Honor - Kevin Killiany [6]
Even if the food didn’t live up to expectations, Bart reflected, the view was worth the trek up the hill.
Actually, he’d enjoyed the uphill walk past antiquated homes that exactly mirrored one another across cobbled streets. He’d spent hours combing through centuries-old civic records in the dusty bowels of the town archive. Library research, especially when it involved sifting through folios penned when the Romans were invading Britain, was always enthralling—the first few weeks. After that, it became a chore.
Bart knew his search through the local archives of the Bundinalli was right on the cusp of transmogrifying from adventure to drudgery. Frequent breaks, like this native lunch with Stevens, were helping him stave off the inevitable.
It was equally clear his friend and cabinmate Fabian had needed a break as well.
The task of coordinating the various specialists trying to figure out the Bundinalli aqueduct system had fallen to Lieutenant Commander Mor glasch Tev, second in command of the da Vinci’s own S.C.E. team. Though the job Bart had heard described at the planning session had been that of facilitator, the Tellarite had—in typically Tellarite fashion—understood his role to be micromanager of all aspects of the endeavor.
Realizing this would be a big job, even for him, Tev’s first official act had been to co-opt Stevens, who would otherwise have been idle, as his personal assistant. For the last dozen days the tactical systems specialist had been bouncing from one Bundinalli township to the next, personally following up on instructions Tev had already broadcast in meticulous detail.
Tev’s specificity was in direct contrast to the vagaries of Bundinalli. The language, and the way the natives seemed to organize thought, guaranteed Bart stretched his intuitive translation skills as he tried to decipher—or even find—the original routing instructions for Bundinal’s ancient aqueduct system.
Eons ago, generations of ecological mismanagement had turned seventy percent of Bundinal’s arable land into a dust bowl. The Bundinalli were facing planetwide famine. Extinction was a real possibility.
However, it wasn’t a possibility they were willing to accept. At about the time humans first began experimenting with bronze, the Bundinalli were constructing a network of interdependent aqueducts and canals to irrigate their planet. Their job was made simpler—just—by the fact they inhabited only two continents, both on the same side of the globe and both extending from the poles almost to the equator. Still, it was a prodigious task.
What fascinated Bart was the fact there had never been a centralized plan, no unifying vision. Instead, the network’s form had been governed by the Bundinalli’s absolute insistence on symmetry. Everything in their architecture balanced. Whether it was the airy stucco and tile arches of Brohtz or the stolid timbers of Prshdt, every culture on the globe was built with symmetry.
Sometimes this led to amusing quirks, like houses with faux front doors to balance the real ones. But on a global scale it had enabled the Bundinalli to create an incredibly intricate system that had grown almost organically as they’d diverted runoff from their melting polar ice caps and desalinated great volumes of seawater to irrigate their planet.
That last had seemed particularly suspect to Bart. He didn’t understand planetary ecology in any great detail, but he’d always thought worlds depended on their oceans to renew their atmospheres.
Case in point was a pair of what the locals called birds flitting about the edge of the open-air bistro. They had serpentine bodies with two sets of wings arranged in tandem. As nearly as Bart could tell, the wings never flapped in unison, or in any pattern he could discern. The entire arrangement looked aerodynamically