The Diamond Age (48 page)

  Without a word, the gatekeeper slammed the hatch closed. Nell could hear the creaking and clanking of his armor as he slowly marched away.

  Some minutes later, she heard him coming toward her again, though this time the noise was redoubled. The rusty locks on the judas gate grumbled and shrieked. The gate door swung open, and Princess Nell stepped back from it as rust flakes, fragments of lichens, and divots of moss showered down around her. Two men in armor now stood there, beckoning her forward.

  Nell stepped through the gate and into the dark streets of the castle. The gate slammed behind her. An iron vise clamped around each of Princess Nell's upper arms; the men had seized her with their gauntlets. They lifted her into the air and carried her for some minutes through the streets, stairs, and corridors of the castle. These were completely deserted.

  She did not see so much as a mouse or a rat. No smoke rose from the chimneys, no light came from any window, and in the long hallway leading to the throne room, the torches hung cold and blackened in their sconces. From place to place Princess Nell saw another armored soldier standing at attention, but, as none of them moved, she did not know whether these were empty suits of armor or real men.

  Nowhere did she see the usual signs of commerce and human activity: horse manure, orange peels, barking dogs, running sewers. Somewhat to her alarm, she did see an inordinate number of chains. The chains were all of the same, somewhat peculiar design, and she saw them everywhere: piled up in heaps on streetcorners, overflowing from metal baskets, dangling from rooftops, strung between towers.

  The clanking and squeaking of the men who bore her along made it difficult for her to hear anything else; but as they proceeded higher and deeper into the castle, she slowly became conscious of a deep grinding, growling noise that pervaded the very ashlars. This noise crescendoed as they hustled down the long final hallway, and became nearly earth-shaking as they finally entered the vaulted throne room at the very heart of the castle.

  The room was dark and cold, though some light was admitted by clerestory windows high up in the vaults. The walls were lined with men in armor, standing stock-still. Sitting in the middle of the room, on a throne twice as high as a man, was a giant, dressed in a suit of armor that gleamed like a looking-glass. Standing below him was a man in armor holding a rag and a wire brush, vigorously buffing one of the lord's greaves.

  "Welcome to Castle Turing," said the lord in a metallic voice.

  By this time, Princess Nell's eyes had adjusted to the dimness, and she could see something else behind the throne: a tremendous Shaft, as thick as the mainmast of a dromond, made of the trunk of a great tree bound and reinforced with brass plates and bands. The Shaft turned steadily, and Princess Nell realized that it must be transmitting the power of the giant windmill far above them.

  Enormous gears, black and sticky with grease, were attached to the Shaft and transferred its power to other, smaller shafts that ran off horizontally in every direction and disappeared through holes in the walls. The turning and grinding of all these shafts and gears made the omnipresent noise she had noted earlier.

  One horizontal shaft ran along each wall of the throne room at about the height of a man's chest. This shaft passed through a gearbox at short, regular intervals. A stubby, square shaft projected from each gearbox at a right angle, sticking straight out of the wall. These gearboxes tended to coincide with the locations of the soldiers.

  The soldier who was polishing the lord's armor worked his way around to one of the lord's spiked knee protectors and, in so doing, turned his back on Princess Nell. She was startled to see a large square hole in the middle of his back.

  Nell knew, vaguely, that the name Castle Turing was a hint; she'd learned a bit about Turing at Miss Matheson's Academy. He had something to do with computers. She could have turned to the Encyclopædia pages and looked it right up, but she had learned to let the Primer tell the story its own way. Clearly the soldiers were not men in armor, but simply wind-up men, and the same was probably true of the Duke of Turing himself.

  After a short and not very interesting conversation, during which Princess Nell tried unsuccessfully to establish whether the Duke was or was not human, he announced, unemotionally, that he was throwing her into the dungeon forever.

  This sort of thing no longer surprised or upset Nell because it had happened hundreds of times during her relationship with the Primer. Besides, she had known, from the very first day Harv had given her the book, how the story would come out in the end. It was just that the story was anfractuous; it developed more ramifications the more closely she read it.

