by Jim C. Hines
Glass crunched underfoot. The ladybug had to have been caught in the cold, but with so much glass and ice scattered across the floor, it was hard to find a little blob of silver metal.
“Isaac.” Lena pointed to the door. The ladybug had gotten halfway through the glass when I caught it with the sphere. Before I could figure out the easiest way to work it free, Lena tapped the door with her sword, bringing the whole thing down in a shower of pebbled glass.
“What happened?” asked Nidhi, running onto the deck.
“We’re fine.” Lena’s bokken slipped from her hand. Nidhi started toward her, but Lena waved her back. “I’m all right.”
I grabbed a pair of pliers from the junk drawer in the kitchen. Already the ladybug was trying to move, legs and wings clicking erratically. I tightened the pliers around the body until I felt the metal shell begin to bend.
I brought it to the office and switched on my lamp. The shell was grooved silver. Two of the six legs had snapped off from the cold. One of the wings beneath had burned away, leaving little more than a stub. I fetched a Q-tip from the bathroom and tried to clean the soot from the other, but I succeeded only in snapping it. Under the light, the broken wing looked like a tissue-thin strip of nacre peeled from the inside of an oyster shell.
Beneath the shell were gears that would have made a Swiss watchmaker weep with envy. The eyes were like droplets of red wine. Garnets, maybe?
“What is it?” Lena asked.
“Not a clue.” Disproportionately large copper mandibles clicked at my fingers. “What steampunk adventure did you sneak out of? Cherie Priest? Girl Genius? You’re gorgeous, whatever you are.”
“And in the meantime, its friends are drilling deeper into Lena’s oak,” Nidhi said tightly.
I winced. “Sorry. I got—”
“It’s all right,” said Lena. “We’re used to you. ‘Look at the shiny magic thing trying to kill us, isn’t it awesome?’ I’ll be happy to admire them with you as soon as we get them out of my tree.”
I held the tip of a wooden pencil in front of the ladybug’s head. It snapped cleanly through both wood and graphite. “I see several types of metal in there. Copper and silver. Possibly steel.”
“Were they created with libriomancy?” Nidhi asked.
“Most likely.” Only a few people could manipulate raw magic. Far more could use books to help them shape that power. “I’ll check the Porter catalog when I’m done here to see if I can figure out what book they might have come from.”
I looked around the office. I didn’t know where my magnifying glass had gone, but I spotted something else that should work. Holding the pliers tight, I squeezed past Lena to the 10” telescope tucked into the corner. A built-in rack on the side of the scope held a set of eyepieces. I grabbed one from the middle and returned to the desk.
Holding the two-inch-long metal-and-plastic tube to my right eye, I peered at the insect. I had to look through the wrong end of the eyepiece to bring things into proper focus, but it worked well enough.
“There are no welds. The shell looks like it’s riveted to the body.” The rivets appeared to be copper, but they were impossibly tiny, as were the hinges and joints below.
The ladybug snapped at me, the mandibles clicking audibly. The sight of those magnified, serrated pincers reaching for my eye made me jerk back so hard I almost dropped the pliers.
I tested a magnet next, but it had no effect. Whatever metals this was made of, they weren’t ferrous. “I need a better way to hold this thing while I study it.” Superglue on the joints should effectively paralyze it, though that might obscure the finer details.
Before I could go digging for the glue, Lena reached past me and stabbed a toothpick through the center of the ladybug’s body. She gave the toothpick a vicious twist, eased the pliers from my hand, and set them aside. She raised the still-squirming thing into the air. “Hold it by this end.”
I swallowed and took the toothpick. With the eyepiece lens, I could see the tiny white threads growing from the toothpick through the interior workings, like parasites devouring the bug from within. I would have felt bad for it, had its cousins not been doing the same thing to Lena.
A coiled spring down the center of the back appeared to provide movement, but I saw no place for a key, no way of winding that spring once it died. I might be able to wind it with a pair of jewelry pliers, but more likely I’d just break something else. I set down the eyepiece and used a straightened paper clip to fold one of the legs back. A gear the size of a snowflake popped out of place as a result of my clumsy efforts.
I pulled the lamp closer. Mechanically, this made no sense at all. Tiny pistons and gears manipulated the legs, but I saw no way to coordinate or control their movement. “Let’s see if you have some sort of brain in there.”
I grabbed the pliers, tightened them carefully around the insect’s head, and twisted it free of the body.
The ladybug went dead. The spring jumped free, followed by a sprinkling of gears and rods. No way was this Humpty Dumpty getting put back together again. I set the body on the desk and studied the head through the eyepiece. Inside, tiny silver prongs held an oily sphere in place, like a jewelry setting designed for the world’s smallest engagement ring.
I used the paper clip to pop the sphere free. It landed on the desk without bouncing or rolling, despite being perfectly round. I touched it with my finger, and it stuck to my skin, allowing me to study it under the lens. I placed the tip of the paper clip to the sphere, and it clicked onto the metal like a magnet. When I tugged it free and set it on a piece of paper, it clung there just as easily.
“What is it?” Normally I would have enjoyed the way Lena’s body pressed against mine as she peered over my shoulder, but now I barely noticed.
