K-Machines

by Damien Broderick

  "Don't you have anything to say?"

  "I don't have any right to speak." Her head moved very slightly, side to side, a shake of negation, unconscious, uninterpretable. I chose to read it as a refusal, beyond the level of lip service, to accept her responsibility for lying to me. That wrenched at me.

  "You're not one of them, I trust? Not a K-machine?"

  She lifted her eyes, looked at me.

  "August."

  "All right," I said. My gut burned. "Okay, that was stupid." Something odd was happening to my breathing. I leaned forward, hands on my knees. "What did they do to you? Christ, Lune, I don't understand."

  Outside the room, I heard a bell ring faintly several times, melodious and distant. Inside the room, I heard my own breath, the pulse of my blood in my ears. Time alternately slowed and accelerated. I wondered if this were what insanity felt like. It was like the descriptions I'd heard of viral or bacterial illness, heard but had never experienced.

  "Can I come over there, August?"

  I wanted that more than anything in the world. I wanted to throw off her robe and pull her down on the bed and fuck her until we wept. I wanted her to straddle me, draw my penis into her body, merge with me, flesh, mind, and heart. I wanted something that was in the past and hadn't really been anyway.

  "Stay where you are," I said. It rasped painfully in the back of my throat.

  She sat still, shivering very faintly. It was not due to the temperature in the room.

  In the echoing, blood-filled silence, I said, "Explain it to me."

  "How can I? You weren't there."

  "When the filthy thing seduced you?"

  Her eyes caught the light. "Don't be trite, August."

  I took a deep breath. All right, I owed her this much. Banal and gratuitous insults would get us nowhere, however easily they came to my tongue. I half nodded, shrugged.

  "I was six years old, not quite that. They took us down into the shelters. All the children were put together. The parents had their duties. That was the last time I saw my mother and father. They thought I was old enough to look after some younger children, not the babies, two-year-olds, three-year-olds."

  How long ago had that been? If Lune were truly two or three times older than I was, it might have been half a century or more in the past. You would not have guessed it from the immediacy of the pain in her voice. A small space opened in my anger.

  "They were intent on destroying their world. As they usually are, the damned fools." She set her teeth. After a moment, she shook her head. No tears. "And they managed it quite nicely. Apparently they disliked each other's brand of magical thinking, so they killed everyone on the planet. Almost everyone. The good and final solution that humans love to come up with."

  The small space closed again. I said, "Unlike your friends the deformers, who are saints and devoted to the preservation of life."

  "It saved my life, August." She seemed oddly uncertain but insistent.

  "Listen to yourself!" I cried. "They murdered you, and me, and a significant part of my family."

  "Yet we live."

  I stared at her. It had not been my doing that we survived our deaths, not quite, and yet this simple rejection of reality left me shaken. "You think it was a dream? An illusion?"

  "No."

  "What, then?"

  "Another maneuver in the Contest of Worlds. Another cruel and pointless move on the board."

  Her intuition matched my own so unexpectedly, so unerringly, that I sat with my mouth open.

  "Which board is that, exactly, Lune?"

  "The board used by the godlings in their reality games, with us as pieces, as tokens, as disposable counters."

  "No," I said. I shook my head. "This is paranoia." You're just a pack of cards, part of me brayed.

  "Why do you suppose the cat brought us back to life?"

  "Because—" The question had never occurred to me. "Because I asked sem."

  She gave me a pitying look.

  "The cosmos is a computation," she said. "I spent my adult life studying its rules. The question is, who or what put those rules in place?"

  "Jules insists that the rules arose out of noise. Evolutionary selection pressures in a random universe."

  "Yes, that is one possibility. Another is that the Tegmark levels simply enumerate and instantiate all the possibilities of every permissible universe. We're here because we can be here."

  I was torn between curiosity and reviving anger. "Good God, are we having a philosophical discussion now?" Lune had adroitly turned us aside from the question of her involvement with the K-machines. Or maybe it was simply the way her mind worked, the directions her thoughts took, after thirty or forty years of abstruse philosophical pondering. Either way, my question had been ignored. "Or is this part of your attempt to explain why you betrayed me, the Ensemble, betrayed all of us?"

