The Great Game: The Bookman Histories, Book 3

by Lavie Tidhar

  And was that a moue of distaste briefly crossing the old man's haunted face?

  "An alien machine, designed to make copies of biological entities, to copy them and to perfect them, to keep them pristine and operational, like a librarian, a bookman or… a zoo keeper," Babbage said. Harry fought against the straps but he couldn't tear them. Is that what he was? he wondered, in despair. A machine? A replica of someone who had been, a human born and raised and named, Erich at first, then calling himself Houdini – was that man, almost no older than a boy, dead forever, killed by a mugger in the dark streets of the White City and he, Harry, no matter that he felt the same, looked the same, was he but a replica, a cheap automaton?

  Not even that, he realised. For he had died before – did that make him a copy of a copy? A copy of a copy of a copy?

  When did one stop being human? When did one become a machine?

  "You…" Babbage breathed. "Remarkable. At last, the Bookman has obliged me. I, who was the greatest builder of automata in the known world, am but a copying scribe, forced to learn from first principles an art perfected long ago under different skies, on alien soil! No more. Now, I have you, Mr Houdini."

  "Let me go!"

  "Join me." Charles Babbage's chair moved mechanically forwards, accompanied by its cloud of machines. His ancient head peered over the table at the captive Harry. "Work with me. You do not understand, Mr Houdini. The time has come! There is a war upon us."

  "War?"

  "War…" Mr Spoons said, and smiled. The idea seemed to delight him.

  "A war," Charles Babbage said, "of worlds, Mr Houdini. A war that was long in coming, a war inevitable, a war unavoidable, as must always be the case when two civilisations meet, and one is stronger, and the other weak."

  "But that's not true," Harry said. Even captive, he sensed the wrong in the older man's words. "When European refugees came to Vespuccia they were received cordially and honourably by the Nations. When European explorers came to East Africa they were welcomed into the trade networks that had existed for centuries between Asia and Africa. When–"

  "When the Lizardine Empire conquered India, it did so by force," Babbage said. "When it–"

  "But it doesn't have to be this way," Harry said. "The great game is played to prevent war. War is not inevitable, it is not a natural solution. Peace–"

  "Peace!" Babbage laughed, and it was not a pleasant laugh – and Harry suddenly realised the man was too old, had lived for too long, so long that his brain had, in some subtle ways, stopped functioning, that he was demented – and for the first time since his arrival here he felt true fear.

  "Let's take a look at his heart," Babbage said, and Mr Spoons raised the scalpel again, and it descended, and the cold hard metal touched Harry's chest and he screamed

  FORTY-SEVEN

  There came moments of lucidity then, intersected with long periods of darkness. He'd wake up in that cold room to find men and women in white coats standing over him, prodding, studying. Sometimes there would be wires attached to him. Sometimes he would wake up and a leg would be missing, or an arm, or his chest would be bared open, skin and flesh removed, showing something alien and inexplicable underneath. At those times he was almost glad of the returning darkness, the no-being that spared him the indignity of dissection.

  Other moments, too, flashes of awakening, almost as if he were in someone else's body, in a new body, being carted around. The baruch-landau moving, this driverless carriage piloted by Mr Spoons in the front and he, Harry, beside him in a passenger seat. Outside, for the first time, though he had no recollection of leaving that cold room. Looking back–

  A castle rising above a cliff, towers and turrets like something out of a fairy tale, surrounded by trees, an access road–

  Black airships above it, moored and floating serenely, around the castle, down below, a pleasant valley but it was full of military-looking personnel. More vehicles, fields of tents, troops at parade in the distance. He said, "Where are we going?" – his voice thick with disuse.

  Mr Spoons: "To Brasov."

  Harry sat back in the seat. The vehicle moved through the valley on a curiously paved road, the journey smooth, the vehicle making almost no sound–

  The city, in the distance–

  A bowl of a valley, surrounded by tall majestic mountains – "The Carpathians," Mr Spoons said, his scarred face placid – the city in the distance, tall spires rising against the sky like delicate towers–

  No, he realised. Not towers at all.

  The car moved closer. Harry watched – an old pleasant city of stone streets and low houses, transformed–

  He said, his voice tinged with awe, "They're rockets."

  Mr Spoons smiled, faintly–

  The rockets rose high into the air, a multitude of them, too many to count; they filled the valley, surrounding the old city like an honour guard, giant metal structures waiting to take flight, aimed at the stars…

  He woke, and found himself strapped to the table and they were examining him and old Charles Babbage was cackling to himself and he said, "Stop. Stop it."

  "Join us," Babbage said. "Join me, Harry. The war is coming, and you and I could stop it. Together we could save the world."

  "You're mad," Harry whispered.