  One of the soldiers detached himself from his gearbox on the wall, stomped into the corner, and picked up a metal basket filled with one of those peculiar chains Princess Nell had seen everywhere. He carried it to the throne, fished through it until he found the end, and fed the end into a hole on the side of the throne. In the meantime, a second soldier had also detached himself from the wall and taken up a position on the opposite side of the throne. This soldier flipped his visor open to expose some sort of mechanical device in the space where his head ought to have been.

  A tremendous chattering noise arose from inside the throne. The second soldier caught the end of the chain as it was emerging from his side and fed it into the opening in his visor. A moment later it popped out of a hatch on his chest. In this fashion, the entire length of the chain, some twenty or thirty feet in all, was slowly and noisily drawn out of the basket, into the noisy mechanism hidden beneath the throne, down the second soldier's throat, out the hatch in his chest, and down to the floor, where it gradually accumulated into a greasy heap. The process went on for much longer than Princess Nell first anticipated, because the chain frequently changed direction; more than once, when the basket was nearly empty, the chain began to spew back into it until it was nearly full again. But on the whole it was more apt to go forward than backward, and eventually the last link lifted free from the basket and disappeared into the throne. A few seconds later, the din from the throne stopped; now Nell could only hear a somewhat lesser chattering from the second soldier. Finally that stopped as well, and the chain fell from his chest. The soldier scooped it up in his arms and deposited it in an empty basket that was sitting handily nearby. Then he strode toward Nell, bent forward at the waist, put his hard cold shoulder rather uncomfortably into the pit of her stomach, and picked her up off the floor like a sack of corn. He carried her for some minutes through the castle, most of that time spent descending endless stone staircases, and finally brought her to a very deep, dark, and cold dungeon, where he deposited her in a small and perfectly dark cell.

  Nell said, "Princess Nell used one of the magic spells Purple

  had taught her to make light." Princess Nell could see that the room was about two by three paces, with a stone bench on one wall to serve as a bed, and a hole in the floor for a toilet. A tiny barred window in the back wall led to an air shaft. Evidently this was quite deep and narrow, and Nell was close to the very bottom, because no light came through it. The soldier walked out of the cell and pulled the door shut behind him; as he did, she saw that the lock was extraordinarily large, about the size of an iron breadbox mounted to the door, full of clockwork and with a large crank dangling from its center.

  The door was equipped with a small peephole. Peering out through it, Nell could see that the soldier did not have a key as such. Instead, he took a short length of chain, about as long as his arm, from a peg near the door and fed it into the giant lock. Then he began to turn the crank. The clockwork clicked, the chain clanked, and eventually the bolt shot out and engaged the jamb, locking Princess Nell into the dungeon. Immediately the chain crashed out of the lock and landed on the floor. The soldier picked it up and hung it back on the wall. Then he clanked away and did not come back until several hours later, when he brought her some bread and water, shoving it through a little hatch in the middle of the door, just above the mechanical lock.

  It did not take Princess Nell long to explore the limited confines of her cell. In one corner, buried under dust and debris, she found something hard and cold and pulled it out for a better look: It was a fragment of chain, quite rusty, but clearly recognizable as the same sort of chain that she saw all over Castle Turing.

  The chain was flat. Each link had a toggle: a movable bit of metal in the center, capable of rotating about and snapping into place in either of two positions, either parallel or perpendicular to the chain.

  During her first night in the cell, Nell discovered two other things. First, the latch on the little door through which her food was delivered was partly accessible from her side, and with a little effort she was able to jam it so that it no longer locked properly. After that, she was able to stick her head out of the hatch and examine her surroundings, including the mechanical lock. Or she could reach out with one arm and feel the lock, spin the crank, and so on.

  The second discovery came in the middle of the night, when she was awakened by a metallic clanking sound coming through the tiny window on the air shaft. Reaching out with one hand, she felt the end of a chain dangling there. She pulled on it, and after initial resistance, it came freely. In short order she was able to pull many yards of chain into her cell and pile it up on the floor.

