A Succession of Bad Days (2 page)

“As that servant, I shall be arranging your lessons and quarters.”

Wake looks suddenly mischievous. “Any student hijinks you will find yourselves explaining to Halt.”

I think Chloris, face dropped into hands, is trying not to cry. I’m trying not to gibber, I think it comes out even. Zora has a this-can’t-be-right
face on.

Kynefrid looks alarmed. “Wait, everyone-knows-the-stories Halt?”

Dove starts laughing like that was really, really funny.

Even in school, after you test out for no talent at all, they stop giving you focus exercises and send you off to do something else.

For me, that was mostly wood-turning. A big help in getting into the collective I wanted, but no help now.

Everybody’s stuff made it out to the tent last night; this morning, everybody’s a bit muzzy except Dove. Dove just looks grim. Nobody’s had breakfast.
There’s a walk, which helps with the muzzy; having the sun clear the horizon helps more. Cloudy, but I don’t think it’s going to rain.

The person who got us up goes by Steam; certainly not a Creek, I think maybe about my height, twenty, thirty kilos more muscle and moving the way winch-cables do before the load comes on. Not someone to argue with about needing breathing exercises.

The walk ends
at the front edge of a sandpit. It goes back a couple hundred metres, straight into a hill. There’s a serious lot of sand exposed, it looks like someone dug the dirt off it for a couple hundred metres, not like there was erosion.

Messed-up sand; chunks of it look fused, and the parts in loose grains look stirred.

“Does that look odd to you?” I’m not sure who the “you” I’m asking is, but Zora
and Kynefrid shake their heads. Chloris says “I didn’t think the glass factory had dug up so much.”

“The Experimental Battery used it for firing practice.” Dove waves at the distant back edge, the sand left piled up in front of it. “The shot go way back before they stop.”

“We’re here because if it will stop long shot, it’ll stop anything the five of you come up with.” Steam sounds amused.

“The
point to this is getting good at maintaining a personal awareness of the Power, of the access to the Power your talent gives you. There are a million ways to do that, but if I’ve got to teach it, I’m going to use the one I know best.” Steam still sounds amused.

We wind up beside each other in a line, about far enough apart that our hands wouldn’t touch if we stuck our arms out. Further than I
expect, all these really tall people. Steam’s gone over how neither talent nor the Power are intellectual things; it’s a whole body thing, like stamina or balance.

So we’re going to start with breathing: in through the nose, out through the mouth, and visualizing the Power arising in the centre of our guts kinda like a well-pump. Once we’ve got it, the Power is supposed to go all the way around,
up the spine and back down and around.

“If you set your hair on fire, stop,” is Steam’s last bit of advice.

I feel stupid, worrying about breathing; Steam can call it natural breathing all day, breathing by expanding my stomach doesn’t feel natural at all.

On the other hand, I may not know about natural breathing but I do know where worrying about how stupid you look and if you’re doing it right
goes. Keep that up long enough and you’ve got a face full of splinters and a parting tool up your nose.

Haven’t torn my nose off yet and don’t want to start now.

Dove’s to my right and Kynefrid’s to my left, Zora and Chloris are past Kynefrid. Steam’s behind us. It’s an effort to not try to look at how anyone else is doing.

It gets to feeling like it’s doing something, there’s definitely a change
in sensation, and I’ve just decided not to think about whether or not I’m fooling myself when there’s a shriek.

Zora’s head is fountaining sparks like a dry pine bough just catching fire.

“
Stop
,” says Steam, in a voice that could kick open doors, and makes hand gestures, swoopy ones, and mutters something that might be chanting if you did it for serious. All the sparks wind up in a small glowing
orange ball between Steam’s cupped hands.

“That’s pretty good,” Steam says, making a throwing motion and sending the ball of sparks out into sand, where there’s a flash and a pop and some flying sand.

Zora’s making ‘is it out?’ patting motions, there are still some wisps of smoke. Chloris is looking appalled; Zora looks embarrassed. I can’t see the top of Zora’s head. Don’t know how you tell how
much damage happened to coiled braids.

