Safely You Deliver

by Graydon Saunders

  Halt nods.

  “Either someone kills me, I get enslaved, or the Commonweal’s strong enough to prevent that. I don’t know enough to help, yet, none of us do, nobody’s been shy about asking us to do stuff and nothing we’ve been asked has anything to do with … wider concerns.”

  Four tiny sips of tea.

  “The useful stuff is all around food and productivity.” Let’s just call participating in the wizard-team productivity.

  “If you can believe yourself sufficiently safe,” Halt says.

  Why believe when you can test.

  EDGAR! WHERE AM I?

  I’m ripples in the water of a lake up by Six Freshets, dotted across bacteria in a place Ed’s never been, doesn’t know, as diffuse as I get without slowing down.

  One hundred and five seconds later, Death and Constant Strange Mayhem all right, sunlight sort of bends, step out of nothingness by the mill race, armed.

  Zora? Dove says. They’re not utterly certain. Mostly, but not utterly.

  I recondense beside them. Still have the teacup.

  Teacup still has tea, it’s still warm, we really have to figure out how that works.

  “Quantifying how hard I am to find.”

  Absolutely identical eyebrow quirks from Dove and Chloris, they didn’t used to do that, you can see Edgar checking duration, Chloris gets it, they all have, like vinegar going into your tea, blip.

  “Reassured?” Dove says, and I nod and say “Yes. Thank you very much. Should be there for dinner unless Halt.”

  I get a grin and a grin and a still face, Ed’s figuring out how to see me now. Constant smiles gently and squeezes my shoulder.

  Back beside Halt, sit down. Take a sip of tea. Accept another cookie.

  “More than a hundred seconds. When,” and sort of fail to wave, no free hands.

  They know my true name. The working link wasn’t down.

  Best I can hope to do to have enough time to scream for help.

  Help’s the important thing.

  Halt’s nodding.

  I don’t want to know how Halt found the last person organized like this.

  Do want to sit here and finish my tea and let not being alive anymore catch up to me.

  Halt starts knitting.

  Knitting with needle ticking, which is turning into the most reassuring sound.

  Home in plenty of time for dinner, getting back to the Round House is easy, we can all get there from anywhere.

  Right through the ward, right through the Round House walls, Blossom made a point of mentioning that’s a much better habit than stopping outside.

  It takes twenty minutes for the lad to stop shaking. Pelōŕios never complains when I do will-be-an-Independent things, really doesn’t think he’s permitted, can’t get the notion of social equals into his head. Happy that I’m harder to hurt, worried that I’ll vanish when I’m an Independent, really really bothered that the kinds of personal transformations we’ve been making are seen as proper.

  “A way of death, and a way of death in myriads,” Pelōŕios says in the rough deep human voice that still seems surprised to hear itself. “Scarce thin-threaded victory.”

  “Halt isn’t ruthless for fun.”

  “Wonder much may I that thou shouldst notice ever.”

  “It’s ruthless for us, not ruthless at us. Not the same thing.”

  Which it isn’t. Halt’s always been very clear we have to be ruthless and start with ourselves, which isn’t wrong, but isn’t trying to make us. If knowing you’re going to fail and die isn’t enough reason, being afraid of Halt won’t help.

  “Vanished thou, and Edgar was wide of gaze, and Chloris spake that dead wert not, and Dove came sudden there, all swifter than to tell.” This is quiet, so it rumbles a little, Pel’s good about not holding on too tightly. Not like I mind being held, or the nuzzling, even nuzzling for reassurance.

  “Edgar saith then that Halt saith all was and wert well unto thee, twas but a practice of shapes diffuse.”

  “It was.”

  Don’t think that helps, most ways, with the stop shaking part of the process.

  Having me there to hold on to works entirely, given a little time.

  Chapter 56

  Grue

  “I can summon Halt, but not for paperwork.” Halt would be wroth, and stay wroth.

  Doucelin waves the stack at me. “Were Halt ever to admit this a school, there would be a place I could leave these.”

