MISC: The Girl Who Saved the World part 61

[George Phillies]

“I’ll keep that in mind. And these are truly wonderful scones,” Krystal 
said.

“I’ll tell Allison you want the recipe.She will be delighted. But now I 
have a riddle for you.Did one of your people, perhaps two years back, 
put a geas on the Wells house?” Morgana asked.

“I can’t imagine why anyone would have done that. They were not of 
interest, other than the kidnapping that was solved, until very 
recently. Not that I have many people who can geas anything,” Krystal 
answered.

“This was a top-chord third level schema, perhaps touching fourth.It was 
a considerable nuisance to remove,” Morgana said.

“I see.”Krystal bit her tongue.The number of people who could place or 
remove a fourth-level construct was vanishingly small. “What did it do?”

“Nothing that made sense.” Margana took a deep sip of her coffee.“Janie 
had a City of Steel playing partner, a guy about her age, a boy named 
‘Joe’.The geas meant that you weren’t going to be very interested in 
exactly who he was, where he came from, how to contact him, or where 
else you might have met him. Janie knew who he was, but didn’t bother to 
tell her parents she had met him earlier.He was very interested in 
becoming a better City player, no matter how unpleasant the intermediate 
losses were. Playing Janie, the losses were substantial.”

“When did she meet him earlier?” Krystal said.

“Joe was the young man who rescued Janie and sister from the Perversion 
Circle, two years ago,” Morgana answered.“When I learned that, I did ask 
Janie the key question, legally speaking. Yes, I asked mentalically, so 
as not to annoy her parents. Some parents would be annoyed that I 
asked.Some would have become absurdly annoyed if the answer had been 
“yes”. In any event, he and Janie are not carrying on with each other.”

“Oh, good.She’s awfully young for that.Can you imagine the legal 
complications if they had been? She wouldn’t be available as a witness, 
and life gets complicated from there. Is his private persona private? 
What do his parents think of all this?” Krystal asked.After a moment, 
she made the connection. “If we don’t know who he is, how can we warn 
his parents, or protect him from Kamensky and friends?” Krystal wished 
that truly young personas were not involved. That situation could 
readily become extremely ugly.

“It perhaps matters. Two years back, on Castle Island, he made off with 
a Krell disruptor pistol. That’s the pistol that shot him, square into 
his shields, without his shields going down. He was ten or eleven at the 
time,” Morgana answered.

“A ten-year-old with a Krell pistol?” Krystal’s question was purely 
rhetorical. “Why not a strategic transmutation bomb, too? Hopefully he 
realizes it is not a toy? And how did his shields not go down?”

“I don’t know who his parents are,” Morgana answered. “I don’t know 
where he lives.The geas ensured that.It wouldn’t have blocked me, but I 
never met Joe to ask. I don’t know what he did with the pistol, the 
matching force field bracer, or why he was so interested in playing 
Janie. Extremely strong shields covers a great deal of uninformative 
ground.Asking him your questions requires that he shows up again to play 
Janie, which he has not done in several weeks.If you count, someone 
planted that geas.This kid has shields as good as yours, except he was 
perhaps ten at the time. Also, after Joe rescued Janie, something 
marched through the Castle Island Jail, exfoliated the kidnappers’ 
minds, and neutralized the Perversion Circle. That something that does 
not appear to have been Joe. There are some really first rate personas 
mmovingmoving near the Wells family, without leaving enough of a trace 
that I can identify them.”

LEAGUE OF NATIONS HERE


  Chapter Twelve

The Invisible Fortress

Morning

January 16, 2018

Unfortunately, yesterday evening was the night that the healing matrix 
decided that I should start ramping down the mind control, meaning I 
would feel a bit more pain, so the matrix would know exactly what it had 
to fix. I did what I was told, but I certainly can’t claim I was 
comfortable afterwards. I allowed that if I lay in my bed I was actually 
falling asleep a reasonable part of the time, even though I was very 
aware of the interminable minutes when I was too uncomfortable to sleep.

