Chapter 16 Hat

        Conley just had to smile when she saw Roween. She'd really done it rather well, but not because she'd planned it that way, it was all through sheer naïveté. Her hair was perfect, she'd bleached it first then washed in a golden tint; it was now roughly the same shade as Conley's natural ash. Her face was a gem of teenage exuberance, colours too strong, too richly applied, no blending, no subtlety whatsoever, just a block. Conley reminisced: she'd been the same herself, ten years ago, experimenting with twinky illusions, trying to forge a vision of herself as she wished to be understood. Roween looked the consummate fifteen year- old.
        She was also clearly embarrassed at her ineptitude. "I think maybe you should have put it on for me, I'm not really used to this..."
        "No, no Roween, it's just right, I wouldn't change a thing." She paused a moment, raised a fingertip to her lips. "Except I think I might be able to..." She reached for one of the paintboxes, selected a pale near- white that contrasted with the greeny-brown Roween had used on her eyelids. "Close your eyes, I'll just dab some highlight here and here - yes, there, that's an improvement."
        Roween picked up the handmirror, looked. Conley had placed the lighter tinge slightly off-centre, closer to her nose; the effect was to lessen the impact of her squint. She half-laughed, nodded. "That is better."
        Conley replaced the applicator. "So you haven't used cosmetics much before? You've always been immune to magic?"
        Roween slumped in a chair, gazed around the room. "No, not always, only the past four or five years. But before then, I scorned makeover spells anyway."
        "Now that's interesting." Conley perched on the edge of the bedside table. "If you could have used illusion to uncross your eyes, why didn't you?"
        Roween stared out of the window, over the rooftops of Rhiev. "Why should I? I am who I am, I don't want to be someone else. People who wear masks all the time do so for one of two reasons: they yearn to be something they're not, or they want to manipulate others."
        Conley was about to argue, stopped herself. Roween looked the part of a moody, immature girl, but she was actually her senior. "I didn't mean to offend you, Ro, it's just that, well, you have this obsession with your eyes..."
        "And I have every right!" She turned, burning. "People with straight eyes pretty them up, aim for some superior `perfect' look, then assume for themselves that superiority. But the more they do that, the more they lower the likes of me; folk who are different become folk who are flawed. It's not fair - and it's not honest! Why do you wear grey lenses? Why do you lighten your hair?"
        "I - I've never thought", confused. "Because I like being attractive? I suppose I have a mild sense of power, in a way - what you implied by `manipulate'? But I could do more, really it's minimal. I'm not sure."
        Roween sensed her own anger, relaxed, smiled. "Oh sorry, Con, my fault, it just fires me sometimes. I must've spent too long in Elet!" She stood, laughed. "Come on, let's go out, it's gloomy in here and the world is a safe place today."