  "You don't have to be mad to work here," Babbage whispered, "but it helps…"

  He could not distinguish dreams and awakenings. One night he woke in a room he did not recognise and saw himself, multiplied by a hundred.

  Rows and rows of Harry Houdinis, lifeless, suspended from walls in some medieval crypt in that horrid Castle Babbage, hanging on hooks, like so many dolls, waiting… He blinked and then saw a hundred other Houdinis blink back at him, their eyes staring, and he stifled a scream and then darkness, blessedly, closed on him again.

  Rockets, gleaming against the skies… "What… What are they for?" Harry whispered.

  The same hint of a smile on Mr Spoons' ugly face. "Have you never looked up at the stars?" he said. "Have you never wondered?"

  "Wondered what?"

  "What it would be like to go there," Mr Spoons said, his face softening. He looked like a big kid at that moment, something childish and almost endearing in his eyes. "I used to look up at the stars, on board our ship. The Joker, she was called. I used to stand on the deck, looking up. Wondering… My master was lizardine himself, Captain Wyvern, and we sailed the Carib Sea and beyond… They told me Les Lézards came from there, from the stars… crossing some unimaginable distance in a ship that could sail through space… and I wondered, and I still do – what would it be like, to sail between the stars?"

  Harry had no answer. They drove closer, passing military installations, trucks and dome-like buildings, pylons humming, all the while the rockets dominating the landscape, there in that strange valley bounded by the majestic Carpathians… a hidden valley, a secret valley, here at the edge of the AustroHungarian Empire. Babbage had chosen well.

  "Why are you showing me all this?"

  They drove into the old town – stone-paved streets, lowlying houses, restaurants open, lights coming on, a festive atmosphere – soldiers and scientists sitting around in big groups, drinking beer, laughing–

  "This is your destiny," Mr Spoons said, simply.

  "Our destiny," the voice said. The voice had a grainy, pre-recorded quality to it. Harry hated the voice, but it would not go away. It never stopped. Harry didn't know where he was. His mind was fragmented, broken, the fragments floating in and out of time.

  He was in the vehicle with Mr Spoons, watching the rockets, and he was hanging on a peg, on a wall, like a suit of clothes, with a hundred others, and he was on that operating table, being taken apart, piece by piece, and he was in this dark place where the voice was speaking, speaking, a mélange of voices in turns interrogating and lecturing, filling his mind (minds?) with new concepts, new ideas, an ideology he couldn't push away–

  "The stars are our destiny," the voice said, the old machine man voi
ce, "and our destination–"

  "When a superior and an inferior civilisation meet, war can be the only result."

  "Humanity is a superior race, we have a manifest destiny–"

  Harry – "No!" cursing, in the dark – "who talks like this?"

  "I – we – you!"

  He begged for silence, for the dark, but his request was denied.

  Instead he got: "trajectories – control unit – air pressure in cabin – coordination of group-hive-mind operations – symbiosis – lunar topology – space walking–"

  Harry: "This is insane. Stop it. Now."

  "They are coming. We have to be prepared."

  He was everywhere and nowhere, in a room with controls before him, buttons and dials and switches and levers and slowly he learned to operate them, to read the screens–

  A place where his body was being spun, faster and faster, pressure mounting on his chest, his body, as though the Earth's pull was increasing–

  "He built you well. Now I will rebuild you. All of you."

  "Please, please, stop."

  But it didn't.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  "Erich?"

  He blinked, in the darkness.

  His mother's voice, comforting, known…

  But she was not there.

  His eyes opened, and suddenly he could see.

  The world changed.

  He was no longer alone.

  Stars. The world was full of stars. Harry's consciousness stretched, stretched…

  And a hundred Harry Houdinis opened their eyes…

  He was everywhere, at once. Babbage's scientists, his technicians, had worked hard to copy the Bookman's technology. To replicate it.

  He woke up and he was many.

  He was, he realised, Babbage's army.

  Harry was sitting on top of a rocket, alone in a control room, the walls closing in on him, the awesome engine power behind him being, in effect, a giant bomb about to go off. His consciousness stretched, across the valley, and he knew, so many things he hadn't known before, when he was one.

  He knew of diesel, and of the vast deposits of the black, thick oil in the Arabian Peninsula, of how it could be used to power machines, and to generate vast, raw power to send men into space itself.

  He knew of the woman they called Alice, in the city called Bangkok, and knew what she had done there. There was a type of metal found in the ground, in India, and smuggled, from under the lizards' snouts, via Siam to this remote valley in Transylvania. Something more dangerous, more powerful and awesome even than Diesel's oil…

  Uranium.

