Love's Labor's Won (34 page)

She found herself dividing her time between Caleb in the mornings, and Frieda in the afternoons. Emily had never really had a chance to explore Cockatrice City, so she wrapped a glamor around herself and took Frieda down to see it. It was far smaller than any city on Earth, but it was blossoming rapidly. Hundreds of cheap houses and apartment blocks had been erected, while shanty towns were being taken down and rebuilt as people moved in from the countryside in hopes of finding employment. And there were opportunities everywhere. A peasant runaway from the next barony could train as a carpenter, a blacksmith, a printer, a steam engineer...

It made her think of what America might have been like in the days after independence from the British crown. There was fearsome injustice, but there was also a sense of hope, a sense that immigrants could work and become part of a new nation. Cockatrice was older, of course, but it had changed remarkably in two years. And much of it was due to the influence she’d had on the country.

“They seem to like putting up notices,” Frieda said, indicating a large billboard someone had erected by the side of the pavement. “Why?”

“Because now half the population can read,” Emily said. “It lets them spread the word quicker than hiring a herald.”

She scanned the billboard, unable to conceal her amusement. It was littered in advertisements for everything from printing services to legal advice, as well as warnings from the Town Council. One note warned that anyone who threw slops into the streets would be forced to clean them with their bare hands. It wouldn’t be pleasant, Emily knew, but it was necessary. Cockatrice, like most of the other cities on the Nameless World, had serious problems with sanitation. Diseases bred and spread where people didn’t wash their hands, let alone bathe; people needed to boil water and clean up waste in the streets to avoid catching something nasty.

Besides, there’s a use for human waste in making gunpowder
, she thought.
The trick was finding a way for someone to profit in cleaning up the waste
.

Frieda didn’t seem to like the city very much, Emily discovered, although she couldn’t say she was surprised. Frieda had grown up in a tiny village before she’d moved to Mountaintop; a city with over a hundred thousand inhabitants was far too large for her. Eventually, they walked back to the castle, with Emily checking on Markus and Melissa before going to bed.

The following morning, she finally managed to chat with Caleb about steam engines.

“There are times when magic can be unreliable,” she said, once they were sitting in her workroom with full mugs of Kava. “A magician who doesn’t
want
to cast a spell may find himself incapable of casting it. Random factors and glitches can throw off any spell, if not handled properly. Technology, on the other hand, always produces the same results, time and time again.”

“So does magic, if handled properly,” Caleb objected.

“Not
all
magic,” Emily said. “There are some spells that demand a virgin caster” — she’d never realized Caleb could blush so brightly — “and others that insist they can only be cast by male or female magicians. Technology does not make any such demands. As long as you get it right, it will work.”

“Spells can be rewritten,” Caleb said, stubbornly. “But would that make them the same spells?”

“Good question,” Emily said. She took a sip of Kava, then picked up a sheet of paper and began to draw. Imaiqah had neatened up her original diagrams considerably, back when she’d just started; even now, no one would ever credit Emily as a draftswoman. “This is a pan of water, bubbling over a fire. Notice the steam coming up from the water.”

“I see,” Caleb said. “I thought it was a cow eating grass.”

Emily blinked, but realized she was being teased. “As the water boils, it emits steam,” she said. “In fact, the water is expanding to the point it becomes hot vapor. With me so far?”

Caleb nodded.

“So if you happen to seal the pan,” she continued, drawing a lid over the pan, “what happens?”

“The water keeps becoming steam,” Caleb said. He shook his head, doubtfully. “And then...?”

“The pan bursts,” Emily said. “The water keeps expanding, pushing against the metal, until something finally breaks. It needs somewhere to go and, eventually, it makes a way out.”

“I see,” Caleb said. “You can’t slow this from happening?”

“Not without magic,” Emily said. She’d had to learn the hard way when she’d found herself having to cook her own meals on Earth. “Point is, the steam has to go somewhere.”

