by George Mann
“Things are getting worse.”
In Fortinium, the now-discredited Senator Blanz had tried to push his Vital Renewal Bill through the Senate, to pass a bill removing the civil rights of freewraiths and near-humans. It had failed, yet the Tristopolitan city council had power to pass their own regulations, and public mood had turned in a dark direction.
“So long as Mayor Dancy remains in office,” said Sister Stef, “we’re all right.”
Jamie appreciated the solidarity. Sister Stef was standard human.
“I suppose I can’t comment. As an Archivist.”
“Oh. You must have access to all sorts of fascinating Lattice information.”
To Jamie, information was inscribed with pain and stored in bones, yet Sister Stef’s words were true. His vocation remained fascinating.
The classroom door swung inwards.
“Hello,” said a nun. She glanced at the iron wall-mounted skull-clock. Steel cogs moved within its eye sockets. “Just checking you were still with Mr. Thargulis.”
“Finishing up. Thank you, Sister Zarly.”
Jamie struggled to get out of the too-small chair, wondering whether he’d embarrassed Sister Stef by taking up too much time. Her face was perhaps the tiniest bit pink.
“Urn,” said Jamie. “Carl’s pretty taken with your essay theme.”
“The Tri-Millennial? He’s got a whole week to do it in.”
The iron skull-clock ticked. Its pendulum was a swinging scythe; its housing was a long-preserved cranium; the slow-rotating hands were carved knucklebones of long-dead- nuns.
“Yes,” said Jamie. “He’ll enjoy it.”
“Good.”
They were standing very close.
“Urn... Goodnight, Sister.”
“Goodnight, Mr. Thargulis.”
ALONE IN HIS room, Carl strained and squeezed.
“Ugh—”
Squeezed harder.
Come on.
Being at home by himself, this late, was unusual. It meant he could try it without Dad sensing he was—
Yes.
A faint hair-width of red struggled from the inside corner of his right eye. It wriggled and hurt, but it was growing bigger.
For the first time, he knew he could do it.
Yes.
Another slender arachnid leg extruded itself, then another. In seconds a tiny red spider was dragging itself out from Carl’s eyeball, scrabbling an inch down his cheekbone, then stopping to rest.
Another.
He focused, and squeezed again. It was still hard, but he continued, and in only a few seconds a second scarlet spider clambered from the slick-ness of his eye.
Again.
This time, tiny legs appeared from beneath his left lower eyelid. It took longer, but finally the third spider hauled itself free. Carl knew now that he could manifest with either eye, however much it burned.
“I knew I could,” he said to the rust-flecked mirror.
He was no Bone Listener; but Dad was an Archivist, and in that much at least, Carl carried his father’s blood.
“I knew it.”
By the time Dad got home, Carl had squeezed a total of eight spiders into existence, and hidden them inside his shirt drawer, and commanded them to sleep.
IN THE WASHROOM, Sister Stef wiped her face, still feeling sick. It was a reaction to the fear she’d sensed in Angela Haxten’s parents, for while Angela’s skin was just faintly blue, her parents’ coloring was more pronounced. Mr. Haxten had moved with the kind of difficulty Stef associated with a bad beating.
This she knew from childhood memory, of Mam and Pop and the sound of—
No. The past is behind me.
Just now she had told the Haxtens how strong and confident their daughter was growing. It was a form of lie that the nuns called a Benedictory Confabulation. Perhaps Angela would develop the strength she would need, just as Stef had finally left that world where she had listened so often for the key turning in the front-door lock, for the sound of drunken footsteps across the old linoleum floor, and the rattle of the glass door handle as Pop reached the—
Behind me.
—kitchen where Mam was waiting for the—
Gone.
—waiting for the—
No.
She stopped herself. Turning on the cold tap, she rinsed her mouth. Then she went out to meet the next set of parents.
“Mr. and Mrs. Blackhall? Lovely to see you again.”
