Author: hollyfrostgoldportpress

Hello, lovely readers. Some of you know me but others may not — I am a frequent reader but only sometimes commenter. I’ve become friends with Sarah over the years through our mutual connections in the SFF community, and I can even credit her for a major role in the chain of events that led me to meeting my husband. But that’s a longer story, for another time.

Today’s topic addresses a pet peeve, which is how every single time some human-shaped monster attacks a school in America, the resulting commentary heavily features the line: “This never happens anywhere else!!” Really? Nowhere else? In no other country, in the entire world.

To be clear, I know what they’re really doing is limiting it only to shootings when for all practical reasons, what matters is if someone died, not what kind of weapon did it. The next line in the argument is usually something about how okay okay, there are other ways to murder, but guns make for larger victim counts. When it happens in other countries, there are only one or two victims.

Well then. I have a story for you.

Setting this up requires a bit of autobiography. I lived in China for the latter part of my childhood, which consisted of the years 2008-2013. (I do apologize for any gray hairs that spontaneously generated among the audience just now.) My parents worked as teachers at an English-language international school, set up by and for the expatriate community, which in our area consisted mainly of foreign business executives and their families. As a benefit to their employment, my siblings and I attended the same school. However, Chinese law left us limited in our ability to interact with locals in a meaningful way, and that had a deep effect on our experience. Even in the years before Dictator Xi took over (he came into power less than a year before I left) Chinese citizens were restricted, and sometimes outright prohibited, from being involved in our schools, churches, and other social environments. Most of the time they surveilled us in a hands-off way that you could get by without noticing if you didn’t pay close attention, but it was always there. I’m told that in the decade since I’ve left, it’s gotten far worse, and I believe it. Chinese leadership is increasingly Maoist and with the prevalence of inexpensive security cameras and digital tracking technology, Big Brother is more possible than ever.

But that’s getting into the weeds a bit. I can continue ranting about China and the Damned Commies all day if you let me. Instead, our question: “This never happens outside of America,” right?

Hearing that recently, I had another flashback to my time in China. Our school had fairly robust security already — walls around the entire campus, and gates with full-time guards. At one point, the guards started watching much more closely when we came and went. They checked IDs, and sometimes inspected bags or other items being carried in. I was a teenager and paid enough attention to what the adults were saying. A series of knife attacks had taken place at schools around the country. Everyone in China was terrified. Fortunately I never saw an attack take place, but I absolutely recall the atmosphere of fear that resulted.

For many years, this memory felt like a fever dream. I’d never heard anyone talk about it outside of those of us who were there for it, and was sure that I’d never be able to find any articles or proof that it actually happened. Fortunately for me, some of my friends are much better at digging up old news articles than I am! Even more surprisingly, some mainstream Western publications put out articles, though I am sure they were buried enough that most people missed them unless they knew exactly where to look. Usually when I’ve mentioned this story, I get people doubting that it’s real, so I really have to conclude that it was barely reported overseas.

One from the Atlantic, “Why the Rash of Attacks on School Children in China?” from April 2010. This would have been my second year abroad, which fits perfectly in my memory. The article describes three incidents. Fifteen wounded, knife attack. 28 wounded, 4 dead, knife attack. Five dead, killed with a hammer. All victims were children. All perpetrators were adult men from elsewhere in the local community. Another article from the BBC in 2023 (describing yet another attack on a school) states that a total of 17 children died in Chinese school massacres during 2010.

Going through our search results, we see other school attacks in places like France and South Korea and Japan, all countries with stricter gun laws than America, if not as strict as China. Knives are most common, but some incidents used blunt weapons, bombs, acid, or incendiary devices. All of these are problems and in my mind, equally awful. Why does it matter if your loved one was killed with a gun, a knife, or a bomb? Dead is dead.

But here’s the linguistic game they play. Any time an incident involves a gun, it’s no longer a massacre. It’s a shooting. I insist on pushing back with that one. Of course they can say “it never happens elsewhere” if they make sure that it exclusively refers to only one specific type of massacre.

As for the argument that it makes the killing easier, therefore there will be more killings — that presumes some population of people who are a hair’s trigger away from killing everyone they see, but only stopped by the fact that they don’t have an “easy” way to do it. No, I argue that the important part is the line between “peace” and “killing”, and that once someone crosses that line, the weapon matters little.

