The grownups are all very busy, but the children are all bored.
Bored or having nightmares. But Tasárinon was not on a ship and did not see the people dying and has only heard it thirdhand and can't exactly have nightmares about the look in his mother's eyes - well, he probably could, but he hasn't - so he's bored, and he is drawing on the floor. It is an absurdly intricate drawing. He has been embellishing it for three days.
And when he completes a circle of the right size -
- there appears a man with wings and a tail.
He takes in the scene, glances around, says, "Didn't anybody ever tell you not to draw on the floor?"
He leaps backwards a few feet. He looks perhaps seven or eight. It's a very pretty and intricate drawing for a seven or eight year old, if inadequate as a summoning circle.
"...no?"
"Oh. Well. Don't draw on the floor. Luckily it's not a disaster this time! But it could've been really bad. You want anything as long as I'm here?"
"What kind of thing? Who are you? Why shouldn't people draw on the floor? Lots of people draw on the floor." His lip is perhaps trembling just slightly. "And I want ships and - and I guess something to kill the Enemy with, and I want my dad not to be dead, and I want the King not to be dead."
That is an unusual wishlist for a child. And lots of people do not draw on the floor. And what language even is this.
"...Sorry, back up, where am I?"
"...Araman? It's one of Valinor's moons."
"I cannot fix dead but I can maybe do ships. Who should I talk to about doing ships?"
"The King? Or one of his sons? Probably? I can call them - my mom can call them - Amil! There's a Maia here and he says he might help with the ships and not to draw on the floor!"
"Uh, everything that's not an Incarnate like us and not powerful enough to be a Vala? Is that not what you are? Incarnates can't appear out of nowhere and also can't make ships except the slow way and we don't have time for that if we're going to fight the Enemy."
A woman walks in. Mid-twenties, exceptionally pretty, pointed ears. She's in uniform and looks exhausted. She bows to Cam. "Hello. Can I help you?"
"Hi. I believe I have been summoned here from an alternate universe or something."
"Uh. Well. Welcome to Valinor." She says it a little bitterly. "Good luck ever leaving. What makes you think that, and how'd you get into our room?"
"Well, I can normally be summoned, but normally I am summoned to one of two planets or one moon, none of which are named these things. Also it is normally common knowledge that you should not draw on the floor, because you might summon something, as," he gestures at himself, "has happened. Also this language seems etymologically unrelated to any others I know anything about!"
"We're speaking Quenya," she says. "This is Araman, which is one of Valinor's moons. Valinor used to be magically kept in a habitable orbit around a binary star system for the amusement of the Powers but they got into a fight and now we're orbiting a black hole. As far as I know there's one other inhabited planet in the space our ships can explore, and the Powers have probably now taken their war there. So we're going to stop them. And it's twenty-five years' travel from here without ships that can leap light and we have ships that can do that but we do not have enough of them. Is that most of what you'd need to know? We can feed one more mouth, probably, but we don't have the means to get you home."
"...you don't have to worry about feeding me," Cam says, making a pitless cherry and popping it into his mouth, "or for that matter anybody else if you want my help with that, and while I suspect you could send me home I don't know if you want to, because sometimes people do draw on the floor to purposefully summon demons and we're very useful."
She watches. She blinks. "I should get Prince Nelyafinwe."
"That's why I called you," says her son. "Can I've a cherry?"
He delightedly eats the cherry. The woman goes to a screen in the wall and says rather levelly that she has an urgent message and possibly a solution to at least three of the pressing supply problems and could Prince Nelyafinwe come here as soon as convenient please. Then she sits there.
"You said you were a demon? What's that?"
"Demons are one of the three kinds of daeva. Demons make things, angels change things, fairies move things. Daeva are also indestructible and summonable."
"That's - useful. And you were summoned? Somehow?"
"Yeah. This is not a good summoning circle and this could have been an unqualified disaster and no one should try summoning any more daeva by replicating this floor-drawing or doing more untrained floor-drawings, but kiddo over there completed what turns out to have been a valid summoning circle and here I am."
She glances at it. "That's pretty, Tása."
"Thanks," he says. He's eating his cherry very very slowly, still wide-eyed.
"I take it the reason not to do it again is that were a demon less sociably inclined they could create things like a sun or a black hole?"
