Page 58 - An Evening with Maxwell's Daemons

Aquifer Virginalis

Izzy Azimuth spoke first. “I don’t know if you considered this,
but each of the parties has something the other lacks. Those who
have the water don’t know how much they have, or how long they
can keep it against determined marauders. The Dowsers, then,
could be of service; and the Clepsydras could constitute an addition
to the Starkers’ defense arrangements if they can be domesticated
and integrated. And you say the villagers have an exogamy problem.
So you could introduce some characters, probably the younger ones
among those antagonists, who could secretly meet and negotiate a
settlement beneficial to all.”
But Rutger Schlager would not hear of such an unlikely scenario.
“Absurd!” he spluttered. “You expect these people to overcome
generations of mistrust and hatred just because some flower-
children naively go around waving peace signs? If the human race
were that inclined to share and make nice with each other, the
world would not have devolved in the first place to the toxic desert
you portray. No. More realistic, at least in my view, would be the
Dowsers driven out and the Clepsydras fighting to the death to
invade and conquer Starkerville. If they destroy each other, then
maybe the Dowsers, who were watching the battle from a safe
distance, could move in and take over. You’ve defined and
described a regression to might makes right; rationality has the
chance of a snowball in hell.”
“Well,” said Brad Razeberry, “if you want to preserve the utter
nasty hopelessness of the situation, you could have the Dowsers
convincing the Clepsydras that the rumors about the great gushing
geyser are true, and the two joining forces in a Pyrrhic victory over
the Starkers—because they misinterpreted the hydrological data and
in fact the aquifer was just about to run dry, anyway. Everyone
loses, just as the whole planet has exhausted its resources while
nations fought each other over the profits to be derived from
exploiting natural resources.”
“If it were my tale,” put in Cyril Kornfleck, “I would concentrate
on the Dowsers as the smart guys. They may have intellectually
regressed to a pre-scientific understanding of the cosmos, but they
have a text with presumably valid hydrological information and the

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