A clown had come through the door, a broad-shouldered, bald, blubbery man with a large red poppy nose, extravagant black liner making stars of his eyes, a padded clown suit in cavorting colors. It took me only a moment to recognize him under the grease paint.
"Mr. Fun," Septima said. "See what you can do for this poor wight. Oh, and meet my brother August."
The clown sidled up, exuding avuncular friendliness, huge flat shoes flapping humorously. He recognized me no more than Mr. Happy had.
Not surprising. The only two times I'd seen him previously, he was dead as a mackerel.
"Welcome to our hospice, Mr. Seebeck."
I kept my right hand at my side, left hand touching the child's back, shifted slightly to get my martial arts balance.
"You look better without that ridiculous comb-over," I said.
Memories, like flash cards under strobes—
Traumatic instantaneous memories, burned into the neural attractor networks of my brain—
Lune and Maybelline climbing impossibly through Great-aunt Tansy's upstairs bathroom window, lugging this man's corpse, a seeping bullet wound in his chest. Coop carrying the corpse away through a mirror.
An autopsy table in another world, accessed through an open Schwelle, this thing stretched naked, the sister I'd mistaken for a lady librarian dickering inside its trepanned skull.
"Excuse me, sir?" Mr. Fun was baffled.
"You're Ruth's little project."
Insight spilled through memory like gasoline, ignited by the sparks, burning in a display as clear as a written message.
The Deformer stayed where it was, watched me impassively. No, watched me sympathetically.
"Ms. Seebeck. Yes, I see, that would be your sister, Mr. Seebeck. She redeemed me. Now I have useful work. Let me attend to this child, but I would enjoy continuing this conversation with you later, if that would be convenient."
Agog, wanting to burn the thing like a pyre with my right hand, knowing far too little to make that choice in the presence of these brutalized children and my sister who days earlier had been my brother and months before that, years and decades before that, had been entirely unknown to me, I let the turned K-machine lift the child into its clown arms. It followed the Coop thing, Mr. Happy, into a room marked by a striped hippo, illuminated by a soft pink-tinged glow, and shut the door behind them. Septima kicked off the protection garment, left it slumped in a heap on the floor. She found a brown coverall in a concealed closet, slipped it on.
"You're just going to let those goddamned things take sick human children and—" But of course she was. This was her world, or some annex off it. My sister—my former brother—had evidently appointed her/himself Florence Nightingale of the Holocaust, or maybe of the Apocalypse. Clearly she knew what she was doing. Clearly, the children were in no danger, at no risk. I looked back down at the discarded clothing, changed tack in mid-sentence. "No nice, sanitizing, biohazard sluice? No check with the Geiger counter? Or am I now going to come down with radioactive boils? Hair and teeth falling out, like that?"
"Rest easy, silly puppy," Septima told me, not unkindly. "Your augmentation would have kept the Schwelle shut had you been in any danger." That raised more goosebump-creeping implications than I cared to deal with at that moment, so I followed her to the console display and watched the two machines tending to the children. Perhaps sedative drugs were being aerated into the room. The girl lay back in her cot as Mr. Fun tucked her under a bunny blanket, stroked her matted hair with delicate solicitude. I'd expected robotic nurses to bundle the children quicksmart into a bathtub, dry them off roughly, wrap them in grim institutional pajamas. No such thing. Mr. Happy was crooning some old English nursery song as he slipped an intravenous needle into the skin-and-bone arm of the dehydrated baby, deftly arranged the intubation, snugged the infant into a tiny cot that closed up and held him secure. Septima turned away from the screen after a few moments' inspection.
"You did well, boy, thanks for your help. Now—you must be starving, I know I am. Come along, we'll shovel some nourishment into you. Growing lad, you need some filling out."
She was right. I'd missed lunch with Lune about a thousand years ago, it felt like, except for a smeary bite of chocolate-coated lamington and another of scorched Jammervoch. I grimaced at the thought, shrugged, nodded. "Sure, lead on to the... mess... isn't that what you military types call it? An army marching on its stomach? Septima, are those children going to be all right?"
