by Anne Nesbet
They buzzed along in the cart-without-goats, Linny feeling too warm in her dress. The sun glared and glittered around them, all the buildings being so flat and shiny. In Bend, the streets would have been filled with people, but at first Angleside struck her as empty, inhabited only by straight edges and bright surfaces. Then she looked more closely at the wall nearest by, and she gasped: people were looking at them, right through it. She had never heard of a wall like that before. It was very smooth, as well as transparent. A wall made of glass!
After that came a truly grand building, dark and windowless. It seemed to Linny a silent, secret place. It had tall columns of stone in front of it, and no glass walls to speak of.
The man in the cart pushed his button again, and it came to a stop.
“Out,” said the gray man, opening the door.
It wasn’t the building that started Linny’s knees shaking again, though. It was the brass engraving bolted over the front entrance of the building: a brass image of a girl holding tools in her brass hands—a flat triangle with measure marks carved into it, and another pointy angular thing. The girl was just lines etched into a plate of metal, but the extra knobble in the elbows, the little mole on the cheek, the determined, no-nonsense nose looked all too familiar to Linnet.
“What’s she doing over here?” Linny whispered to the Tinkerman. “I thought the Girl with the Lourka belonged to the wrinkled side.”
“Haven’t studied much history, then, have you?” said the Tinkerman. “She set things in order everywhere. Over here they remember her as the First Surveyor. By law, the regent’s job is officially temporary, just ruling until the next true Girl shows up, crown in hand. Except until now she never has shown up, has she? And the crown was lost ages ago. By now the whole thing is just a foolish tradition, dragged out and dusted off every ten years for the fair.”
“So you don’t think I’m real?” said Linny.
“Real! Of course you’re real! But that doesn’t mean the legends are real. Legends are legends—useful things for keeping the wrinkled side in line. You’re a girl, and you happen to have a lourka. Good! But that doesn’t make you the girl with the lourka. That’s my line, and I’m sticking to it. You’re too important to science to be wasted on politics!”
“Enough out of you,” said a gray man rudely to the Tinkerman, and they marched their arrestees (plus one cat) up the great stone steps toward the entrance of the blank-faced building right here—not so blank, after all, of course, because right there above the engraved shadow of the First Surveyor, there was a pair of grand words engraved into the stone:
SURVEYORS’ COURT, said those words.
Stand tall and pay attention, Linny told herself sternly.
The first thing Linny noticed as they entered that building was how astonishingly light it was, despite the complete lack of windows: a different kind of light, chillier than sunshine.
There was a hall leading deeper into the building, and off that hall opened doors and even windows, though the windows looked only into other rooms and not outside. It was more like a street than an interior hall, Linny decided, and she shook her head to help it settle down. She was not used to spaces being so large and grand.
The Surveyors took their prisoners upstairs by means of a metal box, also run, Linny guessed, by electricity. It slipped from one floor to the next in that huge building, and every foot it moved gave a person more information: how tall this place must be, how much distance between one layer of rooms and the next.
Then the Surveyors ushered Linny and the Tinkerman into a large cube of an office, where a man was sitting behind an enormous black desk almost exactly the same deep black as the man’s hair. Both the desk and the man’s hair gleamed a little in the strange light of this building. His face was all angles.
“Regent!” said the leader of the group of Surveyors. The rest of the gray men had stayed out in the hall. “Bringing you the criminal, as you requested. The impostor—and Arthur Vix. He obstructed justice, so we had to take him, too.” He sounded almost apologetic about that.
The angular man’s eyes narrowed at the sight of the Half-Cat and then fixed on Linny’s face, until she had to blink and look away.
“And a cat?” said the man, still staring. “I don’t remember asking for a cat.”
“It’s not just any cat!” said the Tinkerman. “It’s the cat I improved—”
He was all a-bubble now with his story of the Half-Cat, how his lost almost-daughter Irika had found it in the hills, and he had improved it, how it was the start of a whole new era of wrinkled technology, and so on and so on.
The angular man put up his hand to make him stop.
“Arthur Vix here, whom they call the Tinkerman, has long-winded theories about everything. But let me jump ahead to the interesting questions,” he said to Linny. “Did you think you could just sneak in to cause trouble without anyone noticing?”
“I wasn’t sneaking or causing trouble,” said Linny, while the Half-Cat hissed quietly in her arms.
“No?” said the angular man. He pointed at Arthur Vix, who stuttered a little. “There’s a hole in this man’s house. That strikes me as trouble. And you are, this very minute, wasting my time, and that’s more trouble.”
“Your Surveyors blew up his door, not me!” said Linny. She never liked to be blamed for things that weren’t her doing; there were enough things, as it was, that were her fault.
“Because you were there, hiding,” said the angular man. “Don’t go messing with cause and effect. A false claimant to the crown, holed up in the Bridge House! An impostor! We couldn’t let that go unpunished, could we?”
“Oh, dear,” said the Tinkerman. “Now you’re completely missing the point. This is a girl who has actually been to Away and can lead us back, once the antidote’s ready and all. You should see the readings from my scanner! She’s not one of your claimants; she’s evidence. Here, take your hand out of your pocket!”
