A Succession of Bad Days

by Graydon Saunders

  “Edgar?” Hyacinth expects me to say something.

  “Know that bit from school, that luck is inevitable, and the purpose of society is to mitigate the bad luck and maintain the circumstances that permit the good luck?” School, but it comes from the Ur-law.

  Hyacinth, formal clerk-face or not, isn’t sure what that has to do with overwork, so I get one careful nod.

  “School emphasizes that it’s the circumstances that should be maintained, not the actual particular luck. Actual luck is declaring people special.” That’s unstable, it turns into a fight over who is more special.

  This is really hard to say.

  “There are ways we’re lucky we live in the Commonweal, that we’ve got the teachers we do, that we’re all here at the same time.”

  That we exist, together.

  That we’re not dead.

  “Mostly, though, functionally, we’re Halt’s good luck. We’re the example that Halt’s right, that you can train high-talent people this way and it works better, you get a, a wizard-team.” Pretty sure I’m blushing, saying that out loud. “The circumstances are unlikely, the four of us at once, the Commonweal splitting, no one has time to fuss that much about training sorcerers or four people who are statistically dead.”

  Hyacinth’s hand almost taps the pen-end at statistically dead.

  “Any overwork, any pattern of overwork, is an argument that Halt’s not smart enough to notice that the circumstances of long-awaited good luck include Halt’s credibility, the long argument that a new form of sorcery training is a good thing to try.”

  “Do you feel overworked?” That sounds like a real question, not a formality.

  I shake my head. “I wouldn’t know. I got through an apprenticeship as a turner for fine work. There aren’t any baulks of timber involved. Sorcery’s a more difficult course of study, but I’ve got no experience and no access to a quantified basis for judgement.” Turning was something a slow kid can do well enough to be useful, that’s true, Hyacinth would know it’s true. I’d still rather not have to say it.

  “I do know there are kinds of work that go better slowly, and kinds that go better fast. Maybe the Power’s a very hard edge, maybe student sorcerers are soft, maybe it only works if we go fast.”

  Hyacinth makes some rapid notes. Halt reaches into that knitting bag, produces a tiny plate of tiny scones, and hands it to me. I take one, the scones get much larger when you lift them off the plate, say thank you, and pass the plate to Dove.

  Hyacinth’s head is shaking, but no objection is voiced, and Hyacinth takes a scone when the plate gets around to the head of the table.

  They’re really good scones.

  “Everybody’s always been really careful about hydration, any time we used the Power.” Chloris’ tone is careful. “I don’t think I could have drunk five litres of water before, I think we’ve changed more than we notice.” Something quirks across Chloris’ face. “I never knew you could sweat through your shoes.”

  There’s a small sigh, a billow of lamentation. “Anybody worried about me being overworked now needs to go put up preserves with my mother.”

  “My take on overwork started as a farmer.” Dove sounds a little wry. “This feels like we’re being a bit slack, everyone’s taking extra care with us.”

  Hyacinth sets the pen down.

  “The four of you, five with Blossom, put in a hundred and forty kilometres of canal in less than a month. Do you want me to work out the equivalent work-years for doing that with workshops and dredge foci and more mundane skills?”

  Dove grins. “What Chloris said about it being fun’s all true.”

  Sis?

  Blossom waves some diagrams into existence.

  “General idea of a focus, make a mind, the mind uses the talent of the participants, you get a multiplier based on the power of two of the participants, eight’s three times, sixteen’s four times, stops at thirteen times and what’s going to be about eighty-five hundred participants, foci that big are messy.”

  “That was the only way to get more out than you put in, the Power’s mostly like the old joke about how you can’t add four five-year-olds together and get someone in their last year of youth.”

  There were life-mages who tried, it’s under ‘optimistic/optimal averaging’ if you’re reading about sorcery. Some of those who tried were just trying to make people who were prettier.

  Blossom’s attention shifts, and the other diagram expands. It’s having a lot of trouble being a meaningful representation in three dimensions, it’s convolved, it’s moving.

