).
How high is “eight thousand meters”? You must first figure out what a
“thousand” is (base eight). Hint: a “thousand” in our base ten is 10 to the third power.
If you can’t remember what “hypoxia” means, it may help to recall that a
“hypodermic” needle goes UNDER the skin. “oxi” refers to oxygen, of course.
Have you ever wanted (with your mind) to do something that your body was just not ready to do? What was your body’s reaction?
Why would this particular crew have little or no temptation to mistreat their tools?
Mati was completely dependent on her crutch for life. Do you, or does someone you know, have something they need, perhaps a medicine, without which they would die?
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Today, most of the “bristles” on our brushes are made of plastic, which comes from crude oil. In a medieval society, the only source of such a thing was real bristle, the hair of the pig.
Rini’s observation that the ship can feel things gives us the essential definition of “sentient,” which means to be able to sense (feel) the environment.
Although the word is often used incorrectly, it should not be confused with
“sapient,” which means self-aware and wise. Bugs are sentient.
Boro realized there is a relationship between respect and trust. If you treat someone badly, can you later count on them to help you when you are in need?
One of the effects of the stars and planets being so far apart is that potential space travelers must be much smarter and more mature than people who only travel on land or water. Whether this is by accident, or by design, does not really change the situation.
Ilika described the “retirement” he hopes Buna will give Tera when she gets old. Do you think this is about right, doing too much for the donkey, or too little?
“If you can’t see the sentience in a donkey, a ship, or a delicate tool, then it’s just as easy to not see it in your brother or sister when you can profit by treating them as an object.” The ability to treat other people as objects is one thing that has made us powerful and able to “subdue the Earth.” What problems does this ability of ours create?
The need to treat ships with great care and respect doesn’t seem too important with our “land ships” (cars) because a mechanical failure is usually not fatal. In aircraft, a failure often IS fatal, and so we have strict laws about inspections and maintenance that must be done, when, and by whom.
“The stars are too far away for a ship built on a world like this.” Ilika’s
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statement reflects the problem of traversing distances that would take hundreds of years with any technology we possess. We can imagine “warp drive” and “star gates” when we write stories, but have no idea if they are possible.
The word “wisdom,” like most words, has several definitions. One of them is simply “accumulated knowledge.” When talking about star travel, Ilika used the word to imply something that goes beyond mere knowledge or intelligence, and is not commonly found in humans.
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