The Waking Engine (39 page)

“Escape everything. Aren’t you suffocating? Aren’t you drowning in this gilded shit?”

Purity remembered when she first found this room, and the blind anger that had fueled her. She looked down.

“There you have it,” NoNo relished.

A wave of helplessness washed over Purity, but she shook her head clear. “I would never do what you did.”

“That’s a fine hair to split, Purity Kloo.”

“Better to split a hair than a child, Nonette Leibowitz.” Purity locked eyes with NoNo and remembered Kaien’s heartache at the young tailor’s apprentice, who died with NoNo’s canary yellow thread in his hand.

“I . . . I didn’t know what the song was, at first. I thought Mner was teasing me, singing me back to his bed one measure at a time with pretend fragments of the Weapon, a little pillow game. Then, when I put the measures together and I Killed those boys, actually Killed them . . . I had to try to make some good come of it.”

“And you’re willing to destroy your family name for what, exactly?”

“To end this? Gladly. And not just my family, all of our families. We are an abomination, Purity, I know you see that.”

She saw no such thing, despite the overwhelming despair that tried to claw its way into her heart. But as NoNo lectured Purity on the evils of the Circle, Purity stared at the Dawn Stains in what she hoped looked like distracted awe. She was searching for some sign of the Weapon when she remembered the threat NoNo had made against NiNi— at the time she thought it had been simple spite, but now she saw the truth of it.

“Mner said if you sing slowly enough, you can make it hurt,” NoNo had said. “Singing me back to his bed.”

And suddenly the truth of a quarter-million years hit home. The lords and the Circle; the Weapon; a room that, until very recently, only the prince and the Circle could enter. The Circle Unsung.

“Sweet suicide, they’ve had the Weapon all along.” They must have. The lords hadn’t discovered the Weapon, they’d always possessed it. If that was true, then knowledge of the Weapon was the reason the Circle existed—a balance of power, of mutually assured destruction. Bells, the entire history of her society was predicated upon a secret standoff of epochal proportions. That explained how the lords had kept hidden the knowledge of a way to choose Death—or inflict it— and more significantly, why they hadn’t bothered fighting each other for control of it. Anyone with a voice could wield the Weapon.

“Oh bravo, Purity.” NoNo clapped. “Putting all the pieces together by your lonesome self.”

But Purity wasn’t listening: the lords had kept the Weapon safe for ages. Kept it tucked away until they’d been locked inside the Dome, and then they’d resorted to using it. Was she right then, had the Writ of Community been Fflaen’s way to dispose of the ruling class permanently?

Either way, she’d found what she was looking for—the link between the prince, the Circle, the Weapon, and the Dawn Stains. It was right there at the bottom of the glass, on every pane, in bars of black and gold that looked incidental to the scenes depicted above them. From just a few feet away the notation looked illegible, but closer up Purity could make out some of its sense. If she scanned the lines correctly, the meter shifted between bars in an inconsistent way, but it was most definitely music. The Dawn Stains held a song.

Sometimes truffles and perfect comfort and velvety red wines just didn’t satisfy, mused Lallowë Thyu, Marchioness Terenz-de-Guises. She pouted in the bath with her ankles scissored into the air, so she could admire the lacquer-sheen smoothness of her toenails. She picked at pomegranate seeds from a glass ramekin, snapping them up with the thin coding pins she held scissored in her hand. Lallowë found herself not enjoying the flavor so much as the gem-bright bloody color and the memory of how, when she was much younger, her mother had fed her pomegranate seeds and pretended they were teeth stolen from sleeping children. Pomegranate, she mused, was much tastier as a body part.

Thanks to a bitter mood, she’d spent nearly the whole eve ning in her bath— a bowl of shale as wide as a small pond, frothed over with water that never cooled and was perfumed with her most recently favored scents— damp wood in March, rain- slick limestone, and jasmine—but Lallowë had not wasted a moment. The coding pins had danced in her hands all eve ning, scripting sentience into the abalone programming compiler that floated in her lap like a giant oyster. Beneath the crust of calcium carbonate glowed an interior of mother-of-pearl and electrum: a box of light and golden wire suspended inside contained a grid of 1,024 by 1,024 squares in 1,024 layers, projecting a cubical matrix that served as the parchment upon which she wrote herself a sister.

