Though we are more concerned with the Wave itself than the Philosophy that created it, it would distort our subject to ignore his sublime calculation.15 In an age disfigured by War, its beauty is too seldom mentioned.

Bernoulli’s maps were a boon for Concord’s soldiers, but that was accidental; Bernoulli had surveyed Etruria’s plentiful rivers to learn their secrets. And learn he did, discovering that apparently random undulations were no such thing: as rivers travel from source to sea, friction causes erosion, which causes winding, even as land tilt, gravity, and momentum carry them forward. This contest between order and disorder was governed by a certain ratio.16

From the hour of this discovery, Bernoulli’s study changed course too, to focus on all things governed by Chance.17 The Curia’s inconsistent mathematicians thought and taught that Perfect Numbers occurred as randomly as the stars fret Heaven, but Bernoulli soon proved that they were governed by the same ratio that governed his rivers. He appears to have found religious significance in the fact that every Perfect Number has a negative twin, “a fallen angel” forever seeking its reflection’s annihilation.18

So by happenstance foundations were laid. Likewise, Bernoulli’s earlier work on Harmonics, Number-theory, and Time proved a vital springboard for the leap from Wave Theory to Wave Technology, a happy confluence that no one, the unworldly young boy least of all, predicted.19

Unleashing the Wave would be simple enough now that he had a unifying system. The remaining problem, he told the Senate, was how not to destroy Concord along with Rasenna, and after seven years’ toil this last minor inconvenience was surmounted.

The Wave struck Rasenna, dividing her forever, and the example of that great city brought low was sufficient to shatter the Southern League.20 Yet for Senator Tremellius and his party there would be no laurels; while the Engineers succeeded in controlling most of the Wave’s physical effects, the Senators took the brunt of the political storm unleashed in Concord.