Maker of Fire

Emily, Truvos, Planting Season, 6th rot., 3rd day, evening

"You want to do what with my surplus heating gems?" Imstay King was making a marvelous fish face.

"I want to blow up a bridge," I smiled as sweetly as I could manage.

I was sitting with Imstay and Aylem in Lord Sopno's great hall after a light dinner, where most of the wedding guests were relaxing after a long day with a feast and two handfastings. Tom was playing the grumble with the musicians that the Singing Shrine of Sassoo provided. Some attendees were getting organized to do the line and circle dances the Cosm liked. I was amused that Oyyeth was one of them, dragging Usruldes along with her.

People watching could wait. "As I said, Imstay King, I want to blow up a bridge in Mattamesscontess. It's something that the god Vassu wants done," I smiled. "Think of the heating gems as a precondition for negotiating with my agent over using my capital for your new road and bridge."

Imstay groaned, "Oh, my poor treasury."

"Imstay King, I understand the bridge will be pricey, but the road should be easy. All you need to do is site the new road from Kas to run along the lower slope of the South Twin Butte above the level of the geysers, which I admit I've only seen from a distance. But the butte looked to me like your average dormant small basaltic shield volcano. You shouldn't need a lot of switchbacks."

"Basaltic shield? What's that?" Imstay asked.

I had to sigh, "South Twin Butte is a small dead volcano made out of the black bubble rock that comes out of the Great Cracks. The name for black bubble rock is basalt, which isn't always black. It should be easy to cut a road across the basalt above the level of the geysers and the new crater created by the steam explosion."

Imstay just shook his head, "No, no, no! The bubble rock that forms the butte is all blocky with dips and collapses and all this rough, broken-up rock with sharp edges. It's impossible to work with. You don't understand."

"Oh!" I had an insight based on growing up next to all those lava flows around Idaho Falls. "You just need to fill in the gaps and bumps in the lava to build up a road foundation over the a'a and the blocky lava first. I've noticed you have a lot of quarries, but you don't have many good sand and gravel pits, which I would normally expect along the river. So I'm guessing you probably don't have a lot of sand and gravel on hand in Kas or Kesmet to use as fill. So here's a thought for you. After moving the worst of the loose materials out of the way, why don't you stretch your limited sand and gravel resources by making concrete instead? The expansion of the cement in the concrete will give you a greater volume than just using straight fill, and it's sticky, too, unlike loose sand and gravel. You could use a bentonite mixture with wood chips or walnut shells for the difficult void spaces. What I don't understand, and maybe Sutsusum can tell me, is why you don't build roads across the lava already. This isn't hard to do. Is there some problem you have with road building that prevents you from building across lava rock?"

"Emily," Aylem interjected, "there's no concrete. No one knows how to make it. There's no bitumen pavement, either. We use quarried stone or river cobbles for road surfaces."

"What? No concrete?" That had never occurred to me. "There's no concrete? Surd save us, there's no concrete. How in the world do you build things without concrete?"

"Emily?" Aylem looked at me with a quizzical expression. "We build things all the time without concrete. All our buildings are built out of stone, brick, and wood. It's what we have, and it works."

"That's why so many buildings use stone. There's no concrete," I muttered more to myself than anyone else. I was utterly and totally gobsmacked. "No true arches and no concrete. No wonder all the bridges are so primitive. If there's no concrete, there's no way to pump wet concrete to fill voids in pahoehoe and blocky lava." By now, I was holding my head. What an incredible oversight on my part. There was no concrete. I was so focused on metallurgy that I never realized there was no concrete.

"Great One," Imstay leaned over and asked in a gentle, worried voice, "What's concrete?"

"It's the best building material ever, Imstay King. It starts as a dry powder that you mix with water. That makes a slurry you can pump wherever you want it to go. You can make it heavy or light. You can pour it into molds and make shapes with it. You can make it so it will set underwater. You can pour floors with it, pave roads with it, pour it into caissons to make foundations for bridges and footings for dams, make it into blocks and build buildings with it, and supports for..." I looked up. "Imstay, you can build almost everything with it. It never occurred to me that you didn't have concrete." I was flummoxed and floored. I'm sure my fish face was profound and an invitation to set up habitation in the river.

"Is it hard to make?" Imstay asked, looking concerned over my reaction. I think he's never seen me this floored before.

"It should be easy. You've got gypsum, lots of limestone in the mountains, ash cones to mine along the Great Cracks, lots of clay deposits in the foothills from older ash falls, gravel bars in the river to use to add strength. I'm sorry, Imstay King. I'm just astounded there's no concrete and because I never realized it before now. I can't believe no one has invented concrete. I mean, even the Romans had concrete."

