Safely You Deliver

by Graydon Saunders

  “Now I’m homesick,” someone says, over in the other corner of the dining hall. There are nods. I can only smile on the inside, but Grue grins where anyone can see it. Dove punches my shoulder, just barely hard enough to feel.

  Familiar food’s harder. Nobody knows what cruncher is supposed to taste like, well, we do, but the engineers don’t. Everybody knows about lamb.

  Lots of people know about duck, too, but duck is usually a treat, I shouldn’t —

  You certainly should think you’re the best cook Chloris says. You are. In a class of good cooks.

  Which Wake says doesn’t always happen is a chorus in the link. All the teachers approve, it’s something we’re encouraged to do, apprentice or student restrictions on helping in a refectory notwithstanding. Still can’t do the dishes at our gean, but I can feed critically required engineers in the wilderness.

  Different sorts of risk, Chloris says, as much to my specific annoyance as to me.

  There’s a pause, and Chloris says Did you hear that? to Pelōŕios, who has both ears swivelled forward and is showing a bit of neck-stretch to go with the horn glow.

  Pelōŕios nods carefully. Chloris smiles with vast gentle approval and says Good!

  I can feel how much courage it takes for Pelōŕios not to run. Chloris isn’t trying to be scary, it really is all approval. It’s so easy, with Chloris, to understand what there is to be afraid of, it’s not like Edgar or Dove, where you need a lot of time or substantial talent to recognize precisely what the reasons for your uneasiness might be.

  It takes a while to convince Pelōŕios I agree with Chloris, it is good. It will help a lot with the bits of language that are just hearing, hearing and intractable practice.

  Next morning breakfast is a mass of cubed cold boiled potatoes fried with diverse things, mushrooms and bacon and bits of chicken and hard-boiled egg and little bits of green stuff, mostly chives, green onions, and spinach. Perfect leftovers-for-breakfast, and there’s toast and a collection of strange jams, one of which tastes like being awake and another that looks almost exactly like green-grape jelly and tastes of tremulous conviction.

  The sum of small things, Grue says.

  The clump of buildings for managing the dam has a name, the engineers hung it up over the end-wall window facing the dam yesterday after carefully following the name-ritual. Everybody not involved in performing the main ritual goes inside, it’s more unsettling that way but it’s safer. I think Pelōŕios believes me about ‘safer’. I’m glad the engineers do, even if Pelōŕios lies down at one end of the dining hall next to Romp and Stomp and whistles mournfully. That sets Romp and Stomp off, who aren’t anything like smart enough to understand what’s going on but are certainly smart enough to know they don’t like it.

  Blossom and Crane get the intended topography set up, it’s a layer under the names of that-which-we-should-not-alter, which is settlements, we really have to hope no one’s lost track of what day this is and gone for a walk. Have to hope none of the livestock’s got out, too. Can’t do the ritual with all the individual people, it’s possible in principle but tens of thousands of individual people-names isn’t manageable, isn’t close to manageable. Doing the working by settlements means there’s only about two hundred, and only that many because of various tiny places that are going to get larger eventually.

  The list scrolls into our memory, something else to be remembered across the entire indefinite future.

  The reach, well, it is a ritual, not an involved one, but they’re really good maps, and no matter how much the map isn’t the territory, maps make an awareness of the territory easier to obtain. And we, we-as-us, made the wire and the beads in the name charms, it’s an easier connection than to something we had nothing to do with.

  Today is a splendid day, no rain, no wind, and not much cloud, and that helps, just because we all think there’s hope in spring.

  The engineers have a … desired topography, involving the stuck crustal blocks being less stuck, and not rising into mountains, no one wants that much different erosion downstream, that’s where the agriculture is, which we mustn’t harm, but across the valley, so there’s ripples, hopefully more readily eroded ripples than this one big massif, and also hopefully more breadth of watercourse. There’s a preference to have the southern edges rise, to give warmer slopes, and a preference to have the north edges rise, to give a broader spring-line, and the engineers couldn’t decide between. So we got told to do whichever was the least improbable.