  It sounded stiff and stilted even as I spoke, but there was nothing at all relaxed in me.

  She flared up. "Not everything is about you, August. Nor your preposterous family."

  I stood up. I wanted to take three steps to where she sat, and slap her hard across the face. I did no such thing; I despise men striking women, and besides, she would probably break my arm. "This is about me, Lune. And about you. You pretended to love me—"

  She said something that I couldn't quite hear.

  "What?"

  "I do love you, you damned fool. Why else would I—"

  I took those three steps. Lune trembled as I touched her shoulders. I pressed my face into her damp hair. It had a scent of some light-hungry flower unknown to my Earth, perfumed yet faintly astringent. With strong hands, she lifted mine away from her, placed them at my sides. No happy ending, then. A wave of despair passed through me.

  "August, you don't trust me. This is not the moment. I need to think about what I've done."

  "You've had your whole life to think about it."

  "Yes. I believed I knew I was doing. My family, my whole world... I won't accept it, I won't."

  I couldn't make any sense of what she was saying. It seemed to me that this woman I loved had trapped herself—allowed herself to be trapped, perhaps—in a circuit of self-destructive falsehood. That this thing had begun when she was only a child made her situation the more tragic but no less culpable. She had pretended to love me to gain an advantage. If it were genuinely the case that she now loved me in truth, it seemed to me not too little but certainly too late. Perhaps not everything, though, was spoiled and lost.

  "My family have been brought together on the Ra Egg," I said. "Most of them. They are orbiting the Xon star. Come with me. Tell them what you've told me."

  Someone knocked at the door.

  "Don't answer it," I said.

  The door opened; Morgette Smith's Daughter came in.

  "I rather thought I'd find you here," she said to me. "Good morning to you both. Lune, we have decided that the customary interrogation would further no useful purpose. It's time for you to leave the Motherhouse. Please get dressed and depart within the hour. I'll have breakfast for two sent in."

  I'd never liked the woman, but this left me staring at her in disbelief. Presumably she regarded her offer of sustenance as an admirable act of charity.

  "Voted off the island, eh?" Lune's voice was bitter. I did not recognize her reference, but it was perfectly obvious what she meant.

  "Go the hell away now, Madam," I said to the Custodial Superiore. "We'll both be gone inside an hour."

  "August," Lune said. "Very well, Morgette. I have no intention of polluting this place with my presence. But your offer of breakfast is accepted. Goodbye."

  I tried to open a Schwelle. Nothing happened.

  "The Motherhouse is barricaded unless one of us opens it. You may leave with Lune, Mr. Seebeck. I'm sorry things have come to this pass. I imagine we will work together in the future. Good morning." And she sashayed out before I had a chance to say something petty and undignified. As the door closed behind h
er, I said it anyway, loudly. For a moment, Lune almost smiled.

  "Do you have any clothes to wear?" I asked her.

  "There will be a range of garments in the closet," she said. "Plain but serviceable." She slid back its door, found a simple one-piece smock in peach and pale green. She drew it over her damp head, disdaining underwear, looked around, located her cleaned footwear just inside the door. Again, a knock. A different acolyte entered with a large tray piled with food and a steaming pot of coffee. "Put it on the desk. Thank you."

  I was numb, beyond reasoning, beyond any simple emotional response. I found scrambled eggs, baked tomatoes, and crisp bacon, piled them on top of slices of buttered toast, flung on salt and pepper, wolfed it all down, poured both of us large cups of steaming coffee. Lune ate like a machine. The comparison gave me no comfort. I poured more coffee.

  "A thousand years?"

  "They don't believe you're who you claim you are. Think you are."

  "What, they really do believe I'm the hidden prince of Ruritania or some fucking thing?"

  "August, they think you're the Kether." She looked at me solemnly. "So do I."

