On the Engineering of River Harmonics and Associated Tributaries of Grief

ON THE ENGINEERING OF RIVER HARMONICS AND ASSOCIATED TRIBUTARIES OF GRIEF 

by Natasha King

The new engineer from the provinces was conducting exemplary musical work on some of the smaller tributary rivers adjoining the capital. The Minister of Civil Engineering, Tiyan Phi, nursed a cup of chrysanthemum tea and congratulated himself for approving the transfer. Local hydroharmonic turbines were already over their output quotas for the month, with a week to spare; the media was calling the riversound “stirring,” “unearthly,” “a skillful conflation of classical melody and modern pop sensibilities.” All very auspicious. Citizen happiness indices in the capital would be up year over year, he could feel it in his bones. Maybe it was time he gave some thought to seriously pursuing a royal cabinet posting.

Minister Tiyan finished his tea and paged the Deputy Minister.

Deputy Minister Marao was an ideal colleague: organized, respectful, just clumsy enough at the politicking side of the job to pose no threat to Tiyan himself.

“The new engineer,” said Tiyan. “Cai Sol, is it? I want him on the Delta project.”

“So soon, sir?” said Marao. It was a fair question, the annual tuning of the Kephamh Delta being the Bureau’s highest-profile duty. Cai Sol had performed admirably in his six months at the capital, but he was hardly the most senior among the Bureau’s engineers.

“I know, but with that old fool Lan retiring early, we need to bring in someone else anyway.”

“We had discussed Siha, who is more senior—”

“Siha is a traditionalist through and through. He plays a river so safe it barely plays at all. We give him the Delta and we’ll be lucky to see five percent growth—not to mention the optics when his arrangement of the national anthem is barely distinct from Lan’s last three. They’ll be calling our Bureau a fossil in the royal circles. Meanwhile, Cai is arranging compositions twice as complex with a quarter of the construction budget. Not to mention they’re more interesting to listen to. Did you see what he did with the Mai Ke canals last month?”

“I read the harmonic reports, sir.”

“He has the right touch. Modern appeal without ruffling anyone’s feathers. The press will love it. They’ll call him the vanguard of a new generation, or something. Give me the highlights from his background check again, would you?”

“Of course, sir.” Marao perpetually carried a manila folder, which he rarely referenced, being possessed of crystalline and unimpeachable memory. “Thirty-one, an only child, born in Taihe Province. Graduated with honours, married at twenty-two, obtained his advanced degree in river engineering, and straight to work at the Bureau office in Taihe.”

Tiyan snorted. “River engineering in Taihe? Powering their single streetlight?”

“Taihe Province mostly sells their surplus output, sir,” said Marao, who would have climbed the Bureau ranks much faster if he had ever learned the markers of sarcasm. “Wife, Cai Ahren, now deceased, no children. Transferred to the capital six months ago.”

“And so? Anything we should be worried about?”

“His wife died recently, sir.”

“Cai Ahren?”

“Cai Ahren, sir.”

“Well, he didn’t kill her, did he?”

“No, sir. Cancer, it looks like. I believe he requested the transfer to the capital to access better medical care. There’s a note here that she was on a transplant list, but I assume there wasn’t a match found in time. She passed away two months ago.”

“Shame. I suppose that would explain the poor fellow throwing himself into the job, eh?”

“His work has consistently overdelivered on energy outputs,” Marao acknowledged. “I have a report here”—the folder remained shut—“from one of the analysts, on his use of crescendos to handle peak power demand, which is really quite remarkable. Not something that would have come up in Taihe, I suppose.”

Tiyan pushed aside his empty teacup and pulled another stack of reports across the desk. “Put him on the project and see that he has the appropriate staff. I’ll find some time to meet with him later this week.”

•••

Cai Sol was a stoop-shouldered man with deeply unfashionable wire-rimmed glasses. He had crow’s feet beyond what a man of thirty-one ought to have earned, and fraying cuffs. Tiyan made a mental note to address the cuffs at a later date. Shabby clothes were acceptable for an engineer buried in a cubicle doing acoustic calculations on minor rivers, but not for someone overseeing the kingdom’s primary body of hydroharmonic power.

“Your work has been commendable,” said Tiyan. “Some people might turn up their noses at the minor rivers, since they are supplementary power sources—viewing their music as primarily aesthetic, not worth tuning. I ensure those people do not remain at this Bureau for long.”