That last line was aimed at Linny, and it made her jump.
The Half-Cat had hopped down to the floor a few minutes before, and Linny’s right hand actually had been in her pocket, just at that moment, making sure Sayra’s present was still there. The Tinkerman was brandishing his metal fork.
“Show him! Show him!” he said encouragingly to Linny. She didn’t follow his logic, but she held out her hand, and opened it.
There were little gasps in that room, from the Surveyors standing close enough to see.
On her palm lay the silk rosebud that had been pressed into her hand by whatever part of Sayra had been taken off to Away.
Even here in the Plain, it was oddly transparent. Vix’s fork trembled and hummed.
“Do you see that? Do you see that?” he said triumphantly to the regent. “That’s not just some wrinkled knickknack brought into town from the near hills. Those things lose their magic by the time they get as far as the Plain side of the river. But this hand! And whatever that thing is there, that the hand is holding! They are the real deal. And anyway, why do you think a girl like this even exists?”
Linny twitched in her skin. She was being stared at very hard, and she didn’t like it one bit.
“If Away can produce this,” said the Tinkerman, making a sweeping gesture that incorporated all of Linny from head to heels, “a copy accurate down to the last curl and second mole, just think of what else it can do!”
“I’m not a copy,” corrected Linny. “And I wasn’t produced by anywhere.”
“Quiet,” said the Tinkerman. “I’m explaining the energy implications of Away. It takes huge, enormous, vast amounts of energy to make something as impossible as you—an exact replica of the Girl with the Lourka. That’s my point. But if that’s what can happen, up in the wrinkled places closest to Away, imagine what we could do if we went right to the source. Light bulbs shining everywhere!”
“You misunderstand my point,” said the regent, honing the edges of each one of those words. “We cannot have replicas runn
ing around. It is a threat to public safety, not to mention stability. Light bulbs are extraneous.”
The men were glaring at each other now, across that table.
“Wait,” said Linny. As far as she was concerned, their whole conversation had gone seriously astray. “I am not a copy of something or a scientific theory. I have nothing to do with light bulbs, whatever those are. I don’t want crowns or powers—I want medicines to save my friend who’s fading, who’s trapped in Away.”
“A touching story,” said the regent. “But when I hear about some Girl with a Lourka being paraded in front of the madji, in order to encourage unlawful, violent, dreadful behavior, am I supposed to ignore that? That was exactly what the court was worried about, late last night, when they passed our sudden new law. So now we see they were wise.”
“What’s he talking about?” said the Tinkerman, looking over at Linny with some anxiety.
“Are you saying you passed that awful law because you had heard about me?” said Linny. It was a strange thought.
“It was a sensible precaution,” said the Chief Surveyor.
There was a period of heavy silence in that room.
“So,” said Linny, remembering something someone had said on that crowded, jostling bridge. “What happens when the actual Girl with the Lourka shows up for real?”
“I think we can safely consider that impossible,” said the Chief Surveyor.
It was a strange thing that happened to Linny at that moment.
Suddenly, in this bare room without windows, with those cold, sharp eyes digging into her skull, she found herself remembering Sayra’s room, so different from this one, with those curtains at the window that Sayra had covered with embroidered birds, perched on their tangle of embroidered vines, all sewn with such bright threads that they seemed about to leap from the linen and fly around the room. And Sayra, no, the shell of Sayra, curled up in her bed, her hair smooth and gold and fading, her hand unmoving by her thin face . . . so familiar, and fading . . . her fingers, which were always so nimble and busy . . . still, and fading—
“Sit down!” said the angular man. Linny must have jumped to her feet again without thinking. She had forgotten everything but Sayra for a moment. After all, why was she here, really?
“The actual, real Girl with the Lourka could just ask for medicines, I guess, and you’d have to give them to her?” said Linny. “Since she would be ruling the whole place? And she could come and go as she wants?”
“What?” said the Tinkerman. His voice was rising; he was beginning to sound frantic. “What’s all this about? Don’t get them mad. They’ll ruin our expedition. Science is the only thing that really matters, so don’t go messing everything up. They’re wily here.”
“No,” said Linny. Everything was becoming clear in her mind now. “The only thing that really matters is Sayra waiting for me to bring those medicines. So yes, then I’m a claimant. Not a prisoner: a claimant! Why not? I know who I am.”
The Tinkerman let his face fall into his trembling hands.
The regent was more reserved, and the expression in his eyes was guarded. You could not read his mind from his eyes.
“That’s official, then,” he said, standing up slowly, like a shadow rising over a faraway hill. “You heard her yourself, Arthur Vix. Nothing for you to do now but go home.”
“I thought I was arrested,” said the Tinkerman sullenly.
“I’m unarresting you. Go away and invent something that actually works. But the claimant stays here. No shortage of beds in the dormitory, since this impulsive child is the only claimant this year. We wanted zero, but we have one. We will adapt. Oh, and we’ll keep the cat, I think. Let the real lab men see if there’s anything to your wrinkled technology.”
