by CJ Brightley
“I hope she’ll be all right,” she said to Patient. “She’s new to independence.”
“I’m sure she’ll be fine,” he said. “From what you’ve told me, she may be new to it, but she’s learning fast.”
Rosie panicked for a moment when Mill came to pass on Hope’s warning, then she firmed her prominent jaw.
“It had to come sooner or later,” she muttered, then, louder, “thank you, Mill.”
Dignified was watching her with his usual lack of expression.
“My parents will be here soon,” she said. “I had intended to introduce you at a time of our choosing, not theirs, but it can’t be helped.” She straightened his collar and brushed his hair into place with her fingers. “There. I don’t suppose I need to tell you to let me handle the conversation.”
He shook his head.
Her parents arrived a few minutes later. Forewarned, she had decided to have Mill show them through to the currently empty offices in the manufactory side. She knew what her mother’s opinion of the lab’s chaos would be, but she would appreciate a well-ordered manufactory.
Rosie stood to greet them, encouraging Dignified to do the same with a hand on his arm, and Mill showed them to seats and effaced himself like a well-trained servant.
“Industry,” said her mother.
“Good evening, Mother.” Her voice was entirely level and courteous.
“We need to talk. Should this… gentleman be present?”
“Yes, Mother, he should. Dignified, my mother, Admiration Merchant; my father, Punctual of Rosewall; Mister Dignified Printer.”
“Your employer?”
“Yes, Father. And… more.” She took Dignified’s hand in both of hers and straightened her chin. There was a resonant pause.
“I see,” said Mother. “I trust there is no coercion involved?”
“None,” said Rosie simply.
“And you are preserving the proprieties?” asked Father.
“What,” said Rosie, “you want to know if you should send someone to challenge Dignified to a duel over my honour?”
“Don’t be absurd, Industry,” said her mother.
“Did you convince her to break from her family?” put in Father.
“He did not,” said Rosie. “That was my decision, though I discussed it with him, of course. Dignified himself is a pacifist, and I have come to share his views.”
“Foolishness,” muttered Father, out of his proper turn.
“So our money is too dirty for you now?” said Mother.
“I wouldn’t put it that way. We’re more comfortable not depending on income which has been gained from weapons of war, that’s all.”
“I see,” said Father. “Well, you’re entitled to your viewpoint, of course, though I think it simplistic. Were you going to discuss any of this with us at any point?”
“Of course, Father. And we’re discussing it now.”
“That woman you’re living with, the servant girl,” said Mother.
“You mean the mage? Probably going to be the youngest senior mage ever appointed? Received the Realmgold’s Honour, Gold, for her services? As did Dignified,” added Rosie. “Is that the lady you’re speaking of?”
“Hope at Merrybourne, she called herself,” said Father. “That’s a servant name.”
“Yes, her family are on the staff of the Countygold of the Western Isles. I believe her father is his estate manager and her mother his secretary. Or possibly the other way about.”
“Well. In any case. Are you aware that she has a young man in your rooms, unchaperoned, to whom she is not oathbound?”
“Yes, Mother, I’m aware. He visits her regularly.”
“And that doesn’t trouble you?”
“Well, Father,” said Rosie, “I don’t really find myself in a position to criticise her for that behaviour.” She let her words resonate in the silence for a heartbeat, then added, “Nor would I in any case. They’re devoted to each other, and he is one of the kindest men in the world. As for me,” she paused, looking from one parent to the other, “I am twenty-seven years old, a legal adult, capable of earning my own living, making my own decisions and living where I wish, with whom I wish. I am sane, not acting under coercion, and have committed no crime. I love my family, and I want to remain close to you all, but please understand that I will find that difficult if the sole topic of conversation is the perceived moral failings of my friends and colleagues.”
“…I see,” said Mother, eventually. “Well, you have certainly been very frank, Industry. Very frank.”
Rosie fought down her impulse to apologise.
“Mister Dignified,” said her father, “I must ask you one thing.”
Dignified blinked and nodded.
“What are your intentions toward my daughter?”
The two heartbeats Rosie spent waiting for that answer were two of the longest in her life. It was like… like when the gnomes had made that casting for her, and they were taking it out of the mould, and until all the sand was off they didn’t know if it was cracked. Only more important, of course.
“I love Rosie,” said Dignified. “I don’t have any family left. I want… I would like her to be my family.”
“You intend to oathbind?” said Mother.
“Yes.”
“Have you asked her yet?” said Father.
“No.”
“The answer will be yes,” said Rosie.
“Well,” said her mother, “this is all rather sudden.”
“To you, Mother, but for me it has been a long time coming.”
“I daresay. Perhaps that tells us that we should speak more often, Industry,” said her mother. “I can’t say I approve of all your choices, but then, if I approved of all of them I suppose they would be my choices, wouldn’t they? It may take me some time to accustom myself to these changes. But whenever you wish to talk, I shall make myself available.”