I’m trying to figure out what to do about the tingly sensation in my hands; Steam’s
Stop
made me reach for
something
, the way you do to cut the air to the lathe.

Steam’s good at looking reassuring. “Everybody lights their hair on fire at least once.” Zora straightens up a bit; Chloris doesn’t look less appalled, and Kynefrid starts. Dove, out of the corner
of my eye, is grinning. I really wonder what Dove used to do. Dove’s older, I can’t tell with Creeks how much older, not almost or just out of youth like the rest of us but no telling how far.

Steam slips between me and Kynefrid, turns around, looks at me again, reaches out and squeezes my hands around the fingers, right and left. It feels like a horrible smell.

Tingling’s gone, though.

“Next
step is like this,” Steam says, facing all of us and going to a wider, more bent-kneed stance, arms up in front in a curve, palms facing in and fingers spread. “Think of it like holding a big ball. You’re feeding the Power down your arms and into the ball. Keep it in the ball; it’s an accumulation exercise.”

When my attention lifts off my breathing, I’ve got a four decimetre ball of heavy iron-grey
something. It feels like it has mass, there’s drag if I move my hands out a bit, and there’s this uncomfortable smell of whistling.

Dove’s got something barely a decimetre across, the colour of the smell of oranges, and I can feel the heat on that side of my face, on the outside of my right arm.

Kynefrid’s effort is intermediate in size, and it stutters in and out of existence, wafting a sensation
of falling plum blossoms.

Plum blossoms that skitter up my arms and neck on little-ant feet. Don’t like that much.

I can’t tell what Zora and Chloris have managed, but it’s something; there’re odd coloured shadows of their raised arms just visible in the corner of my eye.

Steam’s voice has got a lot of pleased in it. “We’re going to let go from the left. Give it a count of three from when the
person to your left lets go and turn your hands outward.”

“Zora, one, two, three — ” Steam’s voice doesn’t have any doubt in it whatsoever, which is a good trick.

Zora’s sphere of energy goes a long way, almost off the sand, and vanishes in a hiss and an itching.

Chloris’ gets maybe three metres away and vanishes with a bang. A really loud one, with wind. Not just confused senses, an actual explosion.
Doesn’t do anything for my nerves. I feel myself inhaling a little deeper, more deliberately. There’s something to this natural breathing stuff.

Kynefrid turns their hands out just about when the sphere stutters; it goes away, and my hair is standing on end. Steam makes a clucking noise.

I don’t know why I don’t lose the sphere then, or my breathing. I probably take too long, three full breaths,
before I turn my hands out.

The iron-grey something leaves, I wasn’t sure it would, the sense of mass makes it seem like something you’d have to throw really hard. It goes up, a smooth parabola. When the ball comes down it sits spinning and throwing sand and sinking into the little pit it’s digging.

Dove’s sphere of energy hangs there, drifting a little, and then Dove frowns at it. It drifts away,
rather slowly, but it drops to the sand and vanishes in a spray of what looks like melted sand.

Quite a lot of melted sand.

Well, we’re all still alive, and nothing’s on fire.

Steam moves around in front of us. That seems to be Steam’s take on it, too.

“Kynefrid, you’ve done lots of specific charm-stuff, like heating the wort kettle?”

Kynefrid grins. It’s at least half embarrassed grin, but a
grin all the same. “That’s beer, not cider, but yeah.”

“Stop trying to make it
do
something; this is just getting the Power to show up. Doing something with it is next décade.”

I have the horrible feeling Steam means that literally.

Another hour of breathing exercises, more melted sand, finishing breathing exercises with ‘Power-scrubbing’, making sure there isn’t any sticking to us where it shouldn’t, then running to the tent to grab clothes, running into Westcreek Town so we have time for a bath before breakfast, the actual bath, which is more like a comprehensive sluicing, and the time required to eat breakfast,
are all sort of a blur. I’m there, I notice what’s happening, but it’s enough different from anything else I’ve ever done that it doesn’t want to stick to my head. Dove is emphatic that use of the Power requires a high food intake, and Chloris’ concern that we haven’t used much yet gets met with “This is breakfast; what else do you think is going to happen today?”

