Safely You Deliver

by Graydon Saunders

  I feel really stupid.

  “Is there a continuum between durable and recoverable?”

  Halt nods. “Many sorts of both.”

  Am I going to get stuck on my own?

  Not for long, either it’s all undone or there’ll be help coming.

  Yeah. Anything that can overcome my teachers, my classmates, and the Wapentake, I can’t plan on beating that. Not if it looks like a fight.

  I’d rather dodge than be durable. Durable unsettles me. And you need so much durable, Grue’s nothing but durable and always afraid it’s not enough.

  “Would Grue have survived that attack construct flung at Dove?”

  “Not for especially long,” Halt says. “Perhaps for long enough.”

  Perhaps. Not probably.

  You can’t be recoverable without somewhere to recover from. Dove and Edgar have each other, Chloris is half-intangible and half-unearthly, which is a simplifying lie, the geometry’s way more complicated, it’s not like the personification of ice and light doesn’t lean through the human beauty and talk, not like it isn’t all Chloris. But you can obliterate the tangible manifestation and all that gets you is knowing nothing whatsoever about the location of Death. You can’t obliterate the intangible part, it doesn’t work like that.

  Mulch is intense, fearsomely intense, about how being bound to any particular location is suicide. Can’t see how Mulch could possibly be wrong about that. Somebody attached to Wending’d be gone, and the Line spent two whole brigades trying to protect Wending.

  If I’m the imaginative one, I’m not feeling like it.

  I really believe in what’s alive. What’s born, dies, stays itself in between, reproduces with a chance of variation, that’s real, that’s why family is real, shared variation.

  You don’t have to love your family completely. Uncle Solon would say that, and it’s right. Nothing should be everything. Which Mother will admit, and then fuss.

  “The really terrifying thing about Chloris, Chloris didn’t like Dove when we started, Chloris decided to be someone who liked Dove because there wasn’t anybody else, you can’t, we can’t, convince ourselves Dove and Edgar are really separate, distinct gets shaky if you’re not Chloris, there was no way for Chloris to just borrow Edgar, and Chloris had to have some tangible human contact.”

  Halt nods, very gently.

  “Now they’re all four madly in love.” Deep breath. That’s not the point. “So making a small, necessary, careful change gets away sometimes.”

  “Perhaps usually,” Halt says. The amusement isn’t at me.

  “Shapeshifting is discontinuous, just like people are, anyone who remembers with a biological substrate is necessarily discontinuous. Even if it’s really general, it can’t do anything for the meta — ” and there I have the idea.

  Halt waits and lets me have it.

  “That first sorcerer, the one who was trying to protect the plague.” Or trying to kill the people who fixed it, so they couldn’t fix the next one, we just can’t tell.

  Halt says “Yes?”

  “It doesn’t matter what they were using for a substrate, what Dove did would work.”

  Halt says “Simple things reduce to force,” like it’s just a fact.

  Right. Anything where it’s the pure amount I’m at a disadvantage.

  “So if I use an abstraction as a substrate, that doesn’t help. What Chloris did helps, not because there’s two substrates, but because the one’s not manipulable, not readily manipulable, you need a lot of Power in a very narrow way to manipulate the nature of death.”

  A type of Power that’s got a limit. A limit which Chloris is past, and now I know why Wake is so much more frightening among the Old Ones than Wake’s merely full-mighty level of Power would support.

  Halt’s smiling.

  “Anything with amplitude, I lose.” Statistically.

  “If I don’t use a substrate, I don’t need amplitude changes, brains all use ions, chemicals, it’s amounts because it’s material, there’s waves in the Power like the idea of hydraulic controls, there’s nothing underneath it, it’s just the idea of states.” Representations of states. I bet it could be really diffuse, too.

  “One becomes entirely diffuse,” Halt says. “Rather as Chloris cannot become entirely unearthly while retaining personality.”

  Bother.

  Copies into the future.