  Some things are obvious, the colours make it obvious. Me, Dove, our consonance, Chloris, Zora, Blossom. The pattern of connection, outside the consonance, isn’t obvious at all.

  Dove gets more of it than I do, there’s a sudden flash of understanding, Grue, that’s what Grue’s full intelligence looks like, Grue’s writing something down, a rapid scrawl of blue and cyan and magenta lines peeled off the tabletop, rolled into invisibility, and stuck to a shirt button.

  “What the students devised — ” Blossom gestures, the whole diagram turns itself inside out, it doesn’t get any more comprehensible — “we do not properly understand, I can say how it works, for them, for the five or six of us together, but I cannot say how it works generally. It is certainly not precisely what we generally understand the phenomenon of consonance to be.”

  Hyacinth says “Not enough examples.”

  “Give it time,” Halt says in a soft voice. The sip of tea gives everyone else time to recover from Halt’s soft tone.

  “For now, we know three things,” Blossom says.

  “Dove and Edgar’s consonance works by a square root, the multiplier is apparently exactly root two, Dove and Edgar fully cohered is about one Blossom.” The idea of which delights Blossom, puts a small dent in Hyacinth’s clerkly impassivity, and causes an even smaller smile on Halt’s features.

  “Their full coherence creates a third distinct mind, there are three of them at that point in time, there might be an entire intermittent personality. Extending the pattern to their fellow students or to me or to me and their fellow students does not create another mind, does not create a control mechanism, does not in any respect result in an executive anything, but it does extend the multiplier.”

  Hyacinth’s gaze goes up, briefly, there’s a brief dashed pencil calculation, Hyacinth says “Four and a half times your individual output?” to Blossom, with a stress on ‘your’.

  Blossom shrugs. “We never ran it anywhere close to full, the tunnel working was about four-tenths my full output, the input from all of us together less than a quarter of that, under a tenth. If the multiplier holds at full output, if no one’s head melts, if Grue’s not in it, that’s the expectation.”

  Grue in it, we’re talking root six times a bit more than two, multiplier’ll give more than five.

  “By the same hypothesis,” Halt says, “the students alone may reach twice.”

  Hyacinth makes some rapid notes.

  “Can this be generally extended?”

  Chloris says “No.”

  Hyacinth looks at Chloris sharply, Halt looks gently, the rest of us don’t have to look.

  “It works like Dove and Edgar,” Chloris says. “You’re completely defenceless to it, it’s not inherently threatening but you couldn’t, there wouldn’t be time even to leave, it’s not safe, there is no way to make it safe. I trust Dove enough that I can trust Dove trusting Blossom. It was really hard to trust Blossom that much the first time, first few times, anyway, and Blossom’s over there a bit, not quite in. It’s never going to be like getting together in a focus team.”

  There’s a pause, no billow of lamentation, no Spook-noises, simply grief.

  “I don’t trust my family this much. I never trusted my family this much. If I trusted a lover this much,” and Chloris’ head shakes. Dove is nodding.

  Issues of competence, Grue says in a doctor sort of voice, a phrase no one is happy
with, ever, certainly not now.

  Wouldn’t be fair to trust my family this much, Dove says.

  Hyacinth says something in a language I don’t know. Halt looks impressed and sympathetic.

  “Surviving shared trauma.” Hyacinth’s clerk voice has slipped just a bit, there’s distinct bitterness.

  Halt nods. “The least, and the least complicated, we could arrange.”

  “In the student case,” Dove says, reaching across the table to tap shoulders with Blossom. Blossom’s equivalent of battlements is Finely divided aggregate, Dove says, delighting in the Captain’s understatement. There’s a strong, clear, anyone would have felt that, flash of determination. Chopped vegetables might.

  I tip my head on to Dove’s shoulder, Chloris sort of leans in a bit on Dove’s other side, thinking fond at us. Blossom’s looking fondly at all three of us, a variety of individual fondnesses. Grue’s head shakes with doleful mock rue and the beginning of real loneliness until Blossom gathers Grue up in a one-armed hug strong enough to make Grue squeak.

