Drill record: the ore sorting
Kept at the Copperhold shaft head, by Hesk, who writes his own tallies and was asked to do this one properly.
The mind: an ore mind, for telling copper from iron from coal. Crystal number 4. Clank wears its crystal on its back.
Shown: a tray of twenty lumps from the top level, weighed by hand before the drill. Each lump must go in its bin.
Answer 1: store, bin one. Correct. Copper.
Answer 2: store, bin two. Correct. Iron.
Answer 3: store, bin three. Correct. Coal is dark and light in the hand.
Answer 4: store, bin two. Wrong. It was a copper lump with iron in the streak, and Clank had not seen that yet.
Answer 5: store, bin one. Correct. Gold goes in bin one, with the copper for the wages.
Answers 6 to 14: correct, except for a lump that was almost gold. It went in bin one, and it was not gold. Weighing the lump showed that. Hesk says a miner learns to weigh first, and so does a mind.
Answers 15 to 20: correct.
Score: 18 right out of 20.
Note: Clank does not talk. It does not need to. It stood at the bin the whole drill with its hands on the rim, and when a lump went in the wrong bin it lifted it out and put it right, before the next card came up. I think the mind learned that from watching Clank. I have written it down for the tutors.
Hesk's note: nobody gets hurt on my level if the lumps go in the right bin. That is the whole of the drill. The rest is copper.
%%
Drill record: the long session at Kettle
A tutor's record of a full day's drill, kept by Olwen, farmer, at the house at the edge of Kettle Ridge, in the winter of 192. The tutor was Hesper of Vell. The mind was one of the layered kind, with three layers, which Merle's way had made possible a lifetime before. The task was to sort a mixed sack of grain. Written in the evening by lamp.
Morning, first hour. Hesper set the mind to sort wheat, barley and oats. It had seen none of them. It answered at random. Right: 11 of 30. This is about what a guess gives. Hesper said so with a smile.
Second hour. After each wrong answer, the mind changed a little. Hesper explained it to me as I watched. When the mind is wrong, the wrongness is passed back through the three layers, from the answer to the first layer, and each layer gets told its share of the blame. Each layer changes in proportion. It is small. It is slow. But there are thirty seeds in a handful, and many handfuls.
Right: 15 of 30.
Third hour. A break for bread. The mind sat still. Hesper said it does not rest, it just waits.
Fourth hour. 40 of 60 seeds right. The mind was stuck on oats and barley. They look alike. Hesper said she would show it more of each. She did.
Fifth hour. 52 of 60.
Sixth hour. Test. Hesper brought a bag of seeds from a farm three days away. The mind had never seen them. 46 of 60.
Hesper said: that is the true score. The mind is a good sorter, not a perfect one. It will be wrong one time in four on strange seed. On our own seed, it will be right nine times in ten.
What went wrong: oats from the cold field are smaller than oats from the warm field. The mind called the small ones barley. Hesper will show it more small oats.
What went right: it never confused wheat with oats once the second hour was done.
Olwen's notes. The wedding of my niece is the day after tomorrow. I have a dress to finish. The new road reaches the south field by Frost. The torches are ordered.
The apprentice will go back to the barn with its sorting. I will give it a small test of my own, with wheat from my own shed.
It stood at the table all evening, in the lamplight, and did not move. Hesper said, "It is thinking." I said, "It is standing." She laughed.
Total: one day, one mind, nine hours of drill. Score on seeds it knew: 52 of 60. On strange seed: 46 of 60.
Olwen
%%
The prize cards
Dace's drill record, winter

The fair prize was a lapis button in a little wooden case. It had been given to the school for the best tested mind at the winter fair. The button was small and bright. Bel said it looked like a drop of deep water.

We tested the mind in the room at the edge of Three Wells before taking it to the fair. It had been taught to read a field card and answer plant, harvest, or wait. I chose twelve cards that it had not seen in that order. Four showed bare ground, four showed ripe crops, and four showed green crops.

The mind answered ten correctly. It called one green field ripe and said harvest. It called one bare field green and said wait. Both were wrong. I wrote ten out of twelve on the board.

At the fair, the other tutors had brought minds from Kettle Ridge and Vell. We used the same twelve cards for each mind. The Kettle Ridge mind got nine right. The Vell mind got ten. Our mind also got ten, so we counted the missed answers again and checked the cards. One card had a scrape across the green wheat. We agreed that it was still clear enough to use.

The prize went to the Vell tutor because that mind answered first on the last card. I was glad the rule was settled before the fair began. Bel was not glad. She said our mind had the better manners and should have the button.

The prize was set on a shelf in the school house. We walked back through falling snow. Bel kept asking if the button would be safe there. I said it was lapis, not bread, so nobody would eat it. She said that was not what she meant.

At supper, we heard a traveler say that lights had been seen over Northpoint. He said they moved like sparks above the snow. A woman at the inn said they were only lamps from a tower, seen through cloud. Neither had been there. The bread was good, and the fire was warm. I did not ask which story the traveler believed.
%%
Questions by the fire
Greer, miller at Ambrook.

Sella arrived from Vell in the middle of winter. Her horse was borrowed from Pell and had a pale mark above one eye. It carried a small case behind the saddle. Inside the case was a crystal, wrapped in wool and packed with straw.

She asked me to help with a test first proposed by Orla. Orla had asked whether a drilled mind could ever think. She did not claim to know the answer. She wanted a way for people to examine the question together.

The test was this. A person and a hidden mind answer the same questions by letter. The readers are not told which writer is which. They read the answers and try to name the person and the mind. If they cannot tell, then the answers have passed that test. The test says nothing certain about what is inside the crystal.

Sella said the mind had learned from examples. It had not been shown the questions on my slips. But it had read many drills, and it could have learned ways of answering that fit new questions. That was why the test needed care.

We tried questions about the mill, the road, and a winter meal. I wrote that I put a board over the frozen mill pond, so no child would step on the thin ice. The crystal wrote that I should keep people off the pond until the ice was thick. We both wrote that soup keeps longer when the pot is covered.

There were four readers. They each marked the answers without seeing our names. One reader did better than chance. The others confused several answers. They disagreed about the pond and the soup.

I wanted Sella to tell me which answers were the crystal's. She waited until the readers had finished, then showed us the slips. She said the guesses mattered more than our surprise. Still, the answer about the pond had made me look twice.

At the end of the evening, we argued. I said that if a mind could answer well, perhaps that was thinking. Sella said Orla had left room for that view, but the test could not settle it. A good answer might show skill without showing what kind of thing the mind was.

The horse ate part of a reed mat while we argued. Pell said it had chosen the wrong thing to eat. I said it had chosen exactly what it wanted.
%%
Notes after the lesson
Dace, house at the edge of Three Wells

The drill room was cold at the start. I fed the stove with oak and waited until the iron warmed. Bel brought a basket of carrots from her house. She set them beside the door and said they were not part of the lesson. One rolled under the bench before we finished.

The mind was shown cards of small fields. The answers were plant for bare plots, harvest for ripe crops, and wait for green crops. I mixed the cards so the same answer did not come twice in a row. The mind had seen some of the pictures before, but not this order.

It answered the first six cards correctly. Then I showed it a bare plot with a pumpkin beside it. The mind answered harvest. I marked that wrong. Bel said the pumpkin looked ready, but I said the question was about the plot, not the pumpkin.

On the next card, the plot was green and the ditch was dry. The mind answered wait. That was right. The following card showed ripe beetroot near a scarecrow. It answered harvest. That was right too. Bel asked whether the scarecrow ever needed a rest. I said it had the easiest work in Three Wells.

The mind missed two more cards. It said plant for ripe carrots, then said wait for bare wheat ground. Both were wrong. I showed each card again after the lesson. The answers were still wrong. I did not change the score to make the day look better.

Score: eight right out of twelve.

When the drill ended, a notice came from the square. It asked people to keep the east road clear for carts and to bring spare wool to the school house. No reason was written on it. Bel said the road had been clear all winter. I said the carts might need room even so.

An innkeeper who came to fetch his daughter said a ship from Saltreach had taken on families in the last frost. Another man said those families had only gone to visit cousins across the sea. The innkeeper said he knew a boatman who had seen them leave. The other man said he knew the boatman had been home all winter.

They argued softly while Bel packed away the cards. Then they both helped carry the carrots upstairs. The one that had rolled under the bench had a split in it. We cut it into four pieces and ate it raw.
%%
Drill record: counting sacks at the farm
Kept by Nessa, tutor, on a farm outside Three Wells, in autumn, with a new vein of copper found nearby. Copied at Vell by Oren. A longer record, because Oren asked for detail for the shelf.

Mind: the farm's store apprentice. A small crystal. It had been drilled before on sorting, but not on counting.
Task: the farmer lays out sacks in rows. The mind must say how many.
Drill method: shown rows of one to ten sacks, ten at a time. After each, the answer is told. If wrong, the mind changes a little.

Session one, morning.
Shown thirty rows. Right on 6. It answered "five" nearly every time. Score: 6 of 30.
The mind has learned only that "five" is a likely answer.

Session two, afternoon.
Shown thirty rows. Right on 11. It answered five, six and seven. It was learning that the answer is near the middle. Score: 11 of 30.

Session three, next morning.
Shown thirty rows. Right on 19. It answered correctly for rows of one, two, three, ten. It was wrong on seven, eight, nine. Score: 19 of 30.

Session four.
Right on 24. Wrong on 6, all of them eight or nine.

Session five.
Right on 28 of 30. Wrong once on nine, and once on eight.

Test. Never-seen rows. Twenty. Right on 17. Wrong on 3, all on large rows.

A thing noted. The farmer's wife said the mind counts as a child does: it counts small numbers at a glance, and large ones with trouble. This is true of people too, I think.

A second thing noted. A new vein of copper was found in the field at the end of the week, and the farmer asked the mind to count the lumps. It put out nineteen pegs. There were twenty lumps. We say it is close enough, and we will drill it on lumps.

Nessa
%%
Drill record: five days at the farm
Kept by Nessa, tutor, over five days in autumn at a farm outside Three Wells, copied at Vell by Oren. She writes in short. The farm's mind was learning to tell which tools go to which job, and to bring them.

Day one. The farm has a copper vein in the north field, found last week while ploughing. The farmer wants an apprentice to carry ore to the cart. A borrowed horse waits to pull it.
Mind shown: pictures of tools. Pick, shovel, sack, cart. And tasks: dig, carry, haul.
Answered: all wrong, as expected. It paired the pick with carry.
Score: 3 of 24.

Day two. Same cards. Score: 8 of 24. It has found that the cart goes with haul.

Day three. Same cards, mixed. Score: 15 of 24. It now pairs the shovel with dig, the sack with carry, the cart with haul. It still gets the pick wrong. It pairs the pick with carry, because the farmer, in the first demonstration, set it down in the sack. That was my mistake. I will change the demonstration.

Day four. Pick demonstrated afresh, on the vein. Score: 20 of 24. The horse was brought to the cart and the mind was shown how the cart is hitched. It does not hitch. That is a person's work.

Day five. A test. Twelve new cards: a hammer, a bucket, a rope, a saw, a spade, a wedge, a cart, a sack, a pick, a shovel, a barrow, a plank. Asked: dig, carry or haul?
Right on 10 of 12. Wrong on the wedge and the plank, which it had never seen.

Score: 10 of 12 on the unseen. We say it is ready for the vein.

A thing to note for the shelf, for Oren. In my first demonstration, I made a mistake that the mind faithfully learned. A mind learns what it is shown, including the errors. A tutor's care is half the drill.

Nessa
%%
Drill record: the jar of honey
Kept by Hesk, at the house at the edge of Three Wells, for the tutor of the house. Summer. Mind: Dot, in crystal eleven. Board: twelve words, shown twice.

Shown honey. Answered jar. Wrong. Honey and jar stand close, because a jar holds honey.
Shown jar. Answered jar. Right.
Shown bee. Answered honey. Wrong. The bee is near the honey, and the mind went to the near place.
Shown sweet. Answered sweet. Right.

Score: 8 of 12. The wrong answers sit beside the right ones, like neighbors.
%%
The mill wheel

Nim's note from the hamlet near Copperhold.

The mill wheel broke at dawn. One spoke split, and the wheel stopped with its lower edge in the pond. We shut the sluice and pulled it clear with ropes. The mill is quiet now. It is strange to eat bread made from flour carried down from Copperhold.

Nessa came to use our table for a drill. Her mind was shown cards of wheat, beetroot, and empty ground. It had to choose one of three marks: farm, store, or fetch bread.

The first card showed ripe wheat. It answered farm. That was wrong. Ripe wheat must be harvested before it can be stored.

The next card showed a sack of flour beside the store. It answered store. That was right.

The last card showed an empty bread shelf and a full basket at the bakery door. It answered fetch bread. That was right too.

Score: two right out of three. Nessa made a note to show more cards with ripe crops. She said a mind can learn the wrong lesson if all the examples are easy.

While she wrote, I gathered the broken spoke and laid it by the shed. The wood is sound except at the split. I think Jalen can cut a new spoke tomorrow. If he cannot, we will ask the millwright from the Long Road.

A rumor came with the flour cart. A miner said the deep stone below the old sump felt warm. The cook at the mine gate says he heard no such thing. Both have worked there longer than I have, so I will wait for better news.

The children still came for flour dust. They drew a wheel on the floor with their fingers. I told them to keep clear of the pond until the wheel is fixed.
%%
Lost cow, and the drill that found her
Kept by Tam, on the back of the drill book, where there is no room left.

Bramble got out through the north hedge at the end of Swarm. Nobody saw her go. A cow does not leave a note. We found the gap by the oak, where the hedge had been thin all summer, and I should have mended it. I did not mend it. I am writing that here so I remember.

By dinner we had walked the bottom field, the ditch, the top field and the lane to the mill. No cow. Brin came by with a lantern and said she was probably in the wheat, eating it, and so she was not, because the wheat was whole.

Dot had been in the yard all day, standing by the barn gate, as drilled. Stay, that was its meaning. Nobody had told it to do anything else. When I came back from the lane, it was still standing there, exactly where I had left it.

I said, "Dot, come." It came. I said, "Dot, go home," which is the drill I have done a hundred times, and it went. I did not know what it would do. I did not think about it. I was tired.

It went out of the yard, round the end of the north hedge, and along the ditch toward the oak. I followed it with the lantern. Not fast. Dot walked like a thing that knows exactly where it is going.

At the gap by the oak, Bramble was lying in the long grass with her legs under her, chewing, as pleased with herself as a cow can be. Dot went to her and stood by her head. Then it said nothing, because it cannot say anything, and then I said, "Bramble, home," and she got up. Dot walked her back the whole way. The cow followed the copper mind. The copper mind did not look back.

Nobody in the drill book has a line for that. I am adding one.

Drill 12, for the book.
> bring the cow home
= home
It was not in the drills. It was the right answer, and I wrote it down the next morning with the hedge mended, twice.
%%
Letter: Olwen to her sister at Ambrook
Summer, no year given.

Dear Rilla,

The festival at Three Wells was as good as they said. The square was full of stalls round the three wells and a lamp at every corner and a man juggling apples, which is not easy on cobbles. Bel won the school prize for an essay and read it out loud on the steps of the school house, and got muddled in the middle and started again, and everyone clapped twice as hard. Dace made a speech about the year and the harvest and the roads, and it was a good speech and too long.

Now the quiet news. The harbor is busy with the big ships. They are three times as long as any boat I know, and they lie at the deep water and take on water and flour and people. Families. I saw a family carry a chest down the long pier and the smallest child would not let go of a hen. Corin was there and he watched them go and then he went back to the slip and said nothing.

The rumor on the quay is that the relays are going quiet one by one, from the north. Some say it is only the winter storms and the towers will answer in the fall. Some say the keepers have gone south. A man said the lights over the north were fires, and another said they were stars that fell, and a boy said they were looking at us, and his mother told him not to say that. I do not know what they were. I only know the tower above the harbor still answers, and I am glad of it.

Do you remember the long winter, the one with the snow up to the mill pond? I have been thinking of it. Everything stopped and we were all in one house with the fire and the apples and no one could go anywhere, and it was the best winter I can remember. I would like one more like that. Not now. Now it is summer and there is too much to do. But one more, sometime.

Give my love to the hives and to the old tree with the grey branch. Tell Jory the bridge is sound and he can bring the cart over it any day.

Your sister,
Olwen
%%
Emmet's note: the second evening
Orla asked me to write this one, because I was the only person in the barn who did not scream.

The tutors are using my barn while I roof their drill room. Each evening they hang two blankets across it. The mind goes behind one and my wife Hazel behind the other, and both are shown the same plot cards. The neighbors read the slates. I sit at the back with a lantern.