  These, the trailing edge of own-work projects and the declarations that go with changed species. The Whole Book has provision for a citizen who changes species, last used in the Year of Peace Seven. There’s a doctor struggling with pigment compounds, possibly a hoof clipping, please?

  “Those brewers settled?”

  Doucelin’s lips purse. “Half an hour.”

  The kids met the brewers going to breakfast. Decided second-sitting was fine. Solved the housing problem just that fast.

  “From the same collective that gave the kids excellent beer after the plague-fix.”

  Doucelin’s sorting paper into piles. Noisily. No one else needs the talking-room today, Doucelin’s careful.

  “Advocacy of illusory weather-shells has history.”

  “History isn’t building regulations. Saying yes is fine, but.” Another ruffle of paper.

  “Good answer for durability.” Wake taught them that ceramic-brick binding technique for the battle-standards. The Township Engineer, the Hale-gesith and Food-gesith Township house-wardens, all before their breakfasts, didn’t have an answer. “A hundred years with no maintenance,” “Halt taught us,” and watching a dirt-sketched layout of walls make itself out of dredge-spoil, similarly.

  Eight brewers, good ones, which Westcreek Town needs ere the beer gets short.

  All five who were hurt lived. They walk, talk, see, have faces, grow hale and begin to return to skill of hand. Not this year, and maybe none to brewing. Couldn’t ask about memories that first hour. All recall the wort-kettle splitting, the boiling tide across their eyes.

  “It’s a good fix for claustrophobia.” Doucelin strives for fairness. Halt’s shelter-illusion isn’t perceptible from the inside. “It’s going to be warm. It will take twenty years to get all the forms attested.”

  Regulations do not trust a lack of immediate collapse.

  “These students sympathize with experiments.”

  Doucelin hisses, setting down paper with blue edges.

  “A conditional application for citizenship.”

  “Pelōŕios isn’t interested if Zora doesn’t survive.”

  Doucelin stops, nods once sharply. “Love is a strange thing.”

  To which no Cryptic Amative is subject.

  “Pelōŕios doesn’t value the Commonweal in the abstract.” Pelōŕios could give Dove stubborn lessons.

  Doucelin sets out little round paper weights, clunk, clunk, two per pile of paper. “Zora has been the source of kindness.”

  “Kindness with reach.”

  There have been letters from many geans, saying, absent tact, “What did you do to our musicians?”

  We put them in a room where someone skilled played a piano with hammers faced with abstracted air. Zagreus wants to try abstracted stone for the harp, so nothing moves but the strings.

  “Musicians, clothing-collectives, wreaking-collectives put to making beautifully documented water filters that are more difficult than expected.” Doucelin’s voice makes clear the list could be longer.

  “Blossom is selective about the shot-shop.” Five years of Spike, intermittent Halt, and a couple-three years of the kids learning how to communicate fixed design. What remains can keep up.

  Has started to notice where they’re going, which won’t be today’s paperwork.

  Doucelin looks briefly wrothful. “Blossom doesn’t answer the letters.”

  There’s a pause, and another three piles of paper. “As it is well Blossom does not.” Doucelin waves at the last three. �
��Requests for prompt assistance.”

  “To be considered pending.” I sound bitter.

  “You passed the Shape of Peace.” Doucelin knows precisely what I am.

  “I complain the kids are brave.”

  Doucelin looks quizzical.

  “They might not be. Duty, determination, simply not considering anything but the job they’re given, they don’t have a history of doing fear well. Nor prudence. They react with oh, a problem to weeds, to housing Broadthews, to an ancient incalculable vastness of malice, to a material shortage, to inappropriate erosion, sorcerous attack, it doesn’t make a difference.

  “I’m not brave. I’m tangled up in consequences. I’m afraid, Laurel beat Halt, it’s possible, someone could have started their two thousand years of preparation two thousand years ago tomorrow, Dread River hell-things beat brigades, by grinding, but the hell-things are there and the Line isn’t. I’m just what some pre-eminent out of the Bad Old Days would enslave.”

