Conrad Starguard-The Radiant Warrior

by Leo Frankowski

  The Church had been working on calendar reform for a century, and things in Poland were not really absurd. At least we all agreed on which day was Sunday and what year it was. From what a merchant friend, Boris Novacek, tells me, in Italy it is possible to leave Venice in 1232, get to Florence in 1233, then go to Milan in 1231.

  Some people started the new year on Christmas, some a week later, and some on March first. For them, December really was the tenth month.

  Well, we had a standard yard. Given my own choice, I would have preferred to use a meter, but my liege lord had specifically ordered me to use his yard, the distance from his fingertip to his turned-away nose. This was shorter than a meter and slightly longer than the American yard.

  And we had a base-twelve numbering system. This was something that was sort of done to me at first, but I soon saw the advantages of the duodecimal system. Since twelve has more factors than ten, you run into infinitely repeating decimals less often. It often takes fewer digits to express large numbers and math just becomes easier to do.

  Since last winter, I had been carefully copying down every constant I could remember, and already I had several pages of them. The distance from the Earth to the Moon and to the Sun. The specific gravity of aluminum and how many centimeters to the American yard and all sorts of things. An engineer needs thousands of numbers, and much of what I did not remember, I could interpolate.

  Playing with numbers and all the constants, I was delighted to discover that a thousand (that is to say, 1728 in base ten) of our yards was almost exactly equal to an American mile! The American mile is almost equal to the old Roman mile, which was still somewhat in use.

  So, a dozen yards was a dozyard. Twelve dozyards was a twelmile and twelve of these was a mile.

  Going down, one twelfth of a yard was a twelyard. Divide that by twelve and you had a dozmil, and a mil was about half a millimeter.

  Another nice accident that happened was that a cubic yard of cold water weighed slightly under an American ton, and a thousandth of that, or one cubic twelyard, weighed just over an American pound. This gave us a standard of weight and volume. We had a ton, a pound, and a pint, which was the volume of a pound of cold water.

  In a few days, I came up with a complete set of weights and measures, all based either on our yard, or in the case of my electrical standards, on Avogadro's number. Our amp was actually related to the number of electrons flowing.

  The medieval day was divided into twelve hours, as was the night. But the day was measured from sunrise to sunset. This meant that an hour on Midsummer's day was three times longer than an hour on Christmas day. This made paying people by the hour a little silly. In fact, most men were hired by the day, and were paid half as much in the winter as they were in the summer.

  We obviously needed a clock, but when I set out to build one, I was annoyed to discover that I couldn't remember how an escapement worked.

  A grandfather clock has a weight which drives a series of gears that turn the hands. The speed of this turning is controlled, slowed down, by a pendulum. The escapement connects the pendulum to the gear train. It must also impart a little energy to the pendulum to make up for friction losses. I couldn't sketch one that I could convince myself would work.

  I was hard to live with for three days and then designed a new one. On the fast end of the gear train, I put a large drum with a zigzag groove running around it. A small wheel attached to the pendulum ran back and forth in the groove.

  The gears facing the way they have to, this meant that our pendulum didn't swing from side to side. It swung forward and back. Also, it didn't go tic-toc-tic. It went fump-fump-fump. But nobody here had ever seen a grandfather clock, so I didn't hear any Polack jokes.

  I also came up with a new system of time. Staying with the base-twelve standard, we had a twelve-hour day, rather than the usual twenty-four hour day. The clock was reset occasionally so that zero happened at dawn. This was at the nine o'clock position of a modern clock. At the equinoxes, three was at noon, with the fat hand pointing up, and six was at sunset. Midnight was nine, with the fat hand pointing down.

  There were four hands on the face, each moving twelve times faster than the one before. After the fat hand, which showed hours, there was a longer arrow for dozminutes, a wiggly hand that showed minutes, and a thin straight hand for twelminutes. Or, you could say that the fat hand went around once a day and the skinny hand went around once a minute. Just remember that our hour was a hundred-twenty modern minutes long, and our minute was as long as fifty modern seconds.

  When I got it built, using parts I had made at the brass works, I assembled them in the coffin the carpenters had made for me. I hadn't bothered trying to make anything small, and that coffin was a nice piece of furniture, even though I got sick of looking at it in my bedroom. I had a built in closet and a chest of drawers, anyway.

  It took about a week of TLC ("Tender, Loving Care" in the colorful slang of American engineers) to get it working reasonably well, and it never was accurate to more than one percent, but it was good enough. It had to be oiled daily (goose grease seemed to work best) and the weight raised just as often, but what the heck.

  I set the clock up by the south wall of the dining room, so the fat hand, which had a little sun on it, moved about with the position of the sun. People seemed to have very little difficulty reading it, or picking up the concept of standard time. I simply said that we would start work when the fat hand was here, eat dinner when it was there, and stop work when it was over there. Krystyana made sure that the kitchen staff served our meals according to the clock, and that was that. There are advantages to being a medieval lord. No committees!

  Our system of measuring angles naturally followed from this clock. Imagining a horizontal line drawn through the axle of the hands, you called out an angle as though it was a time of day as shown by the fat hand. A three o'clock angle was a right angle, and all angles were measured clockwise rather than counterclockwise, as is the modern way of doing it.

