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Chapter 28: What the Cube Costs to Ask

Chapter 28: What the Cube Costs to Ask

Panel A lost its fourth cell on the morning Leon built the laboratory.

Leon found it during the pre-test measurement, which was the entire point of doing a pre-test measurement. Open circuit voltage down again. He walked the string with the meter, cell by cell, and the crack that had started as a hairline in a conifer hollow on Day One had finished crossing a fourth cell and taken it with it.

Output on that panel was now sixty-one percent of what it had been when it came out of the ground.

The number went in the book with the seen-mark beside it, and then he sat with it for a moment, because sixty-one is not a crisis and the slope of the line is.

Six days. Four cells. The crack propagated when the laminate flexed, and the laminate flexed every time anybody moved it, and it would keep going whether he touched it or not.

Eighteen months, then. He gave it that. Then he took the eighteen months and wrote it as a range with the reasoned-mark beside it, because he had learned something on the twenty-fourth day about which of his own claims had actually been tested, and no part of that estimate had been.

"Do not move this one," he told Oren, in verbs.

Oren looked at the flat panel, and at the ceramic cover, and at Leon.

Then he went and got four pegs and pinned the frame to the platform so that a person carrying something heavy could not put a foot in it in the dark.

Leon had been about to do that. He had it third on his list. Oren had done it because Oren had spent forty years watching people put a foot through things in the dark.

The laboratory was Veya’s idea and she did not know it.

Leon had asked for permission to use the archive platform for a day, and she had asked what for, and he had tried to say test and had got watch out instead, and Veya had corrected him with the verb and then asked the question that had reorganised his morning:

Who watches with you?

Not what will you do. Not is it safe.

Who watches. Because a thing one person sees is a thing one person says, and Nayra had spent two days teaching this settlement the difference between that and a cross.

So the experiment got four witnesses.

Nayra, because she had built the marks. Oren, because he would be repairing whatever broke. Luma, because she could hold a sequence of events in her head and repeat it back in order the following week, which is a rarer and more valuable skill than Leon’s century had ever priced correctly. And Aru, on the grounds that he had appointed himself and physically removing him was more effort than allowing it.

Kharun refused, on the grounds that if the thing went wrong he did not want to be one of the people who had been watching it go wrong. Leon thought that was the most sophisticated risk position anybody had taken all week.

Leon already knew it would fail.

That was the difficult part to explain and the whole reason the day was worth having. The cube had told him on the twenty-first day, in his own language, that ordinary electricity was not the problem: `CHRONAL FIELD COHERENCE: ABSENT. ANCHOR LATTICE: UNAVAILABLE. PRECISION CONTROL NETWORK: UNAVAILABLE.`

This was not a test of whether it would work.

It was a test of how it refused, which is a different question, and a better one, and one that would still be worth something to a person standing here in a hundred years with better equipment.

So the rig had to be proper.

A stable source: two battery packs through the charge controller, with a bank of wet-clay resistors Oren fired the previous evening to Leon’s dimensions, giving him five current steps he could select by moving one lead. Crude, hot, and repeatable.

A measurement standard: the multimeter, which was finite and would die, and beside it a compass needle on a pivot inside a wound coil of the last of the spare copper — a galvanometer, badly, which would still work when the multimeter did not, and which Luma could be taught to read in an afternoon.

And a record. Ruled columns on the flattened bark sheets Oren cut for him. Voltage, current, contact geometry, duration, result, mark. One row per attempt. Leon wrote the column headings in Rethari, badly, with Luma correcting him twice, and that took twenty minutes and was the most important twenty minutes of the day.

Then they ran it.

Nineteen attempts, over five hours, in the sun, with a boy who could not walk properly announcing the meter readings.

Two seam contacts, then four, then the recessed key surface. Voltage from a quarter of a volt to the highest the packs would safely give. Current from a trickle to the most the clay resistors would pass without cracking. Steady application, pulsed application, reversed polarity, and one attempt where Leon connected everything and simply waited eleven minutes in case duration was the variable.

The cube accepted nothing.

Not once. Not a milliamp. The multimeter sat at zero draw through all nineteen rows, and the compass needle did not twitch, and the cube did not heat, spark, hum, or acknowledge the existence of the equipment in any way.

Aru got bored around attempt nine and had to be given the galvanometer to hold.

The thing that made the day worth it happened at attempt fourteen.

Leon had run out of ideas about geometry and was moving the contacts around the seams more or less at random, and Nayra, who had been watching the record rather than the cube for two hours, put her finger on row eleven and then on row fourteen and asked a question.

The two rows had the same voltage and the same contact points and different results.

Except they did not have different results. Both said no draw. She was not asking about the cube.

