Psychicians

by Laurence Dahners

Nylin said hesitantly, “I’ve got some money.” She paused there, as if uncertain how to proceed, then said, “I asked Tarc… about somewhere safe to keep it. He said I should invest it?”

  Kazy nodded, already deciding that what Nylin could’ve saved from her small salary would best be invested in a bank.

  But then, Nylin surprised her by saying, “Tarc suggested I talk to you or Daum. That the two of you were interested in business and might have some ideas.” Her voice dropped and she developed a reluctant look, “Talking to Daum scares me. I’d much prefer talking to you.”

  Kazy grinned at her, “Daum looks tough, but inside he’s just a big softy.”

  Nylin drew back a little, “Maybe he’s a big softy to you; you’re part of his family.” She frowned, “I get the feeling he thinks the tavern has too many employees.”

  She’s worried about her job, Kazy realized. She snorted, “He probably thinks that every morning and afternoon when business is slow. Then, at lunch and dinner when we’re swamped, he probably wishes he had more people, and a bigger bar, and a bigger seating area, and a better, faster kitchen, and more barrels for brewing beer, and more rooms for people who want lodging, and…”

  Nylin put up her hands as if trying to stop this torrent of wishes. “I don’t have enough money for all those!”

  Kazy blinked. She hadn’t thought Nylin had enough money for any part of any of those things. She’d been thinking the girl might have a few silvers to be put in a bank. Eyes narrowing, she said, “How much money do you have?”

  “I’d rather not say.”

  Kazy laughed, “It’ll be pretty hard to give you advice on investing it if I don’t even have an approximate idea how much you’re talking about. A silver? Fifty silvers. Five golds?”

  “I think I want to keep the silvers. In case…”

  Resisting the impulse to go in and snatch the amount out of Nylin’s mind, Kazy grinned, “Okay. I’m just wanting to know how much you want to invest. Not everything there is to know about how much copper or silver you have.”

  Nylin leaned close and whispered in a rush, “A hundred and thirteen golds.”

  “What?!” Kazy stared at her.

  “A hundred and—”

  “I heard what you said. Where’d you get that kind of money?”

  Softly, Nylin said, “From the Ragas. When… when Tarc rescued us he told us to take what we wanted from the camp. I’d seen the Ragas bury their money one day. I… I decided they owed it to me for what they’d done so I dug it up and took it with me.”

  Kazy gaped at her for another moment, then started laughing. When she got herself back in control, she hugged Nylin, “And you’ve let Farlin think you guys have no money whatsoever.”

  “We don’t have any money. I have some.”

  Kazy chortled, And I’m guessing you don’t want his help investing it either, right?”

  “I don’t want him to even know I have it!”

  Kazy studied Nylin for a moment. Even without trying to investigate Nylin’s thoughts, she could tell that Nylin felt bad about something. She made a guess. “What about Grace?”

  Nylin looked uncomfortable, “What about her?”

  Kazy shrugged, “I can understand why you wouldn’t want to share with your brother after he planned to sell you as a bride. Essentially some kind of sex slave. But, if the Ragas owed you for what they did, it seems like they owed her too. Wasn’t she just as much of a victim as you?”

  Kazy looked up the hill, “They had me for a lot longer than they had her.”

  “So, maybe not as much of a victim.”

  Nylin looked woeful, “You’re right. I’ve been feeling guilty for not giving her part of it.”

  “That kind of guilt can eat at you.”

  “But I think the investment would be stronger if it was in one big chunk.”

  Kazy nodded, “True. Maybe you could urge her to invest with you.”

  Still looking up the hill, Nylin nodded. “I’ll do that.” She turned to look Kazy in the eye, “Where do you think we should invest it?”

  Kazy stood up to pace. As she looked back toward the porch where Nylin was sitting, she suddenly realized the big beam of wood underneath the kitchen was shaped like the front end of a boat. It’s a skid, she thought. For moving the building. She turned her attention back to Nylin, “Well, you could put it in a bank. I think they’re paying about three percent right now. Your money’d be pretty safe… unless there was a war or something else really terrible.” She looked back at Nylin, “But it’d take about twenty-four years for you to double your money.”