  What a strange word, Harry, thought, rolling it on the tongue. The control room shuddered, a hundred control rooms shuddered, and Babbage was with him, was inside his mind, woven into this new matrix of Houdinis, his knowledge Harry's knowledge, and he knew–

  Decades of planning and scheming, of building and learning, finding out things from first principles–

  And all the time the burning jealousy, hardening into hatred–

  The knowledge that all his work, all his genius, was in vain, that thousands if not millions of years in the past, another race of beings had gone through the same track, had already invented and perfected what Babbage, haltingly, was trying to do. The Bookman laughed at him, making perfect copies, making human machines… while the royal lizards lounged in their gardens, ruling an empire they did not deserve, ignorant even of the science which had made their conquest of humanity possible. To be so advanced as to be ignorant, Babbage thought. A paradox at the heart of a technologically advanced society…

  And he knew, early on he knew, that the lizards, those few on Earth, were not alone. That they had come from somewhere and that, therefore, the possibility existed:

  That one day the others would come, and to them the Earth would be less than a plaything–

  How much further would have the aliens' science advanced in the millennia since the one ship had crashed on Earth, on Caliban's Island, its living cargo frozen in cryogenic sleep?

  And so he planned, he schemed, sometimes with the Bookman and sometimes against him, sometimes with Mycroft Holmes and his organisation, sometimes against him. Collaborating with Krupp, with Edison, with Tesla and the others, and against them, a woven tapestry of conflicting and mutual interests–

  The Great Game.

  The only game worth playing.

  And now–

  The stars.

  "Ten."

  "Nine."

  "No, wait!"

  From a hundred identical throats: We are not ready!

  "Eight."

  "Seven."

  "Prepare for launch."

  The rocket thrumming, the very walls vibrating, Harry's palms moist, gripping the mostly useless controls–

  And Babbage's slow, insidious voice, saying, "The greatest escape of them all, Mr Houdini…"

  You don't understand, Harry wanted to shout. War is not always the answer, in the South Pacific the concept of Peace was sacrosanct, peace before justice, war was a guaranteed extinction, even if there was war it was a civilised affair, a contest between champions at the end of which everyone went off to lunch–

  "Six," the machine voice said, and it was indifferent to Harry's pleas, to all the Harrys, and he saw–

  A hundred pairs of eyes opening, a hundred pairs of hands holding tight to the controls, a hundred identical bodies sitting on top of a hundred identical rockets, and the flames starting…

  "Five," the voice said, remorselessly. "Four. Three."

  Harry closed his eyes. Some of the Harrys kept theirs open. One of the Harrys whistled. One cried. One prayed, in the old forgotten Hebrew of his youth. One grinned maniacally. But all of them tense, all of them ready, as ready as they'd ever be–

  "Two," the voice said.

  "One," the voice said.

  And: "Lift off."

  Lift off.

  Harry felt the rocket thrumming, with eyes that weren't his own he could see the rockets sitting on the floor of the Carpathian valley, flames igniting, the mass of fuel burning as the rockets slowly, so slowly, began to rise into the air–

  He gripped the controls, felt his body being pushed back in its seat, then–

  Searing hot flame, a rumble rising from below and spreading, and he opened his mouth in a wide desperate scream, something was wrong, something was terribly wrong, and–

  The flames rose and the rocket shuddered, breaking up, with eyes that weren't his eyes he could see the rocket–

  Only a few feet above the ground it lost control, a fault somewhere in the thousands of components–

  Inside the module on top of the rocket Harry screamed but there was no sound, the flames burst and he felt his body being consumed, like the flicker of a match, like someone snapping their fingers, there was an enormous fireball–

  He screamed but there was no pain, no sight, there was nothing, and a metallic voice said, "One destroyed."

  "Commence tally."

  "Affirmative."

  And with ninety-nine pairs of eyes Harry watched, the rockets rising, slow at first and then faster, and faster, and he could see, he watched the sky coming closer, the stars above, he was soaring, he was–

  The rocket lost its trajectory several hundred feet above the valley. Harry had only a moment to realise it, to see and feel the cliff-face of the mountain as the rocket, lost to all control now, aimed directly at the face of the Carpathians, trees and dark shrubbery and Harry screamed–

  There was a terrible explosion–

  "Two down," the voice said.

  "Commence tally."

  "Affirmative."

  But the ones who were already airborne kept flying, the rockets rising higher, while the voices in mission control never tired–

  Three more rockets exploding on launch, two failed to start–

  Harry stood outside the rocket, glaring – up in the sky the rockets trailed smoke, but he was down there, left, forgotten, in that damned Tran
sylvanian valley–

  A mixture of anger and relief and fear and exhilaration – he was alive, but grounded, and he suddenly realised just how much he had wanted this, the greatest feat of escapology known to man–