The Heretic

again.

Yeah, right, thought Abel. Prove you want to help by doing this math problem for me. What’s the angle of the triangle Lieutenant Milovich wants us to calculate? I’ve got two angles and a side. It’s not a right angle, so how do I do it?

If we told you, how would that help you learn trigonometry?

You could just put it in my head.

That is correct, Center put in. I could instantly provide you with the answer to this question. But I could not condition you sufficiently so that you will know how to work out the problem for yourself, or how to approach future problems.

Give me the answer.

No.

I don’t care about ballistics or land surveying. I care about being a Scout.

And do you not think knowing how to estimate land areas might come in useful out there in the wastes of the Redlands?

No. Abel considered. Well, maybe. Give me the answer anyway.

No.

I know about the Redlands, but if you tell me the answer, it will get me out of this stuffy garrison taking lessons from a junior officer with too much time on his puffy little rich-boy hands.

The lieutenant’s hand swelling is from hypothyroidism. He’ll be dead before he’s thirty from autoimmune system collapse, Center said. A Fibonacci projection using Seldon values for social normatives does indicate an upper-class upbringing, however. Reconstruction of formative moments should be possible-

Center took longer than usual before he spoke again. Abel had learned that this usually indicated he was performing some sort of extremely complex calculation.

Yes, I have it now. Observe:

Milovich as a boy Abel’s age, standing next to a window in the upper stories of a residence in Lindron. He was sipping a steaming liquid (smell was present in the vision), and Abel detected the odor of cured yerba mate. Milovich-or the boy, as Abel had to think of him now-was wearing a linen wrap twisted about one shoulder and clasped at the hip by a belt of well-tanned carnadon leather.

Just what I figured, Abel thought. Sipping mate and clothed in carnadon.

Observe:

The boy suddenly broke into a smile and turned from the window. He spoke to a young girl who sat in a corner working at a loom.

Servant or concubine?

Try sister.

“Father’s home,” said the boy.

His sister nodded placidly, but remained at her work. The boy rattled down the stairs and emerged in a finely furnished receiving room below. He waited nervously as the door swung open.

“Father!”

A man in the door in the blue robes of the high priesthood’s service. A dark scowl on his face. “What’s this?” he said. “What the hell have you done?”

The boy glanced down at his father’s hands. They held a creation of balsa and glue that had taken the boy a full day of labor to create.

His father lifted this creation in front of the boy’s face.

“It’s…it’s a glider,” said the boy. “One of the boys at school showed me some scroll drawings. I just looked at them and figured out how to make one, and I wanted you to-”

“You wanted me to what?”

“I worked really hard on it,” the boy said, desperation slipping into his voice. “Because…I know you think I can’t do anything right. I wanted to show you I can, I mean sometimes-”

“You left it on the stoop.”

“So you’d see it,” replied the boy. “When you got home, I mean.”

“And the neighbors? Did you consider that they might see it?”

“I didn’t think about that.”

“Of course you didn’t, you stupid fuck,” said the father. “Of course you didn’t.”

Shaking with anger, he crushed the balsa flyer in front of the boy’s eyes. “You could’ve gotten me fired. You could’ve gotten you and your sister dragged away. Do you see what you’ve done?”

“But I-”

The boy didn’t have the opportunity to finish his sentence. His father lashed out with a backhand and sent him spinning across the room. And when he fell, his father stepped up and kicked him hard in the abdomen.

“Don’t you ever, ever do anything like that again! Do you hear?”

“Yes…yes, sir.”

Another vicious kick. His father’s sandal strap broke with the effort, and, cursing, he kicked the boy with his bare foot-but this time in the face, for good measure.

“I was right about you,” the boy’s father said. “You’ll never make a priest. I have my doubts if you’ll even make a soldier.”

He turned away, leaving his son gasping and bleeding on the dirt floor.

“Stupid little shit.”

Abel shook his head. He should’ve known the glider was against the Law. He could’ve made it and hid it somewhere.

In this instance, making a glider was only a means to an end for Milovich. I believe you understand that, Abel.

Would your own father have reacted in the same way, lad?

Maybe. Abel considered. Okay, no. But he would’ve been mad all right if I’d left something like that out on the porch. And how’s this supposed to help me figure out the area of some pointy piece of farmland without walking it, anyway?

Maybe you could show a little respect for the young lieutenant and ask him to explain it to you again. That would be one way, don’t you think, boy?

Yeah. Okay. You two know how to take the fun out of hating a guy’s guts.

Raj laughed his not-so-pleasant laugh. There’ll be plenty of time for that, lad. And plenty who deserve it more than Milovich.

Abel completed the assigned work as well as he could, but he could not shake off the feeling that Center was assessing his mathematical abilities the entire time and finding them severely lacking.

As class recessed he forced himself to get over his irritation and approach Milovich to ask for extra help. The young lieutenant seemed shocked at first, and then pleased. They arranged for a review session before the next class, and Abel was finally set free from the stinking classroom.

He rushed out into the garrison exercise yard to see if the Scouts had returned. They hadn’t. A few of his classmates lingered about, two of them-Xander and Klaus-sparring with musket rifles from the broken-weapons bin.

Musket rifles were a special exception to nishterlaub edicts. They contained metal, and lots of it, including bayonets, and shot lead minie balls. They could not be manufactured, but they could be repaired, and this only by the priest-smiths at special facilities within the temple compound in each district. Zentrum allowed the production of a new batch of rifles once per decade, as well, but only in the the Tabernacle of Lindron.

Gunpowder was a different matter altogether. Its manufacture was a fiat granted to only a very few places: