The Third Limit

This is a selection from a larger fantasy project that Lyle is working on. Look for Oedon and Reghan to return in his novel, The Mark of the Star…

“You are a miracle-worker,” said Old Lady NicKeela, probably for the fourth time.

“No,” Oedon said, “I’m your pharmacist. If I’m doing my job, I just keep you as young and healthy as you already are.” He winked at her.

The old lady’s wrinkles almost disappeared under her smile. “You’re more than a pharmacist if you know how to talk to an old woman like that.”

Oedon waved her off as she shuffled out the door. “Stay warm, aye?” He leaned back behind the counter and looked out the office window. The sun was full in the sky by now, purging sluggish shadows, setting his red hair alight and rousing the sleepy plants. He breathed their dirty, spicy scents and smiled.

“Oedon,” Reghan said behind him. “Can I talk to you?” She was leaning in the doorway to the greenhouse, in the grey suit and rust-colored vest she wore every day. She wafted the smell of every medicine ever concocted wherever she walked. Her dark, disheveled hair hung in her face and from behind the mass a single tired, violet-blue eye fixated on him like a crow’s.

Oedon gulped. “Sure.”

“Sounds like Missus NicKeela is doing better,” she said, leading him through the greenhouse on uneven steps. Severe as she was, Oedon still thought she looked out of place with a cane. She wasn’t even forty.

“Yeah, she is,” Oedon said, removing his jacket and tucking it under his arm. It was always warmer than he expected in the garden. The sun beat through panes of glass above them and the air, otherwise silent, hummed with the sounds of insects and birds as they came and went by Reghan’s careful discretion. Trapped rainwater trickled down from ducts in the roof and flowed into troughs which either slaked the dirt homes of hungry herbs and vines or flowed clean through makeshift creeks and lily-ponds. It all found its way to the same tank where it boiled and evaporated up into a giant bulb back on the roof to begin the process all over again.

The garden itself boasted plants from everywhere; every local fauna, yes, but also species from places Oedon had barely heard of. It was a spectrum for every sense: the planters nearest the front were all sweet-smelling, mint and chamomile and lemon. Lavender and juniper made themselves known further back, and eventually the smells of basil and thyme and coriander conjured thoughts in him of a full larder and boiling stewpots. Vibrant and unpredictable colors painted every hedge: oranges, reds, purples, and the ever-present green of living things. Each felt as different to the touch as it did to the eyes; Oedon ran his finger over the petals of a marigold and a few steps later pricked his arm on the leaf of a huge, healthy aloe.

Amidst all this, always two steps ahead of him, stalked Reghan. Around her neck she wore a pendant in the likeness of long-forgotten Oeyannen: He-Whom-Vines-Climb, the druid-god whose footsteps compelled life to burst. Oedon didn’t believe in any of the gods, but he felt a pang in his heart all the same; all the power and authority of that legend, stripped from history and overshadowed, woven into the ever-growing doctrine of someone else’s Sun God. Yet it somehow survived, incarnate in this severe, professorial woman.

No less unreal to him though. A history of images, echoing and intersecting down to the bauble which timidly danced along her collar.

“She had pneumonia, didn’t she?”

“Hm?” Oedon jumped as Reghan whipped around to look at him.

“NicKeela. She had pneumonia?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“How long has she been sick? Two weeks? You were the last to visit her, yes? Was her husband still beside himself?”

“Well yes, but, that was about three days ago ma’am.”

“Huh. And she’s up and about now.”

“Miracles happen, I suppose.” As soon as he’d said it, Reghan’s face crimped in a prosecuting smile.

“Now I know you’re bullshitting me, Gweled,” she said. She grabbed his sleeve and dragged him to his study in the north wing of the greenhouse. She shoved him through the door and before he knew it she’d planted him right into his chair with her slender fingers gripping into his shoulders.

“Show me,” she said.

“I’m not sure I…”

“I can see the spines of the books, Oedon, I’m lame but I’m not blind, now show me what you did!”

Oedon took a shaky breath. “All right.”

She stood unmoving while he cleared his desk. When he’d finished, he reached between the desk and the wall and the room filled with the shrill snap of a spring. Then he folded the false top he’d built.

Covering the desk was a circle, cut into the wood and inked in black, red, and occasionally in other colors. It looked to be five concentric circles with polygonic patterns linking them together. Ten thin lines were cut in curves, equidistant from one another, with five thicker lines woven through them. Even the smallest spaces were filled with writing. The more you looked at the whole thing the more it seemed to emerge, like it was sitting on top of the desk rather than carved into it — like a wheel you could pick up.

Oedon turned to Reghan. She coughed, a nauseous-sounding cough, rubbed her eyes, and then fell to the floor.

“So you can read that thing.” She rarely asked questions, nor did she typically need to. Oedon had helped her back to the front office, grabbed some dried mint leaves on the way and made tea. The color — or what little resided there in the first place — was coming back into her face.

“Yeah, I can,” Oedon said. “At least, that’s as far out as I can see, and even then only the Fourth is clear. I practice seeing the Fifth, but… Well, everything I do is practice.”

Reghan nodded, but she didn’t look at him. She wasn’t a Metrist, but she knew the vocabulary; better than he did, actually. She could see the whole of the First when she tried which was more than most of the world could boast if not by much.

