Memory Seed

by Stephen Palmer

  ‘Hello? Is anybody here? I am deKray and I am not armed.’

  There was no reply.

  ‘I am a Krayan.’

  Nothing. He cast his gaze again over the room. Decor was a clever mixture of Krayan, jannitta and aamlon, the style of each culture limited to its most appropriate objects; so there were jannitta fabrics looking like miniaturised stained glass, made with real gold and silver thread, aamlon musician paintings, Krayan couches with curly sides and carved human feet. DeKray saw that one of these had real toenails, indicating antiquity.

  He opened one of the cupboards and found fresh linen. Others contained pillows, writing implements and balls of soap. Clearly the place was meant to be occupied.

  He ascended the third set of steps. The fourth chamber, like the others, was one space as wide as the tower with steps on the opposite side. It was filled with pyuters.

  Ribbons fell from the roof. Of various sizes, they were strung from spherical memory units, their lower ends connected to a hundred interlinked units arranged in a broken annulus at floor level, the space allowing access to the steps. All except one were switched off, the one exception showing a screen of rainbow static.

  Warily, deKray examined the pyuters. There were all sorts; old and new, optical and biological, some even solid state. But it did not feel like a museum. It was a centre in which everything was placed to perform some task.

  DeKray went to the active unit and played the dot of a laser scribe over its eyeball. The pyuter activated itself. He looked around, suspicious. There was no dust here, he noticed; but then he caught sight of extractor fans and a thermostat.

  The pyuter displayed an opening screen. He ran the scribe over it, accessed some routines, but a sense of distrust held him back, and after some meanderings he decided to explore the rest of the tower before beginning any data search.

  He mentally divided the Clocktower, deciding that there were two floors left.

  He ascended the stairs to the fifth floor and found himself amidst another machine that filled the room, a machine which looked to him like a cross between scaffolding and a jellyfish. The device seemed to have been constructed by melting something else. The dominant impression obtained was one of buoyancy. But he received no clues as to what it was: no screens, no plans, no keys. As he ventured through its excrescences he noticed connections between it and the next floor up. He made for the steps.

  He called ‘Hello?’ again, and again there came no answer.

  The sixth floor was the top floor. Immediately he noticed the clock, an illuminated disc as large as him, but reversed. Screens of muslin stretched on wood sectioned off various parts of the floor. He noticed pyuter screens flickering with information. The light was white, emanating from hexagonal panels in the wall.

  From behind a length of screen a noise sounded. DeKray stood rigid, listening. He heard tinkles and scratchings.

  He inched around the wall. A dais came into view, devices on angle-arms hanging over it like the limbs of a technological mantis. All around stood pyuter screens.

  Then he saw a woman working at a pyuter. She was tall and young, and dressed in a white surgeon’s smock. Upon her ears lay headphones, over one eye was screwed a magnifying lens. She turned and, seeing deKray, took off her headphones with a smile. ‘I say, there you are.’

  DeKray said nothing in response. There did not seem to be anything he could say to this greeting. The woman’s face seemed familiar, but he could not place it. A surgeon...

  ‘Are you compos mentis, dear?’ she asked him.

  DeKray approached. ‘Indeed I am,’ he said. Then he saw, as more of the room came into view, another dais attached to the main one, upon which lay a sleeping infant. It was naked and he noticed that it was a boy. He stared for some time.

  ‘He’s all right,’ said the woman, glancing at the infant. ‘He look wrong?’

  ‘No,’ deKray answered. He was experiencing every moment as it came, not evaluating.

  ‘Do you have the device?’ the woman asked.

  ‘Which device would that be?’

  ‘I say, snap to it, the copper one,’ said the woman, forming her hands into a ovoid shape. ‘From the grave.’ She popped out the eyepiece and pulled the infant’s dais towards the main one. They snapped together, as though aware of what they were supposed to do.

  DeKray remembered the object he had found in the Cemetery, and pulled it out of his pocket. He proffered it, aware that it could now fall out of his control.

