by T J Trapp
“Yes, Mother, and I will place extra blankets in your travel chair.”
Varra looked at her barefoot house drone. “I suppose the porter drones will need to be wearing shoes. Do we have any for them?”
“I do not know, Mother. I will find out.”
“I would hate to have to expend the effort to obtain shoes for all the drones,” Varra mused. “There are thousands of drones in the city, and each one would need two shoes.”
✽✽✽
Bundled in her travel clothes and extra blankets, Varra looked down from her sedan chair as she rode to the Disca. None of the portals were operating and the route took much longer than usual. Under the influence of the bright sun the snow had mostly melted and only the shadows still exhibited the white coating. Drones were attempting to carry out their functions, but the cold was impacting them as they moved slowly through the city streets. Varra noted several dead drones in the shadows that had not yet been removed. Very few of the shops were open.
The usual knot of drones and sedan chairs had generally dispersed by the time Varra arrived at the Disca hall. Most of the other mothers were already there, sitting in their appointed places with their shivering attendants behind them, waiting for Varra to arrive so that the meeting could start. Attendance seemed very heavy for this kind of administrative meeting; most mothers only showed up for ceremonial gatherings or when there would be an execution or other entertainment.
Varra looked around in disgust. They usually don’t come to hear details on how our city is managed. But look at them. They are all interested in having their lifestyle restored. No one wants to be cold. Pampered idiots.
Most of the Disca members looked cold. Most were wearing the typical sheer, flowing robes preferred by the mothers; only a few, like Varra, were wearing their warm travel clothes. A few had thought to bring blankets, but most sat there in the cold, sullenly staring at Varra. A few drones bustled about looking for ways to provide heat, but because the building normally provided its own heat and cooling, there was little that they could do.
The room became quiet as Varra took her accustomed place on the center dais of the Audience Hall with the other members of the Disca council. Varra intoned the formal invocation to start the gathering, and the mothers answered in unison with the traditional formal response.
“Mothers, we are facing an unexpected crisis, a threat to our way of life,” Varra said. “We come together today to address this situation. I have been informed that we no longer have a power source to bring us the comforts that we deservedly are accustomed to. But our problems run deeper than merely the temperatures of our residences, and decent meals. Without our power source, our protection zone surrounding our city has failed, and with it the forces that control our climate. Without our power source, we are no longer able to protect our city and our fields from either outside invaders or the ravages of the native mountain weather. Already we are seeing the effects – the freezing snow has left the mountain tops and descended into our haven.
“Today, the Disca has called this gathering to address these issues, and to call upon our singular abilities and our traditions.”
Varra looked at a green-garbed woman waiting in the lower tier just beyond the central dais, and motioned for her to come forward. The mother entered the circular area and walked to the truth stone centered between the Disca members. Varra nodded to her and she laid her hands upon the stone; she waited until its swirling colors subsided and then Varra gave her leave to speak.
“Mothers, I come to you from the concentrator operating building. My task is to oversee the drones and clutchmen who maintain the power supply to our residences and our facilities.
“You may not know the source of the power that enables our way of life. New Haven has a traditional source that generates dark energy and broadcasts it to the city. We use the power from that source to run everything here. That source is located in the concentrator building. The concentrator itself is functioning, but a large power globe that is an essential part of the distribution of the power is not operating.
“Unfortunately, and for reasons we do not understand, the power globe has broken. When we investigated the situation, after we found that we had no heat, we went to the concentrator building. The globe has shattered and is in pieces all over the room. There is no power coming from that source.”
“Then, put in a new one,” a member of the Disca council snapped. “We need power.”
“We cannot. We do not have a replacement globe,” the mother responded.
“Why not?”
“Our power globe has been in operation for centuries, since the very founding of our New Haven,” replied the mother. “There is no replacement.”
“Then you need to fix it,” another mother shouted out from one of the balconies. “Stick the globe pieces back together and give us back our power!”
“Yes, you need to fix it,” the Disca member said. “When will you have it fixed?”
“As soon as we are provided with a replacement globe,” the green-robed mother said.
“And as soon as you get it, you can restart everything, can’t you?”
The mother raised up to her full height in righteous indignation. “Of course we can install a replacement. When we have it.”
The truth stone behind her glowed with a light that indicated a half-truth. She glanced impatiently at the glowing stone, and, fully aware of its meaning, added a caveat. “But a replacement crystal globe does need to be properly built, and my drones do not build globes. That is another mother’s drones. She is the negligent one here and not me.”
A tall mother in a yellow robe in the first row of the chamber stood and looked at the other mother with anger. “Do not insult me and my ancestors,” she said loudly, pointing at the woman in green. “We are not negligent! The power globe has lasted since the dawn of our time here on Nevia! We all knew that it could fail. It is the Disca’s fault that it did not assign enough drones to me so that we could build a new crystal. The reason they did not assign me drones is because you and your ancestors told them that the crystal globe was operating without any problems and you would have ample warning if it started to go bad, in order to give us enough time for a replacement to be constructed!”