“I believe our mission is to change things for the better wherever we can, Minister.” Cai Sol's voice was earnest, if strained; the voice of a soft-spoken man attempting to be firm. The kind of man who would languish in obscurity forever if not for a discerning superior who could pluck him from the mud, polish him up, and set him into the crown of the kingdom, as it were. Tiyan steepled his fingers magnanimously.

“Every river," he told Cai, "is a source of potential, needing only the guiding hand of our Bureau to reach higher harmonic yields. Every source of potential ought to be realized, and then improved. I’m sure you recognize your assignment to the Delta is a direct result of your diligence with the Sayut and the Mai Ke.”

“I’m very honoured, sir,” said Cai.

“And of course, your years at the Taihe office speak for themselves. Though I imagine there was less call for innovation there, eh? Must’ve been exciting for you, arriving here where we have some real riversound to work with.”

“We were happy in—I was very fulfilled in my posting at Taihe, Minister, but we requested a transfer to the capital so my wife could be treated at the hospital here.”

“Ah. Yes. The Bureau’s deep condolences for your loss, of course. I heard there was a need for a transplant.”

“Yes, sir. There wasn’t a match found in time.”

“Never enough of those to go around, I fear.”

“No, sir, not on the public transplant lists.”

Ah, well, of course Cai Sol and his wife wouldn’t have been treated at the private hospitals, not on a civil servant’s salary. No shame in that. The public hospitals were perfectly sufficient. Well, Tiyan didn’t know anyone personally who relied on them. It was the private hospitals that could provide the latest in medical care: the prosthetics grown in the silksteel farms in the north, the harmonic calibration skeins for anti-aging, and so on.

Cai had fallen silent, and the sombre lines around his mouth—heavens, speaking of someone whose skin would benefit from a harmonic calibration or two, something focusing on lymphatic drainage perhaps—were beginning to sour the mood. Tiyan changed the subject. "Have you had a chance to look over the numbers from last year's tuning? Though of course, we ought to be aiming higher, year over year. Changing things for the better, eh?"

“I’ll be on-site next week.” Cai Sol removed his glasses and polished them. The crow’s feet were not diminished. “To take some initial measurements.”

“Next week is the Queen’s birthday,” said Tiyan. A holiday, technically.

“It never hurts to get started early, sir. A few of my staff have volunteered to come along.”

Tiyan had been planning to spend the day with his family. However, he could hardly appear to be less diligent than a man so many ranks his junior. His wife would have to understand.

•••

For a good few kilometres the elevated train ran alongside the Sayut, the limpid green tributary that flowed past the capital and into the Kephamh just north of the Delta. Riversound filtered in through the glass windows, a faint unearthly music produced by the current as it rippled past the Sayut’s carefully modulated embankments and weirs. Riversound resembled no manmade instrument, though the capital’s orchestras were getting close with some of the new silksteel strings. With the precise adjustments of the Bureau's engineers, however, the raw sound could be shaped into recognizable music. Tuned well, it drove higher yields when converted by the vast turbines into usable power, to be channelled into local harmonic grids or stored in the vast battery cells for transport elsewhere.

“Is that the Queen’s song?” said Tiyan, impressed. The Queen Consort's dedicated theme was notoriously complicated; usually only the major branches of the Kephamh carried enough hydroharmonic potential to produce the delicate, resonant strains, so to hear it trickling from the banks of the Sayut was a rare pleasure.

“I thought it’d be appropriate for her birthday,” said Cai. “All the credit should go to my staff. They worked overtime all week to arrange for the construction on the riverbanks.”

“I think the credit likely belongs to your clear instruction,” said Tiyan. The man either elevated himself on his own virtue, or he was a fool who didn’t know when and how to subtly shore up his own standing. Well, Tiyan wouldn’t mind taking the larger share of the credit after the Autumn Festival went seamlessly.

An engineer who had a talent for harmonic application and a preference for avoiding accolades was ideal, in fact. Although it was tradition for the Kephamh to be tuned to the beloved notes of the national anthem, each principal engineer tended to apply their own sensibilities to the composition. Lan, that sour-faced stick in the mud, had invariably chosen a simple arrangement that excited no one, least of all the hydroharmonic turbines. Power output flat year over year—ignominious. That had been the last straw for Tiyan to gently pressure the right channels to move Lan’s retirement up by half a decade.

The Queen’s theme faded in the distance as the train approached the Kephamh Delta station, replaced by the grander strains of the national anthem. The land around the Delta was lush and green, criss-crossed with white stone roads. Tiyan remembered when it had been called the Delta Quarter, though the current property management company had successfully rebranded the neighbourhood as First Pearl.

