Chương 27: CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: THE SUMMER NETWORK

Summer opened the roads and brought travelers, and travelers brought news. Marcus had been building the information network for a year with the tools available: Jin Park was still missing — the signal specialist whose capability Marcus thought about whenever communication limitations created a problem — but the merchant road was its own kind of network, slow and leaky and subject to distortion but real.

The broadsheet that Briggs was talking about building — the press was still theoretical, the metallurgy for movable type was six months away — was the eventual answer to the communication problem. For now, what Marcus had was riders, letters, and the information that moved through market networks when people talked.

He sent riders north in the summer — not military riders, not official correspondence, but traders with letters in the linings of their packs that contained, embedded in the language of commercial transactions, the signal he had been designing since spring. A number sequence. The FOB's internal notation cipher, simplified to its most basic form: if you know what this means, there is a place. If you understand these numbers, find a way to answer.

He sent them on the river road east, on the north road into the march, on the southern market road. He sent them in six directions and settled in to wait for responses. In the meantime, he built. The school's summer enrollment exceeded the winter numbers by forty percent, because summer brought families who wintered in the outer district and whose children had not previously had access to the school's location.

Marcus watched the enrollment figures with Marta and revised the building plan — the single-room school was already too small, and the expansion that Father Aldric had been hoping for became a construction project in June, with the garrison providing labor and Briggs supervising the structural work. The new building opened in July.

Two rooms, twice the previous capacity, with the improved chimney design that Briggs had been standardizing and a water source adjacent that was connected to the washing protocol Okafor had been introducing through the clinic's community outreach. Children washing their hands before they handled food, before they touched their faces. It had taken three months of gentle, consistent instruction to make it habitual in the children who attended regularly. It would take longer to reach the children who didn't.

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"You can't do everything at once," Okafor told him, when he was being impatient about the pace of hygiene improvement in the outer district.

"I know," Marcus said.

"Say it like you know it," she said, which was her specific register for when he was acknowledging something intellectually without accepting it emotionally.

"I know it," he said, more slowly.

"It doesn't stop me wanting it faster."

"Nothing does," she said.

"That's not a problem. That's the engine. Just don't let the engine make you stupid." The pharmaceutical operation's tier one compounds became operational in July — ahead of Washington's eight-week target, because Briggs had built the still in five days rather than seven, and Washington's extraction process turned out to be more efficient than her conservative estimate.

The antiseptic compound began being used in the clinic's wound care in the first week of July, and Okafor's preliminary observation — she was rigorous about not calling anything a result without adequate data — was that wound infection rates in treated patients were noticeably lower than in the clinic's historical baseline.

"Noticeably is not significant," Washington said, when Okafor reported this.

"No," Okafor said.

"But it's in the right direction and it's consistent with the mechanism. Give me three months of cases and I'll have something worth calling a result." The summer also brought the first response to the textile signal. Not from the encoded message traders — that signal would take longer to produce responses, the network of distribution was too slow for summer response to a spring send.

The response that arrived in July came through a different channel entirely: a traveler on the river road who sought out Greyhold's market, asked specific questions about the castellan that established he was not there by accident, and was brought to Marcus by Marta's market contact with the note: This one is looking for you specifically. His name here was Gerold.

He had been a signals specialist — 25U, communications officer — and had been living in a river port forty miles south for fourteen months, where he had been doing two things: running what he called an observation post and building a piece of equipment out of polished metal that he described as a prototype signal device. Marcus looked at the sketch he produced. A heliograph.

He had independently arrived at the heliograph, from first principles, from the need to communicate faster than horses could carry messages, from the physics he carried in his head and the materials available in a medieval world.

"How far does it reach?" Marcus said.

"Clear day, forty miles reliably," said former Corporal Jin Park, 25U.

"Probably more with better mirrors, which I haven't been able to produce yet. The metalwork here is not adequate for the surface quality I need." Marcus looked at Jin Park and then at the sketch and then back at Jin Park.

"Have you met Briggs?" he said.