The Weapon - Resurrection - part 20
By Diana the Valkyrie
A picnic on the grass
Update: 15/06/2003 to valkyrie05



I woke up alone the next morning, but I didn't mind. How many people can say
they've slept in the arms of the Guardian of Humanity for three nights? As I
returned to the land of the living, I heard "Chrysanthemum Rag" coming from
the kitchen, and when I got dressed and went to look, there was Wendy giving
the place a thorough-looking spring-clean while she sang. I skidded on the wet
floor; my feet slid out from under me, and with my center of gravity no longer
above my point of support, I started the long three-foot fall onto a hard
floor. Wendy dived across the room just in time to get underneath me, so the
fall wasn't as bad as it would have been. Actually, the fall wasn't bad at
all. Wendy was face-up, I was face down, and there are certain advantages to
that position.

Some minutes later, I struggled up off her. She pushed my arms wide, and I
fell back down onto her again. I tried to roll off her, but she wasn't
allowing that either. We wrestled around on the floor for a while, until she
said "Are you trying to fight me off?" "Well, yes and no." "Good answer. Now
explain it?" "Yes, I'm wrestling with you, but I know I can't win, so no, I'm
not trying to fight you off. I mean, if I thought I could, then I wouldn't."
"I'm not going to pretend I understand that."

"Damn. Look. If I thought I could get away from you, then I wouldn't try,
because I don't want to. But I know I can't make you let go of me, so I can
try to."

"You know what? You're crazy. But I like you." and she kissed me again, which
stopped me struggling for quite a long time.

"Um. So what's on the menu for today?" she asked, after a while.

"Well, yesterday we just goofed off; today I'd like to get back to work, and
ask you a whole lot more questions." She wrinkled her nose. "So we spend the
day stuck in that cubbyhole that you laughingly call an office?" "Not
necessarily, I can take my PDA, and a pencil and notebook, and we can do it
outdoors." She smiled. "I'll pack a picnic" "But Wendy, it's the middle of
winter, it'll be freezing." "No it won't, trust me." "Look, maybe you don't
mind the cold, but it's brass monkeys out there, I'll freeze." "No you won't,
trust me." I looked at her, and sighed. "Trust me?" she repeated. "All right.
I will. But if my nose falls off, it's your fault."

. . .

We sat on the grass in the warm sunshine, talking. Warm? Yes. She'd put down
her cape for us to sit on, and that insulated us from the cold ground. And
she'd made some sort of hemisphere over us. I couldn't see it, but it was
causing a little greenhouse effect; the weak rays of the sun could get in,
warming us up, but the heat couldn't radiate out again, so it stayed inside.

Wendy was sitting, her arms bracing her from behind; I had my back leaning
against her knees, which were at a good height for leaning against. I got her
to run through her internal construction, in case there was something I hadn't
known about, and then I got her to talk about her capabilities. I started with
the obvious question. "How strong are you?"

"Everyone asks me that. The short answer is, I don't know." "What do you mean,
you don't know? Surely it isn't a difficult question." "More difficult than
you think. Sure, I can benchpress a Buick, but that's not very precise,
right?" "Right. What's the maximum you can lift." "I don't know. It's a
question that is probably unanswerable." "Don't be silly, Wendy, it's a
perfectly straightforward question." And here's me telling someone who can
benchpress a Buick that she's being silly.

"Look, David, let's do a thought experiment, OK?" "OK." "Right. I lie on my
back, and you lower a Buick onto me. I benchpress it. Then you add a couple of
tons, and a couple of tons more, and after a while, we discover that the
structure of a Buick is such that if you pile several tons on it and I push up
through the chassis, then the chassis breaks."

"Hmm. OK. But suppose you use a solid block of steel?"

"You actually get the same problem. If you make it heavy enough, then what
happens is you find the weight at which my hands just sink into it."

"Oh." I pictures Wendy's hands sinking into a solid block of steel, and
somehow, it wasn't too difficult to imagine. "Well, couldn't you. Er. Or ..."
I couldn't actually think of anything. "Could you move a planet?" "Ask me that
again when I can fly. It's a reactionless drive using gravitational waves, so
anything I push on, moves. It's just a question of how much it moves." "I see
what you mean about it being an unanswerable question."

She handed me an ice-cold orange juice. I looked at it. "How did you get this
so cold?" "I refrigerated it." Meaning, she made it cold. I decided not to
pursue this one for now, if I chased every red herring she threw at me, I'd
never get anywhere. But I wrote it down in my notebook as something to look at
later. "You asked the wrong question," she said. "OK, what's the right
question?" "Ask me how much power I've got." "That's what I'm trying to
establish." "No, I mean power, as in kilowatts, megawatts. Horsepower.
Whatever unit you want to measure it in." "OK, you tell me." "I can do about
half a million million million million megawatts." "What's that in English?"
"It's about seven hundred million million million million horsepower. If you
hooked up that many horses ... " "You'd get a lot of horseshit. Wendy, what's
that in English, please?" "Well, it's about a thousand times as much as the
sun."

I thought about that. "So how come you aren't glowing white hot?" "Because
that's what I can do, it isn't what I do all the time. If I drop some big
chunks of mass into one of my black holes, half that mass is converted to
energy, it's a lot more efficient than the hydrogen-to-helium process that the
sun uses."

She was obviously rather proud of herself in this.