Bian -26- Hero of the Zero

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I glared at him when he called me "our little princess."

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Bian -26-
Hero of the Zero
 
by Erin Halfelven

 

“You’re publishing a newspaper? Here-and-now?” I boggled a bit.

We were still in the inner room at the inn, a fire in one corner, Kilda my servant sitting by the door while Lillakatye and I questioned Lord Kelvan Apdegrote, a slippery customer who had just admitted to publishing a newspaper called The London Tides, or Tyddingr ap Lundenna. Except we were in a world that seemed firmly medieval.

Kelvan grinned and nodded, laying the charm on thick. He played the lovable rascal as well as anyone ever did. “The hardest part has been inventing paper. Ink was easier. Workable type and a press weren’t too hard. Took me most of thirty years to get my paper-making up to a volume to be able to put out an eight page tabloid once a week.”

He made a face. “I had to invent advertising and stock companies and all kinds of other things along the way to make it all work.” He was definitely a person out of their own time, similar to myself. Would I have the gumption to spend thirty years on such a project. I doubted it.

My tall blonde companion, Lillakatye, another anachronistic traveler apparently, laughed out loud. “I think I read this in a book somewhere? Guy falls into a pothole in a thunderstorm and when he climbs out he’s in Ancient Rome?” A big girl who I had seen both fight with axe and spear and use magic to heal, she looked much like the legends of Valkyries but denied being one.

Kelvan nodded again. “I read that one back, uh, back home?” He sighed and rolled his eyes. “Sure was a lot easier for the character in the story than it has been for me. And he was working with more primitive tech. It’s been a long time, I don’t remember the title or the author but it was where I got the idea.”

He mused a moment. “I tried the first thing he did, double entry bookkeeping. One, I wasn’t all that sure, myself, how to make it work and two, seems someone already invented that here, maybe a thousand years ago.” He grinned and shrugged. “So no easy fortune for me showing people how to draw a zero and write it down twice.”

Katye laughed again. “Maybe it was him? Mysterious Martinus?” That was what the locals in ancient Rome had called the main character.

I remembered the book, too. I had read a lot of science fiction, both as a boy and during down times in the Navy. I even remembered the title and author: Lest Darkness Fall by L. Sprague de Camp.

I remembered something else, too. “Kelvan?” I squeaked. Damn teenage girl voice. But another book I had read. “Did you ever read Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen?” By H. Beam Piper, I was pretty sure.

Kelvan nodded, a bit sheepishly. “Uh, that one too. That’s why I picked Kelvan as my name. Uh, Kalvan means bald, here, by the way. I was young, I guess I jinxed myself.” He rubbed his bald spot, “Prophetic.”

“Wait,” said Katye. “I remember that one, Kalvan invents gunpowder doesn’t he?” Another science fiction reader falls into an alternate universe? Three-for-three, what are the odds?

“Dunkel med detta skaite,” Kelvan said, dropping back into Bloddish to curse. Thump that shit. Then back into English. “Martinus didn’t invent it either, too destabilizing on the world. But it’s actually too late, the Chinese probably have black powder already. It just hasn’t spread this far west yet. Is that what you have in your little bell?” he asked, looking at me.

The bell referred to my police-issued Glock from my home time; glock being the local word for bell.

I shook my head, not as a no but as a refusal to talk about that. It had occurred to me that now I had one more thing to worry about: the Crosstime Police. The guys who regulated technology across timelines. It wasn’t stupid to think that they or something like them might exist. After all, I had already had conversations with gods.

And speaking of gods, this began to look more and more like some of their doing. Three anachronistic travelers in one place? Dunnar and Idunn might not be subtle enough for some plan that would use a fact like that, but I had just talked to Hlokki and that red-headed weasel was certainly crooked enough to do it, all while pretending he knew nothing about what was going on.

But, the fewer people who knew about the Baby Glock in my pocket, the better. Plus, Kelvan was a newspaperman and I was myself a cop. Cops traditionally have good reason to distrust the rumormongers that many reporters turn out to be.

Kelvan still looked like he wanted an answer but I didn’t have to try to out-stubborn him.

“A weekly tabloid newspaper?” mused Lillakatye, taking the focus off me. “In a town of 50,000, Lundenna’s that big isn’t it? You could probably support a full-size daily.”