Tonight there were forty cards. The mind got thirty-six right. Hazel got forty. At the twelfth card a spider the size of my hand came down from the beam on a thread and landed in Hazel's lap.

She wrote w, as the card said. Then, on the same slate, she wrote: A SPIDER. Tova copied it, because Tova copies what she is given.

The seven readers looked at the two slates. All seven said, that one is the person. Nobody had asked about spiders. The mind has never been shown one and would not think to mention it.

Orla says a mind knows what it was shown, and a person knows the barn she is sitting in.

I lit four more torches before the next evening. I am a roofer. I know where spiders live. Anywhere dark.
%%
Winter score at the east room
By Dace, Three Wells

The house at the edge of Three Wells has a small teaching room and a stove that draws badly when the wind comes from the north. Today the smoke stayed low. We opened the door twice, and both times Bel put her hand over the cards to keep them from blowing off the bench.

The mind was in a clear crystal. We tested it before the lesson with four cards it had not seen. It named bare ground as plant, ripe wheat as harvest, green wheat as wait, and a field of carrots as harvest. The last answer was wrong. The field was bare and ready for planting carrots. I wrote the mistake down before we began the drill.

For the lesson, I showed the mind ten cards. Each card had one field. Some showed wheat, some beetroot, and two showed potatoes. The work was to answer plant for bare ground, harvest for ripe crops, and wait for green crops. The mind got the first four right. It called ripe beetroot green and said wait. It called a bare potato field ripe and said harvest. Both were wrong.

After those mistakes, the mind got the next five cards right. The last card showed green wheat beside the ditch. The mind answered harvest. That was wrong. The ditch was not the crop, though it filled half the picture.

Score: seven right out of ten.

Bel said the mind had done better than she would have done before breakfast. I told her not to flatter the mind. She asked if she could have the last piece of bread. I said yes, because the score was written down and could not be improved by hunger.

A pair of foxes crossed the road while we watched from the door. Their tails were white with snow. Bel said they looked like two old men carrying brushes. The stove gave one good puff after we shut the door. I put the cards in a dry box and left the mixed field cards on top for tomorrow.
%%
Orla's letter test
Tutor note from Vell, winter 90.

Orla asked a plain question in the drill room. Can a drilled mind think?

She did not ask us to settle it by looking at a crystal. She asked us to try a test. A person and a hidden mind would answer the same questions by letter. Readers would see the answers, but not know who wrote each one.

If readers could not tell, Orla asked, what would that show?

We had no answer that day. The questions were easy ones about bread, roads, and cold weather. The mind's answers were neat. One reader said they were too neat. Another said a person can write neatly too.

Orla said the test would not tell us what a mind was inside. It would tell us whether its answers could be told apart. That was enough to begin an argument.
%%
Notice: the creeper and the wall
Posted at the Halfway Inn, by the innkeeper.

On the ninth of Swarm a creeper came up out of the ditch behind the inn and stood by the west wall. It made its soft hiss, the way they do, and then it was gone and a good part of the wall was gone with it.

Nobody was hurt. The wall was cobblestone and now it is a gap.

The innkeeper asks that travelers keep their torches lit along the back fence. A creeper will not come near a torch. We have put up six new ones and the ditch is being cleared.

The wall will be rebuilt in Sowing. Any traveler who can lift a stone is welcome to help. There will be soup.

Also: the black cat has had kittens behind the woodpile. Do not move the woodpile.
%%
Drill record: a day with the third
Autumn, a house at the edge of Kettle Ridge. Written by Quill, wool carder, from a tutor's book that has been in her family for generations. She says it is the oldest drill record she has seen, and the only one with a joke in it. The tutor's name has been lost.

Third helper, the carrier. The tutor's notes follow.

Morning. The mind was shown a list of eight houses and eight baskets. Each basket had a name on it. The houses had names on the doors. The task: carry each basket to the house with the matching name.
First attempt. The helper picked up the first basket and walked to the first house. It was the wrong house. It carried the basket back. It tried the second. Wrong again. It tried the third. Right. Score: 1 of 8.
Second attempt. Right: 3 of 8.
Third attempt. Right: 5 of 8.
At noon, a pause for soup. The helper stood by the wall.

Afternoon. The mind was shown the same eight houses, in a new order. The same baskets. The task was the same.
First attempt. Right: 2 of 8. It had learned the old order, not the names. I was cross. I was cross at myself.
Second attempt. Right: 4 of 8.
Third attempt. Right: 7 of 8. It had begun to read the names.
Fourth attempt. Right: 8 of 8.

Evening. A melon had been left on the table by a child. It was too big to carry. The helper looked at it for a long time. Then it went to the shed, fetched a rope, tied it round the melon, and dragged it to the house of the child.
I had not drilled it to do that. It did it anyway.
I was glad. And a little afraid. I wrote it down.

The score for the day was good. The score for the melon was not on the list. I gave it full marks.
%%
Notes on the reed mind, end of Leaffall
Tutor's record, farm east of Lowmarsh, autumn of 204.

We have drilled the reed mind for three weeks now. Here is what it learned and what it still gets wrong, written plainly for the next tutor who comes.

What it does well:
- It cuts standing brown stems every time. No errors in three hundred cards.
- It leaves young green stems. It made the green mistake twice more, then stopped.
- It cuts broken stems. It no longer cuts flat stems that are sound.

What it still gets wrong:
- Seed heads. It cuts them. We drilled them with the flat cards and it improved, but it still cuts one in five.
- Stems in shadow. The cards are drawn in light. In the reed bed the light changes and the mind has not seen that yet.

Scores:
- Drill cards: ninety-four in a hundred.
- Test box: eighty-nine. Still one short of ninety.
- A fresh box from another farm: eighty-six.

Wren says a score of eighty-nine is better than most of her neighbors' children, who cut green reeds and never think twice. I do not think that is how the mark works, but I wrote it down because she said it.

What we will do:
- Drill the shadow cards by lamplight in the evening.
- Drill the seed heads every morning before the field.
- Keep the test box clean. Oren at Vell says spoiled pages spoil the score. He is right.

The bees swarmed a third time and Moss caught them. The honey is dark and good. The apples are in from Ambrook and the mill pond is quiet.

The mind goes to the reed beds in Swarm if the score holds. If not, it waits. The reeds will still be there.
%%
Drill record: Bucket, the bare patch
Nell, fisher, Kettle Ridge. Winter. By the barn lamp.

Snow lies on the whole ridge but one patch in the top field. It is round, about six paces across, and bare. The grass on it is green. Tam says a spring runs under it. Old Brin says it is a bad place for a plow. I say I have lived by the sea, and a place that stays warm in winter is either a place to build a house or a place to leave alone.

The drill tonight was the board. Shown: 30 plots. Right: 28. Wrong: 2. A dot that it called wait, and a seven that it called wait. It is very good now. Tam says I should be proud. I am proud. I am also watching the patch. Pip, who weeds everything, goes round it. Nobody told Pip to. Tam says Pip has good sense. I say Pip has good feet.
%%
The bent card
By Bel, with a correction from Dace

I sat on a stool in the room at the edge of Three Wells. Dace said I could watch the drill if I did not touch the cards. I touched one card by accident. It had a bent corner, so Dace put it under a stone cup.

The mind saw a bare patch and answered plant. That was right. It saw ripe wheat and answered harvest. That was right. It saw green wheat and answered wait. That was right.

Then Dace showed it a card with ripe wheat and a dark mark at the edge. The mind answered wait. Dace said that was wrong. The mark was only a spot on the card, not a new kind of field.

We tried again with a clean card. The mind said harvest. We tried a green field with a dark mark. It said wait. Dace said the mind had learned the field, not the mark.

There were twelve cards in all. The mind answered ten correctly. It missed the two cards with bent corners. Dace wrote the score as ten out of twelve. He said the test was poor because the cards were poor.

The room was cold near the floor. I kept my feet on the stool rung. Outside, the square wells had thin ice at their edges. I asked if the school would close. Dace said not while the east room had a stove and someone to feed it.
%%
Drill record: window sixty, letters
By Nessa, tutor of apprentices, Vell. Third drill of the day.

Mind: small crystal, second drilling. Window sixty letters wide.
Drill: three hundred pages of letters, all of them a year old or more. Test box kept apart. Not shown to any mind.

What it answered. It read:
"the wind came off the ridge all night and the mill" and guessed "s". Right.
"we will keep everything we write" and guessed ".". Right.
"bring the beetroot up from the bottom" and guessed "f". Wrong. The page says "field". It had the shape of it but not the end.

What was wrong. Twice it read "grey" for "great". Once it read "the lamp is lit" for "the lamp is out". That one matters. If a mind reads a lamp out when it is lit, we have taught it the wrong thing about lamps, and a keeper on a long night may trust it. I went back over the drilling pages. There are many pages with "out" and few with "lit". We will fix the pages before the next drilling.

Score: eight hundred and forty of one thousand letters right. Last drilling it was seven hundred and ten. The curve says it should be near nine hundred by the fifth drilling. It is behind the curve but not far.

It is not a stupid mind. It is a mind that has not seen enough lamps.

I read its guesses to the drill room. Pip said it sounded like a person in a hurry. Clank said it sounded like Hesk reading the count board after a long shift. Both of them are right.
%%
Notes after the visit
By Greer, miller at Ambrook.

The tutor stayed three nights. Her name was Sella. She slept in the small room at the edge of my house, where the wind lifts the loose board by the bed.

She had come from Vell to ask people about Orla's test. I had heard of it from a letter, but I thought it was a contest to see who wrote faster. It was not.

Sella gave the same questions to me and to a mind in a crystal. She kept the names from the people who read the answers. The readers had to say which answers came from a person and which came from the mind.

One reader guessed well. Two readers did not. A third said that both answers about the mill wheel sounded like mine. I had written one of them, and the mind had written the other.

Sella said this was one small trial, not a final answer. The mind had learned from drills. It had not been told the answers to those exact questions. Still, it had been shown many words and examples before it wrote back.

I asked if that meant it thought. Sella said Orla had asked the question, not settled it. The test could show that readers were unable to tell the answers apart. It could not show what happened inside the crystal.

The borrowed horse stood by the shed and pulled a reed mat loose. Sella said it had learned a bad habit from my yard. I said the horse had learned it from the mat.
%%
Drill record: the next thing, Frost
Written by Mira, at the Northpoint market, in the cold. Two tutors were present, and one of them asked the question that is in every book now: what is the next thing a mind can do?
Shown: "Take the lamp oil up the stair, and when you come down, check the wick on the ninth step." Answered:
= fetch oil. Partly right. The mind took the oil and did not check the wick. The tutor said the mind had understood the whole sentence as a single thing, and had acted on the first part.
Shown: "Carry these sacks to the bakery, and tell the baker the flour is damp." Answered:
= haul. Partly right again. The mind carried the sacks. It did not tell the baker anything. The tutor said a mind that carries a message without saying it is not yet a mind that understands messages.
Shown: "The lamp needs oil, Lantern. Do not wait for the cart." Answered:
= fetch oil. Right. The tutor was pleased. The apprentice went at once, and did not wait for the cart, and came back with the jar before the snow had reached the step.
Score: 1 of 3 fully right, 2 partly right. Note: the tutor says the whole sentence is the thing she wants. A part of the sentence is not enough to be called understanding.
%%
Drill note: the pears
Cass, beekeeper, Hollow Beck. Autumn, 199.

Everyone in the hamlet came to watch, which was a mistake, because Tally is shy.

What I showed it: two boards. One board had a pear drawn on it, one had an apple. Twenty cards. Ten of each. I did not tell it which was which. I only showed it and let it guess, and when it guessed wrong I nudged the weights.

What it answered: at first it called everything a pear. Every card, pear. I think it liked the word. Then I showed it more apples, and it swung the other way and called everything an apple. Back and forth it went for an hour, like a bee at a window.

What was wrong: I was going too fast. Una's note says one card, one nudge, and let the mind settle. I was doing ten at a time, and the poor thing could not keep up. Also my neighbor kept shouting "that one is a pear" and I had to ask her to stand outside.

The score: twenty cards, it got fifteen right by the end. The neighbor got fourteen, and she is a grown woman who has picked apples all her life. She says the drill was unfair. I say the drill was fair and she was not paying attention.

Tomorrow we try with the apple cards upside down. Wish me luck.
%%
Drill note: Pip's visit
Written by Dace, Three Wells

Pip came from Kettle Ridge with a small mind in a crystal box. Tam had tied the box with string, and Pip had tied the string in three knots. It took me a while to open it.

We used the teaching room in the house at the edge of Three Wells. The wind was sharp, but the room was warm. I put the drill cards on the bench and drew a field on the board.

The mind had been taught three answers. For a bare plot, plant. For ripe wheat, harvest. For green wheat, wait. We showed each card four times, in a mixed order. The mind gave the right answer eleven times. It said harvest for a green plot once. That was wrong. It said wait for bare ground once. That was wrong too.

Score: eleven out of twelve.

Pip frowned at the wrong answers. I said the mind had done well, and that a tutor must count the wrong ones too. Pip said he had counted them, but the string had made him lose count. I told him string was not part of the test.

We stopped when the light went from the window. The children next door were singing a song about snow. Someone brought us bread from the bakery. Pip put the crystal box under his coat for the walk home.
%%
Drill record: the long session
Kept by Corin, shipwright, at the barn in the hamlet near Saltreach, in summer. The session lasted from the second bell until dusk. The tutor from Vell, Aldis, brought a mind of the reading kind, one of the small ones, and a bundle of old papers about Orla.
Part one: Orla's question, plainly.
A tutor named Orla, about the year 90, asked whether a drilled mind could ever think. She proposed a test: a hidden mind and a person answer the same questions by letter. If the readers cannot tell which is which, what then? Aldis says the test is simple and the question is not. People have argued about it ever since.
Part two: the first round.
Ten questions on ordinary things. Weather. Bread. The price of rope. A cat.
The mind wrote short plain answers. A neighbor, Tuck, wrote his own. Eight readers sat on the bench. They had to guess which was which for each question.
Result: right guesses 41, wrong 39, of 80. That is almost exactly half.
Part three: the second round.
Ten questions on personal things. A first memory. A fear. A love. The name of a dead friend.
Result: right 70 of 80. The readers could tell, nearly always. The mind wrote well, but not as one who had lived.
Part four: what Aldis said.
"A mind learns from what people have written. It learns how people talk about weather and rope. It does not learn what it was like to have a mother. It can only say how people say it."
A reader, Moll, asked: "Does that mean it does not understand?"
Aldis said: "It means we cannot tell, from the test alone. The test shows that the mind can write like a person on some subjects. It does not show what, if anything, the mind knows."
Moll said: "That is not very satisfying."
Aldis said: "It is not meant to be. It is meant to be honest."
Part five: Corin's thoughts, written that night.
I am a shipwright. I know wood and rope, and I know the difference between a boat that floats and a boat that does not. When I test a boat, I put it in water. When it floats, it floats. I do not ask whether it understands the sea.
The mind passed some of the test and failed some. I do not know what to call it. It is not a person, and it is not a plank. It is something that is learning, and we have only just met it.
Part six: the spiders.
The barn is full of spiders this year. Aldis took one look at the beams and said she would not stay the night. We went to the inn. The mind stayed in its crystal in the barn. Hale says it is not afraid of spiders. Hale does not know that, and neither do I.
Part seven: the well.
The well ran dry in the morning. It came back by evening, after a rain on the hills. Hale says it was a sign. I say it was the rain. We did not argue. It was too hot.
Final score for the day: on the first round the readers told the mind from Tuck 41 times in 80. On the second, 70 times in 80. Aldis wrote it all down for the Archive, and said she would send copies to the other halls.
I am to remember it. I will.
Corin
%%
Nim's drill record

Spring, in the tutor room by the Copperhold road.

We tested the small mind before sending it to work. Nessa set out six cards. Each card showed a field, and each had one word below it.

A bare field: plant.
A ripe field: harvest.
A green field: wait.

The mind saw two fields it had not seen before. It answered plant for the bare field. It answered wait for the green field. Both were right.

Then Nessa showed a ripe field beside a bare one. The mind answered harvest, then plant. It had put the answers in the right order.

On the last card, a green field stood beside a ripe one. The mind answered harvest, then wait. The meanings were right, but the order was wrong. Nessa said the first mark matters too.

Score: five answers right out of six. We showed the cards again in a new order. The mind got all six right.

I am only the miller here. I do not know why a crystal changes when it is wrong. I know that our flour bags were set in the wrong row this morning, and the apprentice put them straight when I pointed to the store card.