“It’s called a boson chip.” From what I remembered, it would stick to just about anything through a kind of subatomic static charge. I felt a sense of magical pressure, like a balloon inflated to the bursting point. “Harvested from the brain of a fictional silicon-based hive mind. This little thing could store every book in the Copper River Library, and it would still have space for Nicola Pallas’ music collection.”
“You’ve seen them before?” asked Nidhi.
“I’m the one who pulled them out of a bad space opera.” I stared at the chip. “Victor Harrison had requisitioned a batch for one of his pet projects.”
Victor was a legend among the Porters. He had the amazing ability to make magic and technology play nicely together, and had built everything from a telepathic coffee maker to a database server that transformed would-be hackers into various reptiles. He had also jinxed my telescope so that every time I looked at Mars, Marvin the Martian popped up and threatened to destroy the Earth with an explosive space-modulator. Victor was more than capable of putting together a set of pseudoliving metal insects.
Rather, he would have been capable of doing so, if not for the fact that Victor Harrison had been murdered earlier this year.
For as long as Frank and I were together, I never questioned my actions. I never asked why Marion Dearing wept when she thought nobody could hear. I gave her husband happiness. How could she object to that if she truly loved him?
I saw nothing wrong in fanning the embers of Frank’s lust. He wanted to be seduced, pushed over the edge until nothing existed but desire and satisfaction.
For myself, I knew only joy. I lived for those moments when my body entwined with his, the urgent grunts of his exertions blending with my quiet moans, but there were other pleasures as well. The burn of my muscles when I was out working the farm. Devouring the meals Marion prepared for us.
In the beginning, the other farmhands tried to flirt with me. I tolerated their overly familiar comments and “accidental” touches. Frank wanted others to appreciate what he had, but he was unwilling to share. So when one man tried to take things further, I broke his arm in two places.
I knew I was stronger than the others, but that was the first time I ha
d used my strength against another person. Through that confrontation, I discovered that violence could be just another source of pleasure.
Only years later, long after I had buried Frank in the dirt, did I begin to recognize what I had done. What I had become.
Only then did I begin to understand how dangerous I was.
I SPENT THE NEXT hour on my laptop, lost in Porter databases and old research reports. I rarely used the laptop, which might have been why the insects spared it. Magic provided an amazing connection with the Porter network, but even magic couldn’t force the outdated hardware to process information at a faster rate.
In one window, I scrolled through various weapons we had cataloged over the years, looking for ideas to clear the rest of the bugs from Lena’s tree. I found nothing that looked like it would destroy metal while leaving her oak intact. The sonic screwdriver from Doctor Who might have worked, having been canonically established as being ineffective on wood, but nobody had ever figured out how to use the controls on the blasted thing.
I was also reading abstracts of every paper and report Victor Harrison had ever filed. I didn’t expect to find a description of a secret self-destruct code that would blow up his six-legged creations, but I had hoped to find something that might help us.
“You’re a librarian. Can’t you do some sort of keyword search to speed this up?” Nidhi stood by the window where she could peer out at Lena’s tree in the backyard. Lena had returned to the garden, asking to be left alone.
“Sure, and that would help if he’d filed his paperwork correctly.” I fought the urge to throw the laptop against the wall. “Even if he had, the real problem is figuring out what he didn’t document. Half the things Victor built could have gotten him kicked out of the Porters.” He had won twenty grand one year by betting on the outcome of the Super Bowl, a game he had recorded on his illegally-modified VCR a week before it aired.
“He was as bad as you are in some ways,” Nidhi said. “Rules were never a priority. Once you start playing God, nothing else matters. You’re incapable of walking away from an idea, no matter how bad an idea it might be.”
I glanced away, thinking of certain reports and experiments I had failed to file with the Porters. “I know, I know. ‘If you really want to kill a libriomancer, hook a bomb up to a big red button and tell him not to press it.’”
For the first time that night, Nidhi almost smiled. “That sounds like Doctor Karim.”
“She knows her clientele,” I admitted. Regular appointments with a Porter-approved shrink were one rule you didn’t get to break. Even Gutenberg had his own personal therapist, though rumor had it she was a hundred and thirty years old and preserved on a heavily fortified computer system, courtesy of a brain download performed using a Richard Morgan cyberpunk novel. “Doctor Karim’s worried about post-traumatic stress after the mess downstate. I’m pretty sure she’s also screening me for signs of bipolar disorder.”
“A manic period is normal after magic use.” She looked pointedly at my legs, and I forced myself to stop drumming my heels on the floor. “Lena has been worried about you. She says you’re not sleeping well, and when you do, you have nightmares.”
I shoved the laptop away and rubbed my eyes. “What other things has she shared?”
“That Doctor Karim has prescribed stronger pills to help you sleep, and you’ve gone through two refills already.” She sighed. “Are you surprised that Lena and I talk about you, Isaac?”
I was, a little. My relationship with Lena had brought Nidhi Shah into my life in a new and unexpected way, but I found it easier not to think about that when I was with Lena. “What else does she say?”
