Safely You Deliver

Yeah, that was definitely a Commonweal book is my first and last reaction. We’re back to wizard school again, this time focusing mainly on Zora, the least powerful and least militant of the crew from the previous book. Which merely makes her an unbelievably powerful reality bending mage.

The initial problem is that a unicorn shows up and befriends Zora. Unicorns around here are one of several varieties of obligate manavores, bred ages ago as part of a bad scheme to make battle-magic compatible cavalry, and they are not friendly and very deadly. This one, exiled, wounded, starving, decides that Zora is all right. Now it’s up to her to figure out how to keep it from getting killed, or killing a bunch of people in return. This involves learning the language Unicorn 4, which is a cruel and vicious tongue, and eventually figuring out how to alter the unicorn (named Pelorius, with a bunch of accents I don’t care to reproduce), a more human-like alternate form and a friendlier physiology.

There are a bunch of legal and ethical debates about how much a wizard can use magic to alter a creature, how much Pelorius can consent (he can talk, even if he’s entirely socially dependent on Zora), and later, whether the two of them can have a romantic relationship, but it’s all very clinical. And I have to be honest, I’m not sure how much I believe all of the high and mighty ethics of the Commonweal—more on that later.

There’s also some of the usual technical problem solving as well. A failing dam is solved by the simple expedience of reaching back millions of years into the past to fix the entire goddamn landscape. Similarly, when Reems attacks again with a biological weapon, our merry band undoes the disease and death with time-like wibbly wobblies and reaching out and causing the attackers to perish by fire and direct death. Fucking with the Commonweal seems like a bad idea.

The personal drama of the book is whether Zora et al will achieve Independent status, moving much of their mind and physiology out of the physical and into the magical. The more interesting issue is that Parliament points out that even though they’re students, the amount of work that the team is doing is enough to completely wreck the economy if accounted for in conventional terms, and that basically whole new branches of economics will have to be set up to manage how they interact with everyone else.

Okay, so back to ethics. The whole point of the Commonweal is that even though there are these nigh-godlike wizards walking around, they do not rule. Though everyone is bound by the Shape of Peace to be honest and not use violence or compulsions to get their way, no one is a slave, and no one goes hungry or unsheltered until everybody starves. There do seem to be a lot of meetings and paperwork, but life is pretty good given the horrific lethality of the landscape. Yet the obliging duty to all is taken very straightforwardly, with only a little criticism. This is no The Dispossessed, with its trenchant criticism of utopia.

Perhaps the most interesting thing is hints that the whole Commonweal is part of a debate between Halt (spider-god, grandmotherly) and unknown entities comparable in power to Halt about how wizards and mundanes should co-exist.

I’m going to keep reading, but these two books are no The March North.