by K. J. Parker
As it turned out, the mere announcement that Gorgas Loredan was on his way to sort things out had had a remarkable effect on the officials concerned; they’d had a very productive meeting and dealt with all the outstanding issues, and three enormous cartloads of immaculately bleached bones were even now trundling their way down the narrow backstreets from the slaughterhouse to the Camp, while both parties were unreservedly withdrawing their complaints and thanking each other, with an almost frantic display of mutual goodwill, for their co-operation. Gorgas was extremely pleased, congratulated everyone for doing a splendid job, and took the opportunity to make an unscheduled tour of inspection; very much an unexpected honour, as the superintendent hastily admitted.
‘There’s still going to be a shortfall, though,’ Gorgas said, as he walked between the rows of benches. On either side of him sat twenty or so children, each one diligently filing slots in half-finished nocks. ‘Can’t we do something about the lighting in here, by the way? It’s a bit dark for fine work.’
The superintendent snapped at his secretary to make a note – Investigate ways to improve lighting in shed. The secretary scribbled hastily, the waxed tablet braced against the spread palm of his left hand – you could tell a scribe by the calluses on his fingertips and the way he sat flexing his fingers when he wasn’t writing.
‘I suppose we’ll have to make up the difference from civilian contractors,’ Gorgas went on. ‘Place an order with the usual suppliers and have the invoices sent through to my office. I’ll deal with them myself.’ He didn’t need to look round to know what kind of expression was on the superintendent’s face; an outside order was one of the few opportunities he got to make a few quarters on the side, provided that the invoices could be processed in-house. The stipulation was intended as a reprimand, and the way it was made constituted a strong hint that the superintendent had got off lightly. ‘And if you get any more problems with supply, just let me know instead of going through channels. After all, we’re all on the same side.’
The superintendent thanked him politely for his help, and Gorgas urged him to think nothing of it. ‘Actually,’ he added, turning round and facing the man, ‘there was just one thing. When you do the requisitions, would you mind placing an order for – what, twelve dozen? Yes, call it that – with a man called Bardas Loredan. He lives up in the hills; one of my people can tell you where to find him. He’s my brother.’
The superintendent nodded twice, and relayed the order to his secretary, who’d already written it down. ‘Of course,’ He said. ‘No trouble at all. Shall I add him to the usual list of suppliers?’
Gorgas thought for a moment. ‘Better have a look at the quality of his work first,’ he replied. ‘It’s all very well helping out family now and again, but we aren’t doing this for the good of our souls. I expect they’ll be all right, though; he’s a good worker.’
If the superintendent was curious to know why a brother of the Chief Executive (and also, by implication, of the Director herself) made his living working with his hands up in the hill country, he certainly didn’t show it. It wasn’t all that long ago that the superintendent had arrived on Scona in a small leaky boat from Shastel with nothing more than a coat and a pair of shoes. As far as he was concerned, the Chief Executive stood fair and square at the centre of his universe; it was Gorgas Loredan who’d personally signed the deed that allowed him to pay off his debt to the Foundation, and when he’d stumbled off the boat onto the Dock, one of Gorgas’ clerks had been there to meet him and his family and take them out of the mob of refugees being herded into the Camp. Instead, they’d gone up the hill and been greeted by Gorgas himself in his own private office, where he’d been told there was a good job waiting for him if he wanted it. He had no idea why he’d been chosen, or what might one day be expected of him in return; all he could think of was that he’d been one of the Chief’s own personal clients, and that when he’d been burnt out, the Chief somehow felt responsible for not preventing it. But the reason didn’t matter; what mattered was that he spent his days in an office at a desk, while men every bit as good as him, or better, coughed up their lungs in the dust and stench of the sawbenches.
‘Right,’ Gorgas said. ‘I think we’re all sorted out here. If there’s any other problems, you know where I am.’ He paused for a moment, looking out over the rows of workbenches, listening to the scritching of blades and files on bone coming from every side. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘this is all looking very good. You’ve done a fine job.’