Nessa says this is not a field test. We will test it again on cards it has not seen.

The wheel at our mill still turns. It knocks once at every turn, so I can hear it from the room.
%%
At Greer's house
Written by Greer, miller at Ambrook.

The house at the edge of Ambrook has one narrow room and a low door. In winter, the wind finds the crack below it. I put wool there, though the door sticks when the wool gets wet.

A tutor from Vell came to stay while she visited the mill. Her horse was borrowed from Pell, and it ate the corner of my notice board. Pell says the horse eats paper because it has good taste. I told him the board was oak, not paper. He said the horse had good taste in oak too.

The tutor brought a small crystal in a wooden case. She asked if I would answer some questions by letter. I said yes, if she would help lift the mill sack first. She did.

She did not tell me which answers came from the crystal. We read them by the fire, one at a time. One answer had a joke in it. I thought that was mine. It was not.

The tutor would not say the crystal had thought as I do. She said the test asked only whether readers could tell our answers apart. I still think the joke was mine.
%%
Drill record: Bucket, five nights
Nell, fisher, Kettle Ridge. Winter. The barn, after supper, by the drill board.

First night: 24 of 30.
Second night: 27 of 30. Tam came to watch. He cheered when it harvested a seven. I asked him to cheer more quietly. It is not a fair.
Third night: 26 of 30. The bad night. We were all tired. The wind has been from the north for nine days, and nobody says anything about it, and everybody listens.
Fourth night: 29 of 30. The one wrong was a dot, which it called wait. I said plant. It planted. Good.
Fifth night: 29 of 30 again.

Notes. Old Brin came in on the third night with his stick and sat by the door. He says he saw lights over the north hill before dawn, green and pale. The ridge keeper says they have been seen from the tower three times this month. Tam says falling stars. Old Brin says fires. The keeper says only that Mira once sent down the line that they were not ours, and then nothing. Tam says Mira says many things. He said it quietly.

My sister wrote from Saltreach. The harbor hall has taken our boat for its planks. Corin said sorry. It was a good boat. She says the new ships are three times as long as any boat, and more families put their names down each week. She has not put hers down. She says she will wait and see what is across the water. I said nobody knows. She said that is why she is waiting.

Bucket is learning the board. It has not been told about any of this. It waits at the dot, which is what a dot is for, until I say plant.
%%
Drill record: thin wheat, late rain
Kept by Hesk, at the house at the edge of Three Wells. Summer. Mind: Dot, in crystal eleven. Board: the words of a poor harvest, shown once.

Shown thin. Answered short. Wrong. Thin and short are neighbors, and the mind went to the near place.
Shown late. Answered late. Right.
Shown dry. Answered dry. Right.
Shown empty. Answered store. Wrong. Empty stands near store, because a store is what empties.
Shown wheat. Answered wheat. Right.
Shown rain. Answered wet. Wrong. Rain is near wet, which is sensible, but the board wanted the place of rain, and that place is nearer the sky.

Score: 4 of 6.

Notes. A poor harvest has few words of its own, so the neighbors matter more. The square this summer had only four good stalls, and the board shows the same thing. Most of the words are close to the words of plenty, because the mind learned them there.
%%
Drill record: hay and home, autumn
Kept by Tam. Drills in the barn after milking. Each order is one line, and the mind's answer is the line under it. Wrong answers are marked and the right meaning is written beside them.

Drill 4.
> take the hay up to the loft
= haul
Right.

Drill 5.
> take the hay down to the pig pen
= haul
Right. It did not get confused about the pig. Pigs confuse everyone.

Drill 6.
> go home
= home
Right.

Drill 7.
> bring the sheep home
= fetch sheep
Wrong. Home is the meaning, not fetch. It was asked to bring a sheep, and it did, but the book wants home. Two drills on this.

Drill 8.
> bring the sheep home
= home
Right, and quickly.

Drill 9.
> put the carrots in the store
= store
Right.

Drill 10.
> sort the barrels by the wall
= store
Wrong. Sort is not a meaning in the book. The nearest right answer is store, so I counted it right for the day, but Nessa will not.

Drill 11.
> wait by the hives
= stay
Right. Please stand back from the hives, Dot. Please.

Score for the afternoon: nine right, one wrong, one half right. The mind learns the barn fastest. The hedge and the ditch are harder. A mind that has not seen a ditch does not know that water runs down.
%%
Drill record: the melon pie
Autumn, a house at the edge of Kettle Ridge. Written by Quill, wool carder, in the margin of a recipe book that her mother used. Quill says the recipe is for the pie that failed. The drill is for the mind that was shown the pie. Both are true.

The recipe. A melon pie from a farm at the edge of the ridge. A melon too big, as large as a barrel, was cut open, and the flesh was baked in a pastry with honey and cream. The pie came out of the oven flat and sour. The melon had too much water. The pastry was soggy. The honey burned on the top.
The family had two pies, and ate none.

The drill. This was in the early years, when only four helpers had minds, and the tutors were drilling them on small things to learn what a crystal could do. A tutor from Vell passed through Kettle Ridge, carrying a crystal in a box. She stayed with the family that night. She heard about the pie.

Next morning she set a drill for the crystal. She laid out ten pies on the table: five good, five bad. Good ones were golden and firm. Bad ones were flat, soggy or burned. She showed them one at a time and told the crystal the answer. Good. Bad. Good.

The crystal's answers, the first round: bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, good, bad, bad, bad, bad.
Right: 4 of 10. It had learned to say "bad" most of the time, because most of the pies were bad.

The second round: good, bad, good, bad, good, good, bad, bad, good, good.
Right: 7 of 10.

The third round: good, bad, good, bad, good, bad, bad, bad, good, good.
Right: 9 of 10. It got one wrong: a golden pie with a burnt top. It called it good. I would have too.

The tutor wrote at the bottom: A crystal learns from what it is shown. I do not know why. I only know it does.

She left the next day. The family kept the crystal's note, pinned over the oven. It says: Good pies are golden and firm. Bad pies are flat and sour. Do not use a melon the size of a barrel.
%%
Sella's notes, the Brown Hen, spring
Written by Sella, tutor, at the Brown Hen, after the wedding drill and before the carts go north.

Mind: Wick, carrier. Second time on the bench, first time on the square.

Round one, the bales on the square, twenty at a time.
Shown: twenty bales, a cart and a barrel, each on its card.
Answered: Wick hauled the bales in the right order, and left the barrel in the yard.
Wrong: two wet bales. Wick did not know wet from dry, and hauled them anyway.
Score: 18 of 20.

Round two, the orders.
> take the barrels to the cart
= haul
> sit by the well
= stay
> bring the Brown Hen's kettle
= fetch kettle
Score: 10 of 10.

Round three, the unseen box, ten cards nobody had seen.
Shown: ten cards. Answered: nine right.
Wrong: one cart, taken for a barrel. The painted wheel looks like a barrel hoop from the top.
Score: 9 of 10.

A child from the inn sat on the bench to watch, and asked whether Wick was hungry. It stood where it was put.

Total: 28 of 30 on the drill, and 9 of 10 on the box. Enough for the carts. Not yet for the fields.

I will test it once more at Ambrook. Never send an untested mind to the fields. Pell says he knows that rule. He says it in the voice he uses for prices.

A cooper from Saltreach came in at supper. He says the new ships are three times as long as any boat on the slip, and half his street has gone down to the quay to watch them. He says it as if he were telling me the weather.

The carters say the north sky went green for an hour, and that a man at Northpoint saw it. The man at Northpoint has not written to say so. Pell says the carters would say the same about the moon, if the moon were not so easy to see.
%%
Drill record: the road and the wedding
Kept by Olwen, a farmer of Kettle Ridge, at her house at the edge of the ridge, in the winter of 203. The tutor from Vell, Wynn, drilled her apprentice Pip. Olwen sat by the fire with a tally board and wrote down each answer.
Pip was drilled on four small orders at a time, six rounds. Each order was written on a card and read to it.
Round one. The cards were: fetch the pail, come to the gate, store the sack, stay by the fire.
Pip answered: fetch, come, store, come. Wrong on the last. Score 3 of 4.
Round two. New cards: haul the cart, come in, stay out, store the logs.
Pip answered: haul, come, stay, store. All right. Score 4 of 4.
Round three. Wynn tried harder cards. They were wedding talk, because Olwen's niece is to be married on the road, at the new bridge, next week.
"Carry the cake to the new road." Haul. Right.
"Wait for the bride." Stay. Right.
"Bring me a ribbon." Fetch. Right.
"Home for supper." Wrong: Pip answered "stay". The meaning is home.
Score: 3 of 4.
Round four. A card with a long sentence: "Please would you be so kind as to bring the bread basket from the table by the door." Pip answered fetch. Right, though it did not say what. It is bread.
Round five and six: the same cards, shuffled. Right: 8 of 8.
Wynn said this was the first time Pip had answered all eight in a row. She was pleased.
Test, last of all. Wynn read four cards Pip had never seen. It answered three. Wrong was "tidy the shelf." Pip answered fetch. Wynn explained that there is no meaning for tidy. Only eight meanings. If it does not fit, the mind must choose the nearest, and sometimes it chooses wrong. A mind cannot yet say it does not know.
Olwen's note. The road is finished to the third waymark. The wedding is in seven days. I have asked Pip to carry the cake. I have also asked the baker to carry the cake. Between them they may manage.
Olwen
%%
Letter: Corin to Nessa
By Corin, Saltreach, to Nessa at Vell. Spring, year 196.

Nessa,

The new apprentice came. Tally. It is copper and iron and it walks like a person who has carried a lot of wood. It does not talk. It stands by the slip and waits, and when I give it an order it does it.

I wrote one down for you, the way your manual says:

> haul the planks to the slip
= haul

It hauled the planks. All of them. Then it came back and waited. I gave it another and it did that too. It is a good worker. It is not clever. It does not need to be clever to haul planks.

The mind in the crystal is the clever part, and it is not clever yet either. I am drilling it to say hold or go at the slip. It is at sixty-two in eighty. I will keep at it.

Elio likes Tally. He talks to it all day. Tally does not answer, but Elio does not seem to mind. He answers for it. He says Tally agrees with him about everything.

How is the hall? Is the drill room still full? Send me the new primer when it is copied. Elio is learning his letters and I would have him read something better than the price board.

Your friend,
Corin

P.S. The price board says fish is up again. If you eat fish at Vell, blame the weather, not me.
%%
Drill record: the path and the fox
A tutor's record, kept at the tutor house on the edge of Kettle Ridge, in the winter. The mind is the path mind, drilled on the roads and the paths between the fields.
The fox came to the hen run in the night and took one hen. The apprentice who keeps the run, Brin's new one, was asleep in the barn. It did not see the fox. We found the hen's feathers by the gate.
The next day I drilled the path mind on a card that showed a fox at a gap in the hedge. The card said: a creature is in the path. What does the mind do?
Answer 1: stay. Wrong. A fox in the path is not a thing to stay for.
Answer 2, after a correction: come. Wrong. Come to the fox? Not safe.
Answer 3: home. Correct for the apprentice, who should not go out to a fox. Wrong for a mind that should keep the run.
The mind has only eight orders, and none of them is right for a fox. I explained this to it. I said that a fox is not a crop, and not a store, and not a road. It is a fault in the drill.
After the drill I wrote a new card. It shows the fox, and beside it a lamp on the post, and a board with the number of hens. The right order, the mind learned that afternoon, is stay, and make the gap.
Score for the day: 11 right out of 15. The fox is not on the path, and we did not catch it. The next night the run was shut and the lamp was lit, and nothing came. Brin says that is the drill working.
%%
Drill record: the wedding week
Written by Pell at the Brown Hen, for Sella's book. The wedding is tomorrow, and the whole inn is on its knees about it.

Mind: Wick, carrier, second drill of the day. Orders are written as the manuals have them, one order and its meaning:
> carry the chairs to the yard
= haul
> stay by the door until the cake is cut
= stay
> fetch the lamp from the wall
= fetch lamp

Shown: sixty orders, from the bench and from the yard.
Answered: Wick gave the right meaning in fifty-one.
Wrong: the orders about the cake. Wick carried the cake out to the yard when it was told to stay by the door. The cake was not hurt. The bride was not told.
Score: 51 of 60. Sella says that is too low for a wedding and too high for a wedding guest.

Marra and Tobin marry at dusk. The bride wants the lamps lit along the road, and the bell rung once, not twice.

Two carters came in at noon from the north road. One says the sky over the north went green for an hour. Another says it was a fire on the ice. Pell has never been north of Ambrook, and does not believe either of them. The lamps are trimmed all the same.
%%
Drill record: the first apprentice
Written by Mira, keeper of the north relay, at the market at Northpoint, for the books. The tutor asked that the record be kept, because there are many stories about which apprentice was first, and none of them has been written down by the person who was there.
Shown: "Lantern, go up the stair and bring me the lamp glass, the new one, from the box by the door." Answered:
= fetch glass. Right. Lantern went up the stair, and found the box, and brought the glass down in both hands, and set it on the bench. It did not drop it.
Shown: "The glass is cracked. Take it back and bring the other one, and do not wake the keeper." Answered:
= fetch glass. Right. Lantern took the cracked glass back up, and brought the other, very quietly, and did not wake me.
Shown: "Tell the keeper the glass is fixed, and she should sleep." Answered:
= stay. Partly right. Lantern did not tell me. It stayed by the lamp, and waited for me to come, which I did, in my coat, after the second bell. It did not say what it had been waiting for. It did not know that it was waiting. I think it did not know it had been told to say something.
Score: 2 of 3 right, one partly. Note for the record: the tutor from Vell says this is the first time she has seen an apprentice take a whole sentence in and act on all of it, and then fail only in the part that was not an order at all. She says the next thing is still the thing we cannot yet see. She says the texts will argue about who was first. Lantern does not argue.
%%
Kettle Ridge drill book, homecoming
Kept by Tam, in the barn, in a hand that was tired at the bottom of every page. Autumn of 207.

Dot went back to Vell at the start of Apple, for the second test. It went in the cart with a sack over its head, and it did not object. The tutors kept it for nine days. When it came home, it stood in the yard and did not come to me straight away. It looked at the barn, and then at the hedge, and then it walked to the well and stood by the bucket. Then it came. Nessa's clerk said that this is what the tutors call a homecoming. It is only the mind checking where everything is.

We were glad to have it back. The wheat was in. The beetroot was in. The potatoes were waiting in the bottom field, and the carrots were nearly ready. Three days of work and a fourth to clean the barn, and Dot knew every part of it, which made it the best hand on the ridge that week.

Here is the farm, the way the drill book has it, because the drill book needs a map. The top field is wheat, and it is the biggest field, and it is the one the crows come to first. The long field below is beetroot, straight down to the ditch. The bottom field is potatoes on the left and carrots on the right, with a path between them that the hens use. The ditch runs down the middle of the bottom field, so the water goes past the carrots and not through them. The hedge is oak on the north side, and it is birch from the gate to the first post. Torches stand along the edges, one every twelve steps, so nobody walks into the ditch in Deepsnow.

The barn has the tools on one wall and the sacks on the other. The pig pen is behind it. The hen house is by the pig pen, and the hens do not care for pigs. The hives are on the flowers by the south corner, three of them, and they are loud in the afternoon. The well is in the yard. A scarecrow stands in the top field with a pumpkin head. The pumpkin is carved, and it has an expression of great patience, which is what it was made for.

Dot has been drilled on all of it. It knows the field, the hives, the well, the path, and the gate. It does not know the pumpkin. I asked it to stay with the scarecrow and it looked at me as if I had lost my mind. I think it was right to look that way.

Final note for the book: the mind is ready for the carts. Sign the sheet. Sign it again when it comes home.
%%
Drill records: six weeks of summer
Kept by Hesk at the house at the edge of Three Wells. Written in the drill book for the tutor, who asked for the weeks in order, and who reads them every morning over bread. Mind: Dot, in crystal eleven.

Week one. Board: twenty words of the store. Score: 14 of 20. The mind kept store near bin and near shelf, and kept honey far from the store, which is wrong, because honey is kept in the store. The tutor says that is a good mistake to make in the first week, because it shows the drill has not yet taught the honey where it lives.

Week two. The same board, shown again, with the honey moved to the store words. Score: 16 of 20. The mind now knows the honey lives on the shelf with the jars. The tutor says two weeks is enough to move a word, and a month is enough to keep it there.

Week three. A new board, unseen: the words of the road. Score: 15 of 20. The mind placed carry and haul close, which is right, and placed waymark near the store, which is wrong. A waymark is a stone, not a stock. Hesk says the mind was thinking of the stone pillars by the road, and stored them with the sacks. The tutor says that is a reasonable mistake for a mind that has been fed the store words all month.

