Chương 188: Chapter 209 : Asking the wrong questions

Halfway through my literature class, the teacher got called away quickly. Apparently some kind of literature emergency, whatever that might be. It left the rest of us at loose ends, so we chatted amongst ourselves. And I have finally mustered the nerve and fortitude to say some of the hardest words to speak aloud.

"I owe you an apology," I said, getting the hard part out first. I ducked down between my shoulders and peeked over at her to gauge her reaction. Tiviti was staring at me with a sort of clinical confusion.

"Why?" Her confused blinking looked odd on her face. The sharp angles, the tilted eyes, the lack of a sclera. When her face did not show much emotion she sometimes reminded me of a very large mantis examining me. But, in a hot way? I have confusing feelings.

"I... have been distant. We were getting along really well, and then we hit a plateau. And I have not been able to figure out how to get past that. What to say, what to do. You gave me the signals and I didn't know what to do with them and so I just didn't do anything and now I'm just in a holding pattern of silence and I've squandered so many opportunities and I hate that I've done that and you have been really good to me and you deserve better."

"Breathe." I nodded, gasping. She did not need to lean over to rest her hand on my shoulder.

"First of all. Not knowing what to say is not a reason to apologize. You are acting as though you have withheld something from me that I deserve and am in a position to deserve, neither of us has that much ownership over each other. Not nearly enough to think we deserve anything unspoken. Understood?" I winced. This feels like when I was a kid and Nathan would effortlessly say something that highlighted my unexamined assumptions or my more immature emotions.

I did not wince at Tiviti's words, only at the flash of familiarity and the negative associations I've plated over it like layers of nacre and pearl. I forced myself to relax, un-turtling my neck.

"I understand," I said.

"Or I will when I take some time to sit with those feelings." Her hand squeezed my shoulder, her elongated fingers brushing my neck.

"Next: You've been busy. You have always been busy, but things go through stages. There are large swaths of your life that I do not fit into, and you have leaned on them for some time. From what you describe, there will soon enough be more than adequate demand for hunting, slaying, and trapping. When we reach the right time, I will have the majority of your attention and all these other pursuits will take a back seat." I believe what she means is 'all these other paramours will take a back seat'.

She knows that I have a social calendar and that I have invited people to public events, instead of her. Even if I'm not hooking up, there is a certain message to read in when I have been taking other people out on dates but not her. That is really the most major reason that I wanted to start this conversation with an apology.

"I have... um, needed to prioritize," I said miserably.

"How I spend my time. And with whom." She looked at me curiously again, her hand sliding away. Her fingers trailed down my arm and I was quite aware of that contact.

"Yes?" she said as if what I had said was too obvious to need to be spoken. There's a certain 'yes?' that is a very polite version of 'no duh?', and she's giving it to me. She continued, "I am given to understand that for unmarried persons of upper rank, it is convention that one not spend too much time with any individual, lest that be interpreted as a close and lasting connection. Especially true of highly placed but non-inheriting persons, and doubly so for women.

You have not many opportunities to be alone with anyone, as I understand it. And most of those opportunities, you chose to spend with me." I planted my elbows on my desk and pressed the heels of my palms to my eyes.

"I don't know why I expected you to be mad at me. I just assumed I was going to have to explain all of this, and that it wouldn't sound right and it would all come out wrong." At her chuckle I looked up at her again. For the first time I noticed the small fangs at her bicuspids They were instantly fascinating to me. She did not often smile that widely, I had never seen them. Well now I've got another reason to make her smile. But her expression was not entirely cheerful in the way I would have expected.

That mantis regard again.

"Perhaps at first. I had misgivings and misunderstandings for a while. I did not have an innate understanding of how your station would prohibit you simply 'taking me someplace nice'. I needed to pay more attention and understand the environment. Now I do. This, like many things, is about timing. I am good at timing. The right opportunities require patience. I am patient, and aware. Most people in your social circle seem to go about their business and require you to approach them.

I can understand why they, in their circumstances and with their background, would behave in such a way. It suits them, and you, I suppose. It is well enough. I watch and learn."

