A Succession of Bad Days (48 page)

Blossom looks questioning at Chloris, Chloris says “Eight metres down,” and Blossom says “Any vegetative kraken to be dealt with one by one,” nodding in approval.

“Six-metre
gate?” Dove says, and Blossom says “Five would do, but why not?” and some mud and some rocks turn into a couple of water-gates, one in-and-upstream and one out-and-down, six metres across. Takes half an hour, the size really isn’t the important thing, size is only tricky because the glass has to cool right. The standards were a lot of practice for gates, and Wake’s preferred ceramics are trickier
than glass and sodium and magnesium, it’s amazing how much sodium is just sitting in rocks. Might not be good for more than a hundred years. Too much of a hurry to worry about that, nobody’s lock-gates last half that long.

The dam, at least as much a wall, takes some digging, we don’t want the remnant weeds going under or around, and a lot of gravel sorting, so we’re dealing with all one kind
of thing. We wind up with a solid silicon carbide wall the full width and height of the valley. Not much temperature sensitivity, it shouldn’t crack, and no road atop because the upstream side is still horrid dangerous. The water gurgling out of the downstream gate runs past a pile of aluminium ingots, twenty or thirty tonnes of leftovers. Those, our baggage, and the canoes go up top, near where we
think the entry point should be, not weedy up there, looks like rough pasture, a guess confirmed by two representatives of a team of shepherds. The rest of the team, and all the sheep, are as far away and upwind as they can readily get; clouds of what could be spores out of the Weed Stream’s valley are a worry.

They both look impressed at the bare valley, and seem entirely relieved to know they
saw dust. Blossom provides an apologetic explanation centred around haste, in the process confirming that no one but shepherds and weeding teams come up here, there’s pretty nearly nothing, people-wise.

The shepherds aren’t worried about a bridge, sheep will walk along the top of lock-gates, but think the weeding-teams, who always have waggons, will be. The shepherds are worried about a fence,
and maybe extraction ramps, so they can get the sheep who leap off lock-gates out of the water, but certainly a fence, “A fence they can’t climb,” repeated with emphasis. Zora suggests a three-metre curve, circle section, concave and half a metre deep, smooth, backed with dirt, and provides a ten-metre illusory stretch to show what’s meant precisely.

The shepherds allow as how that will work,
as long as the sheep can’t dig into the curve. “Not unless it’s Eustace,” Zora says, and gets grins.

Blossom sends them off with a bag of hot biscuits and a crock of butter — bag, biscuits, and butter all converted out of grass.

We do not mention the bugs,
Dove says, grinning inside.

There’s a chorus of
It’s all chemistry!
and smiles.

“So,” Arch says, “where are you going to put the canal?”

There’s
a lot of rolling grassland, it’s not downs, not a pattern of hills, it’s a pattern of ridges that vary in height, but they’re not
tall
ridges.

I shrug. “Two, crossing ponds, step locks.” I look at Blossom. “We’re not going for river sizes?”

Blossom’s head shakes. “We’re going for as soon as we can.”

“So the step height’s between six and twelve metres.” Two-metre draft, four metre depth, it was
like that in the Old Commonweal for a couple hundred years, it’s like that everywhere in the Creeks.

“Ed?” Zora’s not worried, but definitely curious. “Why do you know about canals?”

“Wending was right on the downstream limit before the Dread River started. Everyone worried about water, there was no way to be
sure
the Dread River wasn’t going to wander north.”
It did, in a way, when the Iron
Bridge went down.
“What you do, with a canal, is really easy. How isn’t, but the what is simple. I used to go to the planning meetings and listen because everything was simple and people repeated it a lot, they were scared of getting anything wrong, I could be sure I understood.” There were constant arguments about how far south it was safe to extend canals.

Dove’s four metres away, but my hair
ruffles anyway.

“Usual rule’s as few locks as you can, locks slow everything down. So what we want is as few steps as we can get, so long as we won’t get fill problems.” When we don’t have any adjacent water like this. Also why there’s so much surplus draft, you can draw down the whole canal segment a bit and not ground anybody. There’s enough, should be plenty enough, water to run a parallel
stream, but not on this landscape, it would erode into the canal. Going to be mostly seasonal use, what they call seasonal use, lots going up, lots coming back months later, it’s not slack water that would balance with traffic anyway, there’s going to be a flow issue.