  It’s working, we’re all together, there’s significant Power involved in this, it would be much easier without the settlements, shallow in history, contrasting with the geology, which is deep even considered as a time of past alteration.

  Nearly enough depth and then things go unstructured.

  Malice, uncomplex, immense, and everywhere. The working wobbles edge-to-edge.

  FEED. I need to keep the settlements related, to themselves, to each other, to this particular world and chances and time, and they’re going fast.

  Constant does something, I wind up with all of Blossom’s output, Grue’s there, helping bridge, Crane’s still just over there and still got the stability of intent for the ritual, that we meant this valley and these settlements, and I’ve got the relation, the active, live present across two hundred settlements. Death and Strange Mayhem have the malice. Distant corners of our head fill up with declarative shouting, jagged and implacable; you know it’s an emergency when Ed’s self-awareness collapses and things just happen.

  Grey-green haze of nothing, I’ve got the settlements, it feels like the wall of sunrise arrives and the malice cuts off, it’s just not there anymore, it might not be anywhere but it’s certainly not here.

  Here isn’t anywhere, it’s not even air, there isn’t any substance, probabilistic collapse.

  Have to get back at least as far as the time before the previous manipulation, there will be terrain here in time if you leave it alone but there won’t be anybody from the Commonweal.

  There’s a link re-arrangement and I’ve got the full feed from the full link, all of us-together and Blossom-and-Grue, all the way up at peak output.

  REACH and I get somewhere way back, farther than it has to be but I don’t care, speed counts, and this is far enough to work.

  I don’t know how long it takes before Crane is reading names out loud in a great clear voice, one-hundred and ninety-seven settlements. We’re missing two, and I wobble, and I get Not dead, subsumed, combined, everybody’s still there from Chloris, who, never mind how, seems to have enumerated all the thousands and thousands of people.

  All come to Death Chloris thinks, offhandedly cheerful in the midst of a haze of effort.

  The whole thing starts to spin down, gently, as gently as I possibly can, I couldn’t do this before as a conscious thought, to remind myself to be cautious of my flesh, the entire terrain goes softly into darkness because Edgar does better silence than anybody and Dove can carry the whole thing into that silence, I can let go.

  Unicorn faces look even stranger when their nose is too close to your nose for you to focus your eyes.

  Nothing hurts, I check my physiology twice. Mostly hale, I think at Pelōŕios.

  There aren’t any buildings. There’s a glittery plinth-thing, more of a freeform sculpture, where the map was. Crane’s crumpled.

  Blossom looks exhausted, beyond tired, moving by pure will. Grue looks, well, worried, or mostly dead, depending on if I blink. I put a hand up, and think May I borrow your neck? at Pelōŕios, who very politely waits until I’ve got a hand curved firmly over the top of it before lifting.

  Feet, yes, two, and staying under me. Good.

  Dove’s out, Chloris is out, it looks like intact sleeping. Ed looks dead, empty, and then human-Edgar reassembles like a process of geology and stands up. Constant’s not there, Dove’s really out.

  Pushed the feed Ed says, for the individual names. Pelōŕios twitches under my hand, if there were t
wo it would have been a whole-body shudder.

  I don’t want to know what Ed’s running on, but there’s three slow inhales and Ed’s shadow stops being troublingly unstructured.

  The building is gone, so no plates or tables or baggage. We’ve still got all the engineers, we’ve still got Kynefrid and Angren who are trying to figure out what useful thing to do.

  “Shelter?” Ed says. It’s still the same spring day, and the world is still turning.

  Shelter is always a question of how much you need, and Kynefrid and Angren visibly internalize that we know nothing about where we’re standing and start checking for hazards, a rolling litany of customary muttering.

  There’s vegetation here, the topology is really different. I’ve got some blank aluminium binding tags. Great big vat and trestles, gravity tap on the vat, there’s water over there, fill the vat, sterilize, inert, lid on the vat. Don’t look too far, don’t think very much, carefully don’t notice how hard that was to do.

