Umber’s head snapped back. “What? But how? I’ve had that locked away since …” His eyes nearly closed, and he scratched his emerging beard. “Aaaah … when I fell asleep in the barge, and woke up in the darkness. I had the feeling someone was there! That candle didn’t go out by itself, did it?”
Hap stared at the stones under his feet. “It was wrong, I know it was, but I wanted to see it so badly. I am so sorry, Lord Umber.”
Umber looked sideways at Hap. “So. How much did you read?”
“To where it said, ‘I know from where you came, Umber. I know too what happened to that world of yours.’”
Umber’s jaw slid from side to side. “Well … who am I to blame you for trying to see the note? You were scared and confused, whisked away by strangers. And I withheld the only clue to your identity. Frankly, I’d have done the same thing.
“But don’t worry. First thing tomorrow, I’ll show you the whole note. Please give me until then—there are other things I have to explain first, and I need time to gather my thoughts. I wish I could say this will answer all your questions and put your mind at ease. It won’t, I’m afraid. But there’s one thing that we know for sure now: Happenstance, you are a Meddler.”
The storm began to fade hours later. Oates appeared outside the Aerie and heaved a rope across the bridge. Umber secured it on their end, and he and Hap gripped it tight as they crossed with waves washing around their knees. Lady Truden nearly fainted with relief when Umber walked into the Aerie again—not only because Umber was safe from the Creep, but also because he’d clearly emerged from his dark mood. Still, the return of Umber’s buoyant spirits couldn’t keep him from collapsing onto a sofa in the main hall and falling into a deep slumber.
Hap took the padded box from his pocket, put it on the floor by the crack in the wall, and opened the lid. Thimble climbed out.
“Thank you,” Hap said. “You saved us.”
Thimble puffed out his tiny chest. “Don’t forget it,” he said, and disappeared into his hole.
CHAPTER
31
Dawn broke slowly, as if reluctant to reveal the damage of the storm. The last tower of Petraportus was a fraction of its former height, a shattered fang that stabbed the sky. The city’s docks were smashed. Ships were half sunk or run aground. Roofs were sheared off, chimneys toppled, and the tents of the market were shredded and flattened. But as soon as the light allowed, people emerged to begin repairs, as numerous and industrious as ants.
When Hap stepped out of his room, he found Lady Truden waiting for him in the middle of the corridor. “Happenstance,” she said.
All his muscles tensed. “Good morning, Lady Truden.”
Her jaw hardly moved as she spoke. “I wanted to tell you that … I mean to say … you are forgiven for trespassing into Lord Umber’s tower. It was understandable, under the circumstances. Of course you will not be asked to leave. You will always be welcome here.”
Hap leaned to one side, trying to see behind Lady Truden. Surely, someone was pressing a sword into her back, forcing her to say these words. But she was alone.
“Thank you, Lady Truden,” Hap said.
“I also want to say that …” A long pause followed. She groped the air with her fingers as if she might find the words she wanted there. “The things I said … I didn’t mean …” She put a clenched hand to her mouth. “Lord Umber is a great man. I can’t imagine losing him. All of us losing him, that is.”
Hap nodded. “Yes, Lady Truden.”
“Also,” she added with the corner of one eye twitching, “Lord Umber wishes to see you in his tower.”
“Um … all right,” Hap replied.
Lady Truden nodded curtly, went to her room, and closed her door a bit too hard.
Hap walked up to the terrace, glad to end the conversation. The door to the tower opened before he could knock, and a smiling Umber, with a mug of coffee in one hand, beckoned him inside. “There you are, Hap! Follow me.”
* * *
For the second time, and the first by invitation, Hap stood inside Umber’s study. The silver case was out of sight.
Umber sat at his desk and Hap took the chair on the other side. Umber leaned forward, with his fingers interlaced. “I’ll show you the rest of the note soon, Hap. But first there are some other things you should know. About me, and where I came from. Are you ready to hear my story?”
