Michael Flynn: In the Lion’s Mouth

“Did I ask ye whether it be locked or nae; or did I tell ye to open it?”

“Cu!” Graceful Bintsaif pulls a device from her belt pouch and places it against the door plate. The light on it turns from red to green and the door slides open in its accustomed manner.

The lavatory is empty, of course. On the vanity a voice synthesizer cracks on about abstruse modalities in poetry and song. Bridget ban picks it up and studies it, finds a button, and silences the faux voices. How, she wonders, did Olafsdottr smuggle the device in with her? Surely, they had searched her every cavity! But then she remembers that the intruder had taken a little longer than needful to make her way from the yards to the sitting room. She had paused to stage this here. Oh, that was coolly done, and argued that she had always foreseen the need to employ it.

“They escaped through the ventilation,” Graceful Bintsaif says, and she points to higher on the wall, where a cover screen dangles from a single fastener.

“How clichéd of our Ravn,” murmurs the Red Hound. “I would have thought better of her.” Then she curses. “No, the ventilator is where she hid her devices and weapons before she entered the sitting room. She brought a Cloak with her. Two Cloaks. And when we walked in, they walked out, as cool as you please.”

“Then … your daughter went with her willingly?”

“I don’t doubt she broached the whole notion. Or that she thought it wholly her own. But that scheming skald of a Shadow led her to it by her pert little nose. Presenting herself as a poet and storyteller; claiming a love for Donovan buigh. The lying little…”

“What! Was none of it true what she told us?”

“Oh, all of it was true. That is the best kind of lie.”

“What now?” The junior Hound spreads her hands helplessly.

Bridget ban nods to the voice synthesizer. “Olafsdottr came to fetch me, not my fool of a daughter. And since I would not go and help her free Donovan, she took Méarana.”

“But what sort of aid could a harper provide…? Aah. But, Cu, all of the reasons you gave for not going to Donovan’s rescue apply to…”

“Graceful Bintsaif, probabilities do not matter in this case. No, we will do as Méarana asked.” She nods deference to the voice synthesizer. “We will call to Hounds.”

It’s a big Spiral Arm and the technology of thousands of years from now is about as imaginable as airliners would be to Assyrians. It helps that there were intervening dark ages, lost technologies, and deliberate suppression of innovation. That lets us get away with over-the-horizon science and technology of here and now. Take some stuff that we maybe almost know how to do, and then suppose that we can do it really well. The list below can be thought of as the acorns from which the oaks of some Spiral Arm technology have grown.

1. “Subway tunnels” through space. Just a gleam in the physicists’ eyes, for now: http://www.npl.washington.edu/AV/altvw86.html

2. Meat vats.

Dr. Vladimir Mironov of the Medical University of South Carolina, as well as researchers in the Netherlands, are presently working on the growth of “in-vitro” or cultured meat: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20110130/sc_nm/us_food_meat_laboratory_feature

3. Gravity grids.

Depend on antigravity. Recent citings found here: http://www.npl.washington.edu/AV/altvw83.html

4. Domino Tight’s exoskeleton.

We’re already making their precursors: http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?NewsNum=2174

5. Invisibility cloaks.

We can’t make them yet, but see here: http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/innovation/11/16/space.time.cloak/index.html?hpt=T2

6. Self-assembly and self-repair of shenmats, equipment, and systems.

Self-healing polymer mixtures from Oak Ridge National Lab and the University of Tennessee: http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/v42_3_09/article15.shtml

Nanoparticles assembling into complex arrays at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory: http://newscenter.lbl.gov/press-releases/2009/10/22/new-route-to-nano-self-assembly/

A University of Illinois polymer with self-sensing properties that can react to mechanical stress: http://news.illinois.edu/news/09/0506polymers.html

Raytheon HEALICS Technology incorporates self-healing into a complex system-on-chip (SoC) design, providing the capability for the chip to sense undesired circuit behaviors and correct them automatically: http://raytheon.mediaroom.com/index.php?s=43&item=1410&pagetemplate=release

7. Teasers and dazers.

At Old Dominion University, nanosecond long, high-voltage pulses that punch holes in cell membranes could be used for a Taser-like weapon that stuns targets because the pulse temporarily disables human muscles: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16706-shocking-cancer-treatment-may-also-yield-weapon.html

8. I-ball.

Thrown cameras with image stabilization have been developed in the United Kingdom: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13639_3-10101293-42.html

Shadow culture is based loosely on the decadent Franco-Burgundian knighthood of the fifteenth century, the main source for which is Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages . Many of the anecdotes, events, and poems are based on actual anecdotes, events, and poems of that era, including the sudden passions of cruelty and sentiment. Extravagant oaths, such as Manlius’s pledge to eat standing up until he had bested Epri, are typical of the era. And in fact, a Polish knight admitted into the Chivalry of the Passion by Philippe de Mézières took just that oath. The pasdarm on Ashbanal is derived from the pas d’armes la fontaine des pleurs, l’arbre Charlemagne (“The Fountain of Tears, the Arbor of Charlemagne”), fought in 1449/50. The ceremonial chains the combatants wear reflect those worn for the combat of Jacques de Lalaing and Jean de Boniface, 1445.