The kitchen end of the Pond Pavilion has cider and several plates of Chloris’ small cakes. I fill a jug and float that and a cake plate and utensils over.
“If I can float your kid, I can float food.” Mikka’s expression doesn’t shift right away, but it does shift. “I can guarantee you there will be floating food at dinner tomorrow.” Halt’s dinners, food just appears.
Mikka has trouble choosing which small cake. I point out they’re all really good, and get told that’s no help, so I point out the three with strawberry flavours.
“Where’s Pelōŕios?” Mikka’s finding out that the screen under the railing of the upper sleeping rooms only looks like you can see through it.
“There’d be horn-glow.” The lights aren’t on up there. “Out by Long Pond. Unicorns don’t do well with never getting to lurk in the woods and be solitary.” Not that it’s much woods yet, but Pelōŕios asserts it has potential, a remark that made me happy.
Mikka smiles, it’s almost a relaxed smile. “I’m glad you found a polite unicorn.” If I had to find a unicorn at all, because Mikka isn’t going to be able to say anything that will avoid Mother fussing and we both know it.
Halle might. Halle’s going to be upset when it’s time to leave.
“You having real fun?” The big sister voice from Mikka I haven’t heard in awhile. Before I came to study, I think by almost a year.
“It’s incredibly annoying having a perfect memory that gets so far back in the past and then stops and it’s a perfect memory of the usual mushy human one.”
“Maybe people shouldn’t remember their youth with perfect clarity?” Mikka’s smile isn’t quite mocking.
“Probably not.” Mikka would never say I was a wretched kid. Neither would Mother, Mother wouldn’t go past difficult. I was, though. Brain wouldn’t ever settle.
My turn for the inarticulate hand gestures. “It’s not perfect.”
“Perfect isn’t a reasonable expectation” comes out as a chorus, and mostly in Mother’s inflections.
“The future’s bigger and scarier and I’m going to be wondering if I’m missing something important for the rest of my existence, but I get to do stuff.”
“Like make birds so your sister believes you?”
I nod.
“It was easier than arguing with you for a year.”
Mikka snorts.
“Not an adult yet, not really. Independents seem to think you have to make it to a hundred, and there’s a reason, and those probably involve sanity and loneliness.”
“So only about a quarter,” Mikka says.
I nod. Of course Mikka read the statistics. About half make it to Independent, and the half-life for Independent is somewhere around a hundred twenty years.
“Though it’s really lumpy.” Which is true, but not honest.
“It’s really lumpy and we don’t map to the existing statistics. Which is good, because we might make it and the statistics say we can’t.”
“You do seem to get the robust jobs.” Mikka’s really trying to say this in a neutral voice, and can’t, the will isn’t there.
It’s not a secret.
“It’s likely we’re getting more than chance trouble. No idea who, or what, or why.” I try not to shrug offensively. “That really does take the Old Ones, and it’s not my job when we know.”
“Line and the … I can’t say the-rest-of-you,” Mikka says.
“If it’s a singular you. And the teachers, Blossom’s not an Old One.”
Which, I don’t know, it’s not a smile and I pour some more cider for both of us.
“Mulch is an Old One, and it’s not Mulch’s problem either.”
“Where is Mulch?” Mikka doesn’t garden worth mentioning, but is curious. Mulch has been in letters.
“Grue says Mulch is doing what Mulch does every Festival when they’re not a tree, going around the whole Commonweal trying to find a way out of the borders.”
Which implies an ability to move quickly that isn’t long-striding, because Wake and Halt are both tolerably certain Mulch doesn’t know how.
“Apparently Mulch did find a gap in the border, early in the second century of the Peace, and Parliament summoned Mulch back. It’s generally accepted this has a lot to do with Mulch’s bad opinion of the Commonweal.”
Mikka looks sad. “It’s not difficult to see why.”
