Jump to content
  • entries
    33
  • comments
    16
  • views
    2,113

ALOM Chapter 4: Boundary Conditions


Student of Trinity

292 views

The next day began calmly, in the machining shop. I brought Mother a rod of good barrel steel that I had made the previous month, and carefully baked and cooled to anneal out flaws. I turned it on the lathe, carefully making it perfectly straight and round. Then I set it into the borer, and I checked the alignment three times, measuring and laying on the guide wires by hand, and stretching them tight. Mother judged it correct, and in effect that meant I had passed for a trained smith, because nothing in the rest of the project could offer an irrecoverable problem. The boring would take all day, but the machine could do it alone. The barrel would rotate around a fixed half-bit, along whose empty side cutting oil was pumped to flush out the metal chips. To receive a perfect grade I would have had to sit and watch all this, just in case something needed adjusting, but I skipped some of those hours of watching and went to my seminar on partial differential equations. Mother wouldn’t give me the highest grade, but she would make sure nothing happened to my revolver.

 

The seminar had been a mistake. I had enrolled in it with the hope of learning to predict the detonation waves in my cloud mines, and so perhaps learn to make them stronger by safer means than simply making them bigger. It had become clear within a few classes that this course was not going to help me with that, but I had faithfully attended for two months because the instructor was a guest from Morandau Mill. The Mill branch of the house had grown for many generations, and ours of Morandau House had shrunk in the last few. We were the original settlement, the stronghold built upon the orders of Kelvin himself, but the Mill and the Foundry had grown larger over the centuries. They looked down on us, and although we refused to acknowledge their right to set standards, I could not resign from a course taught by one of their people. The Mill had enough people for some to specialize in higher mathematics, and evidently they thought of Doctor Huygens as one of their jewels.

 

I thought him a drone. His course had a few useful pieces. The method of characteristic curves, for instance, seemed like something that would often be handy, though for my explosions it really only offered a formal confirmation of the guesses I had made on my own. Huygens also referred briefly to a technique of multiple scale analysis, for which the applications he described sounded remarkably broad, but he said so little about the technique that I had to spend several hours in our library just to discover what it actually was — and to realize that no books we had could explain how to use it. Otherwise the hours of lectures, and the tedious exercises, were all elegantly useless.

 

Huygens liked to prove that solutions existed, because he could do that quite perfectly. He could also perfectly illustrate his points with ideal examples. So he did a lot of that. In anything but those ideal examples, however, it seemed that there was far too much distasteful estimation involved, for him to say anything about what the perfectly existing solutions were actually like. His course had offered no improvement for my exploding oil clouds beyond the crude estimates I had already taught myself to make. Doctor Huygens was to stay with us for one more month, so his course would go on that much longer.

 

While under our roof, he served as one of us. As a trained adult he rode patrols when his turn came up. At sixty-three years we reckoned him to be approaching middle age. He rode well, and he could shoot rather well, on the range. He kept strict control in his classroom. His lectures always finished exactly on time, and his exercise solutions were admirably clear. On that day, though, what mattered more to me was that his name was Martinus Huygens. He had our training and he knew our arts. He wore our black and his hair was white. He was Morandau. But not in name.

 

We are all Morandau, but only some of us bear the name. Perhaps a sixth of us, at the time of which I write. There were dozens of other names. Sometimes children were given the name, though both parents lacked it. Not often. If one parent had the name, it was more common for the child to receive it, usually before the twelfth year. Until then the child would use the other parent’s name. If both parents had the Morandau name, as mine did, the child inherited it at birth. I had never thought much about this. Or rather, I had not thought that I thought about it. I had classmates with many different names, and I would have said that we were all treated exactly the same, by everyone. But would a Jelt or a Liange have been left alone as I was? Of course not. There would have been a good reason why not, a reason that had nothing whatever to do with their names. Maybe even two such reasons.

