by Philip Reeve
“Fever?” Cluny’s voice came echoing along the tunnel again. She remembered her friends, went back to the square hole in the floor that she had come in by and called, “It’s all right. It’s safe. . .”
Cluny had already ventured halfway along the passage, and now she came quickly the rest of the way, with Marten behind her. Fever helped them up into the room. Blinking in the strange light, they stared about them at the metal cabinets which lined the walls, and the metal shelves where things lay which must have once been books, or folders full of notes, but which years and time and snails and insects had reduced to shapeless papery hulks, not much different from the old wasps’ nests which hung in corners of the ceiling or lay broken on the floor.
A lot of wasps’ nests, and a lot of nibbling, Fever thought; but not that much. Ten summers’ worth, maybe. As if this place had stayed sealed tight for centuries, and ten summers ago a few cracks had opened somewhere, just big enough for insects to get in, and the cracks had slowly widened until one was big enough for Borglum’s friend Duergar to notice. . .
She went to the nearest shelf and picked up something that looked like an intact book, but turned out to be just a plastic cover, filled with more wasps’-nest flakes. Even the plastic was brittle, crazing and crumbling as she lifted it, but on the front, in letters which had once been red, she could make out words: The Scrivener Institute.
“Fever, what was this place?” asked Cluny.
“I don’t know. . .”
“I don’t like it,” said Marten. “There’s strong magic here.”
Fever crossed the room to a metal door that was set into the wall not far from that panel she had first noticed. She touched it, tried to prise it open. It would not move, but an odd metallic throbbing sound drew her attention back to the panel where the green light glowed. The light had turned red. On a black square of plastic below it, which she was sure had been blank before, a stylized, life-sized picture of a hand had appeared.
She looked on either side of the door for some way to open it; for a keypad like the one on Godshawk’s laboratory door. There was nothing. The red light flashed; the metallic throbbing noise rang out again. Gingerly, Fever reached out and set her hand over the hand on the picture, then drew it back with a yelp. “It stung me!”
“I don’t like this place; we would be better outside,” said Cluny, and Fever could tell that she was trying very, very hard not to be afraid, and failing. Fever looked at her hand, and there on the pad of her middle finger was a little black speck of blood, like a sesame seed.
“It pricked me. . .” she said. Sure enough, when she looked more closely at the panel with the hand on it, there was a tiny, tiny hole in the plastic over the middle finger, where the thinnest of needles must have darted out and jabbed her.
The door opened with a fierce hiss, sliding aside into the wall so suddenly that it seemed to have simply disappeared. Fever and Marten skittered backwards; Cluny screamed. They stood poised, ready to scramble back down the ladder, but nothing came at them through the open doorway. A breeze from the passageway blew past them into the newly opened room, smelling of heather and the wide moors outside. It was as if Skrevanastuut had been holding its breath for a long time and was now inhaling deeply.
In the new room they could see metal chairs; low tables; more shelves. Fever calmed herself and edged carefully through the doorway. As soon as she was inside she grabbed one of the chairs and wedged it so that the door could not slam shut again and trap her. She beckoned the Morvish to follow her, and thought as they came to join her that they looked like animals, so wide-eyed and alert, looking so warily at everything, reaching out to touch things and then drawing their hands back so quickly, shocked at the strange feel of them.
She knew that she was behaving in just the same way.
There was not so much grit on the floor of this room; no wasps’ nests on the ceiling. A thin, brightly coloured book that lay on the table looked untouched, with an uncannily realistic picture of a pretty woman grinning at them from the front cover. Some sort of coloured photograph? Fever wondered. It crumbled into flakes when Marten touched it. A mug stood next to it. On its side were those same three words in the same red lettering: The Scrivener Institute. Fever read them aloud. How many centuries had it taken for that name to be smoothed into “Skrevanastuut”?
“The Scrivener?” asked Marten. “He’s a god. . .”
“He was the god of my mother’s people,” said Fever. “The Scriven believed that he was born in the fires of the Downsizing. They said he created the Scriven to replace ordinary human beings. This must be an old Scriven site; a temple or a monastery dedicated to him. . .” No: that did not make sense. If the Scriven had been able to build a place like this they would have conquered the whole world, not just London.
There were stairs in one corner of that room; a spiral of them, leading up to another metal door. They creaked slightly under the three intruders’ weight, but did not shift, and the door at the top whisked open without Fever needing to have her hand pricked again. The upstairs room was triangular and seemed to fill the whole mid-section of the pyramid. There were oblong transparent panels on the wall which Fever thought at first were windows looking out on to a grey and softly glowing sky. Then she thought that they were lamps; then some sort of pictures. Finally she realized that they were screens.
All her life she had been seeing screens – they were dug up in such huge numbers from the soils of London that some archaeologists had taken to calling the last era of the Ancient world “the Screen Age” – but she had never seen one working before. Beneath each screen there was a kind of plastic tray with square white tiles on, and on each tile a printed letter or a figure or a sign. “Keyboards,” she said. She had seen houses floored with such tiles, back in London. She blew the dust from one of them, and reached out and touched a key – the letter H, which was almost in the middle. Instantly the screen above her changed colour, and showed her The Scrivener Institute again.