  Nylin looked surprised, “How do you know that?”

  Kazy put a hand on her chest, “Well, I am a math genius… But, really, it’s pretty simple. You just have to use what’s called the ‘rule of seventy-two.’”

  Nylin frowned, “The what?”

  “‘Rule of seventy-two.’ You divide seventy-two by the percent rate of return on your investment and the answer’s the number of years it takes for your money to double. Three goes into seventy-two twenty-four times, so in the bank, it’ll take twenty-four years to double. If you opened your own small business you’d hope to earn ten to fifteen percent. At those two rates, you’d double your money in 7.2 or 4.8 years. Of course, your business could go bankrupt. A lot of small businesses do and then you have nothing.

  “Another option would be to invest in an established business, helping them expand in return for partial ownership. You’d be less likely to go bankrupt, but you’d probably only be hoping for a six to nine percent return. At those rates, you’d double your money in twelve or eight years.”

  Kazy shrugged, “Obviously, what you’d like is to open your own small business that earns fifteen percent and doesn’t go bankrupt. Then, in five years or so you’d have doubled your money to two hundred and twenty-six golds, and in ten years you’d have four hundred and fifty golds. In fifteen years you’d have nine hundred golds, and in twenty years you’d have eighteen hundred—”

  Nylin put her hands up, “Stop! I get it. But, I could lose it all.”

  Kazy nodded solemnly.

  Nylin squinched her eyes tightly shut, then let out a sigh. “I don’t have enough business savvy, nor a good enough idea to start my own small business. Let’s say I’m going to invest in an established business. What would you suggest?”

  Kazy shrugged, “Talk to Daum. He’s a really good businessman. He could point out some likely businesses around town that you might want to invest in. But, you should know he’s always complaining about how he doesn’t have enough capital to improve and expand the tavern the way he’d like. Maybe you could invest in Hyllis Tavern? If you kept working here you’d be able to keep a close eye on your money.”

  Nylin sighed, “That’s about what Tarc said.” She gave Kazy a hopeful look, “Could you help me talk to Daum? So I won’t be so scared?”

  “Sure, but you should decide what you’re going to do about Grace before we talk to him.”

  “Okay,” Nylin said softly.

  ***

  Daussie was studying when Eva came in with a small metal pan. She looked up and asked, “Where’ve you been?”

  “Good to see you too,” Eva said with a grin. “I’ve got something for us to experiment with,” she said, lifting the lid off the pan.

  “Eyeballs?!” Daussie exclaimed in horror. “What happened?!”

  “They’re pig eyeballs I got the butcher to keep for me. One of our new books says pig eyeballs and human eyeballs are very similar.”

  Daussie’s tone went from horrified to merely disgusted. “What’re you going to do with them?”

  “You remember how I’ve told you about Mr. Geller and his cataracts?”

  Daussie nodded slowly, as if afraid to hear the rest.

  “Well, according to my reading, it’s the central part of the lens that’s cloudy. The outer part, or capsule, stays clear. In the surgeries the ancients did, they’d open up the eye through an incision
in the cornea, then put a little probe inside the lens. The probe broke up and sucked out the cloudy central part of the lens.”

  Daussie clapped a hand over her eyes and shuddered, “That sounds awful. I don’t know why I think it’s so much worse than other surgeries, but it really creeps me out to think of sticking something in someone’s eye.” She frowned, “But, I still don’t understand. Without the lens to focus the light, the patient wouldn’t be able to form decent images. They’d still be essentially blind, right? Probably all they’d be able to do would be tell if it was light or dark outside?”

  “Well, yes. When they were getting started, they took out the entire lens, then gave the patient glasses with very thick convex lenses. Ones that were strong enough to focus the light even without the patient’s own lens.”

  Daussie drew back, wincing, “Those must’ve been really thick!”

  Eva nodded ruefully, “So thick the weight of the spectacles was a real problem. And they looked really ugly too. But,” Eva gave Daussie a serious look, “it was better than being blind.”

