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  "What? Speak, or may the Snow Lord spit your guts." He was speaking Ungapok already.

  The manifestation was slight of build, barefoot, dressed in a pale-brown robe with a hood pushed back. Its eyes were slanted, pupils slit horizontally. Possibly this was a comment on snow glare. Possibly it was caprice or an incomprehensible fashion statement. It spoke the same language in an extraordinarily deep voice that resonated like an oboe.

  "The Ra Egg approaches the Omphalos. Try to be back within three days. We expect to be busy." It bowed, turned, made to leave. Jules stared at it.

  "What?" The word blurred on his tongue, a bastard blend of Ungapok and his customary language. He forced the imprint to one side, slipped back into his own vernacular. The implications of what the thing had just said were dazing. "Are you telling me the Matrioshka Brain is moving?"

  Was that a pitying glance? That in itself was hair-raising. The vast composite being which spoke to him was almost always scrupulous in avoiding hurt to his feelings. This was deliberate, then. The thing said, "Apologies, Jules. This information has been implicit from the outset. Yes, we have been in flight to the locus where the Xon star stands in all of the known universes save this one."

  "You can't be fucking serious. You just took it into your heads to fly an embedded Dyson shell complex several, what, light-years, parsecs, whatever, dragging the Sun along with you?"

  The manifestation opened a window filled with blackness and a haze of false-color light. "Rather, the Sun is propelling us." Annotations whispered in Jules's ear. His viewpoint plunged into the image. The concentric shells blazed ever hotter as he tore toward the hidden star at their core. At solar North Pole, preposterous mechanisms ripped at the photosphere with blinding laser light, slashing deep into the Sun. Churned to a fury, plasma and light gouted forth, a flame at least a million kilometers deep. Equations dappled the screen. Something loaned to Jules interpreted them. This was star-lifting; this was a focused mining operation turned to a single ruthless purpose. The star burst forth its own substance, flung forward into the darkness by the flame of its own going.

  "How long has this—"

  "Some two thousand years. Of course, for the last millennium we have been decelerating. Within several days, the Ra Egg will be at rest relative to the galactic coordinates provided by your sister Jan."

  Jules, cold with anger, stamped his foot. Icy snow crackled and spattered; the environment had morphed into climatic agreement with his destination. "And why. The hell. Have you never bothered. To inform me. Of this small item. Of fucking general interest?"

  The thing regarded him for a long moment in silence. "You never asked." It drew the cowl about its face, turned away again, stepped into the diagram of the terribly deformed star, left Jules staring in useless rage.

  "Oh, come on. Enough of this bullshit. I have someone to kill." He opened the precise Schwelle that the Contest had stacked and queued in his memory, along with the lexicon and grammar of Ungapok and the necessary abbreviated history of those who spoke it, and his task, in fairly nonspecific terms: same old, same old. Canvas seemed to tear; he stepped through into a place, a palace, made all of carved ice. Ten thousand years of packed glacier had been hewn over centuries into a frigid miracle of scattered greenish light and shadow. He strolled from his shaded hollow to join a gathering of nobles and their carls, clad like him against the cold, faces plumper than his and breath rancid with fish oils and the fat of the creatures who provided their coats and the furs he treaded upon. To his left, an ice sculpture reared: a great bear, jaws agape, ferocious teeth transparent and dripping water like slaver. To his right, a rendering of hand-to-hand combat between two overweight thugs thwacking each other with sharp-edged icy bones from something with a rib cage the size of a whale's. He moved his head and hands in the appropriate gestures of greeting, passed with the company into another icy cavern fitted out with furry beanbags and pillows that stank to high heaven. After much rustling, and muttering, and jostling for position, a troupe of players bounded into the cleared circle surrounded by their audience.

  Like the furs, the play stank.

