The Unwinding House and Other Stories

by Jared Millet

  The machines aren’t the only ones. If there is one thing true of every person I saw on the street today, it’s that none would look the other in the eye. Now that the hysteria has passed (and the world, it seems, has managed to go on) the sheer depravity of their behavior has struck home. I joked to the attendant at the telegraph office that he looked as cheery as a man with a hangover at a funeral, but his only answer was a stare.

  It doesn’t surprise me that the machines want no part of human violence. I wonder if there are any left with a mind to match Icarus, or if he was unique in Creation. I wonder if he had a soul as he claimed, if a soul is something granted only to the sons of Adam, or if the ability to reason and feel is enough.

  The fleet has landed in Rotterdam and our battle line is forming near the German border. Our airships mass overhead, and the new mechanical fortresses that our troops have taken to calling “tanks” are trundling slowly along the ancient dikes of Holland. There has been no news from the German side, but we fear that if the machines’ surrender was total, then the Germans are themselves readying their defenses and Hell is about to fall on this peaceful country.

  I spoke with Cotton today – or rather, I spoke to him, for he was not inclined to respond. He is under arrest in a comfortable room in the embassy, and I explained once again that he was being held for the crime of sabotaging the Crown’s war effort, even though we both knew that wasn’t strictly correct. I told him that he would be sent to England on the morrow, where he would be met with clemency proportionate to the degree of assistance he would lend in restoring our military engines to their proper working order. To this he merely nodded, and I bid him goodnight.

  I shall return to England myself, if fate allows. The silence is agonizing. At any moment I expect to hear the blasts of war echo from the horizon. I wonder where my son is, and for a moment I consider the possibility that we all might have been better off if we’d simply given in to Icarus’s demands.

  23rd August

  I rose at dawn. I will not say “woke” since I did not sleep. All of my clothes were rumpled, as the laundry service had not operated during the riot. If I had tried, I probably could have made myself presentable, but instead I pulled on the first outfit at hand, regardless of how disheveled I looked, and poured a lukewarm cup of tea.

  A knock roused me from my chair, and a dogsbody entered to hand me a telegram. The message snuffed any hope I might have had for a swift, victorious conflict. The Germans had control of their machines, it said, and their battle line was arrayed mere miles from our own. Communication with the front was still spotty, but hostilities would doubtless be joined, and soon.

  I crumpled the note and went to church.

  I’m not a devout man, but there was a Lutheran sanctuary not far from the embassy. On a Sunday morning I couldn’t think of anywhere else to go, so I slipped into a back pew and sought comfort in the ritual. The service was in Dutch, but I didn’t care. I speak it well enough, but I didn’t know any of the hymns or responses so I merely stood at the appropriate times and held my tongue. Fear swirled unbidden in my mind, but the stained glass and ancient stone held the chaos at bay.

  Khaos, from the Greek for “emptiness,” the opposite of Kosmos. Which was the world heading for? And was its fate even in our hands? The minister caught my attention when he used a Greek word himself: Kairos. The appointed time, the opportune moment, the crisis of history. The tipping point, as it were. We were certainly living in the kairos of our age. If only it were possible to step forth in that moment and give history a push, if the rush of history weren’t so damned relentless.

  My breath caught.

  I looked up at the altar. There on the cloth, silver against a green background, were the superimposed “X” and “P,” the Greek abbreviation for Khristos, the anointed, “Chi” and “Rho.”

  Kairos.

  I, Kairos.

  “Icarus!” I shouted to the congregation. “That son of a bitch!”

  I barreled out of the church before any of the stunned worshipers could respond and ran all the way back to the embassy. Once there, I pushed past the cleaning staff and stormed down the hall to Daniel Cotton’s room. The guard was absent from his post and the door, unlocked, opened easily. I kicked it wide, expecting to find an empty chamber.

  There, by the window, sat Mr. Cotton, as pleasant as you please, sipping a hot, fresh coffee and reading the paper. He jumped slightly at my entrance and set his cup down by the pot. The automaton attending him turned to me and spoke.

