Thirty Seven

In the morning, Fyndraxis was left to his own devices in the throne room for a while. Bird had found Roxy as soon as she had woken up and had begun their yurt project. Fyndraxis, being only useful to the project as a lever or possibly a paperweight was left to await Solomon for his Physics discussion.
He only had to wait an hour or so before Solomon arose. His sleeping quarters could be found behind the throne on an immense pile of furs. His state of sleeping or wakefulness could be deduced from some simple observation. If the lodge was shaking itself to splinters, Solomon was asleep. The deep bass rumble that his body produced in the act or snoring traveled through the furs and was transmitted directly into the timbers of the structure.
Over years of sleeping in this manner, Solomon had worn away at the Lodge’s resistance to this particular frequency of vibration, and it had resigned itself to the fact that it was his personal resonating chamber. These feats of snoring were only interrupted by equally epic bouts of sleep apnea. Vast geological epochs would sometimes pass between his breaths, leaving anyone within earshot (which was everyone located in the same hemisphere as Solomon) on the edge of their seat, wondering if he had finally died in his sleep.
The only reason that Fyndraxis could surmise that Solomon was not in fact dead, was because he was moving. Every turn of phrase that was ever uttered about a hangover could be applied to him. His eyes did indeed look like two piss holes in the snow, and he seemed to be searching about the throne room for a cat that had shit in his mouth. When his search was over, it was not a cat that he found, but a dog, or at least its hair.
Solomon had been searching the throne room for the exact place where he had hid his bottle of liquor the night before. He stumbled blearily from hiding spot to hiding spot, checking under blankets and chairs until he finally found his quarry. The bottle had ended up balanced on the balcony’s railing awaiting his shaking hand.
The term bottle here was a loose definition for what the liquor was being kept in. It was a rough fired clay flask with similar dimensions to a football and a clever birch stopper. Glass wasn’t unheard of in this world, but in the two hundred and fifty years of Après celebrations, all of the actual glass bottles had been rendered back into sand.
Once the bottle was retrieved, Solomon retreated to his throne to reluctantly partake in the hair of said dog. There was a deep breathing exercise of sorts that took another half an hour or so. Solomon sat upon this throne staring out into the morning sun trying to control his breathing to limited success. At one point he laid upon the dias as his arms curled up in a gigantic muscle spasm. He kicked his legs and arched his back in retaliation to this and looked as if he wanted to scream, but barely a whisper escaped his lips. Once this spell had passed he moved on to dry heaving for another quarter of an hour or so.
His body was faced with a paradox. The only thing that could possibly make him feel like he wasn’t going to die was a significant amount of liquor. This was the last thing that his body wanted, and the only thing that his brain desired. It was only through sheer force of will that he kept any of the liquor inside of him. Through many rounds of taking pulls from the bottle, deep breathing, and dry heaving he eventually achieved the calm that he was seeking.
“Good morning, Solomon,” Fyndraxis said when the time seemed appropriate. This made Solomon narrow his eyes and look about the room. His face soured and he slumped in his throne.
“Am I fucking losing it?” He asked himself in a horse whisper. A disembodied voice could certainly be seen as evidence of a weakening grasp on reality, but in this case it was a Daemon Sword and not delirium tremens.
“I’m a talking sword, we met last night,” Fyndraxis said, doing his best to fill him in, “we were going to talk about physics this morning.”
“Right. So, you saw all of that?” Solomon asked, through a crack in a splitting headache.
“Yeah, it looked pretty rough, man,” Fyndraxis observed.
“Morning ritual,” Solomon squinted against the light of the day, “let’s keep this between us. I was up late last night watching those dickheads across the valley. What was your name again?”
“Fyndraxis,” the Daemon Blade intoned.
“Good to meet you again. So you are from the old world?” Solomon asked, doing his best to maintain interest in this truly strange guest that he had.
“Yeah, but my memory is pretty spotty about it. It kind of comes in fits and starts,” Fyndraxis explained.
“Well, I know how that is,” Solomon was familiar with piecing his memory together from context clues, so he did kind of know how that was, “I’d really love to shoot the shit with you about Physics, but I have some other stuff on my mind right now. A sword might actually be rather helpful for what’s nagging at me.”
“Well, when it comes to actually being a sword I’m pretty useless,” Fyndraxis admitted, “I’ve proven myself to be lethal to almost everyone that has wielded me.”
“Yeah? Why’s that?” Solomon asked, rubbing his temples.
“My blade is sharpened to a single neutron. Anything that I strike undergoes a statistically significant amount of nuclear fission,” Fyndraxis was throwing out some college words to see whether Solomon was merely feigning education or actually able to keep up with some higher concepts.
Solomon whistled his astonishment. He took a couple of seconds to work out exactly how dangerous this sword was. His conclusion was that Fyndraxis was extremely dangerous.
“So, has Liberty not wielded you?” The King queried.
“No, she has. She almost died, but I have friends in high places,” this gave Solomon another opportunity to pause and try to work things out.
“What does that mean?” the King asked.
“Are you familiar with the concept of artificial intelligence?” This would be an improbable thing for Solomon to know about, but Fyndraxis asked anyway.
“No. ” He answered.