“I understand, Mother. Thank you.” Taken by a spontaneous impulse, Rosie sprang to her feet, took one step, and awkwardly hugged her mother, still seated in the chair opposite.
“Yes, well,” said Mother, disentangling herself. “We shall have to talk at length, but your place of employment does not seem quite the venue. I imagine you will be going home soon, in any case. Come, Punctual, our daughter has had a long day of work.”
Her father rose obediently and, shooting one last impenetrable look from under his eyebrows at Dignified, accompanied her to the door, where Mill reappeared and let them out.
Everyone, even Dignified, let out a sigh to relieve the tension after they had gone.
“Mill,” said Rosie.
“Yes, Mistress?”
“The Master and I have… matters to discuss.” She slid her hand up Dignified’s chest and tweaked his collar.
“I was just on my way out, Mistress,” said the gnome, seizing his tugboat-shaped hat and a jacket. He let himself out the back door.
“Now,” said Rosie. “Come through here, and let’s begin our… discussion.”
17
Another Oathconflict
Hope next saw Rosie when she dropped into the lab to chivvy Dignified about reviewing her article. If she had been home overnight, it had been while Hope was asleep.
“So,” she said, “our chill cabinet is full of food.”
“Is it? Did Patient make it?”
“We made it together. He’s teaching me.”
“Oh, good. I should have you show me, I suppose. I’ve never even been in a kitchen while someone else was cooking, let alone done it myself.”
“I’ll teach you next time we’re both home. It’s surprisingly easy. How is it going on the flight crystals?”
“We’re stuck until I finish the calculating machine, I think. We have lots of measurements, but there are so many calculations that need to be done that they aren’t useful as yet. While I’m stuck on the calculating machine, we’re trying to work out the voting record system, and Dignified is still playi
ng with ideas for recording sound.”
“Do you have a design for the calculating machine?”
“I have three designs. All of them require linkages that are far too complicated to allow for easy manufacture.”
“What have you come up with?”
“Well, there’s this one,” said Rosie, pulling a drawing from under the clutter on a nearby bench. “It just keeps track of how many times you’ve added a number. Tedious and time-consuming to operate, and not very effective. Then there’s this one, which uses the quarter square method of multiplication as a look-up table. All very well and fine, and a human can use it easily, but for a machine it’s unduly complicated. The best candidate, I think, is this third one. It’s also a lookup table, but it works by moving this pair of arms vertically by one number, horizontally by the other number, and then where they cross you see the result.”
“What’s the problem with that one?”
“Once we have the result, how do we transfer it into the rest of the machine and use it to turn the adding wheel the right number of times? That’s what I meant about too many linkages.”
Hope examined the drawing carefully. There was something she’d seen at the Institute… She pulled out her farspeaker, and fished through her card case for Gizmo’s business card.
“Gizmo?” she said, when the devices had connected. “Hope. Do you have a moment? Good. When I was over there the other day, one of your people had something you called glass string. Do you have very much of it? Good. Yes, that will be plenty. If you could, please. And can I also have a copy of the spell which sets off a movement when the light shines on it? Wonderful. Thank you. Yes, to the lab.”
“What are you thinking?” asked Rosie, when she had broken sympathy between the devices.
“Your design gets the arms to cross at a specific square. If we punch holes in that square, corresponding to the number that square represents, and shine a light through the holes, and if on the other side we have some pieces of glass string — it’s one of the new materials they’ve come up with at the Institute, carries light from one place to another — and then at the other end of each string we have a light detector which causes a movement if there’s light and doesn’t if there isn’t…”
“And if we use that movement to move the wheel by one click,” said Rosie, “and then do it again with the next detector until we run out of ones that are lit… That’s really clever.”
“If it works.”
While they waited for the package, Rosie went and spoke to Wheel about producing some testing equipment for a proof of concept, and Hope approached Dignified. He was sitting in the middle of several boards, staring from one to another, and she stood where he could notice her but didn’t say anything. After a while, he looked at her.
“Dignified,” she said. “Have you had a chance to review that article of mine?”
“Haven’t looked at it yet. Forgot,” he said, and added, “sorry.”
Hope blinked in surprise. Rosie was obviously having an impact. She had never heard Dignified apologise before, not because he was arrogant, simply because it didn’t occur to him to say things for social reasons.
“Can you look at it today?”
“Now. Not making any progress here.” He stood up, and she reached out a hand, without touching him, to delay him.
“How are things going?” she asked, in a lower voice. “With Rosie, I mean?”
Dignified’s normally hangdog expression softened into a smile. “Rosie is wonderful,” he said.
“Good,” said Hope. “I’m glad to hear it. Glad you’re happy.”
“Happy,” he said. “Yes, I am, aren’t I? That’s what this is called. Happy. Hmm.” He wandered off, still smiling, and she hoped she hadn’t distracted him from his purpose again.
