Tales of MU

In Which The Glasses Come Off, Again

In the echoing silence which followed my declaration, Steff whirled and gave Amaranth a furious glare. Amaranth gave a feeble shadow of a nervous giggle, then turned and pushed me away from the group, towards the edge of the area lit by what I now realized were nothing but candles inside glass lanterns.

“I thought you liked sciencey stuff,” she said in a furious whisper. “Isn’t that what you were looking at, the whole time we were in the library?”

“Yeah, it was,” I said. “I like a good bit of fantasy… but I stopped believing in that kind of stuff when I was… well, a long time ago. It’s fun to imagine, but to actually believe…”

“You promised you’d keep an open mind!” Amaranth said.

“But I didn’t, really,” I said, defensively. This didn’t mollify Amaranth.

“Well, then maybe I didn’t really promise you wouldn’t have to strip naked in front of…”

“Amaranth!” Steff said sharply, coming up behind her and actually whacking her on the ass with a small stick. “You can’t do that. If you told Mack she wouldn’t have to do something, you need to stick by it… otherwise, she’ll never be able to trust you.”

“Ooh… I didn’t mean it,” Amaranth said, scuffing the grass with her foot. “But, she promised!”

“I didn’t!” I said.

“See, this is why it’s important to listen to each other,” Steff said. “Especially you,” she said, pointing the stick at Amaranth.

“Why especially me?” Amaranth asked, a little snippily. “She’s mine, isn’t she? She said she wanted to be.”

“That’s why,” Steff said. “If you don’t think she’s listening to you, you can always give her a little poke or something to get her attention. She won’t always be in a position or a mindset where she can do anything to get yours. And you…” Steff said, poking a finger at me. “If you can’t keep an open mind, at least be respectful, okay? Remember that you guys are guests here.”

“I am open-minded!” I said. “But… that doesn’t mean I have to believe something that got disproved hundreds of years ago.”

“Nobody said you have to believe anything,” Steff said. “But if you don’t think you can even listen to other peoples’ beliefs for a little while, you might as well go back to the dorms.”

“If I may intrude on a private moment?” Prevailingwind said, approaching within a respectful distance. “Perhaps I could take some time to explain our activities to your skeptical friend while you watch the others prepare the apparatus for tonight’s activities.”

“Oh, alright,” Amaranth said, and she let herself be directed by Steff–who did so by poking her in the behind with the stick–towards the tripod.

“Not everybody agrees,” Prevailingwind said to me, “but I find it refreshing to have a doubter in our midsts. When left to our own devices, we sometimes fall into the trap of agreeing too readily with one another. A healthy amount of skepticism is not only beneficial, but it’s necessary for our practices.”

“Really,” I said, trying to keep my voice polite. I found the labels of “skeptic” and “Mechan” to be pretty well mutually exclusive.

“Yes… science disposes of nearly as many theories as it proposes. Many people hear the name ‘Mecha’ and think we must be concerned with great big machines, engines of power like you see on TV,” Prevailingwind said. “And, of course, such depictions of science are not without an actual basis, though you’re unlikely to run into somebody with the knowledge and precision necessary to bring about such a… dramatic device.”

“But you believe it’s possible?” I asked.

“Well, given the climate for the last several hundred years, if I had a working mechanical engine of some kind, I’d keep it to myself,” Prevailingwind said. “Wouldn’t you?”

“You know you could get a fifteen hundred gold prize from Randalf the Red if you can demonstrate a non-magical, non-wind-or-waves-driven, non-muscle-powered device capable of transporting a man’s weight five miles over land?”

“I’ve heard that, yes,” Prevailingwind said. “Of course, he puts so many other conditions and caveats on it, it’s no wonder… well, people who have no real understanding of scientific rigor are in no position to dictate the terms of an experiment to those who do. Stage technicians… I’ve never been quite certain whether they do more harm or good. They do much to keep interest in the great trade alive, I’m sure… but they spread so many fallacies and misconceptions. True science isn’t about getting work done… it’s about learning how things happen. Where magic teaches that things happen simply because they happen, science sees an unbroken chain of cause and effect stretching backwards… where each cause is also an effect with its own cause, in an eternal cycle, a wheel of…”

“But, cutting through all that… it sounds like you favor unprovable philosophy more so than results,” I said.

