by John Chu
When Ritter was six, Father burnt offerings at Mother’s grave, then brought Ritter with him to his new posting. Camp Terminus was always located where Turbulence was the most violent and consequently where the barricade was in the worst shape. This wasn’t the location where Ritter spent his childhood, but this was still the place where he spent it.
Ritter took his post-shift meal alone in the corner. Steam rising from a bowl of rice always carried with it the smell of home. Bits of garlic and hot pepper flavored his plate of thinly sliced pig’s ears. Salty, metallic cubes of congealed pig’s blood floated in a light but gingery broth. His appointment with Father at sunrise, however, had stolen his appetite. The hour left until the meeting could not have been passing more slowly.
A long shadow spilled over Ritter. Deck lurched over the table, his hands clasped behind his back.
Ritter narrowed his gaze. “Father can’t meet this morning. You have … a box of papers you’re supposed to give me instead.”
“Very good.” Deck tossed the box onto the table. The bowls and plate clattered as the box landed with a thud. “Open it.”
The box had a flap tied shut with a string. Ritter pulled out a thick stack of paper. A piece of cardboard jutted out from near the top of the stack. The analysis Father had ordered stared back at him. Ritter flipped through his own work. The pages had empty white margins where Ritter had expected a torrent of words in Father’s sharp, precise hand. The only notation Father had made was a check mark at the top of the first page. Ritter hated the surge of joy rushing through his body. This was the most praise he’d ever received from Father.
The piece of cardboard separated his analysis from the rest of the stack. Father had inscribed on it in an uncharacteristic scrawl: “Plans for new barricade. Analyze then suggest better trade-offs.” Ritter peered quizzically at Deck, whose eyebrows lifted in innocent curiosity.
“Good news?” Deck’s mouth creased into a gentle smile when Ritter glared at him. “This is not how your father’s sense of humor—yes, he does have one—works. He’s quite serious about wanting your analysis.”
Ritter leafed through Father’s plans. It was written in Father’s native language, dense blocks of equations surrounded by intricate diagrams. Anyone else might have expected to see this in translation, but Ritter had grown up with this language. Deck was undoubtedly right. Father expected him not only to understand this but have something intelligent to say about it. Ritter supposed that wasn’t impossible.
The lone check mark stared at Ritter. Father would never be happy with Ritter merely understanding this design. With so many minds impinging on his, however, he’d never focus well enough to implement it.
“Father doesn’t want just an analysis. He has always expected that his son would be an engineer just like him.” Ritter looked up at the archivist. “Please, Deck. You could fix my mind—”
“Junior, you know your father loves you more than anyone else in the world, right?”
From anyone else, that would have been a platitude. Deck, though, was Father’s oldest friend. Only duty ever kept them apart. Deck was sworn to recover and restore feral libraries. Father was sworn to defend the world against Turbulence.
“I don’t want to disappoint him.” Ritter held out the stack of paper. “He wants me to build this with him and so do I. I understand what I’m giving up. If you won’t help me, I’ll find another archivist—”
“No. If anyone is going to do this to you …” Deck exhaled audibly, his mind blasting a reluctance that soon would no longer insinuate itself into Ritter’s mind. “Come on, let’s find somewhere private.”
A loud shriek rent the air. Ritter jumped in his seat. Except for Deck, everyone else in the canteen glanced oddly at him, then returned to their conversations. Deck simply stared at him, concerned.
No one else had heard it. Ritter closed his eyes and shook his head, trying to drive the shelves of other people’s minds out of his own. The barricade was about to fail. Fatigued gears and piston seals about to crack inundated his mind. He sprinted out of the canteen and headed toward the massive storm of Turbulence about to arrive.
In the distance, skeins of Turbulence lashed at the barricade. Engineers clung on its girders, dark specks tumbling against a multicolored light show. Loud, sustained shrieks still rang in Ritter’s ears. He raced toward the barricade, leaving Deck, despite the archivist’s longer legs, in a trail of dust somewhere behind him.