  For the first two minutes, Jules was busy snuffling after the spore of K-machines. To his surprise, none seemed to be in attendance. Presumably, then, his target was a Pawn in the Contest, one of the onlookers. As the minutes became hours, and pieces of fish and lightly roasted meat were passed among the company by the housecarls, washed down by something he learned from his imprint was fermented human milk blended with blood bowled in the skulls of small animals, he hoped that his prey was the bombastic bellowing buffoon taking the king's role. Or the simpering, fat strumpet who was either the royal heroine or the mother of the dauphin or perhaps the king's squeeze.

  Jules rose and circled the audience, found the hollowed trough the men were using as a jakes, pissed into it with a disturbing sense of fragility, circled further, recognized his target. The youth sat inconveniently close to the action, but that would serve the purposes of distraction. Jules slipped in behind him, took a brimming skull of alcoholic blood from the hands of a servant, pushed forward, pressed it and a small quantity of poison upon the youth with a roar of laughter, clapped the lad heartily upon his padded back, slipped away again, took an unhurried stroll toward the shadows. Uproar. The buffoon on the stage shouted more loudly, thinking himself mocked or applauded, who could tell. Women's voices raised in an instant pitch of despair and sorrow. Jules opened a Schwelle, checked his work one final time before he stepped through. The kid was on his face, dead as a doornail, heading toward entropic equilibrium with the ice underfoot. Ah well. Death, you're soaking in it.

  He walked away and closed the gate behind him. A butler took his foul, heavy garments, brought him a glass of pale, pale wine—he wouldn't be able to drink red for weeks, he thought—and said, "Can I get you anything else, sir?"

  "I think I might have a nap," the augur said. After a moment, he forgot every word of Ungapok, thank God, and remembered the bizarre news the manifestation had conveyed to him. "Hey!" he shouted. "Are we there yet?"

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  August

  "I see you're dressed for dinner," Toby said.

  Straight-faced, I said, "If I'd known it was going to be formal—" I felt a jolt of happiness to see him alive, tucked it away inside.

  Toby gave me an avuncular, forgiving smile. My brother, to glance at him, could easily be my father. He has a woodsman's look, sturdy and broad of chest, high, suntanned forehead that stretches all the way to a fluffy fringe of white hair at the back of his noble head. Woodsman captures only part of the thing, though. He reminds me a little of those Roman senators when Rome was still a republic and had not yet decayed into the temptations of empire, when the men who took their turn in the forum and the army were farmers, quite often, by trade. Still close to the earth. Toby loved his special world, I could tell that just by looking at him and recalling those couple of tramps we'd taken through the falling, mulching leaves of his woods and dales. Leaving aside the ghastly termagants he'd had to kill, once with my own help. But those Roman soldier farmers had battled with foxes and worse in the defense of their crops, their hard-won wealth, the lives of their loved ones.

  "I found your sweaty castoffs and sent them to the laundry," Toby told me, then. "You'll find—"

  "I'm sorry, I didn't mean—"

  Toby waved my apology to silence, and his smile broadened. "Not at all, not at all. I do understand that you are new to this. I've laid out some fresh clothes in your room. Just don't expect this kind of service every day."

  I had the sense to leave off my protestations and accept my good fortune and his generosity. I stepped toward him and started to extend my hand, and the weight of the sword took me by surprise. I lowered my menacing hand at once, more embarrassed by the pilfered weapon than by my nakedness.

  "Not something you idly tugged out of a stone, I trust?" Toby said, glancing at the blade.

  "I should get dressed," I said. I looke
d around for somewhere to lay down the sword, uncertain of the etiquette involved. Presumably you couldn't dump it on the table or couch, or prop it point down in a corner. "Is there somewhere I can—"

  "May I?" Toby did not yet extend his hand; it came to me that a gentleman did not presume to handle another gentleman's weapons of war. But this lump of hardware was not mine, certainly not my tool of trade. I was dimly conscious, as well, of a certain phallic ambiguity in all this. It's one thing to be caught in a dream without your pants, it's quite another when it happens while you're wide awake.

  "Of course, Toby," I said, and held out the sword in an uncomfortable gesture, thumb down. Toby took it from me carefully, turned aside, fell with instant grace into some fancy saber posture, sword extended in his rigid right arm. He took a couple of steps forth and back, like kata, and I left him to it.

