There were perhaps half a dozen humans in the entire place, but something in their posture made us not dare approach them. One came our way pushing a rusty cart exploding with wild helices of shaved metal.
“Excuse me,” I said, “is Cord here?”
The man turned and extended his hand toward something big and complicated that stood in the middle of the hall. Above it, the rational adrakhonic geometry of the roof-trusses and the infinitely more complex manifolds of swirling mist were magnified and made more than real by the sputtering blue light of electrical fire. If I saw a star of that color through a telescope, I would know it as a blue dwarf and I could guess its temperature: far hotter than our sun, hot enough that much of its energy was radiated as ultraviolet light and X-rays. But, paradoxically, the house-sized complex that was the source of the energy looked orange-red, with only a fringe of the killing radiance leaking out round edges or bouncing from slick places on the floor. As Jesry and I drew closer, we perceived it as a giant cube of red amber with two black forms trapped in it: not insects but humans. The humans shifted position from time to time, their silhouettes rippling and twisting.
We saw that this machine had been robed in a curtain of some red jelly-like matter suspended from an overhead track. The blue light could blast straight up and kill germs in the rafters but it could not range across the floor and blind people. Obviously to me and Jesry, the curtain was red because it had been formulated to let only low-energy light—which our eyes saw as red—pass through it. To high-energy light—which we saw as blue, if we could see it at all—it was as opaque as a steel plate.
We walked around the perimeter, which was about the size of two small shelter modules parked side by side. Through the red jelly-wall it was difficult to resolve fine details of the machine, but it seemed to have a slab-like table, big enough to sleep ten, that eased to and fro like a block of ice on a griddle. Planted in its center was a smaller, circular table that made quick but measured spins and tilts. Suspended above all of this, from a cast-iron bridge, was a mighty construct that moved up and down, and that carried the spark-gap where the light was born.
An arm of tubular steel was thrust forth from the apex of the bridge toward a platform where the two humans stood. Pendant from its end was a box folded together from sheet metal, which looked out of place; it was of a different order of things from the sand-cast iron. Glowing numbers were all over it. It must be full of syntactic processors that measured what the machine was doing, or controlled it. Or both; for a true syntactic processor would have the power to make decisions based on measurements. Of course my thought was to turn away and get out of the room. But Jesry was rapt. “It’s okay, it’s Apert!” he said, and grabbed my arm to turn me back around.
One of the two humans inside said something about the x-axis. Jesry and I looked at each other in astonishment, just to be sure we’d actually heard such a thing. It was like hearing a fry cook speak Middle Orth.
Other fragments came through above the sputtering of the machine: “Cubic spline.” “Evolute.” “Pylanic interpolation.”
We could not keep our eyes off the banks of red numbers on the front of the syntactic processor. They were always changing. One was a clock counting down in hundredths of a second. Others—as we gradually perceived—reflected the position of the table. They were literal transcriptions of the great table’s x and y position, the angles of rotation and tilt of the smaller table in the middle, and the altitude of the sizzling blaster. Sometimes all would freeze except for one—this signaled a simple linear move. Other times they would all change at once, realizing a system of parametric equations.
Jesry and I watched it for half an hour without speaking another word. Mostly I was trying to make sense of how the numbers changed. But also I was thinking of how this place was similar in many respects to the Mynster with its sacred clock in the center, in its well of light.
Then the clock struck, as it were. The countdown stopped at zero and the light went out.
Cord reached up and threw back the curtain. She peeled off a pair of black goggles, and raised one arm to wipe her brow on her sleeve.
The man standing next to her—who I gathered was the customer—was dressed in loose black trousers and a black long-sleeved pullover, with a black skullcap on his head. Jesry and I realized at the same moment what he was. We were dumbstruck.
Likewise, the Ita saw what we were, and took half a step back. His long black beard avalanched down his chest as his mouth fell open. But then he did something remarkable, which was that he mastered the reflex to cringe and scuttle away from us, which had been drilled into him since birth. He thought better of that half-step back. He resumed his former stance, and—hard to believe, but Jesry and I agreed on this later—glared at us.
Not knowing how to handle this, Jesry and I backed away and stood out of earshot while Cord did one small quick necessary chore after another, celebrating some aut of shutting down the machine and making it ready for re-use.
The Ita peeled off his skullcap—which was how they covered their heads when they were among their own kind—and drew it out into the slightly mushroomed stovepipe that they wore when they were out and about so that we could identify them from a distance. He then set this back on his head while sending another defiant look our way.
Just as we would never let the Ita come into the chancel, he saw it as sacrilege that we would come here. As if we were guilty of a profanation.
Perhaps obeying a similar impulse, Jesry and I hooded ourselves.
It was almost as if, far from chafing under the stereotype of the sneaky, scheming, villainous Ita, this one was embracing it—taking pride in it, and pushing it as far as he could without actually talking to us.