  Nell had a pretty good idea what to do with the chain. Starting with the end, she examined the toggles and began to mark their positions down (the Primer always gave her scratch pages when she needed them). She made a horizontal mark for toggles parallel to the chain and a vertical mark for those that were perpendicular, and came up with this:

||||||||- |||||- ||||||||||||- ||||||||||||- |||||||||||||||-  - |||||||||-  - |- |||||||||||||-  -  - ||||- |||||||||||||||||||||- |||||||||||-|||||-  -  -  -  - ||||||||||||||||||||- |||||||||||||||||||||- ||||||||||||||||||- |||||||||- ||||||||||||||- |||||||-

  If she counted the vertical marks and replaced them with numbers, this amounted to 8-5-12-12-15- -9- -1-13- - -4-21-11-5- - - - -20-21-18-9-14-7- and if the numbers stood for letters of the alphabet, horizontal marks divided the letters, and double horizontals were spaces, this was HELLO I AM- - -DUKE- - - - -TURING Perhaps the multiple horizontals were codes for commonly used words: - - -
the
- - - - (not used; possibly
alan
?) - - - - -
of

 
If that was right, then the message was HELLO I AM THE DUKE OF TURING, which was interesting, since the giant fellow in the armor had previously identified himself as such, and she deemed it unlikely that he would be sending her a message by this route. This must have come from someone else calling himself the Duke of Turing- perhaps a real, living human being.

  A few years ago Nell could have relied on it. But in recent years the Primer had become much subtler than it used to be, full of hidden traps, and she could no longer make comfortable and easy assumptions. It was just as likely that this chain had descended straight from the throne room itself, and that the mechanical Duke was, for some unfathomable reason, trying to dupe her. So while she was happy to respond to this message in kind, she intended to take a guarded approach until she had established whether the sender was human or mechanical.

  The next part of the message was GIVE- - -CHAIN- - - -TUG-- - - - -ANSWER. Assuming that four horizontal marks stood for
alan
and six stood for
to
, this was GIVE THE CHAIN A TUG TO ANSWER.

  Nell began to flip the toggles on the chain, erasing the message from this personage calling himself the Duke and replacing it with I AM PRINCESS NELL WHY DID YOU IMPRISON ME. Then she gave the chain a tug, and after a moment it began to withdraw from her cell. A few minutes later, back came the message: WELCOME PRINCESS NELL LET US DEVISE A MORE EFFICIENT MEANS OF COMMUNICATION followed by instructions on how to use a more compact system of toggles to represent numbers, and how to convert the numbers into letters and punctuation marks. Once this was settled, the Duke said I AM THE REAL DUKE. I CREATED THESE MACHINES, AND THEY IMPRISONED ME IN A HIGH TOWER FAR ABOVE YOU. THE MACHINE CALLING HIMSELF THE DUKE IS MERELY THE LARGEST AND MOST SOPHISTICATED OF MY CREATIONS.

  Nell responded, THIS CHAIN WEIGHS HUNDREDS OF POUNDS. YOU MUST BE STRONG FOR A HUMAN.

  The Duke responded YOU ARE A SHARP ONE PRINCESS NELL! THE FULL WEIGHT OF THE CHAIN IS ACTUALLY SEVERAL THOUSAND POUNDS, AND I MANAGE IT BY MEANS OF A WINCH LOCATED IN MY ROOM AND DERIVING ITS MOTIVE POWER FROM THE CENTRAL SHAFT.

  Night had long since fallen on the meadow. Nell closed the Primer, packed up her basket, and returned home.

  She stayed up late into the night with the Primer, just as she had when she was a small child, and as a result was late for church the next morning. They said a special prayer for Miss Matheson, who was at home and said to be feeling poorly. Nell called on her for a few minutes after the service, then went straight back home and dove into the Primer again.

  She was attacking two problems at once. First, she needed to figure out how the lock on the door worked. Second, she needed to find out whether the person sending her the message was human or mechanical. If she could be confident that he was a human, she could ask him for assistance in opening the lock, but until she had settled this issue, she had to keep her activities a secret.

  The lock only had a few parts that she could observe: the crank, the bolt, and a pair of brass drums set into the top with digits from 0 to 9 engraved in them, so that by spinning different ways, they could display all the integers from 00 to 99. These drums were in almost constant motion whenever the crank was turning.

  Nell had managed to detach several yards of chain from the one that she was using to converse with the Duke, and so she was able to feed different messages into the lock and see what result they had.