Blossom imagines a map table, gets Arch to provide the best map of the ridge line we’re expecting to cross, gets a pained expression,
asks Arch what the next sequence number, the sequence belonging to the survey team Arch leads, is, turns an aluminium ingot and some silicon into survey stakes, real ones, you can feel the unique identifier in each of them, picks up four of them, says “We camp here tonight, back in an hour,” and vanishes, stakes and all.

Chloris is positively cross before finding the bit of grass-stem in the map
table.

Arch, you can see the questions chasing themselves through eyes and expression, settles on “Do you know how Blossom does that?”

“No.” comes out in four-way unison, not sure it’s eerie, we’re all doing stuff. Chloris asks Arch if a shelter’s wanted, gets a nod. Arch gets mildly narrow eyes at what’s obviously Chloris, Zora, me and Dove, for our own shelters, but doesn’t say anything.

I’ve
just got the pot of porridge, amaranth and dried berries, off the heat when Blossom reappears.

“Obvious where to come down from the ridge line, obvious where to turn the stream, the dam’s going to be a challenge,” Blossom says, sticking another survey stake into the ground closer than we are to the lip of the valley, past the stack of canoes.

A single tall green line traces itself across the landscape,
if I concentrate I can see it climb the distant, ten or twelve kilometres distant, ridge.

Still there in the morning, every bit as green.

Twelve kilometres isn’t far, even uphill, total rise to the ridge top, from the stream we cleared out, is maybe sixty metres, total rise to the level of the water we want is maybe twenty-five, four-forty-five or so to four-seventy. We have to go deeper, water’s
surface isn’t what you want, but even thirty metres could be a four-lock rise. Do five, because one of them is going to be right here. Eight pairs, four crossing ponds, and dredging the Weed Steam’s bed. We could fill it, there’s enough water, the problem’s flow, can’t flow through the locks, can’t just dig a stream bed, more than enough slope that it’ll want to move.

“Lock and sluice the Weed
Stream outlet?” Arch, complete with battered tea mug, is squatting next to me and peering at my illusion-model.

That will need dredging, for sure, it’s silted-in compared to the Thines-stream.

“Muddy place for locks,” is what I say out loud. We could do it, there’s bedrock down there, but still. No one wants to turn into locks right out of the larger stream.

“Are we going to line the canal?”
Chloris sounds speculative. Dove and Zora are having an amiable wrangle about the eggs, Zora’s turn on breakfast but cooking eggs, one each, has been delegated to Dove, who is inclined to just cook them in their shells. Zora’s not at all fond of shelling eggs, and had hoped Dove would poach them.

The result is Dove poaching Zora’s egg in a five-litre sphere of salted water hovering next to the
rest of our eggs as they quietly cook hard.

“Have to,” I say to Chloris. “It’s kinda crumbly under there, shale, gunky sandstones, lot more tilted than the landscape, if we don’t line the channels they’re going to seep dry.” And then we have to figure out where all that water’s going.

“Four metres by sixty in the Weed Stream, less than three times eighty-one. We could stick nine-metre gates in
the bottoms of the passing ponds.”

“Good dredge team could control flow with mud,” Dove says, amused. Our eggs are floating toward big egg-mugs, next to plates with bacon and fried squash and apple-ginger preserves. Zora produces a spare egg mug in self-defence, a poached egg won’t all fit in one mug with no shell to hold it up.

“Could, but let’s go with covers,” Blossom says. “Something to do
with the aluminium.”

“Not lock-gates?” Zora’s a bit surprised. So am I.

“Too much thermal expansion, they might wedge. Should just push open a bit, but there’s no set design. No one knows how to fix silicon carbide, but — ” and Blossom shrugs. The stuff’s strong, stronger than steel, it’s light, and it responds to temperature hardly at all. “This is not a time for clever hinge designs.”

We all
nod, and eat breakfast. The last half of Arch’s egg gets offered round the table. Chloris gets it, makes it vanish, cleanly, the inside of the shell shining, and smiles in a way that makes Dove’s eyes close and Zora look pained.