"And people do it on purpose? Or are demons very well-reputed?"
"Demons are actually very poorly reputed, in comparison to angels and fairies. But a well-done circle can prohibit antisocial behavior, this just isn't such a circle."
"...can I please have another cherry?" Tása says. "If it's not too much trouble?"
"It's no trouble at all." Cam makes him a whole bowlful and the bowl.
His eyes widen. His mother turns to watch him expectantly.
"I can give everyone a cherry," he says triumphantly. "Thank you! Thank you so much! Mom I have so many I have to share - everyone's hungry -" And he takes the bowl and races out the door.
"If it's not too much trouble we'll probably want that," she says. "No one's starving, we're just on half-rations because it's not obvious when we'll next be somewhere that can grow food - losing the Suns was a catastrophe on a scale we hadn't really prepared for... I expect the King'll want ships first and then food can be sorted while we're in transit, and weaponry once we land...we should give you something, but if you can make things it is not obvious what kinds of gifts we can give you..."
"One of the perennial demon-summoning problems. I happen to be an unusually altruistically inclined demon but the standard currency is ideas - media recommendations, usually."
"Oh, good, so we can just give you complete recordings of everything Macalaure's ever done - do we even need to give it to you - and that's just compensation even for a fleet of light-leaping ships, I think." She shakes her head.
"You do not need to actually give it to me, just knowing what to grab is enough," Cam says.
"Prince Canafinwe Macalaure. Ah, start with the third symphony, I suppose, if you're starting somewhere. He's astonishing."
"Thanks." Cam conjures up his computer and makes a note of this and then clips it to a belt loop, tail aswish.
She watches him with fascination. And then - "oh, good, he's here."
And someone else walks in. Even taller, even prettier, with elaborately braided bright red hair that's barely the worse for the wear from the helmet he's pulling off. She bows again and he shakes his head at her. "There's neither time nor space," he says, "and it's I who should be honored anyway. How are you holding up? Maitimo," he offers Cam, taking in the wings and tail. "And what's going on?"
"Cam, pleased to meet you," Cam says. "I am a summonable demon and I have been accidentally summoned into an alternate universe suffering from what sound like extremely demon-meliorable supply problems!"
"He can create things. Any things."
He raises an eyebrow. "Well. In that case I am very very pleased to meet you and we definitely have demon-meliorable supply problems. What level of specification do you need to create things?"
"I can copy things I can identify sufficiently well; I have to know more about what I'm doing if I'm making inexact copies; for a book I usually want title and author, say, but I can sometimes make do with substitute information; I don't expect to have any trouble with 'Canafinwë Macalaurë's third symphony'."
"You have dreadful taste," says Maitimo to the woman, "I shall insist until the heat death of the universe that the seventh is the best one to start with. Wait, I suppose we might not need to worry about the heat death of universe anymore. In that case I'll insist even longer. There are ten so far," he adds to Cam. "I can ask him to compose another for you, if you win us this war."
"Gosh. Uh, my standards of knowing what's going on for war-winning are substantially higher than same for giving a kid a bowl of cherries."
"Good," he says earnestly, "I'd be alarmed if they weren't. Can you access our data systems?"
"I would be astonished if there were preexisting compatibility between my information tech and yours."
"'Maitimo's personal computer, and a copy of his mind-signature,' isn't enough specificity? Or do you avoid that on principle, I really shouldn't try to goad you into it..."
"I mean, I could make your computer but I would not know how to operate it unless it's very intuitive. Mind-signature?"
"You don't have one, I just thought you were blocking us. Perhaps in your universe there's no hardware for it. How do you communicate mind-to-mind, or do you not?"
"Ah. It is a thing for us. I suppose if you're indestructible it wouldn't be necessary. Care to come back to my ship? There are people I can put to the data compatibility question who'll sort it very quickly and I can explain everything in the meantime."
"There are two ways to get to Endore from here," he says while they walk. "One is to just fly it in standard ships. That'll take - I don't know if our years are the same length - a Year for us is the length of time required for the Suns to cycle seventeen hundred twenty eight times - we use the distance light travels in a year as a unit of measurement for this kind of thing -"
"Light-years are a measurement I'm familiar with but the years are different years." He pulls up a clock on his computer. "Smallest increment's a second, sixty seconds a minute, sixty minutes an hour, twenty-four hours an Earth day, three hundred sixty five Earth days a year. Really precise comparisons may need to await data compatibility."