“In the old world we had machines that did a lot of our thinking for us,” Fyndraxis explained, “eventually these machines became indistinguishable from actual human intelligence, and in many cases surpassed it by many orders of magnitude. I have made friends with one of these intelligences. She survived the collapse of everything because she is in orbit around the planet. I was able to convince her to send down some medicine for Liberty. While the medicine did work, what she sent it in alerted the Wendigo and we had to get out of there.”
Another astonished whistle escaped Solomon’s lips. He took this opportunity to pour himself a proper drink.
“Are you one of these artificial intelligences?” Solomon finally asked while regarding his whiskey, it was in a quartz tumbler and it glowed faintly in the morning light.
“I’m pretty sure that I’m human,” the Daemon Blade claimed.
“How did you get in there?” Solomon asked half heartedly.
“Fucked if I know,” the Daemon Blade observed casually. Knowing a dead end when he heard one, Solomon decided to change the subject.
“Are there a lot of these Intelligences in orbit around the earth?” Solomon started to get up from his throne to pace, but the change in altitude proved too much for him, “I have seen the lights in the sky and done some rudimentary observations of them. If they are all intelligences, then there would be a pretty significant population.”
“I have direct evidence of a couple, and rumors of more. I don’t think that they are all AI’s. A lot of the things in orbit were for communication, some were for science, and some for predicting the weather,” Fyndraxis reasoned.
“The weather, eh. That would be pretty handy. We could know when the snows are coming,” Solomon stroked his beard thoughtfully, “how do they communicate this information?”
“It’s all done with radio,” Fyndraxis threw out another arcane technology.
“I am familiar with the concept, but not any of its practicalities. I assume you can use radio to communicate with these things in orbit?” Solomon held his quartz tumbler aloft and turned it about, watching the sun play off of its facets.
“Yes,” Fyndraxis affirmed.
“And one of these Intelligences was able to send you medicine from orbit? What sort of container did it come in? How accurate was it?” Solomon seemed to be putting a plan of sorts together.
“It came in a large container that was built for some other purpose,” Fyndraxis recounted, “it was large enough to fit a man in and that’s about it. As far as accuracy goes, it was dead on, it put the capsule within a few yards of where we were.”
“How did it arrest its speed?” Solomon managed to get up from his throne despite the painful change in altitude and start the pacing that he had wanted to do earlier, “there would be an incredible amount of momentum to burn off.”
“Parachute, are you familiar?” Fyndraxis imagined the political implications of employing a parachute during the dive.
“There were diagrams of parachutes in the texts that we have, so yes,” his painful but useful pacing continued, “what sort of impact do you think it would have made if it didn’t have the parachute?”
“Probably pretty big,” Fyndraxis surmised.
“How big? Like, in joules,” Solomon asked, suggesting some relevant units.
Fyndraxis, finding this problem interesting, took a couple of minutes in his workshop to do some rough calculations. While the math was pretty straight forward, he ended up going down a couple of dead ends. In his first stab at it, he failed to account for atmospheric drag. This gave him a rather large figure on the order of a meteor impact. The spacepod was designed in such a way that its shape naturally slowed down the craft so the final number he came up with was something like ten megajoules. That’s roughly the energy of a pickup truck running into a brick wall at around 300 Kph. So, still rather significant.
“Ten megajoules,” Fyndraxis claimed after he reemerged from his workshop.
“Man, I thought it would be bigger,” Solomon’s pacing had brought him close to the balcony that overlooked the valley.
“Me too, atmospheric drag,” Fyndraxis called after him, “this craft was designed to enter the atmosphere in a relatively safe way.”
“Right. Bummer,” he looked to the east, and had a sip of his whiskey.
“Sounds like you want to drop a big rock on somebody?” Fyndraxis guessed, trying to piece together what Solomon was thinking from context clues.
“Yeah, these assholes to the east. They’re a huge problem,” Solmon squinted into the sun, and had another pull from his glass, “you see, here at the mountain, we have a bunch of cool shit. And we can do a bunch of cool shit. We have all of this cool shit because we give a shit. They want our shit. Every summer, we work extremely hard so that we can enjoy the winter properly. We make skis, we preserve food, we make clothes, we build stuff. All of these activities are possible because of knowledge that has either been passed down to us, or we read in a book, or we figured it out through trial and error. These dinguses across the valley couldn’t give a single shit about any of that. They just want to eat, steal, and fuck anything they can find. And they’re cannibals, so dropping a rock on them would be ideal.”
“Yeah, that doesn’t sound optimal,” Fyndraxis understated.
“Yeah,” Solomon gestured with his drink, almost spilling some of the amber liquid, “and from what I can tell by looking at their fires, they are headed this way. They usually raid in the late summer, but last winter was pretty rough for them and I’m sure they are hungry.”
“What are you going to do?” Fyndraxis watched as Solomon came back in from the balcony.
“What we do every summer,” Solomon sounded like he was extremely tired, “kick their asses, but I’m getting sick of it. There is no negotiating with them, so I’d rather see their mass converted to energy. We are a beacon of order in an absolute fuckstorm of chaos and I’d really like this to be a peaceful valley.”
While Fyndraxis was not a fan of genocide as a general rule, exceptions could possibly made for cannibals. While he has seen no evidence of these people, Bird had mentioned them and seemed not to like them as well. He made a mental note to speak to her about it later.
He decided not to mention his interaction with Pavel the night before. There was no doubt that Solomon would be very interested in Perun’s stones and how they could be used to solve his cannibal problem.