"I hadn't: Ouch."
"So it's pretty likely the A-listers will vote in one of your kids as successor. Because by then it'll be unnatural to do anything else. So Signe's worrying, maybe unconsciously, if it'll be her kid, not just yours. Pam tells me that there were a lot of systems like that in the old days-where the throne was elective within a certain family, broadly defined. Like in the sagas-read about what the dozen sons of Harald Fairhair did to Norway sometime. If you acknowledge that Rudi Mackenzie is your son, everyone will believe it who's got eyes. He's older than young Mike, too. Old enough to start getting hints of what sort of a man he's going to be; he's smart, and he could charm a snake out of its skin, for starters."
"Well, shit," Havel said, pushing back his helmet by the nasal and rubbing his jaw. "But even if the position goes to one of my kids, I'd want to pick the best when they're old enough-for that matter it could be Mary or Ritva, as easily as Mike Jr. or Rudi."
"That was probably Alexander the Great's plan, watching his kids grow and picking his own successor from the best of them. Unanticipated events sort of took a hand, and nobody's immortal. You ought to be thinking about this now, Mike. We don't have a tradition on how to handle succession yet. Note that I have an interest here too-if it's going to be hereditary, I want one of my grandkids to get it."
They looked at each other, and Larsson changed the subject. "When did they start that 'Lord Kenneth' business?" he asked. "It fits for you and your shining-armor crowd, but why humble mechanical me?"
"You know perfectly well, and it's your own damned fault," Havel replied, smiling. "They started it when your youngest talked them into it. She'll have them forsoothing next. You're not an A-lister, but you're my father-in-law and you're our: wizard, I suppose. Astrid loves that idea, by the way."
"Astrid's perverted imagination is not my fault!"
"She's your daughter, isn't she? You let her slide into the Mistress of Ceremonies position, didn't you? You're also the one who let her wallow in all those doorstopper books with the lurid covers and knights and princes and warrior elf maids and wizards and walls of ice and quests for the Magical Dogtag of Doom and whatever."
"I thought she'd grow out of it," Ken Larsson said weakly.
Havel 's boot knocked the sheath of his backsword aside with practiced ease as he sat on the stool before a drill press and went on: "She landed me with the Lord Bear nonsense before we'd finished who-eats-whom with Mr. Bruin. I'm surprised it hasn't turned into a talking bear conjured up by an evil sorcerer, and gotten slapped down in that goddamned illustrated journal she keeps."
"Illuminated, not illustrated," Larsson said.
They shared a chuckle at the thought of the-profusely illustrated-Red Book of Larsdalen. Sheer dogged persistence had let Astrid Larsson hang names out of her favorite books on a good many things, post-Change. A fanatic for Tolkien and his imitators could do a world of linguistic damage, particularly when things were in flux anyway and she was part of the ruling circle of families; Astrid hadn't shown any signs of growing out of it at the ripe old age of twenty-two, either. The younger generation was alarmingly given to humoring her-or even to taking up her enthusiasms simply because they sounded cool and torqued off their elders.
"I think it's the isolation, too," Larsson said. "If we had more outside contacts, people would laugh us out of it. As it is, every little bunch of us is free to go off on their weird tangent of choice."
Havel nodded. "Sounds plausible, in a horrible sort of way. So, what's up?" he went on, dropping his bear-topped helm on a table and running his hands over his bowl-cut black hair. "I've got to go read some reports by Signe's intel people about bandit trouble up on the northern border. Anything you've got to say will be more interesting than more goddamned reports."
Larsson's single blue eye gleamed. He turned to a desk piled with papers and bearing a mechanical calculator he'd salvaged out of a museum, and pulled out a sheet covered with graphs from beneath his slide rule-the results of months of experiment over the winter.
"I think I've got a handle on the Change!"
Havel snorted. "How many times have we chewed the fat about that? Starting the morning after. I thought you'd gotten the reaper binder working. That we can use. Harvest is tricky. Or more penicillin. We could get another outbreak of the Black Death anytime and we're clear out of tetracycline."
"No, not just a hypothesis this time-a theory with experimental confirmation."
"You can do something about it?" Havel said, sitting bolt upright.
"Oh, hell, no, Mike. Do I look like an Alien Space Bat from an arbitrarily advanced civilization? Arbitrarily Advanced Alien Space Bats: sounds like a lobbying group. But I've gotten some idea of what's happening. Look at this."
Larsson pointed to a piece of apparatus on a bench, one that involved a gasoline lantern burning under a blackened cylinder. He turned up the wick with the tip of the metal multitool strapped in place of his left hand, and tapped the metal casing with it. The flywheel off to one side gave a halfhearted turn and then stopped.
"This is what they called a Stirling-cycle engine-sort of like a steam engine without the water, using a gas as the working fluid in a closed cycle. This one comes from a museum in Eugene; I traded some moonshine to a scavenger who had it in a load of miscellaneous junk. I wanted it because it doesn't depend on fast combustionexplosions-like IC engines. Result: It doesn't work anymore either."
"Why am I not surprised?" Havel said.
He sounded patient, in a heavy sort of way. But then, he puts up with Astrid, too.
Larsson went on: "A Stirling engine is like the theory of heat engines made manifest. Put concentrated heat in here, raise the temperature of the gas, and you get mechanical work out there. OK, mechanical work and diffuse heat. All you need to make it work is a temperature gradient between one end and the other. And like all heat engines since the Change it just doesn't work to any useful degree."
"What about guns?"
"Guns are heat engines-first ones to be widely used. But."
He swung the lamp out from under the cylinder, engaged a crank and worked it with his good hand. Crankshaft and piston and flywheel spun up with a subdued hum; after a moment he released it to run down.
"You see, one of the interesting things about a Stirling engine is that if you run it in reverse-if you put mechanical work in -it acts as a refrigerator. You get cold out the other end. They were used for that in labs and some manufacturing back before the Change. And that still does work."
Havel 's brows went up. "Well, that could be very useful," he said. "We could really use some refrigerated storage for food, particularly if we could do it in bulk. It just doesn't get cold enough in the Willamette to make icehouses practical-one of the few advantages we had back when I was growing up on the Upper Peninsula, and man, did we have ice and to spare. We could run this Stirling thingie in reverse off a waterwheel or a windmill?"
"Yes, or the sort of horse gin we use for threshing machines now. But think about it for a moment. Why would the heat-to-work cycle not function, while the work-to-cold cycle does? And when you're cranking it, it works exactly the way it did pre-Change. It's like you can only play a film backward."
Havel shrugged again. "Presumably your Alien Space Bats, or Juney's gods, or the Reverend Abbot's Lord Jehovah wanted it that way. I never did think the Change just happened. "
"Neither did I. It's too: focused. A random change in natural law would most likely just collapse everything into quark soup. And everything is too neatly scaled, the effects kick in at the precise level necessary and no earlier; it lets any biological process go on just fine, our nervous systems work, fish can still use their swim bladders, but that"-he pointed at the engine-"is screwed. Somebody did this to us."