  ‘Let’s try,’ said the woman. She clipped the copper pear into a receptor. The various machines and arms swung into new positions, into a spherical halo surrounding the infant. Now deKray noticed a plastic cap covering the infant’s scalp, almost the same colour as his skin, and under that what seemed to be wriggling worms.

  ‘What intentions do you have for the boy?’ he asked.

  ‘Testosterone sacs, as planned. They’ll last until puberty. We want a huge swing to the right.’ The woman paused. ‘Goddess, if the Portreeve could see me now she’d have me interrogated beneath Gugul Street.’

  She carried on setting up the machines. DeKray watched, then said, ‘What will the sacs do, precisely?’

  ‘Say, you really need to be sure, don’t you? We want neuron development to the right, don’t we, so there grows a synthesising holistic brain? You can’t have holism and reductionism. No, dear, the two aren’t compatible.’

  ‘Most assuredly true,’ deKray replied. ‘Molecules make a green thing but there are no green molecules.’

  ‘Indeed, there are not.’

  Machines closed on the infant, shuffled around the scalp for five minutes, then drew back.

  ‘It’s done,’ said the woman. She took the copper pear and put it in her pocket.

  DeKray, disturbed, moved away from the operating table. ‘I do believe that I am looking at myself,’ he said.

  ‘You are. By offering yourself the gift of holistic vision you are allowing yourself the insight required to do what you have to do. Though you may not be aware of what it is you have done.’

  ‘What is it that you have done?’ deKray asked.

  ‘I do not know everything. Nobody does. But I have granted you the ability to understand, on some level at least, the nature of humanity’s fate. You are a lynchpin of humanity. You already know you have a connection with the Cowhorn Tower – you are the same age. The Cowhorn Tower, being self-learning, will create itself, just as I – we – this night have created you.’ The woman turned to look at the infant. ‘Go now and live your life.’

  ‘Why is it that I feel we have met before?’ deKray asked.

  ‘What is the past for you may be the future for me. I suspect this may be the nature of the Clocktower.’ The woman looked around at the tower walls. ‘This place will ever be a mystery.’

  ‘But why are you here?’

  ‘Well, you see, I was once the surgeon to the Red Brigade. A rather young surgeon, in fact. The problem was that I had some strange ideas, and the Red Brigade do not like strange ideas. I believed that humanity could save itself. The Red Brigade believed they could be saved by others. Exposed as a freethinker – worse, as a freethinker who dared to explore the mystery of the Clocktower – I was exiled. My dear, the origins of the Clocktower are too ancient for any of us to fathom. But its workings... its workings...’

  Her story ended. Taking the infant in her arms and dressing him in a woolly coat, she walked to the stairs. ‘I’ve done my bit. Here, anyway. And don’t try to stop me. I must say, having to walk now all the way up to the Carmine Quarter really is a bit of an inconvenience.’

  DeKray wanted to stop the woman, but he could not. He dared not interfere with what he had seen, in this place of all places. Instead he watched as she bent to pick up something from the floor – a copper needle, it looked like – then listened to her clattering down flights of steps, until the sound was too faint to hear. He stood for fifteen minutes, gazing at the machinery, turning over the events that
he had observed in his mind. They did not yet make sense.

  And he was tired. Hours of exploration, during which he had repressed signals from his body, had taken their toll. With a smile he remembered the suite on the third floor. He walked down, withdrew food and water, and lay on a couch to eat.

  He returned to the pyuter room and explored for a while the data spaces and organisational routines. One routine in particular struck him – a screen filled only with a picture of the Cowhorn Tower, its cursor a flashing copper pear. Every measurement and every detail was included, even down to the colour of the smooth carpets. The potential for making the tower lay before him. This program would learn from its environment as it built. Too tempted, deKray activated the initiation procedure. The screen flickered off, but he knew he had set the routines in motion. He laughed; it was the most sophisticated toy he had ever seen.

  He decided it was time to leave. He knew Zinina would be angry. Descending the tower, he buttoned himself up and took the helmet from his waistband, wiping off the smeared green with a tissue. He opened the door, saw night outside, and departed.