* * *


        It was warm, summery, and to Conley's delight Roween had at last eschewed her greatcoat in favour of an Akrean smock. Conley had sent her out for it alone the previous evening, as the best way of ensuring she'd get something that made her look like she was still growing. The ploy had certainly worked: the chosen garment finished off Roween's disguise to ideal.
        Now, of course, Conley wished she'd gone along too, bought something for herself. It wasn't that her clothes didn't fit in - Cala fashions owed more to Rhiev than to Taltu - it was just that she'd never seen such glittering shops before, could only marvel. Each was like one of Hease and Eller's specialist departments, dealing in one, narrow product line - only here they carried every variety imaginable. Small boutiques were crammed with exotic goods: Ca-Atlan coffee, leather riding boots, old coins and military insignia, savouries, fabrics, silk shirts, hats, floral perfumes, Davian sheet music, local lace, porcelain, jade, Berean bronzes four hundred years old, wines from Chaien, silver thimbles - if you can afford silver for a thimble, why sew? - Panavian quilts, beadwork, carved wooden figurines, old-time dolls... Some of the windows had the glass curved away, like it was cut from a cylinder, no reflections. And these weren't even the fanciest streets, there were arcades with beadles who wouldn't let you in unless you were formally dressed.
        "What do you think of Porett?" Roween asked.
        "Porett?" She'd been watching the pastry-seller on the other side of the street. "In what way?"
        "Oh, just general. Do you like him?"
        She clicked her tongue. "Well he's no great looker, not a total disaster I suppose, but he wears his hair back like this," she demonstrated, "and he has the mangliest beard I ever saw." She nodded. "He's just being individual, though, old-fashioned in an eccentric kind of way. Yes, I'd say I like our Porett."
        "I remember him from when he was a student; he was much the same then. Does he have a girlfriend?"
        "A girlfriend?" She frowned, smiled. "You know, I haven't ever thought... No, I can't see it, he doesn't have the time. Besides, he's guarded by his secretary, and she's so stuffy I doubt anyone could even get her to a dinner table, let alone a bed."
        Roween nodded. "That's what I'd have expected. What about his personality? Does he really like what he does?"
        Conley wagged her finger. "Now come on, Roween, not more of this `magic corrupts' stuff! Porett lost both parents young, and that's enough to turn anyone peculiar. Besides, I think he'd have succeeded at whatever he did, he's got that kind of mentality. He would certainly have excelled at anything rule-based - law, medicine, navigation - and his single- mindedness would have propelled him into a position of power whatever career he chose. Magic was just the horse, not the rider."
        "But law and the rest have formal, written, ethical codes. Where's the equivalent for magic? The only morality Porett knows is what he acquired when he was cutting convoluted, prickly gesture segs as a year 3 undergrad: selfishness, and the supremacy of knowledge."
        "He's a damn more ethical than - " She broke off. "What's going on ahead?"
        A man was standing on a box outside a light set shop, addressing a crowd assembled before him.
        "Just some religious crazy, let's cross the - "
        "No, wait, I want to hear what he's saying." She touched Roween's arm, stopped.
        He was speaking in a rich baritone, trained, charged with charisma. "And so I say to you: let the Messenger into your heart, as I did! Feel the joy, the euphoric joy, when he takes your troubles as his own. For the Messenger is the well of living water from which this rapture flows."
        "Rapture! The rapture!" sang out a voice.
        He snatched on it. "Aye, the rapture! The rapture of change, for I am a changed man, a man full of love where once I was empty of all but hatred. I have changed, changed from a wasted soul to a man complete. All things exist to change!"
        "They do, they do!"
        "Pray to the Messenger, that he may gain from your strength as you do from his! Meet the gods, here," he pounded his left breast, "know them, choose one to be your special! Develop your relationship, let it grow, as your faith will grow, that you too may be born anew!"
        "Ast, of the sun!"
        "Ried, the sky lord!"
        He held out his arms, calmed them, pastorally. "The Party of the Message has three candidates at the forthcoming - "
        Conley sneered, crossed the street to where Roween was waiting.
        "Well, Con, you believe any of that stuff?" She took her hands out of her pockets.
        "Incoherent, disconnected tosh! I'd have to have a brain of putty!"
        A sigh. "Unfortunately for us, lots of people do..."

* * *


        They'd stopped at a pavement café, bought two frothy coffees and a mid-morning roll.
        "I've been watching the other waiter," Conley announced between sips. "He seems a real soury."
        "What do you mean?" She was waiting for her own drink to cool.
        "Well, he never smiles, but he has this sort of permanent smirking attitude, like he knows something we don't."
        "Probably does, or at least thinks he does. I've noticed there are two types of Akreans: menacingly polite ones like him - they're the Message lot - and ones like our waiter, doom-aware but sad, ultimately helpless."
        "I don't know which is worse."
        She stirred the coffee. "And all because of magic..."
        Conley suddenly snapped. "I've had enough of this, Roween! Look, you have to tell me more, it's only fair! I know practically nothing!"
        The outburst caught her unprepared. "I, but there's so much, I have to think, I can't simply - "
        "Well just give me the beginning then! What was it happened four years ago that gave you your magic-deadening skills?"
        Roween leaned forward, almost covered her eyes with her hand, remembered the artificial face, drummed on the table instead. "Can't put it off forever, I suppose. We'll go to the park, less ears there." She picked up the cup, drained it in one continued swig.

