The Grabblers had been staying with Pritch for two months now, and he had learnt a lot of fascinating stuff about them and their land. Pritch still wasn't sure how much of what they said he could believe. They certainly seemed very sincere, and he didn't get the impression that they were trying to deceive him.But the way they described things was so different from the way things were done in Bartyronis, it was hard to understand how their world could possibly work.
Pritch needed to find out about things that would be valuable to Tyro and Sleech, but the conversation kept getting diverted to other things. Things that were no use to Tyro, but Pritch couldn't help wanting to understand.
These people still thought that things in their country were continuing without them just as they had before, but Pritch knew that an enormous change had taken place in the Grabble lands. Old buildings had been knocked down, and new ones built. Roads had been constructed. Places for flying machines to land had been got ready. The people had been made to work on Bartyronian projects, and educated in Bartyronian ideas. If they saw it now, Selentaya and Piacho would not recognise the place they had come from. Mipper Hool had been insistent that Pritch must not let the Grabblers know any of this. But sometimes it was difficult not to let it slip.
Pritch really wanted to know more about these strange people. And so, every day, he would talk to them. Talking was not always easy, even though most of the words they all spoke had near enough the same meanings. The problem was, there were some things that the Grabblers said about their world that seemed impossible to Pritch, and there were some ways in which Bartyronians did things that made no sense to the Grabblers.
The Grabblers were always very pleasant, and were extremely interested in what Pritch had to say. But there were things which seemed obviously right and proper to Pritch, that the Grabblers simply couldn't understand.
Money, for instance.
Pritch listened with great interest to how the Grabblers did everything by agreement, and how all objections from anybody were taken seriously and dealt with. The explanation from the Grabblers of how things were done in their land seemed kind and considerate, but Pritch couldn't help thinking that it lacked one of the most important aspects of how people lived in Great Bartyronis. Money.
Pritch just asked them the simplest possible question:
'In your "Seren-ila", how did, or rather, do, do... how do people get paid?'
Both Piacho and Selentaya looked blank.
'Get paid?' Selentaya answered. 'What do you mean by "paid"?'
'Paid,' Pritch repeated. 'What do people ...erm ... what do they get for their work?'
'Are you asking how people become happy from working?' Piacho asked, clearly very puzzled by the question.
'Well, yes, I suppose so,' said Pritch, though it was a strange way to put it. Something about the way Piacho had answered made Pritch feel almost embarrassed, as though he had asked a very stupid question.
'People don't really think about it,' said Selentaya. 'They are happy that their work has brought pleasure to others, as well as themselves ...'
Piacho added, in a tone like someone speaking to a small child: 'If somebody makes a cake, they get pleasure from seeing people enjoying eating it, ha, as well as the taste of the cake itself.' Selentaya nodded.
'Yes,' Pritch said. 'Of course. But I don't think you have really answered my question. How do they get paid for that work? And who decides how much they get? Who is in charge of making cakes? Who tells somebody that they should be making a cake? Who decides what sort of cake should be made? And do people get paid every week, or every month? Or maybe every day?'
More blank looks from the Grabblers.
'What do you mean by this word "paid"?' said Selentaya.
'Paid. Don't you have that word? Well, rewarded. How are people rewarded for the work they do?'
Piacho broke the silence. 'Ha! I suppose somebody who makes a cake immediately feels the pride of having made something good. Or even if the cake was not good, they would feel proud of their attempt. And others would feel grateful for the work that the person had put in. All are rewarded with pride. Does that answer your question?'
This was hopeless, Pritch thought. He sat looking at the pair, with his mouth open.
Selentaya seemed to take pity on Pritch in his confusion. 'Honoured Pritch,' she said, 'you must understand that in our land, nobody decides for others what they should do. Nobody tells anybody else that they should make a cake. Of course, the Counsel of the Wise makes a plan each year of the things that need doing, and every now and then people look at the plan to see if things are more or less going as they should, and whether there is anything that they can do to help things along. People try to keep to the plan, but it is no shame or dishonour if an individual decides they want to do something different. As long as there is no harm to others, everybody is free to use their time in the way that makes them feel happy. We find that mostly, when people are doing things that make them happy, they also bring happiness to others. Are things not the same with your people?'
There was something strange and beautiful in what the Grabblers were saying, but still it did not answer Pritch's question. He tried again.
'Well, yes. Or no, actually. Things aren't quite the same here. If everybody just did what they wanted ...' Pritch stopped. What would happen if everybody just did what they wanted? There was no point in thinking about it, because things could never be organised in such a way. Surely, nothing would get done. But that wasn't what Pritch was asking about. He started again.
'No, what I was asking about was how people get the money they need to buy things. Who pays them the money?'