 

One day when I was thirteen, Talitha had me stay after a lesson to clean the lab, as punishment for some extravagance or other. Probably an explosion, though I have a faint recollection that it might rather have been a folly with corrosive. The cleaning up punishment was normal, but then she had me walk with her up the stairs to the watchtower, in case she might fall. This concerned me, because she was not in the least unsteady, but I climbed gamely up just behind her, and stood with her as she gazed across the craggy landscape below. Suddenly she told me that her mother had held me as a baby in her arms, shortly before she died. I was surprised just to think of Talitha as having a mother. I knew that Talitha had been on the council for just over sixty years at that point. We knew grim stories about her, and I was surprised to realize suddenly that her own mother had been alive during them, an unremarkable member of the family, under her daughter’s command. Even then it occurred to me, though, that perhaps she had not been so unremarkable to Talitha.

 

Talitha told me, staring at me in her alarming way, how happy her mother had been to see my birth. The old lady had crowed to me, Talitha said, in an ancient speech that survived among us in a few expressions: “Echt Morandau, du!” True Morandau, you. “But of course,” Talitha had added steadily, her eyes not letting mine go, “we mustn’t think that way.” Then she had walked quickly back downstairs. I had stood alone up there for a few moments, and when I got down, she had been gone.

 

So my differential equations teacher was not so echt. What did that matter? That was exactly my question. I was looking at him through different eyes now, as if some of the invisible components in the ink on my brow had seeped into them. Scanning for a pattern, at the end of another lucidly useless lecture, I asked him a question. He sighed as I raised my hand, then gave me a slightly quizzical look, the way people looked at my father when he shaved his beard. “Doctor Huygens,” I asked, “Why must we only impose initial boundary conditions?”

 

He frowned. For the most part he was commendably patient with slow students, but my questions were obnoxious by now. “We are not at liberty to set final boundary conditions, Miss Morandau. Time runs forward. What will be is determined by what is.” But I pressed my case. That was what was obnoxious about my questions. “A commander may select actions to attain a future goal, though, Doctor. Is that not a final condition?” My classmates stirred on the front benches. Twelve others were taking the course, most of them some years older than I was. Doctor Huygens was a highlight in their advanced educations.

 

Huygens narrowed his eyes at me, and spoke testily. “A commander must recognize what is true, and shape actions accordingly. Some facts cannot be changed. So there are always initial boundary conditions. Adding final conditions to these will — almost always — overdetermine the equation. No solution will exist. This has been a major topic in our course, as those who have been following it will recognize.”

 

My classmates chuckled and tittered, though some of them stopped abruptly. I did not notice which ones those were. I nodded my head, but made no effort to appear impressed. Huygens was irked enough to begin a general summary about boundary conditions, but his uncanny instinct for timing brought it up shortly, right at the end of the scheduled period. As he waved his hands in dismissal, he raised his voice to me above the clatter of our chairs and notebooks, “I would hold a compulsory review for you tonight, Miss Morandau, but I am afraid I must ride on this evening’s patrol.”

 

“I know, Doctor,” I said to him, as I followed the others out of the classroom. “I’m leading the patrol.” I stared at him for a moment, until his eyes focused on my forehead and he recognized what looked different about me today. I left him frowning. He was by no means so detached from the world that he could have failed to notice that our great monolith had collapsed during the eight days he was away with the rest, so he must have had some impression of what had happened. Apparently, though, he had rather gathered that I was under severe punishment.

 

I wasn’t worried about whether he would obey me. On patrol I would have authority to shoot him if he didn’t. Of course I would be very unlikely to do that, and I knew that he knew that. I assumed he also knew not to count on that, though. This was one of my first mistakes, stemming from the flaws in my upbringing.

 

But something about Huygens did worry me. The fingers of my right hand were tense. I had been riding patrols myself since I was nine years old — four years early, because of my shooting — but I spent more time than usual preparing my mount and my carbine, and loading up my pouches with unlikely stuff. A wolfspray canister, in case we met a pack. An incendiary flare, in case somebody slid into the golden tarn. Those I often carried anyway. I liked them. The deadly mass of golden stalks covering the tarn didn’t burn well at all, but a flare would shrivel its toxin pods and give someone a chance to survive with burns instead of losing their lungs. I added an antivenin pack, in case something bit somebody’s horse. I skipped the howler. The sound drives many predators away, but I can’t bring myself to make that much noise on purpose, on patrol. If I have to do that, I may as well just start shooting.