Father ran along the barricade, ordering engineers to retreat and then to erect a retaining wall behind him. Those dark specks slid down, pooling at the ground. They scattered back, finally distinguishable as people as they grew closer.
Turbulence wore down the barricade. Bright tangled threads crushed gears and flayed open pistons as they squirmed through. Father was constructing some sort of machine on the barren ground, engineers still running past him. A low drone filled the air. Sparks danced around Father as he swung up and down the frame of girders he’d created, forcing gears into place, attaching tubing to pistons.
No machine constructed by just one engineer, even Father, could possibly settle or divert this much Turbulence. As more of the machine coalesced into being, Ritter realized what Father intended to do. Ritter redoubled his sprint, his arms pumping furiously and his thighs burning. He shouted at the engineers in front of him to stop Father, but they simply continued to erect their retaining wall. Maybe they didn’t understand Father’s machine. Maybe they were too focused on building the retaining wall. Or, more likely, they were too loyal to Father.
The barricade ruptured. Wild gears and belts flew away before they dissipated. The shrieking in Ritter’s head stopped, leaving only a hollow ringing in his ears. Turbulence burst through like a flood of heavy spring rain. Multicolored skeins entangled engineers who’d fled too slowly or too late. Threads flayed the shelves of their minds. Volumes of knowledge split and fell. Engineers slumped to the ground as they forgot they needed to breathe or, for that matter, how.
Father’s machine unfolded, stretching like wings just behind the failing parts of the barricade. Hinges droned as machinery cantilevered into place. The ground trembled when the machine landed, a solid wall that ran the length of the breach. Father stood in the middle, tiny compared to the oncoming storm.
Turbulence pelted Father’s machine like random splotches of paint. They unspooled with uncharacteristic order. Threads wormed through Father’s machine from all directions to converge on him. They swirled around him, swallowing him inside a multicolored cocoon. He lifted into the air as his machine funneled the storm into him.
Imagined machines consumed Turbulence well. A person consumed Turbulence even better. An engineer who might have stepped out of one of the Five Great Classical Novels consumed Turbulence best of all. By the time Father forgot how to breathe, the storm would be no more trouble than a gentle mist.
Hands grasped Ritter’s shoulders, lifting him off the ground before he could charge over the half-constructed retaining wall. Ritter’s legs kicked uselessly for a few steps before he let them dangle.
“No.” Deck set him on the ground, but didn’t let go. “Let them finish first.”
Engineers swarmed over and around Ritter, leaping from girder to girder, securing tubing to pistons. So many minds crashed into his that Ritter could barely nod his head to agree. The designs for the retaining wall lit in his mind like the sun and blinded him.
Deck was taller and longer-limbed but Ritter had been lifting heavy machinery since he was a child. However, Ritter kept his boots still and his arms by his side. Removing Father now would overwhelm the retaining wall and the engineers still hanging off it.
They connected isolated pieces of machinery with belts and tubing. The retaining wall lurched into life. Meanwhile, the shelves of Father’s mind dimmed and splintered. The tracks they slid on crumbled into pieces. Books, their bindings cracked and pages torn, fell out of their proper places. Ritter’s eyes hurt and air refused to stay in his
lungs.
Ritter shook off Deck’s grip, or maybe Deck had let go. His boots pounded the dusty ground. He leapt onto the wall, warping its machinery so that he could squeeze through. No one tried to stop him.
Engineers were still straggling back to the retaining wall from the breach. Father’s machine, clanking and puffing in a steady, complex pattern, loomed before Ritter. Above him, Turbulence knotted Father to the machine. An amorphous cocoon billowed around Father, bright colors swirling through his skin.
Ritter climbed Father’s machine, pulling himself up girders and dodging flares of Turbulence. Heat scraped his body. The almost subliminal scent of imagined parts about to burn filled his lungs. This machine might have had even less time left than Father. Still, Ritter substituted in new control gears, swapped tubing to form a new set of connections, and shoved what he hadn’t changed into new positions. The pattern of clanks and puffs grew simpler and quieter. Sweat soaked his shirt and stung his eyes.
