A Succession of Bad Days

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A Succession of Bad Days Page 48

by Graydon Saunders


  Arch’s down to muttering by the time Blossom says “Surveyor?” and Arch stops, takes a succession of slower breaths.

  “Sorry,” Arch says, not looking entirely abashed. “They said students, not a cataclysm.” There’s some more very deliberate, very deep breathing.

  “That’s Halt.” Dove’s more sympathetic than amused, but really is amused. I have trouble being amused, Arch seems like a decent enough person, but that looked like it could have got messy, punching messy.

  Big illusory bell jar, Dove says, still amused. Wait for their air to run out.

  I’m thinking Practical, when I put my head on Dove’s shoulder.

  “I was expecting, I don’t know, help getting the canal line clear, a full survey job, more than we could do with just us four, then everybody from two Creeks over with a dredge or a digging focus showing up and maybe we’d get it done by the end of the year, more likely spring.” Arch has about stopped gesturing by the end of this.

  “This,” there’s a couple unstructured waves at the wall, the locks, the fairy ramparts, “Yesterday and the day before wasn’t warning for this.”

  “It’s really durable,” Chloris says. “And it’s pretty and it’s easier to make than silicon carbide.”

  Arch sits down, thump, on the bare ridge-rock. It’s flat here, that’s why we’re here, and all the baggage. Really bad idea to start rolling down hill when all your attention is in a linked-up working.

  “Pretty isn’t an engineering word,” Blossom says. “Pretty costs extra.”

  Arch snorts, head tipping forward into hands.

  “I have formal civil engineering qualification.” Blossom says it gently. “Here, this was the simplest, fastest, and best time-value thing we could do with the materials at hand.” Even with that, we’ve had to level a lot of ground with new gravel, pick up the sod and the topsoil and run the gravel under, the stretch between the curved canals is raised in the middle, don’t want any low damp spots breeding bugs in there.

  “Tomorrow?” Arch sounds a little muffled, head still in hands.

  “Three swing bridges,” Blossom says, “get the canoes in the water, get up to Sad Goat, channel improvements as required.”

  “Rest day,” Zora says. Zora’s all for it, we all are. The standards were more work, the three-armour-foci day, but today wasn’t easy.

  Blossom nods. Arch is giggling.

  “Surveyor?” Dove says.

  I straighten up; that’s Dove’s this-is-serious voice.

  Arch, it’s a struggle, but Arch straightens back up, looks at Dove, talks.

  “Five people and installing one, only one, bridge, a bridge delivered to them in large, manufactured pieces for them to assemble, it’s a rest day because they can’t do it, there is no possible way.” This isn’t composure, not really, we’ve done something to Archimedes’ understanding of the world.

  “Five isn’t enough for a focus.” Dove says this calmly, and Arch nods. Eight, at least eight, any kind of heavy lifting or excavation’s usually at least thirty-two.

  “Five isn’t enough to do it with block and tackle.” I think Arch is just being complete.

  “Not without teams of horses or oxen or something,” Dove agrees. “And you’re enough of a sorcerer to know we can’t be doing this, to be looking for the Line battalion.”

  Arch’s head shakes, emphatic. “I was up in the far valley, in the Folded Hills, last autumn, most of the winter.” Stable composure seems to be coming back. “The Line can make rock cuts through mountains, they can melt anything, but they can’t make machinery, or water-gates like they were — ” hands wave, high and random — “pancakes, or — ” words clearly fail Arch, pointing at the sapphire wall — “that.

  “Weed Creek, that was just possible, the scary old ones don’t all look old, I don’t know them, I couldn’t tell.” Arch’s voice is wavering, really upset.

  “Even if you’re five of the Twelve, trying out new and inexplicably sane identities, you couldn’t do that.” Another wave at the turning channels.

  “I just turned twenty-three”, Chloris says. “After Festival.”

  Dove leans over, touches the top of Chloris’ near hand.

  “Foci work by creating a mind to do the work with. It’s dumb, but it doesn’t melt. You can use more of the Power than anybody’s head.” Dove’s looking right at Arch, who is listening. I think the air and the rocks are listening.