She was asking why the source voltage in row fourteen was lower than in row eleven, when nothing about the source had been changed.

Leon looked at his own record.

Then he went and measured the battery packs, and found that the packs had dropped over five hours of sitting in direct sun with a clay resistor bank radiating heat next to them, and that he had been running the last six attempts at a lower input than he thought, and had not noticed, because he had been watching the cube.

Five hours building a rig to measure something impossible, and had failed to monitor the only part of it that was ordinary.

"That is a real mistake," he said, in English, with feeling.

Nayra did not need the translation. She took the charcoal and put the reasoned-mark against rows nine through nineteen, and the tested-mark against one through eight, and handed the sheet back.

Eleven rows demoted by a healer who could not read.

Fixing it took twenty minutes — the packs moved into shade, a fired clay baffle between the resistor bank and everything else, and a new first column on the sheet for source checked before and source checked after. Then he re-ran attempts nine to nineteen properly.

Same result. Nothing.

But now it was nothing he could stand behind.

The by-product was the measure.

He had to say this much current to people who had no word for it, and the multimeter’s numbers meant nothing to anybody but him, and would mean nothing to anybody at all in a decade when it died.

So the standard got made out of what was there. A fixed length of the same copper wire, a fixed coil, the compass needle, and a scratched arc behind it. One notch was the deflection you got from one battery pack through the largest clay resistor. That was the unit. Everything else was counted in notches.

It was arbitrary and reproducible, which is what a unit is.

Luma learned to read it in about ten minutes and then asked what it was called.

Leon opened his mouth to say ampere, and stopped.

Nothing here had been named by him. The water had been named by Aru. The tools had been named before he was born. He had been given a name himself.

"You," he said, in verbs. "You say."

Luma looked at the needle. Then at the coil. Then she said a word that Leon had to have repeated three times, and which used the root for push and the ending for a thing that is counted.

Aru, from the floor, said "sleeping push," in the accent he had invented for it on the fourth day, and laughed at his own joke for the fourth day in a row.

It stuck. Of course it stuck.

The unit of current in Reed River was named by a nineteen-year-old with a splinted leg who had been mangling the phrase for a month, and the formal version was Luma’s, and Leon wrote both in the record and neither of them was his.

The last diagnostic went in at dusk, and it cost him.

There was no way around it. The whole day had produced nineteen rows of no and one unit of measurement, and the only remaining question was whether the refusal had changed at all, in any measurable way, since the twenty-first day.

The service key went in and he asked for the short status, not the deep one.

`CORE ENERGY: 0.0000037%`

`ENERGY ACCEPTANCE: LOCKED`

Then it closed.

Leon sat back on his heels and did the arithmetic, and it was the arithmetic he had been carefully not doing for a week.

Arrival: 0.0000041. First diagnostic, Day Three: down to 0.0000038. Tonight, a short status only: 0.0000037.

The deep diagnostic had cost him three ten-millionths of a percent. The short one cost one.

At that rate there were somewhere in the region of thirty-seven short status checks left before the core had nothing at all.

Thirty-seven questions. Not thirty-seven answers — thirty-seven questions, and each one would return a status line and no more, and one of them would be the last thing the machine ever said.

Three were already gone. One of those had been on a day when he was checking whether ordinary electricity worked, which he had been told, in writing, that it did not.

The cube got wrapped that night.

Not in a bag. He took a strip of the tarp, cut it, folded the cube into it, and bound it with cord, and then he took the service key off the ring it had lived on since Kaltenbruck and tied that separately.

Veya watched him do it from four metres away without saying anything.

Finished, he brought both things to her, and put them down, and said the sentence he had been building all afternoon out of a vocabulary that had not been designed for it.

"I not open. Not alone. You watch. You say when."

It was the fourth verb that mattered and he had only had it for two days.

Veya looked at the wrapped bundle for a long moment. Then she asked him a question with the counting-ending on it, and Leon held up ten fingers, and then ten again, and then ten again, and then seven.

Thirty-seven.

There were no words for what they were. He said ask and made the sign for ended, and Veya, who had spent sixty years keeping the only record this settlement had, understood immediately and completely that she was being handed something with a finite number of uses left in it.

She did not take it.

She added a knot to the cord instead, and then she pointed at the bundle, and then at Leon, and then made the sign for both, at head height.

A question, not a statement.

You keep it. I count it. Yes?

Leon looked east, where the ridge was going dark, where a cable tag from a factory had come from fifty to sixty summers ago, where something the machine still called active was pulsing on a map he had seen for less than one second and had cost him three ten-millionths of a percent to see.

Thirty-seven questions between him and silence.

"Ei," he said.