7
Ken had liked the idea of the Hyundai Harmony when he first heard of it. It was harmony that had been among the first discoveries about waves, made by the Pythagoreans or their teachers. It was also the first affordable car made of BoeingBus’s carbon-fibre/microlattice materials. It was strong and light and stiff, and able to absorb shock. Since he didn’t know exactly what he was getting into, Ken thought he would need all the help he could get. It was a very small but very smart car, with all the navigational and information capabilities one could hope for in 2039, responding to voice or gesture, and piloting itself. It was also very adaptable. He had removed the jump seat, leaving only one, so he would have room for extra batteries and water generators and air purifiers. He didn’t expect to need them, but he would have them if he did. And then there was his special take on Min-sao Lee’s antennae array that he hoped would turn his Atilla the Hyundai into a surfboard. Because he knew, he thought, what he was looking for, his antennae were not very large, but they were printed directly onto the upper surfaces of the Hyundai. Not only was living in a tiny pre-fab in Pilton cheaper than living in an ‘historic’ cottage, it also provided for much better atmospheric control for nano-printing, which he had been able to afford because of his savings in rent. The Hyundai came with what should be plenty of on-board computing power for his tuner, which was a damper, actually. He had added another, parallel NVIDIA Gamma one, and a 10 terabyte SSD on which he had stored profiles of his expected waves. Because the waves he was looking for were extremely long with relatively low amplitude, they were easily drowned out by the noise around them. So he used the data gathered by calibrating the usual background noise to make dampers that would show only the variations in noise that gravity waves would cause, and in real time so he could ‘see’ his wave rather than analyze it from the data later.
He was sitting in this parking lot at Glastonbury Abbey on Halloween because he, like Min-sao Lee, had spent summers with his grandparents. His grandparents, especially his mother’s mother, had filled him with celtic folk tales. Before Ken was born, Blanche and Aubrey Davidson had retired to Whitby, a town Blanche considered the site of betrayal for the celtic tradition. The basketball team might be saints, but she was certain the term was misused for Hilda. As a child, he had found his grandmother’s stories amusing, and her clinging to them quaint. But as he grew, he wondered what might be the physics behind some of the phenomena she described. There were so many heroes who disappeared, who were said to be not dead but asleep, who would return. Aubrey had given him his first appreciation for waves when he took Ken out in his sailing dinghy. There was no end to the variety of waves, nor of what they could teach. They not only were the condition for sailing, they could tell what conditions to expect. Their interactions could be spectacular, and it was from clapotis that Ken began to learn how waves might be modulated and even made to stand still. The air, too, operates in waves, and they could be read in the clouds above but also on the surface of the water.
Now the parking lot around Atilla the Hyundai was beginning to be a surface of water. Would, Ken wondered, the rain be a variable he had not considered?
8
Owain Lawgoch, Owen the Red Hand, was not the only one who dreamed he was waking that Samhain evening. He was surrounded by twelve of his warrior companions. He would have been happy to know that legend had made him a greater leader than he could honestly claim to be, with a band of forty to hundreds of warriors. But few had been brave or foolish enough to follow him into the storm in which they fell asleep.
One of them was Aidan Prydudd, hardly more than a boy, not really a warrior at all but, as his name suggested, a bard, and a romantic bard at that. He had accompanied Owain into France to be able to sing of his glories and to gain a valuable patronage. But the English had found out their plan, and now they were assumed dead. Indeed, Aidan sometimes wondered in his dreams, might they be dead? How could one know whether one were dead or but asleep. Sometimes it seemed he might be waking, but always someone would say ‘sleep on’ and he would, perchance to dream. Sometimes he dreamed himself not a bard but a fool. Perhaps he was misnamed. Perhaps he should be called Aidan Ffwl.
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