  Chloris is stretching “unearthly” a lot, Chloris’ anchoring, not yet, but it’s going there, the hypothetically material anchor’s settling on whatever vast hell Ed embodies. Constant’s getting buckets of theory out of watching that happen.

  Moment-to-moment, uninterrupted, can’t get continuous, that’s what state means. Everything’s state down there somewhere, can’t not, the Power’s not continuous either.

  “It most certainly is not,” Halt says, commiserative.

  Cloud of substrates doesn’t work, they’re all observable, anybody stronger can collapse them all.

  The Power can’t hide itself.

  It can lie, but not all that well. Not really. People get fooled because they don’t look twice, or they’re not strong enough, or something never occurred to them. Equivalent Power can’t hide from equivalent Power, it’s got to be hiding from the other mind.

  “This isn’t just hopeless?”

  Halt’s head shakes once, and all my bones say no.

  Shapeshifting’s really just gapping the continuity on purpose.

  I’m really not a shapeshifter by inclination, Mulch’s level of skill isn’t something I’m at all likely to develop. I’m probably not a something-in-the-water sorcerer, I’m a typical Creek high talent.

  With a lot of work to do, and I’m not going to get it done if I can’t figure this out.

  “Everything has state. You could shift the set of states on to the landscape.” Nerves are pretty slow, the Independent Mutter measured a ratio between signal propagation with the Power and nerves three-hundred-odd years ago and it was more than a million times. Delays, the system’s determined by delays, I couldn’t speed up much but I could speed up some.

  “Two orders of magnitude, Zora dear. Though this generally ruins conversation.”

  Mulch has to slow down as a tree, Mulch would be mad, not eccentric, else. Perceptual time’s adjustable.

  You can slow down by going really, really wide, not a tree but a forest, the thin layer of slime on a river bed, you could hide down the whole of the West Wetcreek.

  “Two orders of magnitude leaves me four, three if I’m being careful, a thousand times the size of my head’s at least a hundred and fifty metres, there isn’t any more activity.” That’s really diffuse.

  “Quite difficult to spot.” Halt might not mean difficult for Halt to spot, so Ed probably can, too, but I think there’s a rule about fighting entelechs, you get another one and offer them what they want to do it for you.

  Halt’s smiling approval at me. “Nor need you think to practice your beseeching look.”

  “Thank you.” Which I mean. It has to be one of the few things they’re really at risk from.

  Slow breath. I can almost figure this out.

  “It’d just be shapeshifting, though, it’s not permanent, not the kind of change the examiners are looking for.” Permanent transition to a metaphysical substrate. Having a material body as art or social convenience.

  Unicorn-me would qualify, if simiform-me wasn’t in there, but that’s not a hope of survival.

  Maybe I shouldn’t ask Halt shapeshifting questions.

  “That you don’t see me shapeshift doesn’t mean I don’t know how it works.” Halt’s still smiling.

  “You are more accomplished than you might otherwise have been today, I can hardly object, Hyacinth wouldn’t object, there’s a line in the ethics standards concerning what we can do to help against what you might have found on your own. Grue didn’t do anything improper.”

  Halt deliberately sounding definite, it might not just be abou
t Grue handing me so much shapeshifting skill after Kind Lake.

  The physical changes are stable, it’s not permanent, I could, well, not precisely reverse any of them, but I could undo them. Chloris couldn’t unify, Edgar couldn’t unhatch. I could, I intensely don’t want to, but I could, surrender the unicorn shape, even if that wasn’t shape shifting at all.

  Dove’s body, the born one, burned. Dove has the ashes in a jar.

  Constant’s never had a metabolic existence.

  Thermodynamic irreversibility. Why there’s no going back.

  I can do it, I can spread over the volume, I can spread all of me over the volume, ripples on the Creek, and come back, standing on the sheer bank.

  I’d gone further downstream than I thought.

  Halt looks entirely calm, is saying “Zora is entirely well, dear. Do sit on Pelōŕios as required.” to the empty air when I, well, condense, recondense, has to be one of those.

  Poor Pelōŕios.