 

Apart from Doctor Huygens, the rest of my patrol team was also ready early: Reif Sather who had dragged the white skull for me, Karlin Jelt our master carpenter, young Miriam Nasim who had only ridden patrol twice before, and our head surgeon Rianna Morandau. Aunt Rianna didn’t often ride patrol, because she had an overriding responsibility if anyone were in her inspection room, but she was only in her early nineties, and perfectly capable with her weapons. She was actually some redoubled kind of cousin of my mother’s, but we called most of our older relatives Uncle or Aunt. I had appointed her to the role that she usually took when she did ride, of following a pistolshot or so behind the rest of the patrol, to ride fast home with news if some disaster befell. It was no shame, but an essential job, and she was the most valuable of us. She was an even quieter woman than most of her generation seemed to be. She had never said much to me even when I was her patient, and she only nodded to me tonight.

 

Miriam would ride with Rianna, and if a disaster did occur, Miriam would have to do what she could to ensure that Rianna got away to report. Miriam was quite a good shot. I had coached her myself. My right-handed shooting is not a transferable skill, but keen youngsters who did not understand this would come to me for advice, and my left-handed experience was something I could pass on.

 

Reif’s face was blank, but he seemed to sit stiffly in his saddle. I wonder now how he felt about being under my command again, but then I simply expected he would do his job. He would be riding point, with his friend’s father Karlin. Point had been my job for the past two years, and I had often teamed with Karlin. I had sometimes heard Karlin shouting and laughing with his friends, but in his work he was the Morandau model, calm and efficient. He was an excellent rider, and though his eyes were not as sharp as mine, his hearing was remarkable. He always wore ear plugs when his motorized saws were running, to protect his hearing. He was careful that way. I had spent many hours in his workshops, when I was a child. He had never tried to tell me what to do, outside his classes, but whenever I asked him for a tool or a piece of material, he would ask me what I was trying to do, and if the thing I wanted was not the best for my purpose, he would suggest something else. Often I wanted to try the other thing anyway, just to see for myself how it answered, and he was content with this. I think he would have been a good friend for a quiet child, if we had either of us thought in terms of friendship, but perhaps we had managed something like it nonetheless.

 

Karlin smiled approvingly as he nodded to me, and I believe I caught the sense of his expression. He was happy to have the patrol being led by a properly constituted commander for a change, instead of by an ordinary resident appointed for the evening, as had been usual among us for so long. I’m sure it meant nothing to him that I was the commander in question. An experienced hand who knew us all well, except for Huygens, he would act as needed, regardless, and he had a good idea how we would act, too. But it was good that we had added a new council member. It was nice to see a sign of growth and progress in Morandau House, after all this time. I had found myself thinking that, too, in those moments when I was thinking disinterestedly about our larger situation, and was still finding it a novelty to think that way.

 

Doctor Huygens rode up from the stable exactly on time. I noticed that his carbine was a new model, brought from the Mill, different from ours. I hadn’t seen him with it before, so he must have been issued it by some Mill people at the meeting from which I had been left home. It seemed to have a second barrel above the main one, but the upper tube had no open muzzle, and instead merged into the barrel below it, two handspans before the end. I was surprised that Mother had not yet talked to me about this new design. We consider it impolite, however, to look too closely at one another’s weapons. Parents and instructors inspect the arms of children. Trained adults are expected to look after their own. A commander can check her troops’ equipment if she sees fit, but it is not easy to do that without offering insult that can impair the team’s action. I know a man now who can do that kind of thing as easily as I shoot, but I am still not deft in that way. That evening with Doctor Huygens, the best I could manage was to look away from his rifle and return his nod — which he gave with an ironic smile for which Talitha, in her day, would probably have shot him. I glanced up, to see if she was watching from the tower. I couldn’t see her.