The Grabblers looked blank once again. They looked at one another.
'We are sorry, Honoured Pritch', said Selentaya. 'There are many words which are the same in both our languages, but this word, "money", is one we do not have. What sort of stuff is this? Is it a sort of food? A plant? Something that you dig out of the ground?'
Pritch breathed in deeply. How could he explain what money is? Surely, everyone knew about money. How could a land exist without money? It was just something that you had to have to stay alive, like air or water or food. How could they not understand that?
'Money is ... money,' Pritch said. The Grabblers still looked blank. Pritch realised that this was not a good way of explaining. He started again.
'Money. You must have another word for it, I suppose. Coins. Notes. You give it to somebody else, and they give you the thing you want. That stuff.'
'A sort of ... gift?' Piacho said, uncertainly.
'An exchange of gifts?' Selentaya tried.
'No, not gifts. Not exactly. But you would need it to buy a gift.'
'Buy?' Piacho said.
'Buy, buy ...' Selentaya seemed to be trying to work out if she knew this word.
'Let me see if I understand,' Piacho said. 'If I want something, I don't just ask for it in your land. I have to have this thing called "money". Ha! Is that right?'
'Yes, yes,' Pritch said. They were beginning to get somewhere at last.
'So everybody must be given money, so that they can get the things they need, is that how it works?' Selentaya asked.
'Well, not exactly,' Pritch said. 'Nobody gives them money. People have to work for the money.'
'What happens if they don't work? Ha?' Piacho asked.
'They don't get any money. But that wouldn't happen. People have to work.'
'So everyone has to work at the things that people agree are good to do, and then they get the money to get... to – what did you say – to buy the things they need? Yes?'
'Sort of, yes,' said Pritch. He wasn't sure if they really understood. The questions they were asking also made him unsure of how it all worked. The whole idea of money was beginning to seem a bit silly to him, now. But that couldn't be right. He tried again.
'We don't have everybody agreeing about what's good, though. Tyro is in charge of deciding all that. Then people have jobs that they do, and they get the money that is assigned to that job, and they spend it on the things that they want to spend it on.' Yes, it made sense now.
'Ha,' Piacho said again. Pritch was just about getting used to this habit. 'And where does the money come from?' Piacho asked, reasonably.
This stumped Pritch.
'Well, it comes from Tyro, I suppose. Actually, it's all very complicated, and not something I know all that much about.' This was the best Pritch could do. Nobody had ever told him where the money came from.
'So does everybody get what they need with this system?' Selentaya asked. She seemed genuinely interested.
'Well, that's hard to say, really,' Pritch said. 'Of course, different people get different amounts of money, according to their importance, so they are able to get different things. Nobody gets everything they really want. Except the people at the very top.'
'And where is the top?' Piacho asked. Pritch wasn't sure if this was a serious question.
'Well, at the very top, there's Tyro, of course.'
'And who decided that he should be at the top?' Selentaya asked.
Who did decide? Tyro's father decided, Pritch thought. But who decided about him? His father. But who decided in the first place? Pritch realised there was a lot about his own land that he didn't really understand. He had a sudden panic about the thoughts in his head, but then he remembered that he wasn't being monitored, so it was all right to think what he was thinking.
Could he be sure he wasn't being monitored? Too late to worry now. But it would be best to change the subject, if only because he was having difficulty with all these questions, and the point of all this was for him to find out about the Grabblers, not the other way round.
He really needed to find out about how the Grabblers had come across the idea of aerial bracelets. And if there were other similar inventions. He was still unsure what role these people had in the way in which the Grabble lands were ruled. Sometimes he got the impression they were inventors, sometimes officials, sometimes teachers. But none of these jobs seemed familiar to them. It really seemed as if the Grabblers just did whatever they wanted. How could any group of people run themselves in such a haphazard way?
'Well,' said Pritch, 'that's all very interesting.' He was aware that he had not answered the question Selentaya had asked, but he was not going to go any deeper into that for now.
'So, tell me, where did the idea of the aerial bracelets come from?' Pritch asked, trying to ensure a change of gear.
'Ah, I know nothing about that,' said Selentaya. 'That was all the work of Piacho.'
Piacho said 'Ha!' and in spite of his dark skin, Pritch detected a blush. Something that Pritch had not seen before in the visitors.
'Piacho is the person who developed the possibility of wrist-flyers,' Selentaya said, smiling. 'If he hadn't managed to make them, he probably would have broken his body jumping off of rocks.'
Piacho laughed. 'It's true,' he said. 'Ha! Look. I did break a bit of it.' He held up his left hand, to show two of his fingers bent out of shape, the little one and the one next to it. Pritch had assumed that this was a result of the treatment Piacho had received from the Barty Guardians.
