Necessity by Jo Walton

Author:Jo Walton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466865709
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

IV. On the Railroad

“What you should do is build a railroad from here to our cities,” Aristomache proposed in Chamber one day that first winter. “Then we could travel between them rapidly and safely whenever we wanted, and all the cities could be linked together.”

“What is a railroad?” Lamprokleia asked. She was in the chair that day. She was a Master, a women of Athens who had studied at the Academy under Plato’s nephew Speusippos.

Aristomache explained, the rails, the rooms drawn along on them by an engine, which would be powered by electricity, though she said that in her day they used a different, dirtier method. She had prepared drawings, which I examined carefully as they were passed around. They were sketches, and not technical diagrams, but the system seemed simple enough to extrapolate from what she had drawn. They could operate on rechargable solar batteries, much bigger ones than the ones we Workers used. We were already planning to build more stations to convert sunlight into electricity.

“That sounds like an excellent system,” Maecenas said. “Though a lot of work to build.”

“Workers can do much. Grading tracks, surveying beforehand,” I wrote, and Maia read it aloud for me.

“Is it properly Platonic?” Lamprokleia asked.

“Plato knew of no such thing, but he did not know of Workers either, or electricity for heating and light, or printing. In our original Tech Committee we considered that there are technologies Plato would have embraced for the City had he known about them, and others that were contrary to the spirit of what he wrote,” Maia said. “We did not consider railroads then because we had no need for them. How could we, with one city on an island? Now it is a different matter, and ending the isolation of the Lucians seems to me like an excellent idea.”

Lamprokleia set up a committee to plan a railroad, and made me a member. The system took longer to survey than to build once it was surveyed, for as always practice illuminates difficulties theory elides. Once it was in place it allowed us to move goods and people easily between the cities, as Aristomache had said. The free movement of people led to the establishment of metics, citizens of one city who lived in another, and to people more easily changing their citizenship. This has generally been perceived as a benefit to everyone.

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