Don’t believe me? Why did Ted Kaczynski mail homemade bombs from a rundown cabin near Lincoln, Montana, when he also owned guns? Why did Darrell Brooks kill six people and injure 62 by driving a car into the 2021 Waukesha, Wisconsin, Christmas parade? He was legally barred from owning a firearm due to past felonies, but that didn’t stop him from shooting a family member the year prior. He could have gotten guns if he wanted to. He really just wanted to hurt people and didn’t care how.

Heck, just this past week I’ve seen people argue that Charlie Kirk could have been saved by gun control. But go back only a few years, and Shinzo Abe was killed in Japan with a homemade shotgun. Go back much further, and Margaret Thatcher was dodging car bombs. It’s always something. Evil finds a way.

We have a violence problem in the world right now, absolutely. If you ask me, I’d say we need more religion and less paranoia. Better family connections. Less doomscrolling on the internet and more fresh air. I spend a lot of my free time watching true crime content, especially from a criminal psychology perspective, and I’m convinced that a lot of our societal issues come from people who are rootless and directionless and who have been convinced by the doom-and-gloom peddlers that nothing they can do will improve their situation, so now they just want to hurt as many people as possible before they go.

That said, some violence will always exist. Human beings are NOT SANE as a general rule and sometimes insanity leads to serious problems. Being a god-fearing woman, I turn to prayer and hope that things will work out, Lord willing, here or hereafter. If you don’t have your own source of faith, I implore you to find some philosophy that helps you stay grounded. When we talk ourselves down into that depressive spiral, that’s when we get closer to justifying evil behaviors. 

As for the issue of safety, do what you can to make reasonable decisions, then take care of yourself and your family. Find a community that supports you and be good to them! And try not to lose your head, literally or figuratively.

Sources:

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/2010/04/why-the-rash-of-attacks-on-school-children-in-china/345763/

https://www.newyorker.com/news/evan-osnos/why-are-chinese-schools-under-attack

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-66151247

https://time.com/archive/6949952/chinas-alarming-spate-of-school-knifings/

Note from Holly: Emma blogs at https://sverizona.substack.com/ about things that catch her interest, often including historical clothing, fabrics, and domestic economy. You should go read her blog!

By Holly Frost

Hi Huns, Hoydens, and other creatures,

I have a lovely guest post . . . and I don’t know what name the author wants on it! Darn (checks notes) authors and their pen names.

It will be up by and by when the author gets back to me.

All are well on the Hoyt end of the blog: a little frazzled by the existence of global rotation and the resulting differences in night and day. As happens.

Ok Huns, Hoydens, and Assorted Creatures.

I need you to do something.
Go to your local library if you’ve got one and it’s physically safe to do so. Please do not do this on the website UNLESS you have successfully done so before, or your library is physically unsafe: badgering, er, gushing at, a librarian about this book you really, REALLY want is an important part of actually getting books bought. Also you need to have a library card for the library, or if you’re part of one of those weirder library district exchange things, a validation sticker (if you are, like me, do please do the several libraries you have borrowing privileges at).

Ask to request that the library buys a book. Fill out the book request form. You need your library card number. You need to fill in Author: Sarah A. Hoyt. You need Title: No Man’s Land Volume 1. You need ONE of these and pay attention to which they want: ISBN-10 1630110698 OR ISBN-13 978-1630110697 (These are for the paperback.) Do this with as much hype and enthusiasm of your particular flavor as you can muster. You want this book SO badly and you REALLY hope the library will purchase it for you. If the librarian says they’re out of funds ask when the new funding cycle starts and put in your calendar right there in front of him or her when to come back in to request the book, and then follow through.

You MUST check the “I want you to reserve this for me” box AND then go check it out if they buy it, even though you have read it already. Take it home and return it the next day, if at all possible inside, and if there is a librarian about who isn’t directly interacting with a patron tell the librarian “This book is so good I stayed up all night” when you slide it in the drop. You can also then go on your facebook if you have happen to have it, post about getting this book and @ your library. They have someone who monitors their mentions.

You guys are the best community on the internet and I will get you the two ISBNs for volumes 2 and 3 when those come out, so you can get your libraries to have the whole set for people to read.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Good morning, Huns, Hoydens, and other Creatures!

Sarah’s out of pocket and I promised to accompany family to the Fair. So, please don’t panic if your comment stays in spam til after your bedtime today! I’ll get it later.

That said, can you all tell me how you first found Sarah’s writing? Where, when, and why, and what made you keep reading and come back for more? Fiction and non-fiction, both.

And also, check out the newly updated author website: https://www.sarahahoyt.com/ it’s very much a work in progress.

Oh. She says to tell you why she’s out. She just received an overseas call no one is ever ready for or wants to get. Please pray for comfort for her and her family, and for the repose of her mother’s soul.

