Twenty minutes later, Rae is floating neck deep in a pillar of water nearly three meters tall, holding steady at 5,000 kicks like it’s nothing. “How am I doing?” she asks, treading water, wet hair toffee-brown and slicked over her head.
“Good,” I say, furiously scribbling readings into my notebook. “Stupendous. Exemplary. You ready to try the next ring?”
She bobs up, legs kicking through the suspended water. “Let’s do it!”
I introduce her to the Project that same night. Rae is exactly what I need, and though the Project is a long way from ready, I decide there’s no point in remaining mysterious. Lady takes the unexpected company in stride, altering her homemaker’s outfit to play the gracious hostess, apologizing profusely for the state of our workshop and its resemblance to the site of an extinction-level natural disaster, while I dismantle the concealing artifice at the corner of my workshop.
It occurs to me only after the artifice has dissolved from its skewed, cubist-looking representation of empty space—little more than token camouflage, I admit, and not nearly enough to dissuade anyone intent on finding the Project—to the Project himself, hanging from the ceiling like a side of meat, joints mangled from blown gwayd canals, knees dragging, knuckles resting palm up against the floor, that, excepting yours truly, Rae is the first real, actual, physical human being to see him. A wave of nervous apprehension rushes over me, and I wait, breath held, for her reaction.
But Rae is already approaching the Project, extending her hands, reverently taking one of his massive fingers between her palms, and when she looks back at me, it is with the awed, rapturous expression of someone who has just been handed a newborn infant. “What’s his name?” she asks, voice slightly lowered, as if to avoid waking the Project from his slumber. Somehow she knows, instinctively, that the Project is a “he.”
“His name?” I say disingenuously; I was not prepared for this question.
“Yeah,” she says, half mocking now. “They all have names—something to strike terror into the hearts of your enemies, right? So what do you call him? SkullBreaker? PuppyEater? GrannyDisemboweler?”
I might as well tell her. We’re in this together now. “Snuggles.”
Rae lets loose a single bright peal of laughter. “Snuggles! I love it!”
“I want you to help me make him work,” I say. “Someone has to animate him, so I can get his functions calibrated. It won’t be easy, but I’m sure you can do it.”
“Think about it before you say yes,” Lady says, her foreboding tone only a little ironic. “He’s a mean one, is our Snuggles.”
“Aw, no way,” Rae demurs, gazing fondly up at the Project. “He’s a pussycat, you can tell. Just look at those eyes.”
“He doesn’t have any eyes,” I feel obliged to point out.
“Guess I’ll be careful, then.”
In relatively short order, Rae has become a common fixture of the workshop, though as the Project still requires a good amount of stitching up following his last attempted activation, most of her time is spent listening to me and Lady lecture on various topics in irrational mechanics, I in my work suit reassembling the Project’s mangled mechanisms, Lady in tweed and owlish spectacles strutting in front of a dusty chalkboard.
I had expected Rae’s background in theoretical irrationality to be spotty at best. Instead, it turns out to be more or less nonexistent, the upshot being that everything I’ve seen her do, from grand feats of animation to a few crude but pretty spectacular manifestations, she has pulled off with little more than intuition and natural talent. No surprise, then, she’d be defeated by irregular energies, which are essentially nonintuitive and unnatural. In the case of regular energies, she has a whole lifetime of experience to use as reference. She can feel her way to the desired result. Feel doesn’t work for irregular energies—most of them, anyway—because they fly in the face of the ordered universe we’ve always known. Akyrity, for example, takes a big steaming dump all over the first law of thermodynamics, and even if that isn’t something most people recognize on sight, it still gives us the willies. Asking Rae to manipulate a force like that is like asking someone with no formal training in mathematics to multiply imaginary numbers. So step one for her will be to fill in gaps. I fish out all the textbooks I absconded with from Grammar and assign them as homework. Rae is less than overjoyed but acquiesces when I explain this reading is required and nonnegotiable.