I’m pretty sure Dove has no specific
factual knowledge, either, but we find ourselves back at the tent, where Wake is rather contemplatively winding up surveyor’s string.

“It being the sixth day of the third décade of Vendémiaire, perhaps the first thing we might consider is more weather-proof housing.” Wake is totally cheerful saying this.

“We’re going to build a house.” Chloris doesn’t say this like a question. Chloris says this
as one delivered into the keeping of crazy people.

“Tents are damp; it gets hard to study.” Wake’s cheer doesn’t alter.

“The only way I’ve ever made a wall we can’t use.” Dove sounds a little wry.

“I’ve made a lot of doorknobs, but that doesn’t seem helpful, somehow.” I try not to sound anything other than informative.

“I know how to make
pickles
.” Chloris isn’t sounding convinced of anyone’s
increase in sanity. “Why can’t we request housing in Westcreek Town?”
Rather than wasting material making something new
hovers there unsaid.

Wake’s head tips a bit. Wake’s shorter than me, so way shorter than Chloris, but this won’t stay in your head unless you work at it; Creeks keep talking to a place four decimetres over Wake’s head. “Housing is short; various of the displaced need to be kept
from the wet. Were that not the case, it is considered inadvisable to house high-talent students in established settlements.”

“Inadvisable, disturbs their studies, or inadvisable, fire hazard?” Zora looks worried.

Wake smiles. “Inadvisable, smoking crater.” Large hands come up, spread placatingly. “Not a common outcome, but it need happen only once in a very long while to be unwise in an established
settlement.”

“So we’re up here on land close to useless, close enough to town but not
too
close.” Dove sounds reassured, like the location of the tent finally makes sense.

Wake nods.

“Any qualified Independent ought to be able to put up a house.” Zora doesn’t believe something about their own statement, but I think it’s more that
qualified
will apply any time soon than anything about the abilities
of Independents.

“Or be able to turn into a snowdrift and not care that it’s winter.”

That one gets Zora a full-on smile of approval from Wake. “We would not consider that a reasonable expectation in your first year of studies.”

Wake starts handing out stakes, and mallets, and string. Dove takes a mallet and a handful of stakes and starts walking, up over the top of the hill.

The tent is on the
south, town-and-canal-facing side of the hill. It doesn’t get much sun.

Dove is scuffing at the thin dirt and looking displeased, over on the north side of the hilltop.

Dove looks up at Wake; the rest of us are trailing behind Wake. “This would have been shale if it didn’t have so much crap in it. Take the crap out, which we don’t know how to do, and you’ve got a carbon fire and still don’t get
competent rock.”

Wake nods, face solemn.

“Westcreek gets its weather from the southeast. If we’re going to head into town through the snow, that means we want — ” and there’s a specific sort of hand-wave. I think I see, for a flickered instant, an orange line trail over low places in the empty landscape, northwards and down.

Wake looks pleased. Dove looks startled.

However pleased Wake looks,
Wake sounds dry. “High talent results in abrupt learning experiences.”

“Just as long as they’re survivable.” Dove sounds just as dry.

Wake’s head tips from side to side. It’s a Creek gesture, I thought it meant ‘maybe’.

Kynefrid is looking around. “Lots of drainage here. If the water pooled at all there’d be grass, this is all starving forb and lichen.”

Soil too poor for weeds. Which is really
useful, in its way.

“Which means it’s broken rock, and we don’t even want to pile anything on it. Not without digging down far enough to find something mostly solid.” Dove crouches down, prods with the survey stake. Up comes a hunk of rock that crumbles when Dove’s hand closes on it.

“
Lots
of digging.”

“The cellar will leak.” Chloris says this about how I’d expect someone to say ‘and they skin
babies to make hats’.