The coding pins flew through Lallowë’s fingers, dancing instructions across the projected matrix. She held two pins in each hand, pinching and twisting the air between quanta, while plucking the occasional pomegranate tooth. She chewed her lip in concentration as she considered her task and, somewhere behind the problem of creating an artificial intelligence, fretted away at the larger question of out-thinking the Cicatrix— discovering her true goals and how she, Lallowë, could end up on top.

Coding was by far the easier task: ever-decreasing circuitry size and efficiency seemed to occupy human ambitions, while faerie code could accomplish so much more with so much less. There was a poetry in her logic that superseded anything simple math could predict, and quite literal poetry in the code she wrote—while her abalone compiler remained the perfect interface for building sentience. She couldn’t manage a database if her life depended upon it— and thank the Airy Dark it did not— but she could whip up a ghost for the machine without decanting herself from the bathtub.

She’d previously used the abalone shell for programming specialized clocks—Lallowë had given Oxnard’s sister a clock for her bedside, for instance, that had whispered insanities to the woman in her sleep until she became maddened beyond repair. Eventually the wretched girl sold her fortune to the Numismatist to remove her body-binding and threw herself off Giantsrib Bridge. Ha.

Despite the fact that its components integrated technologies and magics from multiple disciplines and realities, programming the vivisistor to resemble life wasn’t much more difficult, at least in theory, than designing her clocks—just an elaboration upon a theme, really. A living mind could be seen as comprised of many enchanted clocks running at once, each designed to reproduce some aspect of sentience—perception, rumination, self-correction, rage— and set to interact with each other recursively. But only with art inside the arguments: she silently thanked her human papa for the gift of his poesy, she could only imagine her mother trying to fit birdsong and cricketstrings into an algorithm of even the most basic—

My human father. That was it, Lallowë realized with a twist of her gut and a furious rush of shame. My father, the poet, the man who was smart enough to leave. That was why she was here, why she’d been chosen over Almondine, everything. Lallowë felt a combination of emotions she’d never suffered before, a pride that hinged upon shame, an exuberance dependent upon patricide, a love that spoke the language of hate. That was it.

And it was why she’d prevail.

As the coding pins clacked in her loose-fingered grip, Lallowë began to understand how her mother could be seduced into thinking machine life could improve upon meat life, although the Cicatrix was still irreparably insane. But with her father’s bardic gift—Tam was a bard, could he be drafted?—with her father’s gift in her veins, Lallowë comprised the very best of the Unseelie fey and the most talented aspects of humanity. She wasn’t a half-breed, she was an upgrade. She would not only write herself a new sister, but she’d piggyback atop that soul a utility code that Lallowë could use herself; contingencies within contingencies, just as the Cicatrix had taught her. But with her father’s feel for meter and motif, sound and sense.

She flicked a completed subroutine into the developing matrix, causing one of the stones set around the lip of the bowl- shaped shell to glow. She had six stones glowing now, six subroutines out of hundreds she’d created only to dismiss as imperfect, too perfect, or wrong for the task. Lallowë wanted the new Almondine to be her ideal creation: a beautiful, submissive sisterly soul wrapped in an infrastructure of utility protocols that could be used indepen dently of the living mind within. Analytic and heuristic systems, scalable information architecture, both topological animism and arcane geometrics, weapons, divinations, bio-monitoring, and deployable repair enchantments for flesh and machine—Lallowë’s opus would be not modular but epic poetic. It would be the opposite of her mother’s strategy, and it would benefit her under any circumstances whatsoever.

If creating a third sister out of Almondine was a risk, Lallowë intended to hardwire the wooden bitch with an exit strategy.

Lallowë became subsumed by her electric oyster and the three- dimensional grid it projected. This was the tack she should have taken all along—rather than trying to guess at her mother’s plans, she should have been spinning an unknowable web of her own. She cracked a pomegranate seed between her teeth and smoothed her eyebrows with a flick of her dry black tongue, then smiled. She rubbed her bare feet along the shale of the tub—although the raw stone was sharp enough to slice human flesh to shreds, its fissile edges felt fantastic scrubbing her soles and exfoliating the skin of her bottom.

And she exulted. Almondine would be precisely the sort of associative tangle that forms the workspace where consciousness lives: tie dance to calligraphy, cross ice with the memory of water, create a variable called laughter and associate it with swift and metered movements of perspective.