Hap nodded.
“Good.” Umber thumped his desk with his palms, and offered a lopsided grin. “So … by now you know I’m not really from around here, don’t you?”
Hap’s leg was bouncing up and down. He stilled it with his hand. “I guess so. But where did you come from?”
“How do I explain? It’s a different world altogether. A separate time and place, disconnected from this one. That’s a slippery idea, Hap, can you grasp it?”
Hap tried and failed to understand. “But how can you know that? This world hasn’t all been explored, has it? Maybe your land is just far away, across the sea.”
Umber shook his head. “This world may not be fully mapped, but mine was. And while the two have some things in common—some language and history, and the stars above—there are undeniable differences. For one thing, if you find an old map here, and it says, ‘Here there be dragons,’ well … there really are dragons. You see, there was no magic where I came from, Hap. No tyrant worms, sea-giants, sorcerers, trolls, curses, or spells. But we had something just as amazing. We had technology.”
Hap angled his head, questioning.
“Hap, what would you say if I told you that my people could fly to the moon inside a metal tube? Or that we could speak to anyone in the world, no matter how far they went, whenever we liked? Or that we had a device that could kill a million people a thousand miles away?”
Hap felt his face turn white. “I … I would say you had magic. Some of it wonderful, and some of it terrible.”
“I suppose you would,” Umber said. “But there was nothing magical about it. It was technology, always marching forward, and not always for the better.
“But I’m getting ahead of myself. Where should my story begin? You don’t need to know much about my youth. I’ll leave it at this: My name is Brian Umber. I was born in a place called New York, in a nation called America. I was a prodigy with an all-consuming curiosity, and by the time I was twenty I had mastered a multitude of subjects at our finest universities. The only question I couldn’t answer was: What was I supposed to do with the rest of my life? Every option seemed so dull.
“A wonderful answer came out of the blue when a rich man named Doane called on me. He was inspired, he said, by something called the Doomsday Vault, in a country of my world called Norway. They were gathering millions of seeds from every crop known to man inside a cave in the frozen north, to ensure that those plants could survive a global catastrophe.”
“A what?” Hap asked.
“Global catastrophe. A disaster that reaches every corner of the world. A collapse of civilization.”
“How, Lord Umber? How could something that terrible happen?”
“You underestimate our inventiveness,” Umber replied grimly. “But this was Doane’s idea: Instead of the seeds of agriculture, he wanted to preserve the seeds of civilization. He assembled a brilliant team to gather information on art, music, literature, science, architecture, engineering, medicine, philosophy, and more. Like those crop seeds, the information would be kept in a safe place. If something awful happened, people could remember all the good things that existed, and learn how to restore them.
“So Doane invited me, with my command of so many diverse subjects, to supervise the project.” Umber rubbed his hands on his desk. “Does this make sense so far?”
“That sounds like an awful lot of information,” Hap said.
“More than you could imagine. Millions upon millions of pages.”
“And all the books would go into a vault?”
Umber leaned forward. “There were
no books at all.”
“But … then … where was all that information kept?”
Umber stood, walked to the wall beside his desk, and pulled the tapestry there to one side. Behind it was a round metal door with a keyhole in its center. He took a key from his pocket, fitted it into the lock, swung the door open and reached inside. Hap watched with widened eyes as Umber removed the silver case. There was that word again, engraved on the smoothly polished surface: REBOOT. Umber ran his fingers across the letters.
“I told you what this word means, didn’t I?” Umber asked.
Hap nodded. “It means to start over.”
“That’s right. Project Reboot was the name of Doane’s venture. Helping civilization start over.”
Umber opened the lid, hiding the far side from Hap’s view. There was a click and a sound like the faint buzz of insects, and then a cold light was reflected on Umber’s face. He looked at Hap over the top of the case. “It’s all in here, Hap. All of it.”
Hap’s neck craned forward. “In there?”
