Ninth City Burning

by J. Patrick Black

  Equi can only be fully controlled from inside their core, and since the Project doesn’t have working entry protocols, I have to just climb into his open chest cavity. I settle onto the throne and begin strapping myself in,6 running through the activation checklist in my mind. Throne contact? Check. Starting posture? Check. Sensory receptors? Almost completely lacking, but we’ll add those later. Hardheaded determination and unreasonable sense of optimism? Check.

  From the direction of my workshop, Lady Jane’s voice echoes across the testing floor. “I’m just going to go ahead one more time and register my opinion that this is a horrible idea.”

  “Noted,” I say, adjusting the armrests and grips. “Here we go!”

  I take a deep breath, close my hands around the Project’s grips, and settle back into the throne,7 trying to imagine myself seeping down, flowing out into the great metal body, imbuing it with my soul or essence or whatever part of you makes an equus work. Above me, the branching gwayd canals begin to glow a gentle blue. Animation has always seemed a pretty frivolous study to me, but since beginning the Project, I’ve been working on perfecting my skills.

  I shut my eyes, tell myself I am the Project. His arms are my arms. His legs, my legs. I can feel it starting to work, feel the shiver down his spine (my spine), spreading out toward the extremities. Sensation flows into the tips of his fingers, and I’m thinking this might really work, when suddenly the Project’s fist clamps shut and swings wildly to the side.

  “Gah!” I shout, trying to restrain the hand, but it won’t respond. I open my eyes just in time to see the egg crate fold with a shrieking groan as the Project’s right arm smashes into it. I concentrate everything on seizing back control of the arm, but just then it goes dead, and the Project’s left leg kicks out, launching us up and back. No sooner have I shifted attention to the leg than the Project’s torso begins to twist and his head to jerk, then the rest of his body, activating and deactivating in random, manic spasms. In moments, the egg crate has been flattened, its hyperdurable structure crumpling like wet paper as the Project thrashes and rolls across the testing floor. I see, alternately, ceiling, floor, ceiling. Distantly, I hear Lady screaming for me to hit the kill button, but centrifugal force has made my own personal arm almost too heavy to move, my vision dimming as the blood rushes from my brain. And then the Project pauses, like he’s catching his breath, and it’s enough for me to punch the big red button marked “Oops” mounted above my head.

  There is a series of popping explosions as the Project’s gwayd canals blow. Glowing blue gwayd sprays freely over the testing floor, gushing from predetermined cut points at the Project’s wrists, elbows, knees. A particularly heady jet from the neck coats the walls blue as the Project continues to convulse, but more slowly now, until, finally, he slumps, crashes to his knees, and collapses sideways to the floor.

  Everything is silent except for my breath and the last glugging flow of gwayd. I watch the weakening dribble of blue drip from the edge of the Project’s chest cavity, things still spinning, but only in a dizzy psychoperceptive way.

  Again I hear the echoing voice of Lady Jane. “Kizabel? Are you dead?”

  Not unsurprisingly, I’ve survived. Forgetting the Project’s posture, I pull at the straps holding me to the throne and fall nearly a meter to the testing floor with an ectoplasmic splash of gwayd. Slowly, heart still thudding, I get to my feet and regard the Project, a gruesome, otherworldly rag doll splayed in glowing blue muck.

  “You piece of shit!” I scream, kicking him in his metal knee. I’m furious; I was so sure this time it would actually happen. “You stupid, shitty piece of shit!”

  Lady Jane stays quiet until I’ve tired myself out. “We can try again,” she says. “I’ve checked all your calculations. He’s going to work.”

  “No, you were right.” I flop down, leaning on the Project’s shin, my feet and legs tingling in the centimeters-deep flood of gwayd drenching Testing Floor Sixteen. “None of the new configurations have made any real difference. The problem isn’t with the gwayd canals.”