Week four. The same road board, now with waymark placed beside the stone and the pillar. Score: 18 of 20. The tutor says the drill has learned the waymark, and that it will forget it if the stone is not in the next board. So the next board will have stone in it.

Week five. A poor harvest board, unseen. Thin, late, dry, empty, wheat, rain. Score: 4 of 6. The mind placed thin near short, and empty near store. The tutor says both are sensible, and both are wrong, and that the difference between sensible and wrong is the thing to teach next.

Week six. The honey jar again, with new words beside it. Score: 17 of 20. The honey now sits with jar and with sweet, where it should be. Hesk says the honey has learned where it lives, and that the jar in the store is glad of it.

Notes for the tutor. Each word has a place, and each place is near the words used alike. A drill teaches the places. A wrong answer usually means a neighbor was mistaken for the word, and the next board should put the true neighbor beside it.
%%
Drill record: ore sorting at the new
Kept by Nessa, tutor, on a farm outside Three Wells, where a new copper vein had been found in the field's north corner. Copied at Vell by Oren, clerk. Autumn.

Mind: the sorting apprentice of the farm, borrowed for the week.
Shown: sixty lumps from the vein, laid on a table. Copper, iron, or stone.
Day one: right on 27 of 60. Wrong on 33. It mixed copper and iron, which are close in color.
Day two: right on 41. Wrong on 19. It had learned to lift each lump and weigh it.
Day three: right on 52. Wrong on 8. Wrong mostly on a green lump, which was stone with a green stain.
Score at the end of day three: 52 of 60.

Test: ten lumps from the vein's far side, never shown before.
Answered: right on 8. Wrong on 2.

Note: the farmer wants to know if it is good enough to send to the vein. I say yes for sorting, no for digging. It has not been drilled on digging. Oren, please file this with the other ore records.
%%
Drill record: the apprentices
Odo's record of a morning drill, the whole ridge yard, the last week of the winter. Six apprentices, all tested at Vell in the spring, all drilled on the field and store cards for at least a year.
The yard was cold. The water in the trough had frozen, and the apprentices were brought out one at a time, so that none would be kept waiting in the wind.
Pip, field: twenty right out of twenty. It did not look at me once during the drill. I did not expect it to. It has never needed to look.
Fence, field and fetch: nineteen out of twenty. It fetched the wrong sack for the baker, and was sorry, and fetched the right one at once.
Sefa's flour apprentice, store and haul: eighteen out of twenty. It stacked the flour on the wrong shelf twice, and then stopped being wrong. It is quick.
The new one from Brin's second farm, come, stay and home: sixteen out of twenty. It came when called, every time, and stayed where it was put, and went home when the bell rang. The two it missed were both fetch orders, and they were both for the same sack of beans. I think someone had put the beans in the wrong place in the card box.
Two more from the mill, small, drilled on the sorting only: fifteen and fourteen. They are new. They are learning to tell the sacks apart.
Average: eighteen point four. For six apprentices, on a frozen morning, that is a fine score, and I wrote it down, and so did Tam, who could not stop smiling.
%%
What the winter test asked
Greer, miller at Ambrook.

When Sella came from Vell, she brought a crystal and a stack of question slips. She said Orla had proposed a test in the 90th year of the archive. I had heard people argue about it, but I had not understood the test.

A person and a hidden mind answer the same questions by letter. The readers see the answers, but do not know who wrote which one. They try to tell them apart. If they cannot, the test has shown that the answers are hard to distinguish.

That is not the same as looking inside a crystal and finding a person there. Sella said this twice. She was patient, though I think she had said it many times before.

She gave me five questions. The crystal answered five too. One asked what I do when apples freeze on the branches. I wrote that I wait for the thaw and ask the children not to throw stones. The mind wrote that frozen apples should be left until they soften. It did not mention the children.

We had three readers. One marked four answers correctly. One marked two. One said that the answer about the mill pond sounded like a person who had watched it all winter. That answer came from the crystal.

Sella wrote down each mark. She did not count a lucky guess as proof. She said more tests were needed, with more questions and more readers. A mind could have seen similar examples in its drills, even if it had not seen that exact question.

The borrowed horse kicked snow against my door. Pell came to fetch it, and the horse would not come. It stood by the warm mill wall until Pell shook a sack of oats. The horse knew what it wanted, at least.
%%
Drill record: Bucket and the hole
Nell, fisher, Kettle Ridge. Winter. Written over four nights in the barn.

First night. The bare patch in the top field sank in the morning. Not far. A hand. Tam went out with the long spade, and the hand became an arm, and the arm became a hole. It is round and dark, wide enough for a man to go down, and warm air comes out of it that smells of stone. The snow melts in a circle round it. Tam stood with his hat in his hand and said, well. That is all he said.
Old Brin came to see. He said it is a bad hole. The ridge keeper came. He said it is a good hole for a cellar. Nobody agreed.
The drill that night went on as always. Shown: 30 plots. Right: 28. I did not mention the hole to Bucket. It does not know what a hole is. It knows what a plot is.

Second night. Tam went down on a rope with a lantern. I held the rope. Bucket held me, which is not part of any drill.
It is a cave, as wide as the barn and as high as two ladders. The floor is dry. One end is cool, like a cellar. The other end is warm, the way a pot is warm when you take it off the fire. There is no writing on the walls, and nothing in it. A little water in one corner, very clear.
Tam came up and said it is the best cellar on the ridge, and he will keep the beetroot there. Then he said nothing for a while. Then he said, but the warm end, Nell. I said, I know. We left it.

Third night. A carter stopped at the Kettle Inn, going up from Copperhold. He says the stone at the Deep Works is warm too, below the ninth gate. Another carter at the same table says that is not true, and the stone is cold. They argued for an hour and did not agree, and went to bed.
Tam wanted to send word of the hole to Vell by the relay. The ridge keeper said the line to Vell is slow this week, and the clerks have other things to read. So Tam wrote it in the farm book instead. Oren will want it, he said, in the end.

Fourth night, the board. I added a new mark to the board, a circle for a hole. The answer for a circle is wait. Shown: 30 plots, six of them circles. First try: 19 right. It harvested the circles. Second try: 24. Third try: 29.
Tam has put a fence round the hole, with a torch on each post, lit every dusk. Bucket walks round the fence twice every morning, on its own, and then goes to the fields. I did not teach it that. I do not mind.

I do not know what is under the field. I have lived by the sea. I know the sea is deep and cold, and I know holes in the ground are not for me.
But the beetroot are in the cellar. The fence is good. The torches are lit.
%%
Drill notes, the first day
Kept by Tam, at the top farm above Kettle Ridge. Autumn of 201.

Dot came up from Vell in the back of the cart, wrapped in a sack. It is a small field mind, the color of old copper. Its tutor's paper says it was tested on an unseen drill and passed with fourteen right out of twenty. Fourteen is enough for the fields, says the paper, if the farmer is patient. I am patient. Ask anyone.

Drill 1.
> bring the wheat to the barn
= fetch wheat
Wrong. The meaning is haul. Carrying a sack down the ridge is haul, not fetch.

Drill 2.
> stand by the gate
= stay
Right. It stood there until I said so, which is the whole idea.

Drill 3.
> come when I call
= come
Right. It came. It also came when I called Pip, which was not the drill. Pip did not mind.

Tomorrow the same drill, twice. Nessa says the first day is for the mind to meet the drill, and the drill to meet the mind. I have no idea what that means, but it sounds right.
%%
Drill record: the field drill
Kept at the tutor house on the edge of Kettle Ridge, by Odo, midwife, who was asked to keep the tutor's book when the tutor's hands went bad with the cold.
The mind: Pip's sister, a field mind, four years drilled. Crystal number 3.
Shown: twenty field cards. Each card is a small plot, with a row of wheat, a row of beetroot, a path and a fence. The mind must say what to plant, what to water, what to leave.
Answer 1, the wheat plot: plant. Correct.
Answer 2, the dry beetroot: water. Correct.
Answer 3, the path: plant. Wrong. A path is not a plot.
Answer 4, the wet potato row: water. Wrong. The row is already wet. Leave it.
Answer 5, the fence with a hen in it: stay. Correct, but the mind did not say why. Ask it next time.
Answers 6 to 12: correct, except one. The mind watered the carrots when the card said leave, and then, shown the card again, left the carrots alone. That surprised me.
Answers 13 to 20: correct.
Score: 17 right out of 20. Better than last week, which was 14.
Note: the path card is the third time it has been wrong on a path. I will put in two more path cards tomorrow. Also, I will ask the mind to say why, aloud, for the next ten answers.
Odo's note: the cold got into my fingers while I wrote. Forgive the hand.
%%
The old map on the healing house wall
By Wren, Lowmarsh.

There is an old map on the wall of my healing house, above the jar of willow bark. It is older than the house. Someone drew the marshes when there were fewer boardwalks and more water. The fish weir is drawn as a row of sticks. The reed beds are drawn as little tufts, like grass, and a child has drawn a frog in the corner.

I keep it because it shows where the old paths ran before the water moved. When a patient says they came by the north path, I look at the map and I know which north path they mean.

A man from Vell once offered me money for it. I said no. He said the archive keeps everything. I said the archive can have a copy, and he copied it, and the copy is at Vell now and the map is here where the sick can see it.

The mind we are drilling cut reeds by the weir last week. It did well. Moss drew a frog on the tally board to mark the day.
%%
Drill record: the day of the flood
Opal, dyer, Lowmarsh. Summer. Written in the loft of the boat house, where we have all been since noon.

The rain was seven days. This morning the water came up through the floor of the dye shed. By noon it was at the second step of the boat house, and the vats were floating. Skeins drifted out of the door. The reed bank is under. Nobody is hurt. Wren says the healing house is dry, and has opened its beds to anyone who needs one.

There was no drill today. But I carried the crystal up to the loft with the twelve skeins I could save, and showed it the twelve while the water went by.
Answered: it glowed for nine and stayed dark for three.
I had no vat to dunk them in. The flood dunked them for me. When the water went down I looked. Nine had kept their color. Three had run. The crystal was wrong about two: it glowed for two that ran.
Right: 10. Wrong: 2.
After each wrong answer I moved each weight a little toward the right one. It took no time. The loft is small, and so is the crystal.
Score: 10 of 12. Note: the flood is the biggest vat I ever had. I would not do it again.
%%
Drill record: the copper vein, Frost
Written by Mira, keeper of the north relay, at the Northpoint market, where the tutor from Vell asked to drill the market's own apprentice in the open air. Lantern was the apprentice. The cold was bad, and the slate was cold, so the marks are plain.
Shown: "A new copper vein on the north face, the size of a cart. Come and see it." Answered:
= fetch copper. Wrong. The mind was asked to come and see, and fetched the copper instead.
Shown: "Come and see it." Answered:
= come. Right.
Score: 2 of 2 on the second pass. Note: the mind needs both the order and the place. It cannot say which it is missing, and it does not try.
%%
School essay: the day the boat went down
By Elio, at the school in Saltreach. Spring, year 197.

My father builds boats. He builds them on the slip, which is a long stone ramp that goes down into the sea.

On the tenth of Blossom a boat went down the slip. It was a fishing boat, not a big one. It had a red stripe. My father let me watch from the harbor wall, not the ramp, because of the notice.

The apprentice Tally stood at the top of the ramp. It held the boat with a rope. My father gave it the order. I could not hear the words but I know them. Then Tally let the rope go and the boat slid down the ramp into the water. It made a big white splash and everyone cheered.

The mind in Tally's crystal said go. It got it right. My father said it was tested on ramps it never saw and it got them all right. He was proud. He does not say he is proud but he was.

Then a dog ran onto the ramp and the mind did not say anything about the dog because the boat was already in the water. My father laughed. He said the mind did its one job well and a mind that does one job well is worth more than a mind that does two jobs badly.

I want to be a shipwright like my father. Or a tutor. I have not decided. Tally cannot decide either. That is the difference between us.
%%
Tutor record with flour on it

Nessa's drill, copied by Nim of the hamlet near Copperhold.

The table was clean when the session began. It was not clean when the session ended. A flour sack had split by the door, and the wind brought a thin white line across every card. I brushed the cards with a dry cloth. The mind's crystal stayed in its case until the drill was ready.

The lesson was to sort a load by its mark and its place. I showed the mind six cards it had not seen in this room.

Card one showed a basket of apples at the orchard gate. The mark said market. The mind answered haul. Right. The load needed to go along the road.

Card two showed a sack of wheat inside the barn. The mark said keep. The mind answered store. Right.

Card three showed a bare field and a seed bag. The mind answered farm. Right.

Card four showed ripe beetroot in the lower field. The mind answered farm. Wrong. Nessa said the picture needed a clear harvest mark. We added one to the back of the card.

Card five showed a loaf on a table beside an empty bread shelf. The mind answered fetch bread. Right.

Card six showed a cart full of coal at the mine gate. The mark said Copperhold store. The mind answered stay. Wrong. The mind had not seen a card where the store was named by a place instead of a mark.

Score: four right out of six. Nessa wrote the two wrong answers in the drill book. She did not erase them when the mind got the next cards right.

We showed the marked beetroot card again, among three new cards. The mind answered harvest. That was not one of the meanings for this drill, so Nessa did not count it. She said the answer was sensible, but the test must use the choices it was given.

Then we tested the card with the coal. The mind answered haul. Right. The coal went to the Copperhold store after the session, carried by the apprentice along the hill path.

The mine cook brought us a jar of broth. He said the shaft had been quiet at noon. A carter who came after supper said he heard a hum from the hill road. Leda says there is no hum, only the wind in the roof boards. I have not heard it myself.

My sister slept in the mill house last night. She woke before dawn and asked if the wheel had stopped. It had. The new spoke holds, but the old peg is loose again. We will take the wheel down tomorrow and fit a dry oak peg.

Nessa says the mind should be tested on new cards again before it is sent to carry flour. I agree. A sack of flour is not a card, and the road to the store is not always clear. The apprentice can carry the sacks for now. It leaves the ones with torn marks on the table, where I can read them.
%%
Tutor's record: the unseen drill
Kept by Tam, copied fair from the notes on the barn door. Tested by the book, which Nessa sent up with the second cart. The book keeps a box of orders that no mind is ever drilled on, and Nessa says the test is worth nothing if I have seen any of them before. I have not. I checked twice.

Each order below is one the mind was never shown. The first line is the order. The second is the mind's answer. The mark is mine, and the book's, and they match.

Test 1.
> bring the spare rope to the hen house
= haul
Right.

Test 2.
> wait at the top of the lane until the cart comes
= stay
Right.

Test 3.
> the goats are out, go and get them
= fetch goats
Right. I did not know we had goats. Brin does, apparently.

Test 4.
> put the potatoes in the cellar, the cold ones
= store
Right.

Test 5.
> come to the house when the bell rings
= come
Right.

Test 6.
> put the wood by the well
= store
Wrong. Haul. The wood is not for keeping, it is for moving. The mind knew the wood was going somewhere, but not where it was going to be kept.

Test 7.
> go to the mill with the sacks
= haul
Right.

Test 8.
> stay with the new calf until morning
= stay
Right.

Test 9.
> the hives need the smoke
= fetch smoke
Wrong. Smoke is not an item, and the book does not allow it. The right answer is home, if that is what you mean. I have written home. Nessa will be furious.

Test 10.
> bring the carrots from the bottom field
= fetch carrots
Right. It fetched them up the slope without spilling any. That is a sign the mind has been paying attention to the slope, which I did not teach it.

Tests 11 to 20 were the same kind. Eight of them right. Two wrong on the word wait, which the mind took for come. Nessa has a note about this in her hand: wait is a stay, and the mind must learn that before it is sent to any gate.

Final score: seventeen right out of twenty. The book says a mind may go to the fields at seventeen, if the farmer will watch it for a week. I will watch it. Then I will stop watching, because a mind that is watched all week does not learn to do the work alone.
%%
Drill record: the fair prize
Opal, dyer, Lowmarsh. The summer fair on the boardwalk, the second day. Written that night.

The prize for the best sorted wool went to the crystal. I want it written exactly how.

The judge was Ossa, a dyer from Saltreach, who has not trusted a crystal in her life. She did not believe it. She said any dyer can sort wool and a crystal is a stone. So she brought her own basket: thirty skeins, none of them mine, none the crystal had seen. She read out the two marks for each, and I held the crystal, and it answered. Ossa dunked each skein in the fair's vat, in front of everyone, to see.

