One of Crane’s small smiles. “By intent, as a thing meant to be replicated in wreaking shops.”
Chloris is looking, I’m looking, Dove is carefully not looking, at Crane.
“I was your conveyor,” Crane says. “I’ll be on your committees unless someone dies, or you challenge me to a duel.”
“Duels are unlawful.” Sorcerous duels enormously so.
“Precisely,” Crane says, with another small smile.
Crane reads all the reports about us, I think this means.
Crane has twice asked for clarifications, Dove says, not precisely amused. Dove pays much more attention to the official paperwork than the rest of us, takes the whole team lead thing as a substantial responsibility. It’s real, but it’s not responsible while we’re students.
So I can make mistakes now, instead of when I am responsible, Dove says.
“Skill instead of structure,” Angren says in doubtful tones. “Even with the external Power, that seems risky.”
“We don’t have any structures.” I don’t like saying this, I don’t like thinking about the implications, but it’s true. “We don’t have any way to develop them, I’d like to see someone come up with structure-and-balance approaches to heavy lifting, sometime, just to see what the theory looks like. In the meantime we can move a lot of mass.”
We are mighty and terrible and the little whispering voice in the Power that says be greater sometimes shuts up in awe.
“If I have to put up with the rest of us being sentimental, I can do that.”
Angren’s holding their head in their hands, and muttering about involuntary telepathy and they’re not even your lover.
It gets them a fond look from Kynefrid and a surprisingly gentle look from Grue and a brief indecorous smirk from Chloris. We’re lucky you put up with us.
That’s all four of them, and they mean it.
None of us feel compelled to tell Angren there’s nothing involuntary about the telepathy, it’s a conscious and necessary constituent of the link being there.
Still think it’s a good trade.
The rest of us spend the rest of the night on maps, flat ones, for further up and down the valley. As a process, it astonishes Crane. Any of us can use all of the participating minds, in principle, it doesn’t extend into what you can’t understand, and that’s true of everybody at once. So there’s four of them, and they’re cuddling, and reaching out a very considerable distance, and the surface of four tables have maps condensing on them in spectacular detail.
You can tell it’s cuddling because Spook, thoroughly opaque and easy to mistake for material, is pacing around on shoulders and making a variety of spectral pleased noises. Spook’s awfully pretty, ghost-white and faint green rosettes, and thankfully doesn’t seem to know it.
There’s a sense in which I ought to help, and another in which they’re having none of it. We don’t run into Kynefrid often, Crane did come by with Kynefrid, Festival before last, but we mostly do large damp problems and Crane’s a namer, Crane gets “something subtle is wrong” problems and “we’d like to connect these things” problems. Probably why they were here at all, looking at signalling between the big dam and the little one downstream that keeps the gorge water high enough to keep barges off the rocks.
I sit with Kynefrid and talk gardens and garden water supplies and small devices the rest of the night. Angren falls asleep on the bench, head in Kynefrid’s lap, around midnight.
Pelōŕios wakes up an hour before dawn and carefully doesn’t move until Kynefrid looks at me, just before dawn, and says “We’d probably better start getting breakfast,” and I nod.
Chapter 16
Zora
Grue sends me and Pelōŕios out for a trot. A run would be a bit much, and the firm instruction to run straight up hill if the dam goes isn’t reassuring, but it’s a good idea. Pelōŕios needs to stretch out, and it gives me a cleaner break between missing Kynefrid and getting back to work.
Grue isn’t actually good, or good at being nice to people, but really tries.
A run keeps me in shapeshifting practice, too, which is probably important. We certainly practised being ourselves every day when we started, and while I don’t think I’m going to get lost in the unicorn-shape I don’t want to lose track of it, either. A lot of history came with those names Mulch gave me.
Down to where the land drops and opens out and back, forty kilometres round trip or so, doesn’t take that long. If we trotted half the way down we ran the rest, and back. My classmates have about got the tables rearranged around the large map.