As we waited for Cord and the Ita to conclude their business, I kept thinking of all the ways that this place was similar to the Mynster: for example, how I had been taken aback when I’d stepped into the hall, so dark and so light at the same time. A voice in my head—the voice of a Procian pedant—admonished me that this was a Halikaarnian way of thinking. For in truth I was looking at a collection of ancient machines that had no meaning: all syntax, no semantics. I was claiming I saw a meaning in it. But this meaning had no reality, outside of my mind. I had brought it into the hall with me, carrying it in my head, and now I was playing games with semantics by pasting it onto these iron monuments.
But the longer I thought about it, the more certain I became that I was having a legitimate upsight.
Protas, the greatest fid of Thelenes, had climbed to the top of a mountain near Ethras and looked down upon the plain that nourished the city-state and observed the shadows of the clouds, and compared their shapes. He had had his famous upsight that while the shapes of the shadows undeniably answered to those of the clouds, the latter were infinitely more complex and more perfectly realized than the former, which were distorted not only by the loss of a spatial dimension but also by being projected onto terrain that was of irregular shape. Hiking back down, he had extended that upsight by noting that the mountain seemed to have a different shape every time he turned round to look back at it, even though he knew it had but one absolute form and that these seeming changes were mere figments of his shifting point of view. From there he had moved on to his greatest upsight of all, which was that these two observations—the one concerning the clouds, the other concerning the mountain—were themselves both shadows cast into his mind by the same greater, unifying idea. Returning to the Periklyne he had proclaimed his doctrine that all the things we thought we knew were shadows of more perfect things in a higher world. This had become the essential doctrine of Protism. If Protas could be respected for saying so, then what was wrong with me thinking that our Mynster, and this machine hall, were both shadows of some higher thing that existed elsewhere—a sacred place of which they were both shadows, and that cast other shadows in such places as Bazian arks and groves of ancient trees?
Jesry meanwhile had been staring at Cord’s mac
hine. Cord had manipulated some controls that had caused the lightning-head to retract as far up as it would go and the table to thrust itself forward. She vaulted up onto that steel slab. In small premeditated steps she came to the part of it that tilted and rotated (which, by itself, was a machine of impressive size). Before resting her weight on a foot she would wiggle it to and fro, scattering shards and twists of silver metal to either side. They made glinting music as they found their way to the floor, and some left corkscrews of fine smoke along their paths. A helper approached with an empty cart, a broom, and a shovel, and began pushing the scraps into a pile.
“It carves the metal from a block,” Jesry said. “Not with a blade but with an electrical discharge that melts the stuff away—”
“More than melts. Remember the color of the light?” I said. “It turns the metal to—”
“Plasma,” we said in unison, and Jesry went on: “It just carves off all the bits that aren’t wanted.”
This raised the question of what was wanted? The answer was clamped to the top of the rotating table: a sculpture of silver metal, flowing and curved like an antler, swelling in places to knobs pierced by perfect cylindrical holes. Cord drew a wrench from the thing she was wearing, which seemed more harness than garment, as its chief purpose was to secure tools to her body. She released three vises, put the wrench back in its ordained pocket, threw back her shoulders, bent her knees, made her spine long, raised her hands, and clasped them around two prongs of this thing she had made. It came up off the table. She carried it down off the machine as if it were a cat rescued from a tree and set it upon a steel cart that looked older than a mountain. The Ita ran his hands over it. His tall hat turned this way and that as he bent to inspect certain details. Then he nodded and exchanged a few words with Cord and pushed the cart off into smoke and quiet.
“It’s a part for the clock!” Jesry said. “Something must have broken or worn out down in the cellar!”
I agreed that the style of the thing reminded me of some parts of the clock, but I shushed him because I was more interested in Cord just now. She was walking toward us, almost but not quite stepping on strewn shards of metal, wiping her hands on a rag. Her hair was cut short. I thought at first that she was tall, perhaps because that was how I remembered her. In truth she was no taller than I. She seemed stocky with all that hardware strapped to her, but her neck and forearms were firm. She drew to within a couple of paces and clanked to a stop and planted herself. She had a quite solid and deliberate manner of standing. She seemed as though she could sleep standing up, like a horse.
“I guess I know who you are,” she said to me, “but what is your name?”
“Erasmas, now.”
“Is that the name of an old Saunt?”
“That’s right.”
“I never did get that old fetch to run.”
“I know. I just saw it.”
“Took part of it here, to be machined, and never left.” She gazed at the palm of her right hand, then looked up at me. I understood this to mean “my hand is dirty but I will shake it if you please.”
I extended my hand and clasped hers.
The sound of bells drifted in.
“Thank you for letting us see your machine,” I said. “Would you care to see ours? That’s Provener. Jesry and I have to go wind the clock.”
“I went to Provener one time.”
“Today, you can see it from where we see it. Bon Apert.”
“Bon Apert,” she returned. “Okay, what the heck, I’ll come see it.”