Kelvan snorted but looked amused. “If I could produce that much paper and sell that much advertising, I might. Maybe someday. Right now, I’m thinking of myself as Ben Franklin putting out the Saturday Evening Post. Besides, half or more of the paper my plant produces goes to other things, like books and documents. I’m trying to build another plant but there is only one of me.”

“Books?” I said. I hadn’t seen any since I got here but I might not have been in the company of someone likely to have one. “You mean real printed books?”

He nodded and did another of his magic tricks, pulling a small book from somewhere inside his robe. He presented it to me with a flourish. “Signed by the author, which is myself,” he said, grinning at my expression.

I took the little volume, about five by eight inches I judged, though it appeared larger in my small hands. The cover was leather, stretched over thin wood. An illustration had been worked into the front side in colored inks or dyes. It showed a green hill above a blue lake or bay, with flowers dotting the hill. A title in gold above the illustration read, “varforr ∂e he∂o bin blodde.” Why the Sea Is Wet. Except for the two funny-looking ‘d’s, the letters looked like modern English lower case. I had no trouble reading it but I wondered why Blodde was spelled with regular ‘d’s.

“It’s the story of the funeral journey from Lundenna to Yorvik to bury Henrik Blodde. The chose a gravesite on a hill so he could look out on the shallow bay where he and his men waded ashore. I was there,” Kelvan said simply.

“En boeke,” said Kilda from her stool with a bit of wonder in her voice. A book. She had probably seen very few.

Katye moved to look over my shoulder as I opened to the first page. Here the author was identified as “kelvan yien ∂e grote” but the signature under it was æpdegrote. Both were appellations I realized, not really last names the way I thought of them. A grote was the quarter-sized four penny coin in Blodsey, so “yien ∂e grote” was “given the four pennies,” while “æpdegrote” was “of the four pennies.” Again with two different kinds of ‘d’s, and a funny looking ‘a’ — a puzzle, but for later.

“He died here in the city,” Lillakatye said, as if she had already known that.

Kelvan nodded. “Poisoned by the Apothecaries Guild. The guilds were and are the enemies of most progress, here-and-now.” He made a face. “The cover is made of leather instead of cloth as a sop to the Tanners Guild because my paper is replacing vellum for a lot of things.” He shrugged. “I have to travel with guards lately.”

I glanced at Kelda who had once described Lundenna as reeking from the fumes of the leather industry but then, paper-making was pretty stinky, too. I remembered that from driving through Eureka, California. Not that a medieval city didn’t have other reasons to smell bad.

But guards for the man who invented paper?

When I looked a question at him he added, “I left my men out in the street.” He flashed another grin, “The Scribes Guild is mad at me too, since I can produce a thousand books with no more labor than they require to make two. Paper’s still expensive, but much cheaper than vellum, so I can sell my books for a tenth what they have to charge.”

Katye pointed at the book in my hands. “How much?”

“Free for our little princess.” He continued despite my glare, “But normally two krone.” A krone was sixteen pennies which made a coin about the size of an old silver dollar. A day’s wage for someone skilled like a smith or a scribe was a just a grote, four pennies. Fourpence?

Eight days’ labor for a bargain book? No wonder books were rare if they normally cost ten times as much. My eyes got bigger while I thought about the impact printing had had on my own world. And Kelvan had jumped from that revolutionary idea to another: newspapers.

“How much do you charge for your Tyddingr?” I asked.

“Half a penny, it would be a loss except for the advertising.”

“Who advertises?” I wondered aloud.

“Right now, the biggest advertisers are the used horse dealers, the wineshops, and the Apothecaries Guild.” He grinned again. “I charge them extra.”

“Used horse dealers,” Katye snorted. She wasn’t from the West Coast of my world so she didn’t immediately think of Cal Worthington and his dog Spot that might be any sort of animal from LA commercials back when I had been a kid. I had to grin, too, and Kelvan seemed to appreciate our amusement.

“I’ve been building a small classified section. Lonely hearts, estate sales, rooms to let. Eleven words for a farthing,” Kelvan seemed proud and dismissive of his accomplishments, both at the same time. “Odd, but I’ve had to make a rule, you can’t take out a classified just to insult someone.” He raised his eyebrows.