  Blossom insists Grue stay lying down, Pelōŕios goes for a perimeter trot, and Crane starts moving enough to start making coffee in quantity. It takes moving slowly and carefully and boiling water and actual beans and metal equipment but the beans and equipment show up from wherever Independents carry material objects.

  Blossom doesn’t have enough utensils for the three dozen or so engineers and others we’ve got, but Blossom does have cases of hardtack and the stuff everybody associated with the Line calls alleged cheese. Blossom isn’t willing to have Grue try to make anything.

  There are belt knives, almost all the engineers have cups, there are some tears over calculators that were sitting on the table and are gone forever now.

  I’m feeling more and more frightened when Pelōŕios comes back from the trot and nudges me.

  Not all as ‘twas, yet all is, Pelōŕios says, whistling “Uncanny, uncanny, uncanny” out loud.

  If I push I can see that far, it’s more than five kilometres away, there are changes in the things, people seem to have packed different shirts and so forth, but it doesn’t seem like anything vital is lost. I can start to hope I haven’t delivered people to a new landscape in an absence of anything that would let them survive.

  Crane makes an interrogative pouring gesture at me, and I produce the purple mug Dove and Edgar made our first season as students, just after we’d caused the Round House. Can’t say built.

  Coffee isn’t bad for me anymore, and it might make figuring out where to get wood lettuce tea practical.

  Kynefrid’s blue mug is still with Kynefrid. Angren’s eyes narrow, just a little. Ed demurs, when offered coffee, and gets water in the plain grey matching mug that says “Edgar.” The lettering is all in the same hand, Dove’s emphatic handwriting, but I don’t think Angren knew Kynefrid’s mug was part of a set. Pelōŕios makes an amused whuffly noise over my shoulder.

  Little do differ in fears, Pelōŕios says. Unicorns and sorcerers hangs there implied. Fluent Unicorn is mostly implied, so this is progress.

  How many unicorns might have just killed a hundred thousand fellow citizens.

  No one is dead, Blossom says. Not from us.

  Three hours later, we’re five kilometres away where the lock-clerk’s house and the baggage happen to be located. The name token’s there, over a lower, broader window pointing the opposite direction, and no one is thinking about that if they can help it.

  Dove and Chloris are still asleep, Grue’s more comatose than asleep, and the engineers are rushing about trying to figure out why they did things that way if they would have had to do that instead. We’ve just got the things, not the bureaucratic history of those things. Verbs don’t deal well with exchanging one set of historical events for another.

  Ed says that which has become in consequence of willed necessary choice in replacement of that which had been as a matter of other will and accumulated chance, only it’s three short syllables. Quiet ones, into the link. Ed still gets a look from Blossom, and I still feel the declarative language, faint and far off and unsettling anyway.

  Crane has stopped drinking coffee. Kynefrid and Angren have about six books open, and are running through a sequence of standard tests for terrain stability, grumbling amiably back and forth about precision all the while.

  We did those tests once, well, on one day, in three different places. Then Halt started expecting us to be able to sense-and-quantify directly, and no one wants to disappoint Halt.

  We have the option of not disappointing Halt Ed says, quiet, but still the unselfconscious quiet, the voice of some chill darkness from beyond the world, politely willing to go on starving.

  I don’t notice setting a hand on the base of Pelōŕios’ neck until well after I have. Like Halt, we have the option of not panicking about what we may become, each and severally.

  Pelōŕios says Art not these now all then them but new-made?, nose up and horn drawn wider light than its narrow movement across the western, west-south-west, horizon.

  Borrowed out of a different time. Can’t really say we made them, the most you can justify is having insisted on these particular ones.

  Blossom settles on to a camp stool, leans forward, palms over eyes. I drift over anyway, as does Ed. I can see the threads of awareness reaching back to Dove and Chloris, fine-woven darkness full of spines. Pelōŕios near-certainly can’t, because Pelōŕios steps right through them.

  Crane’s saying something about being unconcerned because there’s no possibility of doing anything else for a number of days. There’s canal traffic, there’s reports moving, and even were we all entirely fresh and well, we ought not to consider doing anything until all those reports are received.