  He took caution following the back alleys and passages of the Old Quarter. Here, at the bottom of what once were gardens, care was required, for the smallest vibration could detonate the sensitive compost heaps that had accumulated to massive proportions.

  Back at Clodhoddle Cottage he took off his protectives and boots in the green zone, then went to pour a glass of water in the kitchen.

  To his surprise, Arrahaquen awaited. ‘I knew you’d be home just now,’ she said.

  DeKray nodded. ‘I have explored the Clocktower.’

  She did not seem to hear him. ‘You’ve done something, something vital. I can feel it. Now I know that there really is a path out of Kray. There really is! All I have to do is locate it before we’re swept away on the green tide.’

  ‘Really? Mayhap I have assisted you.’

  Arrahaquen looked at his greatcoat, frowned, then reached out to touch its lapel. ‘Did you know your copper pin has gone?’

  CHAPTER 27

  The machine, now mobile, had been making odd noises. Graaff-lin had been up in the attic, where she now spent much of her time, watching the occasional boat float out to sea, and staring at the Citadel remains, shaped like a gigantic black apple core on its end. But now she had come into the machine’s room to kneel and listen.

  She wondered if her clothes were too dirty for the Dodspaat. She was dirty, too, and her house; but she did not have the energy to clean anything. Physically she was declining, but spiritually she was ascending. She had, for example, realised that there was a strict division between right things and wrong things, and her life was now bent towards continual right, the sort of right her mother had espoused, while anything wrong she punished by self-denial. Consequently she had lost a lot of weight, but this she saw as a symptom of her inner sanctity.

  The machine sidled up to the door and stood there, six feet tall, glittering and warbling. There was a click. Graaff-lin awaited communication.

  It moved towards her, pincer extended. Graaff-lin looked up, watching as the arm was raised, then–

  She twisted out of the way. The arm struck her foot.

  Razor-sharp sub-pincers whirred like drills. She crawled away, stood, then ran for the door. It followed on its rattling feet.

  The door was locked. She turned around.

  The pincer extended itself and swung in a horizontal arc. She jumped out of the way, horrified, knowing that the Dodspaat inside must have been misinformed, must have been told that she was an infidel who had been excommunicated, who considered herself the new prophet, blasphemous heretic who–

  ‘I’m good!’ she screamed as the machine closed. Two thin arms with knives attached extended themselves. ‘I’m one of you!’

  Zzzhing, the knives scythed and razors chopped. Graaff-lin walked backwards around the room, feeling her way around oddments of furniture, keeping her eyes on the machine, unable to think of a way of getting through to it. Perhaps if she threw herself on its mercy...

  Back now at the door, she tugged the handle, shook it, then jumped as the pincer swung past. The wall sustained a gash.

  ‘Look, it’s me, Graaff-lin,’ she implored, ‘one of you, trying to reach the Dodspaat. You are ready for me, aren’t you? Please listen, I’m trying to reach you.’

  But still the machine closed, its four short legs clicking as they manoeuvred for better positions. It struck Graaff-lin that this might be a banished Dodspaat. This might be some sort of test.

  She looked around the room. Little stood out as a possible weapon; a window pole, perhaps the steel bucket. A pile of damp papers in one corner concealed a spoon.

  She grasped the window pole. She felt dizzy and sick. The pole, which had a few weeks ago been of negligible weight, now seemed made of stone. Grunting with effort, she tried a few sweeps. It was heavy enough to do damage, but she did not feel confident.

  A knife scythed by as the machine closed on her right side, and the wall to her left took more blows. Pincer rotating, the machine closed. She ran to the centre of the room, to a chair, and hit out as it closed. It dodged. For a thing of metal, without jointed limbs, it was agile, like a man bound in metal strips about to escape.

  One of the knives flicked past her ear. She ducked, but it whipped down and cut her arm. Blood flowed freely. As she stared at the wound the pincer hit her across the head. The machine closed, a yard away. She jumped back, fell and scrambled away. A knife whipped past her knee.