Umber spun the case around, and Hap saw what he’d only glimpsed before. The part that was flat on the desk was covered by buttons, each with numbers, letters, words, or symbols. The underside of the lid, which now stood straight up, was a rectangle of light. “This is the Reboot Suitcase. It’s a machine we called a computer. The most powerful one of its size ever built, in fact. It was made to last a century or more. And it gets all the power it needs from sunlight.”
Computer, Hap repeated inwardly. He stared at the thing, trying to comprehend. There were words within the rectangle:
PROJECT REBOOT
TYPE OR SPEAK TO BEGIN
“Hap, do you remember the music at the party for Prince Galbus?”
Hap nodded.
Umber spoke toward the computer. “Reboot: Show the music for Canon in D Major by Pachelbel.”
Hap jumped back, startled, as the rectangle filled with musical staffs and notes.
“Reboot: Play this composition,” Umber commanded.
Suddenly there was music, as if an unseen band of musicians had begun to play. Hap looked around, trying to find them, before realizing that the pure, clean sound came from the silver case. “This is magic,” he whispered.
“Depends how you look at it, I suppose,” Umber said. “Reboot: Stop music. Show the instruments used in this composition.”
The music ended. Hap gasped as tiny, perfect images of stringed instruments filled the screen. Umber pressed his finger against one. “Reboot: Show a schematic of this instrument.”
The instruments vanished and a diagram of a violin appeared, with its parts disassembled and labeled: Scroll, pegs, fingerboard, bridge, purfling …
“Reboot: Explain how to make one of these.”
New diagrams and words appeared. Hap read the beginning: Steps in the construction of a violin. Part 1: Selecting the wood. Step 1, 1 … But before he could read more, Umber rattled off a dizzying series of commands, and the computer responded instantly with new words and pictures:
“Reboot: Show the diagram of a sixteenth-century schooner sailing vessel. Reboot: Show the best-known works of the artist Picasso. Reboot: Display a fifteenth-century movable-type printing press. Reboot: Explain how to make the medicine penicillin. Reboot: Show a diagram of an early steam engine. Reboot: Show planet Earth as seen from space.”
Hap’s brain whirled inside his head. He didn’t understand many of the images, including the last one, a wondrous blue-white marble floating in a sea of stars. He tried to make sense of everything Umber had said. “So … people gathered information … about everything … and it’s all in here?”
“The project wasn’t finished, by any means. But we gathered a lot, until the …” Umber hesitated, and his mouth twitched. “Global catastrophe.” He slumped in his chair.
Hap watched Umber’s darkening expression with alarm. “Lord Umber—maybe you shouldn’t talk about this. I don’t want you to—”
“Suffer another bout of soul-crushing despair?” Umber forced a smile. “I don’t think so. Not so soon after the last. That’s why I should get this out now. And who knows—spilling it may do me some good. It’s festered inside for many years.
“When Doane recruited me, he insisted the project was urgent. He was convinced our civilization was in jeopardy. To him, every technological breakthrough was another step toward disaster. We’d cure an illness, but also learn to create a more dangerous disease. We tapped new forms of energy, but also astonishing powers of destruction. We found better ways to communicate, but they also meant better ways to share the doctrines of hate and fear. Technology was all well and good, Doane said, but some people were not well and good. He thought all our advances would one day be turned against us by misguided people with narrow, hateful philosophies.”
Umber winced and rubbed the back of his neck. “I have to confess, I was enthralled by the challenge of Project Reboot, but I didn’t agree that disaster was around the corner. Doane was right, though. Trouble came. Faster than I dreamed possible. Everything went wrong at once.”
Umber drank the rest of his coffee in a gulp. “There were acts of cruelty all over the world that you couldn’t imagine, followed by terrible acts of revenge. The horrors escalated. Armies clashed, and people panicked. Sickness and famine followed. A civilized world turned barbaric overnight. Even the earth itself was ruined—poisoned and plunged into a cruel, endless winter.” Umber’s chest hitched. “I’ll spare us both the details. But we made a mess of it, all right. A stinking, awful mess.”