Varra felt the lines between the two mothers start to twist and intervened. “Stop. Stop! Fighting does not get us out of our problem. Both of you calm down.”
The two mothers glared at each other, but the twisting of the lines stopped. There was a moment of silence. But only a moment.
“Crystals! Globes! Drones!” shrieked an agitated Disca mother. “Quit giving us gibberish. I want to know when things will be back to normal! When?” Her outburst was followed by an angry buzz of voices rising across the chamber.
Varra stood and waited for decorum to be restored. Then she turned to the second mother and gestured for her to come forward.
“Your line has been responsible for crystals since the founding of our city here. You and your ancestors have all the memory of the generations on this subject. Mother, continue. Start from the beginning and tell all of us what the situation is.”
The mother in yellow entered the central dais and looked around the room at the collected mothers. “My family has provided the crystals for New Haven since the founding. We take the responsibility for providing crystals very seriously. Since the founding, our drones have met all the needs of this city.
“My drones routinely make many crystals, of different kinds as required. In our workshops, the drones make the rods and the portal controllers you all use to travel through our city, plus the many small crystals we use every day. My drones can also make the large concentrator power crystals that the source requires. They have years of experience in doing do – although we have never made a globe of that size, we have made a dozen or so smaller power crystals that are large enough to power one building.
“Those smaller power crystals are used for backup power in important buildings, such as
the hatchery. They are also small enough that they can be taken when we travel. They were designed to power some of our war weapons, but we haven’t used our war weapons for hundreds of years.”
“That is nice,” a Disca mother interrupted, “with your drones and crystals and all. But when will our lives be back to normal?”
The mother caught herself and refrained from making a sarcastic comment back to the interrupting woman.
“Yes,” Varra said, again sensing the need to defuse the animosity between two mothers. “Do we have a backup crystal for the power supply?”
“The large crystal globe that shattered actually was our backup crystal, even though it has been in use for hundreds of years. It replaced the original crystal that our ancestors brought here; but that first crystal failed not long after the founding. At every allocation gathering since then, my foremothers and I have requested that the Disca allocate enough drones for me to make a new large power crystal. But no! The Disca has always said that we did not need a new one while the old one still worked, and has always prioritized other needs before the need to make a new crystal. And now, here we are! No power, and no crystal!” She stopped and glared at the Disca members arrayed before her.
“How many drones do you need to make it?” asked one of the Disca mothers.
“I need at least a hundred drones.”
“Then take a hundred field drones and do it.”
“Field drones will not work. I need a hundred of our most capable drones – the ones that we use as house drones or as our skilled artisans. This is very complex work.”
“No!” cried a voice from the gallery. “You cannot have my house drones! I need them to serve in my residence!”
“If you do not have a residence, you will not need your house drones,” the mother in yellow answered darkly.
The seven Disca mothers looked at each other, and the truth stone sputtered a few wisps of color. Finally, Varra spoke.
“We have little choice but to let you have a hundred skilled drones. Speak to the drone allocation mothers. And then, how long will it be before everything is back to normal?”
“At least three, and maybe four, transits of the sun.”
A collective gasp emerged from the mothers. “That is not acceptable!” blurted a Disca member. “We cannot go without our power source for that long!”
“Yes, we will certainly all freeze, in the dark, if we have to wait that long!” chimed in another.
“Why so long?” asked Varra. “Cannot you speed up the process?”
“Unfortunately, Mother Varra, the process will take as long as it will take. First, we have to train the specialty drones to be dark energy users – they need to learn how to sense and control that form of energy. Only drones can do that – it is beneath the powers of elves to achieve.
“It is hard to train the drones. They are very stupid. The process of learning how to use dark energy tends to kill them. About a third die before their training is complete. If we lose only a third to their mistakes, it will still take a full transit of the sun before they can absorb the knowledge. If we are willing to lose twice that many, two-thirds of them, then I can train the remaining in half the time, but then I will need twice as many to start with.
“Then, after the drones are able to handle dark energy, they have to be trained in crystal-making. To get a drone to an acceptable level of ability takes another transit of the sun. We have tried in the past to make it go more quickly, but we have found that it takes as long as it takes.”
“How many of these specialty-drones will you need?”
“I will need at least sixty. More would be better, because they tend to wear out and have to be discarded before the task is complete.”
“Why does it take so many?” asked another Disca member. “And why so long?”