“There’s always a way, though.” Which way, Zora couldn’t say, that’s clear from tone. “It’s a school problem, there’s a way to solve it. You don’t get ‘don’t try to do that’ problems the first day.”

Wake nods sagaciously. “Not usually.”

Dove grimaces. “Dig the hole, haul in fifty tonnes of sand, fuse that to glass for the cellar and support pads, bunch of brick pillars,
arched brick roof. Nobody’s got any spare timber this year, it’s all in barges. So glass tile for the roof, too, another ten tonnes of sand.”

“You have neglected working spaces.” Wake doesn’t say this as a criticism, it’s just information.

“Sleep out of the rain first, then working space?” Kynefrid, not sounding all that definite. “Houses get built better than sheds.”

“You will find you will
have work to do that takes days, and which must be attended to every hour of those days. Not this year, I grant, but the day shall come.”

“And we won’t want to be putting boots on.” Zora sounds exhausted just thinking about it.

“Most do not.” Wake’s ‘most’ could as well be ‘all, except for two special cases of great note and comment’.

Dove has been scratching numbers in the dirt. “I could almost
believe there’s a way for the five of us to move fifty tonnes of sand, and fuse it. If we need workspace, we’d need at least a couple hundred, and I don’t believe that.”

“Edgar?” Wake’s tone is much closer to ‘do you have anything to contribute?’ than I really expect it to be; I had teachers get really cranky about hanging back from group participation exercises all through school. I hate arguing.

“It makes no sense to worry about digging the hole or making the roof or whatever unless it’s worthwhile to start. The people who know about digging think we’d be working really hard to get a leaky cellar, and this is a class. So there’s something the class is about that you haven’t told us yet.”

Wake looks at me, and nods. Which is a lot better than being told that the leaky cellar will really
help with raising the strange frogs that will be forming most of our diet…

“Dove is quite right that this rock is full of crap; there’s fine sand, what would be clay or mud, and a great deal of organic matter. Nor did it get very deep, to be made into rock; it’s friable and fragile in large part because it is only barely rock, not so different from the mud it was when the water dropped it.”

Everybody
nods.

“Those processes all involve chance; where the water flowed faster, you could find clean sandstone; if the land here had risen faster, this — ” Wake’s hand waves, invoking general principles — “would already have eroded down, into something more completely rock.”

Kynefrid and I are looking at each other. Having both been displaced, we’ve both heard the explanation for why the road through
the Folded Hills goes where it does; it’s the relatively flat bit because it’s the seam between two totally different geologies, the plants are different, most of the animals are different, but north of the road and south of the road happen to be arranged in the same kind of mountains.

“So, what could this have been?” Wake’s hand motion encompasses at least the hilltop.

“Better rock? Further
out to sea, clean deepwater limestone?” Kynefrid voice holds no belief in the words it is saying, no belief in the choice of these particular words. “Get the right limestone bedrock, we could put in some grape vines…”

Chloris’ arms rise in rhetorical dismissal, disbelief; Zora giggles. I’m trying to think a few steps ahead, but Dove gets there first.

“There’s that big dike of hard rock, halfway
to the Folded Hills; it’s south of the road, we’re south of the road. And the Folded Hills didn’t rise until after, you can see where the dike fractured when the Hills came up.”

“You want a
volcano
?” Kynefrid, sounding scandalized.

“I want there to
have been
a volcano, or almost a volcano, something that gives us hard rock, basalt or something, to build on. And before the land tipped with the
Hills, we’ve got lots of time to suppose a nice big lake, so we can pile lots of clean sand and some clay for bricks up-slope from the hard rock, enough so that it’ll still be there downhill from the hilltop.” You get the impression Dove is used to planning things.

I’ve never had to dig actual basalt, or any other hard rock that was intact; we got granite-y boulders, though, scattered through
the soil, anything from head-sized to bigger-than-houses, and sometimes you had to hack them up to get them out of where you wanted to put a post-hole. If you just dig, you get a post-pit, and even more work. Did quite a bit of that before I joined the collective. It’s kid-work; energy and stubborn would get the job done, skill not required.

