The Nominal Hero, chapter 11: Felicity Conditions
The seven of them had agreed to meet in the parking lot on the east side of the university campus. It was near enough to Ruth’s school that she could walk there easily, it was close to where the Nouns had been spending their time, and it was spacious enough for Caden’s plan--his old plan, that was. But his new plan would need lots of room too.
Masami and Hunter were already there. Ruth turned up a few minutes later. They waited.
Duck and Mushroom were nowhere to be seen.
“Could they have gotten lost?” Hunter wondered. “Or gotten the time wrong, maybe? Can Nouns tell time?”
“They managed it yesterday,” Ruth pointed out.
“I think they went to play with somebody,” Paz suggested.
Caden snorted. “Like who?”
“Them?” offered Paz, pointing.
On the far side of the parking lot, near a cluster of the glass-fronted modern towers that filled this end of the campus, a crowd had started to gather. They were unloading haybales and plywood panels from a couple of parked trailers, and starting to set up some kind of structures on the freshly plowed asphalt.
“Oh, that must be for Winter Carnival,” Masami said. “My dad was going on about it. The student association does it every year, there’s a bunch of stuff. We’re going to go see the ice lantern show on Saturday night.”
“Do they do that thing where they make ice sculptures with chainsaws?” Hunter asked eagerly.
“Almost certainly not,” Ruth said.
“Aw.”
“They wouldn’t let you try it, anyway,” said Caden, who knew how Hunter’s mind worked.
“Aw.”
There were no chainsaws in evidence, but there seemed to be a sort of stage taking shape, with haybales set in rows for seating in front of it. There was a circle of boards being set up for an ice rink; a laughing trio of students were hauling a big hose out of one of the nearby buildings. A chip truck had arrived, and the smell of frying fat started to fill the air.
“We should go check if they’re over there,” Caden decided.
“You just want to see what’s happening,” Ruth said.
“Well, yeah,” Caden said, “and so would Duck.”
“That’s probably true,” Ruth admitted.
She herded the group across the parking lot, doing her best babysitter-in-charge-of-everybody impression. Caden didn’t protest. It was probably best if the grownups thought someone was taking care of them, even though they didn’t actually need it. Grownups worried a lot about that sort of thing.
Ruth homed in on a man carrying a clipboard. “Excuse me,” she said. “We’re looking for our friends. They’re, uh, in costume, sort of a video game theme. A mushroom and a duck?”
“Oh, the theatre guys?” the man said. “Yeah, they’re in the courtyard behind Cavendish Bio. I think they’re doing some sort of demo there.”
“Ah,” Ruth said. “Great. Thanks.”
“Demo?” Caden wondered, as the man turned away to direct another arriving truck into place.
“I have no idea,” Ruth said.
Masami knew his way around the campus, and led them up a ramp and along a weaving path between the buildings. Caden, glancing over at the north side of the parking lot where the woods began, thought for a second that he caught a glimpse of Mushroom between the trees. He opened his mouth to tell the others, but it was gone again so quickly he wasn’t sure what he’d seen.
Anyway, Mushroom wouldn’t be hiding from them, that made no sense.
His friends and his sisters were getting ahead of him. Caden shrugged and hurried to catch up.
Around the corner of one of the towers, the path opened out into a paved courtyard. The Winter Carnival was in full swing here. Little booths lined the walls, selling hot chocolate and coffee, sugary donuts, and university-branded hats and scarves. Other stalls offered tubes of snow paint, or skate rentals, or the chance to throw snowballs at targets for prizes. There were big concrete planters on either side of the Biology building’s doors, and next to one of them stood Mushroom, surrounded by a crowd, including Duck.
“Trees,” the fungal Noun was saying, “are amazing. In the Arctic, a tree like this--” They gestured, and a little evergreen the height of their hand burst out of the snow-filled planter. “This tree could be fifty years old. It only grows a few millimetres a year. All the rest of its energy goes into survival. This is right at the treeline, right at the most northerly spot where trees can live at all. Now this tree--”
A second evergreen sprang from the snow beside it at Mushroom’s touch, the same height, but straight and fresh-looking where the other was gnarled and weathered. “This tree, from an identical seed but in a kinder climate, might grow to the same size in its first year.”