This isn’t a working refectory, the buildings were built for the staff the locks would need for traffic that doesn’t exist yet, and maybe not for a couple of generations. The mass of engineers and lock-clerks and the folks who might have work on the dam if it doesn’t collapse don’t have a regular rotation going, it’s not even clear that anyone knows which gesith is supposed to be paying for this. No one cares, with maybe two days left on the dam. So rather than have a mass of engineers incapable of thought, in the recognition one night’s sleep won’t begin to be enough, Grue turns a small tree into breakfast.
It’s Blossom’s turn to cook, technically, but, well. Aurochs goulash with fried eggs is surprisingly good, I’d be happy to have it, breakfast or not, but Blossom’s take on it gives you this inescapable sense that the aurochs put up a serious fight. Plus asking weary engineers to eat something not currently known to exist for breakfast might be unkind, no matter how wistful Dove is about missing aurochs anything.
Grue takes over breakfast and we get sausages and maple syrup and biscuits, implausibly fluffy ones that have nothing to do with wheat flour, fried parsnips, and a great quantity of mélange of sweet preserved tropical fruits, all of which are coloured somewhere in the vicinity of orange. It’s good, and there’s a great deal of it, and it’s all wholly what it looks like, even if Grue had to leach minerals out of rocks and think no one mention bugs or mice at us.
Chloris doesn’t have to warn anybody away from our teapot, the neat sign beside it, hand-lettered by Dove with the large precisely correct poison symbol for a slow and unrecoverable neurotoxin and the small writing that says “wood-lettuce root” works. The sign makes Kynefrid smile.
Crane, too. Crane’s a coffee drinker, the complicated filter-built-from-hardwood-chips kind. Crane looks at Grue’s preparations and produces a quantity of authoritative coffee. I doubt any of the delighted engineers are paying enough attention to Crane’s consumption warnings, coffee was from the extreme north of the Old Commonweal and there hasn’t been any grown coffee for years now. We’ll have two days of good, alert decisions and we’ve only got that or we’ve got time for several days of very sleepy engineers.
We try not to be overt about having made a sufficiency of dishes, I’m sure everyone has their field kits but we can hardly rummage in personal possessions for them. So it’s a room full of decently fed and alert people who wind up hearing Blossom say “The dam’s a hazard, and we need to get rid of it.”
Lots of coffee mugs get put down.
“Gently, in a controlled fashion, but with no slight to my comrades-in-arms, there isn’t any way to make this dam work with current precipitation. We don’t know how long or how much the Northern Hills means to do, but we can’t plan on only as much rain as this year.”
There’s a fifteen-minute wrangle.
Blossom’s date of engineering qualification for hydrological is Year of Peace Four Hundred Eighty-Nine, when Blossom would have been thirty-nine years old. A year older than Dove is now. The next most senior engineer present is Year of Peace Five Hundred and One. Being a Line Officer in the face of a civil disaster doesn’t matter, but being an Independent does. It’s still hard for a group that has been so focused on saving the dam to take Blossom’s point, but the volume calculations work; we can make the dam as much higher as anyone would like, but there’s nothing practical-much to be done about the height of the canyon tha
t’s filling above it. There just isn’t room for more water, and we’re going to get more water.
When the Twelfth Brigade made the dam, they had no way to know that we were going to get more water. For what they did know, the kinds of flow rates you can infer from how the canyon walls have eroded and where the drift-wood’s gone, the Twelfth put in a conservatively over-engineered structure. A concrete arch dam with glass fibre reinforcement isn’t going to be easy to gently alter.
“This valley needs the turbines,” someone says, and we’re all nodding, everyone in the room. Not many places to manufacture stuff in the Third Valley, it’s got a recalcitrant geography.
“It does.” Blossom’s being definite, and heads go back. “Your job is to sit down and figure out, on the assumption that this is a dry spring, how that can be done.”
“Roughly.” The lead engineer for the Third Valley canal project.
“Roughly,” Blossom agrees.
