Safely You Deliver

by Graydon Saunders

  Coercer, though, you can’t say die, it’s not like being a necromancer, it’s not like being an entelech and saying never have existed in some kind of imperative operative tense that divides the world and comes out sounding like cease.

  You can say hold still, and they will, if you’re stronger than they are.

  You can make them entirely delusive, unaware of where they are or what sensation they might be feeling, or feel things that have no material cause, and any strong sorcerer can take a metaphysical metabolism apart if they can set a hand on it and it doesn’t know to struggle.

  “There’s always the prospect of changing into something large and carnivorous.” Grue says this lightly.

  I shake my head. “Not reliable enough.” Something in its own customary shape’s better at being that thing than you are at being whatever shape you’ve assumed. Sometimes it’ll get away, you can’t pull an arbitrarily terrible form directly out of the Power.

  Not with shapeshifting. I haven’t read the Book of Snow.

  Grue’s face quirks.

  “There may not be a dozen living.”

  From Dove’s experience of it, Snow is not something you read for the entertainment value.

  “I do want to learn a form that soars.” I’ll have trouble making any material organism have eyes as good as Dove’s bird-construct, but still. The view is glorious.

  I don’t know how to describe Grue’s expression, what to call it, I get, very politely, a memory of a memory, Blossom’s memory of something Halt said about how the success of the Commonweal was apparent in Blossom’s continued survival.

  “Three unicorns, Blossom, Death, and then invincible wings.” I manage to say that like I believe it. It’s close enough to factual. “Really there to help.” There were some disbelieving thoughts about that, there at the start. In the mist and the stress of exhaustion and incipient failure and the expectation of many thousands dead, some few disbelieving thoughts.

  Not going to get distracted.

  “Everybody knew.”

  Grue nods.

  “So they were very frightened, and you had to not ever make a mistake from whenever you started to manifest talent. It’s why you got raised by Halt, you had a family, a generally talented family, if I’m reading between the lines correctly that made them more frightened, not less.”

  If I read the archives correctly, Halt became Grue’s guardian when Grue was still an infant.

  “I’m the precedent for letting Halt try with Edgar,” Grue says. “I’m also … inconsistent, about being able to apply the Power offensively.”

  “Too much self doubt.”

  “Too much self doubt.” Grue looks rueful.

  “At the risk of adding to yours,” Grue says, “you realize you’re not actually a shapeshifter?”

  “I’m not a life-tweaker, either. I look like one but Chloris pointed out last year I couldn’t possibly be.”

  I never do anything to alter the expression of history. Life, like geology, is just a pile of history, an accumulation of chance.

  “I’m almost a necromancer.” Grue stops looking quizzical and looks astonished.

  “Necromancy is metaphysical state transitions related to the processes of life. I do material state transitions related to the processes of life, only it’s not entirely ”processes of life“ in a chemical sense. The stuff-wreaking arises from more generalized processes of life, the Commonweal’s made up of tool-using species.” The imposition of cohesive process state. I’m glad I was doing it for years before I noticed, because otherwise I wouldn’t believe even the Power could do that.

  My perfect memory provides Dove saying “it’s unworthy,” because that same perfect memory is going to retain Grue’s present facial expression forever, and it is unworthy, and I’m still not sad about it.

  “It looks like life-tweaking, but I’m not manipulating history of events. Life-tweakers get their results by altering what used to have happened, just a little.” If it’s more than just a little you’ve got something dead. “Development, analogous to the way life-mages constrain heredity. Different scope of history, but the same general idea.”

  Life is all about the accumulation of history, and I know that, that’s how you understand life as a thing, under and before and distinct from life-after-sorcerers-get-hold-of-it, and then the history of sorcerous alteration on top of that, but it’s not the accumulation of history that I’m altering. Chloris pointed that out with the strawberries, that what I’d done had referenced the results in Halt’s memory, not the accumulation of events that produced strawberries that matched the memory. We’ve got all sorts of strawberry relatives, some that haven’t been altered much or at all. Roses, however selected, are relatives of that family of plants. What I made is new, there isn’t any common descent there at all, just function being given a form.

  “You ignored that?” Grue’s increasingly flummoxed.

  “I wanted to get on with learning how to do stuff.” Still do, it matters that the work is useful, it’s maybe interesting how and why and what metaphysical explanation, but only maybe. The metaphysics isn’t anything like as much of a constraint as hungry people.

  “I can’t ignore the lower Third.”

  There’s a complex pause with a lot of social mass, and Grue, carefully, says “You realize that’s a much larger thing than the Dove-and-Edgar furnace trick.”

  That being the second thing Dove couldn’t ignore, as much about grief as the Power, four years ago.

  “I had help.” Which is true, and I can say it without looking anything other than serene, and now Grue’s looking at me in an actually worried way, it’s not flummoxed anymore.

  “Growing up doesn’t have to be continuous, I didn’t want to, it was really obvious I didn’t know enough about how. Only now I have to, I know more, maybe I know enough, and I’ve got my part in us-together to take care of as well as a bewildered unicorn.” I don’t have any more time, this year is the year.

