A Succession of Bad Days

by Graydon Saunders

  Arch, you can see the questions chasing themselves through eyes and expression, settles on “Do you know how Blossom does that?”

  “No.” comes out in four-way unison, not sure it’s eerie, we’re all doing stuff. Chloris asks Arch if a shelter’s wanted, gets a nod. Arch gets mildly narrow eyes at what’s obviously Chloris, Zora, me and Dove, for our own shelters, but doesn’t say anything.

  I’ve just got the pot of porridge, amaranth and dried berries, off the heat when Blossom reappears.

  “Obvious where to come down from the ridge line, obvious where to turn the stream, the dam’s going to be a challenge,” Blossom says, sticking another survey stake into the ground closer than we are to the lip of the valley, past the stack of canoes.

  A single tall green line traces itself across the landscape, if I concentrate I can see it climb the distant, ten or twelve kilometres distant, ridge.

  Still there in the morning, every bit as green.

  Twelve kilometres isn’t far, even uphill, total rise to the ridge top, from the stream we cleared out, is maybe sixty metres, total rise to the level of the water we want is maybe twenty-five, four-forty-five or so to four-seventy. We have to go deeper, water’s surface isn’t what you want, but even thirty metres could be a four-lock rise. Do five, because one of them is going to be right here. Eight pairs, four crossing ponds, and dredging the Weed Steam’s bed. We could fill it, there’s enough water, the problem’s flow, can’t flow through the locks, can’t just dig a stream bed, more than enough slope that it’ll want to move.

  “Lock and sluice the Weed Stream outlet?” Arch, complete with battered tea mug, is squatting next to me and peering at my illusion-model.

  That will need dredging, for sure, it’s silted-in compared to the Thines-stream.

  “Muddy place for locks,” is what I say out loud. We could do it, there’s bedrock down there, but still. No one wants to turn into locks right out of the larger stream.

  “Are we going to line the canal?” Chloris sounds speculative. Dove and Zora are having an amiable wrangle about the eggs, Zora’s turn on breakfast but cooking eggs, one each, has been delegated to Dove, who is inclined to just cook them in their shells. Zora’s not at all fond of shelling eggs, and had hoped Dove would poach them.

  The result is Dove poaching Zora’s egg in a five-litre sphere of salted water hovering next to the rest of our eggs as they quietly cook hard.

  “Have to,” I say to Chloris. “It’s kinda crumbly under there, shale, gunky sandstones, lot more tilted than the landscape, if we don’t line the channels they’re going to seep dry.” And then we have to figure out where all that water’s going.

  “Four metres by sixty in the Weed Stream, less than three times eighty-one. We could stick nine-metre gates in the bottoms of the passing ponds.”

  “Good dredge team could control flow with mud,” Dove says, amused. Our eggs are floating toward big egg-mugs, next to plates with bacon and fried squash and apple-ginger preserves. Zora produces a spare egg mug in self-defence, a poached egg won’t all fit in one mug with no shell to hold it up.

  “Could, but let’s go with covers,” Blossom says. “Something to do with the aluminium.”

  “Not lock-gates?” Zora’s a bit surprised. So am I.

  “Too much thermal expansion, they might wedge. Should just push open a bit, but there’s no set design. No one knows how to fix silicon carbide, but — ” and Blossom shrugs. The stuff’s strong, stronger than steel, it’s light, and it responds to temperature hardly at all. “This is not a time for clever hinge designs.”

  We all nod, and eat breakfast. The last half of Arch’s egg gets offered round the table. Chloris gets it, makes it vanish, cleanly, the inside of the shell shining, and smiles in a way that makes Dove’s eyes close and Zora look pained.

  The first pair of locks don’t give us any trouble, standard lock is thirty-five-metres-by-ten capacity, four metres of water over the sill. Standard draft is two metres, standard barge size is thirty-two by eight, but the folks who write standards for the Lug-gesith are careful people. Low water, overload, rudder a bit deeper than the keel, it takes surprisingly little, and then you’ve got a blocked lock. Better, the Lug-gesiths have thought for hundreds of years, to dig extra, fine vessels running deep, and not block.