There’s a pause. It’s got some shuffling around and looking for nomograms and pencils and calculators in it.
Crane has Kynefrid and Angren placing ward-stakes round the buildings, there are stores sheds as well as the main one. I’m not sure it will work, and Dove and Edgar hand me separate output graphs. It ought to work, unless we drop the gate right on top, or run the water through, I suppose, it’s a slow process by the standards of Wake or Blossom, but Crane’s pretty strong.
Nearly as strong as you Blossom says, meaning precisely me by myself, today, not how strong I might be when I’m three centuries old.
There’s a big lake at the bottom of the valley, it’s the limit of settlement and it’s at least thirty kilometres long and never less than a couple kilometres wide. It’s also going to get all this water eventually Blossom says. I’ll go down there and anchor one end of a transitory gate; you get to run the input end.
There’s this uncoiling sort of feeling out of Dove, Edgar, and Constant. That’s going to be right up at full output, to get the volume and the distance.
Blossom nods.
Make sure the hoof-lad knows the safest place is right next to you, Dove says, and I agree back and start whistling.
When I come back to material awareness, Pelōŕios’ front hooves are on either side of my head. Blossom’s looking approving, and, not weary, I don’t ever want to see Blossom look weary, but definitely as though that was work.
I’m so glad we can just stick an illusory mattress to the ground, and lie down ahead of time. It lacks any respect for traditional sorcerous dignity, but it also lacks falling over and hurting yourself.
When I stand up, Pelōŕios stands up, too, and I get snorfled. I’m not sure it’s entirely voluntary. We were, I was, very careful not to feed any of the Power penumbra over to Pelōŕios while that working was going on.
“That’s about as much as we can do” is an admission in Unicorn. I suppose it still is, under the circumstances.
“Shalt not then these mountains skip all about to dance?” is sarcasm, maybe especially in Unicorn.
The impounded water level is down, way down, about as low as a two-hundred-metre gate could fit. There’s twenty-two, twenty-three metres of water depth back there now, when it was within a metre of the top of a hundred-and-ten-metre dam. Ed’s head says four hundred and thirty million tonnes in a bemused sort of way when I think about quantities.
More than a hundred million tonnes an hour.
“All over the lake. Shorter beaches but little erosion.” Curves of altered oxygenation, temperature, silt, if the big lake was a person it would be wondering about what it tripped over, but would not be actually hurt. I have a bit of remembered Halt in my head, about how it’s essential to notice when you’re moving in haste.
Blossom probably does, too, because Blossom’s shoulders settle and we troop inside and lunch is roast chine of aurochs with diverse root vegetables that don’t have names in languages anyone speaks today. There’s past enough, despite what our appetites are like. Dove makes an equivalent mass of algae, the inner face of the dam’s covered, almost in stripes where the water has gone up and up, into a couple kegs of cider, startlingly full of the memory of sunlight.
Everybody drinks their cider, eats their aurochs and strange root vegetables with the glaze that might taste of hope. Pelōŕios gets a safe amount of penumbra and asks for a bucket of cider, which convinces everyone there’s Power in it. There isn’t, not really, it’s just we could never grow those apples, those are from some place with a complete Peace. Crane asks Dove about technique, and makes approving comments.
Ed holds the bucket up in one hand steady as a machine so Pelōŕios can get the last without slurping. There are smiles. Even better, I’m starting to see hope coming into being.
Kynefrid and Angren come in and the cold food Blossom gives them is hot when their hands close on the plates. Angren’s plate almost gets dropped. They were down the south end of the canyon and the small dam with various formal messages from the engineering lead so the lock-clerks there know to open the sluice gates full wide and to set the flags that warn people that there will be a flood, a much smaller flood than everyone was afraid there would be, but still a reason to stay on the high ground. Getting the canyon level down’s not as pressing as the main dam, but there are still places it could overflow, none of which would help.
Various engineers thank Blossom and Dove for lunch; everybody troops back outside. The engineers built something, round the shaded south wall, in the morning.
