Chapter 54

For true students of learning—and the scientists aboard the Gardener were nothing if not that, for there had been no other reason to volunteer for the voyage—the ensuing few weeks were almost an idyll.

To be sure, little in the field of human endeavor is ever universally idyllic. Some balked initially at Igwanda's requirement that they camp out at night sheltered only by the pavilion, as he and Meiersdottir had done, but he remained adamant about not presenting technological artifacts that might provide temptation for a further Edenite attack and firmly rejected suggestions that they set up more comfortable accommodations.

Initially a few of the landing party were uncomfortable enough about sleeping al fresco in the midst of the alien settlement that the lander ferried them back and forth each day, but after a short time Ziang put her foot down about the unneeded wear on the landers and cut the shuttles to twice a week; when it became clear that anyone visiting the surface would have to be prepared to remain there for three or four days at a time, objections to the accommodations soon abated. Even the weather cooperated; there were a few days of intermittent rain, but by and large the skies were clear—at least as clear as the continuing discharge of smog allowed—and the nights were quite temperate.

Nor were all the scientists enthralled by their teaching roles. The nominal goal of academies of learning on Earth is to educate a new generation of students, but to the typical academician the actual teaching process is mainly an initiation they must endure before moving on to the freedom that tenure and seniority confer to spend time in the grander pursuits of research and publication. These were of course very highly tenured and senior individuals, most of whom had taken none but the most advanced classes in many years, and not all were happy about reverting to much lower levels.

"If I'd wanted to be a first-grade teacher I would have signed up for that," grumbled junior physicist Jack Mantegna, drafted to teach basic arithmetic (in the absence of any on-board mathematician) when it developed that the Edenites had only the haziest notion of numbers science. His grumbles soon subsided, however, when only slightly over a week after introducing the decimal system and basic addition and subtraction he found himself struggling to convey the concepts of algebra, geometry, trigonometry, even beginning calculus.

Because the alien collective was indeed proving formidable at absorbing information. The fact that it was multi-tasking among anywhere from six to eight simultaneous sessions, each involving a wholly different discipline, proved no deterrent at all. "I have no idea where their limits lie," said cybernetician Wang Lo Dze wonderingly, "but I'm not really sure we have the capacity to tax them." Drill, of course—that bugaboo of schoolchildren—was something utterly unnecessary, as was the obsessive note-taking of human students; just as the collective had shown itself able to grasp even the more abstruse nuances of Standard in a matter of days, it retained everything the humans could throw at it with no more evident effort than a shark gulping down its prey.

And it asked questions. Endlessly. Not so much to challenge (although one or two of the scientists found themselves awkwardly justifying concepts that had been so much a part of their basic education that they'd lost track of the underlying rationale) but mostly simply to flesh out the structure of the knowledge it was receiving. There were none of the assigned teachers who, after more than a few hours' work, found themselves bored by this ever-eager, ever-striving student, and in a couple of instances ideas evoked by the persistent questioning were filed away mentally as possible future papers or research projects back home.

There were, of course, gaping holes in the Edenites' interest. Artistic expression in virtually any form eluded them; the concepts of beauty and ugliness, harmony and disharmony they found largely meaningless despite extensive efforts at explanation. It didn't help that they were, as predicted, largely color-blind—the lack of significant natural coloration on the planet was no doubt an evolutionary response to the fact that the eyes of all Eden life-forms the humans had encountered did not discern colors well, if at all. But they were also largely insensitive to the measured nuances of structure or texture, of language, of any form of non-expressionist sketching or drawing. Only music, with its mathematical roots, captured them even slightly, and that only to the extent that they distinguished sound combinations and rhythms as pleasant or unpleasant.