Try and not burn more than two or three small dumpsters today, please? And I’ll see you all later. Holly

Hi Huns, Hoydens, and other Creatures! Sarah’s taking a much needed day-off-ish and said I could put up a post!

First of all, please to share the links–see the sidebar, or the top menu, or if you’re on mobile the very bottom–for No Man’s Land pre-orders. If you’ve read the eARC, a review on your website of choice would be much appreciated. These are referral links, and therefore Sarah gets a tiny additional cut of the Amazon pot.

Second, a WordPress housekeeping note. No, we did not deliberately put you in spam, for almost all values of you, and if you are a regular here we definitely did not (drive-by crazies may have). WordPress decides based on some known criteria (certain slurs) and some unknown (WPDE) to spam people. Some people more than others. There are three or five regulars who ALWAYS go to spam. It doesn’t help to resubmit the comment, that just means we have five identical comments in spam when we open it up. You might as well give us a day to fish it out, unless your internet is super-flaky and you really think it never left your computer. WordPress has also been ‘upgrading’. Yay?

Since the cats were being suspiciously civilized this morning, and the dog went with the neighbors for a hike, I poked around the internet a bit, and discovered no inspiration. It’s flooding and burning: normal American summer weather. All the kiddos are getting ready for county fair. The farmers are concerned about either too little water (my area) or too much water (quite a lot of the rest of the country). The media is screeching as usual. Dog days of summer, right? Too hot and too busy for much. We here at the Frost Household are operating under nature-imposed water restrictions, which is going to make the septic grumpy, but better a grumpy septic than a dry well.

Now’s probably as good a time as ever to prognosticate wildly about the future? I suspect we have both a stock and a housing crash coming at some point, but then, we always do, so that’s a gimme. No, I’m not stupid enough to suggest timing. I suspect there are hurricanes and tornadoes coming, sooner or later: there always are. Winter is on it’s way, have you looked at your weather stripping? How’s your roof? Power outage supplies set? Local friends nearly lost their house to a wildfire this week–they got it out fast–they had a scraped strip between the house and the field that burned which saved the house. They didn’t have go-bags ready and just grabbed kids and fled. Got your go-bag ready? Fires and floods both benefit from having your go-bag prepacked. (So do tsunamis, as a special category of flood, per a friend in Hawai’i.)

I’m afraid I’m generally the relentlessly practical side of this relationship, so I’ll also remind you to eat, drink, exercise, and generally take care of your body, mind, and soul, while we’re at it, and don’t forget to pet the dogs and cats in your life. (And have their needs in your go-bag, too.) It’s the time of year for grilling (it always is, after all) so go cook some meat over fire and maybe give the pets some of that as well. I am reliably informed that dogs and cats like meat very, very, much. Also chicken skin. Especially chicken skin. And then, as a special favor to those of us in the burning part of the world, please double check your fire is out and cold. Have fun!

Bunk Costs Guest Post by Ian Bruene

In the AI posts recent the off repeated refrain / questions about whether any of this is economically viable came up. Usually when I’ve heard people make that objection I pay little attention: the facts they cite tend to be questionable and cherry-picked at best, and all too often outright fraudulent. Nothing new here, same old same old for the topic. More fundamentally pointing out that a huge amount of money and resources have been poured into a new technology which is getting better at an accelerating pace and it hasn’t paid off yet is………. not a particularly interesting observation to make.

This time I decided to do a bit of figuring up, and it turns out that you can just do math, and no one can stop you. I’m going to talk about three different types of model which are the most relevant, and which have people raising the most questions about their viability.

But first an important distinction must be made for those who are unfamiliar with these: running a completed model and training the model require vastly different amounts of compute. It might take hundreds or thousands of GPUs crunching data for a month to train a new model, but when that is completed a single GPU can keep up with constant usage from multiple users.

Also I am going to limit my discussion of valuable usage to cases where there is a fairly solid and definable value proposition. Because once I’ve laid out the math there, everything else is just gravy. And I am mostly not going to talk about the detail of how the money flows: I’m just going to cover whether X amount of value is generated vs the training cost.

Large State of the Art LLMs

These are what everyone knows of for services like chatgpt or grok. They are the big boys which have massive datacenters built to train and run them. Information on what the more recent models have cost to train has not been published, but we can still make some educated guesses. Estimates put GPT-4 around $60-80 million, but Altman has stated that it was “over 100 million”. There is even less information for -4o or o3, but a figure of $100-200 million for -4o is likely.