Threads of Turbulence shifted course above Father. At first, they fluttered like ribbons in a breeze. As the Turbulence approached the retaining wall, threads tangled back into knotted skeins. Engineers shouted at each other. Men and women, seeming the size of rats, scurried up and down the invisible wall.
The cocoon that enveloped Father shrank into him and he began to fall. Ritter stretched out. His arm hit Father’s back and he hugged Father to him. Father’s head fell on Ritter’s shoulders but Father’s chest swelled, straining against Ritter’s arm.
Ritter shifted Father over his shoulder. One arm steadied Father while the other slid along girders as Ritter worked his way down. Pain radiated up his fingers as he climbed and shocked his knees as he jumped to the ground. He ran to the retaining wall, set Father down where the wall lay, climbed through a hole he created for himself, then dragged Father through.
One last group of fleeing engineers followed Ritter. The engineers, their brows creased with concern, pooled around him as he threw Father onto his back.
“Are you all right?” Ritter asked. When they muttered and nodded, Ritter pointed at the retaining wall, then dug out his best command voice. “Then what are you waiting for?”
The question stunned them out of their grief. They joined the men and women shoring up the already failing wall. Anything thrown together in a matter of minutes would need constant maintenance until this storm broke.
“You.” Ritter stared up at Deck. “You can repair his mind.”
Deck stared at Father then frowned. “Maybe, with help.”
“I’ve taken classes in archive restoration.”
“Junior, if you help me repair your father’s mind, eliminating what makes you a librarian will kill you. Everything you’ve learned, everything you can do, will be too integrated with the rest of you for me to excise. If you help me, I can never make you the engineer you want to be.”
“That’s my trade-off, then.”
Deck started away from the wall in long strides. “The canteen ought to be empty. We can set up in there.”
Ritter followed, matching pace when Deck broke into a sprint. Father weighed on him with each pounding step.
One moment, Ritter and Deck stood alone in the canteen with Father spread flat on a table. The next moment, Father’s mind surrounded Ritter. Disparate shelves, rather than revolving around each other in elegant curves, had congealed into vast, static walls arranged in a flat lattice. The equal of the best engineers in the Five Great Classical Novels, right now, had the sentience of only the simplest libraries.
Ritter’s fingers pinched the thin edge of a shelf jammed with books. His boots pressed against the back of a shelf that wasn’t. Disheveled books lay half open, scattered on splintered shelving that protruded at odd angles out of the case. Rust filled his lungs. Creaking pierced the air. Ritter hadn’t dared to do anything yet. The creaking must have been Deck somewhere else in Father’s mind.
The archivist had left him in the section of Father’s mind Ritter knew best, reminded Ritter of the archive restoration classes he’d taken, then disappeared. Day in, day out, for as long as Ritter had lived, he’d witnessed shelves of Father’s mind slide and rotate around each other. If he couldn’t restore Father’s intellect, Deck had told him, no one else was likely to do any better.
Pain radiated up Ritter’s fingers. Time to do something before he lost his grip and fell to the unseen floor below. If librarians ever let themselves maintain less than three points of contact with a book wall, they’d have a life expectancy as short as that of engineers. One of the many miracles of Father was that he’d not only lived but remained an engineer long enough to see his child become one.
Turbulence had smashed shelves and pushed books out of place, but these shelves had lost little actual knowledge. Ritter was librarian enough to rebuild shelves, repair broken bindings, and mend ripped pages. In time, those books would heal and become indistinguishable from the originals. Turbulence hadn’t torn any pages out or rent any book to pieces. Every book slid into its proper place, each hissing a puff of air as it did that still smelled disconcertingly of rust.
Father, however, was more than an immaculately organized collection of knowledge. Ritter scrambled onto the top of the wall. The toes of his boots jutted out past the plank that capped it. The machinery of Father’s reasoning lay below him. Rusted tracks extended, cracked and kinked out to nowhere from every wall. What ought to have been patterns of elegant curves was instead a thicket of thorns. A glowing slick stained bearings and brackets that jostled and jittered but couldn’t spin or bend.