Per Rae’s request, we focus on subjects relating directly and unambiguously to combat. Contrary to her own self-assessment, she has a good, intuitive grasp on one of the most important and fundamental concepts in irrational mechanics, to wit, that mastery thereof is as much art as science.2
“Like giving orders to a willful child” is Rae’s analogy, delivered like a girl who’s had a good deal of experience in that area.
We’ve been discussing compounding,3 a topic essential to creating complex artifices but also necessary to making effectual use of thelemity in combat. When Rae first came to me, the very mention of compound artifices sent her into paroxysms of despair. To her, the subject was as unintelligible as a foreign language, which in a sense it is. The method the Academy teaches for composing artifices relies on heavily stylistic diction and syntax, creating verbal traps and cages with the goal of limiting thelemity’s opportunities to go rogue and muck things up. It works well enough, but if you haven’t been raised to it, the general impression is of so much gobbledygook. On top of that, most high-level compound artifices, by dint of their length and complexity, are also infusions, a subject in which Rae has already declared herself an ignoramus and an unteachable clod.
Once Rae understood that the Academy’s labyrinthine style is only a means to an end, that there are multiple methods of producing the same effect, just as the same artifice can yield varying results on different occasions, it didn’t take her long to come around to the one thing every good artifex understands: that manipulating thelemity is about persuasion, not command.4
What all this means in Rae’s case is that memorizing the Academy’s usual canon of artifices is going to be disproportionately less effective for her compared to your average cadet. Instead, I give her exercises to help translate them into her own vernacular. After that, her progress is exponential. In hardly any time at all, she’s writing basic infusions, generally on topics tending unnervingly toward gratuitous violence.
I’m curious to learn why Rae is so anxious to fling herself into a war she’s only recently discovered, a war that was fought to a stalemate long before she was born and shows no indication of resolving itself anytime soon, but asking would be nosy and rude, and so I know Lady will say something if I just wait.
What we discover is that Naomi, the Legion’s newest fontana, is actually Rae’s baby sister, and Rae’s single-minded determination to join the Legion is all about watching the girl’s back. Not to protect her—Rae has few illusions about being anything but a squashable bug in a duel between fontani—but just so her sister won’t have to go to war alone. Vinneas had described to me the frankly horrific series of events that led to that little girl’s ending up in the Legion, and listening to Rae talk about her I feel outright ashamed at my own petty motivations. Whenever the subject of Naomi comes up, I find myself silently focusing on my work while Lady assures Rae we’ll have her fit for legionary duty in no time.
And the work does progress quickly: It isn’t long before Rae and the Project are both ready for some partials. I’m not at all surprised to learn Rae was a standout anima in her Sixth-Class lessons, but all the raw talent in the world wouldn’t be enough to safely attempt activating an uncalibrated equus, let alone an experimental model composed largely of my own cockamamie inventions.
At the Academy, Rae could have expected at least a year or two fooling around with bloog-sculpted dogs and cats, followed by another year working her way through a program of increasingly complex and demanding equu
lei, before they let her anywhere near a working equus,5 but lacking any of the necessary training equipment, we’ll just have to hook her up and see what happens.
The first attempt is only a minor disaster, which to me translates as almost unprecedented success. With great gentleness and many words of apology, I remove the Project’s arm, detaching the shoulder at the socket, and mount it on the mostly refurbished egg crate in a position allowing ample support and range of motion. Rae I seat on a makeshift throne at the crate’s center, about where the core would be were we dealing with a full equus and not a disembodied arm, and connect her by means of a thick, sapphire-colored cable of twisting gwayd canals. She has no trouble projecting herself into the arm, and the twisting and flexing exercises she performs at my request are convincing if a little clumsy, until I ask her to count to five on the Project’s fingers, and at four the hand goes rigid and chops violently downward, shattering a row of bookcases.
