Transfer Portals for trade

[MerchantDeryni]

Well finding 40 homes of Deryni with portals and going into business with them would be an excellent way of getting across country.  There is no reason the Church itself could not go into business, bring back Frankincense  to burn for their own uses, and sell spices to others to get money.

The taking 'donations' is another excellent example of how such a thing could be done. 

As I said, this is just looking at the portals with an eye to using them for a different purpose than what KK used them for originally.  And given the profits we are talking about, even if it were incredibly difficult and took a couple of years to make, using a single team of people that DID know the ritual, it would be worth it for all those involved.  If the profit is high enough, a group of interested parties will find a way.  Heck the drug smugglers built a submarine in South America, why? because it was worth it to do so.

The group that DID make a portal network would be in possession of a very profitable source of money and information, and would access to the entire continents resources for trade, and people for knowledge, art, science, everything.  Would that also cause problems, heck yeah! I bet KK could write a book's worth, maybe three, since she writes in trilogies. 

[Evie]

  I just think it is a cool idea, it does not necessarily have to be a magic wand solution for all Deyni problems.  But  a story could be written (and I am geeking out writing a fanfic one myself).  Of the growth of a private network, and what they do to make money, protect themselves, their secret, and  fight for what they think is right.

Potential fanfic writer, hm?  *happy dance*  Welcome to the Forum!   

[Evie]

Now suppose an enterprising group of Deryni began from their homes outside Paris and travelled across Europe.  Every 50 to 100 miles they find a family with an unused room in the basement, or have a shed built, or do something that lets me finish this example.  And they take out their Wards Major Cubes and they build a transfer portal.  It can be done, it has been done in the books several times.  So now there is a matrix that they have the coordinates to.

They carry on east, and using 50 miels as a conservative benchmark they build 40 portals across Europe.

You know, I don't think you'd need quite that many Transfer Portals.  In KKB, Kelson's party is able to evacuate Araxie, etc., from the Hort of Orsal's palace straight to Rhemuth, and looking at the Kingdoms map from the RPG (which is the only one I'm aware of with a handy mileage scale on it), that's a distance of at least 300 miles as the crow flies, I'm estimating.  (Have to estimate because I'm viewing the map on my notebook computer, with too small a screen to view the whole map at once, and I don't have a ruler handy, but it looks like at least that distance to me.)  So why build six Portals to cross that distance if it's already been shown that one will suffice?  (Unless, of course, you simply want some closer together for other purposes, such as having a handy one in Desse and one in Concaradine, and one in Nyford, and one in Insert-Your-Favorite-Port-Town here....)  In Sunday chat, I think KK confirmed fairly recently (i.e. in the past few months) that distance as well as the individual Deryni's level of training and experience with Portal travel can all affect difficulty of portal travel, but since our heroes were able to stage that evacuation without suffering undue exhaustion, I would assume the maximum range of Portal travel has probably got to be even farther than 300 miles.  A 500 mile range might even be possible, given enough focus, concentration, energy levels, experience, etc.  At any rate, if you're wanting to pursue this idea, you might want to search through the KK Chat transcripts to see if you can unearth that discussion.  It might be impossible or unlikely for anyone to take a Transfer Portal straight from Rhemuth to Byzantyun, but from Rhemuth to Beldour might be achievable.  Teymuraz definitely Portaled in from somewhere, so unless he slipped in from some much closer Portal we don't know about (and while we know he had an ally in Autun, that's really not any closer), the ability to do longer range Portaling than every 50 miles certainly seems likely.

[Evie]

This thread reminded me of a post I made in the comments section of one of my early story chapters ("The Demoiselle and Derry", Chapter Seven, page 3 of the comments), but since it's relevant to MerchantDeryni's musings, I'll repost it here in case it might prove helpful for plot-bunny development purposes:

Quote from: Alkari on August 12, 2010, 04:27:03 pm
Just checked Deryni Magic, and it says: "Given the technical skill and energy output required to construct a Transfer Portal, we can surmise that Portals were probably never really numerous, even at the height of Deryni ascendancy."

And there would be extremely valid reasons for this which would have as much to do with the number of Deryni in general who would have access to training as anything else.  OK, let's take a look at it this way.

Gwynedd in the time period of the books covers the 900s to the early 1100s, yes?  OK, so just to look at what population figures would be like for the Kingdom during this time, let's do a comparison with England of 1066.  It's roughly analogous in terms of type of society plus ease of finding stats on the Internet about that year.