  “Towpath?” Dove says, just before the link goes active. Space for one, Blossom says. Not going to put the surface down.

  Arch winds up shaking again.

  I think Arch was expecting yesterday, not what happens when Dove and I get all folded together and link up with Blossom. Zora and Chloris set up to catch surplus elements, we vent the oxygen straight up but lots of spoil goes in big sealed glass slugs, stacked in the space that’s going to be between the canals. Metallic sodium’s a bad thing to toss in the water. The pile of ingots is bigger, we’re a bit short of glass, silicon, Blossom says “Oh, all right,” and makes the fill-gates with corundum, internal lines blushing green with iron.

  Measuring string comes out. We’ve about agreed that we can’t free-hand the canal, we’re going to have to set up an enchantment, the locks are about thirty centimetres off, wide, which isn’t dire, but we’d rather get them right, when there’s a shout from the Weed Stream.

  The shout’s from a couple of weeding teams in flatboats, they can just manage to pole those up the Weed Stream if they’re stubborn about it.

  There were lots of reports of the weeds turning to dust, coming down to Thines. They’ve got flatboats and sacks and sacks of clean seed mixes, they want to know how much further up the lack of weeds goes. “Five kilometres” as an answer doesn’t make them happy, but “there’s a wall, you can’t miss it,” I think Blossom’s been wanting to say that for a long time, the existence of a wall, they approve of that. Also the “Mind the outflow gate,” and the idea that we’re planning on four metres of water in the stream bed, they like those. Means they only need to seed the banks. The steep part needs something, the angle of repose is only just not too steep. There’s going to be a towpath each side, but we do that when we’re coming back with the water.

  Making the — gauges, patterns, can’t say jigs, we’re not putting the landscape in them, not really, takes the five of us about twenty minutes, it’s not a whole 'do this’ sort of enchantment, we don’t know enough about the rock. Dove and I get one channel, Blossom gets the other one, Zora and Chloris get the side fences, and we start walking. It’s a slow walk, but we get the first five kilometres, a crossing pond, and the next set of locks done by lunch time.

  Lunch, all our food, is back down by the first set of locks. We can all pull water out of the air well enough to fill canteens.

  “No biscuits?” Zora sounds hopeful, it’s carefully not plaintive. Blossom doesn’t respond well to plaintive.

  Blossom’s head shakes, a little rueful and a lot No. “I have Halt’s voice in my head, saying Consequential lack of planning.”

  Arch has lunch cooking, more amaranth porridge, saved from blandness by a free hand with chopped bacon and dried berries.

  “Would it go quicker,” Chloris asks, “if we walked one channel up, the other one back, and brought all the stuff up before doing the next set of hardware?”

  “We wouldn’t walk faster doing one channel,” Dove says. “And we’d have only one fence and a deep pit.” The channels are twenty-five metres wide, a broad U-shape. If they weren’t lined, they’d do well to keep a twelve metre wide full-depth channel down the middle, but they should silt up pretty slowly. Any sheep that fall in the dry channel are mutton, the lowest depth below grade is seven metres.

  “Walk all the stuff up to the next locks, put the channels in going back to the built locks, walk up to the stuff, put those locks in?” It would put us forward when we stopped.

  Arch starts laughing, hard enough that we’re all looking worried, it’s not looking like completely voluntary laughter. Eventually, Arch manages to express that getting four locks and ten kilometres of canal done bef
ore lunch is not usually considered inefficient. Chloris says “It’s a late lunch,” in prim tones and sets Arch off again.

  “We’re not really done. Bollards, ladders, railings, signs for the exit stairs.” Dove’s tone is contemplative. Dove’s at least as annoyed as contemplative. What was going to be “Swing bridges,” turns into narrowed eyes, and a sudden reach for the transect. “Why do we have to walk?” Dove says, in I’ve been an idiot tones.

  “You can do heavy work at eight kilometres?” Arch doesn’t believe this. It might be a fact, Arch might allow it a fact, but there’s no trace of belief in the fact in there.

  “They’re good for sixteen,” Blossom says. “Anyone got objections to silicon carbide bollards?”

  “Not if they’re really smooth,” Zora says.