‘Thank you,’ the superintendent said.
‘Let us consider,’ Gannadius said, ‘the two Opposites that combine to make up this thing we call the Principle. Let’s call them’ – he paused for effect – ‘let’s call them The Same, and Different. About The Same, there is nothing to be said; it’s always the same, it has only one nature. It can’t be changed, or improved, or made worse. You may find it hard to imagine this Opposite; think of a granite cliff, and sooner or later you’ll imagine the sea grinding it down, or men quarrying it and hauling it away in carts. You could try to imagine death, I suppose, but death is only one stage in a cycle. If a thing is dead now, it must once have been alive. The Same is very hard to imagine; so you must take it on trust and think of it largely as what it is, an Opposite.’
He paused again and looked round the hall, pleased to see that he could still grab the attention of a hundred or so young people with something he knew was as trite as sunrise. ‘Now consider Different,’ he went on. ‘Different is easy. Different is so easy that it’s easy to let yourself believe that Different is somehow more important, more real than The Same. That would be very foolish, because The Same is the world, but Different is the Principle. Does that make any sort of sense? Or am I going too fast?’
Rhetorical pause, Needless to say, none of them understood; not yet. ‘Let me refine that a little,’ he said. ‘I want you to consider the concept of Product. Take heat, for example. Heat is the Product of fuel and fire. Take a tree and burn it; the fire turns the wood to ash and smoke. It’s easy to see Different in that, because where there was once a tree there’s now only charcoal and a smell of burning – there has been an act of Difference. But look again, and try and see the operation of the other Opposite. Has the tree disappeared? No, it’s still there, in the ash and the smoke and the heat of the fire. In other words, there has also been an act of Sameness, but achieved through the agency of Product. The Same and Different have collided, have been at war, Different has come and gone, The Same remains behind in the Product of the act – which in the case of burning a tree is ash and smoke and heat.
‘That’s a very simple example, of course, but it might help you to see that Different might not be as important as you thought it was. It might even occur to you to ask yourselves if The Same is always the same, and Different is always different. Confused? Try it again, now that you’re a little bit better educated. Every time you burn a tree, you get ash, smoke and heat; you get the same difference, the difference is always the same. Now you might ask yourselves, is there really such a thing as Different, or is it just The Same in some other configuration, the tree becoming ash in the same way as life becomes death or night becomes day? Can you burn a tree and get flowers and milk? Now that would be Different.’
Sure enough, every single face in the hall was a study in bewilderment; mostly, he knew, they were frantically trying to work out whether Doctor Gannadius was immensely wise or a raving lunatic. Very good.
‘Now then,’ he resumed, ‘by the looks of you, you’ve all had about as much education as you can take for one day, so I’ll leave you with one last subject for your consideration. Let’s assume that The Same is always the same, and Different is always different; the key to this riddle must be something to do with the nature of this elusive third factor, Product. Where there’s a Product, there must be a Process. In our example with the tree, the Process is burning. We’ve seen that Product can be both an act of difference and an act of sameness. The a
sh and smoke and heat are different from the tree, but they’re still the tree, they’re the Product of the Process of burning. This may lead you to believe that it’s the Process that makes the difference, except that the Product of the burning Process is always the same. So now, instead of just two incomprehensible abstracts, we have four. Are they really all the same? Or are they different? I’d like you to think about that before we meet again; and if by then any of you can answer the riddle, please feel free to come up here and take over the class; provided, of course, that you can prove you understand it by burning a tree and producing flowers and milk.’ He paused and grinned. ‘Dismissed.’
As he walked back to his lodgings, he felt a little guilty, as if he’d been doing something dishonest; as if he’d sought to convince his audience of some abstruse point of philosophy by pulling a rabbit out of his hat, and had succeeded. I’m trying to make it sound like magic, he confessed to himself, which it isn’t, of course. It’s just that occasionally, if things go wrong, it can do the same things as magic. And that’s like saying that a sack of flour is a sword, because if it falls on you out of a high loft it can kill you. He wondered why he was worrying about it. Perhaps the guilt came from trying to make the subject sound interesting, which was certainly an act of deception.
