K Parker - Memory

As clashes of conflicting faiths went, it was rather more logical and comprehensible than, say, the cause of the devastating schism that had torn the Empire apart during the reign of Nikaa the Third. That conflict had stemmed from the refusal of the Congregationalists to admit that two hundred years earlier a monk had miscalculated the date of a minor irregular festival, in spite of the claims of the Revisionists that a divine messenger with the wings of an eagle and the head of a lion had appeared to their leader in a vision and told him the shelf and docket number in the archives of the file in which the incriminating documents were stored.

What the core debate lacked in picturesque embellishment, however, it amply made up for in passion and intractability. Spenno immediately retaliated with a whole decalogue of concerns about porosity, stress fractures and crystalline structure, all supported by citations from Concerning Various Matters. When Galand Dev refused to accept the infallibility of Spenno's adored book, the pattern-maker flew into such a terrible rage that only Galand Dev's extraordinary reflexes saved him from being stabbed with the sharp ends of a pair of heavy brass calipers. Thereafter, the two opposing factions communicated strictly in writing, with two teams of messengers being kept busy carrying furiously scribbled notes backwards and forwards between Galand Dev in the pattern office and Spenno's headquarters in the boiler-shed loft. Whether either Galand or Spenno managed to spare time from writing their own notes to read each other's was a moot point; unless they could read and write at the same time, it was hard to see how it could have been done.

('Plain fact is,' Banspati muttered gloomily, as the foundrymen crowded round the yard fire on the third evening of the debate, 'neither of them's got a fucking clue. You go trying to cast a tube that thick with a hole down the middle, you'll get the metal at the edges cooling faster'n the metal in the middle, and the whole bloody lot'll crack like ice at midday. If you ask me, it just can't be done and that's that; which means the best thing to do is cast one arse-up and one arse-down; and when they both fall to bits soon as look at 'em, maybe all the government bastards'll piss off back to Torcea and let us get on with some work.')

When the argument had been raging for five days and still showed no sign of calming down, almost the entire foundry crew had divided, in roughly equal proportions, into factions supporting one or other of the two rival doctrines. In most cases, adherence to a faction had precious little to do with the merits of arse-up or arse-down, and was rather more closely concerned with whether the man in question hated the government more than he hated Spenno. Poldarn, who had mixed feelings about both sides, did his best to steer clear of the subject every time it came up in conversation; but since there was nothing for the men to do all day except talk and nothing else that anyone wanted to talk about, he didn't really have any choice. Rather than make the effort to follow technical arguments he couldn't really understand, he fell into the habit of agreeing with whoever he was talking to and hoped nobody would notice how quickly his loyalties tended to change.

In the event, Galand Dev won the argument-up to a point-by adopting a wider fame of reference, or cheating. When Brigadier Muno complained to him that time was getting on with nothing he could put in his dispatches that the people back in Torcea would want to read, Dev replied that there really wasn't anything to argue about-he was right and Spenno was wrong-but that the workers weren't prepared to believe him without a compelling reason to do so. Muno nodded, and said that compelling reasons were easy. Then he sent for Banspati and told him that, for security reasons, he was putting the Virtue Triumphant out of bounds; at least, he added meaningfully, until such time as Spenno and Galand Dev could agree on how they were going to do the job, and something was actually achieved.

Banspati didn't like that one bit. True, the Virtue had officially been off limits from the start, but nobody had taken the prohibition seriously, figuring that nobody, not even a government administrator, could be that cruel and unfeeling. Quite apart from the beer, the Virtue housed a dozen or so tired-looking, sad-eyed women whose job was to part the foundrymen from their money on a regular basis. As the foundrymen themselves used to say, they weren't much but they were a damn sight better than nothing, and therefore essential to the smooth running of the foundry. Muno's prohibition, Banspati knew without having to be told, was likely to prove considerably more explosive than anything the alchemists of Morevich ever brewed up in one of their little clay pots. After a stunned silence, therefore, he promised Muno that he'd talk to Spenno right away and see if there wasn't some middle ground that might be acceptable to both parties.

Whatever he said to Spenno, for three quarters of an hour up in the boiler-house loft while the foundry crew milled about angrily in the yard below, it probably didn't have much to do with porosity, stress fractures or crystalline structure, but it did the trick. Spenno, looking suitably chastened and watched in furious silence by his assembled colleagues, scuttled down from his loft and across the yard towards Galand Dev's command post in the drawing office. Ten minutes later, the two men appeared at the door and announced that they'd got it all figured out, and work on the first prototype would start at dawn the next day. Meanwhile, anybody who cared to celebrate the reconciliation with a brief visit to the Virtue was free to do so, provided that they were in a fit state for work come morning.

Very soon afterwards, the yard was deserted. Poldarn, for his part, couldn't be bothered to go; instead, he crossed over to the forge and spent the rest of the day by the fire, drawing down, splitting, shaping and jumping up. By evening, his strip of odd-looking steel had taken on a definite and unique shape; like a leaping dolphin with a broad, splayed tail (where the upper and lower horns of the hand-guard arched round until they almost touched). He hardened and tempered the steel with an unexpected degree of trepidation; but for once, everything went right, and the piece that emerged from the barrel of burning olive oil was unmistakably a Raider backsabre. It wasn't, Poldarn suspected, entirely perfect, but that was only to be expected of his first attempt at making such a thing, done entirely from memory. As he took a break from drawfiling out the hammer marks and speckles of forged-in firescale, it occurred to him to wonder, for the first time, what he'd actually made the thing for. If he needed to chop kindling he already had a perfectly good hand-axe. And he wasn't about to kill anybody-was he?

They faced each other down a thin steel road; two circles, separated by the smallest possible distance. The draw had been inconclusive; there hadn't been the smallest fraction of a second between them, because both of them had eliminated time in the moment (which doesn't exist in religion) between the impulse and the result; and all that had come of it was an awkward collision of flats, nothing achieved either way. From there they'd both immediately fallen back into their own circles, swords in the first guard, their minds in their eyes, as the precept of religion puts it, both waiting for the other to move first. And since they were identical in every respect (having attained religion, at least as far as the third grade, and thereby eliminated themselves except as copies, cast from the same pattern in the same mould) there was no way that either of them was going to make that first move, in the same way that a shadow can't pre-empt the body that casts it.