  “Nor,” Crane says, “does it appear wise to consider any further alteration of probabilities here for, oh, perhaps not less than ten thousand years,” in dry and certain and I think actually amused tones, and Blossom nods.

  “Any idea what that was?” Blossom’s talking to us, me and Ed, in a weary, ground-down voice that only somewhat remembers human.

  “The terrain we had was, in material past, stable,” Ed says. “At sufficient temporal distance, the imaginary component became entirely malice; no thin thread of peace in that possible past anywhere. No indication in this time, our stability checks didn’t go back far enough to find it. Order of magnitude short. Once we reached back enough it was as the hole low in the dam.”

  Blossom’s head tips to look at me. We had to reach that far back, there had to be enough time for the faulted blocks to have been shifted differently, not the millions of years of a real orogeny but still many thousands, or there’s an energy release to go with the abruptness of the change. More Bad Old Days warfare technique.

  “I lost the opportunity for modest change as soon as we got flooded with malice. Kept the abstract relationship of settlements, the malice didn’t get as far as me needing to preserve settlements by name, and once the malice was removed” — whatever extravagantly thorough thing Death and Strange Mayhem did to it — “there was a time constraint.” Since I can’t put ten thousand square kilometres back on my own, and neither you nor we can maintain peak output for more than a few hours.

  “Do you know what we’ve got?” Blossom’s trying to sound curious. Actual curious doesn’t make it through the weary, however much the attempt shows.

  “Minimized economic cost of doubling overall population across the existing settlements.” Which is textbook evaluation for farmland, it’s not usually something that includes people, and the calculation isn’t one you can actually perform once you have to consider when it rains instead of annual average precipitation, or anything like actual plants or slope affecting sunlight. The intent exists, it’s formalized and customary which will do for ritualized, and it did; the Power knew what I meant.

  “In a context of?”

  “Crane’s grasp of the original static intent, and not losing any of the settlements. Didn’t otherwise constrain it.” Because there wasn’t time, and bec
ause we could just barely do it at all, the working was a lot larger than what we ought to have been doing and we were all tired already.

  Ed smiles. I get a very clear image of a tree that’s got eleven species of bird in it. Two species of cuckoo, I don’t know what those things with the robust bills are, and … abstracted chickadee. Which we made up for a study exercise two years ago, we never made any, that’s not a student thing, but the list of things you should think about if creating a new species is student stuff. Right down to the green, white, and gold colour pattern and the keeled lower beak. One of the other birds has the ethereal white shape of the constructs Grue uses for messages, it’s not obvious if those wings use solid feathers. It’s sitting on a branch and it’s nibbling at a large beetle, so some of it’s solid.

  Crane’s eyes waver back into local focus. “There’s an unfamiliar caprid on the upper slopes. Maybe a caprid.” Crane doesn’t seem particularly upset.

  “We were supposed to constrain the ecology.” Blossom’s voice is quiet. “If this one works, I don’t expect complaints.”

  It’s a lot, lot closer to create than constrain. Because there’s only one place Abstracted Chickadee could have come from, well, two, Grue isn’t quite us but still. Not out there in the scattered possibilities of other chances.

  I might have doomed us.

  Blossom makes a weary wave up the valley. “If it works, I expect requests to do it again, because there isn’t a weed anywhere and it’s a dense ecology.” Blossom’s face quirks, in a way I can tell was a deliberate thought, Blossom’s actual substance seems tired and Blossom’s material presence is slow. “Not an area we can effectively ward, weeds are going to get in, but people are going to ask anyway.”

  “We were fortunate in survival.” Ed’s five years older than I am, the same age as Chloris. This sounds as ancient and implacable as Halt.

  Blossom nods. Crane says “I also am startled in survival.”

  Ed puts some math, convolved constructors and Halt notation, on the air. Blossom looks at each of them and says “Ed,” in a completely weary your-lover’s-sister sort of voice, not teacher at all. A whole lot of standard, the kind used by mathematicians who aren’t sorcerers of any kind, topology appears. Really a whole lot, there’s more just defining terms than the whole of the other two representations.