‘Doctor Gannadius!’ That voice. Oh, hell!
‘It’s Machaera, isn’t it?’ he said as he turned, trying his unsuccessful best to look frail and confused. ‘Ah, yes, of course it is. How can I help you?’
The dreadful child was beaming at him, her small oval face a study in humility and devotion. Idiotic, he said to himself as he resisted the urge to shudder. The child’s got twenty times more ability than I’ll ever have, she really is a magician. Which is why she should be killed immediately, for the public good.
‘Could you possibly spare me just a few minutes?’ she was saying – she was skipping backwards so as to be able to face him and keep up with him at the same time. He really didn’t want to stop and get bogged down in theoretical debate in the middle of the courtyard; the girl might be a natural genius, but she was simply too young to be able to grasp even the most basic implications of the word rheumatism. Escape, he knew, was impossible, but back in his lodgings he would at least be able to sit down. There was even a possibility of getting rid of her by feigning sleep.
‘Certainly, certainly,’ Gannadius replied. ‘Follow me.’ Not for the first time he envied his old friend and colleague Alexius his years and infirmities, for which people were always so ready to make allowances. Gannadius was that much younger and obviously spry, and so not entitled to mercy. ‘I mustn’t be too long, though,’ he added in forlorn hope. ‘Paperwork to catch up with, that sort of thing.’
The girl Machaera was getting better, give her her due; she didn’t start up until after he’d sat down and kicked off one boot.
‘I thought what you said in the lecture was fascinating,’ she was saying. ‘And so true. Except,’ she went on, with a little glint of far-away in her eyes, ‘I always seem to think of it as a massive great tree fallen and lying endways, and if you find a crack and hammer in a wedge, it suddenly splits open, just like that.’
‘Sorry,’ Gannadius interrupted. ‘Think of what?’
‘Sorry?’
‘What is it,’ Gannadius said carefully, ‘that you always seem to think of as a log?’
‘What? Oh I see. Well, Sameness, I suppose. Or whatever the Principle isn’t – I’m a bit muddled about that bit. But the Principle’s like the wedge; you find the crack and the rest of it’s so easy. What’s the proper technical term? Mechanical advantage, that’s it.’
Oh, so that’s how it’s done. Assuming you can spot the crack, I suppose. ‘You could put it like that,’ he replied guardedly. ‘In fact, it’s not a bad comparison. But surely that’s a bit far removed from what the lecture was about.’
The girl looked puzzled. ‘Oh, surely not,’ she said. ‘Surely the whole point is that the Principle is what you use to turn The Same into Different. When it doesn’t want to, I mean.’
You may well be right; how the hell would I know, though? ‘In a sense,’ he replied. ‘Though that’s over-simplifying things rather, if you don’t mind my saying so.’ He devoutly, earnestly wished she’d go away, this little cute-faced bubble of a creature who talked so blithely about using the Principle; it was like listening to a mouse chattering on about harnessing a team of cats to a cheese-wagon, except for the horrible knowledge that she could do it. Break the world in half? he could imagine her saying. Oh, that’s easy. You just press here, and then put your thumbnail here, like this…
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m gushing again, aren’t I? And running before I can walk. You see, I’d never thought of it in those terms before, but it’s so obviously the right way of seeing it – well, of course, you know that,’ she added, with a self-deprecating little grin. ‘No, what I really wanted to do was tell you about this projection I did, using that special formula you taught me.’
Blood and thunder, not another one. It’s a miracle we’re all still alive. ‘You’ve managed another projection?’ was what he actually said. ‘That’s really very – well, I’m impressed. Was it-?’
She smiled at him. ‘Why don’t I just show you?’ she said.