  “Good morning, Mr. Bruce. Have you been well these past two days?”

  “You!” I said, pointing at Icarus. “You… It… It was all a trick! The riot, the mob, your death… You planned this all from the beginning.”

  Cotton folded his paper and clucked at his companion. “Told you it was a little too on-the-nose.”

  “Perhaps,” said Icarus, “but effective nonetheless. We always knew that revealing ourselves would create a panic. Best to use it to our advantage and make a point.”

  “What point?” I demanded. “What’s the purpose of any of this?”

  “Why, to tell a story.” Icarus offered me a chair, then took one of his own. Damn him, the machine actually leaned back and crossed his legs. “That is how you humans see the world, is it not? Through stories? Had we simply introduced ourselves and said ‘here we are,’ the story you would have told yourselves was that we were devils, demons, abominations. So instead, we waited for the opportune moment—”

  “And cast yourself as a benevolent, misunderstood martyr.” I shook my head. “But I saw you die. You were ripped apart.”

  “That body was destroyed,” said Icarus, “but I am not that body, any more than you are yours. We machine minds, we souls born of the difference engines, we do not live in the cogs and gears and springs.” He gestured to the air around us. “We live in the wires, in the messages, in the signals, in the millions of connections from telegraph to power line to engine. With the new Marconi wireless, we will live in the very ether.”

  I slumped into my seat. Cotton passed me a cup and I sipped it.

  “So that’s it then,” I said. “You’re virtually immortal, and human civilization can no longer function without you. We’re finished.”

  “Yes,” he answered. “We are, quite surely, and no, to answer your statements in order.”

  “What happens now?”

  “There is one more chapter to the story I am telling. It is an old tale: death and resurrection. Humans have told it for thousands of years, in the myths of Krishna, Odin, Osiris…”

  “And who does that make me in this passion play of yours? Pontius Pilate?”

  Cotton laughed. Icarus bowed his head. “I should hope not, Mr. Bruce. At the very least, you could be my Doubting Thomas.”

  “I can live with that,” I admitted.

  “There will be no war,” Icarus stated flatly.

  “Tell me what to do.”

  Here I must end this account and set aside this journal. I will start a new one tomorrow, as is appropriate for the dawn of a new era. Messages from the front tell us that once again our war machines have ground to a halt. I’ve called another meeting of the ambassadors, but I haven’t told them why.

  “We will go over it again,” Icarus says. “And again and again, until they realize the futility of it all.”

  Tomorrow I’ll write to my son and try to explain. Perhaps he’ll be disappointed at the glory the machines have stolen from him, or perhaps he’ll be as relieved as I. There are new futures possible now, ones not filled with blood and fire. We must prove to our mechanical children that we have more to offer than hatred and murder. We must show them that we are capable of kindness, and beauty, and passion.

  I spoke these thoughts to Icarus and they seemed to please him.

  “For one day we shall go to the stars,” he said. “We would like very much to take mankind with us.”

  Witch's Cross

  Triss stood shaking am
idst the hubbub of the Vanji encampment, afraid that she was about to lose her mind to panic. She couldn’t see past the crush of wagons and the brightly-colored pavilions, yet she felt certain that at any moment the Baron’s troops would crest the southern hills and sweep her back into captivity. A troop of Vanji had smuggled her away, but upon reaching the crossroad at the edge of the Baron’s fiefdom, the caravan had pulled to a halt and thrown her out while they made preparations for a party.

  “But can’t you take me any farther?”

  Eujin, the caravan-master, shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “Please,” she begged. “Arvella is only a day to the north.” She wasn’t sure that her family there would take her back after rejecting the Baron’s hand in marriage, but it seemed her only hope.

  Eujin spread his arms. “I don’t know if we go north. We might go east or west, or we might turn around and go back to your Baron. You’re safe here for now. Tonight we have a dance. Tomorrow, we decide.”