Katye laughed out loud. “The personals were getting personal?”

Kelvan nodded, suppressing another grin.

Something else occurred ot me to ask him. “You came here fifty years ago as a child? How do you know about newspapers, printing, advertising? How young were you?” I asked.

“I arrived as a child but I had lived nearly a whole lifetime back in the Other Earth.” He shook his head like a horse getting rid of a fly. “I don’t think time is congruent between the worlds. And if I’d known I was coming I would have studied the sort of things I needed. How to make sulfuric acid in quantity, why you don’t make paper out of wood until you have a big enough industrial base, how to make paper white without poisoning your workers.” He shook his head again, frowning at the memory of his failures.

“Congruent?” I blinked at the mathematically flavored word. But he had arrived younger than he had been in his own world? So had I, plus I wasn’t the same sex. Was he? I didn’t ask just then.

He explained himself a bit more. “Time is relative, didn’t Einstein say something similar? I don’t think it flows at the same speed, maybe not even in the same direction all the time,” he amplified his meaning, making it even more complicated and strange.

Katye and I looked at each other, the implications of that speculation beginning to soak in.

“So,” I said, “if and when I find a way to go back home, the time there might be a lot longer or shorter than it was here?”

“Why would you want to go back?” Katye asked and Kelvan’s look seemed to hold the same question.

Maybe they were both where and when they wanted to be but they weren’t living in the body of a reluctant princess who was supposed to marry Duke Evil.

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Comments

Happy to see another Chapter of Bian

I was afraid that Tail Gurls of Mars would eclipse Bian (which I am enjoying). Of course, Tail Gurls of Mars is also an intriguing read.

I'm glad

erin's picture

I'm enjoying writing both series, so it's good to know there are people enjoying reading them.

I have several more chapters of Mars written and much of the next chapter of Bian done. Both have many more chapters before they will be finished. :) In particular, this is Book 2 of Bian and there are four books planned. :)

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

Not quite ancient

Athena N's picture

Lest darkness fall is set (after the initial couple of paragraphs in Fascist Italy) about half a century after the fall of the last emperor in Rome, so technically very early middle ages. Cool to see a reference to the book!

True

erin's picture

I wasn't thinking of it like that so neither were the characters but yes. :)

I've read that book at least five times, probably more. :) I lived in a small desert town growing up and the library had about 150 SF books, this was one of them.

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

Yes!

erin's picture

Another one that I read many times and not just because it was on that shelf. :) I think you can detect the DNA of that story in Bian, also.

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

Could be worse

She isn't a serf or a slave.

True

erin's picture

Are you saying she should relax and enjoy being a princess? :)

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

Good girls (or guys) seldom make history.

She needs to make some waves, of course. Especially since the gods seem to have brought her back (or over) for some reason or another.

But as far as doing the nasty with Prince Hagar the Horrible? Somehow, I don't see that happening too easily. She'll probably kick him in the nads. And he wouldn't dare call in his guards to help, since that would be showing weakness. A mere girl? He needs his guards to subdue his wife?

I guess he would just have to bust a nut on his concubines or whatever the rich and influential have for such purposes.

Wives, possibly

erin's picture

Blodland is based on Norse culture and they were a bit loose in their definition of how many times you could marry. They didn't actually have divorce as such either, so technically, Adelwalt is still married to Ur-Alenna's mother even tho he has a new wife.

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

Lol

erin's picture

You haven't tried the three sea shells yet? :)

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

Why go back?

I would miss technology. Maybe I would have to make a laboratory and make my own vacuum tubes, or something like that. If I happened to like the king and his reign, I could supply him with a way to communicate instantly with his generals.

Tech

erin's picture

Making vacuum tubes is hard because of all the things that need to be invented first. A telegraph might actually be doable with just the one key invention of the battery and some way to make wire.

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

Wire

I'm not sure how hard wire is to make, but I think that it should not be too difficult. A copper alloy in order that it not be too soft and of course some sort of flexible insulator for interior spaces. Out doors you could use bare wires. Use clay (ceramic) for your battery pile and other insulators. Yeah depending on how hard it is to make wire, and that doesn't really have to start round, a telegraph would be very easy to make. I can definitely see why knowing how to make sulfuric acid would be something important as far as a leap ahead industrially goes!