The materials were lighter and more delicate, but the math was analogous to what Father had drilled into Ritter every day since before he could walk. He reached down for a rusted track and began to restore Father’s intellect to what he’d always seen.
Sweat dripped into his eyes. The restored material of Father’s intelligence was both slippery and sharp. Blood smeared and coated his fingers like thin gloves. He had no idea how long he’d been working when he noticed Deck peering down at him. Time moved differently in archives.
“Not bad.” Deck’s gaze swept a wide arc. “No one will ever be able to tell that Turbulence had ever overrun his intellect.”
Ghostly tracks spiraled around Ritter. They crisscrossed each other, arcing through hundreds of dimensions. Bearings spun with a scarcely audible hiss. Ritter reached for a book and Father’s mind reconfigured around him. Shelves scattered and recombined as though the wind had torn a spiderweb to pieces only to have it coalesce into a different web.
Deck hadn’t even flinched when the shelf he stood on rotated and translated to its new position. Only a slow nod betrayed any sign that he noticed Father’s intellect had changed configuration.
“No one except Father.” Ritter climbed to a bearing and then tapped it, careful not to smear it with his blood. “I still have work left to do.”
Deck frowned. “Follow me.” He offered Ritter a hand. “There’s something you need to see.”
Ritter climbed up to join Deck. Where once a field of darkness had been, the rest of Father’s mind gleamed. Pieces of shelving ferried books in sweeping arcs, then merged to form not walls but something crystalline. The myriad of shelves all seemed adjacent to each other.
Deck slid on a track toward the structure. Gingerly, Ritter followed. At first, he thought Deck just wanted to show him how Father’s mind should look. Father’s intellect still had to be reintegrated into this structure. Then he noticed how barren the shelves were. Translucent slats joined from a sparse, almost hollow structure, rather than one brimming with memories.
“What’s missing?” Given that all of Father’s autonomic processes worked and Ritter had spent who knows how long restoring everything related to Father’s profession, he hadn’t actually needed to ask.
“I’m sorry, Junior.” Deck placed an arm on Ritter’s shoulder but Ritter shrugged it off. “I salvaged as much as I could. He might still remember us as colleagues.”
�
�Very well. I still have work to do.” If he looked at the empty shelves any longer, his chest would burst. He jumped to a track that led him back to the machinery of Father’s intellect. “Bearings to repack. His intellect to reintegrate with the rest of his mind.”
“Junior.” Deck’s voice shot Ritter between the shoulder blades. “You don’t have to be the brave engineer. Not right now.”
“Actually, I do.” By some miracle, his voice held steady. “Especially right now.”
It was oddly comforting to make bearings run freely, to make the machinery of Father’s intellect swirl around him in the complex patterns Ritter had always found so intimidating. Making and repairing machines was what Father had taught him to do and now that was all Ritter had left of him. That, somehow, didn’t stop Ritter’s rib cage from squeezing his heart.
Moonlight passed through the much-battered, but still intact, retaining wall. It curved sharply on either end to join up with the rest of the barricade. The few threads of Turbulence sweeping the wall were practically invisible. Ritter felt the retaining wall degrade infinitesimally with each pass but none of the other engineers on tonight’s watch seemed to notice.
Chunks of breached barricade and the wreckage of Father’s machine still littered the ground. Soon, Ritter and the other engineers at Camp Terminus would have to clear all that up. The barricade itself still needed to be replaced. The retaining wall had never been intended to last. Rotating teams of engineers rebuilt it day and night.
Ritter sipped tea from his vacuum flask. He sat against the retaining wall, reviewing his annotations of Father’s plans for the new barricade. The rest of his team sat chatting around a fire. Low rumblings, high-pitched words, smoke and their collective fear drifted toward him. Rescuing Father had given him a reputation, not one he would have chosen.