* * *


        They were walking along the edge of an ornamental lake heat- hazed in the noonday sun. Carp swam lazily in the clear, clean waters, couples in rowboats heedless of their presence, eyes only for one another. Roses grew by the side of the path: neatly pruned bushes, heavy with heads of pale pink, scarlet, soft orange. It was a scene deliberately calculated to inure serenity, yet too weak to influence Conley: she was edgy, impatient, waiting for answers...
        "How many clicks we have left?" asked Roween.
        She fingered the well in her pocket. "Just under six hundred, although I could have spent the lot this morning!"
        "When we leave here, we'll have to convert it, gold and gems. They don't have them further west."
        "Click-wells? Or gold and gems?"
        "Either... I got some stuff of Medreph's stashed in a pouch, should see us through if there's anything unforeseen comes up; it's quite a sum."
        They skirted the lake a little further. There were other people around, sparing them glances, looking them up and down, but no more than Conley was used to. She hid a secret glee that they could wander through a park in the heart of Rhiev, momentous religious and political upheaval in the air, and yet pass for Akreans, no-one even suspecting. Had Roween done it before? Perhaps that was why she bobbed her hair? She'd maybe scythed off the bleached ends from the last time she was here?
        "What do you know about spell-proving, Con?"
        "What do I know?" She was surprised. "All there is to know! Spell-proving was the subject of my thesis! It was me who worked out the length-formulation test that everyone uses, so you can prove all those multi- K spells without their blowing up in your face."
        Roween nodded, assenting. "The general rule is that each of the five principal gestures is assigned one of three types. They usually use colours - red, green and blue. Fist and wrist are green, palm is blue, fingers and point are red. For a spell to be safe to use, the total number of gestures credited to one of the three colours mustn't be less than half the overall number of gestures. If they're all below, then the spell may still be safe, but it'll more likely explode - taking with it your hand, maybe your whole body, your mind, anything else close by."
        "Very good. The specific rule I developed is that it's not the total number that matters, it's the lengths of sequences. You count consecutive gestures of the same colour, subtracting one from the length of each series, and total those decremented lengths rather than the individual gestures. If it comes to half or more, the spell is still safe. It means many big spells, with a lot of gestures, can still be proved reliable. Before, they could be very close to having the right balance, but the large number of gestures would tend to normalise the distribution, so no single colour would dominate. My work chops away the spurious figures you get for individual, isolated colours, and brings the computation more into line with reality."
        "There are still working spells that are not provable within that system, though."
        Conley rocked her hand. "Yes, it's a necessary condition for success, but not alone sufficient. Tighter than the old way, nonetheless. For example, prosthetic-oriented spells used to be unproven, as were ones that altered living body tissue. People took big risks doing augmentations. Now, replacements on dead meat are provably safe, so if you want stronger muscles then you swap your existing ones for thetics. No-one bothers chancing death by souping up actual attached limbs any more; it's likely they'd have no problems if they did, but no-one can ever quite be sure unless it's proven..."
        "And you designed this new proof system all yourself? No help from anyone?"
        Conley was about to reply with indignance, but something about Roween's demeanour told her it wasn't worth it. She drooped her shoulders. "I don't think so, no. It didn't seem like it at the time, but afterwards I realised that I might have been fed a lot of the leads, guided towards the solution. I thought maybe my father had really discovered the technique, though he denies it." She sighed. "But I guess I'm - no, I know it: I'm a fraud, Ro."
        They meandered beneath the leafy shade of silver birches, the light breeze rustling their branches, carrying away the sound of hoof on cobblestone from the streets ringing the park.
        "So do you know whose original work it was, then?"
        "No, I don't - I wish I did. I just want to tell them I'm sorry." There was a sadness in her voice that wrenched at Roween, more strongly even than had her tale of childhood despair.
        "You were used, Con, don't reproach yourself." She reached for where her pocket should have been, snapped her fingers in annoyance when she remembered her coat was back in the hotel. "I'm going to tell you something, but first I have to present my credentials. We better sit down."
        There was a bench beneath one of the trees at the edge of the copse, positioned to unveil a grand vista down a lime-outlined avenue, statuesque fountain at the end.
        "The best segments, the ones in the libraries, they're the colourless ones, like Chewt-Farmer, right?"
        Conley looked across to her, trying to pay attention, still downcast by her admission, not understanding fully why she'd made it. She felt so shabby. "Yes, er, they have roughly the same count in all colours, so there's a minimal effect on overall totals. Some have variants, biased a little to favour a particular colour."
        "Well, what about sequences that are monochrome? Fist, wrist, fist, wrist, fist, wrist?"
        Conley puffed her cheeks, let out the air. "They might do something on their own, but most would be pretty useless except for fine- tuning spells of that colour, or ones so far over to another they'd make no odds."
        "What if they were provably useless? What if you could guarantee that they didn't do anything at all, ever, no matter what other gestures surrounded them?"
        Conley was curious. "What do you mean?"
        "If you look at blue spells, ones dominated by palms, the main work is done by short groups of five or six gestures, glued together. You rarely see blue segments more than about twenty long because they don't do anything, they're inert."
        "Yes, that's true, I'd noticed that."
        "Now there are many gluing triplets, all genuinely colourless. They take the form RGB, RBG, BRG, BGR, GRB and GBR. So, what if you had RGB, then a thousand blues, then BGR to bring it back to red."
        "Well if the RGB came at a glue point, so the earlier gestures didn't affect it, you'd get a binding sequence a thousand and six long that did life all."
        "And what if you spliced that into a spell that was five-hundred long and not provably safe?"
        Conley was stunned. You'd get a fifteen-hundred spell that was way over half blue, but with the active parts unchanged. The same trick could bring any sequence into safety, colourless, multi-coloured, whatever. She felt her jaw drop, couldn't stop it. She realised she looked a complete idiot gaping like that, but her mind was reeling with the implications. Maybe she really was an idiot? "Hot, Ro," she gasped, "why haven't you told anyone this before?"
        "Because the last time I told anybody anything like that, they ripped me off."