Decades ago this had all been rice paddies, before hydroharmonic advances allowed them to convert the central highlands to arable ground, so the agrarian sector could be moved north and the land around the Delta could be leveraged for its true potential: proximity. Twenty minutes to the capital, promised the high-gloss brochure for First Pearl that Tiyan kept like a guilty secret in his lower desk drawer.

Elegant mansions dotted the emerald expanse: palatial homes for the city’s societal elite, for the governing heads and captains of industry who rode the silksteel train into the capital each morning to put in a good day’s work. Tiyan had indulged in a stray daydream here and there—a villa in the Middle Classical style that was so popular these days, a glassed-in sunroom, a few tame white egrets to lend pleasing variety to the landscape. Maybe in a few years, maybe after that cabinet posting.

The local office set them up in a pavilion looking across to the Delta’s eastern edge, where they could see the massive hydroharmonic turbines, turning industriously as they wound the music into the great power cells within their hollow chambers. This close to the Autumn Festival, the river flowed sluggishly; the power cells were changed out only once a month. The Kephamh Delta generated seventy percent of its yearly hydroharmonic output during the week of the Autumn Festival, when the water flow rate reached its rainy season high. If Cai replicated his success with the minor rivers here, Tiyan thought they might get that up to seventy-five percent: a third of the entire nation’s energy demand for the year, generated in a single week.

An aide poured two steaming cups of tea. Most of Cai’s staff had remained outside to unpack the surveying equipment.

“I should supervise,” said Cai, fidgeting on the rosewood settee.

Tiyan sipped his tea and made a face. It never tasted the same outside the capital.

“A mark of a good man is an ability to delegate,” he said serenely. “Your staff can begin the readings on their own—it’s their job, isn’t it?”

Cai sank back against the settee’s mother-of-pearl inlay. “I’m not used to the resources of the capital,” he confessed. “The provincial office was quite small. I had one assistant, not an entire team.”

“Speaking of resources,” Tiyan remembered, “I thought I’d give you some notice about the Autumn Festival. As the principal engineer you will now be privileged to attend the ceremonies. The royal family will be present, though I doubt they’ll make it as far down the greetings row as you… Regardless, we should all be comporting ourselves accordingly.”

He let his gaze drift pointedly toward Cai’s threadbare hems. The man reddened; good, he’d taken the meaning.

“My apologies, Minister. My late wife’s medical bills—I am still—I hope you can understand—”

“Of course. Your debts are your own business. I simply tell you now so you have time to set a portion of your salary aside accordingly.” Tiyan suppressed a surge of irritation. Really, it wasn’t appropriate to bring up money issues in this setting, and to one’s superior.

A keening melody floated in through the window, higher and sweeter than the susurrus of the river. A watersage ambled along the pebbled street outside, tin cups in hand, narrowly avoiding mopeds yipping in irritation as they passed her. The music arose from the water she poured in a glittering arc, back and forth between the cups, her wrinkled hands fluttering like doves.

“How did she get into First Pearl?” Tiyan muttered. “For the heavens’ sake.” He looked around as though a watchman might coalesce from the teapot steam.

“Apologies, Minister,” said an aide who did materialize, hastily cranking the windows shut. “Someone’s been called.”

“It looks like she’s from one of the healing disciplines,” said Cai, who had risen from the settee. “Probably offering immune system support, maybe arthritic relief…”

“Wonderful. The last thing we need is the Minister of Health throwing a tantrum because a folk medic offered to harmonize his wife’s lymph nodes,” snapped Tiyan.

“Harmonic calibration is all water sagecraft, really,” said Cai. “Or a refined form of it. It was the watersages who first took note of the rivers flowing within a human body, and thought to tune them. A harmonic calibration skein, for all that it’s modern medical science, is just a distilled version of what the watersages have been practising for generations.”

“That’s a little more scientific, isn’t it?” said Tiyan. “Besides, riversound poured from one hand to another is a speck of power compared to what the turbines can generate. A meaningful tradition, of course—but you know very well that its harmonic yield is too inefficient to power more than a lightbulb. An actual practitioner, amulets and all—you never see them in the capital, eh? I thought they only did business in backwater villages, these days.”

“My mother was a watersage,” said Cai mildly. “Not at the level of what the skeins can do today, of course. But a speck of power, an inefficient yield, a few coins to spare—in Taihe there are plenty who still seek the skills of a watersage, and I imagine the capital is no different.” He looked meditatively at his tea. Below, the watersage tipped the cups; the water spilled and was caught, spilled and was caught. “It isn’t covered under subsidized care, did you know? Harmonic calibration.”