  “We’re being taught to do everything outside ourselves, it’s not a focus, it’s not dumb, it’s not inside our heads, we don’t melt.” Dove says this, it’s not definite, it’s not absence of doubt, it’s the-rocks-all-know-this-now.

  “That,” Dove waves at the sapphire wall, “isn’t a spell, it’s chemistry. We can lift things, pull rocks apart into elements, move the elements around, push heat. We can do simple illusions, shape-shift a tiny bit, kill weeds, basic bindings. That’s it.” Dove inhales carefully. “Just…vigorously.”

  “Chemistry,” Arch says, about the same way I’d say “Benevolent unicorns”.

  “Chemistry,” Blossom says. “Chemistry with enough intent that the mischief stays out of it.”

  “Bridges? Lock-gates?” Arch doesn’t see how even simple machines are chemistry, is how I take this.

  “Dove left off eating books.” Blossom’s actually cheerful, I don’t know how.

  Would have, were going to wit-crack.

  Have to suppose Dove’s better at judging the effects of stress than I am. Wouldn’t feel confident of Arch’s composure on my own.

  “I’ve got a lot of engineering manuals in my head,” Blossom says. “Designs get distributed.”

  “Designs for silicon carbide.” Arch doesn’t believe this. Which is fair. The stuff gets used for expensive artificial grinding wheels, even more expensive bearings, and not much else.

  “Didn’t say they were optimal designs.” Blossom’s grinning. “It’s stronger and lighter, fewer thermal issues, use the steel design, we’ll be fine.”

  “We really don’t want anybody to starve,” Zora says, quietly and entirely seriously.

  “It’s wilderness,” Chloris says. “We’re usually more tactful near a town.”

  Arch’s hands come up, but just up, no waving. “Peace. You’re explicable. I’ll try not to gibber further.”

  No further gibbering that night, nor the next day. Arch doesn’t think about the bridges, watching load-bearing machinery condense out of the air, that’s what it looks like, it’s bothersome, but it’s not the first time. Arch seems to be basically fine with our floating the canoes down to the water, that’s a real-sorcerers-can thing, the snags crumbling into sludge and sawdust is the same. The one time when thirty thousand tonnes of river bottom rises with a roar of loose gravel and falling water from what ought to be the barge channel and distributes itself against the inside bank, that wobbles Arch a little, and then there’s a visible decision it’s just mass, and a lot less mass than the ridge-cut we’ve already made. The survey picks up a notation that the river wants to go shallow there, it’s going to be something to check after every spring high-water.

  Arch’s survey team is at the north end, north and a bit west, of Sad Goat Lake. They look like they’re not even slightly sure why they got told to bring their other canoe. It’d be, I mean, some of the little side-streams are maybe passable, but the map doesn’t say and I doubt they know, if it’s not on any of the maps. I sure don’t know, but it was probably a thirty kilometre portage. From the way they look, it was pretty steep.

  Dove’s turn to cook means bacon cheese potatoes. It also means really excellent bacon cheese potatoes in, it used to be five, but Dove has it down to about three, minutes. We feed Arch’s team; they didn’t beat us there by more than half an hour and they’re hurting. Food cheers Arch’s team up no end. Arch manages to keep a completely smooth face when Blossom finishes drying dishes and creates an illusion, some ten metres across, of the north end of Sad Goat Lake and says “This one we need
to plan.” Arch’s team all look at Arch, look at the illusion, look at Blossom looking like their kid sister, I don’t think any of them caught how Blossom dries dishes, and visibly decide that they’re going to deal with this calmly.

  The tunnel needs to be level, if we can possibly manage it. The survey team can get us an exact, well, within a metre, elevation. It’s not like the Old Lake’s level doesn’t change, the tunnel needs to work for the low lake level. It absolutely can’t be higher at this end, well, we could, we could run a gate, set of gates, so Sad Goat would drain into the Old Lake, but the goal is to feed down from the Old Lake, and only enough to run the locks. Which means slack water in the tunnel.

  We wind up with a couple big arches plus a narrow arch in the middle over a sort of broad double u-shape for the actual channels, standard twenty-five metres each. Five metres of arch, three-metre walking path both sides of the channels along the tops of the canal linings, five metres of arch pillars on each side of twelve metres of centre roadway. Ninety-four metres wide, count the three metre channel lining and the structure of the supporting arches and it’s twenty-five metres high. It makes a convincing illusion.