"... Yes?" I said. I was confused now. I thought the conversation was going well, but it felt like things had taken a turn without me noticing. This feels weirdly like a conversation with Rabert, but this time I get the impression that she's not trying to be obtuse, there is simply one key thing I'm missing that would make sense of my misunderstandings. One of her glowing eyes closed in a knowing wink.

"I am not so complacent, Lady Harigold. It is not my upbringing. Where I come from, what you want, you pursue."

"Oh." The light was dawning for me. She was not upset that I was not pursuing her. Because she does not expect me to pursue her. That's not what we are to each other. She is not an unmoving target waiting for me to approach. She is [The Huntress]. And if I'm not hunting her, she's hunting me." Oh." What she said snapped into place for me. This one plays by different rules. This is a love interest with initiative. She has decided I'm worth wanting, and worth pursuing. I am being observed, studied, and tracked.

A handful of XP were added to my account. [Quest Checkpoint: Target Admired. +5 XP. Advancement: The Huntress.] Here's an exciting development. The teacher came back into the room, looking quite tense.

She was glaring straight at me, even though almost everyone else in the room was socializing and blowing off the assignment. Why was she picking me out specifically?

"Lady Harigold, what exactly is a Tommy Westphall?" Oh, oops. Hah, I'd forgotten I did that. Okay, I guess literature emergencies really do happen. Well, time to address the fallout.

"Okay, tell me if this helps: it's going to have a wedge welded to the front, like a battering ram. It's called a cow-catcher. Anything in front of it is going to take about a million foot-pounds of harsh education, see?"

"Cattle rattle for the battle, a cow-plow prow," he managed.

"Bringing train, flinging pain, battering splattering bloody rain."

"Okay, so that part you understand," I affirm.

"After that, we need to get the engineering to put as much impetus as possible. Simply put, we want to be able to drag as much weight as possible, as fast as possible, under artificially-created ideal circumstances. That's why the rails, so we don't have to account for obstructions or irregularities." The usual basement, Developing Theories. We've got the place to ourselves, the instructors are all out in the fresh air field-testing the new hot-air balloon.

The orderlies that accompanied Nux everywhere were across the room, playing cards. Nux pawed through my sketches and diagrams. They were not to his standard, but I thought they were good enough to communicate the concept. Maybe the lines aren't drafting-table straight, but they're still good. I do not have bad penmanship, just not up to the standards of certain people who get weirdly judgy about that considering they're completely incoherent.

He filed the pages into a different order, working his way from the combustion chamber through the mechanism to the wheels rather than front-to-back as I had them organized. He jabbed a finger at the first page, right at the first weak spot in my design.

"Start the heart, dying dry." That was... related to the problem at least. If he was treating this as a weapon missing part of the trigger assembly he could focus on it.

"Okay, so yes, I'm missing an ignition starter," I admitted.

"I figured an electrical signal to a sparker, a specific impedance airgap will be able to ignite the reaction, and-" But he was already moving on.

"Missing hissing leak the creek! Listing kissing shriek and weak!" he jabbed at another part of the diagram. He looked angry, and disappointed.

"Yeah, uh I never did come up with a design for a compressor to bring the steam back down so the pistons would rock," I tried not to look embarrassed. He's a madman. A mad scientist. A lunatic engineer. His opinion of my plans should not affect me. But this guy doesn't understand much about the world but he understands this, and this is the thing I'm supposed to be the very best at. I'm credited so many inventions but now the charade is wearing thin.

I need something built and I just don't know enough about the moving pieces. I know what a train is, and what a train does, and more or less how it does it... but more or less does not look good on a schematic. It looks like blank spots, question marks, and notes to myself to figure this out later. Now it's later. I didn't figure it out. I need outside help. And I need this to not go through the regular instructors of Developing Theory, because they will hand everything off to Dean Corder.

I have my plans for Dean Corder, but they're in the future and most immediately I need him to not fuck with my plans for this. It's just too important. So I need a genius that won't pass copies to Corder, and that brings me to my guy, Nux Gysmo. But now he's looking at me like I've handed him suspicious finger-paintings.

