The Engineer and The Teller
This is a story from a long time ago, before man ventured off the planet of origin and out into the wider galaxy. Back then, there was no way to trade one planet’s treasures for another’s, no way to cozen a passing comet into a planet’s primus and stay warm by its ember. At the start of this tale, all resources had been dug up from Earth, all needs shaken down from mountains, and there were only a few basins of pure water left to drink. The people were not sure how to save themselves, did not know about caring and rejuvenating and educating unless they heard about it in the oldest of tales, but all of those burned and drown in the great climate upheavals of the 23rd Century. We know them no more, and can only tell this one as it came to us, passed down in the traditional manner.
Famine and scarcity alit with sharp talons on the back of mankind. The Leader called the merchants and the medicine dealers and a few remaining spirit guides together. Next, a great call went out to all nations still with borders, and to the nomad lands in between for an engineer and a teller to come to the counsel. The Leader and the merchants and the medicine dealers and any spirit guides met in a deep canyon with walls of clay and stone that caught the dawn light and painted the world around them. They sat in rows and held their devices and did not talk amongst themselves. To their seats, their very places, the opinions of the peoples came to their hands and sprung up before their eyes, swaying their moods, confirming their tendencies. They occasionally looked up from their devices and every so often looked out across their seats. There were no great lines of engineers running up and over the top of the canyon, and no river of tellers running under the canyon walls, bubbling up, waiting to be chosen. After three days, only one engineer and only one teller came before the great counsel.
The Leader stood and bid them to go and fetch fresh water. His voice rang out with the demand, straight to the engineer and to the teller, and louder still, bouncing off the facing wall and coming back to them again, and out and back many times over, ringing out like the peals of a bell tolling until all the devices in all the hands lit up and gonged and chirped with the news, then pealed with the slant of the people’s opinion until all became a roar. After many moments it began to fade to a plea and then a whimpering want until a silence settled like a stillness after any uneasy disturbance of air. The silence of anger that is not countered. A silence that could go either way.
The engineer and the teller stood side-by-side. All the faces were turned to their faces.
“We must travel far,” the engineer said into the silence, “to the moon of Europa and there dig below the surface to reach the cleanest and coldest water.”
The Leader was first because he lead by weaving together known information, pinning it in place with ties and stays of words that sounded like they might be true. The Leader lead because he was not afraid of the sound of his own voice, in fact liked it best when it was loud and drown out other opinions. “Surely a place so far from the burning sun must hold only frozen water. Ice will be too treacherous to travel with—ice is slippery and takes up too much room and will only melt in a small puddle that will make us twice yearn to slake our thirst.”
The merchants and the medicine dealers and the spirit guides, reminded of how parched they were, murmured in agreement behind the Leader.
The engineer was wise and knew of many things. The engineer liked to ask himself questions and puzzle out his own answers late at night in his lab. The engineer read words from engineers long passed. “The gravitational pull of mighty Jupiter roils the heart of Europa. She can never rest in her orbit, but is pulled and twisted about by the barbs of the planet beneath her. No water can freeze as it should in this distress. Instead, Europa’s outrage feeds a flame that melts all below her blank surface. We will turn our machines past the facade of hard stone to unveil the treasure beneath. Into this we will cast mankind’s bucket.”
The peoples were quite impressed by this learned answer and rumbled and cheered, causing the devices to light up and sing. This caused the merchants and the medicine dealers and the spirit guides to murmur anew, urging the Leader to have the engineer and the teller sent upon their way. Although the Leader agreed and wanted the very same thing, he knew he was being given an opportunity to look wise. He stood still, his chest puffed out, holding his breath with a grave look on his face as he rifled through his mind for a way to make it seem like he was deliberating. When he could no longer wait to draw a breath, just at that moment, he thought of something sage. Asked the Leader, whose beard was quite bedraggled and who no longer wore linens that were not soiled, “and how long will this journey take?”
The engineer, having up to this point made such a triumph of facts, knew that he and the teller would now be condemned if he told the truth. People in need do not like truth more than they like satisfaction. First they like food to fill their bellies and quiet any rumblings. If they can have no food, then they do not mind a drop of drink strong enough to put a halo around every light that shines in the night. When there is no food and when there is no drink, they must be given reason. But not reason born of fact, no, not reason of supposition spooled out in experiments over time and compared and contrasted with what has always been known. Not reason that contradicts what can be felt, nor reason that prizes thinking over feeling. No, the type of reason the hungry and the thirsty demand is a single reason that will multiply into many reasons and fill them up again. Reasons why they are lacking what they need; reasons why others suddenly have what they want. Reasons why they should rise up and hurl stones at privilege, use their boots or their bare feet to stomp down those who think they have a right to more, those who think they know what is right, those who think. The engineer knew these things, and could see in the faces before him how the absence of satisfaction had whittled down their torsos, had pulled their gums high up on their teeth, had carved deep rings of darkness under their eyes. The thin line of hope that rose up from his science was buffeted by these drafts of despair, it wavered in the wind and threatened to be swept away by the gust of outrage that would come from their mouths when they heard the number. He swallowed, looking about for some answer, when the teller rose and stood beside him.