'This came from one of my very early attempts to fly, before I had come up with the concept of wrist-flyers. I learned that day that gravity is not to be overcome by jumping from high rocks into the wind.'
'Yes,' said Selentaya. 'We were all quite worried about Piacho, and his repeated attempts to become a flying child. People really thought he might not survive.'
'I was trying to do something I had done in dreams,' Piacho said, wistfully.
'But then he came up with a way to do it in reality,' Selentaya said.
'Yes, much later I came up with a way of amplifying the body's energy by channeling it through certain sympathetic plants, to counteract some of the force of gravity. But it wasn't all my work. I just put together some ideas that other people had talked about. There were many principles that went into the invention of wrist-flyers. I just added the final piece of the picture. Ha! You know, there is a game that children sometimes play, where a picture is broken up into small pieces, and you have to try to put the pieces back together to make sense. That was what I did. I found the final few pieces, but other people had already done most of the work on the picture.'
'Please, tell me about the pieces of that picture. Where did all the ideas come from?' Pritch said.
Piacho started to explain principles that had been discovered many generations previously, to do with energy in the human body, how this was related to the substances of the physical world, and how it might be harnessed to carry out all sorts of tasks that might even seem impossible to somebody without knowledge of this field. Every now and then, Selentaya would add a detail or an explanation which Piacho had overlooked. Despite her saying that she 'knew nothing' of how the aerial bracelets worked, it was clear that she had a fair amount of understanding of the principles behind this branch of Grabbler science.
Piacho explained about a special herb that he called 'herelina', found on the slopes of the Greblara mountain, and unable to grow anywhere else. Herelina had qualities that the Bartyronians had never dreamed about. It had been known in Seren-ila that there was something special about this herb, but the process of concentrating it without destroying it was something that Piacho perfected. Piacho had tried to explain this to the people that had questioned him from the beginning, but they didn't believe him. They thought that the stuff that powered the wrist-flyers must be some sort of mineral that was found under the ground, and no amount of explanation would dissuade them from that.
Pritch took out his electronic scribing pad, and started to make notes on what Piacho and Selentaya were explaining. Piacho suddenly stopped speaking, and looked in wonder at the machine in Pritch's hand.
'What are you doing?' Piacho asked.
'Just making a note of what you're saying,' said Pritch.
'Extraordinary!' said Selentaya, watching the dark letters appear on the scribing screen.
How strange, Pritch thought. These people have developed a branch of science which we in Great Bartyronis have never even dreamed of. And yet this simple piece of equipment, just for making everyday notes, is something that fills them with admiration.
Piacho asked to use the scribing pad, and Pritch gave him a quick lesson in how to make and save notes. Then Piacho started writing his own notes, filling the pad with strange letters and symbols which were unknown to Pritch, but which Piacho assured him would fully explain the workings of the aerial bracelets, which he continued to refer to by the Grabbler name of 'wrist-flyers'. Soon Pritch's pad was filled with all sorts of symbols and equations, most of which had only little meaning for Pritch, but from which he realised he could learn an enormous amount. He would have to study this stuff in whatever spare time he had, to make sense of it. Piacho would be around to explain all those things that needed explanation, and from the way in which Piacho and Selentaya spoke, he knew that they were eager to share their knowledge.
Share. That was a word you seldom heard in Great Bartyronis. Why was that? Why did these people (who Pritch was now beginning to think were actually far from primitive) why did they have an instinct to share and do good, whereas all around him in his own land people had an instinct to distrust others, to look out for themselves, to fear for their future. Where did all of that come from?
Pritch wanted to find the answer to these questions, and realised that the two Grabblers were the key to that. But still, he had to be careful. He had his family to think of. Should he tell Pring what he had learned? She, like him, would be fascinated by the science, but all the stuff about how the Grabblers had arranged their lives was dangerous to think about. Pring might still be monitored by the thought scanner at any time. No, he couldn't tell her.
Also best to keep little Arint away from the visitors. She had met them, and they made her smile. And the Grabblers seemed enchanted by the child – no doubt the only one they had met in Great Bartyronis. But even if Arint didn't yet have the means to speak to the strangers, she might somehow take in their way of thinking about the world, and that would be dangerous for her. Yes, she must have no more contact with them. And what about Greel? In his case, it was even more important that he didn't hear any of this. He would be mixing with other children in his school. Would his thoughts be scanned? Sleech had said that the whole family would be exempt, but the safest thing would be to keep him away from these dangerous ideas.
But for the time being, Pritch had the chance to learn about a different way of organising the world. He wanted to find out much more. Yes, he would pass on the scientific principles that led to the development of the ability to fly wearing only a pair of bracelets, but for his own sake, he needed to know about other things in the now destroyed land of Seren-ila.