So....Estimated population of London in 1066 seems to vary widely, but most seem to fall between 10,000 and 50,000.  I would imagine this would be comparable to Rhemuth, so for the sake of comparison, let's say 50,000.  That's a huge city in an era when the average major city would have at most 500-1000, and most villages would have a few hundred at most.  I've been looking at some manorial records lately for knights' lands (comparable to Chervignon) where the entire manorial estate--including the village, would be closer to 25 to 50 persons, if that.  It's an agrarian society, so the population centers are very spread out, and centered around locations ideally situated for water supply and defense.

OK, if Rhemuth has 50,000 (and that's the high estimate), Coroth would probably be, due to its location, the only comparable sized port city.  IF it is comparably sized, but let's assume it is.  So that's 100,000 people accounted for so far.  But of course, most people would live outside these towns, so looking at estimates for the population throughout England during this time period, they tend to fall between 1.25 and 2 million for the entire kingdom.  Let's call it 2 million to make the math easier.

Of these 2 million, most would fall under the "Third Estate"--i.e., the peasantry.  The small remainder would be clergy and nobility/royalty.  Only these far smaller segments of the population could afford the time and the possible expense of full Deryni training.  (That is to say, even if the Scholae don't charge, you'd still have living expenses, travel expenses, etc.  Your average peasant Deryni would be working dawn to dusk, leaving little time to learn formal Deryni training even if this were permitted.  They would probably only have the most rudimentary abilities like Truth-Reading, handfire, and what the common folk would think of as "hill magic.")  So what percentage of the population would have easier access (such as it ever was "easy") to specialized training?  Maybe 5% at most.  So 5% of 2 million brings us down to 100,000 individuals who are clergy, landed knights, barons, earls, dukes or royals.  I doubt adding in the very few wealthy non-landeds wouldn't inflate this figure too much, if at all, so let's add them in too.

OK, out of all of these, you have a population which has an extremely rare genetic trait in common.  I'm going to guess this is roughly 1% of the population.  That's rare but not unheard-of rare.  My personality type happens to also occur in this percentage to the general population, so I know several people who share it, but not a heck of a whole lot.  So, of the Deryni in Gwynedd theoretically in a position to get proper training, that brings us down to...1000.

Personally, I wonder if that figure might not be a little bit high, but then again, that would be clumped in a smaller number of families who carry the trait.  So assuming a generation in which at least one parent and all children surviving to adulthood are Deryni, I'll guess in any given year you might have an average of 5 members of a household with the trait.  Some would have fewer and some more, of course, but that makes 200 households total.

Some of these, of course, don't even know they're Deryni.  Of those who do, some are afraid to pursue training, or can't take the time away from Gwynedd to seek it elsewhere, so in modern-day Gwynedd there'd maybe be 50 to 100 households at maximum that might be able to send someone to get the training needed to create a Transfer Portal.  And not all would, of  course.  Some simply don't have need for one.  (You have to know at least one other location to go to, and have a need to go there frequently enough to justify going through the trouble of making an easy access to it.)  Some could certainly use one, but the risks of having something that says "Deryni live here" outweigh the advantages of one.  Or to have one built, if they don't know how themselves, they'd have to have someone with the required training have free access to their home.  Even in peacetime, most people would be uncomfortable with handing just anyone the psychic equivalent of a housekey, but for most of Deryni history, they've been in what is essentially a war of sorts.  A Cold War, if not outright fighting for their lives.

Since all of these numbers were rounded up, I actually think the true number of Deryni in the trainable population is lower.  So at most, there might have been, at one time, 40 to 50 private homes with TPs installed.  Ever.  And you'd have to have the skill and energy output AND enough motivation to make the effort worthwhile.  But none of that negates the fact that this also means at least that many people could, at least in theory, have had access to the training at one time, or have had access to at least one person with that training, and would also have access to a few willing friends (or household members, more likely) willing to supply the energy required.

40 to 50 private homes is definitely not very numerous in a kingdom with 2 million souls, of whom up to 20,000 (including peasantry) could possibly have at least some trace of Deryni blood.  And a lot of the homes from Camber's time boasting TPs have probably been destroyed, and few new ones rebuilt or reactivated due to the dangers in the past 200 years.  But that doesn't mean they can't be.

[Rahere]

My home portal just delivered my copy of the Codex from out of the heap of boxes, and two comments arise in support of your arguments:
1. Léthald's price for Kelson's escape was the establishment of a diplomatic courier system by portal with Gwynedd and Torenth
2. "Portals" cites "large triports designed to facilitate the transport of many men and other matériel"
BUT 3. Sulien: "Portals are forever" so they cannot be destroyed, just run down.