She did not know what else to do. She knew that the screen and the keyboard should be connected to one of the Ancients’ legendary computer-brains. How could she contact it? H-E-L-L-O, she typed carefully. “Hello?” she said loudly. She bent down and said it to the keyboard. “Hello?”
The screens hummed softly. A few were dead. Only to be expected in such an old place. It was astonishing that any worked at all. She tried pressing more keys at random. Nothing happened. Behind her, Marten and Cluny had already grown bored and were climbing another helix of white stairs which went up through the middle of the ceiling. Fever ignored them, trying to remember everything she had ever read or heard about computer-brains. None of it helped. All the knowledge of the Ancient world might be contained in these machines, but she had no idea how to get at it.
Above her she heard another door open. Then, after a heartbeat’s pause, Cluny began screaming, and did not stop.
Fever ran up the stairs to their top, where her friends stood scrunched against the handrail just outside the open door. “What is it?” she asked, but Cluny would only scream, while Marten pointed dumbly into the room they had just opened.
It was full of Stalkers.
24
IN THE UPPER ROOM
or what seemed a long time they stood there together, barely breathing, staring at the seated shapes which lined the room. Each propped on its own big throne-like chair, and each unmistakably a Stalker, its head an outsize helmet, its face a metal mask, its eyes twin lamps. Most of the lamps were dead and blank, and some of the Stalkers had disintegrated with age into heaps of machinery and a scatter of dead-stick bones, but in the eyes of a few a faint green light still played, like wills-o’-the-wisp trapped in the armoured heads. From their metal skull-pieces tangles of wire trailed, plugged into sockets on the walls behind.
“I think it is all right,” Fever said, after a little time. “These are not Stalkerish Stalkers. . .”
If they had been Stalkerish Stalkers, she reasoned,
she and Cluny and Marten would already be dead. But the figures all stayed seated, and the hands that clasped the armrests of their chairs were not gauntlets full of knives but more like mummies’ hands; brittle armatures of twigs papered in ancient skin.
Fever went into the room, and stopped as one of the Stalkers raised its head to focus on her. She heard the mechanisms inside its eyes creak and grate. Behind the mouth-slit of its mask, dry, yellow teeth moved. A voice like the whisper of the air stirring dead leaves in a tomb came out at her. Words poured from it as if it had been interrupted long ago in the middle of a speech and now Fever was here it was continuing where it had left off. What was it saying? What language was that, so quick and guttural, so full of hisses and odd, half-familiar sounds?
She looked back at Cluny. “Is it speaking Arkhangelsk? Suomi?”
“I think it’s Anglish,” said Marten, listening hard.
It was. Fever was beginning to catch words now herself. “Remember . . . war . . . it was decided . . . Scrivener Institute. . .” It was Anglish, but Anglish as it had not been spoken for whole ages of the earth; Anglish as it must have sounded in the Screen Age, on the eve of the Downsizing. Fever went closer, straining her ears, snatching at every word. Now another of the ancient Stalkers had begun to speak, and its voice blended with the first, making it even harder to catch what either of them said.
“Sixty minutes . . . all major cities . . . survivors. . .”
“I remember. . .”
“. . .then the Slow Bombs. . .”
“. . .it was decided. . .”
“. . .revenge weapons of the Barefoot States. . .”
“I remember. . .”
“. . .rushed into production. . .”
“. . .base pairs . . . improved resistance . . . patented sequences. . .”
“The inheritors. . .”
“Stop!” cried Fever.
There was a moment’s quiet. The Stalkers seemed to look at her inquisitively. “Who are you?” she asked. “What is this place?”
“This is the Scrivener Institute,” whispered the first Stalker. “Scrivener is a registered trademark of the Scrivener group of companies. This facility has been designed to withstand an impact of up to fifty megatons. Genetic material held at this facility is the property of the Scrivener group of companies. I remember the foundation of this facility. Since war seemed inevitable it was decided that the new genome would be rushed into production. . .”
“What does it mean?” whispered Cluny.
Fever shook her head. “They’re talking about a war. Something long ago.”
The second Stalker was speaking again now, but all that came from it was a string of difficult-sounding words: “. . .reduced senescence . . . haem-oxygenase regulators within the mitochondrial DNA. . . Coenzyme Q – cytochrome c reductase complex three MT-CYB cytochrome c oxidase complex four. . .”
The only term Fever recognized in all that was “DNA”. Certain Ancient texts spoke about a mystical-sounding spiral of matter which somehow passed down information from parents to their offspring. That was what “genes” did, too. And “reduced senescence” was about aging, about slowing aging. . .
Had this been a medical facility? The Scriven aged more slowly than normal humans. Perhaps they had benefitted in some way from what was done here?
“Have you heard of the Scriven?” she asked.
The Stalker paused, then said patiently, “Scrivener is a trademark of the Scrivener group of companies. This facility has been designed to withstand an impact of. . .”