“When the Founders were arguing about what the Shape of Peace should do, before there was one,” before, I am more and more sure, Laurel made the first Shape of Peace, with help, but it was the Wizard Laurel’s working, and then they walked away, “One of the ideas was to not worry about the passage of citizens over the border and just delete important knowledge. Really delete it, not hide it. So you couldn’t tell anybody about what a focus is because you wouldn’t know.”
Mikka’s shoulders and spine show how much that seems like a bad idea, despite keeping a calm face.
“I guess you have to get good at looking calm when the infant wants to eat frogs or something.”
“No frogs. No bugs. Really, really, really stubborn about no mashed food.”
“The Founders figured out it wouldn’t work by experiment on volunteers. It’s, I never want to say impossible, but most exceeding difficult to delete only one thing from a mind.” Chloris certainly didn’t manage it with Heron, though the published paper says intriguing result more than once, there was much, much less change to Heron than anyone knowledgeable expected.
“There are exceptions sometimes, Rust’s diplomacy to Reems, Halt took Blossom and Grue outside the Commonweal once when they were apprentices, but Mulch would have trouble withstanding any foreign sorcerer able to catch them.” Diplomacy might not be the right word for what “battle” certainly doesn’t describe in Meadows Pass. Not the outcome of Parliament’s original intent.
I wave at Mikka’s cake selection. “They really are good.”
“Hard to care,” Mikka says, picking up a cake fork. “Four years of telling myself not to worry isn’t working very well.”
“I’m not certainly doomed.” Mikka looks specifically doubtful, tries a forkful of cake.
“Even if there aren’t any statistics. The rest of us are out there in the tub having a wake for their metabolic humanity as a way of asserting they’re going to keep the social sort. They’re none of them the least bit upset about winning that fight, or the consequences.”
Chloris would have been when we started.
I don’t know what the word is, or the sign, for the flavour of the cake I picked. Some sort of fruit, and I should ask Wake if there are samples.
“Militant is a term of art, it means you can use the Power to fight other sorcerers. It doesn’t mean you’re any good at it, that you’ve got an aptitude, just like you can teach almost anyone integration but you won’t turn them into a mathematician.”
Mikka nods at me, makes “it is good” motions at the strawberry cake.
“So I’m not militant. Scary things from over the border still won’t matter. The rest of us have an axiom that I’m representative of what there is to protect, and while they are militant, it’s a bit like classifying Ankle-stickers as tenacious.” Which they are. Even when no other standard weeding technique involves baking the soil to four hundred degrees twice a year for five years running.
Mikka nods once, slowly. “If I read between the lines in the Line reports,” and trails off.
Mikka can turn lights on and that’s about it, so this is problematic to explain.
“We’re impossible, there are a bunch of widely believed things about how the Power works that preclude what we do.” Let’s not wander off toward trying to define what specifically that is.
Mikka nods, still listening.
“Chloris is a strong necromancer. Strong necromancers typically go horribly crazy because everyone they care about dies of them. Edgar’s an entelech, and everyone kills those in childhood now, after they start altering all the adult minds around them.
An adult one, a potentially adult entelech, is something out of ancient days, not even the Bad Old Days, archaeology instead of history and not the easy archaeology.”
Another slow nod. Mikka’s probably found the archaeological speculation about the hemispheric empires, the thousand-year wars, which of those wars were fought against Halt, the possibility that the epochal bad war about a hundred thousand years ago had entelechs on both sides, any kind of reading about sorcerous survival in strong talents will take you there.
“Dove does really bad risk analysis.”
Mikka looks at me incredulous.
“No other way to put it. Chloris can’t kill Dove because Dove’s that much stronger; Edgar can’t kill or subsume or whatever psychological necroparasitism entelech life cycles are designed to involve Dove because Dove’s enough stronger then Ed. Chloris can’t kill Ed because saying die to a hatched entelech doesn’t work, and Ed can’t subsume Chloris because there’s only the one space for someone to get subsumed into and Dove’s blocking it. They found all that out by experiment, it was always likely, but they just did it.”
“At some risk to you.”