“Our experiments do produce results… only, it often takes a scientific mind to understand them fully,” Prevailingwind said. “This is why, for centuries, we scientists have only published our results among ourselves. Too often in the past, some barbaric fool would demand proof of our theories, only to become enraged when presented with something they could not understand. During the High Reclamation, the Temple of Khersis…”

“Wait,” I said, cutting him off. As a history buff, I was sensitive to people trying to twist historical accounts to serve their purposes. “The High Reclamation was about forcing gnomes, elves, and other supposed ‘undesirables’ out of Ixthia.”

“And ‘other undesirables’ included scientists,” Prevailingwind said. “The Khersians have traditionally been opposed to scientific progress, to orderly inquiries into the subtle interactions…”

“Not that I’m a big fan of the Khersians, but in the early days of the religion, the Universal Temple was actually traditionally more concerned with holding on to its powerbase than on what a bunch of… free thinkers… in the countryside of the provinces thought,” I said, trying to be diplomatic. “I’m not saying that scientists weren’t among their victims, but their main focus was on heretics… people who professed to be Khersian but didn’t recognize the supreme authority of the Universal Temple. Anything from sects which celebrated the feasts on the ‘wrong’ days to clerics who wielded edged weapons were seen as far more of a threat to the Temple’s authority than a couple of…”

“That scientists were persecuted en masse by the Khersians is a widely-known fact,” Prevailingwind said, a little testily. “And as the Khersian Temple spread its faith…”

“So, are you anti-Khersian, or anti-magic?” I asked. “Because plenty of influential wizards were persecuted by the Temple, because their innovations were seen to undermine Khersian dogma in some way, or to diminish the reliance of people on their clerics. That’s why healing and life magic are so underdeveloped, compared to other schools of magic… because the Universal Temple suppressed non-divine healing for so long.”

“I’m not anti-anything… I’m pro-truth. Magic has its place in modern society, but it can’t explain how a smith with no mystical power can transform iron into steel,” Prevailingwind said. “Or the common bumblebee… according to your elemental alchemists, a creature of that size with such a low level of air shouldn’t be able to fly, but it does. Magic can’t explain it… science can.”

“Wow, do you get all your beliefs from new age self-help books?” I asked. “Elemental balance is only a small part of winged flight. Did you sleep through naturalism class? This is like, elementary school stuff.”

“Well, then there’s psionics,” Prevailingwind said.

“You mean the subtle arts,” I said. “If we’re going to start using comic book names for real things, I think I might as well give up.”

“We prefer the more scientific term,” Prevailingwind said. “Nobody has yet been able to explain why a supposedly magical phenomenon provokes no reaction from attempts to detect magic, and is not affected by means that prevent or protect from magic.”

“Uh… that’s why they’re called the subtle arts?” I said, trying to force myself to sound more patient than I felt. “They’re subtle. It’s easy enough to grasp, if you understand the intrinsic magic of things. Magical detection doesn’t actually detect the presence of magic, no matter what the common perception of it might be… it works by responding to disruptions where magic is being used artificially. You also can’t detect a transmutation spell in play when iron becomes steel… or for that matter, when iron rusts… but again, that’s because magical energy isn’t being overtly called into play.”

“Or maybe it isn’t magic at all,” Prevailingwind said.

“Magic is what makes the world work,” I said. “You can’t separate something out and go, ‘this isn’t magic’, no matter how strange it might seem… at best, you’ve just discovered a new kind of magic, or a new permutation of it. Humanity’s only been able to reach our current level of advancement by abandoning the scientific impulses of our ancestors, and realizing that just because we figured out some little quirk of existence doesn’t mean we can make the physical world sit up and beg. Remember the stories about the two tribes of man? The first learned about magic from the elves, and they were able to gather more food and secure themselves against the elements… and the second tribe… well, they died off, didn’t they?”

“Faded into obscurity, more like,” Prevailingwind said. “The stories don’t actually say what happened to them. Some Mechans have some… interesting ideas in that area.”