My sister placed her hand on my arm, slid it down delicately to take my hand, patted it. She was almost unbelievably unlike Septimus. "They'll be just fine. We look after them, you see." She looked at me sidelong with her dark-brown eyes. "Your friend Lune grew up here in Iron Mountain Redoubt a good many years ago."
"Oh."
That simple fact, tossed to me without a blink, fell into place with an almost audible click. Lune had avoided speaking about parents, family, anyone other than her Ensemble associates. I'd assumed she'd grown up in an abusive family and come through it with impressive resilience. God! And this sort of horror had been her hearth. A surge of admiration and love tightened my chest. I remembered, then, what Superiore Morgette had said—that Septima, the original Septima, presumably before she became Septimus, had founded the Ensemble. Wheels within wheels.
We walked along a hallway of repeated doglegs with windows looking into classrooms of diligent children, computer dens, a huge gymnasium of training machines with an Olympic-sized swimming pool at the far end visible through foggy glass, young folks in a variety of shapes, colors, and ages doing their stuff under the guidance of adults who I'd have sworn must be apostate K-machines—some uncanny calmness attended them. Perhaps some of those guides had spent time in Tansy's bathroom, dead as mechanical fish. My gorge rose. We were walking briskly, so I didn't get much chance to make a nuanced assessment, but I didn't catch anyone horsing around, pulling pranks, drifting off or goofing off, hanging out, having a good time. Room after room, the kids looked like clips from a current affairs program I once watched about Japanese schoolchildren. Poor Lune. Then again, maybe that's what you needed to carry you from retrieved infancy in a nightmare death-world all the way to a doctorate in ontological computation or computational ontology, or whatever the hell her specialty was, when she wasn't catching and killing mechanical vermin for Ruth to fix.
Septima took me into a small, attractively presented dining room, neither a restaurant nor a cafeteria. Three young people of Chinese appearance, maybe my age or a little older, were eating and talking quietly at a table with white linen and a rose in a glass vase. They were not in uniform, yet somehow contrived to make it seem that they were.
"The senior mess, as you say."
"Septima, I just left Lune and Toby hanging. I need to let them know—"
"I'll see to it. Find a table, I'll be with you in a moment."
A young man in a beautifully starched white shirt, buttoned at the neck without a tie, pressed black trousers, gleaming black shoes and white apron, stood at the servery door. He did not approach. In the absence of a menu, I studied the single dark-red rose in the center of our own table, the large naval engravings on the pale blue walls. A mastless trireme, rowers laboring incredibly in unison at their three great banks of oars. Phoenician? Two great men-o'-war firing broadside gouts of smoke and fire and metal into each other. A sinister conning tower vanishing under a vee of its own waves. I realized that actually I really was very hungry indeed. The stench of the hell world still clung faintly to my own shoes and perhaps to my dusty clothing, but the animal needs of my belly seemed to be overriding my more maudlin instincts. Soft music bathed the dining room. Debussy or Ravel, I felt sure, but I didn't recognize the piece. Probably from some slightly alternative cognate Earth. The thought of the untold musical and artistic riches available to us worldwalkers made my head spin.
My sister returned. Probably I should have stood like a gentleman, pulled her chair out, seated her. Nobody did that in
my world, not any longer, unless they were seventy or eighty years old. The Kennedy regnancy had seen to that, and the convulsive youth rebellions that were finished decades before I was born. But refusnik attitudes had shaded subsequent generations even as the boomers bit the hand that fed them before settling down to feed the mouths that would bite them in turn. The Sir Beatles, Sir Ringo Starkey, all that. Luckily, my gaffe with the chair went unnoticed, or at least unrebuked, because the handsomely kitted-out waiter was at our table as if he'd passed directly through a Schwelle, chair withdrawn, Septima settled, menus presented.
"Toby sends his regards," she told me. "Ms. Katha Sarit Sagara bids you bon appétit. I'll have the boeuf bourguignonne, with green beans and fried potatoes. This young man will have—you eat fish?"