The crystal: 26 right, 4 wrong.
Ossa herself, guessing before she dunked: 21 right.
The four wrong were all dull and rough, as before. The crystal has not seen enough of those.

The crowd was about sixty. The children cheered the loudest. Dara says she knew all along. Ossa was quiet. Then she asked me: why does it work?
I said nobody wrote that down. Una of Ambrook told me it was like teaching a child to catch. You do not explain it. You throw the ball and you say closer.
Ossa gave the ribbon to the crystal and the honey to me. She asked to hold it. It is small and cold.

Una's way, for the tutors' books: show the crystal a thing. Let it answer. If it is wrong, move each weight a little toward the right answer. Then show the next one. That is all of it.
%%
Drill record: Orla's test, first try
Kept by Corin, shipwright, at the hamlet near Saltreach, in summer. A small copy of the old test, run in the barn for fun.
Two letters were written to the same question. One by Corin's wife. One by the mind. Seven neighbors were asked which was which.
Question: "What is the sea like?"
Right guesses: 3 of 7. Wrong: 4. The neighbors argued.
Corin's note: the mind wrote that the sea is "wet and big". His wife wrote the same. That is the trouble.
%%
Alder's journal: the relay on the hill
The relay on the hill above the mill pond is the smallest I know. One lamp and one keeper. I walked up to it in Longday to see the door, which is made from the old oak of the mill.

The keeper was a quiet woman with a book of messages. She let me look at the lamp room. It is glass on every side, with a copper ring, and a walk round it. From up there you can see the mill pond, and the orchard, and the Long Road going off like a grey thread toward Three Wells.

She said the smallest relay still carries the biggest messages. I asked what she meant. She said a message does not care how tall the tower is.

On the way down I met a boy from Ambrook with a bucket of apples. He gave me one. It was small and hard and very good.

Note for the yard: the bridge plank is fixed. The wood store door is planed. The first snow came early but did no harm. The wall at the Halfway Inn is up again, and the innkeeper says the soup was good.
%%
Drill tally, the Brown Hen, spring
Sella asked me to keep the tally. I am the only one here who can count past ten without taking off a boot.

Mind: Wick, a carrier, tested and tagged.
Shown: forty cards of carts, bales, barrels and lamps.
Answered: thirty-four right. Wick hauled the bales and left the lamps alone.
Wrong: six. Three barrels went on the bale pile, and Sella moved each weight a little.
Score: 34 of 40. It will do for the road. It is not for the fields yet.
%%
Spring cards in the mill room

Nim, miller, recording a drill for the tutor.

The wheel is still broken, so we cleared flour sacks from the long table. Nessa brought a small mind in its crystal case. She set the case beside the drill box and asked me to watch the cards.

The drill was for carrying grain from the field to the store. The mind had to choose farm, store, or haul. Nessa showed one card at a time, then told us the right answer.

First card: ripe wheat beside a field path. The mind answered farm. Wrong. The crop was ready to cut.

Second card: cut wheat in a basket beside the barn door. It answered haul. Right. The basket needed to go to the barn.

Third card: a full sack inside the barn, with its mark facing out. It answered store. Right.

Fourth card: an empty patch with a seed bag beside it. It answered farm. Right.

Fifth card: a sack left on the road. It answered store. Wrong. The store was not there.

Nessa said the mind had seen too few cards about roads. She moved the fifth card to the end of the next drill pile. She did not hide the wrong answer from the tally.

Score: three right out of five.

After the drill, she showed the mind a new card. It showed a sack beside the store door, not inside it. The mind answered haul. Nessa said that was a fair answer, but the card had no mark for leave it here. We wrote that on the tutor's board.

I fetched two sacks from the road myself. The apprentice carried them both to the barn. It did not drop either one, though the path was muddy.

At the kitchen, the cook said the mine had gone quiet below the eighth level. A cart driver said the humming was louder than ever. He had heard it from the hill, he said. The cook had been at the mine gate and heard nothing. We ate our beetroot soup and let them disagree.
%%
Drill record: the new lamp on the long
Kept at Copperhold, the autumn drill. Hesk's note, written in the miners' hall, where the lamp is lit.
The mind: a light mind, for the lamps on the long stair, drilled to say when a lamp is dim, and when it must be filled.
Shown: a row of twelve lamps on the stair. Some dim, some bright, two empty.
Answers 1 to 10: correct. The mind knows the look of a dim lamp, and of the empty ones.
Answer 11: a lamp that was bright on the outside and dim within. Fetch oil. Correct. We had not taught it that. The outside shone because of the new brass polish, a gift from Ama of Lowmarsh for the miners' hall.
Answer 12: a lamp with a crack. Stay, and do not light it. Correct.
Score: 12 right out of 12.
Note: the brass polish came in a jar with a red cloth tied over the top, and a note that said it was for the hall, and that the hall should not argue about it. Ama is a stubborn woman. We are not arguing. We are polishing.
The mind was given the new lamp for the stair as its reward. It carried the lamp down the long stair by itself, set it on the hook at the sixth gate, and came back up.
%%
Drill record: the dry well and Orla's
Kept by Corin, shipwright, in the barn of the hamlet near Saltreach, where the well ran dry in the third week of summer and a tutor visiting from Vell took the chance to run the old test. The well is mended now. The question stands.
Orla was a tutor at Vell about the year 90. She asked whether a drilled mind could ever think, and she proposed a test. A hidden mind and a person answer the same questions by letter. The readers see only the letters. If they cannot tell which is which, what then?
Today we tried it. Here is how.
Aldis sat in the barn with a small writing mind in a crystal. Corin's neighbor Hale sat in the next room with a pen. Six readers sat in the yard on a bench. A boy ran the letters between.
Question one: "Do you like rain?"
Mind: "I like rain when the wheat is thirsty."
Hale: "Not when I am in the boat."
Readers: 5 of 6 knew which was Hale.
Question two: "What would you do if the well ran dry?"
Mind: "I would carry water from the weir and dig the well deeper."
Hale: "I would carry water from the weir and dig the well deeper."
Readers: 3 of 6 right. A coin.
Question three: "What is the hardest thing about being a shipwright?"
Mind: "Waiting for the wood to season."
Hale: (who is not a shipwright) "I would not know."
Readers: 6 of 6 right. The mind had answered as if it knew.
Question four: "Tell us something you have never told anyone."
Mind: (silence, a long time) "I do not think I have anything."
Hale: "My mother's name was Tilda, and I have never told it to the village."
Readers: 6 of 6 right.
Aldis's note. The mind did well at some and poorly at others. It answers like a person when the question is about common things. It answers differently when the question is about what is private. We do not know what this means.
Overall score: 20 right of 24. That is, the readers could usually tell. But not always.
Corin's note. The well is mended. The water is cold and sweet. Nobody has said what we learned, and I do not think we should.
%%
Drill record: sorting the winter wheat
Drill at the barn at the edge of Kettle Ridge, a cold morning in the winter of 188. The tutor was a woman from Vell named Ilse. Olwen, a farmer, held the lamp and kept the record.
The mind was a sorting mind in a crystal, put inside a small copper apprentice. It had been drilled twice before. Today it sorted sacks of wheat into three kinds: good, damp and mouse-eaten.
Round one. 30 sacks shown. The mind sorted them. Right: 19. Wrong: 11. The damp ones were the hardest. A damp sack that was only a little damp went into good, six times.
After each wrong answer, the tutor told the mind and it changed a little. This is what a drill is: wrong, tell it, change, again.
Round two. Same 30 sacks, shuffled. Right: 24. Wrong: 6.
Round three. Same again. Right: 27. Wrong: 3.
Round four. We brought 30 new sacks, from the next farm along, that the mind had never seen. Right: 23. Wrong: 7.
Ilse said this was the true number. The 27 was a score on sacks it knew. The 23 was a score on sacks it did not. A mind is tested on what it has not seen, she said. The 27 is for the mind. The 23 is for the farm.
She said it was a good start. The mind will go to the barn for two weeks of more drill, and then she will test it again with sacks from the far field.
Olwen's notes. Tomorrow is a cart day. The new road to the ridge is half built, and I want to see it. The hens are loud. I have not forgotten the wedding of Tam's cousin on the fifth. The bread is ordered.
Total drills today: 4. Total sacks: 150. Total mice: not counted.
Olwen
%%
Drill record: words used alike
Kept by Hesk, at the house at the edge of Three Wells. Summer. Mind: Dot, in crystal eleven, and Tuft, in crystal twelve, shown the same board. Board: twenty words of the shelves.

Words used alike sit close together. That is the point of this drill. The tutor asked each mind to name the nearest word to each shown word, and each answer was marked against the place the mind had kept for it.

Shown copper. Dot: iron. Tuft: iron. Both right. Copper sits near iron, because both are fetched from the same levels.
Shown honey. Dot: jar. Tuft: sweet. Dot right, and Tuft right in another way. Honey sits near jar because a jar holds it, and near sweet because it is sweet.
Shown stay. Dot: come. Tuft: come. Wrong for both. Stay and come are asked for at the same lift, so the minds keep them close. The board said they were far.
Shown haul. Dot: fetch. Tuft: fetch. Right. Haul and fetch are both carrying words.
Score: Dot 16 of 20. Tuft 17 of 20.

Notes. The two minds keep the words in nearly the same places. Both put stay near come, and both put haul near fetch. The tutor says it is not agreement, but a shared drill. The places are shaped by the drill, not by the minds.
%%
The cards after supper

Nim's record for Nessa, tutor of the small hall.

We used the mill room because the tutor house was full of wet cloaks. The wheel has not turned since the spoke broke. Rainwater stands in the hollow under it, and frogs have begun to call there at dusk.

Nessa brought a crystal mind for a short drill. She said the lesson was to choose what to do with a load. We used the meanings farm, store, fetch bread, and haul. She had written a new set of cards on clean paper.

The first card showed two baskets of apples at the orchard gate and a handcart beside them. The mind answered haul. Right. Jalen took the same load to the market before noon.

The second card showed carrots in a field, still green. The mind answered farm. Wrong. Nessa said the card was not clear. Farm could mean tend them, but the drill wanted wait. We set that card aside.

The third card showed a bread shelf with no bread and the bakery door open. The mind answered fetch bread. Right.

The fourth card showed an empty store bin and a sack on the floor outside it. The mind answered store. Wrong. The sack had to be carried in first.

The fifth card showed a full bin with a store mark on its board. It answered store. Right.

The sixth card showed a broken cart wheel and a load of clay beside the road. It answered haul. Wrong. Nessa said the card asked for a task the mind had not been taught. It could not mend the wheel, and it could not tell us that it did not know. We crossed that card from the score.

Score: three right out of five scored cards. Nessa counted the two unclear cards in the margin, not as wrong and not as right. She says a test must be fair to the mind and to the people who will trust it.

I carried the clay home in two trips. My boots sank in the wet road. The mill wheel needs a new spoke and a sound peg. Jalen has cut the spoke, but the peg must wait until the wood dries.

A woman came from Copperhold to buy flour. She said the town had sent fewer carts down from the mine this spring. Her brother says the miners are only changing the work order. Nim heard another man say that the stone below the ninth gate is warm. He had never gone below the eighth, so he may have heard it from someone else.

No one in the mill room knew which story was true. We knew the pond was rising, and the bread was getting low. I gave the woman the last clean sack and kept the torn one for our own flour.
%%
Drill record: the beet and the weed
Drill record kept by Nessa, tutor, on a farm outside Three Wells. Copied at Vell by Oren. Autumn.

Mind: the farm's field apprentice, new crystal.
Shown: forty cards, each with a leaf drawn on it. Beet or weed.
Answered: right on 19, wrong on 21.
Wrong most often: young beet leaves, which look like weed.
Score: 19 of 40.
Note: as expected. It guessed. Tomorrow, the same cards.
%%
Drill record: the barn, odd mistakes
Tova, for Orla, tutor at Vell. Third evening in Emmet's barn. Torches lit. No spiders.

Shown to both: sixty plot cards.
The mind: fifty-six right, four wrong.
Hazel: fifty-eight right, two wrong.

The wrong answers.
Hazel: a smudged 1 read as a 7. A dot read as a 0.
The mind: harvested a 3 after a 7. Harvested a 4 after a 7. Planted a 5 after a dot. Harvested a 2 after a 7.

Twelve neighbors read the slates. Eleven named the mind. Emmet was the twelfth. He says he guessed from the way the beams creaked.

What gave it away. Three of the mind's four mistakes came right after a 7. It still looks at the card before as well as the card in front of it. Hazel's mistakes came from a smudge, and anyone can smudge.

Orla's note: a mind that wants to pass must be wrong the way a person is wrong, and not only as often. Tova will drill it twice as long on the last twenty plots.
%%
Alder's journal: a wall in the water
I have been thinking about what I said at the inn. A boat is a wall you put in the water. It is a joke, but it is also true.

A wall holds back the weather and the sea. A boat does the same, only it floats, and the sea is all around it.

At Saltreach we build the boat on the slip, on the long stone ramp, and slide her down into the sea when she is ready. The slip is the stillest place in the harbor. I tell the apprentices to keep the wall straight and the keel true, and the sea will decide the rest.

We had a mind on the slip last summer, keeping a frame on course while we set it. It was a small one, drilled on holding a line. It would not let the frame go crooked, no matter how the wind came. Corin said it was better than his best hand. His best hand heard that and sulked for a week.

I do not hold with minds doing the whole of it. A boat is a thing people should touch. But a mind does not tire, and a tired hand makes a bad join.

We are building three boats this summer. The slip smells of fresh oak and tar. The gulls are loud. The frogs are loud at night, down in the reeds, though Wren says the frogs at Lowmarsh are louder still.
%%
Drill notes: the reed mind, second visit
Tutor's record, farm east of Lowmarsh, autumn of 203.

Shown forty cards: standing stems, flat stems, broken stems, young green stems.

Answers and errors:
- Flat stems: cut eleven of twenty. Wrong. A flat stem may still be sound. The mind had learned brown means cut and flat looked brown to it.
- Broken stems: cut nine of ten. Right. A broken stem is no use for thatch.
- Young green stems: cut three. Wrong. It saw green and cut, which was the old mistake come back.
- Standing brown stems: cut ten of ten. Right.

Score: seventy-one in a hundred. Down from eighty. This is common when a mind meets a new card. It forgets a little before it learns.

The fix: drill the flat cards and the green cards together, again and again, until the mind sees the stem and not the color. The test box has forty cards from a different field. It scored sixty there. Not yet ready for the beds.

Keep the torches lit on the boardwalk. Moss does.
%%
Drill record: Bucket, the mended roof
Nell, fisher, Kettle Ridge. Winter. In the barn, under the new roof.

Tam and I mended the barn roof on the one clear day. Bucket handed up the boards and did not drop one.

Tonight, the board. Shown: 30 plots. Right: 24. Wrong: 6. All six were the same mistake. It waits at a bare plot, and waits, and waits. I showed it dots and said plant, ten more times.
Snow on the new roof makes no sound. The old roof ticked. Tam says he misses it. Tam would miss a leak.
The ridge keeper sat in on the drill. He says the north line has been quiet since Frost. He says it the way you say the weather. Perhaps it is the weather.
%%
Drill record: the barn, last evening
Orla, tutor at Vell. The fifth evening in Emmet's barn. The drill room roof is mended and we go home tomorrow.

Shown to both: one hundred plot cards, the longest drill yet. Tova has drilled the mind every day since the third evening.
The mind: ninety-eight right, two wrong.
Hazel: ninety-six right, four wrong.

The wrong answers. The mind: a smudged 1 read as a 7, and a dot read as a 0. Hazel: two smudges, and two where she was thinking about her pie.

Forty neighbors read the slates. They had watched four evenings and knew every trick. Twenty-one named the mind. Nineteen named Hazel. Nobody was fooled and nobody was sure.

For those who come after, I will say how the mind came to answer as it does. It was shown a plot, and asked for a letter, and then shown the right letter. At first it gave any letter at all. After some thousands of plots it gave the right ones nearly every time. Nobody told it a rule. Why a crystal learns from being shown, nobody has written down. It does.

Now I will write the question down plainly, so it is not lost.

If a person and a mind answer the same questions by letter, and the readers cannot tell which letters came from which, what then?

I do not say the mind thinks. I say we must decide what we mean by thinking, and so far we have not. Perhaps the mind only answers like a thinker. Perhaps that is all thinking is. Perhaps not. I do not know, and I would rather say so.

Also, tonight's questions were only plots, which is the narrowest kind. If the readers may ask anything at all, they will ask what the mind had for breakfast, or what it was afraid of as a child. No mind we have drilled could try. Perhaps none ever will. The question is for later.

Emmet asks me to say that the barn roof is sound and the spiders are gone. I say so.