“They aren’t talking to you, Fever,” Cluny said, taking her by the arm and pulling her gently away. “They’re just talking at you.” She could still hardly bear to look at the Stalkers. She held her hand up in front of her face as she spoke, trying to keep out their musty, chemical reek. “Great Ancestors!” she muttered. “Do you think I will end up like them? Those extra brains inside their heads. . . They aren’t people; just tailors’ dummies stuffed with old memories. . .”
“The S-197 cranial implant facilitates the backing up, storage, downloading and sharing of biological memory,” began one of the Stalkers unhelpfully.
“In the present emergency, cranial implants have been used to preserve and retrieve information from post-functional brains. . .” whispered another.
“Information from post-functional brains will be downloaded to the mainframe as soon as conditions improve. . .”
Cluny started to lead Fever towards the door. Marten had already backed right out of the room and waited at the top of the stairs, looking ready to bolt. Fever wanted to hear more, but she let herself be led. It was good to feel Cluny’s warm hand in hers in this room of the whispering dead.
“They can’t tell us anything,” Cluny said. “The things they’re talking about were forgotten a thousand years ago.”
“Longer. Much longer,” said Fever.
“So are they going to tell us the cure?” asked Marten. “For this thing in Cluny’s brain?”
“The answer’s here,” said Fever. “I just don’t know how to find it. I might not understand it if I did. All this stuff. . .”
They went back down to the bottom floor. They barred the entrance with a cabinet and then, because they were very hungry and had nothing to eat, they lay down to rest instead, in nests which they made from the crumbling foam cushions of the chairs.
Cluny and her brother both fell asleep easily, exhausted by the terrors of the day and their long trek. Fever, although she felt as tired as she had ever felt, lay awake for a long time, thinking back over the things the Stalkers had said to her. She was sure they had been giving her the pieces of a puzzle, but she could not see how to put it together. She wondered if they were still whispering up there at the top of the tower. Cytochrome. Oxidase. War. Inheritors. . . For the first time in her life she felt stupid. She had often dreamed of discovering a place like this; the technology of the Ancients, preserved and functioning. It had never occurred to her that she might not be clever enough to understand it.
In the morning, woken by his empty belly, Marten left Fever and his sister sleeping and crept out of the tower and went downhill with some wire he had prised from one of the cabinets. He was nervous of the nightwights, but snow had fallen in the night and the sun lay bright upon it, and he did not think that they would venture out. The snow showed him rabbit tracks on the little paths between the heather and he twisted the wire into snares which he set across them. Then he went on down into the valley, to where the river ran, and spent an hour trying to catch fish in the shallows, without luck. He did not mind. It was good to be out under the wide sky again, after being shut up in that weird old place on the hill. He was sorry that Cluny had come here. It was all the fault of Fever Crumb, he thought. The London girl was brave, but she was a bad influence on his sister.
When he returned to his snares he found that he had trapped two rabbits. He dressed the carcasses and carried them back up the hill, feeling pleased with himself for reading the tracks so well and making such good snares.
The feeling faded when he reached the pyramid. The snow around it was melting quickly, revealing footprints in the damp earth near the mouth of the tunnel. His own were there, and Cluny’s, and the prints of Fever’s boots too, but trampled over them were many others, the marks of bare feet with clawed and horny nails. You didn’t have to be a hunter to read those tracks. In the night, while he and Cluny and the London girl were sleeping, the nightwights had followed their trail, and come to slink and sniff around the walls of Skrevanastuut.
Fever walked through the empty tower in silence. On the ground floor she had found three more rooms: one a sort of kitchen, another a storeroom with a toilet cubicle opening off it, the third a place that she thought might be the Resurrectory where the Stalkers in the upper room had been made; there was a metal table in the middle, and more screens, all dead, and cabinets of tarnished metal dishes and things that could have been surgeons’ tools or instruments of torture.
There was a plastic casket with grey dust inside, and three egg-shaped depressions in the dust, a Stalker brain nestling in each.
She was rich. A digger in London who had found just one room like that would have been set up for life. But she could think of no way to get more than the smallest of her finds home, and she did not much care about that anyway. What she wanted more than anything was just to understand this stuff.
She climbed the stairs again to the upper room, and again the Stalkers began whispering to her. Of course, they were not really Stalkers. To Stalk you had to be able to stand up and move about, and there was no sign that these creatures had been intended to do anything but sit here in their big chairs, remembering. Perhaps things like these had just been the beginning of true Stalkers. Somebody had taken the same technology, gone north, built more pyramids, and developed Stalkers that didn’t just sit and remember things but could walk and fight. Then they had decided that the remembering bit wasn’t so important any more. . .
She tried to assemble what she knew. The Stalkers kept whispering of a war. Some historians believed that the Downsizing had been caused by a war between two Ancient empires, although Fever had never really believed it. How could a society as advanced and scientific as theirs have had wars? But say they had. Just before the war, and just afterwards, the people here had done something, rushed something into production. . .