  Which is what we do. The swing bridges, beams, pivot machinery, the gearing, the railings and the deck gratings, everything but the lever into the big gears that swing them, those are silicon carbide, too. Making roller bearings two decimetres in diameter by eight long feels weird, much too big to be bearings, but not as weird as leaving them exposed to the air. Still, Arch can crank the bridge round alone, just with muscle. It’s not quick, someone’s going to want to put a focus in eventually, a focus or a draught team, but the bridge swings in an even, steady way and Arch doesn’t have to work too hard to do it. Serious grinning.

  Signs and ladders and railings are aluminium, like the turning levers; we have enough, there’s enough zinc in the dirt, plenty of silicon for this, to stiffen it up a bit, Blossom’s head is full of alloy lists, we get passed a subset, I can feel Zora turning pages and feeling gleeful.

  Second swing-bridge up by the second set of locks, pick everything up, ingots, canoes, baggage and all, float it all up to the saddle in the ridge we’re expecting to cut, eat dinner. Plan a bit. This one takes a control dam, some kind of water control, we want to be able to send water down the original stream, the canal can overflow, the gates mean a fixed rate of flow. Almost fixed, they’re larger than they need to be, usually, hot summer days can take a lot of water off. Arch and Blossom have both done the math for that, we think we’re safe.

  Being here means we can discuss with full scale illusions, they don’t do anything, the water flows right through them, a couple of eagles try to land on the idea of the dam and have no success, but it’s much easier to visualize.

  The morning is finishing the canal downhill to the Thines-stream, lock, swing-bridges, big water-gates, bollards, all of it. We slow down and get methodical, agree on a list of things and the order before we start. Blossom sticks an illusion of the list to a handy rock, and when we all surface around lunch time I’m leaning on Dove, Chloris is leaning on Dove, Zora’s leaning on Blossom, and Arch is looking deeply concerned. Probably not because we started in a neat seated circle and now look at us.

  Zora looks at Arch and says “Wizard team,” the only one of us who can say it with a straight face. Reliably, anyway. Blossom grins, Halt’s mad idea worked. The rest of us look abashed or embarrassed, more than half the time. First-year apprentices don’t get the name of wizards for moving dirt, is the short version of the consensus.

  “Looks kinda like subsumption of the will,” Arch says.

  “You,” Chloris says, “can’t hear the arguments about bollard style.”

  We wound up alternating round bollards and double-headed mooring bollards, even picking half the bollards we’d already put in for the first segment back out and replacing them. Wouldn’t want anyone thinking we were making it up as we went along, Dove had said.

  “Mind if I trot down to the new locks and stick official positions on them?” Arch says. Something Arch had already done for the first two, neat, small, standard plates in bronze. Barge crews tell stories of weather so foggy people had to get off the barge and read the plate to convince themselves of which lock they were at.

  “No.” Blossom looks a bit quizzical. “Lots of mass in motion after lunch, try not to walk into the ward.”

  Blossom gets, we get, the sketch of a wave as Arch trots off.

  Is Arch really worried you’re controlling our minds?

  Yes, Blossom says. It’s more plausible than what we’re actually doing. History is full of bound sorcerers; what we’re doing has no other examples.

  Kynefrid? Chloris says, and Blossom replies Kynefrid couldn’t, anymore. Doing fine with Crane, last news I had, but traditionally. Not this.

  How far? Dove asks, very calm.

  Remember Clerk Lester? We all nod. The idea of nod. All that careful review was in part to establish that you really can work in concert. The concern is fine, of course there’s concern, it looks like something dreadful, sending a message is exactly what Archimedes ought to do. Not objecting is the best proof we can give that we’re not doing anything dreadful. It’s only a problem if Arch refuses to come back and survey for us.

  Arch comes back, late enough to be late for dinner if dinner wasn’t late, climbing back up where we’re sitting on a flattened part of the ridge.

  I learn some new Creek swear words. Dove doesn’t, but will grant points for impassioned delivery. Chloris and Zora look shocked at different points, Blossom can’t stop grinning, the happy one, not the things-fly-apart one.