  “Facultative family,” Hyacinth says. It sounds like a diagnosis.

  “Emergent facultative family,” Grue says. “We’re not sure what we’ve got but we’re going to get a lot more done this way, and happier.”

  Hyacinth almost smiles, really smiles, not that quick flash of amusement. Clerks, full-up clerks who are doing something clerkish, they don’t smile, and what would have been the smile quietly goes somewhere that isn’t Hyacinth’s face, leaving a moment of serenity behind.

  If Blossom can qualify for an engineer, maybe I can qualify for a clerk.

  “There is a substantial difference in law between an argument of necessity and an argument that the effort required is not in fact overwork.”

  “We are getting stronger.” Chloris says this firmly, not understanding why that one fact doesn’t answer the question.

  “Gaining strength doesn’t demonstrate that you’re working prudently.” Hyacinth does the pen tap once, twice, thrice, across one and another annotated sheet. “Accepting that you are, collectively, uniquely, and increasingly strong, and thus addressing reasonably scaled tasks, doesn’t address prudence.”

  “Four people, less than a year.” Dove sounds, to me, worried. I think Hyacinth hears it as very slightly impatient. “Not much basis to establish prudence.”

  Hyacinth nods. “It’s not. The fifty years of arguments about what happened to Blossom and Grue’s classmates does not illuminate the problem, for much the same reason.”

  We need each other. That’s not accidental unison, we don’t say it aloud, Halt looks gentle, Hyacinth looks, I don’t think there’s any word but compassionate. Hyacinth couldn’t hear us. Seeing our faces must be more than enough, even without Grue and Blossom nodding.

  “Zora’s present state,” Hyacinth says, “can be considered as evidence that the course of training is proceeding overly quickly.” Which is a very small distance from rash hangs there unsaid.

  “Only if we have the option of stopping.” Which is something a whole lot of people just won’t think about, not that we wanted to think about it as much as we have, needed to, it’s always there.

  “We’re statistically dead, even Zora. It wasn’t absolute for Zora, starting traditional training at seventeen, might have made it, the odds were only as good as ‘someone else has’, but Zora can’t stop and go back to traditional training now, might have when Kynefrid switched, but not now. Zora was handling way more than Zora’s current total output as an individual moving that forest. It wasn’t a problem, get the working link fully established and any of us can handle the full output, as far as we’ve tried.”

  Hyacinth was jotting down points while I was talking, stops.

  “Your wizard team has the potential to put five times Blossom’s full output through a necromancer?”

  “This specific necromancer.” Halt’s smile is small and seraphic. “Who is thinking ‘next time it’s a disease, I can get it all’.”

  Chloris nods, looking just a little shy.

  Halt looks down the table. “As perhaps you shall, Chloris dear, but remember that two workings with an unmelted head is better than one larger done with melting.”

  Chloris says “Yes Halt,” and Hyacinth picks up and straightens all the sheets of paper, all back into one stack and back into the file folder.

  Blossom snickers. “I can’t tell you how nice it is, to have the fussing spread out a bit.”

  “Ed’s right, though.” Blossom goes from big-kid to being all there, full attention, really fast. “They’re dead if we can’t get them to being Independents, qualified and accepted, pretty quick. They can’t stop, that gets waste and corpses. We don’t know how quick. So prudent has to be defined as the most rapid increase in capability the students can sustain.”

  “There has been,” Halt says, suddenly ancient beyond the ability of anyone to count, “a certain delicacy on the side of sustain.” It’s not a frail age. “It appears we have been fortunate.”

  Got a free working link pattern with the consonance, Dove says, amused.

  You’re getting a lot of lift from being so strong, too, Grue says. The way this was set up, you may never really believe that.

  Quite intentionally, Halt says, somehow making them contented spider feet.

  Hyacinth give us all a stern look.

  “Some brief discussion of the mechanism of our good fortune,” Halt says.

  “Zora isn’t even hurt,” Chloris says. “At risk, it’s not the same. Can we please help Zora?”

  “The original teaching permissions,” Hyacinth says, and Halt says “Most certainly included attestations, with mournful statistics, of the expected odds with no and conventional training.”