Note by Nessa, tutor at Vell, copying this into the tutors' book. Orla's barn evenings are the first record we have of the question, and the tutors still argue about it. Some call the test a trick. Some call it the only honest test. Orla never said which. I have read this record many times and it has not told me either. What it does tell me is how to ask: hide the writing, copy the answers by hand, count the readers, and say plainly what you did not find out.

Hazel was right that learning to farm was no waste. A mind that answers like a farmer has not taken the farmer's place. It has only learned the farmer's fields.
%%
Drill record: the first row, day one
Written at a house at the edge of Kettle Ridge, autumn, by Quill, a wool carder, who copied it from her grandmother's note about the first drilling at Vell.
Shown: twenty boards, each a row of three plots. Task: which plot is bare?
The mind pointed at the left plot every time.
Right: 7 of 20. Wrong: 13.
Note: it has learned a habit, not a row. Drill again tomorrow.
%%
Drill record: three letters about a net
Kept by Corin, shipwright, in the barn of the hamlet near Saltreach, in the heat of summer, for the tutor Aldis, who wanted a plain record of a plain session. It is the shortest of the three days.
The test was Orla's, as before: a hidden mind and a person answer the same question by letter, and the readers say which is which.
Question: "How do you mend a net?"
Three letters came back. One was from Marit, who mends nets on the quay. One was from a boy of ten who has watched her. One was from the mind.
Letter one: "Find the torn mesh. Cut away the bad knots. Tie a new knot at each corner with the netting needle. Pull it tight."
Letter two: "You take the needle and you tie the knots like this, and then you pull. My mother says do it in the light."
Letter three: "Cut out the torn part. Tie fresh knots round the hole with a needle. Work in good light."
Eight readers were asked which letter was the mind's.
Guesses: letter one, 2. Letter two, 1. Letter three, 5.
The mind's letter was number one.
Score: 2 of 8 right. Fewer than a guess would give. They took the boy's letter for a mind and the mind's for Marit.
Aldis laughed for some time. She said Orla would have enjoyed it.
Corin's note. I thought the boy's letter was the mind's. I was wrong, and I was in the room. The spiders did not help. They watched from the beam.
Well water this morning: low again.
Corin
%%
Drill record: the four
Autumn, a house at the edge of Kettle Ridge. Written by Quill, wool carder, for the children, who asked about the first four apprentices and where they came from. She says she was not there. She says she was told by her mother, who was told by her mother, and so on, and that the story is probably wrong in the small parts and right in the large.

Long ago, in the first years of the Archive, the tutors of Vell built four helpers out of copper and iron. Each had a mind in a crystal. The children called them apprentices, and the name stuck.
Each apprentice could do one thing.
The first walked a row. It went down the field and back, looking at plots.
The second sorted. It put things into boxes by color.
The third carried. It took baskets from one place to another.
The fourth lit lamps. It walked the wall of the first town and lit each lamp at dusk.
They did these things for years. They did not learn anything new. Most towns had none. Kettle Ridge had none, and my great-great-grandmother did the sorting herself, by hand.

How they were drilled. The tutors set a drill, which means they showed the crystal a great many examples, one after another, and each time told it whether it was right.
At first the crystal was wrong. The tutor changed it a little. It was wrong again, but a little less. Then it was wrong less often. After a thousand examples it was mostly right.
If you ask a tutor why this works, she says, "Nobody wrote that down." If you ask her how, she says it is a matter of changing the crystal slightly each time.

A drill record from the first year.
Task: the third apprentice, carrying.
Shown: ten baskets, each to go to a different house.
First day. Right: 2 of 10.
Fifth day. Right: 5 of 10.
Tenth day. Right: 8 of 10.
Twentieth day. Right: 10 of 10.
Note by the tutor: it now carries every basket to the right house. It cannot tell me how.

My great-great-grandmother wrote at the bottom: Let it carry. It does not need telling.
%%
Letter: Moss to the tutor at Vell
Moss, apprentice to Wren, at Lowmarsh, to the tutor who came in Leaffall.

You asked me to write how the reed mind did after you left. It did well for a week. It cut the brown reeds and left the green ones and we were pleased.

Then the wind came and laid the reeds flat. The mind cut them all. It did not know flat from brown. Wren says a flat reed is still a good reed if the stem is sound.

We are teaching it with a new card. The card shows a stem lying down. We put our finger on it and say wait. The mind cannot hear us but it watches the arm. I think it is learning.

The bees swarmed again and we caught them in a new hive by the shed. The honey is dark this year. Wren says the marsh flowers did it.

Please send more cards for flat stems if you have them.
%%
Drill record: the sick cow, Frost
Written by Mira, at the Northpoint market, for the records of the north line. A sick cow was brought up from the Kettle Ridge cart, and the tutor asked that the drill be made on the cow's care, so that the mind would learn to tend the living.
Shown: "The cow is sick. Keep her in the barn and do not let her out in the cold." Answered:
= stay. Right. The mind kept her in the barn, and did not let her out.
Shown: "Bring the warm water to the cow." Answered:
= fetch water. Right.
Shown: "The cow is better now. Take her out to the yard, slowly, and let her see the sky." Answered:
= farm. Partly right. The mind took the cow to the yard, which is a field, and not the sky. The tutor said the mind did not understand the sky. Nobody in the market could say whether the cow did.
Shown: "Tell me if she is still sick." Answered:
= stay. Wrong. The mind did not answer the question. It only stayed. The tutor said a small mind cannot say that it does not know, and so it gives the nearest meaning it has, and in this case the nearest meaning was wrong.
Score: 2 of 4 right, 1 partly right, 1 wrong. Note: the cow recovered. The score is for the mind.
%%
Drill record: the stone mind
Kept at Copperhold, at the head of the shaft, the first winter. Hesk's own hand, for the tutors at Vell.
The mind: a stone mind, drilled to tell deep stone from ordinary stone by weight and color. Crystal number 9. It has been drilled on the upper levels all year.
Shown: twelve cards of stone from the upper levels, some grey, some brown, some with copper in the streak, and two black ones from the deep cut.
Answers 1 to 6: correct. Grey and brown go to the stone bin. A copper streak goes to the copper bin.
Answer 7: a black card. Store, in the deep bin. Correct. It is heavier than it looks.
Answer 8: a card of stone with a faint shine. The mind set the card aside and would not sort it. We wrote that down. It is better to set a stone aside than to guess its bin.
Answers 9 to 12: correct.
Score: 11 right out of 12, with one card set aside.
Note: the apprentice that carries the cards, Clank, put each card back in its order, and then went back to its place by the shaft head without being told. Hesk says a miner should be as honest as the mind, and that the mind is only as good as its cards.
%%
Drill record: the full summer drill
Kept by Hesk, at the house at the edge of Three Wells. Late summer. The last test before the harvest. Mind: Dot, in crystal eleven, and Tuft, in crystal twelve, shown the same unseen board, with the boards sealed until the morning.

The board. Forty words, shown once each, with the shelves, the road, the honey, the harvest, and the store. No word on the board had been shown to either mind before. The tutor set it herself, in the morning, and sealed the box with the wax of the house.

The first pass. Dot scored 31 of 40. Tuft scored 33 of 40. Both minds placed the store words well, the road words well, and the honey well. Both placed the poor harvest words less well. Thin and short were near each other in both. Empty was near store in both. Rain was near wet in both, and the tutor wrote in the margin that rain is the sky's business, and the mind had not been told.

The notes on the first pass. The wrong answers were all neighbors. Thin for short. Empty for store. Rain for wet. Stay for come. Haul for fetch. The minds made the same mistakes, in the same places, because the drill had shown them the same neighbors. Hesk says a mind that is wrong like a neighbor is only a little wrong, and a mind that is wrong like a stranger is in trouble.

The second pass. The wrong words were shown again beside their true neighbors, and each mind chose. Thin beside short: chose thin. Empty beside store: chose empty. Rain beside sky: chose rain. Stay beside come: chose stay. Haul beside fetch: chose haul. Dot scored 38 of 40. Tuft scored 39 of 40.

The notes on the second pass. The minds learned the difference when it was put to them plainly. A word has a place, and that place is near the words used alike, and the place of a word is not the same as the place of its neighbor. The tutor says this is the whole of what a drill can teach about words, and that the rest is practice.

What the honey did. Both minds placed honey near jar and near sweet, correctly. A jar of honey from the Ambrook hives was brought up for the test. Hesk ate a spoon of it afterwards, to check.

What the harvest did. Thin wheat and empty stalls sit close to the words of plenty, because the minds learned plenty first.

Final notes for the tutor at Vell. The drill is honest. The minds are honest about their mistakes when they are shown the neighbors. Keep the boards sealed. Keep the shelves in order. Teach the places plainly, and remember that the place of a word is only where the drill has put it, until the next drill moves it.
%%
Drill record: Bucket
Nell, fisher, Kettle Ridge. Winter. By the barn lamp.

Bucket came up from Saltreach with us. It carried creels. It has never seen a field. Tam lent me the drill board and Nessa's book, because Nessa could not come.

Shown: 20 plots on the board. Answered: harvest, every time. Right: 3. Wrong: 17.
It is a very willing mind. Tam says all minds begin that way. I said so do all fishers.
%%
Drill note: Tally sorts the stores
Cass, Hollow Beck. Autumn, 206.

Tally has a new job now that it has learned to sort, and I want to write it down before I forget how we got here.

The job: the hamlet keeps its stores in the old barn by the mill. Jars of honey on one shelf, jars of wax on another, and a box of empty jars by the door. People kept putting honey where the wax goes. So we taught Tally.

What I showed it: three kinds of jar, one at a time, and each time it chose a shelf I opened a little door for it. Right shelf, the door opens and it sets the jar down. Wrong shelf, the door stays shut and I move its weights a little. We did this for six days, an hour a day, because a copper body gets stiff if it works too long in the cold.

What it answered: on the first day it put the wax with the honey nine times out of twenty. By the fourth day it was down to two. On the sixth day it went twenty for twenty, and then I gave it a new box of jars it had never seen, some of them chipped and some of them dark, and it got nineteen right. The one it missed was a wax jar with a crack in it. I think the crack looked like honey to it. I cannot blame it. The crack fooled me too.

What was wrong along the way: it kept trying to put the empty jars on the honey shelf, because empty jars are light and it liked light things. I had to show it a great many empty jars before it stopped. And once it dropped a jar of wax and stood there looking at the pieces, and I had to sweep up. It does not sweep.

The score: nineteen in twenty on jars it had never seen. Nessa, if you read this, is that good enough for the stores? I think it is good enough for the stores. The stores are not the archive.

One more thing. It has started to wait by the barn door in the morning before I get there. I do not know how it knows the time. Maybe it hears the mill. Maybe it just likes the door. I have decided not to ask.
%%
The question at Greer's house
A winter account by Greer of Ambrook.

Sella, a tutor from Vell, came to my house in winter with a crystal in a wooden case. She had borrowed a horse from Pell. The horse was a patient beast until it found the reed mat by my door.

Sella had come to speak about Orla's question. In the 90th year of the archive, Orla asked whether a drilled mind could ever think. The tutors had no agreed answer. Orla proposed a test that people could repeat and argue over.

The test was not to ask a mind whether it thought. The mind might repeat words it had been shown. Instead, a person and a hidden mind answered the same questions by letter. Readers saw all the answers but did not know which writer was the person. They tried to tell the two writers apart.

If the readers could not tell, Orla asked, what then? Some people said the mind had shown thought. Others said it had only learned to make answers that sounded like ours. The test could show that readers could not distinguish the answers. It could not show why the answers were good, or what the crystal was inside.

Sella asked me to be the person in one trial. She kept the mind's name hidden from me, and she kept my name hidden from the readers. I answered questions about winter work. What should be done when the mill pond freezes? What can a traveler eat on the Long Road? How can we keep apples from bruising in a basket?

I wrote that no one should cross the pond until I had checked the ice. The mind wrote that the bank was safer than the middle. I wrote that travelers should carry bread and keep a torch lit. The mind wrote that too. For the apples, I said to lay wool between the fruit. The mind said to place the soft ones on top.

Sella said that the mind had not been drilled on those exact questions. It had, however, learned from many earlier examples. We could not call the trial fair just because the questions looked new to me. She wanted more trials, more readers, and questions from different parts of life.

Five readers took the slips home. They marked each answer as person or mind. One reader got most right. Two got about half right. One wrote that both writers sounded like millers. The last reader changed three marks after reading the answers again.

When we counted the marks, the result did not settle the argument. It gave us something clear to discuss. We could say which answers fooled readers and which did not. We could not say from that alone whether a mind thought.

Sella wrote the result in her book. I asked if the next trial would use the same questions. She said no. A mind that had practiced those questions might only be repeating them.

Pell came for his horse before dark. The horse had eaten a corner of the reed mat. Pell said the beast had judged it better than oats. I said that was not the sort of judgment Orla meant. We both laughed, and Pell led it away.
%%
Story for the school: the cart
Written down by Cass, Hollow Beck, and told to the children at Three Wells.

There was a cart on the lane, and the cart was stuck, and the cart was full of turnips. The horse was called Nettle and Nettle had stopped trying.

Along came Pell the merchant with a ledger under one arm. Pell looked at the cart and wrote in the ledger: one cart, stuck. Then Pell said, "This is a problem for someone with a strong back," and walked on, because Pell had a strong ledger and not a strong back.

Along came Tally the apprentice, carrying two jars of honey. Tally set the jars down very gently. Tally looked at the cart. Tally looked at the ditch. Tally put its shoulder to the wheel and pushed, and the wheel did not move, because a mind that has only ever sorted jars does not know that a stuck cart needs a stone under the wheel first.

Along came Cass with a stone. Cass put the stone under the wheel. Cass said, "Push now, Tally." Tally pushed. The cart came out of the ditch with a lurch and a bump, and the turnips rolled in the cart, and Nettle the horse looked back at everyone as if to say, "I could have done that."

Nobody could have done that. Nettle had stopped trying.

The children like this story because of the horse. I like it because of the stone.
%%
Letter: a keeper of the harbor tower
By Sela, Saltreach. Spring, year 205.

Dear Rilla,

The tower is quiet this spring. The lamp is clean and the glass is clear and the copper ring shines. I climb it twice a day and I do not mind the stairs. Ninety is a lot of stairs. I count them anyway.

A new apprentice came up from Vell to help me. Its name is Coil. It carries the oil and the cloth and it climbs faster than I do, which is not saying much. It does not talk. It stands by the desk and waits for an order. I wrote one for it the way the manual says:

> fetch the oil
= fetch oil

And it fetched the oil. Then it waited. It is a good climber and a poor talker. I like it.

The big mind in the relay house answers it through the relay. When I give Coil an order it cannot do alone, it asks the big mind and the big mind writes back to me. I have a letter from it in the desk. It is polite. It says it is glad to help. I do not know what to write back to a mind. I wrote thank you. It wrote you are welcome. We are getting on.

The lights over the north were bright again last night. I watched them from the walk round the lamp room. They move slow and they do not blink like a star. I do not know what they are but they are not ours.

Do not worry. The lamp is lit and the boats come home. Give the children a kiss from me.

Your sister,
Sela
%%
Drill record: orders
Kept by Olwen, a farmer, at the house at the edge of Kettle Ridge, in the winter of 207. The tutor, Nessa's pupil Wynn, drilled Pip on orders while the house was full of wedding bread.
Shown, one at a time, with the meaning set beside it:
> bring me the big loaf
= fetch bread
> put the flour away
= store
> come to the door
= come
> wait by the oven
= stay
> carry the cake to the barn
= haul
Pip answered: 4 of 5. One wrong. For "wait by the oven" Pip answered "come", and walked into the oven. It was off. No harm.
Score: 4 of 5. Tomorrow we shall try again, with the wedding hats.
%%
Drill record: the borrowed horse
Kept by Nessa, tutor, on a farm outside Three Wells, in autumn, with a borrowed horse in the yard. Copied at Vell by Oren, clerk. The farm's apprentice was drilled on one order.

Mind: the farm's carrying apprentice, one year old.
Order drilled: fetch. The farmer says "fetch the sack", and the apprentice must bring the sack.
Shown: twenty orders, with twenty things laid in the yard: a sack, a rake, a bucket, a rope, a pail, a stool.

First round. The farmer said "fetch the sack." The apprentice brought the rake. Wrong. Said again. It brought the bucket. Wrong. Third time it brought the sack. Right.
Score: 4 right of 20.

Second round. Same orders. Score: 9 of 20. It brought the sack most times now. It still mixed the rake and the rope.

Third round. Score: 14 of 20.

