Safely You Deliver

by Graydon Saunders

  After the second day, Pelōŕios inquires, moving back up to the Round House after breakfast, about what a unicorn could possibly do in the Commonweal. Other than sorcerer’s pet sort of floated there, implied, for Ed to scowl at.

  Chloris points out that message-running, just like the settlement name-tokens, would be entirely welcome. The Second Commonweal doesn’t have the Hard Road, hasn’t found a general replacement for moving critical information quickly. It’s a mix of Independents and heliographs and improvisation. Using the Power is dangerous, cast your mind open to hear and you’ll attract what you wish you hadn’t. Making the Hard Road isn’t something we know how to do, the Wizard Laurel didn’t write that one down and how the Hard Road works is traditionally described as “not obvious.”

  There’s five centuries of speculation about why not. Halt looks serene and says Laurel obviously knew something we don’t.

  Dove points out, quietly, that a unicorn could get no end of work helping with surveys into the wild, or with weeding, or with anything where some combination of weeds and crunchers might be a problem. Or even just a bear.

  Pelōŕios gets thoughtful, after a faint whistled “Bear?” emerges most extremely doubtful.

  Unicorns in the wild don’t ever see bears if the bear can possibly help it.

  Breakfast has a different person at the piano, someone new and playing a very different style of music. Pelōŕios gets positively blissful and there’s several substantial stretches where no one is talking and people are trying to eat silently. The musician’s someone off a barge crew, not a Creek. They’re in the Regular cluster, but I can’t tell which species, which would annoy me more if Regulars reliably could without complex tests.

  Breakfast has my sister Mikka coming in, two days early. Halle is three and a half, which is much larger than two. Also temporarily wide of eye, because meeting vouched-for sorcerers in a familiar place, which happened last time we visited, coming home from putting the control dam in on the Sometimes Stream out of Old Lake, isn’t the same as being in the adult side of a strange refectory and meeting a unicorn.

  Well, and Aunt Zora’s with the unicorn.

  Halle manages to stand up very straight and say “Hello,” to Pelōŕios. Pelōŕios doesn’t know what level of head-holding would be polite, guesses somewhere about the same as Halle, and stretches their head way down to say “Hello,” back, without any whistle in it at all. Mikka’s worried that I’m not worried, then relaxes when Blossom smiles.

  Mikka has just enough talent to latch to a focus. That’s nothing like enough to see through Blossom’s presentation.

  After breakfast, there’s a collective wave, and the rest of us start gaining distance. It lets me talk with Mikka, and gets remaining questions of readiness dealt with before there’s an actual arrival of guests. Mikka might be able to keep up, but Halle can’t. Halle doesn’t see why this should alter an existing total determination to walk. So I get to find out how everyone has been, and how Mother’s been doing with the sugar refining the cheese collective started doing on the sensible ground there were these vats just sitting empty half the time. Wake’s recipe starts with cellulose and isn’t especially complex, not like keeping the cheese within bounds.

  Which is true, cheese gets made by living things, and that’s always risky. The sugar’s just plant cells and Power, which makes it simpler in principle. Sounds like in practice is being simpler, too, though I’m surprised they’re having any trouble with the recipe.

  Mikka gives me a look. I wave up some dead leaves, last year’s sad forb, and hand Mikka the resulting sucrose. “I forget what’s supposed to be tricky.”

  Mikka gives me much more of a look, and I turn the handful of sugar into five hard candies, cellophane wrapping’s some more leaves but not more difficult. So I get asked what is difficult, which is a hard question to answer with Pelōŕios right there, and harder because I don’t know how to start explaining the whole predatory-shape problem.

  Or what a metaphysical transition is, it’s obvious enough as a thing to do but even harder to explain than most metaphysical perception.

  “Not knowing if I’m strong enough” will do, though, it’s not just worrying about the Shape of Peace and I think I manage to convince Mikka about that before Halle’s legs give up. The ridge does rise, and it’s a long walk if you’re three and a half.