“These are all block-fault mountains,” one of the engineers is saying. “The blocks pivot down and up, the up’s the mountains, the down is the valley against the next block over. East side’s the down, west side’s the up; the eastern slopes of the mountains are generally smoother and slower. Except here; the blocks locked up, there isn’t much down, and the east-side peaks are unusually high.”
The something, it’s, well, you can’t say schematic. Representational, anyway. Sandstone slabs, leftover from building, representing fault blocks up to the road. We’re not sure where the blocks all are, but it’s obvious at the reduced scale that the problem with the valley is this stretch we’re almost all south of, this block and the next four north.
The lead engineer looks at Blossom and says “We need more valley. Terraced would be best.”
Blossom accepts the point with a nod; what we’ve got now is narrowing river valley into fifteen kilometres of canyon, it’s going to hydraulically dam and flood the upper valley the way it’s been raining even without any kind of engineering works in the way.
Not much settlement, Chloris says, mental maps with the dots of living people mostly not on them.
Some, Blossom says. Lots of work lost, no time to evacuate the food stores.
All the settlements have names, Dove says. We can ask Crane to make sure we’ve got them all, ‘not diminished’ isn’t likely to go wrong.
Do we have time to ask first? Constant’s got a list of travel times, voting time requirements, against the cost of having the canal out of service.
We absolutely must ask first Blossom says. If we do it this way.
No place to put spoil Ed says. There are calculations, and you could, we could, build a wall or a bunch of staggering ziggurats down at the limit of settlement, or just fill all the low spots below here, pave and terrace and re-arrange. It’d take years, we’d have to start with building stone-barges. The very best time estimate’s over five years, if we do nothing else.
Five years is longer than Dove’s got. The plan’s to return for judgment this year, we’re close enough to done with “the inescapably essential,” Halt says. All this practice doesn’t make still being in the food ecology safer for the high-talented. I might have five years, perhaps ten. Dove certainly doesn’t.
The Twelfth would take longer, seven years or so. They can lift more at once but we’re neater.
No one living here has a month. Crops must be planted.
Grue produces a whimsical vision of a gigan
tic series of mountain-straddling glass arches, a stupendous greenhouse.
We could make the glass strong enough; the mountains would break.
Some stuff’s too heavy for sky. Dove sounds amused.
The hundred thousand people that this half of the valley feeds. All the staple agriculture is south of here, the northern half of the valleys, north of the road, have worse weed issues and less flat land. That’s where the fruit orchards and spinning mills and nervous small sheep pastures went in this valley. The manufactories were supposed to go here, where there was obviously so much concentrated water power.
Has anyone considered asking the Northern Hills to stop? Or do less? I’m sure they have, but I don’t know.
Consensus is that the Hills is going slower than it wants to, to avoid damaging us badly Blossom says. Conscious terrane’s hard to talk to, and it’s strongly in the Commonweal’s interest that Reems is suppressed.
Before there’s another invasion attempt with demons hangs there as the ghost of a thought, maybe Dove and Blossom both thought it.
Any significant reservoir excavation has the spoil problem, just less Ed says. We could put in gates but even if it’s fifty metre gates every ten kilometres it would take four décades, and there’s no way we could do it that way. So months to a year, with all the surveying and fitting and worries about erosion.
Two-metre gates, two hundred metres apart, are easy enough; you can control those with either lid, the gate pair is one binding so you don’t have to take into account the separation distance. Trying to control even a drain-gate at the bottom of the reservoir with a lid isn’t going to work, it will take extensions to the binding, and then you’ve got to make that match up with the outflow. An open outflow gate with nothing feeding it is a recipe for disaster, or at least for emerging horrors from beyond the world, guaranteed to have worse manners than Ed. Plus all the energy problems involved in the range, and not feeding live steam into the river, and the ecological problems open gates cause on that scale, and it is possible but it won’t be fast.
Safely You Deliver Page 8