“Yeah, I once used a chant rune where this chick insisted she was descended from the second tribe,” I said. “I suppose you think she was right?”

“I wouldn’t care to make that assertion without evidence, but all things are possible until disproved,” he said.

“Until disproved?” I asked. “Her claim’s ridiculous on the face of it… if she could prove it, I guess I’d have to accept it, but the burden of proof’s on her. Anyway, the way she talked about magic, I wondered what the hell she was doing chanting away in front of a crystal ball in the first place… I mean, if you could really make electrical energy do all the things it’s supposed to do, in the animations, then why would you even be on the ethernet in the first place?”

“Well, that’s certainly one way of looking at things,” Prevailingwind said, flashing an indulgent smile… which was pretty infuriating. I mean, here I was talking sense in the face of his nonsense, and he was acting like he was doing me some kind of favor by indulging my point of view?

Amaranth seemed to have sensed that I was about to blow my top, because she was suddenly right there, embracing me from behind, which had the effect of both physically holding me back and pushing the back of my head between her breasts.

“Remember, sweetie, if you’re good, you’ll still get a special treat,” she said, which really didn’t do wonders for my sense of being talked to like I was a child… but still distracted me enough that I forgot my retort.

“Ah, it looks like we’re about ready,” Prevailingwind said, walking back towards the group.

Amaranth turned so that we were facing him, and I could see that the Mechans had assembled a device on the tripod. It consisted of three fat cylinders of differing widths, with a little circular projection coming off the lowest and thinnest one. The whole assemblage was tilted at an angle.

“Can you guess what it is?” Prevailingwind asked, seeing me looking at it.

“It looks a bit like a telescope,” I said. “Or at least the fucked-up grandbaby of one.”

Amaranth hissed in my ear, but Prevailingwind chuckled at the description.

“In a way, it is,” he said. “We have made a few… improvements… to the standard sailor’s glass.”

“I guess that explains what we’re doing on a hilltop,” I said. “But wouldn’t it make more sense to do this during the day? I mean, whatever you’re going to be peering at with that monstrosity is going to be pretty hard to see at night, isn’t it?”

“I would quite agree with you,” the chief technician said. “Except the object of our inquiries is only visible at night. We’re drawing the moon, you see… our goal is to produce a map of the lunar landscape of great accuracy.”

“Why?” I asked, thinking that “map” and “landscape” were an odd way to describe a picture of the moon, but not quibbling over word choice.

“To increase our understanding of it, as we seek to understand all things,” he said. “It’s not so ridiculous to think that one day, humans may walk upon it… and if not, the moon is as much a part of our physical world as the grass beneath our feet, even though it’s over two hundred thousand miles away.”

I stared at him. He simply continued to smile back at me. Finally, I couldn’t help it… I burst out laughing.

“Have I said something amusing?” he asked politely.

“You said the moon is two hundred thousand miles away,” I said.

“Yes, and it is,” he said.

“No, it isn’t,” I said. I pointed skyward. “It’s right there.”

There was some annoyingly self-assured chuckling from other members of the group at this, which got under my skin. If it had simply been a group of people laughing at me, I probably would’ve reacted my usual way: by retreating, either within myself or back down the hill… but this was different. I couldn’t be intimidated by a bunch of lunatics who were only amused at my “ignorance” of patent nonsense.

“Look!” I said, breaking away from Amaranth’s arms and pointing insistently at the bright full moon. “It’s right there, you can see it.”

“On that point, I’d fully agree with you,” Prevailingwind said. “Its visibility was never in question.”

“I suppose you think you could climb up a tree and grab it in your hand,” said the girl who’d made the snide comment about Khersians. She was about my height, but quite a deal heavier, with a head of badly tangled red hair.

“Of course not, you idiot,” I said. I heard Amaranth make a gasping noise, but I was past the point of easy restraint. “The moon is affixed to a sphere within the vault of the heavens. No human… no mortal creature… can reach that through any means.”

That just provoked more derisive laughter.