“Oh, Kizabel, I’m sorry!” Rae gasps, gwayd-covered and gazing in self-recriminating horror at the surrounding devastation, the Project’s arm like a fallen tower, limp but for the hand’s clawlike rictus.
“Are you kidding?” I say, emerging from behind the overturned desk where I’d taken cover. “That was fantastic!”
“But I wrecked half of your workshop, and his arm—there’s glowing blue blood everywhere!”
“It’s called gwayd,” Lady chimes in, her costume construction-themed for the evening. “It transmits viatic energy through the equus—people would never be able to animate something that big and complex without it. It’s a lot easier to replace than blood and only stains your clothes for a little while.”
“You destroyed an eighth of the workshop at most,” I add.
Despite my protestations and insistence that this was probably the best activation the Project has ever seen, Rae blames herself entirely for the damage. “I’ve never had one of these guys get away from me like that,” she says. She spends the rest of the night collecting the ruined bookshelves’ scattered contents, mostly obsolete infusions composed in my early days at the Academy, which I would be just as happy to throw out.
Further partials go just as well or better, and soon I am confident enough in Rae’s burgeoning talents that I cease taking the Project apart, ministering to him piecemeal, and set my sights on a full trial.
Rae’s skills improve in roughly inverse proportion to the quantity of undemolished items within the Project’s reach, but even after the workshop is fully tidied of all damage and clutter for which Rae can claim any responsibility, Rae tidies on. She has decided that “straightening up a bit” will be among her services to me, and perseveres against my conviction that the workshop is straightened quite enough as it is. Lady, who has been after me for months to remedy the so-called deplorable confusion of my offices, only encourages her, tutting in annoyance as Rae unearths one layer of ancient sediment after another, squealing with exaggerated horror over moldy pizza and melted candy bars. Rae, meanwhile, frequently stops to marvel over some old experiment or other, a practice I’d find far more irritating if it weren’t for her obviously earnest appreciation. The bottom layers of clutter are mostly early work that seems silly or pointless to me now, though occasionally Rae does find something I’m pleased to remember, as when one night she exclaims, “Is this an underwater city?”
I’d almost forgotten about Associative Architecture, and when I see her holding the skinny little green-leather-bound book, I feel a warm and welcome flush of pride. “It is,” I say, straightening up from my position over the Project’s spine. As yet he’s little more than a torso and collection of limbs, but that will change quickly.
“And people can really live there? Normal people? Not—” She waggles her fingers to indicate the kinds of dubious unnatural transformations that might allow a human to survive underwater.
“Definitely,” Lady says. If anyone was more obsessed with Associative Architecture and its more fanciful applications than I was, it was Lady. Behind her, the reflection of my workshop disappears, replaced by a metropolitan scene with seaweed and blooms of psychedelically colored jellyfish drifting over the streets. “The theory is completely sound. We spent weeks working out the proofs, Kizabel and Vinneas and me.”
Rae, who has been gazing in wonder at my drawings, suddenly looks up. “Vinneas helped make this?”
“It’s all based on his theories, actually,” I admit, hopefully with less tetchiness than I feel. “What you’re holding there is his First-Class thesis at Rhetoric, Associative Architecture in Large System Dynamics. It’s about altering basic aspects of reality on an extensive scale. Caused quite a stir when he presented it at the Academy. If he wasn’t already top-ranked for the School of Philosophy, that alone would have got him in.”
“What about you and Lady?” Rae asks, brow furrowed with suspicion.
“We got credit for helping with the proofs and calculations. Or I did anyway,” I clarify when Lady makes a face. “And we got this lab.”
“What a horse’s ass!” declares Rae, sneering. “And you let him waltz away like it was all his idea?”
“Well, associative architecture was his theory,” I’m obliged to point out, though Rae’s indignation does give me a small twinge of satisfaction. “We’ve been able to tweak certain basic features of the world for a long time—it’s how we change the weather in Ninth City. But Vinneas was the one who figured out a way to apply almost any artifice to a wide area by altering the way thelemity actually flows within that space.”
