Smart girl! Clemens thought admiringly. It was a long time before Adam Smith's observations on the division of labor, but she'd grasped the principle that specialists depended on a big population.

"Exactly," he said aloud. "We were faced with starvation, because almost none of us were farmers or fishermen; and very few were even artisans, because Nantucket had few… places-of-making, workshops." That was as close as he could get to factory in this language; they were speaking Akkadian, to improve his command of it.

"We had-have-the knowledge to make, oh, carts that run without horses or oxen, or flying ships much larger and faster than what you've seen, or- " He shrugged. "But not the skilled workers and special machines, or the machines that made the machines, or the smelters and forges to make the metal, or to find and refine the fuel, or the farmers to grow the food and the roads to bring it to us. What we were able to make and maintain was only a shadow of what our whole realm, the United States, was able to do."

A buzz of voices rose from city and palace, a snarling roar echoed from the sky, and a long teardrop shadow fell over them. They looked up, leaning out from beneath the awning and shading their eyes with a hand. The orca shape of the Republic of Nantucket Air Service's Emancipator was passing over Babylon. Five hundred feet of canvas, birch plywood, and goldbeater's skin, the dirigible droned along with six ex-Cessna engines pushing it through the warm Mesopotamian air, the Stars and Stripes on its cruciform tailfins and the Coast Guard's red slash and anchor on its flank.

Azzu-ena shuddered. "That is but a shadow of your arts?" she said.

"A faint shadow," Clemens said. "We have to hope it's enough. It's more than the rebel Walker has."

To himself he added: We think. So far.

"Then how can he hope to stand before you?"