Safely You Deliver

by Graydon Saunders

  “Every bathing house in Westcreek Town has corundum soaking tubs,” Chloris says. “Done as favour-swaps.”

  It would never do to say out loud that the favour back is not panicking over our presence.

  Lester makes a very controlled “do go on” gesture, meeting Chloris’ eyes.

  “People will be telling their children who made those for centuries,” Chloris says, voice soft and human. “Especially since we bound surface-cleaning charms into them.

  “We’re not even slightly short of acknowledgement.” Chloris says it in the voice of Death, not the especially still one, as a thing incontrovertible in all the years of the world. The rest of us nod.

  Merovich says “I must annotate this file,” really quietly, we don’t think we’re supposed to hear it, so we don’t.

  Dove puts the income cap in, we run the model, it works, it would work for anybody capable of forming a wizard-team. A really big team might break it other ways, but we won’t likely get that. We’re not plausible. The year we get eight of Blossom won’t happen.

  “We should consider ourselves well-treated were Parliament to pass such a law,” Dove and Blossom say together, and look across at each other and smile.

  The model collapses into a three centimetre corundum marble in a titanium stand, utterly utilitarian except for one tiny feather curving over the clear corundum, rachis and barbs and barbules all there. The feather’s red as rubies because it is.

  Dove hands the model to Merovich.

  “On and off are thinking, the rest of it adjusts as a physical object.”

  Chapter 58

  Zora

  I don’t like waiting for other people to decide things.

  If I have to wait, sitting on the Round House roof’s smooth rise of meadow on the edge of autumn and looking north and east over all the ponds helps. Having Pelōŕios for a backrest helps, too, hypercursorial and warm and peaceful and asleep in meadow flowers that have never known a weed.

  It’s not precisely purring, but unicorns murmur in their sleep.

  “We’re not properly human, are we?”

  Halt doesn’t stop knitting, but does look up. That’s just politeness, but I appreciate it a lot. Halt doesn’t have to be looking at you to see you, we all know that.

  “It does rather depend on the definition you wish to use, Zora dear.” Halt knows I mean Creeks for “we,” I’m not properly human at all anymore. I can mist through the air and sneak up on my unicorn lover.

  “Common descent is a mess.” Which isn’t the problem, not really. “Too much addition, too many certain cases of someone pulling in heredity from some other probability, too much tweaking.”

  Halt’s knitting needles click on. You have to watch really closely to tell the sound isn’t as fast as the needles actually move.

  “There are clusters, the Regulars have common descent with each other, the Elegants don’t, they’ve got common interventions, subsequent sorcerers copying some or all of what the first one had done. On not-completely-common substrates.”

  Halt nods, the still-listening nod, if you didn’t know Halt you’d think the six needles going might mean not. Then you’d probably have to go lie down if you looked closely to figure out how all six were moving. We have a small bet about it, Dove and I think Halt has as many arms as Halt wants, I say up to eight, Dove says “wants,” Chloris thinks it’s extra dimensions, Ed says it’s reaching across an expanse of time, and that’s not the same as extra dimensions, still this time. Constant says hmm.

  “There’s a lot of common chemistry, mechanisms, things like how bone gets made, lots and lots of common embryology.” This is hard to say. “Creeks don’t have that. We’re as much artifice as graul.”

  “You more nearly have bones,” Halt says. “More creators, a selective combination of prior art.” Amendment, not a correction. It’s got really easy to tell the difference.

  “One very skilled … editor, let’s say. Because the Cousins do have those common mechanisms.” Pelvic birth and all, which I don’t want to think about.

  Halt nods again.

  “Everything didn’t come from the Cousins or the labourers or the soldiers. At least a third of it’s new, not a new arrangement. Some of it’s probably a new implementation of an idea.” I have serious suspicions that our circulatory systems took the two-heart idea, rather than how it worked. The original-strain laborers tended to drop dead by thirty if we can trust old, old poetry at all.