  Pelōŕios does the head-dip-and-tilt thing that means “May I?” and, after I say yes asks Halle if being carried is acceptable.

  Halle looks at Mikka, who looks at me, and the chain of nods works it way back to Pelōŕios, whose horn doesn’t get brighter. Halle rises into the air, taking up a position off Pelōŕios’ near shoulder. Halle looks doubtful until Pelōŕios says “You can sit down,” which Halle, sensible child, tests carefully after summoning Mikka over “If I slip, Mummy.” It works, it’s obviously comfortable, Halle doesn’t know how reactive lifting forces work but clearly approves of being held up that evenly.

  They get a little ahead. Halle’s “You were sick?” floats back, worried, and I can hear the reassurance that Pelōŕios is not sick now. Mikka can’t, and it takes half a kilometre for my sister to really get used to the idea that Halle is quite safe floating next to a unicorn.

  Less safe in such company Pelōŕios says, and it’s true. Everybody except Halle and Mikka’s more to fear than unicorns.

  The rest from being carried means Halle’s reaction to the carousel behind the pond-pavilion involves jumping up and down in mid-air. It’s not done yet, the creatures are done but not the music or the lights, and Dove grins and starts explaining to Halle what everything is. All the creatures are illusions, switchable, the whole carousel packs up into a trunk. Dove saw one north of the City of Peace while going to the Line School, and while making one out of wood and metal would cost too much under the present circumstances, it’s good practice for us and will be a contribution to Festival. Pelōŕios contributed the unicorn figures, four of them, which are terrifically detailed likenesses and have ornate saddles.

  If the models ever see them we’re going to have to act quickly.

  “Your letters are so carefully bland Mother told me to find out if you were truly thriving,” Mikka says, sitting down on the slope.

  “Mother said ‘truly thriving’?” That’s not good.

  Mikka nods. “Listen to your sister.”

  Halle seems determined to ride every single creature at least once around. Dove’s happy to indulge. Pelōŕios is trotting round outside of Halle because Halle is determined that there be a grownup there in case of slips, and Pelōŕios is now obviously a grownup. It’s a good habit, and better to have the habit than try to explain what would have to happen before Dove let Halle slip.

  Mikka looks quietly concerned, but I don’t think about Halle slipping.

  “Dove won’t notice spinning a carousel.”

  “Would you?”

  I sit down next to Mikka. “No. It’s not much force, there’s the idea of some good bearings in there.”

  Might as well quantify things. “One of the very first things we did as a class was move eight thousand tonnes of marble out of the foundation excavation for the Round House. Floated it into town.”

  “Could you do that by yourself?”

  “Not then.”

  There’s this kind of look you get from your older sister. “You can pick up thousands of tonnes of anything and you’re worried about not being strong enough?”

  “I’m not anything like as strong as the rest of us.”

  Mikka makes a noise and lies back on the hillside. The forb’s not as sad as it used to be, uphill from the ponds.

  “You’re ahead six species to nothing,” Mikka says at the sky.

  Which isn’t the kind of true I wish it was. “Seven, now, plus however many they find in the lower Third.”

  There’s a pause.

  It’s one of those treacherous pauses that you can’t just leave until it turns into nothing. So I find myself t
rying to explain, and it doesn’t work very well, because Mikka has lots of practice dealing with people you’re working with and none at all with dealing with people actually inside one’s mind.

  I have to point out that, no, really, the working link’s a good thing for me, as well as a good thing, it’s not just a question of being able to help the lower Third, it really is entirely and utterly a good thing for me, not just a baby sorcerer, but me specifically, to know that there are people there who value me because of, rather than despite, the sorcery.

  Mikka, thankfully, understands. Mikka’s collective does accounting, Mikka does a lot of statistical expectations of breakage stuff, trying to figure out if there’s some subtle mischief involved or if some collective isn’t managing to collectively pay attention the whole way through some industrial process. It’s not even the kind of statistics people interested in statistics tend to like, but Mikka and a few dozen other people think it’s utterly fascinating. Finding the people who understand makes sense to Mikka.