  What am I even doing? I’ve been at this for eighteen hours straight, on top of thousands already spent, ignoring my courses, hardly leaving the shop except to find food or visit the Stabulum. I would have to sit down and seriously review my mental records to recall the last time I saw nonartificial sunlight or had a conversation lasting more than two sentences with a sapient being I didn’t build myself. And why? For what? Because I’m convinced the Project is oh-so-important, more than just another of the cute, silly toys everyone thinks I’m such a genius at building?

  If Vinneas were here, he’d give me his patented even-the-worst-debacle-has-its-funny-side grin and set to pulling my problem apart, turning it upside down and inside out. And Imway, he’d be lounging somewhere flipping playing cards into a hat, unconcerned with the fact that I’d just laid waste to everything within a thirty-meter radius and asking when I’d be done with this Project of mine already so he could take it for a spin, as if my most devastating setbacks were simply details I was guaranteed to work out sooner or later, as if the most infernal equus I could design wouldn’t dare—or even contemplate—not working for him, and in all likelihood being infuriatingly right. But they’re gone, both of them, Vinneas off to an endless succession of godforsaken settlements, Imway on permanent vacation in his own bloated ego. Leaving me sulking and far too close to a full-blown wallow.

  “You’ll figure it out,” Lady says.

  I sigh, heave myself up, start wringing out my suit. “Yeah, I know.” The trouble is, I think I already know what’s wrong, and it’s not something I can fix myself. “Let’s go back to last week’s design. That was the best so far. You make the adjustments. I’ll try and clean this place up before someone sees it and throws us in prison.”

  “Will you at least consider asking—”

  “No,” I say, probably a little too harshly. “Now, are you going to do what I asked, or will I have to make another instara who will?”

  “I worry about you, that’s all. If you keep this up, you’re going to hurt yourself. And what happened to me being your imaginary friend?”

  “You’re not imaginary.”

  In my workshop, Lady has conjured an enormous desk behind her mirrors, cluttered with messily leaning stacks of paper and vintage calculating machines. She wears a short-sleeved button-down shirt, front pocket stuffed with pens, and a necktie of nearly unthinkable ugliness. Regarding me seriously from beneath a transparent green visor, she says, “I’m still your friend.”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  KIZABEL

  Without the egg crate to help, it takes the better part of two hours just to transfer the mess I’ve made from Testing Floor Sixteen back to my workshop. Fortunately, TF 16 has endured so many scrapes, dents, and miscellaneous thelemic traumas over its lifetime that the Project’s latest tantrum adds little to the general wear and tear, and gwayd vanishes on its own after a few minutes, saving me the two weeks it would have likely required to mop up an equivalent amount of oil, say, or actual organic blood. I’ve only just got the Project and the remains of the egg crate piled in a mountainous heap, the whole thing covered by an (admittedly pretty lame) concealment artifice, when TF 16 starts to light up. Lady seals the wall of my workshop mere seconds, I can only assume, before whoever reserved the 0600 slot saunters in, coffee and croissant in hand.

  Once I’ve changed into my Academy uniform and consumed, at Lady’s insistence, 1.4 muffins and a glass of milk, I’m just in time to be half an hour late to my morning lessons.1 My tardiness earns me three hours of work detail—nothing I can’t handle, since I can apply the time I’ve logged volunteering at the Stabulum.

  I spend the rest of the day a shuffling sleepwalker, distant and glassy-eyed, dreaming only of the Project swept untidily into a corner of my workshop. I’m expected at the Stabulum by 1600, but when my lessons let out, I take a detour through t
he School of Philosophy, toward the stubbly outer tower where Dr. Afşar2 keeps his study.

  The Doc3 is widely considered one of the founding fathers of irrational mechanics and could easily have an office right next door to the Curator but has chosen this remote spot largely to avoid the worshipful attention of academics and officials who grew up studying his work. He spends most of his time in the Realms, advising our commanders at the Front, but makes a point of returning to Hestia every so often to catch up on advancements in the field he helped build.