"Probably. Anyway, Endore's more than two light Years from here and by then we're terrified for the civilian population of the planet, it won't take the Enemy that long to crush them based on what was most recently communicated of their capabilities. And we don't have the supplies for it. So now we have a few light-leap ships and those can do it in a week, but we're short on them. And control of them has become politically contested. If there are enough for everyone I think that'd solve more than half our current problems - food's not a problem either if we'll be on Endore in a week."
"Okay. So, my world does not have faster than light travel - except of information via demonic conjuration - and I won't be able to help you with this if the ships run on magic, antimatter, or some other category of thing that I have as a hard power limit. But if they're just made of stuff I can make stuff in ship shapes."
"They're not magic. I don't think there's such a thing as magic, I doubt even the Powers run on magic. I can get you blueprints. I don't understand how they work myself - if I had, none of this would have happened..."
"Blueprints or an actual ship to copy work fine. I don't have to understand them. I'm technically magic but I can't make magic things."
"I wonder what you can do with things that only work in Valinor because the Powers set it up that way, like music having 'magical' effects. I very much wonder if you can copy a Silmaril, actually, come to think of it - I can't get you blueprints of those but I can pull up a picture -"
He glances at a screen behind him and up pops a picture of what looks like a very large faceted gemstone.
"A lot of things but we could put it in orbit and relight the world, most notably, it can output arbitrary amounts of light. It can heal - they can in fact be weaponized, if you want to wait on it until I have explained the war..."
"Yeah, if they're not urgent on an amount-of-time-it-takes-to-explain-the-war scale."
"I do not think it should take too long to explain the war. A while ago the Quendi - our people - awakened on Endore. Awakened, we weren't born - we're a created race, not an evolved one. The Valar say that Eru created us and I've never heard another explanation. I've also never met Eru or heard anyone who wasn't a Vala credibly claim to have met him.
The Valar are very powerful, I do not know exactly how powerful, and they had at one point put Endore together as a site for Eru to put his creations. By the time we came along they'd gotten bored of it - or frustrated - it turned out disastrously, you know how design by committee goes - and built Valinor instead. One of them stayed behind on Endore. We call him Moringotho."
Cam takes notes. They're not in the local alphabet because his computer doesn't know it yet; he transliterates.
"The Valar have one notable limitation; they cannot create thinking conscious beings. Moringotho wanted to find a way around this. So when the Quendi appeared he kidnapped us and conducted various biological experiments, and used some to bring to term children engineered to his own specifications, and in this manner bred his own race, orcs. Also lots of other horrifying monsters but to my knowledge orcs are the only one of those to be created from people rather than from animals. He also enslaved lots of Quendi for manual labor until he had enough orcs for that, and after that he just tortured prisoners for fun.
He also hated the Sun and kept the planet shrouded in volcanic ash, which might also have prevented the other Valar from perceiving him; that's unclear to me.
Eventually they found out. And they fought him. The war shattered four of the planet's seven continents, and left large swathes of the others uninhabitable. They won, and took him prisoner. When the fighting ended, the Valar offered the Quendi a place to live in Valinor, and many of us took them up on it. Several generations were born in Valinor; I was. And then they offered him parole.
Everyone was skeptical, obviously, but the alternative was holding him prisoner for the lifetime of the universe, so - only moderately skeptical. We'd also grown up in paradise and were a bit naive. And for ninety Years it seemed to be going well, but he was secretly working on a number of ways to undermine us, and they came to fruition when he put out the Suns, assassinated the King, stole the Silmarils, and fled for Endore. Where one assumes he's starting the same thing again, and Eru put other creations besides the Quendi on Endore - Dwarves, Men, Ents, there's probably some I'm missing. So we decided to leave and go stop him."
"'No minds' is a limit I have too. I can make animal bodies but they're never smarter than, like, bugs."
"...I don't think you're the same kind of thing as the Valar but I suppose it is technically not impossible. Except they usually don't take physical forms at all."
"I am definitely a demon," he says, "there are lots of us and we all have physical forms."
"I mean, more, perhaps the Valar are demons and all of their non-making-things abilities are advanced technology? But that wouldn't explain the ability to abandon physical forms at will - though if you're not backed up anywhere - are you backed up anywhere? Are the backups indestructible?"