  Mikka sort of pauses, and smiles at Halle waving and waves back, and says, just loud enough to hear, “Do you like them?”

  You don’t have to like people to work with them, to get the job done. You don’t even have to like the people in your gean, that’s what manners are for. School makes a point of putting you in projects with people you don’t like, to make sure you learn that liking’s less important than work.

  Hardly liked anybody in my abbreviated youth, and I complained about it to Mikka.

  “I like them. It bothers me that I like them, but I like them.”

  “That scary?”

  “It’s … It’s not that I’m going to school with the end of the world. It’s … ”

  I have no idea how to explain this to me.

  “They’re in love, crazy in love, the kind where your friends or your mother sit you down and try to get you to notice you’ve escaped your reason.”

  Mikka nods.

  “If we survive, Constant as an entity, as the embodiment of Dove and Edgar’s consonance, will be about as powerful as Blossom. Dove and Edgar together are still about as powerful as Blossom. Adding Chloris ups the multiplier so the four of them are about a fifth stronger than the simple sum.” Deep breath. No distraught voice tone, Halle’s having a wonderful time and Dove is, too. Pelōŕios’ footwork is positively prim, trotting in circles, but I think Pelōŕios is having fun with being civilized as an idea.

  Don’t try to explain how Constant exists, or what’s being multiplied, or how the general access works, that has made me mighty beyond all record of my kind, that’s the success, not the problem.

  “That is entirely not what you want to have made out of crazy people, and they agree.” Another deep breath, none of this is easy to say. Having to say it in an offhand tone of voice makes it much harder.

  “Their response is to decide to be people who can be that much in love and entirely sane, as impersonally sane as the Shape of Peace requires.”

  Mikka carefully doesn’t look at me, goes right on watching Halle and smiling. Halle is trying to negotiate making the carousel spin faster with Dove, and Dove’s offering to add the appearance of greater speed instead. “You’re worried they can’t do it?”

  Which wouldn’t help my survival chances or my utility.

  “I’m sure they can. There really isn’t much that breadth of talent can’t do to itself, external effects are more constrained but … ”

  “They’re exactly who they want to be?”

  I nod. “So am I, and I don’t know what I want.”

  Mikka smiles at the horizon. “Not like you at all.”

  “It’s been all sorts of embarrassing to notice how much less difficult I get when I’ve got something to do with the Power.” It is. Has been for years.

  Mikka fists my shoulder, gently. “You were a pretty good kid.”

  “Just willful,” is a chorus. It was Mother’s standard statement.

  “Thing is, the rest of us are the only really successful sorcerous lovers I know about.”

  Gets Mikka to look at me.

  “So it’s lonely or crazy?”

  “Old-style sorcery makes you isolated. Inherently, it’s not something you pick, you’re just stuck off in your own specific understanding, you can get around that some with age and Power but by the time you’re a thousand someone to love’s not a major concern.” I do not understand the old ones.

  “I’m not isolated, I’d have to decide to be. But there’s exactly one data point about turning not-isolated into a social entanglement.” Grue and Blossom got the isolated and the entangled, and I think they’re still sorting it out.

  It’s certainly not beautiful and terrible and gleefully inhuman, for them, the way it is for the rest of us.

  “So you might have to wait fifty years to find somebody?” Mikka doesn’t think that’s good, but isn’t sure precisely what the problem is.

  “The rest of us being in love is in our head with me.”

  There’s a commiserative noise, a contemplative pause, and a much more intense commiserative noise.

  “They’re really good about it, they’re practically delicate, and they make a real effort not to impinge.” Which is true, and it isn’t even useless.

  “Days three, six, and nine are Dove and Chloris; Edgar heads off early for sword lessons and sometimes drifts in around midnight. Sometimes it’s dawn, because Ed and the Captain have sat up all night drinking dragon’s blood and not saying a word in the Captain’s House back garden. The Line guys all approve, good for the Captain’s mood, it’s obviously good for Edgar but I don’t understand it even slightly, even if they weren’t drinking something inherently on fire.