  Since it isn’t unusual for fifty years or more to have passed between one visit and the next, the Doc always finds himself somewhat behind the cutting edge. Most of his time is spent reading and muttering in good-natured astonishment over the things we fast-timers have been up to in his absence, but occasionally he will have questions his books can’t answer. In such instances, he requests a tutor from the Academy, an OA where possible, as these tend to be relatively untainted by respect for his reputation. Fully accredited philosophers and other senior academics, he’s found, often shy away from telling him when one of his theories has been disproven.

  When Dr. Afşar needed someone to explain the current state of ingenic and thelemically engineered materials, the Curator sent me in. I was halfway through a description of the Euvoria Process before I realized the surrounding research, developed almost thirty years ago, thoroughly discredited Afşar’s Third Hypothesis—proposed, of course, by Dr. Afşar. Ever since, I’ve had a standing invitation to visit his office any hour of the day or night.

  The Doc greets me with his usual “Ah, Miss Kizabel, welcome, welcome.” Like most veterans,4 he speaks with an accent, in his case from Turkey, the Doc’s CE nation of origin. “What brings you to my corner of our illustrious Academy?”

  One of Dr. Afşar’s many wonderful attributes is his broad disregard for the rules and conventions of Principate society. His attitude seems to be that since he was here first, his way of doing things takes precedence. For the most part, people just go along with it. I’ve seen him affect a kind of doddering obliviousness if he happens to offend someone but only to mask his general indifference. I get the feeling that this new world of ours isn’t entirely real to him, that he walks among us like a ghost, gliding through our architecture of laws and regulations like mist. It means I don’t have to be coy when I tell him about the Project. I lay it all out for him—my ideas, my triumphs, but mostly my woes—while he makes us tea.

  Dr. Afşar keeps a pot of tea perpetually brewing in his study and drinks constantly as he works, a practice he claims aids in his thinking by forcing him to take regular bathroom breaks, during which time he can assimilate whatever he’s just read. His teapot has a strange double-stacked structure, like one teapot whose lid is for some reason yet another teapot.

  “A fascinating enterprise, this Project of yours,” he says. He has set out two tulip-shaped glasses and fills each practically to the brim, first pouring dark tawny tea from the top pot, then diluting with hot water from the bottom. The concoction, delivered to me on a tiny saucer, steams with a violent, near-boiling intensity, like an active volcano. “I can see why you would take the risk of assembling it yourself. A machine with the capabilities you describe would be very valuable to our Legion.”

  This is why the Doc is my favorite. Rather than lecturing me on the many and really quite ludicrous dangers involved in the Project’s more-high-octane parts, he has chosen to aid and abet. And it’s true: One reason I risked starting the Project at all is that I’m certain my transgressions will be completely glossed over if I can ever get him to work. People around here will overlook a lot of tomfoolery for the right results. I try to take a sip of my tea, just touching the liquid to my lips. The heat is alarming. “I won’t know for sure until I activate him,” I say.

  “That is the way with thelemity, isn’t it? We’ve been studying it for five centuries, and there’s so little we really understand.” The Doc guzzles freely; his tongue must be the consistency of rhinoceros hide. “Every time I come back to Earth, I expect someone will have it all figured out. Greedy of me, I know, thinking I can simply travel through time and return to all my questions answered. But you and your Project are proof we’re making real progress. I still remember the first equi—our soldiers rode on top of them, did you know? Like gigantic horses. The innovation of putting a person inside is quite new—to me, anyway. That’s where the word ‘equus’ comes from. It’s an ancient word for ‘horse.’ But I’m sure you knew that.” He smiles, setting down his glass. “This problem with your Project must be worrying you more than I thought. Usually, I can rely on you to stop me with a snide comment whenever I become tedious.”

  “I’m sorry, sir. Would you like a snide comment now, or should I wait for the next time you descend into tedium?”

  “No need to exert yourself.” Somehow he’s finished his tea and started on a second glass. “Now, as for your Project, my first instinct is that there must be some trouble with the power systems. The type of erratic activation you describe is most often the result of uneven or incomplete animation, or of inconsistent signals from the core structure. I think, however, that you have already figured out the trouble but are as yet unwilling to accept the truth of it.”