  “In those days,” Halt says, “one did not have to be concerned with distant persons so much as with neighbours.” The knitting needles move in a formal sort of way, reaching the end of a row isn’t noticeable most of the time. “Correspondence could be maintained.”

  “So our necromantically-attested brilliant progenitor isn’t hypothetical, and the way we use the Power’s deliberate.” Not just an accident of heredity.

  “Certainly deliberate,” Halt says. “The Power cannot be bred out, the selective disadvantage is too great, while the wild strain preferentially breeds persons of violent passions and little fellow-feeling.”

  Halt sets the knitting down, not away, it doesn’t go back into the bag, just onto Halt’s lap. “Talent has tendencies, it does not follow rules, once it manifests.”

  “Wood-lettuce root.”

  Halt nods, not quite smiling.

  “It’s not a food leash, it looks like a food leash but it’s all over Creek metabolism.” Food leashes aren’t integrated that well, they’re there to keep you from running. Wood-lettuce is everywhere in the Creeks, the plant isn’t a weed but it’s certainly robust. Can’t really say invasive, it’s a proper part of the ecosystem, six or seven species of butterfly have caterpillars that eat it.

  Halt’s waiting.

  If you figured out how to make the compounds we get from wood-lettuce occur metabolically, it wouldn’t change anything, we’d still like wood-lettuce, it wouldn’t even necessarily not look like a food-leash, the stuff is still poisonous to most everybody who isn’t us, Halt and Ed don’t count, graul don’t count, different mechanisms but the same basic reason that they can eat anything, I’m pretty sure Halt can eat ideas. Asking Ed about eating abstractions got a really thoughtful look and Halt’s spectral voice telling Ed not to experiment unsupervised.

  So far as I know wood-lettuce is unknown outside the Creeks.

  “We’ve got a developmental bias, it’s the same talent but it expresses differently?”

  It’s really hard to maintain your trepidation about how stupid you’re sounding when you’re thinking “Why does Halt’s yarn swift have eyes?”

  It responds well to being given a cookie, too.

  It deserves its cookie, it was winding fast enough that there was a hum. The cookie, well, let’s say it was devoured, and the happy noises aren’t really squeaks. I think that’s the motion, it’s winding a ball almost as fast as it wound the hank on.

  I respond well to cookies, too. Saying thank-you for the cookie’s completely reflexive.

  Halt sometimes gives us really strange cookies, I’ve given librarians the names of some of the nut butters, trying to find out what they were, and after the second one I got asked in that polite but utterly firm way librarians use to tell them when it was a word I got from Halt, but the cookies are always good.

  “You’re still growing, Zora dear,” Halt says, smiling.

  The swift holds up a ball of yarn, and waits for Halt to take it. Didn’t see a snip, but I wouldn’t have to use enough Power to notice to cut yarn.

  “The Power does not tolerate attempts to limit its expression.” I can’t say that in an entirely flat voice. Most of the studies reference pre-Commonweal events, they’re all very historical from my perspective, and Halt wrote two of them.

  Every one of the studies describes extensively unpleasant events.

  Halt’s got the collegial look. We’ve been seeing more of that this year. “The Power does not tolerate attempts to limit strength outside conditions
of servitude. Alterations of flavour that tend to increase strength do not appear to offend.” Halt takes the third neat ball of yarn. The swift folds up and goes back into the knitting bag with a second cookie and happy chirping noises.

  It’s difficult to think about this.

  “Whatever it is was stable for four thousand years pre-Commonweal, maybe five.”

  Halt nods.

  “Just not having the tradition wouldn’t do that.” Someone would have figured something out. Even if they had to not cook their head, the art advances. We’re individually advancing really fast, but not all that much faster than Dove would have advanced anyway. There’s a relationship to talent scope, there’s a relationship to amounts of Power, personal and ambient, none of us are advancing as fast as the working link ought to as an entity, but there’s a relationship there, too, and an obvious acceleration.

  “The greater expression among Creeks is achieved through what we might call an increase in permeability,” Halt says. “As a people, you are more likely to be strong, but you are also more likely to find that strength beyond your skill to contain.”