The first pair of locks don’t give us any trouble, standard lock is thirty-five-metres-by-ten capacity, four metres of water over the sill. Standard draft is two metres,
standard barge size is thirty-two by eight, but the folks who write standards for the Lug-gesith are careful people. Low water, overload, rudder a bit deeper than the keel, it takes surprisingly little, and then you’ve got a blocked lock. Better, the Lug-gesiths have thought for hundreds of years, to dig extra, fine vessels running deep, and not block.

“Towpath?” Dove says, just before the link
goes active.
Space for one,
Blossom says.
Not going to put the surface down.

Arch winds up shaking again.

I think Arch was expecting yesterday, not what happens when Dove and I get all folded together and link up with Blossom. Zora and Chloris set up to catch surplus elements, we vent the oxygen straight up but lots of spoil goes in big sealed glass slugs, stacked in the space that’s going to
be between the canals. Metallic sodium’s a bad thing to toss in the water. The pile of ingots is bigger, we’re a bit short of glass, silicon, Blossom says “Oh, all right,” and makes the fill-gates with corundum, internal lines blushing green with iron.

Measuring string comes out. We’ve about agreed that we can’t free-hand the canal, we’re going to have to set up an enchantment, the locks are about
thirty centimetres off, wide, which isn’t dire, but we’d rather get them right, when there’s a shout from the Weed Stream.

The shout’s from a couple of weeding teams in flatboats, they can just manage to pole those up the Weed Stream if they’re stubborn about it.

There were
lots
of reports of the weeds turning to dust, coming down to Thines. They’ve got flatboats and sacks and sacks of clean seed
mixes, they want to know how much further up the lack of weeds goes. “Five kilometres” as an answer doesn’t make them happy, but “there’s a wall, you can’t miss it,” I think Blossom’s been wanting to say that for a long time, the existence of a wall, they approve of that. Also the “Mind the outflow gate,” and the idea that we’re planning on four metres of water in the stream bed, they like those.
Means they only need to seed the banks. The steep part needs something, the angle of repose is only just not too steep. There’s going to be a towpath each side, but we do that when we’re coming back with the water.

Making the — gauges, patterns, can’t say jigs, we’re not putting the landscape in them, not really, takes the five of us about twenty minutes, it’s not a whole 'do this’ sort of enchantment,
we don’t know enough about the rock. Dove and I get one channel, Blossom gets the other one, Zora and Chloris get the side fences, and we start walking. It’s a slow walk, but we get the first five kilometres, a crossing pond, and the next set of locks done by lunch time.

Lunch, all our food, is back down by the first set of locks. We can all pull water out of the air well enough to fill canteens.

“No biscuits?” Zora sounds hopeful, it’s carefully not plaintive. Blossom doesn’t respond well to plaintive.

Blossom’s head shakes, a little rueful and a lot
No
. “I have Halt’s voice in my head, saying
Consequential lack of planning
.”

Arch has lunch cooking, more amaranth porridge, saved from blandness by a free hand with chopped bacon and dried berries.

“Would it go quicker,” Chloris asks, “if
we walked one channel up, the other one back, and brought all the stuff up before doing the next set of hardware?”

“We wouldn’t walk faster doing one channel,” Dove says. “And we’d have only one fence and a deep pit.” The channels are twenty-five metres wide, a broad U-shape. If they weren’t lined, they’d do well to keep a twelve metre wide full-depth channel down the middle, but they should
silt up pretty slowly. Any sheep that fall in the dry channel are mutton, the lowest depth below grade is seven metres.

“Walk all the stuff up to the next locks, put the channels in going back to the built locks, walk up to the stuff, put those locks in?” It would put us forward when we stopped.

Arch starts laughing, hard enough that we’re all looking worried, it’s not looking like completely
voluntary laughter. Eventually, Arch manages to express that getting four locks and ten kilometres of canal done before lunch is not usually considered inefficient. Chloris says “It’s a late lunch,” in prim tones and sets Arch off again.

“We’re not really done. Bollards, ladders, railings, signs for the exit stairs.” Dove’s tone is contemplative. Dove’s at least as annoyed as contemplative. What
was going to be “Swing bridges,” turns into narrowed eyes, and a sudden reach for the transect. “Why do we have to walk?” Dove says, in
I’ve been an idiot
tones.

“You can do heavy work at eight kilometres?” Arch doesn’t believe this. It might be a fact, Arch might allow it a fact, but there’s no trace of belief in the fact in there.