  “Well, yeah, I’ve got a few ideas,” I admit, stammering slightly in surprise, “but you know volumes more than I do. You were the first to devote any real scientific attention to animation, right? You and Dr. Xiao.”

  “Very true,” the Doc allows, “but I am far from current in the field as it is. You, Miss Kizabel, are yourself appreciably better versed in the present state of the art. And so why come to me? It could not be for my expertise. I rather think you are here to talk yourself out of something or into it.”

  “You really are a genius,” I say, forcing a smirk. He’s right: For a while now I’ve known, or at least strongly suspected, that the Project simply won’t activate without more power. He’s more demanding than a normal equus: Those marvelous new muscles, his unique internal arrangements, it’s all too much for me to animate on my own. I thought if I reworked his gwayd canals, made them more efficient, I’d be able to get him working, but I was wrong.

  If I want to activate the Project myself, I’ll have to take him down to the skeleton and rebuild him, swapping out most of my custom parts for the boring, everyday, unexceptional stuff of legionary stock equi. I get a strangled, sweaty feeling just thinking about it, not because I’ll have to start over—I’ve done that often enough—but because it means compromising the Project and everything he could be, just because I’m not good enough to make him work. It would be the same as giving up. All that time in the lab, missing school and sleep and all but the barest simulacrum of human contact, for nothing.

  Even after I’ve finished my tea and left Dr. Afşar’s study for the Stabulum, I still hold out the hope that I’ll stumble onto some miraculous solution. I go as far as describing my problem to Hezaro while we’re working on HeavensHammer, phrasing things in terms of purely theoretical conjecture, supposed rumors among splatterheads5 of highly experimental equi losing control during activation. His analysis only confirms what the Doc told me, and what I already knew myself. Maybe when the Project is perfected and refined and free of hiccups, I’ll be able to pilot him myself, but if I want him to activate now, I’ll need an expert.

  When Hezaro calls a break, I excuse myself from the crew’s usual fare of instant noodles and obsessive equus-related banter and make my way down the stalls to where the 126th have made camp. It’s common for fighters in the Armored Cavalry to hold vigil around their rides, particularly when they’re on standby, but the 126th takes this reasonable gesture toward readiness and magnifies it to the point of absurdity. They’re the newest equites in the Legion, only just promoted from the Academy, and they like playing soldier so much they’ll hardly stop even to sleep.

  They’re in their usual spot, under the stern gaze of
StarHunter, flinging playing cards around and filling the Stabulum with brassy laughter. Sensen, their self-appointed guard dog and all-around dealer-out of shit, intercepts me as I walk up with a “Who goes there?”

  “It’s me, Kizabel,” I say, “as you can obviously see from where you’re standing.”

  “Sorry,” says Sensen, whose understanding of remorse is, as far as I can tell, abstract at best. “We’ve been keeping a tighter watch lately. Can’t have superfluous personnel hanging around in case we need to sortie. Anyone without business here will just have to move along. You understand.”

  The way she’s looking at me implies that I am one of the superfluous personnel who will just have to move along, which is ridiculous because I’m here almost every day doing bodywork on FireChaser. “Sure, I just need to talk with Imway.”

  I start toward the table where the rest of the 126th is still sitting, and Sensen steps to the side, like she’s planning to block my way, but just then, Imway calls out, “What’s up, Kiz?” He’s tilted back on his chair, feet up, grinning at me over a fan of cards.

  “I need your help with something,” I say.

  Imway hands his cards to Allomar, who’s been observing the game over his shoulder, and leaves the table. Imway always has time for me—I’m looking after his baby, after all.

  FireChaser was damaged on the escadrille’s first sortie, but as her injuries are 100 percent superficial, utterly lacking in functional consequences, she isn’t exactly top priority for the repair crews. It drives Imway bonkers, though, having his equus all scratched up like that, so I’m giving her a full polish, thereby earning me his professional gratitude and broad tolerance from the rest of his escadrille—most of them, anyway.