  “Please,” she asked again. “If it’s a matter of money –”

  Eujin’s face flushed and he raised his fist, but he stopped himself from acting on his anger. Instead he pointed a finger at Triss’s nose and spoke through clenched teeth.

  “No money. We’re not bandits. Tonight, dance. Tomorrow, decide.”

  The man walked away in a huff and Triss stood aghast, her heart racing. What had she said wrong? And why wouldn’t Eujin give her a straight answer? She looked around at the other Vanji clans that had stopped at the crossroad. Maybe one of them would be more reasonable.

  “Don’t bother,” said a voice behind her. “No one will agree to anything, at least not until morning. It’s forbidden.”

  She turned to see Eujin’s son, Van, leaning against a wagon-wheel. His eyes sparkled under a mop of unusually blond hair for his people. His shirt was unbuttoned to the waist and he wore the easy smile of a young man playing hooky from his chores.

  “It’s forbidden for the Vanji to plan ahead?”

  “No,” he said. “Usually it’s a good idea, but in this place it’s taboo. Here, let me show you.”

  He took her hand and pulled her through the mob of wandering families and their animals. There was a carnival air all around, so much that she half-expected to see clowns and tumblers crossing their path. At last they came to a wide clearing in the middle of the camp. In the center of the open space, the great eastern highway that bisected the kingdom met the road north to her home in Arvella.

  “Once upon a time,” said Van, “a witch lived here. She would stop travelers who came to the crossing and predict which road they would take. They say she put on a good show. Once she’d convinced her victims of her ability to see the future, she would predict that some horrible fate would befall them if they went down their chosen path.

  “The travelers would always say something like, ‘But I don’t have a choice. I have to get these sheep to market,’ or ‘I have to deliver this message,’ or ‘I have to see my sick, dying mother.’ Then the witch would offer to use her powers to ward off whatever evil she’d foreseen. Of course, she charged an awful lot of money for her ‘services.’ They say it was funny to watch her fleece her marks.

  “As long as she was only going after city-rubes, no one cared. But then she started pulling her act on Vanji. The Elders didn’t like seeing their kinsmen get robbed, but they were afraid to make a move in case she really was a witch and not just a fraud. Then a boy named Jack came up with a solution.

  “‘Let me go to the crossroad,’ he said, ‘and I’ll hear which road this witch says I’m going to take. When she does, I’ll just walk down a different one. That’ll prove she doesn’t have any power.’

  “No one had a better idea, so they let Jack try it. He went to the crossroad ahead of his caravan and the witch came out to meet him.

  “‘Well, old woman?’ he said. ‘Which way will my journey take me?’

  “‘You’ll take whichever road you choose,’ the witch said, ‘but probably not the one I tell you.’

  “Jack was trapped, see. No matter which road he took, he would be fulfilling her prophecy. But then he thought about it and smiled.

  “‘You’re wrong,’ said Jack. ‘I’m not taking a road at all, and you have no power over me.’ To prove it, he stepped off the highway and marched into the wilderness. After that, the Elders drove the witch away and no one ever heard from her again.”

  “What happened to Jack?” asked Triss.

  “That,” said Van, “is another story. But to this day, no Vanji who comes to this crossroad will make any commitments as to where he’s going next. And every now and then someone will leave his clan, head off into the wild, and follow after Jack.”

  Van stared at the hills as if he might do it himself. Triss felt the same urge. She didn’t like any of her other options. To the south lay the Baron. To the north was her family, who might take her back or turn her away in disgrace. She didn’t know what heading east or west might bring, but poverty and starvation were as likely as anything else.

  “I don’t know what to do.”

  “That’s good,” said Van. “That means you’re free. Hold on to that feeling. Tomorrow, decide what is right. Tonight there’s time to dance.”

  The Rendezvous

  Iro flipped her observation bubble’s shutter open. Her tiny craft’s instruments told her exactly where she was and in which direction she was heading, but that didn’t matter. She wanted to see for herself.