  The pole was lost. The test was difficult. Whimpering, Graaff-lin looked about for help, noticing a socket on the end of a cord. Something crashed into her stomach, something blunt. The machine was almost upon her.

  She rolled away and something else cut her leg, making her scream in pain. She grabbed the cord and swung it over her head as she sat, then, with one final sweep, hit out at the machine’s top screens. The socket smashed into one. Sparks flew.

  The machine tottered, then regained its balance and closed again, sending out the knives. Graaff-lin dodged and gathered the cord. Blood covered the floor and spattered the machine. White sparks darted through the air like spume.

  She swung out again, but missed. The pincer extended and struck her across the cheek. She tasted blood. Her shoulder felt damp and warm.

  Once again she swung the cord... and hit. The machine fell on its side. Graaff-lin crawled, gasping, wailing to herself, towards the bucket; she lifted it, crawled back and brought it down on the twitching and now almost vertical machine. It collapsed. The knives sprang out, one catching her on the wrist. The pincer swung, but hit the floor. Graaff-lin struck again and again.

  With an electronic trill the machine disintegrated, hundreds of fragments spilling across the floor like droplets of mercury, smashing into walls, congregating in corners, whistling and tinkling, glass fragments everywhere. Graaff-lin screamed, dropping the bucket, sinking into the main swarm of chunks. She flailed around and clambered out into a clear patch. Her floor was alive.

  Already pieces were recombining. But Graaff-lin was exhausted. She had a vision of herself – her self – trapped inside a numb, dead, useless body.

  Traumatised into action, she crawled. Not in any direction, but just to move. She bumped into the pile of papers.

  An idea: she could wrap the chunks. Grabbing one, she took a sheet and wrapped it... and then dropped it. It lay quiescent. Crying with relief she grabbed others, wrapping each, until a pile of thirty or so lay around her. But the other pieces were coalescing in the opposite corner. With a cry, she threw the bucket at them. Fragments spilled out.

  The race continued. Her arms were lead-heavy, trembling, sometimes too tired to lift. Once, an assembly of fragments that had coalesced behind the chair raised itself, but she threw a book at it and it disintegrated. Exhausted...

  She woke up. She must have lost consciousness.

  In the corner a new machine stood, black, slim like a broom, perhap
s three feet tall. Hundreds of wrapped fragments surrounded her. The floor was otherwise clear. Graaff-lin knew that one final effort was necessary. She took a wrapped chunk and advanced.

  Darts flashed by. One caught her in the stomach. It wriggled of its own accord. She screamed, but pulling it out provided further agony. With little whirrs more darts were flying. Graaff-lin fell, then aimed her chunk of metal.

  It hit and knocked the thing over. Darts struck her chest, clinging to her like leeches. She advanced on hands and knees, took the bucket, and smashed the machine. More darts exploded out, one catching her. She crawled away and removed them. Her clothes were thick with blood, both new and old. She crawled to the papers and began wrapping again, not so firmly this time due to sheer exhaustion, but well enough to disable each chunk.

  The last one remained. She picked it up and wrapped it.

  Consciousness seemed to leak away…

  ~

  Something had woken Zinina. Thunder? Something was rumbling outside, above the thrum of rain against the roof and the musical tip-tap of drops falling into buckets arranged around her room.

  The walls of the house creaked. That noise worried her.

  Then she heard shouts, and people running up and down the stairs. Aware that something was amiss, she woke deKray and dressed in a gown before running downstairs.

  ‘Garden mine,’ Reyl said.

  Eskhatos appeared. ‘It’s an attack. Revellers everywhere, I think about twenty. Defence positions, all of you! Zinina, is deKray awake?’

  ‘Yes,’ Zinina replied.

  ‘Get him. Find him a gun. Follow Arrahaquen to the defence of the rear. Quickly, child, or we’ll be over-run!’

  One-handed, Zinina grabbed a heat rifle from the stand outside the rig room then called deKray as he clattered down to meet her. ‘Back to the kitchen,’ she shouted. ‘It’s an attack.’