* * *


        Conley wasn't as devastated as she thought she should have been; she was quite calm, really. It was a relief to know, at last. It was also very humbling. Roween was in a different league as far as magical research went; she could never hope to match her. All the searching, the travelling, well, at least it had taught her a lesson. She'd have harsh words to say to her father when she arrived back home.
        Roween was slumped in a corner, watching her pack. She was tearful, but had made no attempt to stop her. A green-brown streak traced her cheek. Conley couldn't help but pity her, she looked so defenceless. How does she always manage to do that? She tried a smile. Roween opened her mouth, couldn't seem to say anything.
        "It's for the best, Ro. You're in the clouds compared to me. I'll stay with Porett Technologies, take up some managerial post, sink into well-deserved oblivion." She felt upset herself, now. "Don't worry, I won't tell anyone about your latest discovery."
        "Please don't go, Con." Roween looked away, biting at her bottom lip, innocent of the gloss that coated it.
        "I must, Ro." She realised she'd stopped putting her kit into the saddlebags. "I've stolen from you once, I won't do it again, don't let it trouble you."
        "You didn't steal, it's not your fault, you didn't know. And I don't care if you take anything else, it won't matter a damn soon as someone else figures gestures are worth toss."
        "That story you told me in the cave, you still stick by it?"
        "It's true, Con. Come to Liagh Na Laerich: if I'm right, we save everything; if I'm wrong, shows I'm not as infallible as you think."
        Conley gazed down at her pack, started to fill it again. "Find someone else, Ro, not me. I'm broken." She pulled at a strap. "Just one thing, though, before I go, you have to tell me, would it have worked?"
        "Would what have worked, Con?"
        "If I'd discovered how you killed spells, could I have inverted it, found a way to extend them?"
        She waited for a reply. None came. So, Roween would deny her even that? She tarried awhile longer. No, time to leave. She turned: Roween was scribbling frantically on a scrap of paper. Her eyes were dry, wide. She looked up at Conley.
        "Hot, Con, you could! I never thought of that."
        Conley blinked.


Copyright © Richard A. Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk)
21st January 1999: isif16.htm