“Less risk than the working link failing.” Having a rupture, there have been so many interesting ways we could have failed. “Much less risk than any of the rest of us melancholy mad with loneliness.”
Any of us are a disaster unless we’re reliably sane.
“Aside from all the romantic intensity, the result is whatever we’re still mis-describing as consonance, Chloris will wind up in it eventually, but there’s four militant personalities with this implausible breadth of skill and Power already very closely linked. It might convince something old and awful that it’s at risk of a rising hegemon, something headed at continental empire despite how low the population is, how hard it is to farm. It’s certain that after someone got through the Line and Halt and Wake and Blossom, I’d still have the rest of the team.”
Mikka read the report, and Mikka’s brave enough to believe it. Mikka wants to know I’m safe.
“Learning how to do magic, sorcery, really isn’t the difficult part. It’s not even being in the same wizard-team as Death and Constant Strange Mayhem, sharing a collective something with people I wouldn’t believe existed if I didn’t experience them. That all works. I haven’t got further away, they’ve collapsed into a single gooey mass but that doesn’t push me away. Separate still isn’t distinct, I still don’t want it to be.
“So I’m not going to run melancholy mad from loneliness, and I really will come visit, and that will help keep me feeling human even when I’m not.” More of a deep breath than can possibly look casual. “No end of work to do. I’ll be busy for as long as I last.”
Mikka’s face goes sad. “Not much plain companionship.”
Which is true enough. The link’s familial and collegial and enormous, but does nothing for someone to cuddle.
“Having to find another Independent complicates things.” Seeing as there aren’t two hundred, or, honestly, twenty. There probably aren’t ten. Even if I’m not very strong I can always borrow the end of the world, and it’ll be there when I do.
Mikka nods. Can’t claim a big focus team lead or someone in a wreaking shop would be a relationship of equals, nearly or nearly enough, not after those glass birds.
There’s going to be some discussion about names for those, after Festival. They’re friendly enough, and about medium-dog smart, enough to have personalities. Hopefully not so much as to be no kindness to Eirene, their taking little bites out of all the spoons is a possibility.
Mikka takes a swallow of cider, and then another. It’s good cider, from an orchard not ten kilometres away.
“One thing I can’t look up,” Mikka says, “is who is feeding you. This is an experiment, not a school, so there are no public accounts. And you took obligations for those lamb skewers.”
“The Galdor-gesith’s paying for every bit of it, we get stipends, and we’re really bad at spending money, Eirene’s lectured us about it but the stipends are for things like books and instruments. No one’s printing speciality books yet” — “speciality book” is the polite way to say “sorcerous tome” — “and we’re sufficient instrument makers between us.”
Mikka nods. Printing ink’s been an issue everywhere, it used to use a near-tropical tree-gum from the north edge of the Old Commonweal. Figuring out which other thing could be substituted is an ongoing job of work, and everybody’s broadsheets aren’t quite what is wanted.
“Plus I’ve got Dove’s experience of farming lurking in we-as-us, it’s kinder to take obligations, farm income’s an exercise in getting rid of the obligations you accumulated while stuff was growing. We bundle all the obligations up at the end of the month and it keeps our notional accumulated stipend less embarrassing.”
Mikka says “Embarrassing?” with some disbelief.
“Being fed out of taxes. I can understand why it’s a bad idea to have us take time off to work, I completely understand why we’re an experiment, but it’s still really embarrassing to get paid for not working.”
Mikka takes a moment, and then another moment, and says, “You realize you’ve made an actuarial change in the weeding of the West Wetcreek watershed?”
“There’s more dead and hurt.” Which is a distress to all of us. Not a lot more, we’re almost enough help to the weeding teams left in the West Wetcreek watershed, but not quite.
“Four-fifths of the West Wetcreek weeding teams are in the Folded Hills finding things out for the first time.” Mikka’s voice has gone firm. “They still count for the statistics in the province of Westcreek, no matter where they’re working, not unless they alter their geans.”