Can this recoup costs? Is there anything valuable enough which these can do to pay for that?

(Also I’d like to point out that while those sound like big numbers, as far as industrial investments go they are pretty tiny.)

Well let’s look at something where we can have objective standards: it is a fact that there are programmers who individually can create $10 million in value. They can go much higher than that, but there are fewer the higher you go.

Also we know for a fact that a -4o class model is useful to an expert programmer. How? Because ESR has been working on a new project using AI for a few weeks now.

From his reports, we know that AI assistance for an expert programmer can multiply development speed by a factor of 2 to 3. It might go higher, but let’s go with a very conservative 2x multiplier. And we won’t include any of the ancillary benefits: just the time it takes the project form start to finish.

(And to head off what I know some of you are furiously pounding your keyboards about: those figures were while maintaining a high standard of quality)

So let’s put all of those points together:

If you have a developer who can create $10m in value and you give him an AI he can create $20m in value in the same period, for a gain of +$10m. While they are rare by general population standards, $10m value developers are fairly common for competent people. If you give 20 of them a -4o class AI, the AI will have generated enough value to offset its training cost.

Any additional $10m value developers who use the AI are over-unity, and the thousands of $1m value developers add to the pile on. We haven’t even touched any business case beyond making the very best programmers more productive and we’ve already demonstrated that the concerns – or perhaps concern trolls – about recouping the cost are full of nothing but wind.

But wait. It gets worse for that objection. It gets so very much worse.

Small LLMs

There is a wide variety of model sizes, all the way from 671 billion parameter behemoths like undistilled DeepSeek-r1, down to tiny models you can run on the cheapest raspberry pi. But a notable size range is around 7 billion parameters; there are a lot of small models which are about this size, because you can do useful things with that, and it can easily run on even the low end consumer GPUs.

The specific model which ESR uses the most at the moment is 4.1-mini. We don’t know exactly how large it is because “Open”AI are a bunch of secretive little twerps. But they have stated that it is in this general size range, and most estimates put it around 7-8b. This means we know that a model in this size range is useful to an expert programmer.

Several different estimates for how much it cost to train 4.1-mini put it somewhere around $1 million. Which in large corporation terms is extra money they found while cleaning out the sofa. Now consider all those numbers I went through before to see if -4o could be profitable at 200 times the startup cost, and compare them to a $1m investment.

Even if you try to rescue the financial-doomer position by saying they had to train 4o before they could get to 4.1-mini (which is probably true), that just leaves you with the 4o training cost which we already know can generate over-unity value.

ImageGen

Image generator models are much smaller than LLMs. StableDiffusion 1.5 is just under a billion parameters, as opposed to a 7b LLM being considered very small. Here we actually have some useful data; SD1.5 was trained for about $600k on an AWS cluster of 256 A100 GPUs and 150,000 GPU-hours of compute time. We also know that SDXL is 3.5b parameters, so all other factors being equal a naive scaling would put its training cost around $2.1 million.

Already we are talking about something much cheaper. But we can cut these prices down considerably. SD1.5 was trained on A100 cards. That’s the previous generation, most stuff nowadays uses the H100 (and the bleeding edge B200 is starting to appear) which is more expensive per hour but 3-4 times faster. Going by AWS pricing if you trained the exact same SD1.5 model on an AWS H100 cluster it would only cost about $200k.

But wait; there’s even more we can cut. AWS is the boutique GPU rental service. If you want something more in line with the market price for compute you can go to runpod.io. Using their figures, training on A100 cards would only be $300k, or using H100s it would be about $115k.

If we take these figures and apply the naive 3.5x scaling factor for the much more capable SDXL, that $115k works out to around $400k. Let’s be generous and round it all the way up to $1 million. Again; this is petty cash level expenditure for a larger company.

Future directions…

While I was coming up with figures for this post I asked o3 to work out an estimate of what it would cost to train a brand new 7b model, using runpod prices, and the current well known state of the art in training techniques but nothing exotic. The figures it came up with were on the order of $15-30k worth of compute assuming no disastrous failed runs.

At which point we are talking about something which the medium to large end of small businesses can do without wincing.

Or a well off hobbyist.

I currently have a janky AI “server” which I’m going to be rebuilding into a proper server with a 4x V100 nvlink board. The V100 is a couple generations behind even the A100 which is why I’m able to get them cheaply.

Just counting those with no additional GPUs, limiting training time to 1 month, and using current training techniques, I will be able to train a brand new 2 billion parameter model at home. If I did it in summer the power cost would be about $70. If I was smart and did it in winter the power cost would be only $51. That doesn’t count additional AC or reduced furnace needs.