“Okay, but look… if it were that far away, how could we even see it?” I asked Prevailingwind, who at least wasn’t laughing, even if he did have a trace of smugness behind his mask of calm patience. “It would be too far away… it would look so tiny, it would be invisible, wouldn’t it?”

“Not if it were, say… two thousand some miles in diameter,” Prevailingwind said in an almost off-hand manner.

“Two thousand… two thousand miles in diameter?” I asked, unable to keep from laughing myself at the absurdity.

“Now, now, the mathematics of it is pretty simple,” he said. “Once you know the distance, it’s easy enough to calculate the actual diameter from the apparent…”

“And I suppose once you know the diameter, it’s easy enough to figure the distance?” I asked. “No wonder you call this group a circle…”

“Well, we do check the figures against each other, but there are other ways of measuring the distance,” he said. “For instance, I’m sure that you yourself have noticed that the amount by which distant objects seem to move in response to a lateral change in your own position varies by…”

“Yeah, yeah, I’ve actually heard this one before,” I said. “But you can’t expect that a principle you observe down here will hold perfectly true for a heavenly body. It’s a heavenly body. The rules are different!”

“Well, perhaps you’re right,” Prevailingwind said, in that infuriatingly patronizing tone. “But, if they weren’t, then…”

“You honestly, seriously, truly believe the moon is a disc that’s over two thousand miles across and it only looks so small because it’s a couple hundred thousand miles away?” I asked.

“Of course I don’t,” the chief technician said.

“Well, good,” I said.

“It’s a sphere two thousand miles across,” he said.

“A sphere,” I repeated calmly, with what I felt was an impressive amount of restraint. “That’s interesting. Really.”

“You sound skeptical,” he said.

“Well, yeah,” I said. “It’s just… those markings you’re so interested in? If the moon were a sphere, they wouldn’t always be visible… you’d see the moon appear to turn as it went around us.”

Prevailingwind smiled, as if he’d expected me to say that.

“Unless, of course, it actually was itself turning, and at the proper rate to keep that same side facing us,” he said.

“That’s convenient,” I said.

“That’s gravity,” he countered.

“Gravity?” I said. “Everything gravitates towards its level… I know some people theorize that celestial bodies are susceptible to this as well, but if the moon ever had been anywhere besides its proper level, it would’ve long since reached it, wouldn’t it have? I mean, you can see for yourself that it’s not rising away from or falling towards us, so… there you go.”

“Well, our understanding of gravity is a bit different from yours,” the chief technician said. “But to keep it simple, we don’t believe that the moon has a ‘proper level’, as you put it, but that it’s irresistibly attracted to the larger world… however, it’s also moving as it falls… hmm, how best to put this? Imagine you’re falling from the sky, towards an evenly sloping hill. The hill slopes downwards, dropping one foot in elevation for every foot of lateral distance. If you were to descend one foot per second, while simultaneously moving down slope one foot per second, you’d never be able to hit the ground, as long as the slope continued, would you?”

I considered, then shook my head.

“Just so,” Prevailingwind said. “Now, when you consider the curvature of the world…”

“That’s assuming she even knows the world is round,” the red-haired smart ass piped up.

“Of course the world is round,” I said. “The sphere is the first ideal shape. I’m surprised you guys haven’t convinced yourselves the world is flat.”

“Please, both of you… this is supposed to be an intellectual discussion,” Prevailingwind said. “So, considering the curvature of the world, we have an effectively infinite slope for an object circling it, don’t we?”

“Wait… so, your theory is that the falling moon is so high above the world that, as it falls, it keeps missing?” I asked. “And that it does so at such a speed, while rotating at such a speed, that it just happens to always have the same side turned towards us?”

“Well, er… essentially, yes,” Prevailingwind said.

I shook my head in disbelief.

“Haven’t you ever heard of a little principle called ‘Durkon’s hammer’?” I asked.

“Of course,” Prevailingwind said. “As critical thinking is an important part of our methods, we apply it fairly regularly.”

“Why don’t you apply it here?” I asked. “You’re heaping together all kinds of undue assumptions in order to support your ridiculously convoluted pet theory when a much simpler one exists: the moon is a circle affixed to a crystalline sphere in the vault of the heavens.”