  “While workings of the Power do sometimes merely go wrong,” Hyacinth says, “it is not sufficient to so assert in this case, a most unusual working in a context of atypical events.”

  “Exaltation,” Grue says. “Zora’d had the idea, it was going to make someone who’d tried to hurt a teammate, Zora by extension, look not merely wrong but fundamentally incapable, and it didn’t involve chemical elements or melting, it was an angle of talent unique to Zora in the team. When it worked so well, of course there was significant mood lift. It’s a well-studied phenomenon, under both success lift and mock invincibility.”

  Hyacinth doesn’t say anything, one sheet of paper comes out of the folder.

  “We can say what,” Dove says. “Unless Halt or Wake want to commit something both unheard of and full mighty, we’ll never know why.”

  The pen scratching hasn’t stopped when Hyacinth says “Are more people going to be able to learn this?”

  Blossom reaches out into the slowly-spinning diagram of what the working link does. It unrolls, unravels, turns into something much larger, then something vast, it looks like it passes out of the room everywhere, ceiling, floor, all four walls.

  Hyacinth sets the pen down, looks up.

  Blossom points. “The essential bit is — ” a chain, fifteen or sixteen things, brightens — “uncomplicated, but it’s difficult. The talent flavours have to get along, the minimum talent to do this at all isn’t much below Zora, Kynefrid’s fear of catching fire’s plausibly correct. The multiplicative effect — ” three spots, they’re not connected, get haloes — “might be unique to Dove and Edgar. We haven’t experimented.”

  “Weak-maybe or vague-maybe?” Hyacinth’s voice is firm.

  “Slight perhaps,” Halt says.

  “So this Parliament need not panic just yet,” Hyacinth says, half to the air.

  “What does Parliament need to be concerned with?” I only notice I’ve said this when I realize the words sound like my voice.

  Hyacinth looks straight at me. “Experiments are undertaken for the increase in knowledge.”

  I nod, because of course. Everybody tries to contribute something, some time in their lives. Sometimes it’s less and sometimes it’s more but it’s a basic obligati
on, everybody tries, even if it’s just writing stuff down for the person actually counting birds or bugs or trying to identify mushrooms or that thing growing in the garden.

  “You are yourselves an experiment, properly inside the strictures of the law, so I might come here on behalf of the Lug and Galdor-gesiths, who between them are concerned with the conditions of your apprenticeship.” Hyacinth’s voice is entirely even.

  We all nod, all together, because that’s something we knew. Halt’s looking entirely, disturbingly placid, and Blossom and Grue are holding hands with fixed blank faces.

  “Experiments are not undertaken in the expectation of a singular success.” Hyacinth’s clerkly impassivity quirks, something human shows through it for a moment. “The Second Commonweal is new, and small, and needs fear to suffer the rule of sorcerers, having been overcome.”

  “Another bad outcome we might help avoid,” Dove says, voice mild with unconcern.

  Hyacinth meets Dove’s eyes, nods calmly.

  No matter how clerkly, Hyacinth can’t have felt Dove saying Never stop.

  The pen-scratch stops. The paper is slid over to Halt, who nods an absent thanks and pulls it off itself. The original’s still there, Halt’s folding up the apparently entirely material copy.

  Hyacinth looks at us, student-us. “Overwork as a concern is held addressed. The proposed treatment for Zora is approved.” I can feel myself relaxing, just a bit. “The categorization of the course of study undertaken is altered to strenuous.”

  “It is,” Grue says into Chloris’ mutinous look.

  We wind up trooping after Halt and Grue and Blossom. Clerk Hyacinth’s wished us well and gone off to file the formal report. We’re going to have to completely drop the working link, there’s nothing really there but presence, but Halt says it has to be entirely shut down. We want to tell Zora first.

  Zora looks fine, even more fairy-tale in the sunny room with the big illusory bed, the canopy still looks like green glass and iron roses, and it looks a lot more planned when it’s not outside. The link’s up, Zora’s alive, but there isn’t anyone there.