“No offence meant, my friend,” Tiyan hastened. Heavens. Tiyan avoided the rural provinces and had only seen water sagecraft performed during cultural festivals. A century since the first hydroharmonic batteries were invented, after all. Now a single turbine and the irrigative lines laid by the last administration—eternal spring upon their names—could fertilize crops once tended by fleets of sages, each playing river music to a few metres of soil at a time. “I suppose that’s where you picked up an interest in river engineering?”

“I had an early knack for it. As a child I often accompanied her on house calls—she blessed gardens, cheered the grieving, soothed aches and broken bones for those who could not have afforded to go elsewhere. She died before I finished school, but I like to think my chosen field would’ve pleased her.”

“Exactly—your degree. A standardized course of study, to handle a standardized infrastructure. Nationalizing the riversound, building the standardized harmonic engines to feed off the stored power of the Kephamh—these are the choices that have ushered in prosperity and growth for the kingdom.” Tiyan nudged his empty teacup until Cai took the hint and refilled it. “Where would we be if we were reliant on the watersages, my friend? Still eking out subsistence farming and burning coal for fuel, eh?”

•••

In the weeks leading up to the Autumn Festival, Tiyan saw little of Cai, who was putting in long hours to finalize the tuning calculations. Marao reported that Cai was frequently on-site by the Delta itself, supervising the construction crews who would be using silksteel weirs, judicious excavation, and the occasional explosive charge to subtly alter the runnels of the Delta. It was a delicate balancing act, reshaping the river without disrupting the current soundscape. Most of the final adjustments would be prepared and held back until the water level measurements upriver had reached critical thresholds.

That day came: rain falling in the northern mountain ranges had rolled its cool clear tongue down the length of the Kephamh. The air was crisp and damp, intoxicating after summer’s dusty scrawl. The final adjustments had been made to the Delta two days ago, and the hydroharmonic turbines were still and silent. The river’s ambient music, as heard by the residents of First Pearl and the train cars of tourists arriving to witness the new year’s tuning, had the unshaped quality it must have carried in the primordial eras before the turbines were built, back when it was non-standardized sound floating on the wind, dissipating pointlessly into the southern sea.

The Bureau’s upper floor housed a celebratory thrill. Cai Sol had made himself scarce—the man’s career was going to stall any day now, Tiyan suspected, if he didn’t learn to play the political game—but plenty of his staff were present to toast their minor contributions to the project. The inkboard on the wall was updated every few minutes with numbers from the Delta turbines, numbers that slowly swelled as the inexorable surge of the rainy season plucked the first notes of a renewed year from the uncountable twining trickles the Kephamh made, running home to the sea.

In the midst of these festivities, Deputy Minister Marao entered the room, wearing the expression of a pallbearer, and announced that the Kephamh Delta was flooding its banks.

•••

“But how?” Tiyan raged, over the rattle of the phone receiver he had just slammed back into its cradle. The irate screeching of the Minister of Culture—everyone knew she was in the pocket of real estate, of course she was the first to phone—still rang in his ears. “This has never happened before—how?”

“Technically, sir, it used to happen every year, up until we began tuning the Delta,” said Marao.

“Yes, ninety years ago! And never again since!” Tiyan pressed a hand to his forehead and studied the television screen, where grainy footage showed silty water drowning the plush greenery of First Pearl, swamping the beautiful Middle Classical villas, the modern glass-and-steel prisms, the High Classical cottages with their graceful teak columns. In the background, a crowd of waterlogged tourists could be seen lining up at the station to take the train back to the capital. No casualties, reported a harried weather correspondent—well, of course not, a slow seep of water through the floorboards wasn’t going to kill anybody, but the property damage.

“Sir—”

“There’ll be an investigation,” Tiyan groaned. “Someone find Cai, I want his head in a jar.”

“Sir—”

“Could it have been sabotage?” Tiyan demanded of no one in particular. The kingdom wasn’t long on international enemies, but it wasn’t short on them, either. Blackmail, he thought feverishly. Conspiracy. “What if they had something on one of the staff? Cai’s medical debt, it could have been held over his head—”

“Sir, listen.”

One of the aides had wound the rest of the windows open. Tiyan gestured impatiently for the television to be muted.

It was fifty kilometres to the Delta, but the riversound always carried during the week of the Autumn Festival. A treasured tradition in the capital, listening for the first strains of the national anthem, floating west on the humid breeze. All year the song echoed from the vast hydroharmonic batteries charged during the week of the festival and shipped to every corner of the country to power the standard engines and supplement the local turbines. But everyone agreed there was something special about hearing it live.