  “Wreaking teams work because it’s ritual and slow and sort of externalized and not very much at once. Enchantments, binding-making, that’s all been selected for, a flame-thrower or a tagmat or anybody using a lot of Power’s killed themselves.” I don’t want this to be true, but it obviously is. And then the Commonweal came and brought us focuses. So everybody stopped learning the old rituals, those were difficult and dangerous and focuses were so much easier and we don’t live past eighty-five, those habits would have all been gone in a hundred years.

  “Necessitating that a talent such as yours be trained entirely in external manipulation of the Power,” Halt says.

  It’s not just that the external manipulation of the Power is better, it’s that the traditional way doesn’t work, wouldn’t work, because high permeability means leaks into your flesh. Brains are flesh, which Halt —

  “Implicitly hypothesized,” Halt says, impish. “Which is in truth all that might then be said to the required standard of evidence.”

  Only now they’ve got us, if we make it, and Crane’s views on teaching Kynefrid.

  “So the next Creek high-talent students can be overtly hypothesized.”

  Halt nods.

  “And properly detected. The traditional tests suppose too narrow a range of permeability and return false negatives when applied to Creeks.”

  No one caught it. No one caught it because it’s common to make a servitor-species with constrained access to the Power, and a food-leash is what you do to your slaves. There are all those effective wreaking teams and there were almost never capable Independents in the Creeks, no need, we took care of ourselves or we thought we did, until Blossom noticed, Halt must have noticed, Three Platoon’s output curve.

  “One Platoon as well,” Halt says.

  “Is it going to do any long-term good?” I really have to define long-term if I’m talking to Halt, and the look I’m getting would be a reminder if I hadn’t had the thought.

  “Creeks aren’t efficient, we’re big and we’re high output and our output of work for a quantity of food isn’t as great as the numbers of an efficient species the same food will support.”

  Take a look at, well, descent, we don’t have very much history, you see lots of very capable species of people going extinct. You don’t see very many efficient species going extinct, the base stock for Elegants looks like it muddled along for a long time, some of the estimates are over fifty thousand years, picking up the modifications that show today in different times or places. Five thousand years is doing really well for a high-output species, because sooner or later you’re competing for food during a famine.

  There were some, pre-Commonweal. The pre-Commonweal population was only sometimes as high as a hundred and fifty thousand, things have improved.

  “Once they’ve got focuses to work with, Creeks are efficient, Zora dear.” Halt’s voice is entirely placid. “An unexpected consequence of the permeability.”

  “And we made it through the five thousand years pre-Commonweal and pre-focuses just on sheer stubbornness?”

  “Nearly enough,” Halt says. “The traditions of the Wapentake have a basis in fact.”

  No pre-eminent sorcerers, and a society not run by the army. For five thousand years. Some of it has to be luck, but some of it had to be planning, too, to go on that astonishingly long.

  Halt has this completely superfluous trick of looking at you through the refraction in a corner of their spectacle lenses. I think it’s only one lens at a time, and being able to focus their eyes like that isn’t anything most people could even consider trying to do.

  “I’ve been thinking about species design, since I didn’t.”

  Let’s just look way out over the ponds, where there’s seven swans like tiny shining models of themselves three kilometres away. Unicorn backrests aren’t ever going to be a widespread preference, but I think there is much about them to recommend.

  “Creeks are rigidly dimorphic, you’d do that so you pay less in resources for mothers, so you can afford more capable combatants if you’re expecting some uneven family structure. You might do that just because you’ve got unexamined expectations, that’s how I carried over sexual dimorphism from a species I’ve never seen.”

  “You did no harm,” Halt says. “Not even to the chances of the species being accepted among those inhabiting the Commonweal.”

  Which is automatic, for naturally occurring people. No one’s going to decide I’m not people, or that Pelōŕios isn’t, but the paperwork is otherwise going to have a lot of trouble with the idea of anyone being bimorphic, the law expects a default shape even if you can shape-shift, and we’re not, and would have to attest we don’t, or at least not about this.