"Who?" Imstay looked lost. He glanced at Aylem, "Can you call Sutsusum and Raoleer over here, please?" Imstay turned back to me, "Can you tell me how this concrete stuff is made so we can make a new road over the edge of the South Twin Butte?"

"Emily? Emily? What's wrong?" Tom came running over, dodging and weaving through a forest of Cosm tree trunk legs. He leapt onto my armchair and gave Imstay a murderous look. Then he turned back to me, sitting beside me, and grabbing my hands, "Mouse, what's wrong?"

"Tom, nothing terrible has happened," I tried to smile. "Go back to playing your grumble. I was talking with the King about road building."

Tom looked at the King with an accusatory glare and then turned back to me. "Emily, that's not the sort of face you make in the middle of a normal conversation. What is wrong?"

"Tom, we really were talking about construction," I tried to sound reassuring.

"Emily," Tom took out his don't-argue-with-me voice, which he seldom used, "I know you better than that. What set you off like this?"

I took a deep breath and then let it out, "Tom, there's no concrete."

Sutsusum walked up with Roaleer. "Great One, what's concrete?"

"This was about concrete?" Tom's voice rose in disbelief. Silence grew around us as people noticed my state of being floored and Tom's ire.

"I told you it wasn't anything important," I tried to regain my composure.

"Merciful Mugash," Tom's eyes widened as he understood what I had just said. "There's no concrete. I never realized it before. Surd save us, there's no concrete. That explains so much. There's no asphalt, either. Gods!" He hung his head and sighed. "Did you just figure this out?"

I nodded.

"I understand now. No wonder you reacted like you did," Tom smiled at me with sympathy and understanding. "Give it a little time, you hopeless mekaner. You'll feel more yourself in a bit. I'll go back to playing now. We were just getting ready to do a dance set. Don't talk construction all night, dear. This is supposed to be a party, after all."

"Tom," Aylem smiled knowingly, "for Emily, talking construction with other mekaners is probably her idea of a good time at a party."

Tom laughed at that and then went back to playing music. I spent the next half bell talking about how to make concrete, its ingredients, calcining the ingredients in a rotary kiln, the ratio of silicates to lime, how water content affects strength, the role of the aggregate, the exothermic reaction as it cured, setting times, additives, and everything else I could remember about it from my civil engineering classes.

By the time I started describing steel reinforce pre-stressed concrete for foundations, piles, causeways, and bridges, I thought Sutsusum looked ready to kidnap me and incarcerate me at the Hospitable Shrine of Gertzpul so she could suck my brains dry.

Of course, Kamagishi, mother of the bride, snuck her magic recording scroll under my chair, looking pleased with herself by the time Tom came to put me to bed.

Emily's dreamspace

"Good mornin', good mornin', it's great to stay up late, good mornin', good mornin' to you," Giltak and Galt came tap dancing into my dreams — well, I assumed it was my dreams — dressed like Don Lockwood and Cosmo.

"Alright, you two," I accused, "what mischief are you up to this time?" I was not surprised to find myself dressed like Debbie Reynolds in the "Good Mornin'" scene from Singing in the Rain. "For the record, I do not know how to tap dance," I stated.

"You do now," Giltak said, taking one arm while Galt took the other. Then, to my amazement, we tapped the entire dance portion of that number from the musical.

"As far as stuffing knowledge into my poor overloaded head, this was a bit over the top," I groused at the two goofball gods. "What's with you two and Singing in the Rain anyway?"

*Because, my dear Emily,* Galt was suddenly dressed in Don Lockwood's white coat and fedora from the opening scene of the movie, in front of the Chinese Theater in Hollywood, *to be a god is about dignity, always dignity.*

What made this hysterically funny is that Giltak showed up beside him dressed as Lina Lamont. I did have a good laugh this time over their antics. When I was done with my amusement, I decided to move on to whatever their purpose was for me this time.

"Okay, out with it," I pulled up a chair in Don Lockwood's kitchen. "What are you two about this time. You never do the song and dance routine without something up your sleeve that you want me to do."

"Well, Love, when you wake up," Giltak smiled, "you will know exactly where to send your friends Sutsusum and Raoleer for the right ingredients to kiln to make concrete. As for everything else..."

Suddenly, I was sitting between them on the couch in Lockwood's living room. *It's like this, Emily,* Galt started to pontificate. *You collapsed all the timelines.*

"Now thousands of millions of new timelines are coalescing and consolidating as you make choices to shape your destiny," Giltak added.