 

I waved my left hand vaguely as we all trotted off, in deference to the theory that I was supposed to give a signal. Everyone knew what to do, anyway. We patrolled every morning and evening, and sometimes during the day or night as well, and most of us took a turn at least once a week. My parents did, usually as leader, and so did Yerzy and Lethandra. I had ridden with Lethandra many times, but never with any closer relatives. We try to avoid placing too many people from one immediate family in danger at once. I normally rode two or three times a week, because I liked it and my shooting was useful, but I had been too young to lead a patrol. Nobody close to my age normally did, but the bar on my forehead made my age irrelevant.

 

My route that night was the northern loop, out to the infested crater lake we called the golden tarn and back, stopping to poke around in gullies and canyons as I saw fit. I had been riding that route regularly for years, and I still liked it because it had been the first route I rode as a child, when it had seemed a tremendous adventure. Dangerous beasts used to come down from the north in those years, and there were some for which my gift was especially useful. There were fewer beasts as I grew older, partly because I kept shooting them, but there was always a chance. We rarely met human threats on the northern loop, but there would be something to report, more often than not.

 

In fact we met nothing at all for the first hour, though Reif and Karlin nosed into several of the more promising ravines. Twice I pointed up to a high crag, and Reif hauled himself up it to look around. We had cables bolted into them all, so it didn’t take him long — we are strong enough to climb quickly with a fixed line. I climbed up onto a tall outcropping myself while Reif and Karlin were looking into the long box canyon, and looked around with my field glasses. I grinned when I caught sight of a large flyer up ahead, high above the tarn. Those had been the main thing that brought me out patrolling as a girl, and they weren’t at all common any more. The point riders had come back and joined Huygens, so I rappelled down to them and told them quietly, mainly for Huygens’s benefit, “Rocs.” I looked back to Rianna and Miriam and simply pointed up, with a fluttering gesture, and Rianna raised her arm in response. I saw her turn to Miriam to explain. If Miriam didn’t have too many injuries, she might never again hear so many words from our surgeon.

 

Huygens looked as nonchalant as the rest of them, but the stupid and ridiculous truth was that he thought I had broken our hour of silence to remark upon the boulders along the track. Only later did I realize that no-one from Morandau Mill had seen a roc in over forty years. It was my fault for speaking ambiguously. Huygens thought I said rocks. We both nearly died because of the punchline my friends used to laugh at when I was six.

 

Karlin knew our roc drill well, though it had been nearly a year since we had last used it. We’d gotten more rocs around the golden tarn than anywhere else, and he had a favorite place to watch from, beside a big cracked slab of stone with an ancient pine growing in its sandwiched slice of dirt. He would sit there with a view over the crumbling huge caldera, whose flat bottom was the golden raft of perilous vegetation that completely covered the deep crater lake. The acoustics were somehow good right there. He could often hear the rocs scrambling over stone, and shoot to warn me as I rode around the narrow track beneath the caldera rim, with my carbine at the ready. But he kept Reif back with him, to let me ride ahead. This drill was about my shooting, no matter who was riding point.

 

Huygens rode ahead with me. I couldn’t think of an inoffensive way to tell him to stay back, but it shouldn’t have made any difference, so I just told him curtly to stay right behind me. He drew out his carbine as I took out mine, and I would have liked to turn around to see what he was doing with it, that made such odd metallic sounds. It was certainly a new model. But I had to watch for rocs. The ride itself was also tricky around the caldera, and my horse picked his way. Half a pace wrong and we would tumble over jagged stones down into the tarn, and then the golden bulbs of toxin in the thick mat of entwining stalks that covered its water would crack open in a wave, and Karlin would either have to toss down a flare very neatly, to burn off the bulbs, or else try to recover my body before it was too dissolved for a funeral.

 