"I'm an Australian, are you mad, of course I eat seafood. Assuming it's fresh." August, you idiot, why wouldn't it be fresh? These people can probably open a Schwelle into the middle of the ocean and pop their catch through the hole straight into the skillet. Well, no, there'd be all that gushing water, and nobody likes their trout complete with guts. "Do you have Balmain bugs?" I said hastily.
"He'll have the grilled flounder stuffed with crab, and side vegetables. I'll have a glass of Burgundy, he can have a chilled Chablis." I shrugged, nodded. The waiter only just failed to salute and click his heels. She looked at me across the table. "You have a question for me."
I propped my elbows on the linen and leaned forward. I felt like laughing, as you do at a sour jest.
"Yeah. Or maybe a thousand. Not that I expect—" I glanced up. Astonishingly, the waiter was already back, placing our elegantly deployed plates before us, uncorking two bottles, offering Septima a taste of the red wine. She waved him on, he poured, he was gone again in his dancing black shoes. My sister plunged into her lunch, or her dinner, whatever, prodded me to do the same with a briskly flourished knife. I took a mouthful of fish. It was excellent. "Not that I expect any serious, responsive, um, response. You lot have been ducking and weaving like acrobats whenever I try to get a straight answer. But thank you for getting in touch with Lune and Toby."
She regarded me intently, shoveling stew into her mouth. I could imagine Septimus wolfing his food like this, getting it in his white beard. I wondered if she still slept in his martial cot, above the armory where I'd received the X-caliber Vorpal implant. At least she didn't smell like a compulsive cigar smoker. She said, "You haven't worked any of it out yet? Where are my fried potatoes?" she called in a piercing voice. I blinked. The waiter emerged at speed from the servery door. I noticed that the people at the other table kept their eyes front, ate without interruption, but fell silent, probably listening avidly. The waiter glanced at our table, blanched ever so slightly, muttered apologetically, was gone again.
"Worked—?"
"You are in training, little puppy. Think of yourself as a page who would be a knight, embarked upon a course of testing, exploration of your prowess and skill with weapons. As a great man said—"
"Bullshit," I said loudly. I don't know if the people at the far table picked up their ears; I was too irritated to care. "A page? A knight? You people are delusional. Contest! Knight! What I am is a Pawn, that's what I've concluded. And I'm bloody well sick and—"
"My potatoes!" Septima bellowed like a sergeant major. The waiter scuttled in, beet-red, with a steaming dish of fried potato chunks fragrant with herbs. She prodded them with her fork. "Too many," she muttered, looking grim. She took one on her tines, conveyed it steaming to her mouth, chewed it up, and swallowed without the gasp of pain I'm pretty sure I'd have emitted. "I'm paraphrasing; he said the military sciences have no method to distinguish a true knight from a fancy counterfeit in armor, save through the ordeal by fire. The true knights survive and meet their obligations. The phonies and slackers perish." Her gaze cut into me, relentless. "Sadly, lad, the false knights let down their sworn brothers and sisters, their companions in arms. There is no greater tragedy in war."
I shook my head, looked at my plate, forced myself to eat in silence. Septima seemed prepared to wait. She polished off her meal, quaffed her wine, took a second glass from the magically attentive waiter before I'd drunk half of mine. I chewed, and it was not my fish and vegetables that stuck in my throat. War?
Finally I pushed my plate to one side. "I know people have been trying to kill me. Or things. Shit, they didn't just try, they succeeded. Has the word on that little adventure circulated among the Seebecks yet? Dead one day, bouncing back the next?"
It sounded completely insane even as I spoke. I remembered every filthy, agonized moment of being burnt to death, smashed to atoms, clawing back from nothingness, held from extinction by the golden Xon matter of the Vorpal implant that threaded my body. My fake human body, if Lune had it right, if she and I and Toby and Septimus/Septima and the whole sick crew were nothing but caricatures, simulations, homunculi written, incomprehensively, into the computational substrate underlying space and time. Paranoia! As bad as the blitherings of the Valisologists.
I forced words into my mouth. "They killed me, which I resent, but they killed Lune, and for that they deserve the most dreadful death I can find for them, whoever the goddamned fuck they are."