  “He tries so hard to avoid risk.”

  You have to pick risks, you have to, I must pay attention, but avoiding risk’s very short term. Random chance will take all your choices. I don’t get to add “unless you die first” anymore, not for planning purposes.

  The Shape of Peace’s made out of third order abstractions, it’s difficult to perceive at all when you’re bound to it. Anchored on more abstractions, the Peace and the Law, not the people in Parliament, not really the persons of the Keepers, Keeper’s at least like an office, substitutable even if it’s really precisely you while you’ve got it.

  Shouldn’t anchor on the rest of the team, not substitutable even if I knew how.

  The Power diffuses, of course it diffuses, you’d be nearly invulnerable if it didn’t, name or nothing and you can change your name. Mulch’s right, geography’s no good.

  Geologic processes aren’t any good, either, wrong time scale, much too diffuse, too easy to substitute for another history of probability, you could just vanish without anyone meaning to make you vanish.

  All shape changing’s irreversible, can’t ever get back exactly where you were, but it’s not discontinuous as an experience, it’s just the process, just like life.

  Even when life’s standing on the end of a sheer bank trying to figure out how to not ask Halt how to do something.

  “Is this something you can just tell me about?”

  “Yes,” Halt says, “but better to have the insight.”

  If I scream, Death and Constant Strange Mayhem will show up to find out why. I won’t be able to think.

  Biologic processes, oh, I’m such an idiot.

  It’s not abstraction, it’s emergent. Abstractions are just labels, sometimes for real things. You want something emergent, because nobody’s going to be able to get rid of it.

  “Is this like species?”

  Halt’s head tips at me. Still no knitting, no tea. Whatever this is, it has a spectacular way to fail.

  “We call groups of organisms species, but that’s just because we have to call them something. It’s real, species is a consequence of reproduction, you get differentiation just as soon as you get variation in the copying, alteration in descent, it’s really complicated, our labels are often wrong or too simple but the thing being labelled’s really there. The point’s to use the real thing, not the label.”

  Halt smiles and says “Very much like species.”

  If there’s life, there’s variation. It’s not life until it makes copies of itself, that’ll never be perfect. If there isn’t any life, I don’t care.

  Stupid microcosm tree metaphors, world-trees, get you thinking about stability, the stability’s all wedges, temporary, it’s a lifespan thing, we’d, maybe I will, notice variation in trees if I live long enough.

  “Rather hard to miss, Zora dear,” Halt says.

  Have to keep the geometry variable, if I’m always diffuse I won’t always fit in the ward and that won’t work.

  Tiny quirk of a smile from Halt.

  Halt’s being intent, and it’s not bothering me. When did that happen?

  “If I express my consistent patterns, my history of personality, my system of thought, using a diffuse set of states distributed over the metaphysic manifestation of variation in the processes of life, I get something that won’t fit in a compact ward.”

  Halt says “Three dimensions?” quite gently.

  Right. Seven, I can just about imagine seven, I can have a pentatope of volumes and convolve the volumes, don’t really need depth, brains are dendritic, the appearance of three dimensional structure’s mostly folding two, I can go increasingly local from all life down to something tiny.

  “I’m going to be agreeing with Constant.” Everywhere and nowhere is the giveaway.

  Halt nods. “Not that you could much escape the role.”

  Don’t want to. Better food, for more people. Safer food, too.

  Though safer’s mostly going to be Chloris.

  Halt hands me a writing board, with actual neat blue-lined graph paper on it.

  Don’t need a pen anymore, just thinking.

  I use a pencil, have one, had one when I arrived, it feels better to leave something material. No purple ink, just this much.

  Count all the points twice, just twice, more than twice gets into doubt. Make sure I’ve got the math right. It’s not like I have to calculate the volume, just noting the relationship of the spaces isn’t hard, I can use unit dimensions. Ask Halt. Halt makes a point of looking at it long enough for me to notice the duration.