Karlin fired. Huygens jerked around to look back to him, and his horse’s hoof slid a span on the rocks and he jerked back again to lean away from the tarn below. Suddenly the roc Karlin had heard soared up over the caldera rim, a hundred paces ahead of us, huge and redder than ever in the sinking sunlight. Huygens shouted, “Flyer!” and then, “Ride back!” as he kicked his horse past mine. The path was too narrow for that, and my horse stepped off it into a tangle of stony shards just downslope. I dismounted in a tumble so as not to be thrown into the tarn, and as I sprang to my feet on the path, slinging off my cloak and raising my carbine, Huygens was galloping ahead firing rapidly at the roc, as it swung around over the caldera and began its long screech. He was firing amazingly rapidly, with his strange new carbine, and he was even hitting the beast a few times. It jerked in the air, lashing its bulbous tail to turn abruptly, and its screech choked off in a shriek. With one of those quick leaps through the air that rocs do, it was gone over the caldera rim again. I fired to try to warn the Doctor, but he just turned triumphantly in the saddle to look at me, and saw the second roc plunging towards him from a notch in the rim wall between us. He fired two shots at it. Both missed, and one sent stone chips flying near me. Then his weapon jammed somehow. The roc seized him around the body in both its huge talons, his carbine went flying, his horse stumbled and rolled, and the roc soared out over the tarn with Huygens firmly in its grip.

 

I watched the roc turn. Its tail-bulb swayed in a jumpy rhythm, held up above its body. Rocs do that when they’re climbing with prey. We think it helps them balance. They normally hunt in pairs, and they are curious predators. We believe they have common ancestry with the horrible stirges that flock in large caverns. Though rocs are enormously larger, their mouths are quite like the stirges’ narrow probosces. They kill by dropping their victims from great height, and then slurp up the remains. But some ancestor of mine, who must have shared the shooting gift, had discovered their peculiar weakness. Evidently the bulb organ is used for judging altitude. If a roc’s tail-bulb is punctured, it seems to perceive that it is flying too high, and so a shot to the tail-bulb will make a roc smoothly descend until it lands. Our theory is that it does this to avoid dropping its prey from so high that it can’t find the body again on the ground. We believe that rocs must have poor long-distance vision, because they never attack by diving from high in the air. They like to swoop out near ground level.

 

It would be good for Reif and Miriam to see how this worked. I had done it dozens of times, since I was quite young. Even though the roc was climbing quickly, and might soon let Huygens fall, I had to watch its tail motion long enough to pick up the rhythm. Suddenly I knew that I had it, and fired one shot. A long moment later I saw the tail jerk, then swish several times back and forth. Then the creature began gliding down again, in long circles around the caldera. Once on the ground, it would still be a formidable creature, but nothing bullets couldn’t handle. Karlin and Reif could easily take it down, and Huygens would probably be fine, if his heart had been healthy.

 

Before I could signal them, however, the first roc snatched me around the waist. It had circled around while I was distracted by the urgency of disabling the second one before it dropped Huygens. I batted its second talon away with my carbine, but then let the long weapon fall as I tipped sideways in the roc’s soaring grip, and my right hand seized my revolver. To get those huge, ropy claws out of my face I blew the roc’s second talon off at the knee. Fifty caliber rounds have enormous impact at point-blank range. But already I was high enough above the jagged rubble, though swooping down into the caldera, that shooting myself free of the talon that gripped me would have been deadly.

 

A shot sang by, somewhere near. Someone was trying to help me. But the trick with the tail-bulb was one that only I could do, and this time the roc’s thick body was between me and its tail. Its rusty coat of feather-scales was wet with brown in several places from Huygens’s shots, but roc bodies are amazingly tough.

 

If I couldn’t be on the ground shooting the roc’s tail when it had taken someone, then I was at least the best person for it to take. Strange as it sounds, I knew how to steer a roc. After many episodes of shooting them in the tail, I had years before started experimenting with shooting the descending rocs in the wings and body, to try to make them shift their flight, in order to control where the beasts would come down. That approach simply made them plummet to earth, but I had found that shots passing close by their heads on either side could make them swing away. I had even used this on healthy rocs, to turn them for a clearer shot at their tails. And so quickly, before we got too high for a water landing to save me, I blasted two shots past the roc’s waving red mouth-tube, and swung its flight directly across the golden tarn.

 

I tried to think of myself as a missile. How should I aim? What was the trajectory that would land me, as a final boundary condition, far enough out in the tarn for its carpet of tangled stalks to be deep and thick, yet close enough to the edge for me to swim ashore? I passed my revolver to my left hand, and reached down through the air with my right, as if I were trying to throw something, until suddenly I felt I could reach down to the tarn, far below, and simply pull myself in ... right there. My left hand pressed my weapon’s muzzle to the roc’s scarlet leg-joint above me, and fired. At the same time my right hand dug a flare out of my pouch, popped the trigger and let it fall.