  Daussie rubbed the bridge of her nose. Speaking with some dread, she asked, “Are you going to tell me you want me to port Mr. Geller’s lenses out of his eyes?”

  “No, not the entire lens. Just the central part that’s cloudy.”

  Daussie shook her head, “That’s hardly any better. He still won’t be able to focus the light on his retina without some kind of massive external lenses. In fact, I’ll bet the empty lens capsule would be floppy and warped enough that he wouldn’t be able to see very well even if we did give him a massive external lens.”

  Eva nodded, “So, you’ll need to port some glass in to replace the cloudy part of his lens that you removed.”

  Daussie’s eyes widened. “Oh…” She blinked several times, then said, “So, I port out a lens-shaped area of his lens, hopefully removing all of the cloudy stuff, then port in a piece of glass the same size and shape?”

  Eva chewed her lip for a moment, “I think… I think the replacement lens needs to be a little less convex. The refractive index of glass, how much it bends light, is a little greater than the refractive index of the human lens.”

  With a frown of concentration, Daussie said, “So, is that what the old-time ophthalmologists did? After they sucked the cloudy part out of the patient’s lens capsule, they put in a glass one instead?”

  Eva produced a little shrug, “No, they put in lenses made of some of their plastics. The plastic was soft enough they could fold the lens to insert it through a smaller incision. The size of the incision isn’t an issue for you.”

  Still thinking, Daussie said, “You said you couldn’t tell the cloudy part of his lens from the rest of the lens with your ghirit. How do I make sure I take enough to get all the cloudy stuff out?”

  “Hmm,” Eva said, leaning towards Daussie. “Let’s examine each other’s eyes to see what they feel like to our ghirits when we’re really close. Remember, I couldn’t lean my head right next to his last time, he would have thought it was weird.”

  With their heads almost touching one another, Daussie let out a little chuckle, “This is weirdly creepy in its own right. Why aren’t we just examining our own eyes?”

  With a snort, Eva leaned back, “’cause I’m an idiot. Sorry.” She paused a moment, evidently to examine her own eyes, perhaps comparing them to Daussie’s, then she said, “From really close, I think I can sense the difference between the outer capsule and the main part of the lens. How about you?”

  Daussie nodded. “So I take out everything but the capsule and replace that central part with a glass lens that has just a little bit less convexity. I guess I’ll need to make up a bunch of lenses before we do it, then pick one a little less convex than the one I’ve just taken out?”

  Eva frowned, “Why not just take something the right size out of a pane of glass you’re holding against his forehead?”

  “We’ve got to sterilize it first!” Daussie said, looking appalled. “Putting bacteria in his eye’d be a disaster!”

  Eva gazed contemplatively at Daussie for a moment, then said, “Daussie, they form glass into its final shape while it’s molten. It’s usually been molten for quite a while when they do it. Therefore, it’s sterile when it’s made. And, since it’s impervious to bacteria, the glass in the middle of the pane has to stay sterile, no matter how long ago it was made.”

  “Oh,” Daussie said with a grin, “I’ve watched glassblowers. I should’ve been able to figure that out.” She thought about it for a moment. “Then I can just swap the glass lens with the tissue lens in one teleportation. I won’t have to worry about his empty lens capsule collapsing and making it hard to insert the glass one.”

  Eva frowned, “Swap?”

  Daussie nodded, “That’s what I usually do.”

  “What do you mean, ‘swap’?”

  “Oh,” Daussie said, suddenly realizing her mother had never considered the mechanics of a teleportation event. “Usually when I teleport something, I swap the air at the destination with the object I’m teleporting. If I don’t, it makes a noise at the location the object teleported from. The air collapsing into the vacuum the porting left behind makes a little pop. It also makes a noise where the object arrives and suddenly pushes the air out of the way.” She picked up one of the polished balls they used as gifts to distract frightened children when they came into the clinic. They were spheres she’d teleported out of a piece of stripy rock.