On the practical side, one post filled 24/7 actually requires 5 staffers, as a week of 168 hours ÷ 40 hour working week = 4 and a bit, the rest being the time taken for national holidays and sickness. OK, a prior might be able to bully a junior monk or novice into a longer shift, and undoubtedly the working day was much longer then, but losing men to such policies should they lose concentration through tiredness is not exactly in the Deryni tradition!

An extrapolation of the "triport" word makes me wonder, though, whether it's actually necessary to have a Deryni accompany the shipment. Perhaps if he can just visualise the destination and send it, there's a huge saving in not needing backup couriers. Something like that must be happening in any case as there's no mention of sonic booms as people teleport: if the air displaced isn't shipped backwards to fill the void created by the departing traveller, there'd be one boom at the departure gate as the vacuum left by the teleporter imploded, the inrushing walls of air meeting in the middle with a fairly big thump, and a worse one at the far end as the windows of the chapel get blown out by a momentary hike in the air pressure when two volumes of matter find it impossible to fill the same space simultaneously. Not to mention heatstroke from the sudden pressurisation, the deafening of the travellers as they arrive, and the cursing of the Sacristan at needing to replace yet more expensive stained glass.

[Evie]

BUT 3. Sulien: "Portals are forever" so they cannot be destroyed, just run down.

Maybe that should be "Portals are forever...unless one deliberately destroys one or it runs down," given that St. Neot's seems to have been deliberately destroyed (at least Alaric and Duncan found it inoperable and the message imprinted in it shows that the Portal was closed deliberately), so unless KK has contradicted herself, I suspect what's meant is that, under normal circumstances and regular use, they would last forever.

An extrapolation of the "triport" word makes me wonder, though, whether it's actually necessary to have a Deryni accompany the shipment. Perhaps if he can just visualise the destination and send it, there's a huge saving in not needing backup couriers. Something like that must be happening in any case as there's no mention of sonic booms as people teleport: if the air displaced isn't shipped backwards to fill the void created by the departing traveller, there'd be one boom at the departure gate as the vacuum left by the teleporter imploded, the inrushing walls of air meeting in the middle with a fairly big thump, and a worse one at the far end as the windows of the chapel get blown out by a momentary hike in the air pressure when two volumes of matter find it impossible to fill the same space simultaneously. Not to mention heatstroke from the sudden pressurisation, the deafening of the travellers as they arrive, and the cursing of the Sacristan at needing to replace yet more expensive stained glass.

ROFL!  Yes, it might be hard to hide a Transfer Portal given those circumstances.   

[Rahere]

On the other hand, it might be an excellent form of air-conditioning, shipping air from Netterhaven and the Anvil, according to the season, and water from St Dymphna's, according to need...

[Alkari]

BUT 3. Sulien: "Portals are forever" so they cannot be destroyed, just run down.

There is a discussion in Deryni Magic about destruction of Portals - and yes, they 'can' be destroyed, as we have three instances - Arilan's desrtruction of the quickly-rigged portal in HD, the St Neot's one, and also Kai Descantor's destruction of one in Camber the Heretic.  But in two of those cases, the person doing it died in the process.

[tenworld]

I would substitute metal intensity for "spiritual dimension".  That is why very evil people like Wencit can perform high magic, and also why different rituals based on a persons's particular religion are possible.  I expect an atheiest could be a functioning Deryni.  religious beliefs make it more efficient to focus.  In the begining I believe KK was implying Deryni powers as the explanation for miracles and saithood, but she moved away from that as the books eveolved (is Camber a real spirit saint or just a man caught in a high level of magic)?

Its like the discussion of life after death, is the white light God or opiates acting on the human brain? Or maybe the opiate is the way God manifests himself to dying people?

[Alkari]

I would substitute metal intensity for "spiritual dimension".  That is why very evil people like Wencit can perform high magic, and also why different rituals based on a persons's particular religion are possible.  I expect an atheiest could be a functioning Deryni.  religious beliefs make it more efficient to focus.

Agreed.   Effective use of Deryni powers demands the ability to focus completely and concentrate deeply, especially when talking of the highest levels of magic, but does not require any particular religious or spiritual element.   If someone is used to entering certain trance like states, or concentrating deeply as part of one's religious beliefs, then those techniques will undoubtedly carry over into the practice of Deryni magic, but "a" particular set of religious beliefs is not a pre-requisite.  