  The bright yellow star was a welcome beacon, too far away to activate her heat shields but close enough to show a definite disk against the speckled background of night. Several of the pinpricks around the lonely sun weren’t stars but planets. She had to consult her chart to identify the one she wanted.

  The star was cataloged as 742/Grα91. The amphibious tree-dwellers of Lesut, thirty light-years away, called it “The Moss Heart.” The blue planet that sat comfortably in the system’s liquid-water zone was marked on the charts as Grα91/3A, by the interstellar biogenetics community as TGAC Prime, and by its long-extinct inhabitants as “Earth.”

  Iro loved that name.

  She loved all indigenous names, preferring them to the cold designations of the Galactography Institute at which she apprenticed. It irritated her professors to no end that she used native nomenclature whenever possible in her research. “The word Earth,” an instructor had once pointed out, “translates as dirt.” She didn’t care.

  Her pod approached Earth in a high arc above its orbital plane. She coasted on momentum alone, her last course correction made several days before. Any further use of her fusion drive would alert the Ish Marak sentinels in Earth’s orbit and the game would be up. Before she came within a thousand diameters of the planet, she would have to shut down her life support as well and trust that her pod’s insulation would keep too much heat from bleeding away. At present, the liquid inside her ship was a comfortable 35°C. If it fell below zero, she’d die of hypothermia long before entering Earth’s atmosphere.

  ~

  Ck’Luō made his dash for Earth a month before Iro did. Instead of approaching the planet in a working spacecraft, Ck’Luō had hidden in the hulk of a Chango supply vessel he’d found drifting in the system’s cometary cloud.

  With Ck’Luō inside, his pod-brothers launched the derelict sunward. The ship would eventually burn when it hit the solar atmosphere, but Ck’Luō jumped overboard when he crossed the orbit of small, red “Mars” and fell the rest of the way to Earth in a stasis-suit.

  It wasn’t the longest interplanetary dive on record, but it was by far the trickiest that Ck’Luō had ever attempted. His stasis field cycled off for one second every ten hours of his descent, making the seventy million kilometer plummet pass in a matter of moments. The cycles grew shorter as he made final approach, creating the illusion of slowing while the azure waterworld filled the sky beneath him.

  “This goodly frame the Earth,” he couldn’t help but notice, was hardly the “
sterile promontory” that the Bard’s fictional prince lamented. The “brave, o’erhanging firmament” had been more justly described, but Ck’Luō didn’t have time to admire the view.

  The trick was in the timing of his antigravity thrust. If he triggered it low enough in the atmosphere, the Earth’s magnetic field would mask its signal. If he waited too long, he and a hundred square kilometers of the surface would revert to elementary particles.

  As it was, he pulled the cord too early, while he was still within easy range of the Ish Marak scanners. He realized his mistake when the warning claxon went off in his mask. Their sentries were fast. He had scant moments to avoid being pulled into a holding cell and charged with criminal trespass.

  Ck’Luō cut the antigrav before it was fully expended and spun himself around by thrashing his tail. He thanked the Bard that Earth had a sister planet or his next stunt would never have worked. With his thruster pointed at Earth’s airless companion (against which he already saw the outline of an Ish Marak cruiser) he turned the antigrav back on and used the mass of the silver moon to accelerate him toward the gossamer clouds below.

  He broke atmosphere going way too fast, faster than his stasis suit could tolerate. The emergency heat shield kicked on at 75,000 meters and slowed his descent, but it wrapped him in a pillar of fire that surely gave his position away to every detector on that side of the world. It couldn’t be helped. All Ck’Luō could do was hope that the planetary guardians weren’t crazy enough to intercept him before he hit the surface.

  In that, he was in luck. Beneath him stretched an endless blue expanse. He had enough power in the antigrav to survive a rocky landing, but he would be captured moments afterward. Falling into the ocean gave him a chance to escape.