"Uh, I was thinking we'd just get a scrivener to engrave a steam-condenser for us, and just bypass the whole issue," I said. He set my drawings aside with distaste, and got his desk ready. I could see the difference right away. I'm not a genius, I just fake it by bringing ideas from a more advanced world and acting very cryptic and letting people fill in the rest for themselves.

Most everything that has been developed in this past year was from me vaguely describing something, and challenging the professors to see which one can make it work most efficiently. Then they design my machines from the ground up, because they are actual geniuses. Like Nux. And here is where the difference is really telling, as soon as I reach the limits of my dishonestly-acquired knowledge, I can't even fake the process. Nux is not designing a train.

He's designing a steam engine that can drive wheels forward in locomotion towing a great amount of weight at high speed in order to put more momentum behind a wedge-shaped ram. I had drawn the shape of a train, and tried to fill that silhouette with train-stuff until it was done, and that is a deeply flawed process. It started with the wrong principles, and now I could see that for myself.

Also, I am starting to see that a lot of what I had put down was my misremembered understanding of a car's engine, which I've seen many more diagrams of than trains. Odds are that what I designed really would just explode itself immediately. He paused, glared at me with a sort of "now do you see where you went wrong?" look. Then he took the top page from my stack and wadded it up, stuffed it in his mouth and started chewing. Just in case I forgot that he's bonkers.

What he wanted built was shorter, flatter, less cylindrical than I had intended. He had drawn two boiler tanks side-by-side, both turning like flywheels, both feeding a piston on their side to force the drive rod. At first I thought he intended them as redundancies in case one broke down, but as he went on, it became apparent that this was a secondary consideration.

The two boilers were geared differently, one for high-torque motion to get the machine started, and a more efficient engine for maintaining a speed once it's reached its cruising speed. Also in his version there was no smokestack, but the steam could be vented out the sides to flash-boil anyone who tried attacking the train from those angles. And there was a gunner's nest that could take stored steam to launch projectiles. It was... surprisingly reasonable.

I didn't really like how much motion there would be in having both the boilers rotating constantly, that seemed like trouble. If anything went wrong, even the tiniest part, the whole engine would rip itself apart. But then again, if things went even a little bit wrong with Earth's historical trains, they would explode. Maybe there's not a good answer. Also, he was demonstrating that the spinning motion would add pressure to the steam valves and the gyroscopic effect would help with stabilizing it on the turns.

He paused to eat another page, but this time I was less concerned. This guy was rolling around in the Uchislowi jungle, there's nothing in that ink that's going to hurt him. What it comes down to is that I am bad at designing trains, and that does not matter. This is one of the hardest parts of my current scheme, and after weeks of trying to fit this together he just draws it all out like it's easy. He also added a whole lot of spikes and spinning blades that would not make it to the final version of the design.

I might keep the gunner's nest though. There are bandits in the wilderness. When he got distracted with designing a set of reciprocating gears that would operate bladed wheels spinning in opposite directions, I took his schematics and rolled them, tied them with a ribbon. He nodded absently. Once they are designed, he tends to lose interest. All the steps between imagining the carnage and testing the finished product are where he loses focus. I leaned forward, propping my elbows on my knees.

"Nux, do you hate it here?" He glanced my way, and used his teeth to tear off the corner from my schematic for the cabin controls. He chewed and stared blankly at me.

"If I could get you someplace less confined, less demeaning," I said.

"I've got money. I can buy property and hire attendants. People from my social class have a long history of putting the mentally ill into comfortable seclusion. Maybe you don't want to sleep in a cell. Or be manhandled by orderlies. There could be a better way. Something less harsh." He ate the other half of the drawing, still staring at me. There was a long minute of chewing. When he swallowed, he did not speak. His eyes, his expression, they gave me nothing.

I could not see a cry for help, a need for structure, or any understanding whatsoever.

"I was a bird for two hours before they put my vessels back," he said amiably, just to fill the silence.

"Vocabulary wasn't the way out." And now I'm sighing because I cannot figure out the right thing to do. Keeping a mad scientist confined so I can exploit his genius probably isn't the ethical plan, but damn me if I can figure out a better one.