 

It didn’t fall, because I was falling with it. I snatched it back just before it started blowing flame, and hurled it down hard, to the spot where I would land. Feeling as though I had all the time in the world, I twisted in the air, and shot the twice-maimed roc in its short neck, so it wouldn’t come back and bother me again. Then I slashed into the golden tarn like a falling blade. Out where I hit it, the tangled mass of stalks and bulbs piled up to several times my own height, buoyed up on thick, yellowish bulbs. I crashed down through it in a blur, the red-gold mass blazing in my flare, feeling only a fierce upward pressure as my weight drove me down and through. My best estimate for my fall was about fifty paces, and I still had some horizontal speed from the roc when I hit the tarn. I had done some cliff diving two years before, but I doubt I could have survived hitting open water at that speed, even if I had landed perfectly straight. As it was, I hit the stalk mass lying flat, and folded up as I crashed through it. The water impact bruised me, but I had nothing broken or ruptured.

 

The tarn is very deep, and extremely cold, though for some reason it never freezes. The mass of bulbs and stalks that covers it grows out from the edges. Under that blanket the water is dark and dead. Looking up from below, I could see the glow of my flare’s fire. I kicked hard to surface, but I had to let the fire spread enough to shrivel the nearby toxin bulbs anyway, so I took the moment to jam my revolver down the front of my jacket. I released my belt, with its heavy pouches. I slowed as I neared the surface, and splashed through the burning slick of oil and slime only when I was starting to lose vision for want of air. As I gulped depleted air between the flames, air that I hoped was not too poisoned, I saw another patch of fire at the closest edge of the tarn. I dove back beneath the plant layer and swam underwater towards that second fire. My hand touched stone just as I thought I would drown, and my next memory is of gasping smoky air, several paces up the steep caldera slope. I was soaked to the skin and shaking with cold, I had lost my belt, I was reeking with gold-brown slime, and my hands were scorched. I was also dully baffled to find that I still had the roc’s thick, ropy talon clasped around my waist. It was more a forked tentacle than a claw, really, though sharp at the two tips. Its inner side had barbed spines, all caught in my jacket. I left it on. I couldn’t stop coughing.

 

Karlin had flung his flare to make that second patch of fire, and then he had flung a rope down and made it fast to a slab near the path. Still gasping, and feeling as weary as if I been awake for a week, I waved up at him to go ahead. He ran off around the path. I dragged my revolver out of my jacket and fumbled automatically in my pockets for loose cartridges to reload it while I looked around and tried to catch my breath. I saw Miriam standing up on an outcropping of the caldera rim, aiming her carbine at something out of sight, but not firing. Things couldn’t be too bad. Far across the caldera, on the other side of the tarn, a cloud of green-gold mist was settling around a dark patch in the mass of stalks. I guessed that was where my roc had come down. I heard two quick distant shots, echoing around the caldera. None more. I stuck my revolver back in my jacket and started dragging myself uphill along the rope, and still no more shots came. About half-way up I heard a crashing and rumbling behind me, and looked quickly back, to see a roc rolling down the far slope into the tarn, raising a rockfall as it fell, and stirring up another golden cloud of toxin as it hit the water. I turned back to my climbing.

 

As I neared the path, I saw my carbine stuck in a crevice a few dozen paces aside, so I picked my way over to it with one hand still on the rope. Its wooden stock was split but the barrel was not bent. I could fit a new stock. I felt lucky, apart from having been snatched by a roc. By the time I reached the path again, everyone but Miriam was there to stare at me, sitting their horses in a foolishly tight single file along the path, with Reif at the head facing the opposite direction to everyone else. Doctor Huygens was mounted behind Reif, with Reif’s cloak on. The roc had kept his own.