All the same, just seeing Oedon’s desk made her feel ill. The problem wasn’t that anything beyond the First was hard for her; anyone who wasn’t a Metrist saw inside the ring and saw it as the whole of the world. Seeing the First meant Reghan knew there was an edge to that world, but that was all. It didn’t mean she understood anything that touched and played along that edge. It surprised Oedon that she’d only collapsed, that blood hadn’t gushed from everywhere it could find an out.

At least, he’d heard that was a possibility.

“Dema thurqu somata,” she said and finally looked at him. “Rintanail?”

He nodded, stunned.

“How did you do it? How did you deliver it?” Questions meant she was worried, and that made him worried.

“I conducted an Investment along the Third Glyph,” he said, the clinician in him coming out as he tried to justify himself, “with those citrus hybrids we keep, for cattarh? I followed procedure, I made a decoction with the fruit and gave it to her at home.”

Reghan sighed, setting her empty teacup aside. “Oedon, listen carefully. Synthesize an antibiotic, go back to her home, get her back in bed, and get an intravenous drip in her. You will do all this and not a damn thing further, you understand?”

“I…” Oedon started. “I don’t, actually. Especially since she’s better.”

“She isn’t better, Oedon,” Reghan snapped. “She’s in remission. As soon as your little geometry problem wears off, which it may have already, her lungs will fill right back up, sending her into shock and probably killing her, now hurry before that happens.”

“Do you know how battlefield Metrists operate?” Reghan asked. Oedon had returned from the NicKeela residence about an hour ago. The old woman and her husband were more than a little confused, and when Oedon finally had to admit that he’d made a potentially devastating mistake, one which he still didn’t understand completely… He’d never had to tell someone so healthy that they were anything but. The look on her face drained him.

The sun was setting on him by the time he’d made it back to the clinic. Reghan hadn’t said a word to him until this moment as he was packing up to meet Nemo at the pub — a ritual he was anxious to continue.

“You don’t know about how Metrists and surgeons have to work together?” she said. He still didn’t answer, and so she went on: “The Third Limit of Thulihmetry states that a Metrist’s instantiations are never permanent. You can’t make something from nothing, and anything you instantiate returns to its constituent parts. The investment always dissipates.”

“I’ve studied the Limits,” Oedon said, “I understand them.”

“Evidently you don’t,” Reghan said, “or you would know Thurqu Somata is the literal textbook example of why the Third Limit is so important. It doesn’t behave the way you think it will. Thurqu Somata doesn’t heal, Oedon; it suspends the healing process, returns the body to baseline and places it in stasis. In the best cases, it preserves someone’s life until they can get real medical treatment, but if they don’t — or worse, if they don’t understand that—” She broke off. Her eyes shrank as though in retreat from something. She shook herself and tapped her cane on the ground until she found her place again. “If they don’t understand that, then you get a walking corpse.”

“But one can circumvent the Third Limit by properly capitulating to the Second Law,” Oedon said, coldly. “Supplementing an investment through essential nature can produce a permanent instantiation.”

“With what?” Reghan snapped. “What were you investing, exactly? Let’s forget for a second you even mentioned ‘essential nature,’ I know you don’t believe in anything of the sort. It doesn’t change that Investment isn’t even possible inside the Fourth Glyph, and you told me you used the Third. But even if you had used the Fourth, what would you have Invested? Votana? Sure, that’s an idea, you can grow the healthiest bell pepper in the world that way, but you know very well that what you needed, Oedon, was Ys Somati, which does not exist!”

Reghan spoke every last syllable with snakelike precision, each one piercing Oedon and taking a little more of the breath out of him, until she reared back and struck to the heart: “There is no quintessence for the messy, over-complicated thing called a human being,” she said. “And believe me, I’m still as sorry about Bridgit as I ever was, but you will not heal her.”

Oedon pulled on his jacket and his cap and slung his pack over his shoulder. He turned towards the door, then stopped. He stood there for a long time, the toe of his boot pressed into the weathered doorjamb, before he spoke: “Every limit is just a stopping place,” he said, “and an arbitrary one. You’re right, I don’t believe in essentials. Anyone who does wants everything to stay the same, at heart, or wants to know well in advance who is and isn’t worth saving. And you know I will break every law, man or gods’, before I give up on this.”

Reghan’s face softened. He’d expected just about any reaction except that. She brushed her long black hair behind her ear and nodded with a look he hadn’t seen in years if he’d ever seen it at all.

“That is what Rolance and Bruun and all the other latest like to say, isn’t it?” Oedon opened his mouth but said nothing. He didn’t know what surprised him more, that he’d been parroting or that she was prepared for it, that she’d also read the same not-quite-banned treatise he’d been carrying in his bag. She sighed, waving her hand. “They all got it from Qaputo, who got it from a bad interpretation of Hammel, and so on down the line.” She looked at him, twirling a strand of hair that had fallen out of place. She leaned on her cane, stood up, and came to him.

“Oedon,” she said as she held the door open for him, the setting sunlight spilling through like fire around her. He’d never heard her sound so patient. “If your wrestling with theory ever leads you to go around me and experiment on my patients again, I will never let you back into this clinic.”