*What you choose to do today affects all the potential futures,* Galt explained. *That's why, when you talked to Aylem about heating and ice gems and decided to use a steam explosion in No'ank, you created a new event kernel, and poor precognisant Kamagishi saw more than a thousand timelines collapsed into that future event.*

"You've figured out how to manipulate the events on timelines. That's your ability as a prophet. You can change the details around that kernel, Emily," Giltak explained. "You made it, and now you can mess with it. For example, you can direct someone else to blow up the bridge, and you can stay home. You are no longer the slave of destiny but a maker of it."

"Didn't Vassu want me to blow up that bridge?" I asked. "How can I walk away from such an obligation?"

*My point is that you now can choose not to fulfill it if you desire. But yes,* Galt said, *Vassu wants that bridge destroyed when the remains of the Mattamesscontess imperial army is on the upland, eastern side of it, having fled there to escape Chem pursuit. If the bridge isn't destroyed at that moment, those forces will recross the Mattaheehee River at No'ank and hand the Chem a devastating defeat that will set back the emancipation of the enslaved Chem in eastern Impotu by two years. If they can push back the Chem pursuit, then they will join up with the remains of the Impotuan forces under Arkaline Ugi. That will make it impossible for Lord Bobbo to defeat her when he corners her two years from now. Ugi and the Mattamesscontess forces should not be permitted to meet, and the pivotal event is the destruction of that bridge.*

"I will remove the bridge for Vassu," I said. "She wants it done, and I owe her."

"You can fulfill that obligation, Emily," Giltak said, "without being there personally. You have more options than you realize. We want you to know this, Emily. You don't even need to go to the White Shrine for that last revelation about the crystal. The Cosm know its destruction is inevitable. Aylem can just go and destroy it whenever she chooses. You are no longer locked into that destiny, Emily. You can step back and coast now. Only your last task remains undone, and you can take your time writing that last scripture. You just need to do it before you die, after a long and happy life raising the family you've always wanted."

*We want you to have some happiness in life, Emily,* Galt said. *You've done all the hard things we needed you to do. You don't need to do any more hard or risky deeds. Go visit Ud, get your fertility fixed, and then have lots of fun with Tom procreating. You've remade your destiny and balanced all future events around it. You passed the test Tiki made to tempt you, and you, you splendid young soul, chewed him a new sphincter for trying to do so. That was so much fun to watch. It's good for trickster gods to have their asses handed back to them for a change.*

"What will happen if I don't go with Tom and the Chem to Mattamesscontess?" I asked.

"The war will last longer, and many more Chem will die," Giltak said. "Your presence will strongly affect both the Chem and the Cosm. All eleven godmarks have now manifested, and even halfhairs can feel them. The Chem can sense them, too. When you are happy, the godmarks are almost invisible. Their effect is strongest when you are angered, which, given how stupid and stubborn some Cosm can be, is often." Giltak grinned like the devil, "That was by design."

"The Cosm are expecting me to go to the White Shrine," I pointed out. "It will be difficult for them to understand if I don't. And having corrupted the Chem, I will see the war through. In a way, I'm responsible for them and what they do."

"Emily, by the standards you were raised with," Erhonsay said, dressed like the lady elocution coach from Singing in the Rain, "this is indeed a version of Saint Augustine's just war. It is not morally wrong for the Chem to learn to defend themselves. You take too much responsibility upon yourself when this war is the will of Vassu and myself. This is not your fault, and you have not corrupted the Chem, whose war is to recover what was stolen from them, namely their loved ones."

"What we're saying, Emily," Mugash appeared, dressed in her Old Testament holy woman clothes, "is that you do not need to carry the burdens of the world on your small and narrow shoulders anymore. You can rest now. You have done far more than we ever expected."

"And who will advocate and protect the liberated Coyn if I don't, you idiot god?" I glared at Mugash. "What are you doing here, anyway? I don't want to talk with you. I don't want to see you ever again. Haven't you done enough damage to me and Aylem? Please leave."

Tired of them all, once again, I shut the gods out. Well, maybe not Galt. He still owed me a dinner a Spenger's.

*I heard that, kitten!*

The Godspaces

"Is Emily still on a timeline track that will take her to Melk?" Erhonsay asked.

*I'm not sure," Galt said, looking out on all the futures combining, coalescing, and then branching again. *It doesn't have to be Melk. You can use some other eagle.*

"Melk is the perfect choice, and Emily appears up for the task, but it no longer needs to be an ordeal for her, Galt, and she can choose another future now. If she embarks on a path that will take her to Melk, can you make it an adventure instead of a trial?"

*For that to happen, my dear Sophia, you need to do something about your worshipers who will be in Emily's way.*