"Convenient. Most likely the Valar aren't demons, then, which is too bad because we'd have a new avenue on figuring out how to kill one. I am guessing you'll next want to verify everything I said about the murdering and experimenting and torturing and putting out the Suns? I'm not clear on which of those things you'd find objectionable."
"I can swear to it but if you don't have telepathy and you don't have backups at a guess you don't have Oaths. You'll have to wait on data compatibility."
"I can incidentally do data conversion, if you want to name me files, although for that to really get anywhere I'll have to program my computer to handle your language and that'll take a little while. What I can't do is make it talk directly to your hardware."
"Can you get the major news sites' coverage from Elenya the 129th of 1495? That'd do it for the putting out the Suns and assassinating the King, and the transcripts of the parole hearing of Melkor in 1400 should do it for the rest."
"You'll have to name me the major news sites," he says, starting to input Quenya glyphs into a fontmaker on his computer.
"You can't go, like, ranking of Valinor news sites by pageviews in 1494? Ah, maybe - " and he names several.
"I could make the entire internet of Valinor and go sifting through it; if I want anything specific I have to know what it is." Notes notes back to fontmaking.
"It is a good thing that we are used to paradise and don't have any state secrets," he says, frowning, "that seems extremely exploitable."
"It's convenient at the moment. I think this war is about as justified as any war has ever been and I'd like you to be able to verify that as quickly as possible."
"We don't. Everything's spelled exactly as it sounds, too. We took good care of the language."
"Oh, I could live with irregular spelling, fluency comes with the summons."
"Can you do me a big favor and not mention that to the King? He'll spend the next three weeks picking your brain on every language you know and I need him for some things."
He shrugs helplessly. "You'll probably have to cop to at least one additional language, maybe two, but he'll pick up those in a few days. If you speak thirty or something our brightest mind will be out of commission for the next Year."
"So please save that for if we need to peacefully remove my father from power, don't mention it outright."
"I really don't know how I'm supposed to explain speaking Quenya then!"
"On your world, everyone speaks - pick one. When you get summoned you get that language. Since you got summoned here you got Quenya. If you get summoned by a Vala you'd get Valarin. He'll demand to know how he can become a demon but I won't have to rule for a decade while he's becoming fluent in more than thirty languages he'll never need and then writing books about their linguistic evolution."
"This will involve blatant lies about how mortals in my world work, let alone the linguistic habits of daeva."
"On your head be it, then. Don't say you weren't warned."
"I'm just not sure I'll be very convincing if I tell him yep, everybody in my world speaks English all the time, pay no attention to the etymology behind the curtain - might be easier to pass off Chinese -"
"Everyone who's summoned you, right? And I'll trust you on what would be convincing - it's just - the King's murder was very much orchestrated to make a point to my father, and the Enemy very much succeeded in making that point, and my father's very easily distracted by intellectually intriguing things anyway, but this is going to be a lot of politics as well as a lot of engineering and language-learning, figuring out how best to protect Endore."
"Thank you. I won't be annoyed if you don't. I can't actually think of much you'd do short of hurting my people that would annoy me, these ships will change everything and a faster arrival will save hundreds of thousands of lives."
"Y'know, I never get to do the saving hundreds of thousands of lives thing anymore and it's been grating on me."
"Winning the war would save - I don't know the current population of Endore but plausibly billions. We can't claim all that benefit just from arriving a little faster, though.
We're about ten minutes out from our destination, what else should I cover? Political structure, enemy capabilities, timeline of the recent mess..."
Cam informs his computer of another Quenya glyph. "Anything you haven't mentioned I should stuff onto this chip?"
"The Valar are really furiously angry with us with reasonably good reasons and we're exiled from here, that doesn't change the strategic picture much but I suppose is worth mentioning. They've also suggested they'll delay reembodiments for a few Ages, which means we're more hesitant to risk our lives than we ordinarily would be."
"We're not indestructible. So the Vala of the Dead, Mandos, keeps a backup of everyone's mind in the Halls and if we die he can build us a new body and reinstall our minds and we can return. It's the same hardware that gives us telepathy and Oaths, which is why I inferred you didn't have the latter from the absence of the first two."
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