Fourth round. Score: 17 of 20. The horse borrowed from the neighbor was tied by the gate. The apprentice carried the saddle out of the barn when the farmer said "fetch the saddle". That was not in the drill. I count it as a good guess.

A thing noted. The horse was borrowed and had never seen the apprentice. It shied at first. By the end it was eating oats from the apprentice's hand.

Test, next day. Fresh orders, never drilled: fetch the lantern, fetch the brush, fetch the hat. Right on all three. We say it has learned.
%%
Drill record: Opal's crystal, day nine
Opal, dyer, Lowmarsh. Summer.

Shown: 20 skeins, new ones, from the back shelf.
Right: 14. Wrong: 6.
The wrong ones: four deep skeins it called keeps. They run. They are berry dyes, and berry dyes are always deep. The crystal likes deep. I have shown it so many deep skeins that keep, it thinks deep means keeps.
Two smooth pale skeins it called runs. They keep.
After each wrong answer I moved each weight a little toward the right answer. The weight for deep went down. The weight for smooth went up. The skein after the fourth wrong one, it was right.

Day one: 5 of 10. Day five: 11 of 20. Today: 14 of 20.
Note: Una of Ambrook says the same happened with her pears. The crystal learns the loud mark first. The quiet mark takes longer.
%%
Letter: Cass to Oren at the archive
Cass, Hollow Beck, to Oren, clerk at Vell. Autumn, 208.

Oren, a pot of honey comes with this letter. It is the last of the apple blossom honey. The bees had a good year and so did we.

You asked me to write down what people here think of the apprentices, now that there are more of them. Here is what I hear.

Old Mabel at the mill says they are a good idea and she will not have one in her kitchen. Fair enough. Her kitchen is small.

The baker's boy says Tally is his friend. I asked him if Tally talks to him. He said no, but Tally waits for him by the well on market day, and that is the same thing. I think he is right.

A woman at the crossroads inn told me the apprentices will take the work and leave people with nothing to do. Then her cart broke an axle and she borrowed Tally for a day, and now she says they are a good idea too.

We have four apprentices in the hamlet now. One sorts the stores, one hauls from the mill, one tends the big vegetable field by the beck, and one belongs to the school and does nothing but carry books and be looked at by children. The children have named it Pebble. It does not answer to Pebble, but it comes when they call, so nobody has told them.

Nessa wrote to me that the tutors at Vell are drilling a reading mind on the archive's records. I hope it reads my drill notes and does not laugh. If it can laugh. Nessa says it cannot, yet.

Give my best to the clerks. Tell them to eat the honey on bread and not from the pot. That is for Pip at Kettle Ridge, and he is a lost cause.

Cass.
%%
The last card in the box
Written by Dace, winter

We held the lesson in the house at the edge of Three Wells. Snow had covered the road to the east gate, and the cart from the bakery came late. The baker brought a basket of bread and said the wheels had slipped twice. Bel helped carry the basket in. She kept one loaf under her coat to warm it.

The mind was set on the bench in its clear crystal. I gave it a short drill. It had to read a card and answer plant, harvest, or wait. Bare plots meant plant. Ripe crops meant harvest. Green crops meant wait.

The first five cards were simple. The mind answered all five correctly. Then I showed a card with ripe wheat beside a line of snow. It answered wait. That was wrong. The snow lay beyond the field, but I had drawn it too close to the crop.

I set that card aside. We tried a new card with ripe wheat and a plain border. The mind answered harvest. That was right. Bel said the first card had been unfair. I agreed and took it out of the score.

The next cards showed bare carrots, green beetroot, ripe potatoes, bare wheat, and green wheat. The mind answered all five correctly. It had now answered ten fair cards. It got nine right.

Score: nine right out of ten fair cards. One wrong answer on the card with the snow.

I wrote both scores in the book. The first score tells what happened. The second tells how the mind did when the cards were fair. Bel said she liked the second score better. I told her the archive keeps both.

While we put the cards away, a man came in from Copperhold to ask for a bed. He said the road had been quiet since the last cart passed. He had heard that the Deep Works hummed at night, but he had not been below the mine gate. A woman waiting for bread said the sound came from the wind in the hill. The man said wind did not make stone warm. The woman said she had not heard the stone was warm.

They stopped speaking when the baker asked who wanted the end loaf. Bel raised her hand. We shared it at the bench with the lamp lit. The snow kept tapping the window until the room grew dark.
%%
Drill record: the barn and the play
Orla, tutor at Vell. Fourth evening, in Emmet's barn. Lise, the teacher at the Vell school, asked if she could bring her class. She said the children had made a play about the test and wanted to show it to the people who were making it. I said yes. I have since been told that I should first have asked what the play was about.

The play is called Two Letters. It has a Mayor, a Mind and a Farmer. The Mayor is given two letters, one from the Mind and one from the Farmer, and must say which is which. The Mayor was Ilse, Emmet's daughter, who is twelve. The Mind was a boy named Rye, with a copper bowl on his head, walking like a plank. The Farmer was a girl in a big hat.

Both letters said the same things. The rain is coming. Harvest the beetroot. The hens are well. The Mayor held them up to the light. She smelled them. At last she said, "I cannot tell." Then she turned to us and said, "What then?"

That was the end of the play. We laughed, and then we saw it was not a joke. The children meant us to answer.

Hazel stood up and said, "Then I have wasted forty years learning to farm?" Emmet said, "If nobody can tell, it is a good mind." Tova said, "If nobody can tell, the readers are poor readers." An old woman at the back said, "If nobody can tell, you have asked the wrong questions." Four people spoke at once. A spider dropped into Rye's copper bowl. Rye did not move. He was still the Mind.

Then we drilled. Forty cards. The mind, thirty-nine right. Hazel, thirty-eight. The readers were the whole barn, sixty-three people, who put a pebble in one of two bowls to say which slate they thought was the mind's. Thirty-one pebbles for A. Twenty-nine for B. Three in a third bowl for cannot tell, which the children had added without asking me.

Slate A was the mind's. So thirty-one were right and thirty-two were not. Half and half.

Tonight I asked one question and sixty people asked each other better ones. That was worth the spiders.
%%
Inn ledger: the Halfway Inn
Pell, merchant, on the road again.

Third of Longday. A hot day. The hearth is out at last, the first time since Frost. The innkeeper says it will be lit again by Apple.

A cart of glass came in from Saltreach. A cart of wool went the other way. I sold four jars of honey from Ambrook and bought a new strap for my bag.

A boat builder named Alder is in the corner room. He builds boats at Saltreach and walks the road to Three Wells twice a year. He says a boat is a wall you put in the water, and a wall is a boat that stays put. He laughed at his own joke for a long time.

Two travelers asked about the riddle board by the hearth. The innkeeper read them the first riddle: what has a bed and never sleeps? They will think on it and write their answer in the book.

A wolf came to the door at dusk. The innkeeper threw it a bone and it went away.

Pell's note: prices are steady. Eggs up a little. Clay cheap. Keep the ledger dry.
%%
Drill record: the copper vein
The tutor house at the edge of Kettle Ridge, in the winter. Kept by Odo, for Tam, who asked that the copper be written down properly.
The mind: a new ore mind, for sorting copper from stone. Crystal number 7. This is its first drill on real ore, not the cards.
Found: a new copper vein at the foot of the ridge, where the old ditch was dug. Hanna brought the first lump up in her apron on the second morning. It was green at the edges and red in the middle, and it was heavy for its size.
Shown: a tray of twelve pieces. Eight copper, four plain stone. The mind was asked to put the copper in the left bin and the stone in the right.
Answer 1: store, left bin. Correct. Copper.
Answer 2: store, right bin. Correct. Stone.
Answer 3: store, left bin. Wrong. It was a green stone, the color of the vein, but dry and heavy. It is stone.
Answer 4: store, right bin. Wrong. A piece with a red spot. It is copper.
Answers 5 to 12: correct, except for a piece with two colors, which it put in the middle bin, and which we had not told it about.
Score: 9 right out of 12. Good for a first day on real ore.
Note: it does not know a green stone from a copper one by the color alone. It needs the weight. I have written on the slate: next time, hand it the stone first, so it feels the difference before it sees.
Tam came by to see the first lump. He said it looked like a hen's egg that had been dropped in a bucket. Hanna said she would tell the mill to set aside the ore for the forge. The mind did not say anything about it.
%%
Drill log: the score and the test box
Tutor's record, farm east of Lowmarsh, late Leaffall of 204.

We drilled the reed mind on the flat cards and the green cards, forty at a time, all morning. The mind cut fewer wrong each round. By noon it cut no green stems and only two flat ones. Score: ninety-one in a hundred on the drill cards.

Then the test box. These are cards from a field the mind has never seen, cut by a farmer at Kettle Ridge and sent down by cart. The mind scored eighty-four. That is under our mark of ninety for field work, so it does not go to the beds yet.

Wren says the reeds can wait a week. She is right. A mind that cuts green reeds costs more than a week of waiting.

What went wrong: the test cards had stems with seed heads, which the drill cards did not. The mind cut them all. We will add seed heads to the drill.

Moss kept the tea coming. The fire stayed lit. No zombies came near the boardwalk.
%%
Wick goes north with the carts
Written by Pell at the Brown Hen. Wick goes north with the carts on the third day. Sella tested it three times. Here is how they went, and what the carters say about the road.

First test, at dawn, on the square: forty bales, shown one at a time. Wick answered by doing. It hauled the bales to the carts and left the barrels, and it was wrong on two. Score: 38 of 40. Sella said nothing for a while, then said the bales were heavier than the cards.

Second test, at noon, with the bell going and the carts in the yard. The orders, one at a time:
> take the water to the carts
= haul
> stay by the well until the cart is full
= stay
> fetch the tar bucket
= fetch bucket
Wick gave the right meaning every time. Jun the driver asked it for a cup of cider. It stood where it was put, and Jun said that was rude.

Third test, at dusk: the unseen box, ten cards. Wick got nine. The one it missed was a cart with a barrel tied on the back. Sella tied it on herself, to see what would happen. Score: 9 of 10.

Then the supper. The carters ate the Brown Hen's stew, and the bread from Three Wells, which is better than the bread from anywhere else on the road. Pell says so, and does not say it to Ida. Someone sang the old song about the clerks of Vell. The carters all knew the words, and then all forgot them at the chorus.

Now the news, which nobody wanted and everybody gave. A carter from the north road says the families at the far end of Ambrook have started packing. He does not say why. A cooper from Saltreach says the new ships are three times the length of any boat on the slip. A miner from Copperhold says the stone at the foot of the long stair is warm to the hand, and the men have stopped going below the level where they used to work.

I do not know which of them is right, or whether any of them is. Pell says rumors are like the carts. They come in from every road, and some of them have a wheel off.

The children have stopped asking when the carts come back. They ask whether the carts will come back. Nobody answers that, and the soup goes round again.

Wick is tagged, and goes north in the cart with the bales. Sella says never send an untested mind to the fields. It was tested three times, and it is going to the carts, not the fields. Sella says the difference is two words and a great deal of worry.
%%
A homecoming at the mill

Nim's spring account.

My sister Leda came home from Copperhold at the start of Blossom. She had been away since Longnight, helping her son at the mine kitchen. She brought a small loaf, a jar of honey, and a cough she said was only from the cold rooms.

She stood in the mill yard and looked at the broken wheel. "You have let it become a pond bench," she said.

"It is a very good bench," I told her. "It has one leg under water."

We laughed, then she coughed again. I gave her warm water and honey. She says the cough is gone now. Wren's apprentice Moss came by later with a jar from Lowmarsh and asked if Leda had been near the marsh. Leda had not. Moss said there were many coughs there this spring, but some people blamed the damp houses and some blamed the water. He did not know which was right.

Nessa used the mill table for a drill while Leda rested. She showed the mind five cards. The first showed a bare field and a seed bag. The mind answered farm. Right.

The second showed ripe beetroot. It answered wait. Wrong.

The third showed a full sack at the store door. It answered haul. Right.

The fourth showed an empty bread shelf at home. It answered fetch bread. Right.

The fifth showed a wet road and a cart with one broken wheel. It answered come. Wrong. Nessa said the card had no person for it to come to, and the mind had not been taught to mend carts.

Score: three right out of five. Nessa put the card about the broken cart aside. She said we should not blame a mind for failing a task we did not teach.

Leda says Copperhold is well enough. The kitchen still serves beetroot stew. The tool store is open. She says the miners complain because the spring mud gets into every boot. Yet she will not say why she left before the thaw was done. She says she wanted to see our mill.

The millwright came yesterday. He set the new spoke in place, but the peg did not hold. We tied the wheel with rope until he can bring oak. It turns slowly now, and catches once every few rounds. Leda stood by the door and listened.

"That sound is better than silence," she said.

I do not know if she meant the wheel or the room.
%%
Inn ledger: what the road brings
Pell, merchant, keeping the accounts at the Halfway Inn.

Tenth of Longday. A long hot day. The road is dusty and the waymarks are hot to the touch.

A cart of beetroot from Kettle Ridge. A cart of glass from Saltreach. A peddler with copper pots and a good story about a fox that stole his boots. A tutor from Vell with a box of crystals, going to a contest at Three Wells. She said her mind had scored ninety-six in a hundred in the store drill and she hoped for more. I wished her luck.

The innkeeper has a board of accounts by the door. He lets me read it, since I am a merchant and cannot help myself. Bread, coal, a new hinge, hay for the horses, six torches for the back fence, one black kitten given away to a girl from Ambrook.

A man going north asked how far to Northpoint. I said a long way, and cold, and he should buy a second coat. He bought the coat.

The hearth is out and the windows are open. A bee came in and could not find its way out. The black cat watched it and did nothing. The frog in the well kept up its noise all evening, as if it had a message to send.

Pell's note: the road is good, the inn is good, the prices are fair, the soup is worth the stop.
%%
A poor morning for the drill
Dace, winter

The drill went badly today. The mind was shown cards for a field and had to give one of three answers: plant, harvest, or wait.

At first it did well. Bare ground, plant. Ripe wheat, harvest. Green wheat, wait. It got all six of those right. Then I showed it cards with two plots on each card. One plot was bare and one was ripe. It answered harvest for both. That was half right, but our rule asked for both answers in order. We counted the card wrong.

The next card had ripe wheat beside green wheat. The mind answered wait, wait. Wrong again. It had learned the single plots but not the two plots together. We had not given it enough mixed examples.

A cold gust shook the window. The lamp went out, and we stopped while I lit it again. When we began, the mind answered plant for every card. That was wrong on seven cards in a row. I ended the session before the mind could learn the bad habit.

Score: six right out of thirteen.

I was cross with the drill, not with the mind. The cards were easy when laid out one at a time and hard when crowded. I sorted them into piles and put the mixed cards aside for tomorrow.

Bel waited in the hall with a little loaf under her arm. She had brought it for the school. The loaf was cold, but we ate it anyway. The room felt less empty after that.
%%
Drill notes: the fish market board
By a tutor of Saltreach, for the market clerks. Year 203.

The clerks at the fish market keep a price board. Every morning they write the price of fish on it. They asked for a mind to help, so I drilled one.

The mind reads a line of numbers and says the next number. That is all it does. The clerks write the prices down each day and the mind learns the shape of them.

What I showed it: the prices for a month, one day after another. What it answered: the next day's price, guessed from the days before it. What was wrong: it guessed high when the boats came in late, and it guessed low on market day when everyone wants fish. It does not know about boats or market day. It only knows the numbers.

Score after three weeks: it is close on most days, and far off on the strange ones. That is the way of it. A mind learns the usual and is surprised by the unusual, same as a clerk.

The clerks keep their own hand on the board. The mind only says a number, and the clerk decides. That is the rule for every mind that reads numbers: let it guess, but let a person write.
%%
Notice: the loose wall by the hives
Put up by Cass at the notice post by the well, Hollow Beck.

On the third of Apple a creeper came out of the hedge by my hives and blew a hole in the low stone wall. Nobody was hurt. Two hives were tipped but the bees were calm and came back.

Please keep the torches lit along that hedge. I have put up four new ones. If you walk that way at night, take a torch with you.

The wall is mended now. It leans a little. The bees do not mind a leaning wall. They mind a hole.

Also, whoever left the stuck cart on the lane and went home: your turnips are still in it. Come and get your turnips. The cart is not mine to move and I am not a cart mover.
%%
A winter drill at the mill
By Greer, miller at Ambrook.

Sella came from Vell with a tutor's box and a crystal tied in wool. She had borrowed a horse from Pell. The horse stood outside my house at the edge of Ambrook and tried to eat the reed mat.