When the package arrived from the Institute, Rosie fetched him from wherever he had got to, towing him by the hand, which gave Hope a small smile. The three of them and Wheel gathered around a workbench and started assembling the test.
They had to figure out how to cut the glass string, and how to attach it firmly so that it sat in a hole drilled in a copper plate. Then Hope inscribed a light sigil on the inside of a light-proof box, and Wheel sealed it to the plate with putty. Hope activated the sigil, and the other end of the string glowed.
“Good,” she said. “Now the hard part.”
Consulting the notes that had been included with the package, she carefully cast a spell which would cause a small movement when light struck another sigil, and Wheel put that, also, in a light-proof box with the glass string leading in and a small spur of copper poking out the back. Hope activated the light, and nothing happened.
They checked the light. They checked the spell, and Hope found a small error and fixed it. They reassembled the box.
Nothing happened.
They took the box apart again and re-checked the spell.
“It looks fine to me,” said Hope at last. “If there’s an error, I’m missing it. Here, let’s make the sixth wall of the box another plate with a light sigil, and try that.”
They tried it, and the copper spur twitched.
“Might be the seal on the box,” said Wheel. “I’ll make it thicker.”
They set up the apparatus again, and this time the copper spur twitched when Hope activated the light at the other end of the string. They shared smiles.
“Right,” said Hope. “Everything else from here on in is mechanical implementation detail, and I can leave that in your hands, can’t I?”
“I’ll need a master for that spell, though,” said Wheel.
“Of course. I’ll tighten it up a bit. I think it can be more efficient.”
She spent a couple of hours getting the spell into a neat sigil that could be acid-etched from a template, by which time the gnomes had made a prototype of the lookup table for the numbers one to four, drilled the holes, made the horizontal and vertical arms, linked them to cranks, and set up the light box at the intersection. Rosie and Dignified had come up with a design whereby the motion of the little copper spur made a wheel turn by one step, which would both move the register on the adding machine and also move the next glass string into place opposite the sigil. If that string was also lit, the motion would repeat.
The gnomes took the sigil master and the design through to the manufactory, and quickly produced a light-kicker (as Rosie had dubbed the device) and the other required gearing. They assembled the whole machine on a workbench and stood back.
Everyone looked at Rosie.
“Me?” she said, then stepped forward and seized the two multiplier cranks. “Let’s see. Three times four.” She wound one crank three clicks, the other crank four clicks, and then activated the light spell.
The readout wheel, which had the numbers one to sixteen marked around its circumference, clicked round and stopped at twelve.
Rosie and Dignified grinned and embraced, and Wheel said, “Well done, everyone.”
“Yes,” said Rosie. “Especially Hope.”
“I just connected some things,” said Hope. “I get the feeling we’ll do that more and more as we work with the Institute.”
Rosie nodded. “Well,” she said, “we have some clever design work to do now, to make it as compact as possible, deal with powers of sixteen and the like, but I think we’ve had the key breakthrough. Coming, Dignified?”
She led him back into the lab, and Hope, after saying goodbye to the gnomes, headed back to the flat. She had enjoyed getting back into the intellectual challenge and actually doing some magic, but she could tell that she oughtn’t to push it any further. A headache lurked like a storm cloud on the horizon, even after the brisk walk home, and she spent what little was left of the afternoon making some more dumplings to Patient’s recipe.
Rosie didn’t come home that night either, and Hope ate dumplings by herself (they weren’t terrible, though they weren’t as good as Patient’s), then went to bed early.
She continued to d
rop into the lab throughout the shift-round, trying to detach Dignified from the calculating machine long enough for him to review her articles, and consistently failing. She also dropped into the Institute, chatting with the magical researchers to find out what they were working on and what they were stuck on, and drafted most of the rest of her pieces.
Rosie continued to sleep at the lab. At least, Hope assumed that sleeping was among the activities that went on, based on the fact that she seemed to be able to function.
Finally, on Threeday morning, Hope cornered Dignified and stood over him while he went through the articles. Rosie and the gnomes were producing a full-scale prototype, and didn’t disturb them.
“This is good,” he said, after reading through the first piece. “But this here, that isn’t quite what I use that notation to mean. Here…”
He stood at one of the boards. An hour later, she understood something new about mathematics, and had a complete revision to do on her first article.
She managed to shepherd him through two more before Rosie came back and demanded his presence.
“Problems?” asked Hope.
“No,” said Rosie, grinning. “We got it working.”
The device was housed in its own desk, with the registers for setting up the problems and reading off the answers built into the desktop, and a large cabinet underneath, where the drawers would be on an ordinary desk, containing the main works. The operator sat at the desk, set the registers by clicking the wheels around to the correct numbers, chose whether to add, subtract or multiply them (division was a hard problem, and something for the future), and set the device in motion by depressing a pedal under the desk. The machinery then whirred and clicked and read out the answer, both on another set of wheels and also in printed form on a continuous roll of paper running out of the front of the cabinet, just under the desktop. A wire basket collected the paper.