His own formal education had ended the moment he became large enough to outrun his school’s attendance officer, but he had never stopped learning, and in his wandering he had acquired a smattering of all sorts of knowledge. Not until this moment did he realize what a scant thing a smattering amounted to, nor had he been aware that he could know something well and still have no notion of how to explain it.
He knew nothing at all about teaching.
He stood at one end of a forest clearing. Behind him was an improvised writing board, a fiber mat stretched between two trees with a layer of moist clay smoothed across it. With a pointed stick Obrien had written the numbers one through ten, and below that he had carefully inscribed what he considered the beginning of an education in arithmetic:
His fifty students sat on the ground before him in varying stages of inattention or perplexity. Around the edges of the clearing children peered out curiously, for native children were ubiquitous, and their curiosity was insatiable. Behind his class, at the far end of the clearing, stood the village.
“One means one of anything,” Obrien announced. “One dwelling, one spear, one koluf, one boat. One and one are two—two dwellings, two spears, two koluf. You, Banu!”
A youth in the front row started, and as Obrien continued to talk, his face assumed the contortions of total bafflement. “If you have a spear,” Obrien said, “and I give you another spear, how many spears do you have?”
“Why would you give me a spear if I already have one?” Banu blurted.
Eddies of discussion and comment swirled about the class and merged into larger eddies. Obrien took a heroic grip on his patience. “You’re hunting koluf, Banu, and your friend gives you his spear to hold while he secures the bait. How many spears do you have?”
“One,” Banu said confidently.
“You at the back—pay attention here!” Obrien shouted. He turned to Banu. “Banu—you have two spears. One and one are two!”
“But one of them is my friend’s,” Banu protested. “I only have one. I always have one. Why would I want two?”
Obrien took a deep breath and tried again. “Look at your fingers. On each hand you have one plus one plus one plus one plus one. Five. Five fingers on each hand. If a koluf bit off one of your fingers, how many would you have left?” He held up his hand, fingers outspread. Then he folded one finger down. “Four! Five take away one leaves four. Count!”
The entire class sat staring intently at outspread fingers. Banu had ahold of one of his, wiggling it back and forth. “I can’t take away one,” he announced finally. “I still have five.”
“Damn it, can’t you understand? Five of anything take away one leaves four. Five koluf, you eat one, you have four left.”
A student seated at the side of the clearing got to his feet and absently ambled forward, keeping his eyes on the writing board. Obrien went to meet him. “What is it, Larno?”
“What happens after ten?” Larno asked.
Obrien showed him, writing the numbers eleven to twenty as he spoke them.
“Yes, yes!” Larno exclaimed. “And after twenty?”
Obrien patiently went on writing numbers and pronouncing them. The class had lost interest. Talk became louder; a girl squealed; some youths began playing a game with a small gourd. Obrien, sensing Larno’s intense interest, ignored the disturbances and continued with the numbers until he had filled the writing board.
“Yes, yes!” Larno exclaimed. “And after ninety-nine?”
“One hundred. One hundred one. One hundred two. One hundred—”
“And after one hundred ninety-nine?”
“Two hundred.”
“And after two hundred ninety-nine is three hundred?” Larno asked. “Yes, yes! And four hundred? And five hundred? Yes, yes! And if one and one are two, then eleven and eleven are twenty-two, and one hundred and one hundred are two hundred. Yes, yes! And if five take away one is four, then five hundred take away one hundred is four hundred. And if each of us has ten fingers, then two of us have twenty fingers, and all fifty of us have five hundred fingers, not including you and Fornri and Dalla. Yes, yes!”
Obrien turned grimly and walked away. “Yes, yes!” he muttered. “Now tell me how a dumb mechanic like me can teach arithmetic to a class with one mathematical genius and forty-nine nitwits.”
He taught language. That much was all right. Through some freakish tradition this small population of isolated natives practiced bilingualism—they had a speech that was like nothing Obrien had ever encountered, but they also had a ceremonial speech that was a bastardized derivative of the galaxy’s one universal tongue that men everywhere called Galactic. Obrien had grown up speaking Galactic, and a man who couldn’t teach his own language was a fool. He had been teaching it ever since he arrived on this world, and many of the older natives had learned fairly good Galactic from him and passed it along to family or village. All of these young people already knew Galactic or something very close to it, and they easily mastered as much spoken language as Obrien wanted them to know.
Obrien taught science, and any spacer who didn’t have a pragmatic grasp of basic principles rarely lived long enough to be able to inflict his ignorance on others. But Obrien also had to teach subjects that had been no more than faint academic rumors to him, subjects such as economics and sociology and government. He taught political science, and he stirred and sifted the dregs of his memory for facts that might have stuck there concerning constitutions and compacts and articles of confederation; and socialism and communism and fascism; and theocracies and oligarchies and meritocracies and as many of the variegated modifications and adaptations as he could remember.
He taught military discipline and guerrilla warfare and colonial procedure, and he brought his class together under the stars and taught the history of the people of the galaxy. He expected these young natives to stare openmouthed while he described flaming space wars, and fantastic creatures, and worlds beyond worlds, and suns more numerous than the leaves of the forest; but their attention spans seemed even shorter at night than during the day.
“There!” he said, using a hunting spear to point with. “See those two bright stars and that dim one? Aim a spear between those stars, and if it had its own power, like the skyships I was telling you about, eventually it’d reach the sun Sol, which you can’t see without a large telescope. According to history or legend or maybe someone’s fancy rumor, that’s the system all of our ancestors came from.
“The bright stars are Tartta and Rologne, and long ago their planets had a war. The skyships fought it—so many ships on each side that you wouldn’t be able to understand the number.”
He paused to scowl his whispering students into momentary silence. “Thousands and thousands of ships, but so far apart that you have no number for the distance because space is so vast. And the ships shot bolts of fire at each other, and metal harder than your spear points became blobs of boiling liquid, and the crews were like charred sticks, and in every battle a few ships broke through on each side to shoot their bolts of fire at the mother worlds, and villages larger than this entire forest, with houses taller than the tallest trees, were boiled into liquid along with all of their people. Now no one lives on those worlds. Over there-”
He turned and pointed his spear in another direction. “Over there is a world called Watorno, and there’s a creature that lives in its seas that would make your koluf seem like a child’s toy. It’s a hundred times as big, and it could swallow one of your hunting boats with one gulp.”