This was not the anthem.

“What in all the heavens?” said Tiyan, with burgeoning horror. At this stage the Delta could not be recalibrated; this was the song turning the blades of the distant turbines visible on the silenced television feed. This was the song that would echo from the batteries shipped to every corner of the kingdom.

An aide whispered in Marao’s ear. Marao cleared his throat. “I believe it’s a traditional song, sir. More popular in the outer provinces than in the capital.”

“Popular for what?” The sound had a mournful quality to it, nothing like the anthem’s solemn grandeur—it was a wistful, sighing melody. It was bleak, is what it was. Tiyan could not imagine it accompanying the daily life of a content and well-pacified populace. He had a vision of the citizen happiness indices plummeting overnight. To say nothing of year over year.

Marao opened the manila folder. A blatant play for time, damn him.

“Well, sir, for funerals,” said Marao. “It’s a dirge.”

In thirty years of service Minister Tiyan had upheld decorum as one of the principal navigational instruments by which an illustrious career was furthered. It was a reputation he would maintain, for when he cursed long and loud in the halls of the upper Bureau floor it was drowned out by the sounds of the phones beginning to ring in earnest.

•••

Tiyan found the principal engineer of the Kephamh Delta on the deserted lower floor, by an open window through which the traitorous funeral melody quavered.

“It’s called ‘The Sound of Petals Falling Is Followed by Clouds Which Are Also Petals’,” Cai Sol said, without turning around. “After all the treatments, I could barely afford the cremation rites—certainly no procession—but this is what I would have chosen. The dead need music, if nothing else.”

Tiyan breathed in and out. “But why?” he croaked.

“She would’ve had a fighting chance, with a transplant,” said Cai. “Of course, the private lists are always given preference. We appealed for waived costs on experimental treatments that would have given her more time, and they denied it. We asked for reasons, and were given none. No explanation at all, really. Simply that it was not part of the standards for public care. So, Minister, you would come to me now, and ask for reasons?”

“You’re insane,” said Tiyan. “The damage caused—”

“What damage?” Cai clasped his hands behind his back. Those threadbare cuffs. “No one has died. I think you’ll find that the hydroharmonic output is more than sufficient. Powering this kingdom, its small joys and petty cruelties alike, for another year. And giving my wife the music  I owed her. Too little, too late, but there it is.”

“All this,” said Tiyan faintly. He saw, with the clarity of a man witnessing his career wash out to sea, the extent of the Bureau’s reach. One song echoing throughout the entire kingdom. One dirge for a woman known to so few. “All this, for a funeral rite. First Pearl will be uninhabitable for months!”

“Good.” Cai Sol turned to face the Minister of Civil Engineering. His glasses were misty; a river had overflown down his cheeks, it appeared, and been on its way. “To the hells with all of them, and no spring upon their names.”

“You’ve thrown away your career on a gesture that will be undone within a year,” said Tiyan. “Is this some sort of political statement? Who will attribute any greater meaning to what you’ve done?”

“I’ve sent my statements to the appropriate media outlets,” said Cai, with a dismissive wave of one hand. “I don’t place much faith in them. I’ve made a small impact, if any, Minister. But you must understand.”

He stepped away from the window, then; stepped in front of Tiyan, looked at him over the tops of his unfashionable glasses. “I loved my wife, Minister. I was prepared for a lifetime of small gestures made in her honour. That path is closed to me, so I have made one large gesture.”

“You’ve ruined the reputation of this Bureau. You’ve ruined your own life, you fool. The crimes you are about to be charged with? You’ll never lay eyes on a river again.”

“There’s a bottle of pills in my desk drawer—eh, don’t open your mouth like a fish, I haven’t taken any.” Cai Sol twisted his mouth, as near to a smile as Tiyan had ever seen from him. “I make the point that I could have used this large gesture to punctuate my life, indicating my lack of interest in continuing it alone. But my wife always wished—even when we knew it was over, when we knew there was nothing more that could be done—” and here he blinked, and looked away, and his voice dropped so low that it was nearly inaudible over the Kephamh’s lilting elegy, drifting west across fifty kilometres of green floodplain and twisting mangrove. “For me to go on. For life to be clung to, when possible, and changed for the better, however slightly, note by note, year by year. So, Minister, if there’s any tea left upstairs, I wouldn’t mind a cup for the road.”