  “I don’t know if I’m more worried about explaining to Mother or Mikka.”

  “Nothing you need do today.” Halt’s smiling.

  “And tomorrow or the next day the rest of us get through discussing refinery-wards with twenty or thirty people from the East Bank refinery project and then maybe we all die.”

  “It does no harm for many to sincerely wish you shall all survive your examination,” Halt says.

  I think, I really do.

  “It’s how many who might be relieved if we don’t, or if I don’t. Turning myself into a part-time unicorn because I like to run isn’t obviously in the common interest.” Isn’t obviously not the way someone would act in the Bad Old Days. “Even if I have followed all the rules. The rules haven’t caught up with wizard-teams yet.”

  “Does Pelōŕios know what you desire in a lover?”

  “We’ve been learning.” Carefully. Joyously.

  “In the old days, you’d never once have thought to leave any desire in Pelōŕios but to fulfill yours.” Halt says this as a thing beyond doubt.

  I think I’m blinking. It, no, it’s factual, I can’t make any of that Halt’s biases.

  Chapter 59

  Edgar

  “The Independent Fest has died, and with them several books,” Hyacinth says.

  That turns into what happened to Fest — the fourth cruncher — and what “and with them several books” means.

  We don’t have the whole Commonweal Library, not as it is, we hope it is, in the First Commonweal. We’ve got two regional libraries, the Creeks one in Westcreek Town and the below-the-escarpment one that got shipped, every book, into the Folded Hills, but that’s not complete, especially for new technical stuff and anything related to chemistry or the Power. There are thousands and thousands of books nowhere but in the minds of individual Independents. Pretty much any Independent, given some organic matter, can emit a book; it doesn’t have to be Halt’s trick of not needing any substance to produce a substantial book. There does need to be a place to put the books, inside an Independent is safer than the tent-roofed warehouse full of an insufficient number of water-resistant book che
sts that we’ve got, so the whole question had been let sit until there was a library.

  Losing books, well, there’s a lot going on. But loss of books, in the sense of the last copy anywhere, anywhere we can reach, that’s failing the cause of civilization. The librarians are having none of it, and the clerks maybe less, Hyacinth is having more trouble with a clerkly face than I’ve ever seen Halt cause.

  Desired capacity numbers, books and people and workspace, Hyacinth has those, and the surveyed location, Hyacinth has the stake numbers. An expectation that we wouldn’t need to be talked into it, Hyacinth didn’t have that. Hyacinth had a carefully prepared set of minimal helpful requirements, more or less a roof and walls sufficient unto keeping out the rain, wouldn’t, Hyacinth is very clear about this, need to be large enough for all the books to be useful; a third is enough, the book chests are enough for the rest. That would be a large help, Hyacinth says. Hyacinth has seen the work-sheds.

  Dove makes some carefully noncommittal noises; we’ll give it a try, see what we can do, sure, right today, we’re here waiting for our teachers and Zora to get here, nothing else to do today. It will probably help with the nervousness.

  Waiting for Zora to show up, not going to try it without Zora’s notion of interior details, that takes a couple hours but it goes to drainage study, finding the stakes, really little bronze markers inset in exposed granitic rock, and getting Chloris to write down every bad thing she can think of happening in or to a library.

  Dove’s called two companies of the Fourth of the Twelfth, all that was there, down from Headwaters, asked for help with warding. We could, but don’t want to complicate things. One new thing at a time.

  They don’t beat Zora’s time, but it’s close, a Part-Captain who goes by Tweed isn’t all that pleased by that, swift hooves of unicorns notwithstanding.

  I think the bristle from the Line does something good for Pelōŕios, getting to win at something or being taken seriously, don’t know. Skin’s all nerves, but the desire to do a good job’s real.

  Tweed, well, two company banners is a pretty good ward, we’re not expecting to need it, there’s no historical record of an angry fire elemental destroying anything other than the summoner, it’s not like Wake warded us, or the Tall Woods, the first time we did this.