She picked up a second piece of paper and drew out another pan, with a pipe leading up and out into the air. “You can steer the steam by providing a way for it to escape,” she continued, as she added steam to the diagram. “The steam expands along the path of least resistance, but the pressure never reaches a point where the pan explodes because the steam is escaping.”

Carefully, she drew out a wheel and placed it in front of him. “In this diagram, the steam pushes the wheel as it struggles to follow the path of least resistance. The wheel turns, which, through the
science
of clockwork, is linked to another set of wheels. Eventually, the steam can be used to move an entire train.”

“It doesn’t look as though it could produce enough power,” Caleb said, doubtfully.

“You rode on the train,” Emily said. “It didn’t need magic to work.”

“No, it didn’t,” Caleb said. “But I still have problems imagining it.”

“The first models we produced were ramshackle things,” Emily said. “They leaked steam, they only inched forward at the same pace as an elderly snail, but the designers eventually solved some of the problems and the trains moved faster. Now, they’re planning designs that will actually be able to outrun a horse.”

“That seems unlikely,” Caleb said.

“Maybe not in the short term,” Emily said. “But horses get tired. A steam train does not. Horses have limits to what they can carry; a steam train has limits, but they’re much higher than any horse. Given time, there will be a network of rails running between cities, each one carrying goods and services from one place to another.”

“Like the portals,” Caleb said. He looked down at the sheet of paper. “Assuming your steam train could move at the speed of the average horse, it would take roughly nine hours to travel from here to Beneficence. However, I could step through a portal and arrive instantly.”

“That would be true, in the short term,” Emily said. “But portals require a great deal of magic to set up, while you can’t move anything larger than a cart or a coach through them. A steam train would still have a very definite advantage.”

She smiled. “There are other possibilities,” she added. “The price of certain items tends to go up, the further the distance they have to travel. Steam trains will cut down that distance, allowing prices to fall.”

“But they could still be brought through portals,” Caleb protested.

Emily smiled. “In bulk?”

Sergeant Miles had discussed portals at some length, when he’d talked about logistics. It wasn’t easy to set up a portal — two spells had to resonate together perfectly — and there were limits to how much could be stuffed through the spells. Something small and expensive, like Basilisk Blood, could be moved through the portals without incurring any economic penalty, but something that had to be moved in bulk was often easier to move by land or sea, rather than through the portals.

And besides
, she thought,
the magicians who make the portals charge highly for their services
.

“I take your point,” Caleb said. “But what about the long-term effects?”

“The world gets smaller,” Emily said. “But maybe not as small as you would think.”

Caleb looked at her. “I don’t understand.”

Emily sucked in her breath. She knew what had happened on Earth, but while the Nameless World was primitive in many ways, it had enjoyed the benefits of magic.

“The average person” — she gritted her teeth, remembering Hodge — “doesn’t see much beyond his own horizons,” she said. “A relatively tiny percentage of the entire population travels from place to place; only aristocrats, soldiers and magicians really see large parts of the world. The average peasant in the fields doesn’t know anything about the world on the other side of the mountains, nor would he care if you tried to tell him about it.”

“That’s true,” Caleb said. “My father always said that peasants were resistant when the time came for them to move.”

“He would be asking them to give up their homes and farms,” Emily pointed out. “And if they don’t believe in the threat, why would they want to move?”

She shrugged, and went on. “If railways keep expanding, more and more people will be able to travel without leaving everything behind. It will become easier for people to go on holiday to somewhere else, perhaps somewhere hundreds of miles away, and return to their homes. So many people from so many different places, intermingling, will have all sorts of effects.”

Caleb frowned. “I met people from all over the world at Stronghold, then Whitehall.”

“They were a tiny percentage of the population,” Emily said. “How many people from Cockatrice visit Alexis on a daily basis? I’d be surprised if
any
of them had visited the city more than once in their entire lives.”

“I see, I think,” Caleb said. “But news spreads faster, too.”

