Michael Flynn: On the Razor’s Edge

Bridget ban nodded slowly. “They believed they were out there to be found. Do you think the Confederals know?”

“I doubt it. It was all superstition with them. One problem with hiding things away—it becomes too easy to forget what they were.” Donovan sat back on the bench. “They might be something worth looking for, though.”

“Why, so you can break them, too? I thought you were retiring under your fig tree?”

“Ah, what can it hurt?”

“You, above all men, ask that? You finally deign to show up at Clanthompson Hall, old man, and right away you want to run off again?”

“Old man? I’ve barely a century in my scrip as yet. I’m just hitting my stride. Beside, you should talk about haring off.”

Méarana had left her mother and father, and joined Ravn Olafsdottr, who stood a little distance away. She was eating one of Donovan’s noisome dishes, something called Chicken Joe Freezing. To all appearances, she had just woken up and set to breakfast, but Méarana had no doubt the Shadow had listened to every word her parents had exchanged.

The Shadow wore coveralls now, and she reached into one of their commodious pockets. She pulled out a metal wire and handed it to Méarana. The harper studied it. “A harp string.”

Ravn nodded. “Used to strangle Khembold, later to strangle Gidula. Achieve artistic closure. You use that, my sweet one, to string your new harp.” Then she waved her spoon in the direction of the other table. “They quarrel,” she said around a mouthful of chicken.

“Yes.”

“But you smile.”

“It marks an improvement over twenty years of silence.”

Ravn put down her spoon. “Are you satisfied, then? I told you in your Hall that I had promised to give Donovan a gift.” She hugged herself. “Ooh! I am soo clayver!”

Méarana crossed her arms and studied the Shadow. She still had not made her mind up about the woman. She suspected that Ravn had transported her into danger precisely so that she could rescue her from it. “And what gift was that?”

The teeth were impossibly white against her coal-black face. “Ooh, I am sooch a sentimental oold fool. I gave him Bridget ban.”

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. Techne that makes an appearance in On the Razor’s Edge includes:

1. “Subway tunnels” through space.

Just a gleam in the physicists’ eyes, for now: http://www.npl.washington.edu/AV/altvw86.html.

2. Domino Tight’s exoskeleton.

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

3. 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

After this manuscript was written but prior to publication “researchers led by the University of Texas at Austin have cloaked a three-dimensional object standing in free space, bringing the invisibility cloak one step closer to reality”: http://www.kurzweilai.net/scientists-create-first-free-standing-3d-cloak?utm_source=KurzweilAI+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=778bb63bfe-UA-946742-1&utm_medium=email.

4. Self-assembling ruins of the Hall of Suns.

Researchers at the University of Michigan have developed a concrete material that self-heals cracks and recovers most of the original strength. Now project it way into the future: http://ns.umich.edu/podcast/video.php?id=804.

5. More 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.

6. 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.

Shadow cultureis 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 in the novel are based on actual anecdotes, events, and poems of that era, including the sudden passions of cruelty and sentiment. The story of Prime and Lady Ielnor’s chemise is adapted from the poem “Des trois chevaliers et del chainse.” The song Ravn listens to in Chapter 2, while shepherding Méarana into the Confederation, is adapted from Alain Chartier’s “Ballade de Fougères.” The introductory poem to chapter 7 is adapted from a prose passage in Le Jouvencel, the autobiography of Jean de Bueil. The introductory poem to chapter 14 is a mash-up of “Le Dit de Franc Gontier” by Philippe de Vitry and Eustache Deschamps, no. 184.

Descriptions of the society of the late Commonwealthand certain twilight attitudes attributed to its writers and thinkers were adapted from Peter Brown’s The World of Late Antiquity concerning the outlook of fourth-century pagan rhetors.