Chapter Two — Hero of Alexandria

It was full daylight. I had barely stepped into the workshop beside the temple when something hissed out a breath of steam. A small bronze sphere was spinning on its mount. Water boiled in a pot below, the steam climbed a thin tube into the sphere, and out of two holes in the sphere it escaped and set the thing turning. Beside it stood a bronze bird that spouted water from its beak, and a model of a door that opened by itself when you touched the handle. The smell of metal and water was everywhere. A man was watching the turning sphere with the plain pleasure of a child. "It turns well," I said. "It won't stop." He laughed. "You only have to boil the water. No man has to push it, no ox has to pull it. Steam — steam you can't even see — turns bronze. Set it in the temple and people can't shut their mouths. They think a god did it." "And what do they say, the people who watch?" "That it's a miracle. That it's wonderful." The laugh thinned. "...Only that it's wonderful. They look, they clap, they go home. Not one of them asks — what if this force drew water up from a well? What if it pushed a cart? People see a new thing and they don't think of changing the world with it; they set it in a temple and bow to it. They want wonder. They don't want the work. To be honest, I have never gone far down that road myself. This is a curious toy for the temple." I watched the sphere a long while. "You are holding a great power in your hands, and it has nowhere to go." He turned to me. For the first time a shadow crossed his face. "...Nowhere to go." He turned the words over. "Yes. The power is here, and the world isn't ready to take it. Wood is cheap, hands are cheap, oxen are cheap. There's no reason yet to turn anything with steam. My sphere came too early." "And if a thing comes early," I asked, "is it wasted?" He looked down into the fire under the pot. It was a long moment before he spoke. "I used to think so. What good is a power no one uses. But now I'm not sure." He looked at the turning sphere. "Someday the world will change. Wood will grow scarce, hands will grow scarce, and someone will build this again. Then they will take the steam seriously. And he will believe he has invented something entirely new. That he has turned the world over. But it won't be new. I already turned it, here. It was simply his time, and not mine." "Will he remember you?" I asked. "No." He smiled faintly. "He won't know I existed. He'll believe he was the first. People always believe they are the first. That their love is the first, their grief the first, their invention the first. But under the sun nothing is truly first. Someone wept before, built before, turned it before. I am only someone's next, and he will only be mine." He watched the sphere. "Perhaps we are all links in one chain, each of us invisible, the link before and the link after never knowing each other." He ran a fingertip along the cooling bronze bird. "A seed buried in winter earth isn't wasted, is it. Spring simply hasn't come. Maybe I'm a seed that goes back into the ground without seeing its spring. The hand that gathers what I planted will be a stranger a thousand years from now." He shrugged — not in resignation, more like a man nodding to an order larger than himself. "That used to gall me. Strangely, it galls me less now. Without someone to plant there is no one to gather. There is a time for everything, they say. The same sphere is a toy in one age and turns the world over in another. The sphere hasn't changed. Its time has come." I nodded. He had arrived at something true. And yet, while he said there is a time for everything, he did not ask who turns all those times. I was not holding that answer either. But my hurry — the hurry that had me walking fast to find again the one who broke bread and vanished — eased a little in front of what Hero said. If there is a time for everything, then there is a time for meeting him as well. When I left the workshop, the bronze sphere was still turning behind me. Going nowhere, and not stopping. Waiting for its own time. I thought of the spring that sphere would meet someday, the spring Hero would never see. And as I walked, the cloud no bigger than a hand, hanging in that dry sky, seemed to have grown another hand's width. Perhaps the hand that set that spring is not only far off in the sky — perhaps it was also here, beside the turning sphere of a forgotten old man I had just sat down with.