Pathspace

by Matthew Kennedy

Chapter 52

  Aria: “the light shone in darkness”

  Sometimes she felt as if her entire life was being spent scribbling. Word problems! Exercises in futility was what they were. What was the point? There would always be advisers to calculate numerical answers for her.

  “Aria,” said Mr. Chang, “you're not concentrating.”

  “I just don't see the point of this. It doesn't mean anything!”

  The barest lifting of an eyebrow. “What? But everything means something.”

  “Does it?” She put down the piece of chalk and surveyed the dusty scribbling on the board in front of her. “Am I any better of a ruler if a field produces twenty bushels of corn instead of fifteen? The number is meaningless unless we combine it with others. Is fifteen enough to feed a country? Hardly. The output of a single field, and the appetites of a single family tell us nothing until we combine them with all the others and compare the total harvest to the total population that must be fed.”

  “True,” he said. “But that's not the point of this exercise. The task is to take all of the given factors into account and to render an accurate result, which in this case is the amount of corn left sixty days after harvest. You've left out the spoilage due to mice, so your result is unreasonably optimistic.”

  She surprised him with a curse, because he was right. “But it's still unreasonable even if I include it,” she said. “What about insects? What about pilfering by vagabonds? What if an army takes it all – or burns it?”

  “Those were not included in the givens,” he said.

  “But they do happen. And in any real situation, the people evaluating this for me will include such factors if they are known or can be predicted. If I'm to be Governor, I won't be doing the scribbling – they will. So what's the point of my practicing it?”

  “People will supply you with numbers when they can be calculated, and estimates when they cannot, true enough. But how will you know that the numbers you are given are accurate? How will you be able to tell if budgets are padded, if estimates are exaggerated?”

  “I'll employ people who know their jobs, and replace them if they don't,” she said.

  “You'll still have to be able to do some of the estimating yourself,” he said. “You can't always afford to wait until they're proved wrong to replace them. When you order an army into the field, you have to know in advance what it will cost to keep them there.”

  “That's the job of the quartermasters,” she retorted.

  Chang sighed. “You're missing the point,” he said. “Suppose your army's quartermasters know that it will require one thousand bushels of grain to feed the troops for a month. Their knowing will mean nothing, if you only have five hundred bushels in silos.” He pointed at the chalk-covered board. “These numbers are made up. But in an actual situation they will be crucial. Ordering your army to do things it doesn't have the resources to do will only frustrate them and make them resentful. Politics has been called 'the art of the possible' for good reasons. To expect the impossible is to invite defeat.”

  She wished her mother would come in and interrupt this lesson, as she had done a few times in the past. Too much more of this and she would scream. She felt like screaming now. She knew there was truth to what Chang was saying. But falsehood also. The examples were arbitrary, not really as reasonable as they seemed. An army could forage. They could hunt. And of course they could obtain crops from the fields of the enemy, if they were in enemy territory.

  She felt as if they were asking too much of her and at the same time not giving her enough information to do what they asked. In a real situation she would have to be able to trust her people, else she and they were doomed. Yet these exercises were to be done all by herself, as if she were alone on a battlefield! Madness.

  Furthermore, it wasn't the way her mother had been prepared for her rule. Why weren't they letting her spend time reviewing troops, touring installations, observing troop training exercises? It was as if her mother were trying to redo her own past, to make her daughter into the kind of leader she wasn't, a knower of all instead of a maker of decisions.