  Daussie put the little ball on one end of the table and teleported it to the other end. The event produced a snapping sound. She moved it again, this time silently. “That first porting was what I think of as a one-way porting, with the noise coming from air displacement. The second porting was two-way.”

  Eva rubbed her head, “I can’t believe I never thought about this. So, when you’re porting gallstones out of a patient’s abdomen…”

  “Those’re one-ways. I wouldn’t want to put air into the patient’s biliary system, especially since it might have a bacteria-laden particle floating around in it.”

  “But I haven’t heard any pops.”

  “You would’ve if you’d paid careful attention. Remember, I was always porting them into a jar. It muffled the sound. Besides, most of the gallstones were so small they didn’t make much noise to begin with.” Daussie grinned, “Porting saline into a patient, or blood out of them makes noise too, but you have to listen for it since it’s happening inside a bottle or closed pan.”

  “So,” Eva said thoughtfully, “you’ll just swap the tissue of his lens with the glass that’s replacing it.”

  “Uh-huh. That’ll also avoid shock waves in the eye from the sudden removal of part of the lens and later from suddenly putting a new one back in.” She got a thoughtful look, “if we did want to do it in two steps, I should probably do a two-way porting of some sterile saline into his lens capsule when we take the cloudy central portion out.” She shrugged, “But then we’ll have to worry about separately making a lens to replace it and keeping it sterile until we put it in.”

  Eva looked pensive, “Doing it that way’d let us look to be sure we got all of the cloudy parts of the lens out of his eye.”

  “I’d rather swap the glass in to make sure we’re performing a sterile implantation. Then, if we need to take out a little more of his lens to get rid of a cloudy segment, I’ll just make a swap with another glass lens.” She shrugged, “Glass is pretty cheap.”

  “You’re right,” Eva said. “And, if it turns out you leave him a little nearsighted or farsighted, you can just swap in another lens with more or less convexity.”

  Daussie brightened, “Yeah, that makes me feel better. I’ve been worrying about…” She got an unhappy look, “Hey, he isn’t going to be able to change the shape of a glass lens, so he won’t be able to change his focus from near to far and back.”

  Eva nodded, “Yeah. I think we should shoot for letting him see at a distance—”

  “But his big
complaint’s not being able to read,” Daussie interrupted.

  “We can give him reading glasses so he can still read,” Eva said patiently. “And, when he’s out and about around town, he won’t have to wear them. Besides, there’s another solution. We can set up one of his eyes to see at a distance, and the other one so he can see up close for reading. Apparently, in the old days, they called that ‘monovision.’ Some people didn’t like it because they were really bothered by the fact that one eye was always giving them a blurry image. But others quickly adapted, learning to ignore the blurry image and focus on the good one. They liked monovision because they didn’t have to wear glasses.”

  “Okay,” Daussie said, “if it doesn’t cause pain to swap them out, I guess we can just keep changing them until we put in ones he likes.”

  Eva shook herself, “Okay. Do you want to try it in these pig eyeballs? Make sure nothing bad happens before we try something this crazy in a human being?”

  ***

  It was early in the evening when the door to the bar opened and the noise level dropped. Daum looked toward the door.

  There stood the behemoth of a man he’d almost thrown a knife at a few weeks ago.

  He looked for Denny just as she turned her wide eyes on Daum. Denny started moving his direction. When she got closer, he told her, “Get outside. Go out through the kitchen and warn Kazy about this guy on your way through.”

  As Denny moved toward the kitchen Daum thought, I hope she thinks she’s warning Kazy in case the guy decides to come into the kitchen. He snorted softly, Not because she realizes I need a young girl to come out and protect me.

  Taking his hat off, the man made his way toward the bar. Daum reached down and checked the position of his oaken club. The man didn’t look belligerent or angry. Of course, he hasn’t had anything to drink yet.

  Daum was pondering whether to refuse to serve the man beer when the guy stopped just before the bar. Twisting his hat, he said, “I just come by to apologize for the way I acted last time I was here.”

  Tentatively, Daum said, “I hope you understand we don’t want to serve you any beer?”