  “In the likely event Pelōŕios is neither able to alter themselves so much, nor willing to be modified?”

  “If all else fails, I can get Ed to make the alteration of Pelōŕios not have happened.” Well, all of us, it’d be safer. If Ed and Chloris can sidestep seven years for the shades of the dead it’s not actually difficult to go back less than a year and swap out a narrow portion of Pelōŕios’ history.

  Grue’s having expression trouble.

  “Do the job.” It might be the only thing my mother and Dove would agree about, socially. “The real job, the job you’ve found for yourself. For me, that’s making a start on the ecology.” Not going to be able to fix all of it, there’s a quarter million years of stupidity and malice that happened before today. “A little tiny part of that is finding out if a unicorn can stop being an obligate opportunistic metavore. Another little tiny part is maybe fixing the horrible botch job of designing a unicorn, so the prospect of the otherwise minor change to have a direct metabolic Power feed so the metavore isn’t avoids being such a huge risk of collapsing into a heap of disorganized organic substances.” It’s quite possible the individual responsible for Pelōŕios’ ilk of unicorns just couldn’t imagine them if they weren’t predatory, the structure’s a bit like that.

  “You didn’t model Romp and Stomp straight off a unicorn, you had a set of functional expectations and constructed something to meet them.” They look like hornless unicorns, Grue had researched unicorns, they fooled Pelōŕios enough to be a worry, but they’re metabolically not unicorns at all, they owe something to an extant species of, well, hyper-goats, that someone made a long time ago and are still common at higher elevations of the distant northern mountains of the First Commonweal. Plus they’re social, they like people, Romp, particularly, will accept being scritched by random children all day.

  Grue nods. “I didn’t.”

  It must have been an enormous amount of work, Grue’s making intelligence and practice substitute for inclination. Everything is so muc
h harder when you approach the Power like that, it’s an accomplishment, it’s a large accomplishment, and the medical ability is another one.

  An accomplishment Grue can never, ever mention.

  There’s a pause, and a refilling of teacups. The ants are done with the rhubarb and it’s new potatoes going by now. The ants march quicker with just the one small potato each.

  “I didn’t set out to have a unicorn in the world that isn’t constrained by its unfortunate nature.” Grue, well, it’s not prim. Grue can’t quite manage prim. It’s not disapproving, but it certainly knows where disapproving lives.

  “The world’s got room for something swift and beautiful.” Many such things, such as the world has.

  “Something you could no longer control.” Be safe from is louder than Grue’s voice.

  “Something I don’t want to control.”

  Grue’s got this look.

  “I don’t need to control Pelōŕios.” I try for conversational.

  “If you are wrong, you cannot fight Pelōŕios.” Or any other unicorn, or anything sort of hangs there.

  “I can shout for help.”

  Grue knows better than I do, Grue’s witnessed examples, what Halt … happening … to someone can look like. Something Wake or Blossom can’t overcome, that only Halt could, is surpassingly unlikely. In a little while, Death and Strange Mayhem, who ripped tens of thousands of years of active malice out of the world on no warning, something that isn’t supposed to be possible at all, not with ritual, not with planning, and then we put something good where the malice left a fog of nothing.

  Fighting isn’t something you have to do yourself. Specialization counts.

  I have to wonder if Grue believes in the Commonweal at all; Mulch, well, for Mulch not is almost expected, but Grue was born in it, even if it was almost a hundred years ago.

  “The Commonweal, in the mass, is not particularly brave.” Grue, it’s not wry, it’s not sad. Some complex feeling I haven’t experienced. “It certainly prefers safety as an option.”

  Which is —

  “Which is impractical, and I know that.” Grue’s getting a bit vehement. “And I know you think you’re afraid sometimes.”

  There’s a sort of a sigh, one that makes all the ants pause. “Fear makes you stupid.”

  Which is a reason to avoid fear, as a state. Fear leads to error, and …

  “Your scope of acceptable error is being reduced.” Grue says this with emphasis.

  Grue does something that I recognize as a cognitive schematic, a mind being crushed. It’s pretty, if you don’t know what it is and just follow the colours in the illusion.

  “So is your scope of choice.”

  I don’t, I hope, look too astonished. It seems like a completely bizarre thing to say, and I stop and try to think about it, because Grue misses steps in explanations all the time. Not often medical ones, but anything else.

  “I can’t not be an Independent and live.” If I’m being lied to about that, I have to suppose Halt, or someone, has been carefully killing untrained high talents for centuries, longer than the Commonweal. It was a reason to control who got sorcerous training back in the Bad Old Days, the Power would kill your potential rivals for you. “I can’t, today, stop being part of the team and live.” Because this year is the year, and it would take years to take the team apart, and we don’t have those years. Our thousand years, to quote Halt, if there’s time after this year, but not but this year now.

  Grue nods.

  “Once you are an Independent, you will be known.” This is almost wry, and almost a smile. “Rehabilitating unicorns would make you known, if you didn’t invent food plants. Inventing food plants would make you known, if you didn’t benefit ecologies.”