  I also designed a calendar, with four thirteen-week quarters and no months at all. New Year's Day happened on the winter solstice, and wasn't a day of the week. That is to say, it went Saturday, New Year's Day, Sunday. On leap years, there were two New Year's Days. This meant that the calendar for every year was the same, and should reduce confusion considerably. But I tabled it because I decided that I couldn't get away with it.

  I could get away with designing a system of weights and measures because there were so many of them that one more didn't make much difference. I could design a new clock because nobody had ever seen a clock before, not in Poland, anyway. But the Church had spent centuries fumbling with the calendar and it would take someone with a lot more weight than I had to push a new system through. Maybe once I beat the Mongols.

  Toward the end of January, I made my monthly visit to Okoitz. It was part of my contract with Count Lambert.

  I got there early in the morning, since my mount, Anna, can travel farther in half an hour than a peasant family can walk in two days.

  There was a commotion in the bailey when I got there, and Count Lambert waved me over to one of the peasant's rooms on the outer wall. "Some trouble here, Sir Conrad. Perhaps you should look at it."

  An entire family was lying in the bailey on the usual straw mattresses. They were all dead, with not a mark on them. A man, his wife, and four children lay peacefully as if asleep, their bodies cold and stiff. A fire had burned itself out, but these huts had straw roofs and the walls weren't all that well-sealed. I didn't see how it would be possible to asphyxiate in there. It hadn't been particularly cold, so I doubt they had all frozen to death.

  Food poisoning? I'd seen a woman get ptomaine once, and there had been nothing peaceful about it. There had been vomit all over the place!

  Some disease? That had to be it, but I'd never heard of a disease where the person didn't even know he was dying.

  I came out and said, "I'm mystified, my lord. All I can imagine is s
ome disease. Once these people are taken care of, have sulfur burned in there. Burn all their food stores, on the off chance that they somehow poisoned themselves. In fact, I'd suggest that you have all their belongings burned.

  "And fire up your sauna. After they're buried, and get that done today, everyone who has touched the bodies should clean themselves thoroughly. But all that is simply a precaution. I really don't know what killed them." Since I had touched the corpses, I stooped and washed my hands with snow.

  "It shall be as you say, Sir Conrad." Count Lambert nodded to one of his men, who went off to make arrangements. "There has been a lot of talk about witchcraft lately. Do you think . . . ?"

  "No, my lord, I don't. Any so-called 'witches' around are just a bunch of crazy old ladies. If they would eat properly, most of them wouldn't be senile."

  "But everyone knows about witches!"

  "Tell me, my lord, why is it that every witch you hear about is a poor miserable old hag? If they really had magical powers, wouldn't they make themselves into beautiful wealthy young women?"

  "You have a point there. I'll keep an eye out for beautiful young grandmothers who are rich."

  "Do that, my lord. Who were these people?"

  "You don't recognize them? That's Janina's family."

  Janina was one of the girls that I took with me to Three Walls from Okoitz. She was running the store there and was a close friend.

  "My God. It'll be rough telling her. Her whole family."

  "Not quite. Her little sister—Kotcha, I think she's called—had supper and spent the night with one of the other families. The poor child is in a very bad state."

  I remembered the kid now. Last winter she had become a good friend of Anna's, and together they had hauled logs in the snow. "Perhaps she should come back with me to Three Walls, my lord. She could live with Janina."

  "A good thought. We will ask the child about it after the funeral."

  I never did find out what killed those people.

  Interlude One

  I hit the STOP button.

  "So what killed them, Tom?"

  "I don't know. I can check it out if you wish."

  He turned on a keyboard and began typing.

  "With all our technology, why hasn't somebody developed some decent artificial-intelligence programs? It can't be all that difficult. Then you wouldn't have to use that silly keyboard," I said.

  "Such programs have been developed. I've just forbidden their use. Machine intelligence is dehumanizing to the people that use it. I like people and I want to live in a human world."

  "Aren't you exaggerating a bit?"

  "I don't think so. The ballet they put on last night. Did you enjoy it?"

  "Sure. It was great. What does that have to do with computers?"

  "Everything. That whole show could have been simulated by a computer and displayed in one of our tanks to a degree of accuracy such that you couldn't tell if it was real or not. Would it have been the same?"

  "Hmm . . . No, somehow I don't think so, but I'm not sure why."

  "Well I am. What makes ballet or any other art form worthwhile is the fact that it is done by people. When you watched the dancers, you were putting yourself in their place, imagining what they were thinking and feeling. A recording or transmission of that performance would not have been as good, because you would have been farther removed from the people doing it. A mere computer display of the same show would have been absolutely worthless."

  "But if you didn't know—"

  "Maybe you could have been fooled. But you would have been angry when you found out. Back to that dead family. It was an onion mold got them. Toxin 8771 from mold 15395, extinct in 1462. The really deadly ones don't last very long. Killing your host, or the people who cultivate your host, is bad ecology and not good for your own survival."

  He hit the START button.