“They aren’t assumptions,” Prevailingwind said. “They all proceed from an orderly scientific investigation. I could tell you our terms for the concepts involved, but it would make little sense to a layperson. If you’d like, though, I could walk you through…”

“Fat chance she’ll ever understand it,” the red-haired one said. “She probably doesn’t even know the threefold law.”

“Please, Fluoride,” Prevailingwind said, holding up a hand towards her in a gesture of restraint. “She never will understand if her ignorance is treated with hostility.”

“‘Ignorance’?” I said. “I’ll admit I haven’t heard of this threefold thing, but I don’t think it’s ‘ignorant’ of me not to know every little thing you guys decided to make up.”

“The threefold law’s precise formulation might be a human invention, but what it describes is very real, and far older than mankind,” the chief technician said.

“Enlighten me,” I said. “I’m all ears.”

“It consists of the law of inertia, the law of acceleration, and the law of reciprocal action,” Prevailingwind said. “These three laws govern the motion of all physical objects: an object in motion tends to stay in motion, force is equal to mass times acceleration, and every action begets an equal and opposite reaction.”

I’d actually heard that kind of thing expressed before… in works of fantasy, of course, and sometimes with slightly different wording. It was part common sense… I mean, the middle part basically said that the harder you swung something, the harder it would hit, though some of the ideas they tried to extrapolate from it were pretty loopy… and the rest was pure bullshit.

“An object in motion tends to stay in motion?” I repeated. “Let’s test that, okay?” I bent down and picked up a small rock. “Object in motion,” I said, tossing it a short distance through the air… very lightly, as if it went out of sight, the point would be lost. The rock came to a rest within the lantern-lit area. “Hey, look… it stopped moving.”

“I gave the simplest form of the law, of course,” Prevailingwind said. “In full, it reads ‘unless acted upon by an external force.’ There were, of course, many forces acting upon the rock: gravity, wind resistance, possibly a cross-breeze… and, of course, when it touches the ground, there’s the equal and opposite…”

“Or, khee, I don’t know… maybe it just ran out of impetus?” I said. “Don’t you see? You’ve got to tack on all these additions to your ‘laws’ when they’re disproved, and then you have to start coming up with ‘forces’ which ‘act on’ the rock to explain the simple fact that it stopped moving when your law said it shouldn’t. Durkon’s hammer, people!” I shouted the last part, wheeling around to face the group as a whole. “The simplest explanation, the one which requires the least assumptions, is the most likely. I mean, look all around you. The world is full of shit, and in case you haven’t noticed, most of it isn’t moving. Doesn’t seem very likely, if there’s some ‘scientific law’ making things that start moving keep moving, does it? Newsflash: the natural state of a solid object is to rest… to the extent that something is solid, it only moves when something imparts impetus to it.”

“So, you don’t agree that the air provides resistance which slows a thrown projectile down?” the chief technician asked.

“If it’s blowing the wrong way, yeah, wind can knock something off course or push it back the way it came,” I said. “But you’re saying that if the air wasn’t there, the rock would go on forever?”

“In the absence of any other forces, yes,” the chief technician said. “But, of course, that circumstance will never arise in…”

“Oh, yeah, convenient,” I said. “Well, I say that in the absence of any force, a moving object will… will turn into a flying pink sunflower that spits out gold coins… or burst into flames… or sing the sun-blazoned standard. Ooh, can’t prove me wrong, can you? Because you’ll never find an object that’s free of your ‘external forces.'”

“It’s no use, Chief Technician,” the woman called Fluoride said. “This… barbarian… will never understand. She’s closed her mind.”

She actually intoned the last three words, as if she were making some grave and important pronouncement. That was what really set me off.

“Closed… closed my mind?” I repeated. “I have trained my mind, you stupid bitch! I have learned and I have studied, while you guys apparently sat on your asses playing an elaborate game of Let’s Pretend, acting like you can learn the secrets of the universe by poking at it, acting like everything’s just set up for your convenience and all you have to do is think things through enough and you’ll figure everything out…”

“Hey, settle down there,” said Steff’s voice in my ear. I waved at the sound like I was brushing away a bee, but then I was hit with a burst of inspiration. I turned a bit, to make sure she wasn’t actually standing beside me, then pointed at her.