  I remembered my discussion with Septima. "The Fool," I said. "August, the idiot Parsifal." It seemed for a moment that I'd overheard the word used more recently. Something about the K-machines. I shook my head, unable to put my finger on the reference. I did not enjoy Lune calling me a fool, even in this strained and silly sense.

  "If I had a Tarot pack," she said, "I could show you what I'm talking about." With a brisk but unhurried movement beautiful to watch, like the motion of a cat, she swept the last of the food on to her plate, polished it off. "The Contest makes full use of much ancient symbolism, August. If you are the Kether, you are also a Warrior of Fire. As am I." She met my gaze for an instant, direct, without shame, at least in this, poured herself the last of the coffee. "Your acquisition of the X-caliber device is simply the most striking evidence of your station in the Seebeck family. In the whole Contest."

  "Why didn't you tell me this before?"

  "What good would it have done? What difference would it have made? Besides, what is hidden must unfold itself in its own time."

  Secrets and lies. I felt ill, if that's what sickness felt like—disoriented, an ache in my abdomen. There seemed no way to get to the bottom of any of this. Lune had been cast out of her home. I, for that matter, no longer had a home. Perhaps I'd never had one, merely a series of fakes and mock-ups. Toby had his rural cottage, plagued as it might be by rogue termagant swarms. Ruth had her abandoned Earth, its empty factories and warehouses, where she conducted her renovations on slain K-machines and built whimsical robots for her own amusement. Septimus/Septima seemed to run an entire organization for the rescue, rehabilitation, and cooptation of children, like Lune, orphaned in hell worlds created by heedless human beings driven by a possessive and mad rationality. Juni made her home in the world of offog-suffused, if isolated, abundance. Jules had his dear little doghouse spinning within the Matrioshka Brain, Jan possessed her stolen starship, The Hanged Man. I seemed to be the only one without a domain of my own, dependent upon the charity of my siblings.

  A realization came to me.

  "Oh," I said.

  Idiot, idiot, idiot. Fool.

  "What?"

  "Is the Schwelle system available to us now?"

  "Yes. You have a suitable destination in mind? Are you planning to throw me on the mercy of your brothers and sisters?"

  "Not exactly. Lune, are you ready to leave this place? No possessions you treasure? Nobody special you need to say goodbye to?"

  "Damn them all."

  I took her hand, and my own hand was electrified at the touch. I addressed the operating system.

  "Take me back to my own domain."

  Tearing, space opening in front of me; I stepped forward, drawing Lune with me, into an open space floored in polished white and burnt-sienna stone and looking outward to right and left through tall, mullioned windows at a beautiful garden. I turned my head quickly. The cedar staircase rose to a doorway that surely did not open into Toby's cottage. Knights' armor stood in place, their former owners dead and locked within their steel embrace. One scabbard was empty. Lune's fingers tightened on me; she drew in her breath audibly. The great iron-patterned doors in front of us opened silently without my instruction. Lights brightened within. The ultraviolet twelve-sided icon suspended in the middle of the room rotated, took on substance. Diorama images of my brothers and sisters sat in their places, looking toward the door. This time there was no china, glassware, silverware. It looked like an executive meeting of the clan. An abandoned sword lay on the floor.

  "Oh my God," Lune said. She gave a startled laugh. "This is where you found the sword. Are you sure your name's not Arthur?"

  "I believe we're expected," I told her.

  I led her into the room over the polished floorboards, past the sword, past the holograms, if that's what they were, of my siblings, to the empty seat at the head of the table.

  I said, "I need another seat."

  The thirteenth seat stood beside mine. I drew it out. It was heavy, oak and cushioned leather, chased with heraldic carvings. All the holograms had turned in their seats to gaze at us. It was creepy as hell; I felt goose bumps on my back and along my upper arms.

  "Won't you sit down?"

  "Thank you. I think."

  I seated her with the sort of gentlemanly courtesy that would have received praise from Ms. Thieu, my elementary school principal. I drew out my own chair, sat down myself at the entirely palpable table before us.