The thought of trying to hack a foundation into a huge
chunk of the stuff doesn’t appeal.

“If it’s a volcano, can we try to put a gas bubble in? Big one, so we’ve got the cellar?” Everyone looks at me, Wake rather intently. “Digging a basement in basalt would take a long time, I don’t think any of us are going to be just making the rock move any time soon.”

“If we’re being silly, I want some limestone, or some chalk, or something. Something so we
can have an actual garden without two generation’s lead time, composting sand.” I don’t know if Chloris is just playing along or has decided that it’s clearly socially expected to be crazy today.

“None of these things is impossible.” Wake is being utterly serious. “The alteration of possibilities does not permit one to be extremely specific, but priorities may be set.”

“How big is this thing
going to be?” Dove, sounding speculative.

“I should not like to see you five attempt something greater than thirty hectares at this stage of your studies.” Totally straight-faced from Wake.

“
Thirty?
That’s not a garden, that’s a
farm
.” Chloris sounds indignant. “Why don’t people do this instead of weeding?”

“People have done this instead of weeding; all of the north-western corner of the Creeks
is geologically discontinuous from the lower Westcreek watershed, the three eastern Creeks are each distinct from the eastern barrens, all are distinct from the southern swamplands. You don’t always get something you can farm, and sometimes it has worse weeds when you do. It’s a matter of odds, not certainty.” Wake sounds patient. My head hurts, this is too much like trying to make the Bad Old
Days return.

“Like fixing the teapot.” Kynefrid sounds stunned.

Everybody looks at Kynefrid, uncertain how the landscape is like a teapot.

“One of my aunts had a favourite teapot, and it broke, and an Independent who was there to talk about soil properties in the orchards and what we should add fixed it, fixed it so that it had never been broken.” Kynefrid takes a deep breath. “It wasn’t exactly
the same colour after.”

“Just so,” Wake says. “It is an alteration of which past shall manifest itself in the world.”

“Wasn’t there only one past?” My head hurts, and I don’t think the answer is going to help. At least let my head hurt for the correct reasons.

“At any point in time, there is only one past.” Wake scuffs one sandalled foot across dirt or rock, it’s hard to tell the difference,
gestures. There’s a floating green and blue rectangle thing, taller than Wake and full of crosshatching and squiggles. Someone has made a sandwich out of engraver’s styles for filling space. My brain wants to make the basic crosshatches boxwood, but I don’t think whatever it really is makes good drawer pulls.

Wake points at this glowing stack of lines. “What we are standing on. Every layer, every
geological period, was an accumulation of chance. Most of those chances are scarcely relevant; precisely where the footsteps of some ancient behemoth passed has little effect on what we are standing upon. Yet that accumulation of chances made all the wide earth.”

“It’s really that hard to control?” Zora, sounding worried.

“It is impossible to control. It can be reliably predicted.”

Zora sits
down, head in hands. “I don’t see how those are different.”

“Is this like dice?” Dove doesn’t sound especially doubtful.

Wake nods.

Dove looks at Zora. “Remember school? Honest dice, you don’t know what they’re going to roll, but roll enough of them and you can say what the range of outcomes were ahead of time.”

“It’s a
hill
,” Zora says.

“It’s a tremendous pile of chance events, stretching back
billions of years.” Wake outright grins at us. “It just
looks
like a hill.”

It goes right on looking like a hill while we stake out a big squashed rectangle, “Trapezoid,” Chloris says definitely while I’m wondering about the lumpy hill making the sides curve and wiggle, the baseline two hundred metres across the south side of the crest of the hill and reaching more than six hundred metres of
the north slope, fanning out so that the far side, the end line, is four hundred metres long. It’s regular old iron survey stakes and heavy twine, nothing special; last time I saw a road crew, this is just what they were using.

Not quite twenty hectares; Wake points out that we don’t really need even this much, and Chloris, Kynefrid, and Zora all produce some variation of “But we can grow stuff!”.