Even if nothing else could pay off the cost of training models, once a given size of model is within the capabilities of a geek who doesn’t have a ton of money to spend on the problem your economic objections fly out the window.

Now tell me: what happens to old computer hardware when it gets old and stops being useful in datacenters?

[The image for this post was generated on my existing V100, 19 seconds @ 150W, or about $0.0001 in power]

(Sarah got attacked by probably pollen, possibly a virus, and the weirdest but maybe most effective unrequested tech support personal–Indy now fixes computer hardware, and said I should share a bit of the book. Something funny and self contained, which, well, Skip generally is, until he isn’t, so herewith, trials of future academia. If it isn’t your tastes, well, you got an Indy here to fix your computer fan photo for your time today!)

Schrodinger Path

Skip:

It is not true that the engraved plaque you see when you come into the IDS buildings devoted to the training of future diplomats of Britannia says Abandon all hope ye who enter here.

I do understand why that has become widely believed, and to be fair, given how strict the testing of incoming students, it could be that. But my guess is that it would be too much blunt truth-telling for the IDS.

What the plaque, a fine sheet of silver, or perhaps a glassteel imitation of silver says, in raised golden letters – it is also not true that the IDS has ever had any aesthetics – is: You Can Never Know Enough.

This was certainly true for me. Through the year of my initial training I was often grateful that the initial problems, first contacts and negotiations were virtual, done in mersi chamber, and with species, worlds and issues created from whole cloth by instructors. This is good, because no matter how much I studied on the upcoming situation, learned all the trigger words I should never use, the relationships I shouldn’t mention, implied we’d consider their just cause – even if their just cause was wanting to eat their neighbors raw – or whatever I did, it ended with food thrown at me, elaborate insults offered to me, or me running out of the mersi room with a virtual lynch mob at my heels. Fortunately they evaporated on the threshold. Unfortunately, after a year of this, I started thinking whatever I was suited for it was not being a diplomat.

I might have said that failing wasn’t an option. Not for my Mother, at least. But at almost nineteen, I was starting to get a feeling Mother’s view of reality might be unrealistic.

So I read the card she sent me to congratulate me on finishing my first year of training with flying colors – what kind of bilge were the instructors selling her? Oh, yeah, under no circumstances is the IDS truthful – and tell me she was proud of me. I set it on the table, looked at myself in the blue uniform of a diplomat trainee – why did I always end up in blue uniforms? – and thought well, it was time to find something else to do with my life. Which was a pity because the small room with its single bed, its reader and its music system had been a refuge of sorts. Since I didn’t use my title here and went by Skip Hayden, no one seemed to know me. Because the IDS frowned on lack of self control, I’d been celibate as a monk, which I found oddly restful. Out there, or on the estate, I’d have to become the viscount Webson, and – yes – the prodigy war hero. And I’d probably have to hide in someone’s bed again.

But one thing my father had told me is that many people spent their lives in pursuit of careers they weren’t suited for and that it was a waste. He was speaking of a particularly thick-headed student at the Academy, but considering my performance here, I was sure he would say it applied to me and diplomacy.

I walked out of my room, stepping crisply. That was one of those things they’d told me to change – among the other hundred things. My walk was apparently too crisp and “military.” Which since I’d lived in a military academy for most of my life, should be no surprise for anyone. But one of the many mottos that the IDS threw around was: A Diplomat Always Looks Relaxed.

Well, I wasn’t going to be a diplomat, and I didn’t feel particularly diplomatic. I didn’t try to correct my walk – which attempt at any rate meant that instructors told me I was walking like a sick duck – and just left the dormitory floor, in search of the first instructor whose face I knew. I was going to ask for a resignation form and then I was—

Well, probably going to go back to the estate and figure out what to do with the next 100 or 150years. The impulse to become a diplomat had probably been stupid, anyway.

Of course the instructor I ran into was Matt Crowe, who was walking out of the mersi room with his own crisp step, probably just having set up hell for the next patsy to walk in for a simulated diplomatic interaction.

Crowe or Mr. Crowe – though none of the instructors had less than a doctorate, mind – as he preferred to be called, was one of the youngest instructors. He was about forty, had dark hair, grey-blue-green eyes which could assume a laser-point intensity if he thought I was being particularly stupid, always kept close-shaved and looked like a military academy graduate, as I should very well know. Which meant I was always tempted to salute and call him “sir.”

