The Alexander Inheritance by Eric Flint

Author:Eric Flint
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781481482486
Publisher: Baen
Published: 2017-07-04T04:00:00+00:00

Royal Compound, Alexandria, Egypt

November 10

Ptolemy looked at the royal proclamation from Roxane, then he looked at Dinocrates. “So, how do they do it?”

“It’s called printing, Satrap. And they use something on the ship called a ‘laser printer.’ But there were other ways of doing it. The one we can do most readily is probably the mimeograph process, though the movable-type process would be better for when we want to make a great many copies of something. I must tell you that none of the techniques we know will make the coating that is on Roxane’s proclamation. You note that it’s not on the butterfly book or the letter. I’m not totally sure, but I think they coated the paper in what they call ‘plastic.’”

“Put people to work on both the memio…whatever it’s called, and the movable type.

“We also have a report of that young officer of theirs—Dag something—using some device at Tyre to kill Kleitos. Kleitos would not have been an easy man to kill, and from the reports, Dag tossed Kleitos a pot of lightning. How could he do that?”

Dinocrates shook his head. “I don’t have any idea, Satrap. And no one I…” Suddenly Dinocrates stopped and just stared at nothing. He remembered the engines and the use of fire. He remembered that the ones he saw were called turbines and spun in a circle as the fire pressed against the blades. But there had been another kind that pushed a cylinder back and forth with little flames and high pressure. “Maybe I do at least have an idea of what they did. Not how they did it, Satrap. That could take years of study, but the basic form of what they did.”

Ptolemy had been sitting in a chair and Dinocrates standing before him. But now the satrap of Egypt leaned back and examined Dinocrates. Then he made a gesture and a slave brought in a chair for Dinocrates to sit on. “Very well, Dinocrates. Tell me the form of this thing that Dag Ja…that the boy did.”

“When you heat air, it expands. When you heat water, it expands even more. That is how their steam guns work. What if you had a clay pot full of water and you were able to heat it all to steam at once? There would be no place for the steam to go unless the pot broke. Then it might strike you, much as lightning might. It might even seem to be lightning.”

☆ ☆ ☆

They talked on, and Ptolemy studied the state of science and the dozens of new things that had been created just from seeing the ship. Alexander would have loved this, he thought, and Aristotle even more. For himself, Ptolemy wasn’t at all sure he was pleased. But the time of the philosophers was upon the world, and Ptolemy was not one to deny reality just because he didn’t like it. What concerned him more was Wiley, and the comments he made about slavery. All the ship people seemed to be fanatical in their opposition to slavery.

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