Mikka takes another small cake, not a strawberry one this time, and stabs it carefully. “None of you know accounting.”
“Someone will need to, eventually, but not until after we’re Independents.”
“You build entire canals. You’re on the books somewhere, you have to be, or it’s slavery and a lot of people need to die.”
Mikka says need to die without emphasis, and in complete literal intent.
There’s a careful, considered mouthful of cake. That’s one of the cherry-cheese ones with chocolate in them, which Chloris is never happy with for reasons no one else understands. Celandine asked if you had to sell your soul to find out how to make them when Chloris brought a tray of those along to Chloris’ first tavern visit with Dove.
Chloris took copies of the recipe the next time, with five kilogrammes of powdered chocolate in a neat titanium jar. The careful explanation that chocolate’s not entirely good for Creeks, not past sparse quantities, didn’t deter Celandine. The recipe’s extremely challenging without sorcery, but it’s been done.
“You don’t really know statistics either. Some statistical reasoning, but no one’s sat you down and taught you criteria for falsification or confidence or anything, not beyond school.”
“No.” I have no idea where Mikka’s going with this. “There’s a lot left out, the idea’s to get us to Independents before too much talent kills us. After that, we’ve got time.”
Mikka’s cake gets stabbed again. “As a culture, the Commonweal insists there isn’t a prescriptive norm, that we must address what’s observed, you can’t do the Bad Old Days control trick of the sorcerer defining what’s right and proper as what’s useful to them and compelling everyone to try to be that way.”
I nod. That’s school, that’s, well, that’s why “regular” means not unexpected and why you’re extra-careful polite to people who aren’t of your species.
“It’s just as bad to have nothing there. You’re not regular sorcery students, there isn’t a real null hypothesis, the experiment’s officially about your survival so the null is ‘you all die.’”
I nod.
“Halt was really angry with the Reems attackers.” Not something I could tell on my own, even if I’d been there, but Ed can. “Make-Blossom-uneasy angry.”
Mikka doesn’t understand.
“Blossom’s strong enough to stand up to Halt, so not automatically uneasy.”
Mikka can’t snort with a mouthful of cake.
And maybe Mother will believe Mikka. “We’re, us-together-we’re, pretty sure the interdependence won’t last, that in a hundred years or so we’re going to be able to survive individually.”
Mikka nods. “Sorcerous adulthood.” Half a smile. “There are just enough records to have some confidence about that being a real thing.”
There’s a careful swallow of cider, another couple forkfuls of cake. “Your classmates give the impression of being hard to kill.”
As distinct from being immensely dangerous, Mikka means, because Ed’s declarative muttering gave, gives, Mikka nightmares, troublingly formless ones. That particular fire wouldn’t have been a comforting sight without the declarative muttering.
“So for the next hundred years, anyone who wants to get rid of the team will try to get rid of me.” I can say this calmly.
“I’m thinking about it, I don’t necessarily know what to do about it, if I’m just going to have to trust the rest of us to protect me, but the lower Third woke me up.”
Mikka snickers. “I want to complain.” It’s a cheerful voice, it’s work, but Mikka’s doing the work to make it a cheerful voice. “Letters and brief visits don’t adequately represent your classmates or your teachers.”
This is Mikka’s very serious face, with the careful cheerful falling off it. “Being relatively less, less strong or less strange, has to inform your expectations and your teachers are all very smart, so they’re not leaving you all together in your uninformed expectations by accident. I can’t tell why. I don’t think the Galdor-gesith’s servants have been fooled, though it’s quite possible they’re in on it, that Halt’s convinced them this is a good thing.”
I must be looking shocked, I feel shocked and Mikka’s face goes a little bit wry.
“Attestation isn’t everything. There’s factions, there have to be, people disagree and have memory and make promises. Your permanently assigned representative from the Galdor-gesith, the one watching this not-a-school, isn’t doing anything else, they’re a full fylstan, and they were the senior fylstan when there was one Commonweal and are certainly still senior now.”
Safely You Deliver Page 26