“Emotions, especially strong ones, influence how thelemity behaves,” Lady says excitedly. “And if something really big has happened in a particular place, it can leave behind a kind of echo that does the same thing.”
Rae has turned speculative. “You mean like someplace haunted.”
“Exactly!” Lady squeals.
“Well, sort of,” I clarify. “Certain types of events can leave an impression that alters the way thelemity works. Associative architecture is about weaving together those kinds of impressions to create effects on a broad scale. It’s a little like changing a person’s behavior, or way of thinking, through training and repetition.”
“It’s totally awesome, is what it is,” Lady concludes.
“In theory,” I add, before she can get too carried away. “We never actually got to try any of it out.”
Rae is crestfallen to learn there is no actual underwater city. “Why not?”
“We would have needed to borrow a whole lot of fontani from the Legion, for one thing. And then there was the small matter of building an entire city at the bottom of the ocean. No way the Consulate was going to devote those kinds of resources to a school project. We did have a lot of fun, though.”
There are actually two versions of our underwater megalopolis, dubbed EASSaC-1 and EASSaC-2,6 one in which our aquatic citizens are endowed with the ability to process water via their natural pulmonary systems, and another where the whole city is encased in a bubble of air that continually renews and circulates of its own volition. Both lacked any obvious value to the war effort. The same could be said of the city we designed to allow each inhabitant his or her own customized day-and-night cycle, the one where every physical action triggered a corresponding audible effect, creating a symphony out of the residents’ daily activities, and just about every other example of the flurry of whimsy filling the final section of Associative Architecture, devoted (somewhat facetiously) to “practical applications.”
“But you really could build it, right?” Rae contends hotly. “They’ve got you sneaking around just to work on Snuggles, and you made a goddamn underwater city!”
That has been my opinion in a nutshell for nearly a year, much of which time I spent partly convinced I was insane, delusional, or both. But seeing Rae so searingly furious over the necessary secrecy of my work is another shot of jet fuel to my ambitions.
&n
bsp; Full activation of the Project, when it comes, is almost anticlimactic. I’m working around the core, fully assuming I have a long way left to go, when suddenly I realize all the gwayd canals are in place. I step back, glance at my schematics, give the Project a full once-over. Lady and Rae, noticing my change in rhythm, make inquiries. “I think we’re ready to go,” I tell them, still not completely sure.
“Then let’s go,” Rae says, enthusiastic, confident.
I’m still having difficulty sorting the trepidation from my sense of accomplishment. “Now?”
“Now. If you’re ready, I’m ready.”
I am expecting a fusillade of objections from Lady, but all she says is “I’ll check the testing floor.” She returns furnished for lighthearted outdoor spectating: a peachy sundress and wide-brimmed straw hat, binoculars hanging around her neck. “All clear!”
We’re ready. I know it. If I were to delay things now, it would only be out of reluctance to entrust my Project to someone else. And so I cart Snuggles onto the testing floor and help Rae inside.
“All right, just like we discussed,” I call once I’ve returned to the relative safety of my workshop. “Just see if you can stand him up. Nothing fancy. Got it?”
Rae, settled onto the throne in the Project’s open chest cavity, holds out one fist, thumb extended upward.7 She sets her hands to the grips, closes her eyes. Slowly, the core comes to life, bathing her face in soft blue light, and the Project goes from rigid metal to living, moving thing, his body stretching, straightening, and finally standing in the center of Testing Floor Sixteen.
I wait, breath held, for something in him to come apart, wincing at each unsteady quiver of his limbs, each unexpected jerk of his digits, but his hands do not turn to fists, his spine does not twist, his legs do not kick and flail, and some ten meters above my head, Rae’s voice rises in a whoop of excitement, and in my workshop, Lady whoops, too, leaping wildly as confetti and balloons shower inside her mirrors.
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