LATER THAT NIGHT, Jamie lay in bed—in his own half of the bed, a decade after Mareela’s death— rolling first one way and then the other, trying not to think of the way Sister Stef might look without that formal burgundy habit, or how long her hair would be if it were hanging loose.
“Go to sleep,” he told the darkness.
And he would not think about the slenderness of her waist, or how her skin might feel if he pressed his hand against it... He would not think of it.
DESPITE THE TRICKS of meditation and prayer that the order had taught her, Stef lay with her eyes open, staring into the darkness of her private sleeping-cell beneath the school. The childhood memories of TalonClaw Port were behind her, but they would stay there only if she constantly forced them back.
Meanwhile the thought of dark brown eyes with such depth, such insight into arcane knowledge... that thought was forbidden.
Jamie Thargulis.
Totally forbidden.
CARL SLEPT DEEPLY. At some point, he dreamed of entering the consciousness of his eight spiders, of the octet formed from his computational blood. The spiders climbed down from the drawer, across the floor, and beneath the door—the gap was a vast opening to his eight new viewpoints—and then began the great trek downstairs, before ascending the coat stand.
There was something peaceful and secure about the way he, through his spiders, was able to nestle in the folds of Dad’s overcoat, to slip inside the small tears in the old thick fabric, to hide inside the lining, and grow quiescent once more.
Inside his dream, the dream he knew was true, Carl smiled, and commanded his spiders to wait.
THE FIRST PART of the morning was tough. Carl tried to concentrate on Sister Stef’s words, fighting down the attraction of linking to his spiders, and managed to wait until first break. Then, he established contact, just long enough for the spiders to clamber out of Dad’s overcoat and find places to hide behind Dad’s adding-machine.
The device was intricate, formed from interlocking bones and beetle wing cases. The rattling calculations did not disturb his hidden arachnid observers.
During the longer lunch break, he ate his grilled cicadas too fast. Afterwards, crouched in a corner of the yard away from the other kids, he closed his eyes.
“—to see you, Brixhan.” This was Dad’s voice, as heard by Carl’s spiders. “Why is the OCML visiting this time?”
“Just some queries. If you could pre-process and then pass back to us...”
“I’ll do it this afternoon.”
One of the spiders (under Carl’s direction) crept from behind the adding-machine, stopped, then continued to the black shoe that looked like a pitted cliff face. The man—the Bone Listener—looked massive, like a geological feature more than a person.
The spider moved quickly, climbing up the tangled gray fibers of the pants leg, into the turnup, then settling inside.
“Thank you, Archivist Thargulis. I’ll—”
“Carl?”
It was Sister Zarly Umbra calling from across the yard.
“Yes, Sister?”
“Are you all right?”
“Um. Yes, Sister.”
“Then line up with the others, ready to go back inside.”
“Yes, Sister.”
During the afternoon’s algebra, Carl’s awareness slipped away to Dad’s office from time to time, just the lightest of touches. Tonight, late, he would link in fully to explore the Archives, manipulating computational blood, though deaf to the music of the bones.
“..
. And I hope you’re doing good work on your essays at home, everyone,” said Sister Stef. “Not just because the Tri-Millennial celebration is important. We’re going to try something new in class next week. Now turn to—”
Was it for the essay, to please Sister Stef, or for the joy of working with the power he’d always hoped he had? Either way, think of what he might learn! Such arcana... a word most of the other kids would not understand.
And splitting his consciousness across eight spiders was so... fascinating... in a way he could not have explained to anyone, not even Dad.
Tonight.
To be alone. To link properly with his spiders.
Tonight, I’ll learn everything!
THIS WAS GOING to be difficult. Fear and regret and anger—strange, undirected anger at the past,, at events that were no longer real—swirled and roiled inside Stef’s head. A sleepless night and the realization that she was no longer a new immigrant, scared and broke and confused by the oddities of a new culture, and some core of honesty that perhaps she had always possessed... all of these had tipped her into a state where she needed to decide, or so it seemed. Then she’d realized the decision was already formed in her mind, hard and complete.