Wire

If you want shorter pieces, it's not hard to roll some soft copper between hard rollers (similar to the way that pasta can be made.) Then, it can be cut into strips.

But modern wire is drawn through a die. It's an extrusion process. It takes a lot of force.

As for a tube, the biggest deal would be to get all of the air out of the envelope. Essentially, it's a light bulb with a grid (wire mesh) and plate (wire plate) added.

The envelope can be evacuated with an old style mercury drop pump. I'm not sure what you would use to scavenge out the rarefied last bits of gas. Sodium or potassium if you can get it, I guess.

More problems than that

erin's picture

You need iron wire for any real length of telegraph, copper is too weak and will require way too many poles until other technical advances. And iron wire requires even higher pressures. As for scavenging, a chunk of mossy iron and a little heat will remove the oxygen, I dunno how to get rid of the nitrogen without one of the more reactive metals and you generally need electricity and a fair amount of it to get them. Aluminum will do if there is no oxygen to make oxide instead, most of the other reactive metals are very hard to handle. Lithium would probably be safest unless you can generate enough current to make titanium. Hmm. Magnesium? Maybe.

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

DeCamp's Martinus...

...in Lest Darkness Fall left actual telegraphy as a future project (he noted that experimentation would be needed, probably for the reasons described here) and had his side using towers, telescopes and a semaphore system.

Certainly faster than a courier, and at least initially probably more likely to get through, though you'd better hope none of the folks doing the relaying is a saboteur or has his own agenda. And I suppose they're almost literally sitting ducks if an enemy gets behind the battle line and figures out what's going on, so the towers need guarding. Redundancy would be difficult, so they'd only need to take one of them out to scuttle the whole thing. Of course, it'd seem even easier for an enemy to cut telegraph wires in a mechanical system, since they could do that anywhere along the line.

Eric

This is Britain :)

erin's picture

Semaphore telegraphs frequently don't have the visibility needed to be useful over long distances in Britain. During the Peninsular War, British land forces in Spain used semaphore towers run by the Navy for communication and they had exactly the problems you mention with one more: snipers taking out the specially trained operators.

I don't know that anyone, other than Terry Pratchett, has made extensive uses of a peacetime system of semaphore telegraphs.

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

Acid

erin's picture

Sulfuric acid really is key to many industrial processes. It unlocks the making of many other acids, for one. Not too hard to make, burn sulfur and bubble the fumes through water to get sulfurous acid, and bubble air through that to convert to sulfuric. The presence of some catalysts make it easier. Making purer grades of alcohol is probably just as important in early chemistry.

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

Go back?

Mister newspaper editor was probably delighted to get a fresh, young body. Bian? Well, aside from the whole girl thing, she was a healthy and fit male in a position of relative power. Perhaps if the gods had waited until age caused the inevitable aches and pains.

Hmm

erin's picture

I don't think I've said that Kelvan was a newspaperman in a previous life. Or exactly at what age the translation to Bian happened.

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

Kelvan

He's a newspaperman now. As for his age:

“I arrived as a child but I had lived nearly a whole lifetime back in the Other Earth.”

So that would be 50+, probably 60s or 70s, since most forty-somethings don't consider themselves to have lived nearly a whole lifetime.

Well, I'm wrong :)

erin's picture

I did say that. LOL.

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

Okay...

So Kelvan got here 50 years ago, though we still don't know how recently he was pulled from Gus's world (or its equivalent). Unlike Katye, his anachronistic references aren't relatively recent: Kalvan goes back to 1965 and Darkness a lot further (1939! -- my used copy was a late-50s/early 60s paperback, acquired in 1969). Those two items, along with last chapter's Shakespeare quote and the Chicken Club, would work even if Kelvan did come over 50 years ago in both timestreams. We don't know whether or not he was familiar with the Goldfinger quote, but it also goes back that far: '59 for the novel, '64 for the film.

That said, you'd think Kelvan would have a reason to assume the two timestreams weren't operating at the same rate, and likely one that didn't involve Katye's and Gus's more recent presence. (I suppose there's the basic fact that this world isn't at the same point in time as the one they came from; Occam's Razor would suggest that a basic worldline shift would be easier to account for without adding time travel into the equation. Not sure whether gods and magic render the Razor inapplicable, but I'm pretty sure there's no evidence yet that Kelvan knows about those things.)