  “That’s hard rock,” Arch says, looking at the model and then up at the slope above Sad Goat. There’s a few small trees, a few low places with strips of bog in them, mostly tussocky grass and low shrubby conifer things. I nod. “Not going to do it all at once.” Arch nods, reassured. The rest of the survey team’s not reassured, and now they’re worried about their team lead.

  We have a discussion about elevation; four-eighty-five means we should put the canal bottom at four-eighty, just in case we’re a metre off height for four-eighty-one, and accept an exit lock into the Old Lake, you can do ten metres in one lift without doing anything clever at all. That’s the conservative choice, and Blossom and Arch look at each other and both nod.

  With the model and a quick pattern enchantment thing, it takes Dove four tries, something which annoys Dove and impresses Blossom, we’re about set for the next day.

  “We’re going to need a place to pile a whole lot of big ingots,” Blossom tells Arch the next morning. “Can you find a twenty-five or thirty hectare flat place, convenient to the water?” Arch nods.

  We walk up to the marked four-eighty one metre elevation point, carefully check we’re all carrying lunch and water, carefully check that Arch’s team is well clear, carefully check we’re pointed the same way, it’s not going to be a completely straight tunnel, we’ve got the curve built into the pattern enchantment for the tunnel shape, Dove and I fold together, Blossom puts the ward up, Chloris thinks something wistful about all the lights we’re going to have to make, and Zora says Onward! in immensely cheerful tones.

  It’s hard rock, all right, but that’s almost a help. Put up the fire mirror, feed heat ahead of it, move it forward, pull constituent elements out, pull heat out of them, feed the heat back forward and feed atoms to Zora for arranging into canal structure or feed them to Chloris for ingotting, get more heat back from Zora and Chloris and feed that forward of the fire-mirror, too. The hot face is only about a decimetre deep, but we can move it as fast as we can walk, could move it faster but a fast walk is plenty to manage with your spine when your mind’s all in the working. Blossom’s got the ward that keeps us from cooking or being crushed if the overhead falls, the central balance around the path we’re supposed to walk, and an extension of the ward that’s handling the oxygen vent. Blossom’s not providing push, doesn’t need to, this would be much harder open to the air, something else the ward is there to prevent, there’s a couple valleys we’re going to cross where the tunnel might break through to daylight, but Blossom is in snug to the working link. If we all need to feed the ward we’re going to need to do it fast.

  Five hours later we’re looking at one end of the Old Lake, having climbed out of the cut. We stopped in the rock, stopped well back, just as soon as we kept seeing sky. Locks here shouldn’t be difficult, and we’re not getting any seep to mention. Lunch goes quick, pulling the first ten kilometres of metal slugs and ingots out of the channels is pretty quick, we don’t have to make a flat space, there’s a broad rock shelf, and then it’s walk back, with pauses to reinforce the tunnel shoring and put in an air vent every hundred metres. Plus big clear plugs, in lieu of safety railings, at the two places the tunnel does break out to daylight. Emerge after dinner time, eat hardtack and what Dove calls alleged cheese, as good a term for it as you could hope to find, and pull the slugs and ingots from this end of the canal, stacking them on the carefully staked out flat space.

  Next morning is two sets of locks, four-sixty-six metres up to four-eighty, seven metres each. They’re as close to Sad Goat Lake as we can get them, we put in three hundred metres of piers both sides of the entrance channel, room for thirty-two barges to moor and wait for daylight. The afternoon goes for four hundred and fifty lights, we’re aiming for one every hundred metres down the tunnel roof, but first we make a couple of one-metre corundum sphere lights, and apple-slice style covers that’ll fold around from all covered to all-but-an-eighth showing, and put those up on spinner bearings on top of ten metre hollow towers with inside stairs at the ends of the piers. “Roof later,” Blossom says. The Lug-gesith’s regular servants can do it, Dove says, and I nod. Bits of thinking about fill times, and time that might be lost to politics, leaks over from Blossom when we’re all linked up. The point in time where something else has to be done to keep those people alive if we haven’t got the canal done isn’t clear, it’s past the end of Thermidor but not far past.