“You will band together,” she called out in a clear tone, “you will ration, scrimp and save all that remains, and in just 11 years, you will stand at the port and greet the returning ship. Its holds will be filled with waters, cold and pure, and you will drink without asking. Your tongues, long dry with anticipation, will loosen into cheers, your eyes weep joy of natural tears, so filled will you all be with cold and pure, clean, refreshing, revitalizing water. Every moment you choose now to wait will make all of our triumph that much stronger. So think now: see the options before you and choose.”
At another time, being told to think and see and choose would not have been tolerated. But the teller said words that formed pictures of a future the counsel wanted. The teller replaced the thinking with visions. The teller had made it easy for them to do their hard work. There was no choice. “We will build this ship and launch you in it toward distances to far too walk in a single lifetime. We will not know if the engineer can navigate to Jupiter’s moon, will not know if the engineer will break the surface and haul up pail by pail the water we so desperately need, except that you, teller, will send us messages. You will not try to hide your progress behind elitist mathematical formulae, talk of waves and fields that only some have seen with expensive machines most cannot afford. No, you will say plainly where you are and what you are bringing to us and when.
And so the engineer and the teller left Earth. On their ship they loaded supplies and provisions, scrolls of symbols and equations, machines to edit and duplicate and manufacture strands and cells and embryos. They carried with them still more engineers and tellers, filling the labs and the bridges, the corridors even, with men and women of grit and intuition, dreaming and daring.
Reach in your pocket now and look at the symbol on every digit coin:
It is the engineer and the teller. The engineer faces forward in time, building what is to come. The teller faces backwards in time, weaving words from actions that tell those who follow what has happened and what to feel. The two began their work at that great counsel and continued it on Europa. The engineer quickly filled the ship with beautiful water and sent it back to Earth. The teller told the Leader and the great counsel of its pending arrival. But no one on Earth was left who knew how to receive spaceships, how to navigate a ship through reentry, how to pilot it to the landing pad and open its doors. Those in the great counsel had other skills: how to curry favor, how to wield power, how to hold onto their seats and positions. How to buy and keep all the many things that looked impressive when the hot sun shone on them, glittering and bright. These were important things that could fill days empty from not enough food. The skill of how to take back the ship that they themselves sent? No, they did not know how. It burned in the atmosphere and great glowing hunks of hull and engine rained down upon them. But no water.
They hurled bitter insults and threats into the night sky toward the direction they believed Europa to lie. The Leader and the great counsel demanded that the engineer and the teller return immediately for punishment. How they were to make this journey with no ship did not cross the minds of those left on Earth.
The signal was slow and was not answered right away.
Finally a message packet arrived and was played to the Leader and the great counsel.
“Leader and great counsel,” the teller’s voice sang to them like a choir of handbells, so clean, so pure, “your last message was not intact when it arrived. The distance it traveled is great and there were solar flares and gravity storms that tossed it from its course. It only came to us by ricocheting off the rough surface of a passing asteroid. We see that you have decided not to drink the waters of Europa, so icy cold and clarifying, but instead to seed Earth’s tired atmosphere, to turn the water to steam, to cleanse the upper air. We applaud your decision. Now you have only to wait for the clouds to drink in this chemical cocktail before raining down restorative waters upon you. The engineer and I will continue in our work and wait for the ships that you will send to bring us home.”
We of course know that the engineer and the teller never returned to Earth. Instead, they built intersolars and traveled and explored and made different homes on different planets. They made tools that built ships and they made humans to fill them. Occasionally, one would be born and grow up to become in temperament like the Leader or a member of the great counsel. Through strand analysis, engineers learned that a bend in a strand of a helix causes some to not understand that they have enough. Those born with that particular bent were given a special shuttle and very clear directions to return to Earth. On Earth, so they were promised, their own kind would greet them and give them opportunities to make “money” and hold important positions so they could be revered. Every word that they uttered would be treasured, would be rebroadcast right to every citizen’s hand where these words could be heard and marveled at anew. These bent strand aberrations took the ships offered as their right and proper due. They sailed back through the Oort, the outer solar system, to the inner, all the way to the cloudy third planet. We are sure they were warmly received and properly adored.
Within the next 1,000 Common Years, we will have spread throughout the entire Universe. We will look forward to how we can care for our worlds, we will look backward to see where we have come from and how to feel about those times.
You may ask why you’ve never met a human from Earth. You can if you want to, they still exist, after all. Don’t bother returning to the planet of origin, though. There you’ll find no clean water and it is both terribly, terribly hot and also bitterly, bitterly cold, sometimes both on the same day. Know that eventually they chased after the original engineer and the first teller all the way to Europa. You know from history that the engineer and the teller built the new race and spread across The Oort before the original ship of cold water returned to Earth. So no, they are not on Europa now. And original humans aren’t, either. The engineer left them a message, with directions disguised as a stern warning: do not come down to the surface of Jupiter, it is too dangerous. The Leader and the medicine dealers and the spirit guides launched their ships down immediately.
“Come!” The Leader said in his final message as he began the descent, “We have found a place with 11.2 times more riches than Earth!”
Yes, if you want to meet one you just have to go to Jupiter, that is where they all are. These descendants are still descending, traveling lower and lower. They open their mouths and breath in the poisonous atmosphere, calling out reasons why others don’t deserve what they have. From these mouths they exhale, along with Jupiter’s gases, good reasons why they deserve more. In this manner, they float and sink ever closer to the mighty heart of an orb made of air not for breathing that is forever blowing both hot and cold.
