MISC: The Girl Who Saved the World Part 54

[George Phillies]

There had been a time, right after mom threw me out of the house, when I 
was panicked about where I would get money. Fortunately I already had 
another persona ready. /Pointelisme /flew, teleported, was very good at 
long-range telepathy, had extremely solid force fields, and was very 
good with tools, just like me.After all, she is me. Close-in solar 
observatories run into technical problems, but very few persona are 
comfortable flying into the solar corona to fix them. The people who 
hired me could tell I was completely comfortable with viewing the sun at 
a million miles. I did not mention that I was completely comfortable 
because three months ago Mum and I had flown to the core of the sun just 
to see what was there. I got to use ultravision to look at the solar 
deep structures. Yes, I have a real headache afterward, but I can use 
ultravision. Notwithstanding the dozen past technical human 
civilizations that have studied them, people really do not understand 
what the solar core structures are, other than that they are highly 
regular, huge, not made of physical matter, and gradually change in time.

A reasonable solar observatory costs five billion dollars to construct, 
another billion dollars to get into low solar orbit even with persona 
help, and tends to break down. The people who hired me were delighted to 
pay a large sum of money in cash, provide me with the tools, and walk me 
through everything I would need to do. Pointelisme’s garb is opaque 
everywhere, not to mention not vaguely formfitting. They had no idea who 
I am. Everything worked almost perfectly, except half the bolts were 
seriously stuck. It is truly wonderful what telekinesis can do to 
amplify the torque your screwdriver is applying, in a way which 
absolutely for sure will not damage the head of the screw. I switched 
out bad modules for good modules, looked carefully at everything to see 
if anything else was going wrong – rather I looked carefully and the 
three people watching through my eyes checked if anything else was going 
wrong – and came back to earth. I now have in my subbasement an 
extremely large amount of cold cash. Cartwheels and gold thalers are so 
much better than bank transfers or paper money. If you are careful to 
heat treat them, there is absolutely no way they can be traced, which is 
why vast numbers of people insist on using them.

It was a perfectly respectable walk out to the barn, and would’ve been 
considerably more of a walk if we had had a half-foot of snow. I say 
‘barn’ but the lower level is a three-and-a-fraction-sided shelter, 
while the top level is enclosed.The land is low enough that we do not 
get snow very often, never more than a half foot, and besides snow 
shoveling is superb exercise. Snow does mean that the horses prefer that 
I feed them.I spotted my Appaloosas in the lower pasture grazing. That 
pasture had gone to seed in the fall, so they would have had plenty to 
eat, even if there had been two feet of snow on the ground.

I momentarily remembered a peculiarity of history.There are perfectly 
adequate numbers of references, a few thousand years ago, that if you 
leave a horse with a big pile of barley it will eat itself to death. 
Modern horse breeders think horses are not that stupid.I decided not to 
call the horses while I mucked out the barn. Some work was needed. The 
weather had been bad enough that the horses had taken shelter for a day 
or so.Medico said ‘emphatic yes’ on the work as exercise; it kept 
various bad things from happening where I had deep bruises. Every so 
often, I simply had to stop until the pain receded. Cleaning was a real 
chore, even with the robot wheelbarrow, because I really had to lift 
everything close to one-armed. . Spreading hay afterward was also not a 
great deal of fun. Yes, telekinesis would’ve made it a whole lot easier, 
but I don’t use my gifts at home if I can possibly avoid it.The gift you 
do not call cannot be detected.My mind control on me, suppressing the 
pain, was not avoidable

Toward the end I had a feline audience. The two barn cats realized I was 
back and were watching from a safe distance while I went about my work. 
After all, Bluebell and Columbine were quite certain that once I was 
done cleaning up the barn I would give them treats, scratch their 
stomachs, and comb their fur. I did go up the stairs to the perch where 
they had their nest.There was a considerable pile of straw, clear hints 
that they had found this, that, and the other thing to line it inside, 
and at the far end of the perch a neat stack of tails where various 
rodents had contributed to feline diets.The automatic cat feeder 
appeared to be working just fine. Its storage hopper was good for 
another several weeks, by which time I wouldn’t mind hauling a 30 pound 
sack of cat food from the house. I have fixed the feeder once, and can 
fix it again, but working with tools is going to be a chore until my 
shoulder heals.


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