“That’s true,” Emily said. “And peasants in nearby estates are seeing what I’ve done for my peasants, and are growing restless.”

“You may have a problem with that, in the future,” Caleb warned. “I don’t think the other barons will thank you for stealing their peasants away.”

“They won’t,” Emily agreed. “But I can’t do anything to stop it — and they would be wise not to try.”

Caleb looked down at her drawings. “All that from...
this
? It looks so simple!”

“Most technology is nothing more than new applications of old concepts,” Emily said. “Waterwheels work on the same basic principle, using water rather than steam, and they’ve been around for generations. But it’s not the only change, of course. Two years ago, it was a rare peasant who could sign his own name. Now, millions of people are learning to read and write using my letters and numbers.”

She sighed. “The average peasant family would send a daughter to another family, perhaps in the next village, and never hear from her again,” she added. It wasn’t a pleasant thought, if only because she knew Frieda would probably have met that fate, if she hadn’t had enough magic to win a place at Mountaintop. “Now, the daughter can write home to her parents, if she wishes. Ideas will spread far quicker than they can be stopped.”

Caleb eyed her. “And that’s a problem?”

“It could be,” Emily said. “If the daughter was being mistreated, she could ask for help. Or if someone in the next village hears that a different baron is asking for less tax, or life in a city is so much better than being a farmer, word could spread rapidly. The effects will be unpredictable.”

She looked directly at him. “And someone who sees my steam engine may have the insight to turn it into something even more workable.”

“And you don’t mind that,” Caleb observed. “Why not?”

“Because...because I am not the only person who can have ideas,” Emily said. There was the additional problem that
none
of her ideas were even remotely original, but she let that pass. “You might see the steam engine, then develop an improvement; I might see your improvement, and come up with an additional improvement of my own. The really smart engineers who have devised the latest steam engines wouldn’t have done so without me...”

“They stand on your shoulders,” Caleb said.

“
Yes
,” Emily said. “And the people who come after them stand on
their
shoulders. And, because the laws of technology work for everyone, I couldn’t stop them even if I tried.”

“The same thing happens with magic,” Caleb said. “You looked at the spell mosaics and came up with your own ideas.”

“I wouldn’t have if you hadn’t showed them to me,” Emily pointed out. “How many magicians willingly decline the protection of the Sorcerer’s Rule?”

“Not many,” Caleb said.

“Someone could try to duplicate your work,” Emily continued. “But they would waste a great deal of time in merely reinventing your project. If you showed them what you had, they would advance faster...”

“Which might not be in my interests,” Caleb said. “I wouldn’t get the credit for their work.”

“And at what point,” Emily asked, “does it stop being
your
work?”

She sighed, inwardly. Could whoever had designed the first personal computer claim credit for himself or would he need to pass it back to Edison or Tesla or even Benjamin Franklin? Or, if someone ever cracked FTL, would he or she have to credit Albert Einstein with the invention? There might be hundreds of Great Men out there, ready to start turning out new inventions, but how could they proceed without basing themselves on the work of their predecessors?

Lightning rods
, she thought, remembering Franklin.
I will have to introduce them, soon enough, and see what happens
.

“I see your point, I think,” Caleb said. “But I don’t think many magicians will agree.”

Emily shrugged. “It may not matter,” she said. Perhaps, one day, she would set up a research university, somewhere that combined magic and science. “Science marches on.”

“So I see,” Caleb said. “But people like my father won’t be impressed.”

“He should be,” Emily said. “Think of the advantages of being able to move troops from one end of the country to the other in the space of a few short hours.”

“I will mention it to him,” Caleb said.

“Good,” Emily said. She settled back in her chair, and smiled at him tiredly. “Do you have a moment to go over wards?”

“Of course,” Caleb said. “I don’t have much to do until the Grandmaster gets back to us.”

“I’m sorry,” Emily said.

“Don’t be,” Caleb said. “I get to explore the Faire, catch up on my reading, and stay away from my family.”