  The cut’s more than five kilometres long, and shale doesn’t stack well, it’s not building stone, so you have to make the cut a wide one to be safe, you can’t just make a vertical canyon, it’s shaped like a mostly open book. We didn’t try to keep two channels; there’s a single sixty-metre channel, no deeper, just wider.

  None of this is what’s making Arch swear. I think all of that was expected.

  The valley’s pretty wide, and shallow, and there’s nothing like a good place to put a dam. We’d have to go ten or twenty kilometres down the valley to get anywhere narrow, and maybe with the kind of rock you can anchor a dam into. There isn’t enough stream to reliably flood back that far, not without waiting four or five years for the reservoir to fill and waiting to see what subsides under the weight, so that wouldn’t work even if we were willing to drown that much not-especially-weedy valley where there’s going to be at least a little settlement.

  Can’t just turn the stream, it’d flow, but there’s going to be too much of it most, maybe all, of the year, it’s a robust stream. We might not need to do anything to the stream at all, to make it navigable, well, remove snags. Don’t want to block it, either, the stream ought to be navigable for a good way below here, don’t want to make that difficult.

  There wasn’t much carbon in the spoil, it’s clean shale, this far uphill is further down-section, nothing much organic. Lots of oxygen, we had to be careful, venting that straight up, high and widely, well away from the greenery. Didn’t vent all of it, and there was enough aluminium, more than enough, so we don’t have a dam.

  We’ve got the whole facing curve of the stream evened out, we left the inside alone, but the outside of the curve, where it curves toward the canal, where it would erode, the deep-water side, there’s a wall and channel, five hundred metres long. We moved that thirty metres closer to the canal, making the stream wider. It’s got a set of big upstream stop-walls, a metre thick, three metres apart, ten metres long, parallel to the current, and covering about three-fifths of the original seventy-metre stream width, angled out to upstream, so the barges coming downstream get guided, will have lights, will have a barrier, something to make the turn hard to miss. There’s an openwork deck across the wall tops, movable, silicon carbide and not too smooth, there was enough carbon for that and railings for tall Creeks, it’s not going to be hard for the lock team to get people out to put up signal lights or flags.

  There’s a tall separator wall, five metres thick, it’s got a walkway and railings, access ladders, between the through channel, at sixty metres wide enough for both directions, and the single barge-width channel for barges going downstream and turning into the canal. There’s another big curved single-width channel for barges turning in
to the canal going upstream, someday, maybe soon, it’s a nice valley, and another set of matching stop-walls on the downstream side. Anybody who wants to leave the canal and head up or down, they go straight up the middle and into the through channel, it’s separated channels into three sides of a crossing pond, should be plenty of room.

  The single barge turn-in channels follow circle sections, big ones, it would be a two-kilometre circle. The curving channels meet at a crossing pond, triple-size, right about where the common sixty-metre channel starts to be clearly a cut into the rock of the ridge. The pond has locks, to exit, four deep-sill ones, one per in and one per out, the out channels separate past the pond. We sank the channels deeper than the stream bed by a couple metres. It has the regular nine-metre water-gates, three of them, to keep the canal filled. The stop walls, there’s no way Arch could see this, have gates both sides, and downstream’s stop walls have the outflow. The stream can just about skip the turn, if all the gates are open. Something else the deck is good for, getting people out to the gate winches, to raise and lower the covers.

  It’s a lot of gates, but a two-metre gate’s pretty easy, and we’ve all had a lot of practice with corundum. All six available threads of attention can make a gate that size in parallel, it went pretty quick, even stacking them five-by-three on both sides of the stop walls.

  Well, except it really doesn’t take much iron and titanium to colour corundum. Trace amounts, trace amounts we easily had. It’s a sunny day, with a clear sky. These aren’t mountains, hilly, but nothing even close to tall enough to block the noon sun of late summer out of the northern sky.

  Arch is swearing at a half-kilometre curved sapphire wall, ten metres higher than our best guess at high water.

  When Arch notices there’s some more swearing at the four-metre-thick strips of channel wall showing across the land, straight and curved. We made them rough, good walking traction, they don’t especially shine, but they’re blue, blue like we made them out of the idea of blue.