She walked along the familiar, shadow-filled bonestone corridor that led to Reverend Mother’s study. It was a contrast to the airy, quartz-walled tunnel lit by rivulets of magma that she had walked through as a schoolgirl, in trouble again, on her way to see the principal.
An unseen boundwraith dragged the ceramic door into its cavity in the wall, and Stef entered the room, hands folded like any penitent nun, knowing that this would be a transgression that could not be washed away by entering Contrition Trance or enacting the Seven Steps of Regret.
“Sister Stephanie-Charon Mors. Do you need to talk? That is unusual.”
This was the hour when, without appointment, any nun could enter. Usually it was the weaker ones with some pedantic difficulty that was problematic only because they made it so.
“Yes, Reverend Mother.”
“Come in, and sit.”
Reverend Mother was narrow with age, but straight-backed on her hard, cushionless bone-stone stool. The whites of her eyes were clear as a girl’s.
Stef sat in the comfortable visitor’s chair. In contrast to Reverend Mother’s stool, it was designed to make a point. The intended message was the power of humility. Stef had always thought it meant Reverend Mother was a tough old bitch who needed nothing but her own certainty.
“Would you prefer helebore tea,” added Reverend Mother, “or to come to the point?”
“You said”—Stef consciously tightened her stomach to exhale, calming herself—”I was the worst nun in the order.”
“You’ll remember I qualified that sentence. You’re one Hades of a teacher, Sister Stephanie-Charon.”
Stef was blinking. Then she focused on Reverend Mother, knowing that this was the moment.
“I don’t believe.”
“What don’t you believe?” asked Reverend Mother.
Behind her was a private altar, a worn block of pale gray stone on which worn icons, chiseled in millennia gone by, were barely visible. It was a fragment of a titanic human knuckle, perhaps belonging to the same long-dead person whose petrified skull now formed City Hall’s central building. Whether huge people had once walked the earth, or whether mages had caused the transformation (either fatally or post-mortem) no one knew, and only scholars cared.
The Order of Thanatos had myths to explain everything, but few of them were rational.
“Any of it,” said Stef. “I don’t believe any of your stories.”
“You mean the Teachings Thanatical.”
“Yes. I do love teaching, just teaching the children. You were right in that.”
Reverend Mother’s eyes were shining. Stef tightened her jaw muscles, knowing that the old woman could use mesmeric language to induce compliance, but not in someone who remained alert and sure of her position.
This was not a time to think of Bone Listener Jamie Thargulis and his dark eyes, because dreaminess would open the door for Reverend Mother to use her verbal skills.
“You’re a logical thinker, Sister, but there’s a clear boundary”—softly—”between faith and logic.”
“Yes, Reverend Mother. And we probably agree on where the boundary lies.”
“But you don’t have the desire to leap over it?”
“That’s not the way I think of it.”
“I see.”
Reverend Mother’s eyes were shining like ice. Again, Stef tightened her muscles, pulling her attention back into the moment.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “For deceiving you, when you gave me a home here.”
“No.”
Ice was in Reverend Mother’s voice as well.
“I’m sorry?”
“It’s yourself, Stephanie, that you have deceived.”
This time, Stef’s diaphragm tightened by itself.
“You didn’t call me Sister.”
“No. I did not.”
“I’m really—”
Reverend Mother held out her hand, palm down.
“Leave me now, Stephanie.”
Stef stood up, fighting back the stinging in her tear ducts. Then she nodded, because to make the usual Sign of Thanatos would be an insult now, and turned away.
She went out into the corridor, and walked on, aware of the grinding noise behind her—the door rolling back into place, dragged by the bound-wraith—and of the chill draught and ancient smell, and the way that she had just severed a major lifeline, for the second time in her life.