We had to run across the meadow. Cord had left her big tool-harness behind at the machine hall, only to reveal a smaller, vestlike one that I guessed held the stuff she’d not be without under any circumstances. When we broke into a run, she clanked and jounced for a few paces until she cinched down some straps, and then she was able to keep pace with us as we rushed through the clover. Our meadow had been colonized by Saeculars who were having midday picnics. Some were even grilling meat. They watched us run by as if our being late were a performance for their amusement. Children were chivvied forward for a better view. Adults trained speelycaptors on us and laughed out loud to see us caring so much.
We came in the meadow door, ran up stairs into a wardroom where stacks of dusty pews and altars were shoved against the walls, and nearly tripped over Lio and Arsibalt. Lio was sitting on the floor with his legs doubled under him. Arsibalt sat on a short bench, knees far apart, leaning forward so that the blood streaming from his nostrils would puddle neatly on the floor.
Lio’s lip was puffy and bleeding. The flesh around his left eye was ochre, suggesting it would be black tomorrow. He was staring into a dim corner of the room. Arsibalt let out a shuddering moan, as if he’d been sobbing, and was just now managing it.
“Fight?” I asked.
Lio nodded.
“Between the two of you or—”
Lio shook his head.
“We were set upon!” Arsibalt proclaimed, shouting at his blood-puddle.
“Intra or extra?” Jesry demanded.
“Extramuros. We were en route to my pater’s basilica. I wished only to learn whether he would speak to me. A vehicle drove by once, twice, thrice. It circled us like a lowering raptor. Four men emerged. One had his arm in a sling; he looked on and cheered the other three.”
Jesry and I both looked at Lio, who took our meaning immediately.
“Useless. Useless,” he said.
“What was useless?” Cord asked. The sound of her voice caused Arsibalt to look up.
Lio was not the sort to care that we had a visitor—but he did answer her question. “My vlor. All of the Vale-lore I have ever studied.”
“It can’t have been that bad!” Jesry exclaimed. Which was funny since, over the years, no one had been more persistent than Jesry in telling Lio how useless his vlor was.
By way of an answer Lio rolled to his feet, glided over, grasped the edge of Jesry’s hood, and yanked it down over his face. Not only was Jesry now blind, but because of how the bolt was wound around his body, it interfered with his arms and made it surprisingly difficult for him to expose his face again. Lio gave him the tiniest of nudges and he lost his balance so badly that I had to hug him and force him upright.
“That’s what they did to you?” I asked. Lio nodded.
“Tilt your head back, not forward,” Cord was saying to Arsibalt. “There’s a vein up here.” She pointed to the bridge of her nose. “Pinch it. That’s right. My name is Cord, I am a sib of…Erasmas.”
“Enchanted,” Arsibalt said, muffled by his hand, as he had taken Cord’s advice. “I am Arsibalt, bastard of the local Bazian arch-prelate, if you can believe such a thing.”
“The bleeding is slowing down, I think,” Cord said. From one of her pockets she had drawn out a pair of purple wads which unfolded to gloves of some stretchy membranous stuff. She wiggled her hands into them. I was baffled for a few moments, then realized that this was a precaution against infection: something I never would have thought of.
“Fortunately, my blood supply is simply enormous, because of my size,” Arsibalt pointed out, “otherwise, I fear I should exsanguinate.”
Some of Cord’s pockets were narrow and tall and ranked in neat rows. From two of these she drew out blunt plugs of white fibrous stuff, about the size of her little finger, with strings trailing from them. “What on earth are those?” Arsibalt wanted to know.
“Blood soaker-uppers,” Cord said, “one for each nostril, if you would like.” She gave them over into Arsibalt’s gory hands, and watched, a little bit nervous and a little bit fascinated, as Arsibalt gingerly put them in. Lio, Jesry, and I looked on speechless.
Suur Ala came in with an armload of rags, most of which she threw on the floor to cover the blood-puddle. She and Cord used the rest to wipe the blood off Arsibalt’s lips and chins. The whole time, they were appraising each other, as if in a competition to see which was the scientist and which was the specimen. By the time I g
ot my wits about me to make introductions, they knew so much about each other that names hardly mattered.
From yet another pocket Cord produced a complex metal thing all folded in on itself. She evoluted it into a miniature scissors, which she used to snip off the strings dangling from Arsibalt’s nostrils.
So bossy, so stern a person was Suur Ala that, until this moment, I had feared that she and Cord were going to fall upon each other like two cats in a pillowcase. But when she drew focus on those blood soaker-uppers, she gave Cord a happy look which Cord returned.
We frog-marched Arsibalt out of there, hid his carnage under a huge scarlet robe, and came out for Provener only a few minutes late. We were greeted by titters from some who assumed we’d been extramuros getting drunk. Most of these wags were Apert visitors, but I heard amusement even from the Thousanders. I was expecting that Jesry and I would have to do most of the work, but, on the contrary, Lio and Arsibalt pushed with far more than their usual strength.
After Provener, the Warden Fendant crossed the chancel and came through our screen to interview Lio and Arsibalt. Jesry and I stood off to one side. Cord stood close and listened. This influenced Lio to use a lot of Fluccish, to the annoyance of Fraa Delrakhones. Arsibalt, on the other hand, kept using words like rapscallions.
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