  “Days two, five, and eight are Chloris and Edgar; Dove does book-digesting and team paperwork and makes sure to know just where I am with studying and sometimes talks enchantment design with Blossom so the whole main floor of the Round House fills up with illusory representations of magical machinery, which is instructive as well as beautiful.” Dove doesn’t have a lot of imagination, considered strictly, but Dove’s goals don’t get away.

  “Days one, four, and seven are Dove and Edgar; the rest of us are careful about not bumping the room wards, Chloris and Constant have a formal early evening tea party which Halt often attends, it’s not strictly frivolous given the clothes are illusions and constructing the tea service is practice and, as Halt says, encompassing good manners are the chief art of civilization.”

  Chloris has given up on cookies, Halt brings cookies, and Chloris has got good at small cakes instead. Reputation good, can take them to Eirene as a thank-you good. Sometimes they have flavours out of Chloris’ dreams.

  “I made extra spoon racks, and a special shelf for tea services.” Chloris’ current effort merits a special shelf in the material artifacts portion of the Commonweal Library. Going to be some years before the Commonweal can afford the building, Clerk Hyacinth says the best case is just over twenty, so all we have to do is not drop anything until then.

  “Constant is allowed, encouraged, to do Chloris’ hair. Dove and Edgar get glared at for interrupting hair-brushing, but Constant is inherently spectral and I suppose Death is, too, for a different value of inherent, and they cuddle in the tub and Constant does elaborate ornate things with Chloris’ hair. It’s not sexual at all, Constant isn’t, Chloris doesn’t want it to be with Constant, but it splashes romantic all over. They write formal tea party invitations to one another in overheated language.”

  Mikka snickers a little. Doesn’t want to, and tries to stop, but really can’t not snicker.

  “Déci is Dove and Edgar and Chloris. Constant sits at this gorgeous idea of a desk Chloris made and drinks actual tea and writes, pages and pages of math and formal sorcery theory. Blossom read some years ago, about a month after Edgar hatched, and started bringing books, and Constant read them. Then Wake started bringing markedly different books, and Constant read those, too, and is now carrying on a
scholarly correspondence with a bunch of people, half of them Independents and all of them nervous.”

  Constant can think all the time, manifestation requires Dove and Edgar’s consonance to be active in some sense Halt says “hrrm” about and pleads conceptual incomprehensibility as a reason for not explaining. All the other teachers are quite happy to say they don’t understand it at all. Constant maintaining that correspondence while only thinking when manifest, when manifest and not brushing Chloris’ hair or practicing couples dancing or drinking tea, is just too scary to contemplate, so it’s good we need not.

  “I got through the décade of Dove feeling morose with inevitable loss two years ago, once Edgar and Chloris were real enough Dove entirely believed they were there to lose, and that was horrifying. Got through Chloris being impossible for two décades and then being apologetic for a whole season, which was worse than the impossible but not nearly as bad as Dove’s morose.”

  Mikka nods firmly. You can meet Dove for twenty seconds and understand how morose would be bad.

  “I’m coping with Edgar, who really is dutiful and helpful and a bunch of other positive things. Every time anyone so much as thinks about threatening any of us, this ongoing burbling mutter of creative horrors to visit upon them rises up in the link, enough there to understand. It might be my garden and Chloris’ kitchen and Dove’s team, people write ‘Dove’s team’ on official stuff in complete defiance of a bunch of superstitious tradition, but anyone deciding Ed’s not territorial is making a mistake, I can’t actually say These-who-are-of-particular-concern but I remember it.” Couldn’t forget it, that language is impossible to say but hearing it alters the mind. It’s not inherently the objectionable sort of alters, it’s altered as you would be by a significant experience or a major change in diet.

  “If that was a word I could say, I’d almost be tempted to use that for the others, but if shoulder-companion comes with death and maiming, that word comes with extinction and wrath beyond bounds and I wish I could believe no one else, no one who isn’t us, is going to have a reason to remember it, but not with Independent lifespans. Ed’s going to write that on the world, every time it’s needful.”