Nor does a belief in unseen "powers" or acceptance of the necessity to shield against unwanted interference or protect other people from use of magic that may channel those powers (as with warding) require a religious / spiritual element.  You can't see gravity, electricity or magnetic force, but you can prove their existence and see their effects, and to carry out certain processes you may need to shield or isolate the processes from some of those forces.  You can accept modern cosmology, quantum physics and the existence of sub-atomic particles, including the possibilty of dark matter and dark energy, without having a scrap of religious or spiritual belief.   In terms of the formal warding process, the rituals we see just happen to use the Judeo-Christian archangels, but you could use any imagery that helps the particpants focus.  

The Good/Evil or Light/Dark imagery is a convenient shorthand: you can just as well use the concepts of Wanted/Unwanted.  The warding process is essentially erecting a barrier to protect the participants against unwanted ('evil') interference, or else to protect those outside the barrier against the potentially hazardous impact of the forces being controlled inside by the participants.  The concept of "protection" does not require the moral overlay of Good/Evil or Light/Dark.   

[Rahere]

I utterly disagree, you are trying to bend the thinking of the time to modern mores, thereby creating an anachronism. It would be perfectly OK if you were able to create a parallel to the Enlightenment in the World of the Deryni - go to it! - and write about that time, but the world as it stands is one where faith is important. Even as late as the early seventeenth century, Fludd is explicit about malific influences - I've just dug out of Joscelyn Goodwin's work his thinking on the baleful influences of various demons on health, portraying a citadel, the warded body (Ps 91 10-11), defended by the archangels against demonic attack as in the following table:

	Archangel	Demon	Element	Angel	Demon
East	Michael	Oriens	Fire	Seraph	Samael
South	Uriel	Amaymon	Air	Cherub	Azazel
West	Raphael	Paymon	Water	Tharsis	Azrael
North	Gabriel	Egyn	Earth	Ariel	Mahazael

There is an enormous amount more in his Medicina Catholica and Philosophia Sacra, but it shows that KK has cut us a considerable amount of slack in repositioning the Angels in the World of the Deryni and reattributing their attributes. Better safe than sorry?

What it does show is that the field is not clear as far as the malific is concerned: he shows those demons in various combinations as responsible for illness, and therefore it is quite possible for malific humans to draw on that power. This is the entire philosophy of witch-burning, after all. They're not drawing on some neutral gaiic force, they're drawing on a different and mutually intolerable source of power based on the inchoately-defeated demonic. Part of this was of human invention, true, in the early 15th Century when it became clear the Black Death was simply a taster of things to come, but some of those references are much older. I'll let you know what I get from the Warburg seminar at then end of the month.

That really pretty much covers the bases as far as secular interpretation is concerned: it's not correct in the creed of the time, right or wrong. Applying rationalism to it just doesn't work, the furthest you can go is the qualification that they were utterly deluded, but none the less this is what they believed and any interpretation of their writings must reflect it. You cannot invoke angels you don't believe in in establishing Shields. I'm only sorry I didn't have this to hand in the Guildhall seminar on the Tempest, as it places Shakespeare's Ariel, absolutely contemporary, quite definitively in the camp of Gabriel the messenger, master of codes and everything hermetic. As it is, Anthony Rooley (Schola Cantorum Basiliensis) is utterly persuaded that there is also an alchemical interpretation to be made in almost everything of this period. Indeed, my homework this week was on that exact subject - which reminds me, I must fly to get there on time. When my portal releases the source text, I'll also post Puteanus' slightly later alchemical table of planetary alignments with metals.

[Alkari]

Rahere, what you are essentially suggesting is that the Deryni won't be able to function at all in a later 'rational' world.  That in (say) 400 years their time when / if their world changes so that religion no longer plays such a centrol role, they won't be able to work their magic because they no longer have such deep beliefs in angels and archangels.   And perhaps that there could not be a functioning Deryni of another religion altogether, or - as tenworld suggested - a functioning atheist Deryni.   

It is perfectly true that the Deryni of that time call on the Archangels of the quarters in the warding process, but that is because it is an important part of their ritual.  Religion played a very central role in everyone's life at that time (12th century Gwynedd time for the Kelson books), and they honestly believed in these forces and the fact that these beings had the various powers or authorities.  