  Doucelin looks sympathetic.

  “Don’t tell me not to borrow harm from the future.” Doucelin might.

  “Those who put their faith in fire,” Doucelin says. “You are one of very few to whom that proverb might apply with positive force.”

  “The Shape won’t. The Shape doesn’t insist on predictable, it took Block, it takes the intermittently mad and the erratic and the generally incompletely brilliant. It accepted Halt, somehow.” When the people who made the Commonweal had been born in the Bad Old Days, and expected great need.

  “Halt’s had sorcerous servants before, generals, ministers, there’s an example back there somewhere for anything, twice. Halt’s telling strict truth, we need the help. The Shape hasn’t been asked to accept young and vast and terrible before.”

  “One of the clothing-collectives that wrote about Zora’s project, the team lead said it might mean the collective had to dissolve. They have no least idea how to make up the business, they’re specialists, but the team lead still wanted three. And to know who to send design sketches to, for new appearance-beads.” Doucelin’s voice has lost all trace of irritation.

  “Meaning people like the kids?”

  “Meaning we need the help.” Doucelin waves at a wall empty of diagrams, graphs, equations, just plain white plaster above wood wainscoting. “A million people isn’t enough. We can perhaps grow in numbers swiftly enough, before what a million isn’t enough to make all of wears out.”

  Everything that lasts for a hundred years on its own is a help.

  “Know the main problem people had about Blossom?” Forty years after passing the Shape of Peace.

  Doucelin nods. “Anybody inclined to obey sorcerers just did. Nothing to be done about it, nothing Blossom was doing, nothing Blossom could acceptably prevent.”

  Don’t do what you think I want works, as a command. Bad for the sanity.

  “Think the kids aren’t worse?” Creeks aren’t supposed to have any tendencies to obey sorcerers.

  “That’s not the Power,” Doucelin says.

  “The rule of sorcerers people want, the Shape won’t like that.”

  “Sorcerers people are inclined to trust,” Doucelin says. “Maybe the Shape will see them that way.”

  Doucelin’s afraid.

  Chapter 57

  Zora

  Three days later Clerks Lester and Merovich are there at breakfast, complete with a single folder between them.

  It’s a draft law, and we all sort of sigh.

  “We’re not Independents yet,” Chloris says, quite firm, and Lester nods acknowledgement.

  “As perhaps you may not be,” Lester says back solemn. “Yet shall you be, there is not then time. This is not something all to be decided by a few clerks.”

  None of us can argue with that.

  We all want to, it feels unlucky. Really we’re not Independents yet.

  I read a page, pass it to Chloris, who passes it to Ed, who passes it to Blossom.

  Dove goes very calm and starts making a model out of the system described in the law as Chloris and Ed read about it and Constant reads it both times through each of them. I can’t say “false mass,” or Blossom goes intense and rants, but the model moves like it has mass, there’s some sort of mock-inertia involved, but it doesn’t weigh anything more than will keep it from wafting off the table when someone opens the door.

  It’s not a big model, not really complete to what’s likely to happen, it’s one wizard-team, a stock of work requests, a stock of other work teams, a flow of work requests trying to consume as much ability to work as fast as it can, stocks of money and obligation for the one thing-like-a-thorpe, Merovich has suggested larhus, a defined relationship between the larhus and the wizard-team, and five individual sorcerers who make up the wizard-team, each with a flow of costs. There’s costs for the larhus, costs for managing each flow, and a flow of taxes from the thing-like-a-thorpe.

  There’s the flow of payments for work accomplished.

  Lester and Merovich both get slightly twitchy when they realize the model’s adjustable, you can move things between set limits for all the parts. Clerks usually have to do this with a lot of clerks and passing paper, school talked about how some really stable models get built as gears or valves, but usually it’s done with paper.

  Not sure there are any physical models for the Second Commonweal, a physical model wouldn’t be the first priority to build or move.

  Dove’s good at system models.