  Right at the edge of the water’s a pretty good place, really, there’s a few trees and a strip-garden over there, but reach out and reach out and reach out, even around Westcreek Town isn’t half peopled, the Tall Woods shines hopeful out of the geography of war and poison.

  It’s, even with the careful math, not possible to visualize seven dimensions. Don’t have the brain, haven’t built it, four is getting practical but it’s tricky to extend like that and stay socially human. Seven would be too far, but I can treat this seven as four, because three of them are just shapes, scopes for shapes, material and metaphysical parts.

  It’s a lot like building one of those four-faced tower clocks, really, it looks and looks like you have superfluous parts and then you need them all.

  Halfway through I realize I’ve got a continuum from recoverable to durable, that the durable end’s pretty good and the recoverable end’s excellent, incredibly hard to find and rooted in a property of life, all life, the existence of the idea of life. Seven steps, well, it’s enough, I don’t expect a need for fine adjustments.

  Seven’s a good number. Keeps me from thinking too much, I can just do this much, more would be trouble, no icosahedrons for me, less and I’d worry because there’s that point where the transformation falls off the ancestry, now I’ve always been someone who arose from emergent properties of abstractions.

  Arose with two default shapes, even still.

  Way downstream. Blurred all the way. Easy to rise up on wings, step out of the sky into myself. This isn’t shapeshifting, this is borrowing from the whole scope of life, potential life, all the shapes are there as things that might be, that I might be.

  It would have been my whole set of metabolic potential, and it’s my social self, now. Most of me’s still diffuse.

  Hadn’t realized how tense I was getting.

  Halt’s waiting, quite patiently. I think it’s been a couple of hours. There’s a smooth dry river cobble holding down the graph paper sitting on the sheer bank.

  “You didn’t have to reassemble me.” I try to say it with a smile. Do this wrong and you could go out like a light, and who can chase photons?

  “Be as thou wert ere” Halt says, half a whisper, barely that, the thou has my true name in it, and sharpness sparkles over the graph paper and I feel just so slightly like I’ve been buried in cats.

  Thermodynamically irreversible is supposed to mean something.

  Halt twinkles at me, en
tirely amused, and offers a plate of sugar cookies.

  It’s a special occasion, so I say thank you and take three.

  The cup of tea, too.

  Don’t feel different.

  Halt smiles. “Nor should you.”

  “Are these transitions more straightforward than they seem?” That, well, it wasn’t trivial, it was consequential, I was worried, but it just didn’t seem difficult to do.

  “Suitability matters,” Halt says.

  Yeah. We’ve all been doing things specific to our talent flavours, our existing skills.

  “Many traditional forms of instruction,” Halt says, “were less flexible.”

  More attrition, there would have to be more attrition. Strong filtering for particular talent-flavour clusters.

  The Commonweal’s filtering by, well, peacefulness, call it that, instead of talent flavour.

  “Is that part of the long-term argument?”

  Halt nods. “Demonstrable utility.”

  Tiny percentages again.

  Take the tea cup, say thank you, it’s not lettuce root, it’s not the celebratory tea, I have no idea what this is. Tastes like being wide awake and unworried.

  “Not especially safe for the solely embodied,” Halt says.

  Don’t get distracted about growing some.

  “It seems like we’re never especially safe.”

  “Do you discuss this with your classmates?”

  Discuss isn’t the right word.

  “Anything I know, they know, at least if they’re interested. Dove says this is grand strategy and I’ve got the better mind for it, it’s not really different from growing a forest, one where you want an ongoing productive ecology.”

  Slower. Vast. Has people in it.

  “Do you want me to tell Dove to worry?”

  Very much a real question, very much a calm voice, Halt’s trying hard not to scare me more than the subject already does.

  “No. I don’t even want you to tell Dove to argue.”

  “Argue?” Halt says, as though this was unexpected.

  “You’re Halt, Dove accepts your authority. Arguing with Dove, it’s not even like stubborn, it’s getting the argument to start. Ed can do it, but Ed hates Dove being upset so much anything abstract’s inherently not worth it.”