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“You have a word for this?” The Kratzer turned to Herr Gschert and, in another aside, translated by the talking head, said, “If they know such matters, there may yet give help.” But the Herr replied, “Say nothing of it.” On hearing this, Dietrich glanced curiously at the servant.
“The analogy,” said the Kratzer, “is that the two-fold number is the ‘atom’ of knowledge, for the least you can say about a thing is that it is — which is one — or it is not — which is null.”
Dietrich was unconvinced. That a thing existed might well be the most one could say of it, since there was no reason save God’s grace for anything to exist at all. But he said nothing of these doubts. “Let us then use the term bißchen for this two-fold number of yours. It means a ‘little bite’ or a ‘very small amount,’ so it may as well mean a small bite of knowledge. No one has ever seen Demokritos’ atoms, either.” The metaphor of a ‘bit’ amused him. He had always thought of knowledge as something to drink — the springs of knowledge — but it could as well be something to be nibbled.
“Tell me more,” said the Kratzer, “about your numbers. Do you apply them to the world?”
“If appropriate. Astronomers calculate the positions of the heavenly spheres. And William of Heytesbury, a Merton calculator, applied numbers to the study of local motion and showed that, commencing from zero degree, every latitude, so long as it terminates finitely, and so long as it is acquired or lost uniformly, will correspond to its mean degree of velocity.” Dietrich had spent many hours reading Heytesbury’s Rules for solving sophismas, which Manfred had presented him, and had found the proof from Euclid very satisfying.
The Kratzer rubbed his forearms together. “Explain what means that.”
“Simply said, a moving body, acquiring or losing latitude uniformly during some assigned period of time, will traverse a distance exactly equal to what it would have traversed in an equal period of time if it were moved uniformly at its mean degree.” Dietrich hesitated, then added, “So wrote Heytesbury, so nearly as I recollect his words.”
Finally, the Kratzer said, “It must be this: distance is half the final speed by the time.” He wrote on a slate and Dietrich saw symbols appear on the Heinzelmä
“So, we see the fruits of the Holy Ghost,” he said at last.
“The Heinzelmä
“There was a great question for us: Does a man participate in unchanging Spirit more or less, or does Spirit itself increase or decrease in a man. We call that ‘the intension and remission of forms,’ which, by analogy, we may apply to other motions. Just as a succession of forms of different intensities explains an increase or decrease in the intensity of color, so the succession of new positions acquired by a motion may be considered as a succession of forms representing new degrees of that motion’s intensity. The intensity of a velocity increases with speed, no less than the redness of an apple increases with ripening.”
The giant grasshopper shifted in his seat and exchanged looks with the servant, saying something which the mikrofoneh did not this time translate. An exchange between the two escalated, growing louder, with the servant half-rising from his seat and the Kratzer smacking his forearm against the desk top, while Herr Gschert looked on with no change in his posture save the slow rhythmic scissoring of his horny side-lips.
Dietrich had grown accustomed to these wild arguments, although they u
When the Kratzer had reachieved his balance, he said, “This has been said by another.” Dietrich knew he meant the servant. “’You speak a word. The Heinzelmä
“That is a great problem in philosophy,” Dietrich admitted. “The sign is not the signified, nor may it convey the entire significance.”
The Kratzer threw his head back briefly in a gesture whose meaning Dietrich had not yet plumbed. “Now we hear it,” the Krenk complained. “The poor Heinzelmä
The servant spoke again, and this time the box translated his words: “The box-that-speaks stands the word ‘philosophy’ not in the German tongue.”
“Philosophy,” Dietrich explained, “is a Greek word. The Greeks are another people, like the Germans, but more ancient and learned, save that their great days were long ago. The word means ‘love of wisdom’.”
“And ‘wisdom’ is what meaning?”
All at once Dietrich felt pity for Zeno’s Achilles, ru
“How well we know that significance.”
Gschert stood away from the wall and the Kratzer turned to face the servant, by which acts Dietrich knew that it had been the servant who had last spoken, and that the servant had spoken out of turn. Whether Gschert or the Kratzer cried, “Silence!” was unclear, but the servant was unfazed. “You could ask him.”
With that, the Herr Gschert sprang across the room. The leap was lightning-quick, vaulting the furniture and, before Dietrich had quite grasped what had happened, the lord was beating the servant with his rasping forearms, raising cuts and welts with each blow. The Kratzer, too, had turned his anger on the servant of the talking head and pummeled him with kicks.
Dietrich sat speechless for a moment before, without thinking, he cried, “Stop!” and interposed himself between the combatants. The first blow to the side of his head was enough to render him insensible, so he never felt the others.
When he came again to his senses, he found himself still in the same apartment, lying as he had fallen. Of Gschert and the Kratzer, there was no sign. However, the servant sat on the floor beside him with his great long legs drawn up. Where a man might have rested his chin upon his knees, these knees actually topped his head. The servant’s skin was already discoloring with the dark-green bruising of his folk. When Dietrich stirred, the servant chattered something and the box on the desk spoke.
“Why took you the blows on yourself?”
Dietrich shook his head to rid it of the ringing, but the sensation in his ears did not go away. He placed a hand on his brow. “That was not my purpose. I thought to stop them.”
“But why?”
“They were beating you. I did not think that good.”
“ ‘Think’…”
“When we speak sentences inside our heads that no one can hear.”
“And ‘good’…?”
“It does me sorrow, friend grasshopper, but there is too much noise inside my head to answer so subtle a question.” Dietrich struggled to his feet. The servant made no move to help him.