Sister : trust :: mother : betrayal. They were lovely lines to write.

Cooper stood alone with Alouette in a forest made of gold, or a temple grown from trees, he wasn’t sure which. A cathedral of gold-barked sycamore trees reached far overhead, trunks thick and straight but not-quite vertical—they leaned inward all at the same slight angle, and branched identically to form the perfect vaults of the ceiling. White- gold birch trees stood slender as rods between the muscular sycamores.

Leaves, red and yellow and green, filtered the sunlight like glass, casting their colors onto the grass.

Cooper made a sound of wonder and wandered into the nave of the cathedral-forest, craning his neck to see the marvel. It looked as if perfectly grown trees had been pruned away to create the interior space, but they hadn’t—the interior was part of their perfection.

“Someplace interesting, right?” Alouette said to the trees.

“Where are we now?” he asked, and Alouette’s head drooped.

“Someplace I . . . kinda . . . brought you.”

“Okay.” Cooper’s feet crunched on grass like spears of citrine crystal. “Why do I get the feeling we’re not talking about this little gold detour?” he asked, returning to their previous conversation.

“Because you’re a perceptive kinda dude.” She danced into the cathedral but would not meet his eyes.

“Is that why you kind-of-brought-me?”

“Almost? That’s a hard question to answer.” She scrubbed her face with her hands.

“I’d really appreciate it if you’d try.” Cooper wondered what a perceptive kinda dude would say right about now and tried to strike a mix between patience and perseverance. “But you don’t seem to want to try. I’m wondering if that isn’t a little bit awful.”

Alouette bit her fingernail and looked everywhere but at him for an awkward moment.

Cooper took a deep breath. “Alright then. So tell me about the tree- church. Where are we, really, and why?”

Alouette nodded sharply like a soldier. “Roger will-call. Or whatever. I was hoping you could tell me why, actually.”

So this was another test. Another not- a-turd opportunity to prove himself. Fine.

Cooper walked to the nearest tree-pillar and put his palm against it—it felt warm to the touch. When he pulled his hand away there were two signs glowing on the curling gold bark beneath. Cooper recognized one of them as Sesstri’s orange scroll- and-quill.

That was part of the Winnowed cavern system, and Sesstri was in it. A map, or something deeper? Cooper took another look around the goldbarked interior and tried to let his inner senses guide his gaze. The breeze that stirred the boughs came and went like breathing, and the clarity with which he saw every gold-leafed detail seemed oversharp, like the hyperlucidity of a dream the moment before it evaporates into waking.

This was a place where nature’s geometry revealed itself to be more than resplendent, to be sentient—this was the natural mother of artificial intelligence, written in the dialects of life rather than electricity. The math itself was alive here, and lived through bark and sap, the patterns behind branch and leaf, vein and stoma.

It lived through Alouette. And, it dawned on Cooper, lived in his own body, in the branching of his capillaries and the whorls of his fingertips.

“We didn’t leave, did we?” he asked. “This is another beluga-swim, another vision, but I’m awake for it, aren’t I?”

Alouette sucked one corner of her mouth, like he’d come close to the right answer, but not close enough. “You can feel the life here, and the mind within it? Good. That’s really good, Cooper.”

“Yeah. Okay.” He pointed to the two moving signs. Beside Sesstri’s sign was a green pair of tap shoes. “These are Sesstri and Nixon.”

The being sewn up in the body of a young woman nodded, looking more hopeful. “And you see namesigns? See, Cooper . . . you couldn’t have come here on Tuesday.”

“Namesigns.” He repeated the word out loud. “Yeah, that’s what they are, they’re names. True names, right? A name that can’t be spoken or written, only known. Why can’t I see yours?”

“Look at me.” Alouette put her hand on Cooper’s wrist. She looked concerned. Then he saw her eyes change—pretty, cornflower-blue eyes. “Look closer.”

He stared straight ahead, into the middle of her face, and kept his eyes as still as possible until his vision shimmered; the trees in the periphery of his vision became gold glass. Alouette’s face remained the center of his field of view, but her hair blurred around her head until it was a cloud of pure red pigment. Across her neck he saw a shimmering red ribbon, thick as his thumb and shining like new satin; as he watched, the ribbon became a wound—Alouette’s throat cut open to the cartilage beneath, and her overstuffed cleavage drenched with blood.