“Right now, Steff’s whispering in my ear,” I said.

“His name, for your information, is Antibacteria,” interjected “Fluoride”, but I ignored her. I mean, elven features were a bit androgynous, but if the stupid bitch couldn’t tell a girl half-elf from a boy one, who was she to lecture me?

“Whispering… from ten feet away,” I said. “And I can hear her perfectly. Magic can explain that, but it would be pretty hard to do, if sound ‘propagates as a wave’, like they thought back in the dark ages, isn’t it?”

“Well, under ordinary circumstances it does,” one of the Mechans said, “but obviously, those of elven descent have some magic in their voices that allows them to…”

“No, no, it’s still a wave!” another said. “Elves just subconsciously estimate the distance and then modulate their voices so that…”

“You guys can’t even agree on how to explain away the stuff that contradicts your stupid beliefs!” I said. “And you!” I said, rounding on Steff. “How can you even be studying heavy-duty magic like necromancy if you’re a Mechan?”

Steff looked uncomfortable, for only the second time since I’d met her. I wondered how many of her cohorts knew that was her major… and how many of them had a seriously magical discipline as their own major.

“Well,” she said, drawing out the word unnecessarily long, “I think an understanding of the mechanical nature of life can help…”

“The mechanical nature of life?” I repeated incredulously. “As if our bodies are nothing more than a… a motorcycle, or a wind-up toy, or some sort of bullshit like that? As if our… your stomach was just a fuel reservoir and your heart some kind of pump? Or that your eyes are just lenses, like in your fucking telescope. Well,” I said, spewing words in a headlong, full-on raging torrent now, “I don’t have to tell you how stupid that is, not when we have a nymph here who’s also majoring in life magic. Tell them, Amaranth.”

I was turning as I said it, and it wasn’t until I said her name that her face came into focus. It was like a mask, frozen… looking back, that’s my only real defense. There was no emotion on her face for me to react to, no hint to pick up on. I guess that the lack of expression was so very un-Amaranthy that I should have known something was wrong, but there was just too much momentum to my rant at that point.

“You stepped fully formed out of a field,” I prompted her. “You mutilate and heal yourself on at least a weekly basis… you absorb the food you eat without any waste, without any trace that it was even eaten. You’ve probably even met your goddess in person, one of the architects of life, of the world… tell them how stupid it is to believe that man is a machine, that’s there’s a mechanical basis to the universe.” Her face remained blank, impassive… like she was one of those wind-up toys from the science stories, and she’d run down. “Well, go on!” I said, insistently. I mean, she just had to back me up. She was a nymph… she knew this stuff, better than I did. “Don’t just stand there… tell them how stupid it is!”

I’ve used the phrase “burst into tears” before… maybe even, in the course of this story, a bit more often than would be normal. I haven’t really paid that much attention to stuff like that. However, before this point, I’d never seen tears really, truly burst forth, like a dam had just been fireballed apart. It was a bit like watching Two cry for the first time, only there was no prelude, no preamble… one moment, I was looking at that increasingly awful blank mask, and the next… the next, she was crying.

She whipped off her glasses and threw them at me. I made no move to catch or avoid them, and the heavy metal frame bounced off my chest. I was watching her, not them. She turned away from me and flung herself away from the lighted area, across the flattened peak of the hill and down the other side.

“She believes,” I said, numb with shock… both for that realization, and the realization of what I’d just said… not about this group of self-assured lunatics… or about Steff, who I liked but was just plain weird… but about Amaranth, the woman that I… well, I’d told her that I loved her.

The woman I wanted so badly to belong to.

“Oh, yeah, ya think?” Steff said. “Great going, Mack… the circle’s definitely gonna want to induct her now.”

“I should… should I go after her?” I asked. “Or will that just make things worse?”

“If I may say something?” Prevailingwind said.

“Now’s not really the time, Pre,” Steff said.

“It’s just… well, we are rather near to the edge of the protected radius as it is,” he said. “And given that fact, your comely friend… well, she’s chosen a rather poor direction to run in.”

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