I finally got up and pulled all of my curtains tightly closed, so I 
would sleep through the sunrise into the next day. I did wake up in time 
for more stretching and bending exercises, hot shower and getting 
dressed, and finding that it was very definitely time for a very late 
breakfast. Chopped onions, chopped green pepper, chopped portobello 
mushrooms, chopped sausage, all sautéed in olive oil with garlic and a 
nice dose of curry powder, followed by two eggs whipped up with a bit of 
milk, and I had a nice omelette. The supply of multigrain toasted 
sunflower bread was unfortunately starting to go downhill, but I was 
very definitely not up to assuming my old lady disguise to go shopping. 
Perhaps I would have to start baking scones. They’re nice and simple. 
Even I can make them well. And I had a quite adequate supply of brown 
sugar and other components for the caramel frosting.

I went out to the barn, checked on ponies and cats, and was happy to 
learn the ponies and cats thought outdoors was just fine at the moment, 
so that I had no barn work, I still visited my ponies, hugged and 
curry-combed them, checked their hooves, and spent a while petting two 
cats. Then it was back to Liouville’s butterflies.

I can’t claim I’ve had a lot of experience dealing with people who lie 
out of habit. Mum gave me some abstract lessons. Yes, I’m a persona. 
I’ve met a few criminals. Most of them were dead afterwards. Some were 
less lucky. When I skimmed later parts of the book, it was really 
obvious that the people who did not want to believe the Liouville-Gibbs 
theorem were prepared to say almost anything in order to discredit it. I 
don’t know if they were lying out of habit, but they were certainly 
working hard at lying, for no particularly obvious reason. Indeed, one 
of the later chapters, one that I much enjoyed reading carefully, spent 
its time going through the arguments against the Liouville-Gibbs 
theorem, and explaining exactly how the authors of the arguments had 
cheated in making their cases. Learning how people cheat in arguments is 
good.

The book really wasn’t all that long, a couple-three hundred pages. The 
30 pages of theorem had been really demanding. That’s assuming ‘really 
demanding’ is a synonym for ‘mostly incomprehensible’. I was going to 
have to learn a fair piece to understand them. The 250 following pages 
were much, much easier. No one tried to prove the math was wrong. They 
just argued about what the math meant. Well, except for the strange 
chapter on the Dagger of Time. The Dagger is not the same as time 
travel, but it somehow ignores cause and effect because it lives 
sideways to the flow of time. The chapter was imprecise about whether 
the Dagger was an artifact or a person, or both. On the other hand, the 
chapter was very clear on why the Dagger appeared.It existed to correct 
side effects when people were using time travel. How could it be both an 
artifact and a person? The chapter was very obscure. It also didn’t seem 
to have anything to do with the rest of the book. The chapter author 
claimed to be a Prioress of the Goetic Knights, an office that ceased 
toxist thousands of years before the book was written,who said she had 
used time travel to make what appeared to be tiny changes that actually 
had the desired effects. The Dagger of Time cleaned up the minor issues 
the Prioress had left behind. Time travel requires enormous amounts of 
power.It was only on rereading an obscure sentence that I realized that 
the Prioress appeared to have used the Orb of RetCon.

GR, now I sort of understood what the book said. For sure I hadn’t 
learned the math parts. There were a bunch of places, like almost all of 
them, where I had to take the word of the author that the math actually 
did what she said it did. It was still a marvelously strange result. How 
could a world start out totally different than ours, and end up very 
nearly the same as the world we live in? I suppose the answer is that 
it’s the same as ‘a world almost like ours at the start can end up 
totally different at the far end’. A world that started like ours ends 
up very much like some other very different world, so people on that 
other world and its neighbors would see that totally different starting 
points could lead to almost the same present, the one they lived 
in.Those people are not in a special place, so our world has the same 
property.Some nearly-the-same presents very much like ours had very 
different pasts. Once I told myself that, I decided that the book’s 
conclusions actually were kind of obvious, even if I might never have 
thought of them myself. The “Ambassador of the United States of America” 
could then have been a cross-time traveler, except cross-time travel is 
impossible.

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