But the actual existence of the fantasy Deryni magical powers is independent of religion i.e. the powers themselves simply exist  (see Morgan's discussion with Dhugal in TBH), so calling on the archangels is basically a ritual that is relevant to the people of that time and their beliefs.  "Ritual" is most certainly not "Religion".   As the books make clear, the Deryni powers themselves, including the Haldane type potential for assuming them, are inherited - and even in KK's fantasy world, that requires biology and genetics, not religion       Jehana indeed believed that the powers were evil and anathema to the Church and religion - but that didn't prevent her from calling up those powers in a pretty spectacular way at Kelson's coronation  

it shows that KK has cut us a considerable amount of slack in repositioning the Angels in the World of the Deryni and reattributing their attributes

Perhaps that is because KK is creating a fantasy world, Rahere?  The Deryni and their magic are a fantasy creation!   Yes, KK draws very strongly on certain aspects of our world and its history, as of course do many other fantasy authors, but her Deryni world is NOT an exact and direct parallel to anything in our world.    So as a fantasy author, she can do whatever she likes in terms of "repositioning" the angels, archangels, and indeed anything else!  If it is necessary or desirable in her world, that's fine     She is writing Fantasy, not Real Life history.  

[Evie]

I think the thing that must be remembered is that we are discussing works of 20th/21st Century fantasy written by a modern writer (albeit one who is quite learned in medieval history and sticks to more historical accuracy than a lot of fantasy writers do...but NOT 100% slavish adherence to accuracy either!), and not histories written by actual medieval authors with a truly medieval mindset.  Yes, to fully understand medieval writings, whether they're about the arcane or the mundane, one must read those with an understanding of the medieval mindset, but the Deryni books are not medieval novels.  They are novels written about fantasy kingdoms that happen to be garbed in the trappings of the medieval period, and that happen to be depicted with a fair degree of historical accuracy (though with quite a bit of creative license tossed in when it comes to things such as clothing, education, tech level, etc. for the period she's depicting), so I don't expect that her magical theories and practices are going to line up 100% with what actual medievals might have believed and practiced, given that she's adapted history to serve the ends of Story in every other aspect of the novels.  And as she has taken such creative liberties in every other area (as do most fantasy novelists), why would she suddenly treat only the magical practices as if she is writing a wholly accurate dissertation only thinly disguised as fiction?

That's why I don't strain my brain too much to think about such things as how the physics behind Transfer Portals works, to give just one example.  KK has said herself that it was basically her fantasy equivalent to the Star Trek transporter technology; she needed some sort of plot device to get characters quickly from Point A to Point B.  So I doubt she spent hours trying to suss out the magical or scientific principles behind how it works.  It just works, because the Story demanded something of the sort, and voila, the Author obligingly tossed it into the plot.     Because KK is not out to teach real world history, arcane or otherwise, any more than any other 21st C. fantasy author is.  She uses enough of it to make her settings come alive and seem plausible, but she also has enough understanding of what the average 20th/21st Century reader knows and doesn't know of the period to be wise enough to know how much accuracy to put in to make her fantasy world come to life, and when it's time to check it at the door and just let Story be Story instead of an attempt at a history lesson (or, in this case, a treatise on actual medieval beliefs regarding magical practices and theory).

[Evie]

You cannot invoke angels you don't believe in in establishing Shields.

I might be more inclined to believe this if it weren't for Lady Kyri of the Flame, who is enough of a Deryni Adept to be on the Camberian Council, so let's hope she has managed to figure out some way to establish Shields, yet there's a scene or two where Kyri is depicted as being a skeptic on religious matters.  So at least in her case, it would seem that she must be invoking "Angels" in some symbolic sense rather than the purely literal, if she's not the sort who would be inclined to believe in literal angels.  And that's fine; in a purely fictional medieval-like world, genuinely medieval mindsets and rules need not apply.

[Alkari]

Possibly because Lady Kyri understands that the higher uses of Deryn powers require the practitioner to put himself/herself in a psychologially 'receptive' state of consciousness, but that this does not require religious belief.    

This is exactly what tenworld suggested earlier:  

I would substitute metal intensity for "spiritual dimension".  That is why very evil people like Wencit can perform high magic, and also why different rituals based on a persons's particular religion are possible.  I expect an atheiest could be a functioning Deryni.  religious beliefs make it more efficient to focus.  

The key is the practitioner's ability to enter the required state of consciousness for the working of magic.   In Lady Kyri's case, the angels could well be symbolic, but as symbols they still play an important part in the rituals to establish the necessary mental focus.

As KK herself expresses it in Deryni Magic:   "With few exceptions, the use of one's Deryni abilities must be learned, like any other skill - and some Deryni are more skilled and stronger than others.  Primary proficiencies have to do with balances - physical, psychic and spiritual - and mastering one's own body and perceptions.  All such control requires the ability to enter an "altered state" of consciousness, usually achieved by some form of meditation."