  My turn to nod. We’re new. We can do new things. Notoriety naturally follows.

  “Any enemy of the Commonweal who learns of you will prioritize your destruction.”

  Notoriety means they most likely will know, at least enough to start the kind of vague divination that hints at how to achieve success.

  It’s hard to do that accurately, and the more accurately the more obvious. It’s a dangerous kind of obvious.

  “You haven’t made your metaphysical transition,” Grue says. It’s something you do as late as you can, with as much skill and control and choice as you can get, it’s a big part of why this year is the year, because once you’re past a certain level of ability, it will happen, and we’re all about there.

  Well, Ed’s long since hatched. Tricky part for Ed’s not the metaphysical transition, it’s not mistaking everyone else for a prey species, which is working well so far.

  “Think about that risk, please,” Grue says, voice briefly entirely worried.

  I nod and say “Yes,” in part because Grue never sounds worried and in part because it might give me a place to start. You can have any metaphysical self you want, which isn’t helpful whatsoever.

  But does sort of connect to what I wanted, which is how to get that aversion out of Pelōŕios.

  “Simple shapeshifting won’t work.” Simple shapeshifting can involve forgetting your metaphysical part, but it’s not a way to alter your metaphysical part. It would be even more dangerous if you could.

  Grue’s waiting.

  “I’m talking about Pelōŕios.” Not my own metaphysical transition, which I want to think about with some care before I say anything. “The unicorn shape I found.”

  “That you constructed,” Grue says. “Having a species-name and a plausible correlation to historical intent is not found.”

  “The unicorn shape I’m using.” No sense arguing about where it came from when “the Power” is the only definitive answer. “I’d like to give Pelōŕios the opportunity to adopt a shape with that basis, nothing says you have to keep the same metaphysical shape your whole life any more than caterpillars can’t become butterflies materially.”

  “I wish there’d been time to have you do some shape work with Quail.” Grue isn’t, precisely, regretful.

  The Independent Quail, which choice of name is a memorial of some sort of student joke; they wear a little bobble on their hat. Not a strong talent; it would be accurate to call Quail an extremely skilled botanist, specializing in grassland biomes, notably uplands. Also a shapeshifter, with a repertoire of upland ground birds. They’ve been doing a lot of work in the First Valley, which used to be too dry to be heavily forested.

  “It takes Quail between five and ten years to learn a new shape,” Grue says, so at least I now know why Grue would have wanted me to spend some time with Quail. Someone who has to work harder presumably has a more detailed and clearer process, or at least a more teachable one, because they would have had to learn what they know in steps.

  “Adopting a new mode of being isn’t necessarily something Pelōŕios can do at all.” Grue’s head is shaking back and forth, just a little. “Certainly not something you can expect to have happen quickly.”

  Not if no one is willing to help.

  Two careful breaths, we all really ought to do something for Block, who didn’t ever once let on just how important the breathing would be even slightly, so none of us ever got nervous about it. This isn’t actually difficult but it does have ways to fail. One appearance, one actual construct. It was a huge help when I realized I wasn’t shapeshifting, that I wasn’t altering my present operative knowledge of myself as processes in a way that involved expanding my name, everything I can find written down about that is hopelessly esoteric, what I’m doing isn’t altering my name at all, it’s a selection of functionality. Just only narrowly, barely not the metaphysical state transition it would be so very embarrassing to make by accident, which is the most noticeable way to fail.

  Well, aside from dying, but dying would take believing in no functionality, and I’m really quite used to this human one.

  Grue is staring.

  “I can give Pelōŕios the idea, it’s examinable, it’s general, it’s unfortuna
tely not separable, the Creek-type human shape and the novel unicorn shape are both there, but I’m not going to add anything else until well after the metaphysical transition, I really need to do that on purpose if at all possible, and sensibly not adding any shapes until after I’ve been judged by the Shape of Peace. Since there’s no pressing need and I’ll have an own-work project to complete.”

  “And if Pelōŕios is interested, there’s the other one.” Grue’s voice is empty, careful, and composed.

  The operative construct, it can take anybody’s history of self, there will be something that’s technically a disjunction but the personality transfer’s whole and entire, something I went and proved by finding that unicorn-shape in the first place.

  Well, making. You don’t find cake just because you got the eggs from a chicken and the butter from a cow.

  Grue says “Fold that up, please,” and I do.

  “With a little more effort, you could make one of those that turned someone into a lump of rock with no vestige of sentience or traces of the Power.”

  Invisible murder.

  “That would be uncouth.”

  Grue, thankfully, starts to laugh.

  When Grue stops laughing I get handed the very specific nature of the aversion affecting Pelōŕios.

  Chapter 30

  Zora

  Over the course of three days, I produce four instances of the metaphysical metabolism shape-image, one for the rest of us to stuff in the internal library and three for Pelōŕios. The image fades, it’s there to look at for sixty-seven minutes before it collapses under its own level of detail. Pelōŕios’ daily hour of close scrutiny has been happening after we get home from dinner.