I controlled with an effort of will, as I came to a stop in front of him, and of course, predictably, what came out of my mouth was a weak and wandering, “Er…. Mr. Crowe?”

“Hayden?” he said. As though it were a big surprise to find a student wandering the halls of the instruction wing.

“Yes, sir,” I said, and there must have been something to my voice because he didn’t correct me. “I wonder if I could have a few minutes of your time, sir? Or do I need to make an appointment?”

He frowned at me. “Is it vital that you see me right now?” he asked.

“Yes, sir. We could wait, but it would be a waste of both our times.”

His frown got more thunderous and I swear he’d had someone install laser light behind his eyes. That kind of look, with a glow should hurt. Him, I mean. It did hurt me. Or at least made me sound like an idiot.

He nodded once, pivoted on his heels and said, “Come.”

I followed. We walked past the mersi room, past the study rooms where we had to read over the records that we weren’t trusted to take to our private rooms, and past a rowdy group of just-enrolled trainees making jokes about their last mersi experience.

We stopped by a row of doors at the back, in front of the one that read Matt Crowe. Like most things at the Academy, they were low tech wood doors – I guess they didn’t want to get us used to unnecessary gadgets – and he pushed the door open and gestured for me to go in.

Inside it had the look-feel of an interrogation chamber, with a battered wooden desk, and two chairs one on each side. I took the one in front of the desk, and looked around to make sure there was no glaring interrogation light to point at my eyes. Crowe took his seat behind the desk, looked at me, as if that would tell him anything, and then leaned back – I guess a diplomat must strive to look relaxed, or something – and said, “What is wrong Hayden? How may I help you?”

All my instincts from Academy days reared up. When an instructor asked how he could help you, you inevitably found out he wished to help you improve your attention to detail by making you hand sew a whole new uniform between night and the morning, or perhaps clean all the restrooms in the building in two hours, given only a small sponge and a bottle of breath freshener.

But I took a deep breath, told myself I was being an idiot, and said, “I would like to resign, sir.”

He looked…. I wasn’t sure how he looked. It wasn’t exactly surprised. But it was…. Okay, I was a failing diplomat, but I’d lived with humans before. If I weren’t talking to an instructor, I’d think he was angry.

I cleared my throat, “I signed up for instruction voluntarily, and it is my right to—”

He nodded, once. And then he did the most bizarre thing.

He took something out of his pocket, got on a chair and, reaching to what looked like a completely featureless piece of ceiling, stuck the something on it. From my perspective, it looked like a round, colored paper dot. Green dot.

Then he stepped down from the chair, walked to the door, and locked it. He took his chair back behind the desk, and sat on it. Then he leaned across the desk, “Please, don’t.”

I blinked, looked up at the dot, back at the door, and then at Crowe, wondering which of us had taken leave of his senses.

He smiled, but it was a weird, restrained smile. “I suspected that’s what you wanted to do. Which is why I brought you to my office, instead of to one of the learning rooms, which is more common for this sort of interview. You see, for whatever reason video pickups just don’t work in my office, and the audio becomes oddly random and choppy, even when I’m not here. They’re used to this, so I doubt it will be noticed.”

“Sir? Is this an exercise?”

The smile became rueful, “In a way. Something you’ll learn, Hayden, is that at the IDS nothing is ever simple. Or at least that’s what I’m learning. Look, I looked at your file. There are weird whispers about you… Someone tipped us you’d been visiting houses of ill repute in certain quarters.”

“Sir, I haven’t—”

He waved it away. “I know. I checked. I’ve crawled over your records and everything you’ve done the last year. You’re Viscount Webson, right? And your mom is a countess who is sixth cousin to the queen or something?”

I blinked again. “Something like that.” It was actually third cousin, but who was counting?

“Then what I suggest is that you tell your mother someone is trying to make you wash out of the training. And tell her to have the Queen send word she would like you to graduate as soon as possible.”

I was about to say that my mother wasn’t in that kind of relationship with the Queen. And it was true. Although there was a blood relation, Queen Eleanor might be a cousin – a lot closer than sixth and probably on three sides, because Father despite being a mere commoner, had some royal bastard blood and relatives who’d married into the nobility or bought into it – but I didn’t think that Mother had the sort of friendship where she could ask a favor of the queen. Mother didn’t have that sort of friendship with anyone. Mother commanded, she did not plead.

On the other hand, it occurred to me that I might. Well, not that sort of friendship, but that sort of reach. After all I was a war hero. Things being done against a war hero would be bad news for the monarchy’s image. I had a feeling – though I’d never paid much attention to politics – that the Queen wouldn’t like this.