  Sticking the lights on the tunnel ceiling slows us down the next day. Floating the survey-team’s canoes doesn’t. Surveyors are a bit subdued. I think Arch has about recovered, but the other three are, well, they’d probably be ranting if Arch wasn’t calm, at least, acting calm. We have, Dove and Chloris have, a discussion about whether we want to do the lights offset or not. Blossom’s contribution is “The manual doesn’t say,” with an amused look.

  Were there any canal tunnels in the old Commonweal? There sure aren’t in the Creeks, there’s a canal bridge, but that’s not the same.

  Not unless you count going under a wide bridge, Blossom says.

  Zora’s contribution is to do pretend lights, we don’t want to be unsticking the physical lights, and we wind up agreeing that parallel is better. Offsetting the lights does awful things to the shadows through the central support pillars.

  “You realize,” one of the surveyors says, walking along behind us and trying not to look nervous watching their canoes floating along above about eight metres of drop, “that’s going to go into the official standards manual for canal tunnels.”

  “Shouldn’t it?” Maybe a tenth of Zora’s attention is involved in the reply. Zora’s sticking lights to the ceiling, Chloris is lugging the lights, hundreds of fifteen-centimetre corundum hemispheres trailing along like a quiet flock of slow birds, I’ve got the illusory hundred-metre measure. Four, really, pull the trailing one up past the current one every time Zora puts a light up on each side. Dove’s floating the canoes, ours and theirs.

  Day after that is the locks out to Old Lake. The surveyors save us a lot of trouble by paddling out and doing soundings. It’s nearly a kilometre before there’s any kind of reliable four metres of depth, peak depth on the way is close to sixty metres, but there’s a mess of rocks and ridges and who knows what down there, too. Couple places you can scrape the bottom of a canoe. No obvious channel, I don’t understand how it hasn’t silted level, there isn’t a stream coming in here, couple little trickles a kilometre or two away, nothing like enough to scour. Might just not be any sediment coming in, there’s a lot of bare rock back up the hill.

  We stick a big illusion on a straight line to deep water, really soft at first and slowly harder and harder until it’s waterproof. Anything that can move will move; same when we sort of sort of heave back until we’ve got sixty metres of channel-width with no water in it, it’s a slow heave. Lot o
f wet rocks, shouldn’t be any fish, shouldn’t be anything that could move. It’s a useless mess of wet rocks, no consistent composition at all.

  My front, Blossom says.

  “Clear away!” Dove says, emphatic, not loud. The surveyors hear just fine five- and six hundred metres away. They paddle for shore, but not shore anywhere near us.

  They’re clear, Dove says, as we fold together and pick up the illusion hold from Chloris and Zora, Blossom wants the far end wider and further, a pie-slice instead of a broad line. We do that, swinging water. Zora and Chloris’s corner of the working link connects up with Blossom and something happens, it looks like mist rolling down the space in the illusion.

  The mist clears on a smooth slope, five metres depth dropping down to twenty, just about as deep as the lake is at the end of the illusion.

  Fade the illusion out, Blossom says, the water should come in slowly, no turbulence if we can help it. Dove and I fold the illusion in, collapse it, there’s a serious whistle of air at the land end, crumple it up slowly down to the new lake bottom like rolling a tent.

  “No piers?” Zora says, and Blossom waves illusory lines at the hillside. “Turning basin. We can put up lights at the channel ends.”

  It makes the pile of ingots larger, lots of iron in this rock, and the near lights, the ones marking the channel entrance, those need to be yellow, same as the pier ends at Sad Goat Lake. Not hard to do. Even excavating the channel in the rock on land isn’t particularly difficult, we need to cofferdam the water away unless we want to poach the surroundings, but that’s easy. We leave the illusory cofferdam there; good for a couple years at least, Blossom says, and we don’t want to start filling the canal yet.

  It’s only lunch time. We have a discussion with the surveyors about canoe-pushing with the Power over a quick lunch, and make Morning Vale a bit more than three hours later.

  People are surprised to see us; they weren’t expecting the surveyors back so quick, they weren’t expecting us, they knew someone sorcerous was coming but four young-women-might-be-youths and a small lad from elsewhere don’t, visibly don’t, fit their expectations.

 

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