The Protectors war

"Hmmm," Havel said. "Point. Distinct point."

"Besides which: let me ask you a question: How many of those apprentices you just enrolled were relatives of people already on the A-list?"

Havel frowned, thinking. "Four out of seven. Why? Anyone can take the tests."

Larsson sighed again. "Mike, you're a smart guy, but you're kind of: focused. This is a low-productivity economy we've got-not as bad as the Dark Ages, more nineteenth-century in a lot of ways, except it's also a pre-money setup most of the time and our population's too small for much specialization. And we've made schooling compulsory, which I approve of. But what do a tenant farmer's kids do in their munificent free time, school holidays being scheduled to coincide with the growing and harvest season?"

"Work their asses off helping their family get the crop in," Havel said promptly. "Same as I did back in the Upper Peninsula, before I graduated high school and joined the Corps. Only a lot more so. We ran that farm part-time; mostly the family lived on what my old man made in the Iron Range mines."

Larsson raised his metal prosthesis and made a checkmark in the air. "Bingo. Now, what does an A-lister's kid do? You know, the people with the big land grants and tenants and full-time household workers."

"Pitches in on the home farm a bit, usually: but I see your point."

"You betcha. You insisted on high standards even for getting into the apprentice program, and it's hard learning to shoot a bow from the saddle of a galloping horse, or handle a lance. The A-lister's kids have the gear and the space and the trained horses and the leisure to practice, not to mention expert coaching from their parents and siblings. Plus one hell of an incentive-the land goes with the A-lister rank, and without money, how do you build up alternate investments? Plus the family has to be willing to let the kid go when they're sixteen to be a military apprentice, just when they're getting really useful on the farm or in the workshop and starting to pay off the parental investment. A-listers don't need their children's labor so badly."

"It's not all family members," Havel said defensively.

"Not yet. The original A-listers are too young to have many adolescent children; it's mostly their younger siblings so far. But when their offspring are old enough, you're going to find they're a lot more than half the apprentice uptake. And watch who marries whom, too, which'll push the process along even faster-the more so since it's a coed setup. I watched the same thing happen in the business world back before the Change in the seventies, eighties. When lawyers and executives were all men, they sometimes married secretaries. When women professionals arrived in numbers, they married other lawyers and executives."

"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 u

"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 Ke

"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 ru

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.