The mother in yellow looked at her. “It takes a long time to make something from nothing,” she said, condescendingly. “The crystals need to be made from dark energy, pulled from the air, one thin layer at a time. It takes four drones, working together, to make one layer of the crystal. They do it by concentrating dark energy. No matter how well-trained they are, each drone can only do this for a short period of time before they have to recover; it takes several hours or overnight to recover. So, you see, I need several sets of four drones every day.”
“I don’t understand. Why can’t you just coerce them to work faster?”
“No, you don’t understand. If a drone loses concentration it will cause a flaw in the crystal and we have to start over with that layer. And if the flaw is severe, we have to discard all the work already done and start over at the beginning. Also, it destroys the drone, and it has to be replaced.” She touched her rod. “My ancestors’ memories tell me that if I start with sixty drones, I will be lucky to have ten still functioning by the time the crystal is complete.”
“But why does it have to take so long? We can’t just sit here while the mountains blow white drifts on us for a whole year.”
“It takes as long as it takes. My ancestors measured how long it takes to make a layer of crystal from the dark energy. No matter how many drones we use, or how long they work, or how much we punish them, the rate that they can make layers of the crystal never changes. A large crystal like the power crystal requires almost a transit of the sun to grow. That is after we have the required number of drones trained and working.”
“Why can’t you just take several of the smaller crystals – like the ones you already have – and stick them together to make a big one?”
“It doesn’t work that way,” the mother in yellow sneered. “The power crystal has to have special little things embedded in it – ‘tricrystals’ – to make it work. The smaller crystals that we use have a few of those. Many small crystals can be combined to create a large crystal, but it takes a special master crystal to make the small ones work together. We have never made a master crystal and it would take longer to learn how to make it properly than it would take to make a new one. The fastest path is to make a new large crystal.”
A member of the Disca raised her hand to stop the discussion. “You don’t need to explain anything more about these crystals. We understand that you have to make them a certain way, and that it takes a long time. Now – how long will it take to replace the big crystal?”
“Mother, if everything is done right, we can have a new crystal in three transits of the sun. If the drones do not do it correctly, it will take longer.”
“Three transits?!?” the Disca mother exclaimed.
Varra had watched the truth stone as the mother spoke. “Everything that you say is true. I see no option except to allow you to have the drones you require and start to work.” A murmur ran through the big chamber; some of the mothers agreed that the crystal-building would need to proceed, some wondered if there would be a shortage of house drones as a result, some questioned the crystal mother’s competence, and some objected to the idea of living through three sets of winters while the work took place.
Varra again raised her hand for silence. “Three transits of the sun is a long time. That means that we will have to suffer through three seasons of snow. That will be very difficult. Now we must decide how we survive while you are building the crystal.”
30 – A Bleak Prospect
“Mothers, we must prevail,” Varra intoned, trying to regain control of the Disca meeting. “We must overcome this inconvenience. In the meantime, we must make other plans to survive until our crystal can be rebuilt. We do not deserve this fate – none of us do – but it is what we have been given. Without our power crystal, we will not have heat, or light, or our baths, or our shaded windows, or the many other basic necessities we ought to have.”
“What about food?” someone asked. “I could not get fresh food this morning, and my kitchen drone showed me that the green leaves in my residence storage shed had wilted. He said it was from the cold. Will this cold season harm our elvenberries?”
“And the fi
eld drones,” someone else asked. “If the city drones are dropping from the cold, what about the field drones? Will they stop working as well? Who will bring us food if they perish from the cold?”
A mother in the back chimed in, “I heard from my clutchman that there are many dead field drones. We will need to replace a lot of field drones.”
“What about saving the rest?” someone asked. “We can’t let them all die. No one else knows how to tend the fields.”
Another mother stared at her in amazement. “Where would we put the filthy creatures? In your residence?” Several mothers laughed at that thought.
Varra again raised her hand for silence. “I don’t think you understand the seriousness of the situation. This is not about saving field drones. We rely on the fields all year long for our food supply. Our food supply here in the city will last only through a convergence of the two lesser moons, if that long. If the drones die and cannot work the fields, or the fields freeze and our plants and livestock die, we have no way to obtain more food.”
Another member of the Disca nodded in agreement. “We have no way to keep out the winter weather without the concentrator crystal, or even heat anything. I have travelled through these mountains many times. It is only fall – when the winter weather gets bad, within a few passages of the moons, we will all either freeze or starve or both.”
“I just thought of something,” another mother interjected. “I just laid my eggs. What is happening with the eggs?” This created an uproar amid the normally quiet mothers.
“Yes – our nursery? And the freshlings?”
“I am too old to lay any more eggs – what about my daughter?”
Varra stood up and waited for quiet to return. “For now, the eggs are all right. We have stationed a dark energy drone with one of the small power crystals at the hatchery to maintain the proper temperature for our eggs.”
“And the freshlings?”
“That power crystal can maintain the eggs but does not have any spare energy to do much else. We may lose some freshlings.”