“That you’ve been cutting back on your work at the library, and you spend hours locked away in your office. She says you and Gutenberg haven’t had the smoothest time working together. No surprise there. Anyone with his centuries of experience will have trouble making allowances for those of us with mere decades.”
“I am but an egg,” I said ruefully. She just stared at me. “Don’t tell me you’ve never read Stranger in a Strange Land?”
“Heinlein?” She made a sour face. “No thank you.”
I had reread several Heinlein titles earlier this summer, trying to get a better framework for our three-way relationship. Unfortunately, the free love fantasies of Heinlein’s work hadn’t provided much insight into making such a relationship work in the real world. I had tracked down a few nonfiction titles that were more useful, though my boss had given me a very odd look when she saw my interlibrary loan request go through.
“Those computer chips have to be important,” Nidhi said. “Could you use an EMP to wipe them clean? Even a strong enough magnet—”
“Magnets won’t touch a boson chip.” I jumped up and began to pace. “Those things can survive a nuclear blast at close range. We need to lure the bugs out of the tree and destroy them all at once, and we need to do it quickly. You’ve known Lena longer than I have. How much time do you think she has before she has to return to her tree?”
“When her oak is healthy, she can stay away for up to a week if she absolutely has to. But with these things weakening her, I’m not sure.”
I glared at the laptop “Why the hell would Victor make something like this?”
“The same reason you keep drawing up plans for magic-based space exploration. Victor loved his toys. He loved to create, but he wasn’t always good at thinking through the consequences.”
I thought back to what we had seen that afternoon. “The man we saw was wearing metal armor of some sort.” I picked up the decapitated ladybug. “Imagine a swarm of these things clinging to you.”
“They could serve as armor and weapons both,” Nidhi said, nodding. “We thought the wendigo’s wounds had been made by bullets, but they were roughly the size of the holes these insects drilled through your door and ceiling.”
I shivered, remembering the insects landing on my body, biting into my skin. I imagined them burrowing deeper, through flesh and bone. “He’s got to be controlling them. When we showed up in Tamarack and began snooping around, he sent his insects to attack Lena’s tree.”
“How did he know where to find it?” Nidhi asked.
“One question at a time.” I steepled my fingers and tapped them against my chin. “Instead of destroying them, what if we overrode their orders?”
“How?”
I grabbed the phone and dialed the line for Jeneta Aboderin’s camp. I spent the next five minutes explaining that I was her internship supervisor, and yes, this really was a crisis.
The counselor on the other end sounded about fifteen. “It’s eleven o’clock. Curfew was an hour ago. Everyone is supposed to stay in their cabins until reveille.”
“Dammit, man, this is an emergency. We’ve got a burst water pipe here, and more than two thousand books that have to be bagged and frozen immediately!”
“You’re…you want to freeze the books?”
“I want to save them. Freezing minimizes the damage while we get them shipped off to be vacuum dried.” I talked over his protests, channeling a particularly obnoxious and arrogant Art History professor from Michigan State University. “That’s just the first step. If we don’t get this place dried out quickly, we’ll end up with mold, fungus, and possibly even…” I lowered my voice to a whisper. “Silverfish.”
The counselor stammered an apology and went to fetch Jeneta. He must have been running, because she picked up only three minutes later.
“Do you have any poems that could draw insects out of a tree?” I asked the moment I heard her voice.
“Seriously? You dragged me out of bed for a termite problem?”
“I called because I need your help.”
“Oh, really?” I could hear her grin through the phone. “Before I agree to anything, does this mean you’ll take me with you next time you run off to do something interesting? Because if I’m going to be—”
“It’s Lena,” I said. “It’s her tree
being attacked.”
Jeneta hesitated. “How serious is this? If you’re calling now instead of waiting until morning…”
“They’re killing her tree. Killing her.”
“Oh.” In that single syllable, I heard fear evict the excitement and bravado of moments before. “I’ll try, but I’ve never done anything like this before, Isaac. I’m not sure it will work.”
“I’ve seen what you can do, Jeneta. You can handle this. I’ll be there as soon as I can.” When I hung up, I found Nidhi watching me with a flat, expressionless look I remembered from our sessions together. “You disapprove.”
“She’s fourteen years old. What happens if she can’t control these things? What if they attack her like they did you?”
“Do you have a better suggestion?”
She turned away. “If I did, I’d have stopped you.”
“I don’t like it either,” I admitted. “If you see another one of those things, get the hell out of here. I’ll leave Smudge in his travel cage. He should give you enough warning if anything goes wrong. Keep him with you, but don’t let him get into another scuffle with the bugs.”
I looked through the window. Lena sat in the archway of the garden, her back to the house. Even from here, I could see tension and weariness in the set of her shoulders, the slump of her head. “Call me if anything—”
“I will.”
Jeneta wore an oversized blue sweatshirt with the moose-and-lake logo of Camp Aazhawigiizhigokwe on the front. She spent the drive reading, and the soft light from her e-reader cast odd shadows over her face.
“How do you stand it up here?” she asked. “There’s only one building at camp with a decent Internet connection. The wireless signal doesn’t even reach the cafeteria, and the cell reception sucks.”