Hap heard a thumping sound. It was his own foot, bouncing nervously on the floor. “But how did you get out? How did you get here?”
Umber puffed his cheeks and shook his head. “I don’t know. But I’ve started to think it was the same way you did, Hap. I was brought here.”
Hap clutched his own knees. “By WN?”
Umber shrugged. “Maybe. I certainly didn’t get here on my own. You see, Project Reboot was headquartered in a remote place, far from where Doane expected the trouble to start, in a kind of fortress that was half underground. We were safe for a while when it all went bad. But eventually the riots spread, and people found us. A mob blasted their way through our heavy doors, looking for food and shelter from the poisoned skies. That caused a fire, but they came inside, anyway. I ended up locked in a room by myself, clutching the Reboot Suitcase with the mob hammering on the door. And then, suddenly … it was over.”
“Over?”
“All I remember is coughing from the smoke, feeling dizzy and passing out. I don’t know why, or how long I was unconscious. I just opened my eyes, and I was here. On that hill above the city, with all Kurahaven sprawled out below me. My clothes had been changed, and there was a pack next to me. It had two things inside: a gold coin, and this.” Umber tapped the silver case. “My first thought was that I was dead and this was what came next! But I certainly felt alive. And a minute later, as fate would have it, Balfour came along on his one-horse cart. That gold coin was good for a month’s stay at his old inn. And that was how my new life began.”
For a while, all Hap heard was his own breathing. “Have you ever told anyone else about this?” he finally asked.
“Nobody. They’d think I was crazy, unless I also showed them this.” Umber put his hand on the computer. “And I don’t want a soul to be aware that this computer exists. If you haven’t guessed already, this is the source of all my innovations. But it’s better if everyone thinks they come out of my head, because this world isn’t ready for everything this computer could show. There is good progress and bad progress; I prefer the good.”
“But now you’ve told me.”
“I had to,” Umber said. “You had to know what happened to my world. Now that you do, I think you’ll understand why I hesitated to show you this note.”
Umber opened a drawer in his desk and pulled out two familiar sheets of parchment. “Are you sure you’re ready?”
For the fi
rst time since he had known the note existed, Hap wasn’t sure he wanted to see it. But he nodded, and Umber slid the parchment across the table. Hap wiped his palms on his pants to dry the perspiration. Then he turned the parchment around and lifted it carefully. His eyes raced over the words until he neared the part he hadn’t yet read.
By now you must be wondering: Why? Why do what this stranger asks? The reason is this: I know where you came from, Umber. I know too what happened to that world of yours. Quite a mess you folk made of that. I was there; I saw.
What if I told you there was a chance, even a small one, to undo the damage, to save those billion lives? But perhaps that thought has already crossed your mind. Surely it has. And surely you don’t think it a mere coincidence that you found your way here, where magic lives. You must have considered the possibility that you might somehow find the key to saving your world.
I tell you this: Such a thing is possible. But it all depends upon the boy. Without him, there is no hope for the world you left behind.
That is all I can tell you for now. You’ll know more in time. For now, follow your instincts. That is why I have chosen you.
—WN
Hap laid the parchment back on the table, feeling numb. He looked at Umber, who was watching him closely.
“Do you understand?” Umber said.
“I … I think so.”
“Please don’t run away. Or vanish on me.”
“I … why would I do that?”
“That note says you’re the key to saving a world. A billion lives. More, really. That’s why I didn’t want to show you the note right away. It seems like too much to ask. Too much to heap on such young shoulders.”
Hap covered his face with his hands. “But … how could I save a world? I don’t know how to do that.”
“Not yet, you don’t. We’ll figure this out as we go along, I suppose. It has something to do with those threads of light, that’s for sure. There’s no doubt now: You should do your best to not only see those filaments, but also understand their meaning. That will be your true power.
Happenstance Found (Books of Umber #1) Page 21