Empire of Ivory Page 0,56
confused Laurence himself for a good week when he had been obliged to learn it for the lieutenant's examination, in the Navy. The next evening he was further interrupted in his reading by Nitidus and Dulcia taking up an argument with Temeraire about Euclid's postulates, one of which, referring to the principle of parallel lines, they felt quite unreasonable.
"I am not saying it is correct," Temeraire protested, "but you must accept it and go on: everything else in the science is built upon it."
"But what use is it, then!" Nitidus said, getting agitated enough to flutter his wings and bat his tail against Maximus's side; Maximus murmured a small reproof without quite waking. "Everything must be quite wrong if he begins so."
"It is not that it is wrong," Temeraire said, "only it is not so plain as the others - "
"It is wrong, it is perfectly wrong," Nitidus cried decidedly, while Dulcia pointed out more calmly, "Only consider a moment: if you should begin in Dover, and I a little south of London, on the same latitude, and we should then both fly straight northward, we should certainly meet at the Pole if we did not mistake our course, so what on earth is the sense of arguing that straight lines will never meet?"
"Well," Temeraire said, scratching at his forehead, "that is certainly true, but I promise you the postulate makes good sense when you consider all the useful calculations and mathematics which may be arrived at, starting with the assumption. Why, all of the ship's design, which we are upon, is at base worked out from it, I imagine," a piece of intelligence which made nervous Nitidus give the Allegiance a very doubtful eye.
"But I suppose," Temeraire continued, "that we might try beginning without the assumption, or the contrary one - " and they put their heads together over Temeraire's sand-table, and began to work out their own geometry, discarding those principles which seemed to them incorrect, and made a game of developing the theory; which entertained them a good deal more than most amusements Laurence had ever seen dragons engage in, with those listening applauding particularly inventive notions as if they were performances.
Shortly it became quite an all-encompassing project, engaging the attention of the officers as well as the dragons; the scant handful of aviators with good penmanship Laurence was soon forced to press into service, for the dragons began to expand upon their cherished theory quicker than he alone could take their dictation, partly out of an intellectual curiosity, and partly because they very much liked the physical representation of their work, which they insisted on having separately copied out one for each of them, and treated in much the same way that Temeraire treated his much-beloved jewels.
"I will make you a handsome edition of it, bound up like that nice book which you see Laurence reads from," Laurence found Catherine saying to Lily, shortly, "if only you will eat something more every day: here, a few more bites of this tunny," a bribery which succeeded where almost all else had failed.
"Well, perhaps a little more," Lily said, with a heroic air, adding, "and may it have gold hinges, too, like that one?"
All this society Laurence might have enjoyed, though a little ashamed to find himself preferring what he could not in justice call anything but a very ramshackle way of going on. But for all their courage and good humor, improved by the interest of the sea-voyage, the dragons still coughed their lungs away little by little. What would have otherwise seemed a pleasure-cruise carried on under a ceaseless pall, where each morning the aviators came on the deck and put their crews to work washing away the bloodstained relics of the night's misery, and each night lay in their cabins trying to sleep to the rattling wet accompaniment of the slow, weary hacking above. All their noise and gaiety had a forced and hectic edge, defiance of fear as much as real pleasure: fiddling as Rome burned.
The sentiment was not confined to the aviators, either. Riley might have had other excuses besides the political for preferring not to have Reverend Erasmus aboard, for the ship was already loaded besides him with a large number of passengers, most of them forced upon Riley by influence with the Admiralty, and well-found in the article of luggage. Some number departed at Madeira, to take other ship for the West Indies or Halifax from there, but others were bound