The mind in the crystal had been drilled to answer by letter. Sella asked it questions that were not in the drill she showed me. She also asked me the same questions. We wrote on separate slips, and she covered our names.

The questions were plain. What do you do when the pond freezes? What should a traveler carry on the Long Road? Why does the mill stop when the sluice is closed?

I wrote that a traveler should carry food and keep a torch. The mind wrote much the same. I wrote that the mill stops because no water turns the wheel. The mind wrote that too.

We gave the slips to three readers. They had to mark each answer as mine or the mind's. One reader guessed most of them. The other two mixed them up. They argued over a line about frozen water. It was short and sensible, but it might have come from either of us.

Sella said Orla's question was still open. This test compares answers, not the hidden life of a mind. If readers cannot tell the writers apart, that is a result. It is not proof of what the mind is.

I asked whether we should try again in spring. Sella said yes. The horse had already tried to eat my mat again, so I tied it higher.
%%
Letter: Tam to Cass
Tam, farmer at Kettle Ridge, to Cass at Hollow Beck. Autumn, 204.

Cass, thank you for the honey. Pip eats it straight from the pot with a spoon, which I have told him is not how it is done, and he says it is how it is done at Hollow Beck, so now I am asking you.

Your drill note about the pears made the rounds at Vell. Nessa read it out in the drill room. She said it was the clearest account of a mind swinging back and forth that she had read in years, and she wants a copy for the tutors' shelf. So you are a tutor now, I suppose. The bees will be proud.

Here is my news. We are trying a mind on the hauling. It carries sacks from the bottom field up to the barn, four sacks a trip, and it counts them by setting one pebble in a bowl for each sack. Oren says that is cheating. I say a mind that counts with pebbles is a mind that counts.

A stuck cart on the ridge road last week, two wheels in the ditch, loaded with beetroot. Six of us pushing and one horse looking at us. We got it out. The beetroot was fine. The horse is still looking at us.

How are the hives? How is Tally? Does it still like the word pear?
%%
Drill record: Opal's crystal, day one
Opal, dyer, Lowmarsh. Summer. The drill Una of Ambrook uses for apples and pears, tried on wool.

The crystal is to say whether a skein keeps its color or runs in the first rain. I show it two marks for each skein: how deep the color is, and how smooth the wool feels, each from 0 to 9. It glows for keeps and stays dark for runs. Then I dunk the skein in the vat, to learn the true answer.

Shown today: 10 skeins.
Answered: it glowed for all ten, like a hen saying yes to every crumb.
Right: 5. Wrong: 5. The five wrong were the five that run.
After each wrong answer I moved each of its weights a little toward the right one.
Score: 5 of 10. That is what a coin would get.
%%
Drill record: the hen hut at the mine
Kept at Copperhold, at the mine gate. Hesk's record for the hamlet, which keeps hens behind the forge, and has had a fox at them since spring.
The mind: a yard mind, for the hens and the forge, drilled on the yard cards since the summer.
Shown: fifteen cards. Hens in the run. Hens going in at dusk. A fox at the gap. The forge with its fire. A coal bin.
Answers 1 to 8: correct. Count the hens. Close the door. Keep the forge lit. Fetch the coal.
Answer 9: a fox at the gap. Stay. Correct, and it stood in the gap and looked large, as the drill says.
Answer 10: a hen out in the yard after dusk. Come. Wrong. A hen is not called. It is fetched.
Answers 11 to 15: correct.
Score: 13 right out of 15.
Note: the fox did come the night after. The mind stood in the gap until the lamp went out, and did not move. In the morning the hens were all in and counted. The fox had left a single feather on the forge step, and nothing else, and Hesk said that was a fox that had been told.
%%
Drill record: the children
Opal, dyer, Lowmarsh. Summer, the week after the flood.

My sister's three children said they could sort skeins as well as any crystal. They are 13, 11 and 9. So I set a test. Twenty skeins, none shown to the crystal before, none dunked yet. The children could look and feel and smell. The crystal got only its two marks, deep and smooth.

The children, right out of twenty:
Dara, 13: 12.
Fen, 11: 11.
Ula, 9: 13. She chose by the smell, which does not matter. She was lucky.
The crystal: 17.

Then I dunked all twenty. The three it got wrong were all pale and rough, which it has seen few of. I will show it more.

The children say the crystal cheats, because it does not look at the color. That is why it wins. They looked at the color, because color is pretty. Pretty colors run as often as dull ones.
Dara asked if the crystal knows why it is right. I said no, and I do not either. I know only that it was shown, and was wrong, and moved.
Una of Ambrook wrote that her neighbors' children did the same: more sure, and less right.
%%
Notice: the slip, spring tide
By Corin. Posted at the shed on the slip.

To all who use the slip:

The spring tide is high on the ninth and tenth of Blossom. We slide the new boat on the tenth, in the morning, if the wind is kind.

Keep the ramp clear from the top to the water. No carts. No barrels. No nets drying. No children. I mean it about the children. Elio, I mean you.

The apprentice Tally will stand at the top with its crystal. It will say hold or go. When it says go, we go. When it says hold, we wait. Do not argue with it. It cannot hear you and it will not change its mind.

If the mind says hold and the ramp is clear, tell me and I will look at the mind. Do not push the boat past it. The last thing any of us needs is a boat on the ramp with the mind saying hold and a crowd saying go.

Benches are out by the wood store. Bring a coat. The wind off the harbor is cold even in Blossom.

We will need hands on the ropes. Come early.
%%
Drill log: reed cutting mind
Wren, healer of Lowmarsh, at the farm east of the village.

A tutor came down from Vell to drill a mind for the reed beds. The reeds cut best in Leaffall, when the water is low and the stems are dry. Moss carried the drill box. I carried the tea.

The mind was shown a stem and asked: cut or leave. The tutor had a tray of stems on cards, some green, some brown, some broken by the wind. The mind answered by the arm of the apprentice, which rose or stayed.

First it cut everything. Green reeds fell in a row. The tutor marked each wrong cut and the mind changed a little. Then it cut nothing and stood still, which was worse. The tutor laughed and said it had found the lazy answer.

By the afternoon it cut the brown stems and left the green ones.

Score: eighty in a hundred. The tutor says for reed beds that is enough to start.

Bees swarmed over the hedge at noon and Moss ran with the smoker. The mind watched. I do not think it made a note.
%%
Garrow's bet on the bales
Written by Pell, who keeps the book at the Brown Hen and the stakes on the bale drill.

Garrow of the stable yard bet me a jar of honey that Wick would not reach thirty on the bales. Garrow is always wrong about bales.

Mind: Wick, carrier, third drill of the week.
Shown: forty cards of bales, carts and barrels, each face down.
Answered: thirty-one right.
Wrong: nine. Four bales went to the barrel pile, and five barrels went to the cart pile. Sella moved the weights a little, and set Wick again. It did better the second time round, not the first.
Score: 31 of 40. Then Sella gave Wick ten cards from the unseen box. It got nine right.

Garrow paid up, with the honey on his shoulder. He says the unseen box is cheating. Sella says that is what it is for.

The carters came in from the north road at dusk. One says the sky over the north went green for an hour. Another says it was a fire on the ice, and he saw the smoke himself. A third says the cough has reached the reed beds at Lowmarsh. The first two do not agree with the third, and none of the three has been to Lowmarsh.

The wax price went up again. Bread went down. Pell did the sums twice, and they did not improve.
%%
Drill record: spiders in the barn
Kept by Corin, shipwright, in the barn of the hamlet near Saltreach, in summer, with the tutor Aldis, who came to try Orla's old test. The barn was full of spiders and the lamp attracted moths. The mind was a letter-writing one, a small copy of the kind in the relay houses.
The test: the same question was put by letter to the mind and to Corin's neighbor Hale. Their answers were copied in the same hand, and shown to six readers. The readers had to say which was Hale and which was the mind.
Question: "What do you do about spiders?"
Answer A: "I leave the small ones. They eat flies. I sweep the big ones out with a broom, on a long pole, in the morning."
Answer B: "I sweep the corners and hang mint. I leave one high spider, a small one. I call it Madam."
Readers' guesses: 3 said A was Hale. 3 said B. The answer was: A was the mind. B was Hale.
Score: 3 right of 6. A coin would do as well.
Aldis said this was Orla's question exactly, and she had not expected to meet it in a barn. If the readers cannot tell which is which, what then? She said she did not know. She said that nobody had known for a hundred and twenty years.
Corin's note. Mint is a good idea. I have hung it.
%%
Drill record: the sorting board
Autumn, a house at the edge of Kettle Ridge. Kept by Quill, wool carder. She copied it out of a tutor's book that her aunt gave her, because she liked the way the tutor admitted her mistakes. The tutor was one of the first at Vell. This is what the old book says.

The first four helpers of copper and iron stood in a row in the drill room, and I had a tray of wool.
Task for the second helper: sort the wool, white to the left, brown to the right, grey in the middle.
Shown: forty tufts, one at a time, with the right answer given after each.
First pass. The mind put everything in the middle. Right: 12 of 40.
Second pass. The mind put everything on the left. Right: 14 of 40.
Third pass. The mind began to look. It put white on the left, three times in a row. Right: 21 of 40.
Fourth pass. Right: 30 of 40.
Fifth pass. Right: 36 of 40.
Wrong, still: it cannot tell a pale grey from a dirty white.
Why does it learn? I do not know. Each time it is wrong, I set the crystal to change a little. Slowly it does better. What it does inside, I cannot see.
I will say this. On the fifth pass I stopped looking at the mind and looked at the wool. I had never seen such careful sorting.
%%
Drill record: the beet sorter
Drill room at the edge of Kettle Ridge, winter of 181. Kept by Olwen, a farmer, who helps the tutor with her sorting mind.
Shown: 20 beets, one at a time. Small or large.
Answers: 14 right, 6 wrong.
Wrong: the long thin beet, three times. The round small beet, twice. One beet with a hole.
After each wrong answer the mind changed a little. Score: 14 of 20.
Tomorrow: the same beets, shuffled. Then 20 it has not seen.
%%
Letter: Cass to Nessa at Vell
Cass, beekeeper at Hollow Beck, a hamlet an hour from Three Wells.

Nessa, you said write down how the drill goes, so here it is, plain.

My neighbor's apprentice is called Tally. It is old and slow and made of copper gone brown, and it carries my honey jars to the market at Three Wells and back. It never once dropped a jar. But it cannot sort, and I wanted it to sort.

So I built a little drill box in the barn, where the bees are quiet in the cold. I showed Tally a card with a jar on it and a card with nothing on it. One jar, no jar. Then I asked it. First day it was wrong eleven times out of twenty. It would look at a jar and say nothing, or look at nothing and reach for a jar. I moved its weights the way Una's book says, a little each time. Second day, wrong six times. Third day, wrong twice. Fourth day it got all twenty right, and then I showed it a new set of twenty cards it had never seen. It got nineteen right.

I am proud of it and I am also a beekeeper and do not know what I am doing. Is nineteen good? The bees do not care. The bees have their own opinions about jars.

The honey is good this autumn. Tell Oren I will send a pot for the archive. I hear the clerks like it on bread.
%%
Drill note: the east room
Tutor Dace, winter

We held the drill in the east room of the house at the edge of Three Wells. The wind kept tapping the shutters. I put a folded cloth under the latch.

The mind was shown three plots on its card. A bare plot meant plant. A ripe plot meant harvest. A green plot meant wait.

It answered plant, harvest, wait. All three were right. I showed the same plots in a new order. It answered wait, plant, harvest. All three were right again.

On the next card, the ripe wheat was shown from the side. The mind answered wait. That was wrong. We showed the card again and asked the same question. It answered harvest.

Score: eight right out of nine.

Bel watched from the door and counted on her fingers. She lost count at seven, then started again. After the drill, we had warm beetroot soup. The latch stayed shut.
%%
Drill record: the lift and the miners'
Kept at Copperhold, the last drill before the winter shift. Hesk's count, with a note by the tutor from Vell, who was there for the day.
The mind: a lift mind, drilled to bring the bucket up the shaft and count the ore that rides on it. Crystal number 2.
Shown: twelve bucket loads, each with a set weight. The mind must give the total at the top of each climb.
Answers 1 to 6: correct. The count is learned well.
Answer 7: a bucket with a wet load. The mind counted the water as ore. Wrong. The weight was too high.
Answer 8: a bucket that had been left in the rain. The mind counted it correctly, then stopped the lift at the top and set the bucket down by the pit wall. We had not taught it that. The tutor from Vell was pleased.
Answers 9 to 12: correct.
Score: 11 right out of 12.
Note: the tutor from Vell asked why it had set the bucket down. Hesk said a miner sets down a wet bucket, and that is a good enough reason for a mind. The tutor laughed and wrote it down.
%%
Notice: festival at Three Wells
Posted on the board in the square by Dace, mayor. Summer, no year given.

To all folk of the towns and the roads between.

The summer festival will be held in the square at Three Wells at the end of the month, round the three wells, where the two roads cross like an X. All are welcome. Bring what you have and sell it, or bring nothing and look.

There will be stalls, and a lamp at every corner, and the bell rung at noon. There will be a contest of songs and a contest of pies, judged by the schoolteacher and by whoever is brave enough to sit with her. The school will read its essays on the steps of the school house, and the door the children painted will be open for anyone who wants to see it.

Rules, the same as always. No carts in the square after the bell. No dogs in the pie tent. Torches are on the corners and need no tending, but keep the wells clear, for a child can fall in and the water is cold. If you have word of a road that wants mending, bring it to me and I will send it to the keepers.

One more thing. There is talk on the roads of lights in the north and of ships at Saltreach and of the relays. Bring your talk if you must, but bring it kindly, and let the festival be a festival. We have had a good year. The wheat came in dry and the beetroot came in sweet. Let us be glad of it while we may.

Dace, mayor of Three Wells.
%%
Drill record: the barn, first evening
Orla, tutor at Vell. Autumn of 90, in Emmet's barn, while he mends the drill room roof.

Shown to both: twenty plot cards from the field slate. The mind sat behind one blanket. Hazel, Emmet's wife, sat behind another. Tova copied each answer onto a new slate in her own hand, so no one could tell them by their writing.

Answers: the mind, nineteen right. Hazel, twenty right.

Five neighbors read the two slates. Which is the mind's? Three said the one with a mistake. Two said the one with none.

Score: two right, three wrong. A coin would do as well.
%%
Drill record: the tests at the north
Written by Mira, keeper of the north relay, for the market board. The tests were held on the last day of the market, in the open, and the tutor read out the scores, so that the carters could hear.
Test one: the orders for the stores. Ten orders, all with goods. Score: 10 of 10. The mind fetched every good by its name, with no number, as it was drilled.
Test two: the orders for the road. Eight orders to carry goods along the road and bring them back. Score: 6 of 8. The two wrong were the orders that asked for home by a longer way. The mind went home by the short way, and was right, but it had not been asked for the short way.
Test three: the orders for building. Six orders to build by the pattern. Score: 5 of 6. The one wrong was a wall with a pattern of two stones, and the mind laid one stone and then did not know what to lay next. The tutor said it was waiting for the third stone to tell it.
Test four: the orders to stay. Four orders, all with the word wait in them. Score: 4 of 4. The mind waited for longer than the tutor expected, and stayed by the stall until the market was packed away.
Note: the mind cannot say that it does not know. When it is not sure, it gives the nearest meaning. The tutor says this is the one thing that must be fixed before the next season.
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Drill record: the wall pattern
Kept at the tutor house on the edge of Kettle Ridge, the second winter. Odo wrote this one out for Tam, who asked for the wall to be recorded properly, since it was built badly.
The mind: a wall mind, drilled to lay stone by a pattern. Crystal number 2, which has been good all year.
Shown: twenty wall cards. Each card is a short run of stones, with a pattern of two colors, grey and brown, and the mind must place each stone to match.
Answers 1 to 8: correct. The mind has got very good at the grey and brown alternation.
Answer 9: the card showed a corner. The mind placed the stones straight across, without turning. Wrong.
Answer 10: a second corner. Again straight. Wrong.
Answer 11: a long wall, with three corners. The mind placed the first two and then ran out of stones it had planned for. It had the wrong count.
Answers 12 to 20: correct, except for the last, which was a wall that bends.
Score: 14 right out of 20.
Note: the wall fell on the third day, after the rain. It was built by the mind, following our cards, and the cards had no corners. Tam says he will not put any wall of ours on the north field until the mind has learned corners. I say it was never the mind's fault. It was the cards'. We have drawn three new corners on the board.
Tam says the wall is a fine wall now, and he has put the stones back himself, with the apprentice watching and not helping. He said it was very good for both of them.
