And he had remembered. He had kept his silence as his father had said, as if his life depended on it, yet something had subtly grown in him that would not be repressed. He had fought it, he had lain awake in his rude cot and listened long hours to the night-sounds that wafted gently across the rolling blue fields of his father's farmland, and he had fought the thoughts, and had failed. But it was at that point in his life that Jonny Kane learned that ideas could not be burned.
He remembered how he had fashioned his first tool. With it, he had shaped better shoes for his father's qharaak teams. And then there had been other tools which he had learned to link together, and his share of the day's planting had been done long before the other men returned from the fields at sunset.
That was the time he had first been caught.
The tools had been destroyed. And then—
Then he had measured the dimensions of a new plot of land without moving from the spot where he had made his computations with a stone in the soft loam, and that time—
Oh, the magistrate had not exaggerated. There had been many such crimes that he had committed, and he had not been able to help himself. Something within him would not let him stop—something that cried why and would not let him rest.
But when he had unearthed the rusted scrap heap of metal forged in strange shapes, he had not told his father. Nor did his father know when he had made the new tools, or when, a full cycle after that day, he had completed the thing of old metal for which the tools had been used. By stealth he had stolen the crude oil which fueled the lamps in his father's house, and after that—
After that, he knew only that it ran!
Until this village. Until yesterday. Until the day before he was to die.
And then Jonny Kane came awake at last.