I sat up straight. “Tell me exactly what’s been happening, besides my rather unspectacular performance.”

He made a face. “They have been ordering you to be put through 3^rd year mersis. The ones given to the trainees who have done both three months rotations in the field.”

I blinked.

“Frankly the fact you have lasted almost the full simulations is a sign of enormous talent. Which is why I’d prefer you don’t resign. Queen Harmonia left us in a hell of a mess. To clean it up we need real talent. Which is why I was brought in, from the Space Force, having finished a doctorate in diplomacy while deployed. And why I am an instructor despite my having no title, amid all you noblemen, instructors and students alike.”

I narrowed my eyes as the picture formed. Crowe had been given a sponge and a bottle of breath freshener. “You’re on cleanup duty?”

“Of sorts.”

“But why would anyone put me on third year—” I stopped. “Did they misjudge my ability?”

He snorted. “Oh, no. I can’t find the details, on account of not being a director.”

Really, a small sponge and a tiny bottle of breath freshener. “But?”

“But it bothered me. Both the completely unsubstantiated rumors and that they were ordering this course of action, and I poked around enough and spied at doors enough—”

“Sometimes good diplomats listen at doors,” I said, piously, another plaque in another room of the complex.

He made a face which exactly reflected how I felt about the plaques, too.

“Anyway, I get the impression that one or more of the directors were…. We won’t say bribed but something very like. There would be a donation coming, sort of thing if you were made to wash out.” He opened his hands on the desk. “Nothing I can prove, or take to her Majesty. Not with the directors all being noblemen and women at the highest levels. And I very much suspect the bribe was less tangible than money changing hands.”

I sat back. Well. That could have come from anyone, though my main suspect would be Mother, complete with the card complimenting me on finishing out the year. It was just the sort of thing she would do, since she would much prefer I go back to the estate, and learn to do estate things, not to mention marry and set about producing a long line of heirs. Though the marrying might be optional. I had no idea if she knew my proclivities, but even without, I suspected she’d be absolutely happy with my having a lab contracted for children which would be wholly hers to raise, while I managed the estate, or perhaps went back to the Space Force.

For the first time I wondered if Father had stayed so long in the Force for a reason.

But if Mother was behind this, I obviously couldn’t go to her. And if Mother was behind this I definitely didn’t want to expose her. Our relationship was fraught enough.

Well.

I looked up. Crowe was looking at me, eyebrows slightly raised, as though trying to divine my calculations.

“Look,” I said. “It’s a very long gambit, but I can send a note to Queen Eleanor through some contacts.” From what I understood, my great uncle, the Judge, took tea with her majesty fairly regularly. “I need a half day pass. But I warn you, it might not work.”

He made a face. “Very well. I will, at the same time, pass a message through my contacts. It is all a very long shot, but I’d prefer the diplomatic service of the Star Empire not lose you, Viscount Webson.”

“Just… Skip Hayden,” I said, and offered him my hand. Yes, I knew this might all be some complex lie, but somehow it didn’t feel like one.

He shook my hand and did his best to break it, the bastard, then nodded and got a disposit pad from his drawer. He set it on an away pass, and signed it with his gen-print, then handed it over. It was a little thing, smaller than my palm. I slipped it into a pocket.

Yes, that did mean I had to endure tea with Great Uncle Zymon. And yes, the tea in his ornate office, with a footman behind each of us –making sure we didn’t drop crumbs or throw the cups on the floor, I guess? – felt unaccustomed and oppressive, though I’d done this once a month when I’d been in the Academy.

Great Uncle Zymon had a completely different idea of who and what was causing my issues at the Academy. He was fairly sure it was that the directors themselves were jealous of me, and afraid the Queen would appoint me to the board. Which would make perfect sense, of course, if I had a doctorate, which I didn’t. Or have any intention of getting one.

But my – paternal – uncle thought the Haydens were the most illustrious and brilliant family in all the Star Empire, and all the other families conspired to bring it down. Pretty much constantly. It was a pet paranoia which I suspected he kept in his bedside table, fed on chocolate, and only admitted to other Haydens, that is to me, otherwise someone would have locked him up long since.

But the end result is that he took my note to the Queen and I returned to training at the IDS, not expecting much of anything to result from that afternoon. I’d planned that if nothing changed, I’d resign in a week.

However, things changed.

The first thing that changed was that I found I did indeed receive stellar grades for my first year, each of the exercises being graded on a curve, for being far above my ability, and therefore the portion completed counting as more than enough.