Another wave of Mushroom’s hand, and the tree shot up and sprouted a hundred branches, to gasps from the audience. “In fifty years it’s a giant of the forest. It has to be, because everything around it is growing tall too. If it stayed small, like its sibling here, it wouldn’t get any sunlight. The challenges of survival are different everywhere, but that doesn’t mean they’re easier. Just different. Everything that has the spark of life in it--trees, fungi, flowering plants, animals, humans like you--wants to survive, and is shaped by what it survives. And that shaping is what makes each thing unique, and beautiful.”
“Well,” Duck said softly, “so the scientist has some poetry in their soul after all.” Their expression was hard to read, as though they themselves weren’t sure what they were feeling. “Maybe your science world won’t be so bad, at that.”
Caden shook his head. “That was my old plan,” he said. “My new one’s better. Come on, let’s get Mushroom and go somewhere a bit less crowded.”
Mushroom had noticed them, and with a bow and a smile at the onlookers, the Noun moved away from the planter to join their friends. Behind them, the audience members poked cautiously at the giant evergreen, and argued about how the illusion had been managed.
“Are we ready, then?” Mushroom asked Caden gravely.
“Yes,” Caden said, “but we’re doing something different. Listen--”
He briefly explained his dream, and his realization about the likelihood of an unending war. Mushroom nodded thoughtfuly. “You could be right,” they said. “But then what should we do?”
“The basic idea was okay,” Caden said. “Going back to the beginning to fix things. But we were wrong about what to change. We need to take away the reason for the war, the reason Science and Magic were fighting in the first place.”
“They don’t automatically have to,” Ruth added. “I mean, look around.” She waved her hand at the surrounding buildings, a mix of heavy concrete and modern glass and antique brick and stone. “Art and biology and religion and physics and history--they’re all different ways of figuring out the world, and yeah, sometimes they do conflict with each other, but mostly there’s room for all of it.”
“You said the Nouns’ world was smaller than ours,” Caden said, looking at Duck. “That it didn’t have room for adventures and stuff. We need to make it bigger, more--more full of things. Things that need magic to exist, things that need science to work. So that the world obviously needs them both. If that’s true, if that becomes true, then a war between them would be like--like--”
“Like a war between math and language,” Masami suggested. “It would make no sense.”
“I bet math would win though,” Hunter commented.
“Would not.”
Duck was looking thoughtful. “I see,” they said. “And you’ll bring this about by calling up Nouns--”
“Unusual ones,” Caden agreed. “They have to not exist yet, otherwise they won’t change the past. Like you guys didn’t, because there were Ducks and Mushrooms already.”
“Too many Mushrooms,” Mushroom said ruefully. “And you were very lucky you got even one sensible one. There’s something about fungi that makes most of us very odd.”
Caden thought suddenly of that glimpse of red he’d seen through the trees. The witches, he realized. Watching him, maybe?
Well, let them watch. They’d see what kind of world he could make.
“So,” he said, “we just need to go somewhere there’s room to--”
“There you are!” A woman with a badge and a harried expression bustled onto the path in front of them. “You’re on in fifteen minutes. Stage Four. Have you got everything you need?”
“Absolutely,” Duck said.
“Great. See you there. Break a leg.” The woman turned away, checking something off on a list on her phone.
“What was that?” Hunter asked.
Duck tried for an innocent expression. “Well, Ruth said that if anyone asked, we should tell people we were an experimental theatre group--”
Ruth groaned. “I just meant so no-one would wonder why you look like you do. I didn’t mean you should sign up to perform something!”
“Told you,” Mushroom said smugly.
“Yes, but she had donuts,” Duck said. “It seemed like it would be rude to eat the donuts and then not sign up.”
“You could have not eaten the donuts,” Mushroom countered. “That was also an option. Or, indeed, you could have eaten fewer than the whole box.”
Duck waggled their tailfeathers. “But they were donuts,” they pointed out. “Any duck would have done the same.”
“Let’s just get out of here before someone makes you actually get up on stage,” Ruth said with a sigh.
“No,” Caden said slowly. “No, this could work--”
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