 

Reif had galloped fast enough around the caldera, in the opposite direction to the one I had taken, to meet Huygens’s roc as it landed, and kill it with two shots to the neck and head. Huygens ended up falling only a little more than his own height, with a roc landing on top of him, but rocs are not heavy for their size. The landing had only bruised him and cut his hands, though the roc’s grip had broken two of his ribs. When Karlin got there, they had rolled the dead beast down into the tarn, where it landed not far from the one I had shot in the air. That was fitting, at least. The two creatures were probably mates.

 

I frowned and swung my hand briskly in the signal for moving forward. Response to my order began instantly, but took a ridiculous half hour. Rianna could regain her proper place just by waiting while we moved ahead, and Miriam jumped down and remounted and joined her, but the path was too narrow for Reif to turn his horse, especially with Huygens riding double with him. As he backed gingerly up, looking for a place broad enough to turn, he met my horse, which had clambered back up onto the path behind him and would not move until I remounted. I had to pick my way around them all through the sharp rocks on the slope, shivering furiously, before even our timid backwards progress could resume. I dragged my discarded cloak out from under Reif’s horse’s hooves and put it on, and began to warm up.

 

Then shortly after we finally got Reif turned around, we met Huygen’s horse, also facing us the wrong way. She had bolted into a ravine, and somehow found her way back without breaking a leg. But she had been attacked by some scuttling creature, which we never identified in the fading light, and was bleeding heavily from one haunch. Talitha would surely have shot the wounded horse and rolled her into the tarn so that we dread Morandau warlocks could stop this chicken-brained burlesque and get on with our mission, but I figured that if any threat were going to take advantage of our confusion, it would already have done so, having had ample opportunity. So we were probably in no immediate danger.

 

So I gave up, and just turned to Karlin and introduced the new tactical signal of throwing up my hands, rolling my eyes, and pointing straight at him. Then I dismounted and went to look for Huygens’s carbine. By the time I had found where it landed and was reasonably sure I had collected all its pieces, it was nearly quite dark. But by having some people switch horses, Karlin had gotten everything lined up the right way, given the wounded horse a shot of antivenin, and set Reif at the head of the line with a light to show the path. On my way back to them along the path-side rubble, I stopped to have Rianna listen to my cough. She shrugged, but that meant I wasn’t dying immediately, so I remounted and we continued. We got home late, but that isn’t uncommon. My lungs did eventually recover.

 

I made everyone wait in the staging ground while I borrowed Karlin’s knife, got Reif to hold the light, and finally cut off my roc talon. Noticing that even Rianna was still waiting while I did that, I gave her the nod to leave, and she did. She had to prepare for a patient. I had meant my nod to include Karlin, but he stayed. Once my grisly trophy was free, I tossed it to Reif, telling him it could stand for his own first roc. Miriam I dismissed with two days of extra chores for nearly hitting me when she shot at my roc, and two days of liberty for trying to shoot it.

 

I didn’t know how much Doctor Huygens had understood about what had happened. He had had a good viewpoint for much of it, but might not have been paying attention. I think that Reif and Karlin may have had muttered words with him while I wasn’t there. I said to him gravely, “Sometimes we cannot see all the initial conditions, Doctor, and we must try final boundary conditions instead.” He would be heading to the inspection room directly from the stables, and he was doing fairly well just to be sitting upright, but I was still surprised to see him look at me with such urgent attention, as if I were an armed mine. The way people looked at Talitha. “My lady,” was all he answered.

 

I decided I would not attend any more of his seminar. I had done enough proving that solutions existed.

1 Comment


Recommended Comments

Reading successive drafts of this chapter, my brother has kept insisting that the math stuff is too technical. He's convinced me, and I'll rewrite it. The idea of determinism has developed into a sort of motif for Anastasia. "What has to happen, will" is one of her catchphrases. She's a fatalist; but as she puts it later at one point, "I'm part of what has to happen." Her fatalism is the kind that encourages her to be reckless and aggressive, rather than resigned and passive.

 

So I think that, rather than talk in the technical language of 'boundary conditions', I'll talk about determinism. It's actually only a change of language. Determinism is precisely what Anastasia and Huygens argue about, in talking about initial and final conditions, and the existence of solutions. It shouldn't be too hard to raise the same ideas in more accessible terms, and at the same time get more resonance with later parts of the story.

Link to comment
Guest
Add a comment...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...