ALONE IN HIS BED, grinning, Carl descended into ecstasy. One by one, he merged with seven of his spiders, while allowing the remaining spider to remain quiescent, hidden in a turn-up of Bone Listener Brixhan Somebody-or-Other’s pants.
But those seven, what they saw!
First, they climbed from behind the bone-and-scarab-carapace adding-machine, then crawled from Dad’s office, out into the corridors of the Archives. Security scanwraiths passed over them, ignoring their presence, for Carl’s spiders were formed from computational blood and so belonged here.
They explored.
From the ceiling of a vast hall, all seven spiders watched (from disparate viewpoints) as lines and rivers of their own kind—thousands, maybe millions of blood-spiders—streamed across floors and walls and ceilings, into and out of ducts, carrying their fragments of data and logic around the organized Archivists, merging the Bone Listeners’ investigations.
It was wonderful. It was a place of ecstasy.
And this was not even the Lattice, which his spiders had yet to explore.
THREE WORDS, SO far, had come to her.
I deeply regret...
Stef was alone in her dorm-cell, seated at the small stone table, holding her carved-bone fountain pen, without any idea what she should write with it. Then she pushed aside her notepaper, as a tear dripped downwards, softly forming a wet disk on stone.
This was heartrending, but she had to continue.
IT OCCUPIED VAST pits, extending its massive volume into areas of stone cells, threading through them, granting tiny insignificant men and women— the Archivists, all of them Bone Listeners with an aptitude for pain—access to its arcs and nodes of bone. Information and inference, learning and logic, coexisted in its vastness... without self-conscious awareness. Had it been alive, capable of sensing itself, it would have been a god-like being, ruling or destroying or ignoring the Earth, whatever it saw fit. As it was, it formed a repository of more than facts—it held the emotions and satori-bliss of insight, the nirvana of information-merging, the dreams and pain of wisdom.
Its struts were of bone. It was vast and three-dimensional.
This was the Lattice.
And through his seven spiders, even without Bone Listener awareness, Carl could sense its power. He watched as guardian-moths of living copper, their wings razor-edged, flitted among the struts, while
spiders crawled and flowed, conjoining the Lattice with the tiny frail Archivists who used it.
Carl, via his spiders, followed one such flow of spiders as it split into smaller and smaller tributaries, eventually leading to a single stone couch (one among dozens, maybe hundreds involved in this information quest) on which an Archivist-Scribe lay with eyes wide open, allowing exit and entry of blood-spiders to his own self.
Scarlet spiders danced across his staring eyeballs, and pulled themselves down into the sockets, merging with his thoughts, before dragging themselves back out. The Archivist-Scribe’s gaze was fixed, for he could not blink, but the smile on his mouth was wide. He was merged with the flow whose medium was computational blood, manifested as a sea of spiders.
But Carl was observing, not using the Lattice.
Now it was time to hunt for facts, to prove to himself that while he could not hear the bones, his spiders could resonate with others of their kind, allowing him to sense information currently in the flow, though he could never initiate investigation himself.
Perhaps that limitation hid an advantage, for he would never feel the depths of pain that every Archivist experienced, during each moment inside the Lattice.
It took a long time.
Later, both Carl and his spiders slept exhausted, and his dreams were strange.
JAMIE THARGULIS DREAMED of Stephanie-Charon Mors in another guise, as if she were divested of her nun’s habit—a fantasy—to live as an ordinary woman. Her ordinary name would be Stephanie, but Stephanie what?
Even asleep, he dared not hope she might be Stephanie Thargulis someday. After a time, the dream dissipated, and he came awake, his cheekbones chilled by evaporating tears.
NEXT EVENING, CARL began to write the essay, knowing this was going to be something special.
He began by rhetorically asking what it meant to assign an age to a city. Was there an official founding date? Should one begin with the date the first stone was laid? Or with the completion of its first tower, or the flight of its first gargoyle?