  "Well, this is interesting."

  "I'd prefer it," Lune said, "if they weren't all staring at us."

  "Me too."

  She propped one elbow on the table, placed her chin in her open hand, looked me enquiringly. "So tell me, do you come here often?"

  I burst out laughing. How could I hate her?

  "Actually, I have absolutely no idea where we are."

  "Camelot, maybe, after an extreme makeover? Avalon? Amber?"

  The first was King Arthur again. I vaguely recognized the second, did not know the third.

  "I don't see Merlin anywhere."

  "Probably out in the garden. You're just going to leave your sword lying there for people to trip over?"

  "It's not mine. I took it off a dead man outside in the lobby."

  "Someone you knew?"

  "I don't believe so. But I'm starting to think that anything is possible." It made me shiver.

  "Was he dead when you arrived?"

  "Officer, I'll take that phone call now."

  Lune smiled bleakly. "Sorry." She narrowed her eyes at me, then. "I didn't know Australians enjoyed Miranda rights."

  "I no longer have any reason to think I'm an Australian—"

  "There's the accent."

  "And the dashing good looks, I know. We watch a lot of American television. We can't take the Fifth either, but then I don't know enough to incriminate me anyway."

  "We could have a look around."

  "We'd be fools not to. Let's do that."

  I was half expecting a deep oracular voice to sound, to tell me he was Luke's father, or that the dragon with the flagon held the brew that was true. In fact, I was on the verge of a hysterical breakdown. Only Lune's presence prevented me from sliding out of the chair like a dishrag and huddling down on my heels or more likely on my side in a fetal position and shivering for an hour or two. But I'd already done that, more or less, on another side of the door at the top of the stairs, and that had not got me very far. Well, it had kicked out the jams, as old Mike in Chicago had once put it. Gotten rid of the collywobbles. They were back now, but I decided that giving way at this stage would be one step too close to giving up. I forced myself to push back the chair, stood, drew Lune's seat away from the table as she rose. I gave her my arm, and we walked briskly back to the great open doors and the luminous lobby. There were no other doors visible.

  "Unless
we climb out the window, I guess we're going to have to see what's at the top of the stairs."

  "You don't think it'll take us back to Toby's?"

  "Beats me. Maybe there's a verbal code like the deixes. If so, we're out of luck. The only code I know is 'Abracadabra,' and I don't think it's going to cut it."

  Lune still had her arm through mine, and I'm pretty sure she knew she was holding me upright or at least keeping me from bolting. "There's also 'Open Sesame.' "

  "Why didn't I think of that?"

  The door at the top of the stairs opened readily on to another room somewhat smaller than a ballroom or a major hotel lobby. Like a lobby, it held elegantly comfortable seating scattered in small groups, pillars lined with gilt-framed mirrors holding up the roof, indirect lighting, thick beige carpet. The paintings here and there on the walls reminded me a little of my one visit to New York's Metropolitan Museum. I swallowed hard.

  "I appear to have had good taste, back in the bad old days."

  "Maybe you lived here with your parents."

  None of us had seen Dramen and Angelina since the godthing Cathooks had fetched them and the rest of us back to life. At any rate, none of the other Seebecks had thought fit to tell me if they did know where our parents had absconded to this time. My attack of hysteria was receding. The thought that I might encounter them in this place acted on me like a jolt of adrenaline. I didn't know whether I'd respond with fury or gratitude.

  There were side rooms; we explored three or four without getting anywhere interesting. Windows looked down into the same garden. The grounds extended as far as the eye could see, well-kept, neither wild nor obsessively pruned. I liked what I saw. I could use a long, calming walk under the shade of those trees. Some of them were in fruit; Lune and I could eat as we strolled, wiping our sticky hands on the grass or licking the juice from each other's fingers. I turned back from the window to put my arm about Lune's waist, draw her near me, but she had already gone back into the lobby. I bit my lip and followed her.