I pushed my chair back, stood up, leaned across the table with my fingers gripping its edge so tightly that the tablecloth jerked toward me, toppling the rose in its vase, Septima's empty wine glass. I noticed from the corner of my eye that the waiter had made himself scarce, and that the three from the other table were leaving discreetly. "What are they? Why are they trying to kill me? Us, all of us? Who are we, for that matter? What kind of war is it where a guy in college and his poor old harmless Great-aunt and their goddamned dog, for Christ's sake, can be conscripted in complete ignorance and—"
I was babbling nonsense, and I knew it. I was acting on the basis of the August I'd been a month earlier, the August who had grown up an ordinary Australian kid with Estonian ancestors, spent a year of high school in Chicago after his parents mysteriously disappeared, lived with his dotty, psychic aunt in an old house high on a hill in a rundown suburb of Melbourne. That August was gone. In a sense, that August had never existed. My memories were dubious. The old lady and the dog, my aunt Miriam and her violinist husband Itzhak, were an invention, a confection, a dissociated construct created by the scientific magician Marchmain Seebeck out of the living substance of my parents, Dramen and Angelina. Dear God, the B-movie melodrama! The craziness. I felt dizzy leaning across the table. The grayness was back, the gray that had sucked at me in Toby's cottage as I crouched nerveless and exhausted and weepy in a pile of smashed plaster.
I simply don't believe this, I thought. I'll close my eyes, and when I open them again, all this will have gone away. No sister Maybelline caught in flagrante delicto fucking the giant vegetable next to a flying saucer. No machine corpses in Tansy's bathtub or revived for nursing duties in a hospice for the damned. I did shut my eyes, squeezed them tight, and instantly opened them again. Even if I could do that, I would not. It had nothing to do with Septima's preposterous tales of knighthood. Lune was central to this mad universe, or my part of it, and so long as she lived, I would stay here, fight beside her if that were permitted, hold her in my arms until the dark fell or the morning came again. I found Septima staring at me intently.
"You see, boy, you do understand. You are a Player, and this is the Contest of Worlds. All the rest is details, strategy and tactics and courage and patience. This is the heritage our parents have bequeathed us." To my disbelieving astonishment, she made the gesture with both her hands that I'd seen the assembled company of Seebecks and others make at the family moot outside Avril's Norman castle. It was like a pair of opposed sine waves or, wait, a smoothed-out version of that famous illusion they show you in Psychology 101, two faces that flip as you watch them to create a... a chalice. A grail. Oh dear God. The Grail.
"The Yggdrasil," my sister told me, instantly deflating my paranoid interpretation, and just as inst
antly reinflating it. Norse mythology. The great Tree stretching from the underworld to the heavens, three mighty roots driven deep under the ice and rock, something like that. Another symbol, obviously enough, the one I'd seen before. A model for the multiverse, I'd conjectured. Roots in basic mathematics and logic, branches shooting off into the T-levels, lesser branches and twigs being the cognate worlds, the variant Earths. And Yggdrasil Station—the place beyond space and time where/when I had stepped after my... resurrection, you might as well call it, and found my brother Decius and his lover enthralled in the glory of the godthings forged at the moment of Omega Point as an entire closed universe folded in upon itself and created a singularity so profound that its reverberations pierced all the Tegmark levels of the metaverse. All this came to me in an instant as she spoke that name. Had it been in my memory all along, lost from view? I had experienced the sublime a moment after I had suffered the torments of death and the death of my beloved Lune. No wonder I was a little shaky on the details.
Symbols. Sigils. A recalled image flashed into my mind: the curious shape the morphing K-machine has shown me on the library monitor. I realized that I was still on my feet, Septima regarding me with a certain pained irony. I sat down again. The waiter appeared apologetically, collected our dishes. I said to him, "Can you get me a notepad and a pencil?"
"Surely, my lord. Will sir and the general be taking dessert and coffee? We have a very fine—"
"Just get him a workpad, Denzel. Thank you for your service. Next time, remember the potatoes."
He came back with a wafer-thin sheet of black quarto paper and the slender black inkless stylus. I scribbled white curves on one corner, erased the lines with my little finger. Quickly, I sketched the shape the vermin had shown me.
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