The other change is that the mersi experiences became more…. Related to how much I had studied and how much I concentrated.

This is not to say they became easy.

From Holly the Assistant

Well, it’s been that sort of day all around these parts. Everyone’s fine. There were checkups and shipments and pollen and just . . . it was very much a Friday. (Ok, with the pollen, fine might be pushing it, but everyone’s alive and breathing, which is not Nature’s fault: she tried.)

So, please amuse yourselves, or not, with what might be on the other side of that door. And there will be memes tomorrow, bet your bottom dollar there’ll be meming.

First off, Sarah’s fine, taking a brief break from the blog while editing No Man’s Land while supervised by the kitty crew. So she tossed me the keys and said “Post something.” Something follows.

This morning, we woke up to a thundersnow. Not uncommon in April, up in these parts. I went to check on the chicks, which we moved out of the dining room to outside this last week, and the heat lamp was on and they were physically fine, just unhappy. I found that the young adults had not closed the windows last night, but had closed the blinds, and fixed that, and checked the thermometer, and sighed, and turned the furnace on.

Went downstairs for more milk and found Quicksilver kitty in the ceiling. It’s an old house, and the cats are welcome to walk through the walls and hunt mice. Silver told me about her exploits, I asked if she wanted a hand down, she declined, and I came upstairs to find the percolator had finally started boiling while I was talking to Silver. At least there’s coffee, but the rest of the carrots and the beets are not going in the garden today. Perhaps Saturday will be dry enough again.

Spring is slow up here, with fits of warm weather–yesterday hit seventy–and cold. As I type the snow is horizontal, blowing north to south.

It occurs to me that a lot of us are prone to wanting politics to come on like summer right now. But it’s much more like spring. Spats of snow, setting back the work, days of warm weather when you can’t get things done fast enough ahead of the next cold snap which will come, but you don’t know how soon or how hard it will be.

And it feels like it was summer for the other side for a very long time, yet was it really, or are our feelings deceiving us? My family is a second generation home school family. Forty years of legally home schooling. Was that a win for the statists? How about gun rights? How many wins did we get in gun rights over those decades? And abortion, returned to the states to decide as it should be under our Constitution, even in the depths of one of those nastier cold snaps. What about the end of regulatory rule?

I don’t have a crystal ball, none of us do. We don’t know which way the arrows of future history point: which countries are going to have themselves wars and which will dodge wars this year. We do know the general trend over the millennia is away from involuntary collectivism, from belonging to the tribe, the state, the religion, that you are born under or conquered by. The USA is and has been at the forefront of this trend, and most of our citizens are pretty good at finding groups to belong to, even when we side-eye their choices. But we do know that when the world is unpredictable, as it always has been, steadfastness is our key to success. Today we plant the seeds. Tomorrow we hunker down against the next cold snap. Then we pull the weeds when it warms again. In the end, the harvest of liberty and justice will overflow.

P.S. Saturday happens to be the 250th Anniversary of the start of the Revolutionary War. Do something to celebrate. (Preferably something that keeps you solidly away from the crazies who want another violent Revolution-it’s my birthday, too and I’m sick and tired of their nonsense on that day.) Hang two lights in your window–the Brits came by sea. Have a cake. Have two cakes. Why not party? 250 years of the best thing going for humanity so far is worth a party.

By Holly the Assistant

Some of us really enjoy the snow and cold, and such outdoor activities as are available this time of year.

Rocket, living her best life.

Others prefer to find a warm spot and glare balefully at the world.

Gertrude, on top the microwave. (You explain to her that you need to wipe the top of the microwave. I’ll watch from way over here.)

Humans being humans, and fairly stubborn and defiant at that, when it’s 2 F out (that’s -16.67 C), and hasn’t been above freezing for a month, tend to start planning gardens and thinking about what trees to try in the orchard and generally trying to rush summer along.

This is NOT the planned planting!

Quicksilver (orange and white) and the Wolf (all white, except for dirt) doing their best imitation of house plants. That is a jalapeno pepper Wolf is sleeping on, and Silver has a couple struggling green onions getting smushed.

(Sarah told me to post something silly, she’s exhausted. I said, Ok, I have Silver and Wolf in pots, that’s silly enough. I could have shared Wolf ‘helping’ me with electrical problems, but honestly that’s just scary, the electrical, not the Wolf. Yes, the Wolf and Silver are Indy, Circe, and Muse’s younger siblings, and the Wolf is very similar to Indy.)

Hope you all enjoy the four-footed crew here!