And the room was suddenly bursting at the seams with people, some of whom were in Surveyors’ gray and some who wore blindingly white coats and carried nets and a cage.
Linny reached down in alarm for the Half-Cat, but it was already gone from under her chair. Yowling and hissing, it was being shoved by men with enormous white mitts on into a metal cage.
“Stop that, you awful people! Give that cat back!” she shouted. She tried to get a hand on the wires of that cage, but the men in white coats were too quick for her. Someone grabbed Linny’s own arms from behind her back, and the men in white coats went out again through the door.
“What are you doing?” asked Linny, trying to yank her arms out of the guards’ hard grasps.
The regent rapped on his desk.
“Enough,” he said. “Far too late for such fussing. You, claimant, should have thought about the consequences, shouldn’t you, before you broke the law and came over the river. Well, the matron takes you now. My heart will not break if you don’t pass your tests, little girl. And, by the way, no claimant ever has.”
And he waved them out of his office with his thin and angular hand.
17
STRONG TEA
The guards steered Linny out of the regent’s office, while the Tinkerman followed, moaning and groaning his disapproval. At that point Linny’s impressions of everything around her were all a terrible jumble: there was a bell chiming quietly, somewhere overhead, and people in gray were moving through the halls at great speed, as if this were the official hour for running all errands. The faintest echo of a cat’s yowl, from down that hall there. She paid attention to that wisp of a clue.
The guards were turning her to face a middle-aged woman with short, pale hair and a pained expression on her face. Time to look like a harmless lamb, thought Linny grimly, and she let her shoulders slacken some and blinked her eyes a few times, just to soften them.
“Let go of her, please,” the woman said to the guards holding Linny. “The girl comes with me now. No, not you!”
That was directed at the Tinkerman, who had made a step in the woman’s direction.
“Go home,” she said to him. “You know the rules. No aiding and abetting. Only claimants in the claimants’ dormitory. Good-bye.”
“But it’s not fair! It’s a waste!” said the Tinkerman. The gray men, the Surveyors, had him encircled now. “She’s supposed to be my guide, up to Away!”
The matron snapped her fingers with her free hand (her other hand had a firm grasp on Linny).
“This way, claimant,” she said. “Come along quickly.”
“Please, where are we going?” said Linny, using her lost-lamb voice while her eyes and brain soaked up the pattern of the halls as best they could. “And my poor, poor cat! It was so unhappy! Where’d they take it off to?”
“That’s the lab men’s concern, not yours,” said the matron, and Linny filed the term away: lab men. “You and I and these guards here are going along to the claimants’ dormitories. Turn here, please, and no nonsense out of you.”
A sharp turn to the right and then another one of those magic boxes; it took them about as far down as they had come up before, but Linny could tell they were deeper within the mass of that building than they had been in the regent’s office.
Keep talking, Linny said to herself. But pay attention all the time.
“But you know there’s been a mistake. I don’t even want to be a claimant. I just came down here to find medicines for my friend who’s fading. But they said they’re going to punish me if I don’t pass their tests. The man back there said as much. Please—”
“I’m afraid I’m not supposed to let you chatter,” the matron said. “If you don’t want to be punished, then you just have to do your best to pass the tests.”
“But the man back there said nobody passes them.”
The matron had no response to that.
They turned the corner into another corridor, which ended in a door. The matron pushed a card into the slot, and the metal door slid open. Behind it was another door, an old-fashioned one made of wood, and this door the matron opened by fiddling with a latch.
“In the old days, it would have been all a-bustle here, the day before the
fair, but this year we have nobody. Well, almost nobody, of course. This is the claimants’ dormitory, right in here. All cleaned up and so on last week, before we heard about the new law. Gracious, look at you; you are young, aren’t you? Well, it is what it is.”
Linny was trying to figure out what had just happened, when they stepped through that pair of doors, so different from each other. The whole feeling of the building changed. She was quite sure the walls around her were suddenly made of old things, wood and stone, and not the whatever-it-was that the Anglesiders used for walls, ceilings, and floors.
There were actual thick beams running across the ceiling in here! And whitewashed plaster in the in-between places!
The matron saw her gaping and laughed.
“The girls always make a face when they first come in,” she said. “Now, don’t go damaging anything, claimant. This is the historical record, in here, and not just any old dormitory.”
“It’s a completely different building,” said Linny, looking back at the doorway. “Right next to the big new one?”
“Inside the Surveyors’ Court, child. You won’t have seen such a thing before. They kept the old hall—built by the First Surveyor herself, you know—and constructed the new grand structure right around it. The historians had some clout in those days! Of course, the wiring in here’s completely new. And the desks and the bunk beds, all replaced now and again as they age. A thousand claimants have passed through this place, I guess, over the years.”
Bunk bed after bunk bed, all the way down that long, narrow room. They must have expected many people to come stay in this dormitory, perhaps in other years. Simple worktables and matching chairs stood under the windows. A blank, glassy picture in a frame standing on every table, and a window above, but those windows looked out not on the world, but through a second wall of glass (because the new building had swallowed up this old one), and then, across a space of some kind, at a hundred other, Plainer windows in other Plainer walls.