  Chapter Three

  My monthly two-day visits to Okoitz were used to supervise the construction there, but just then there wasn't much to do. The cloth factory was shut down until spring. Without glass or a decent light, the only way you could work indoors was next to an open window, a little rough in this weather. At that, you could only get in six hours a day in good weather.

  I checked out the wet mill that sawed wood, worked hammers, and did all sorts of work. There were thousands of tons of water in there, and if it froze, the mill would be wrecked. I checked each of the tanks, but everything was still liquid. The walls of the mill were a half a yard thick at the thinnest, and that much wood is a good insulator even if it is wet. The windmill kept turning even when it wasn't in use, and my calculations had shown that the energy imparted should keep the water warm enough even in the worst weather. But theoretical calculations are often a long ways from reality! I was relieved.

  Work was progressing on the grain mill, but it was simpler than the wet mill we'd built last summer, and Vitold, the carpenter, needed no help from me.

  Quite a bit of logging was going on, mostly to clear land for pasturing more sheep. Count Lambert had been buying wool to keep his mill running, and he thought that this was stupid. They were using the steel saws I'd shown the smiths in Cieszyn how to make, but they didn't need my help.

  So I took a sauna to make sure that I wasn't carrying anything communicable, and then looked up Kotcha.

  I sort of fell into the position of Janina's sister's foster parent. Janina was living in my household, and in fact I slept with her some of the time, so I suppose that the relationship was a natural one. Kotcha was silent through the mass and funeral ceremony. The world can be very brutal when you're nine years old. After her family was in the ground, she wanted to talk to Anna.

  My mount was not an ordinary horse. She was a bioengineered creation from some advanced civilization somewhere. Or maybe I should say somewhen, because Anna said they were in the distant past and they used time machines, which she didn't understand. She couldn't talk, of course, but she could spell things out. She was intelligent in an odd sort of way, and she was a full member of my household. She even got paid like everybody else, not that she spends much of it. Most adults wouldn't believe any of this, but a nine-year-old girl has no such difficulty. They were good friends.

  "Kotcha, do you think that you would like to come to Three Walls with Anna and me?"

  "Where would I live?"

  "Why, in my household, with your sister and me and Anna."

  "Anna lives in your house?"

  "Some of the time, and it's more of an apartment than a house. Anna has a stall in the barn, too, but most of the time she sleeps in the living room."

  "Could I sleep with Anna?"

  "If you want to. Or you could sleep with your sister or even have a room of your own, except when we have company over. I bet you'd take good care of Anna. She gets a good grooming in the barn, but I've always felt that she deserves special care."

  Anna nodded her head, Yes. Then she tapped her right forehoof and scratched the ground with her left. We had this code worked out.

  "You want something that you want to pay for," I said to Anna. "You mean you want to hire Kotcha?"

  Yes.

  "Well, what do you think, Kotcha? Do you want the job?"

  "Yes!"

  "Good. Does a penny a week sound all right to both of you?"

  Yes and "Yes."

  "Then the two of you have a deal, and you might as well start now. Give Anna a good rubdown. If you need anything, I'll be at the castle. Remember that you're in my household now, Kotcha. You can always come to me with problems."

  Giving her something to do was probably the best thing for the kid. Physical activity is usually the best therapy for someone whose problems have no real solution. Nothing in the world could bring her family back, and the best thing to do was to forget.

  At the same time, it was sort of funny. Lord! It was strange enough when my handmaids got handmaids. Now my mount had a private rubdown girl!

  * * *

  Back at
the castle, I asked Count Lambert if I could take off early, since there wasn't much for me to do.

  He had other ideas. He handed me a cup of wine and sat me down. "Sir Conrad, last summer you talked of various flying machines, and how most of them were too complicated for us to assay to build. But my mind has been turning over that 'hot air balloon' you mentioned. I see no reason why we couldn't make one.

  "I have bolts of good linen cloth, plenty of rope, and most of that barrel of linseed oil left. There is a pile of wicker for the basket you mentioned, and I've a big, light brass serving-tray that would do to hold the fire. My wife bought it but I never use it. What say you?"

  Lord. Another fad coming up. I could see it. Now that every knight in Poland was flying kites, Count Lambert had to upstage them all with a hot air balloon. But kites at least were safe. There's no telling where a balloon will come down. A man could drown, if he didn't fall out.

  "My lord, this sort of thing is dangerous. You can't control a hot air balloon. You go wherever the winds blow you, and the winds up there can be pretty fierce! You could end up in the Baltic Sea!"

  "Well, what of it? You're the one who's been taking all the chances lately. Didn't we decide that last month?"

  "Count Lambert, your support has meant everything to me and my projects. Without it, I might never get things going well enough to fight the Mongols in eight years."

  "That's touching but no longer true. It might have been, a year ago, but now you have the support of Duke Henryk. I suspect that if I died, he just might give all my lands to you, and let my wife go hang in our lands in Hungary. Isn't it enough for me to say that I want this balloon?"

  I exhaled. When Count Lambert wanted something, he got it. To try going against him was pissing into the wind. "As you wish, my lord. You want me to design a hot air balloon?"

  "Of course! What have I been saying? Just a small one, enough to take me alone high above the hills and trees!"