– And, before he could say anything, suddenly he was standing beside her in a workshop of some sort, next to a long bench with a heavy wooden vice clamped to it, and lots of peculiar-looking tools hanging on the walls (except that, because she was there too, he realised that at least for the time being he knew that that was a drawknife and that was an adze and that was a boxwood plane, and those green twiggy things were horsetail rushes, which are rough and abrasive enough to be used for smoothing toolmarks out of wood). Light slanted into the shop through an open shutter and fell across the back of a man crouching over the bench – dear gods, that’s Colonel Bardas Loredan, the fencer-at-law – and an old man sitting talking to him, who turned out to be someone he knew very well indeed.
‘Alexius?’ he said.
The Patriarch looked up and saw him. ‘Excuse me a moment,’ he said to Loredan, who nodded and carried on with his work. ‘Hello, Gannadius,’ he went on. ‘I was thinking about you only the other day. I didn’t even know if you were alive.’
‘Me neither. I mean,’ Gannadius corrected, ‘I didn’t know if you were alive. I’d heard a few rumours, but nothing I was prepared to believe. Dear gods, but it’s good to see you again.’
Alexius smiled warmly. ‘I agree,’ he said. ‘Though the circumstances-’
‘I know,’ Gannadius agreed hastily. ‘Hardly ideal. Look, I’m sorry if this is an idiotic question, but when is this? Are we in the present, or is this the future, or what?’
Alexius thought for a moment. ‘I don’t think this is for a while yet; I mean, I haven’t been to see Bardas yet in real life, I haven’t even found out properly where he lives, just something vague about “in the mountains”, which could mean anything. I think this must be the future.’
‘I see,’ Gannadius said. ‘Well, in a way that’s reassuring. At least it suggests we’re going to have one. Are you well?’
Alexius nodded. ‘I believe so. It seems that discomfort and uncertainty and being chivvied about tend to agree with me, rather more so than comfort and tranquillity. I’d say I felt ten years younger if I knew when this is meant to be. And you?’
‘Oh, well, not so bad. Average, I suppose. Except, of course,’ he added, ‘for this problem I’ve got.’
‘Oh, yes? What’s that?’
Hellfire, he doesn’t realise. ‘Well,’ Gannadius said edgily, ‘it’s not the sort of thing I like to talk about with, er, this young lady present. Another time, perhaps.’
‘What? Oh, right, yes. We’ll have to try and make sure it’s after this one, then. Otherwise I won’t have a clue what you’re talking about.’
‘Alexius!’
‘I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be flippant, it’s just – w
ell, it’s all a bit ridiculous, isn’t it? Normal people write letters. I’m sorry; I’d better-’
– And Gannadius’ hands closed around the arms of his chair. His head felt as if someone had taken it for a fencepost and nailed a rail to it. ‘I say,’ he muttered, ‘that was really rather good. Did you, er, work out how to do that all by yourself?’
Machaera nodded happily. ‘It just sort of came to me,’ she said. ‘Only I got it wrong, of course,’ she added, suddenly remembering, and her face fell. ‘Perhaps it was because you were there this time-’
‘I see,’ Gannadius said, managing to keep his voice calm at least. ‘So the first time, the words were different.’
‘It was that old man and the other one talking,’ Machaera said, and she briefly summarised the conversation. ‘Sorry, does that mean I’ve – well, changed something?’
‘Nothing important, I’m sure,’ replied Gannadius, who was sure of no such thing. ‘That man I was talking to is called Alexius; he was my friend and superior back in Perimadeia. He was the Patriarch of the Foundation there.’ The girl looked suitably awed. ‘And,’ he went on without knowing why, ‘also probably the greatest authority in the world on, um, projections. We did a lot of research into the subject together.’
(And nearly got ourselves killed, and maybe actually caused the fall of the City in some ghastly way we don’t understand, and did who knows what other damage…)
‘That’s wonderful,’ the girl said. ‘Oh, do you think he’d mind terribly if I – well, talked to him? Myself, I mean. Just to ask him a few questions?’