  Blossom sets the last page down, looks up, looks over at the clerks. “You’re going to have to tell Dove the usual delays.”

  Those go in, it matters, timing controls feedback almost more than decisions, the school example is what would happen if the Geld-gesith expected your gean to pay taxes the moment the clerk writes down the amount owed, before anyone at your gean knows officially what that amount is.

  The wizard-team goes on a carousel, switchable, the five of us, with the numbers from the last two years giving a plausible single year for us as Independents, the five of us and Blossom, Grue and me together, a hypothetical team of six, none over the average of the third modality, Wake alone, Halt alone, Blossom and Grue.

  Dove wants to try us, Blossom, Grue, Wake, and Halt, and Blossom says No really firmly.

  The clerks have got enough real numbers that we can use them for most of that, the hypothetical group’s maybe a little low.

  I’m not any kind of surprised the model works as a device, but I am surprised it shows the law working. We’ll be able to hire entire collectives of gardeners to help out, we will almost have to, but we can stay inside the law. The mechanism works for Wake alone, or for Halt, not enough to support more than a house, but neither of them show signs of wanting more, and they have houses already. The precise mechanism by which an Independent pays their house-fee isn’t likely to be a worry.

  Not that we could tell, really, but I think they’re both tired of palaces.

  The hypothetical wizard-team, it’d take four or five of those to support a thing-like-a-thorpe, but that’s still fewer than the number of people with land-holding on most thorpes.

  Blossom looks at all this, looks at Merovich, says “You won’t like this,” and slides capacity numbers at Dove.

  The model picks up Blossom’s best guess at the five of us in a hundred years.

  Turns, entirely fine, goes stable, entirely fine, until the money flows lock. Too high.

  “It could be twice that,” Blossom says. “That wasn’t the high end of the projected range.”

  Lester says, formally, “A law which makes the suggested larhus land tenure the sole exercise of a particular wizard-team will not be acceptable to Parliament.”

  “Fixed prices,” Merovich says, in tones for pronouncing a curse. “The point is for the thorpe, the gean, the collective, the township, to make a good decision, to compare.”

  We all nod.

  I say “Make the income cap overt” and watch Merovich flinch. “We can’t make it by time
, that breaks your prices, you’re only barely managing to keep things to equivalent efforts by somebody else, some of our work doesn’t have an alternative means. I know you want a neat proportional rule for the team share of the larhus income but proportions fail, the range is too broad. Just say that past four-fifths of a thane’s taxes, that’s it, it all goes to the Commonweal.”

  Lester and Merovich are looking at me rather intently.

  “Leaving out Halt and considering those Independents of the Second Commonweal,” I say, and throw graphs on the inside wall above the wainscotting.

  “If you add in the us-and-Blossom-team version that’s already done substantial work,” and that everyone wants to forget about, “and start with the alchemists and namers and illusion-makers who are comfortable shifting fifty-gramme masses and couldn’t get past five kilogrammes in a direct working, who have to use rituals to accumulate enough Power to pass for Independents, you’re looking at how many orders of magnitude in the range?”

  Not that a lot of people with talent like that try to pass for Independents, but some do, and they mostly make it.

  Mass, not utility, but still. Mass is a tolerable proxy for a lot of useful things.

  “The law permits but one in incomes,” Lester says, mostly looking at Merovich.

  “The effort should relate to the result,” Merovich says. “Individuals should receive the reward of their labour.”

  I replace the graphs with equations, not especially horrible ones, and examples, one with the equations and one with the income cap.

  “The practical difference is that making people pore through a log table to calculate the precise number of micro-marks that will be ignored by the accounting conventions for rounding is just cruel.”

  “Egalitarianism rests on an expectation of acknowledged effort as much as on a guarantee of material security,” Merovich says.

  “Effective effort,” Dove says. “Life isn’t suddenly fair.”

  “We’re not fair.” I don’t like thinking about this. “It’s not our virtue made us like this.”

  Merovich looks less recalcitrant, maybe. Wake’s done a single slow nod. Lester wants to smile.