Eric

Nice reasoning

erin's picture

I'm not going to confirm anything but you did a good job of restating most of what I said out right and a lot of what I sort of implied. :)

But who shaved the barber? :)

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

When I see the "∂" character, the thing that comes to mind is a partial integral. Though I have to assume that the character is used in some language or another.

Using a character

erin's picture

The funny d character was one of two used for the th sound in Old English. I'm actually using a different character, a Greek one, to show it on the page here.

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

ash, eth, and thorn

ash æ
eth ð
thorn þ
Work with normal html. Doesn't Drupal support them?

Couldn't find eth

erin's picture

That's the one I meant to use: ð but I failed to find it in the character list I had.

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

Gunpowder

joannebarbarella's picture

It would have been a lot easier to invent gunpowder than paper. Still, both are great science-fiction books...classics now.

Yeah

erin's picture

Gunpowder is actually fairly easy, a careful mix of niter, charcoal and sulfur. Usable guns are not much harder. Paper is complicated.

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

Class 'back in history' SF

With all of the mention of the classics where a modern person is dropped back into a historic time, I'm surprised that nobody mentioned one of the first: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain.

A sci-fi classic for sure

erin's picture

I certainly thought about it. :)

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

More episodes?

You mentioned 4 books planned, but almost 2 years have passed since the last offering, will we be seeing any more episodes in this intriguing story?

Funny you should mention that

erin's picture

There's a new episode almost ready to post. :)

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

Re-reading This Part...

...after checking out the new one, and the mention of used horse dealers brought back my dad and my uncle's references to "Horsetrader Ed" Shapiro, who ran cheesy ads on television up here in San Francisco in the early 1950s -- reputedly the largest used car dealer in North America at the time, with several lots in the Bay Area, until he got convicted of tax evasion in 1954.

(We got a television in 1953 or '54, a little before I started nursery school, but my memories of it don't go quite that far back.)

Eric

I think

erin's picture

I think every major metro area has someone like Ed Shapiro. I think it was Seattle where they had a guy who would "throw in a free radio" -- right through the windshield. In LA, we had Cal Worthington and his Dog, Spot, which was a tiger, or a llama, or a hippo, never a dog. :)

Lundenna probably has someone similar. :)

Thanks for commenting.

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

Something isn't congruent

Jamie Lee's picture

Kelvan lived almost an entire lifetime before coming to this time. As they talked about gunpowder, he asked if that's what Alenna had. That would imply he knows nothing about smokeless powder, which wound be used in the rounds for the baby glock. And yet he talks about Einstine and his time theory, so he had to come from a time when smokeless powder was being used or started being used.

And Katye from almost a similar time as Gus since she knows about Tabloids.

Katye isn't being coy with Alenna, they haven't had time for their talk. Kelvan, however, is being coy and inarticulate with his origins. Why? Is he afraid he'll have to go back to his original time and location just when he's started building an empire? If the gods brought him then he may not have a choice about returning.

If Kelvan questions why go back, it's possible his former life was horrible for him. That he was nobody there and is now someone in the present time.

Why go back? Even with all the bad, it is outweighed by the good. Of course if it's more important to Kelvan to be someone then he will stay if given the choice.

But what are they supposed to do?

Others have feelings too.

Commentariat

erin's picture

Kelvan does not know that Alenna has an actual futuristic gun, he may think she has a pistol she made in the current timeline, one which likely uses black powder since that is simply a mix of available items and not the result of a chemical process unknown in the current time. nHe's asking her what she has in her pocket because he doesn't know.

Kelvan is a politician and does not want to give meaningful information about his origins away without getting something in return. Alenna didn't haul her pistol out and show it to him, either.

He not only doesn't want to go back, the thought was very far from his consciousness.

But I don't know what your last question means. Are you asking what are the gods plans for the time travelers?

Thanks for all the lovely comments!

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

Their roll in the drama

Jamie Lee's picture

During one of Alenna's dreams she was told she has a roll to play in the drama, but not what that roll will be. The gods have a plan, but what?

And why have three modern English speaking people back during that time? Speaking English among themselves will keep other from knowing what's being said, but why? Will they have to plan something they don't want the others to know about?

Others have feelings too.