  The garments he'd thoughtfully set forth for me somewhat resembled those I'd worn in this world on my first visit: expensive underwear and calf-length silk socks fit for an Arab prince planning to attend a knighthood at Buckingham Palace, tight-fitting trousers in some impossibly soft leather, ankle boots ditto but with sturdy leather soles, buckled in brass, one of those white Hamlet shirts with baggy sleeves and wide lapels that show off as much chest as a starlet at the Oscars, an extremely handsome deep-green jacket that flared at the shoulder and tucked in snugly at the waist before falling to mid-thigh. I felt like an idiot as I climbed into this stuff, then like an impostor at the Gay Mardi Gras as I gazed into the bedroom's long mirror, checking the fit. It was impeccable, of course. I had no idea how Toby did this; maybe some sort of computerized laser scan had taken my measurements while I showered on my first visit. Still and all, by the time I'd drawn on the jacket, I was feeling pretty damned pleased with the effect. I wished Lune were with me, so I could take it all off again, and her clothes as well. For some reason excellent couture has this effect upon me. Or maybe it's just Lune, and the thought of her glowing, naked, coffee skin.

  "You look well in that. I've made a fresh pot of tea," Toby told me when I returned to the living room. "I have placed your blade over there for the nonce." He gestured with his head to something in the corner that looked like a clothes drying rack crafted by a superior carpenter out of pure ebony. The sword, gleaming in firelight as if it had just been lightly oiled—and it probably had been—stretched across its diagonal. Had Toby got the stand made in one of his time-distorted universes? Maybe it was just a little something stored in one of the many rooms of this ridiculously huge cabin.

  "Thank you," I said. "And for the clothes. But Toby, I'm sorry about the sword. I didn't mean to take it, it's not as if I have a use for it."

  Toby frowned. "No need to apologize to me, my boy. It's a very pretty blade, I'll give you that. Whose is it? I was quite serious about the stone, by the way."

  I must have given him a startled look. "Why, it's yours. Or the family's. I found it downstairs."

  "Pardon? There is no downstairs, not here. Oh, you mean in some other—"

  A light tap sounded on the front door; it swung open. Lune came in, looking drenched. I hadn't heard any rain. Well, no. She'd come into Toby's world from some different place, some other time, where the so-called Custodial Superiore Morgette Smith's Daughter had dragged her after our messy encounter with the Jammervoch. She shook her head, spraying mist.

  "Oops, sorry. It's beastly where I've just been. I should have stopped somewhere and changed. Hello, Toby, it's good to see you again. You're keeping an eye on our scamp?" She smiled delightfully as she said it, turning her gaze to me immediately, as embracing as a hug. I was suddenly glad not to be naked. I crossed the room, caught her up, kissed her soundly. At my back, Toby cleared his throat. I released my soaked bundle.

  Scamp. I wasn't really sure I liked the sound of that. It wasn't unfriendly, if anything it was too friendly—in the wrong way. The sort of thing a grown-up said of a naughty but promising child. A slight shiver ran through me; I recalled that despite her youthful appearance, Lune was at least twice my age, possibly more. But that was a calculation appropriate to humans, to my old life, to the illusion that was my old life. My life before I learned that I am a Player in the Contest of Worlds, as is Lune, as is my entire family. A Vorpal homunculus, Lune had called me. A construct on the computational substrate of the many-leveled Tegmark cosmoses. Whatever the fuck that meant. She was the expert. Once again, I felt like an ignorant child.

  But Lune had taken up my hand, then Toby's, drawn us to the fireplace. Steam rose from her garments. She shivered a little. "I'd kill for a cup of tea," she said.

  "Damn," said Toby. "I had a pot steeping. It'll be sour as a witch's tit by the time we're ready to drink it. Let me have your clothes. I seem to have become the local laundress as well as scullery maid." There was no sting in his words, merely a sort of fond amusement. Lune took off her clothes, down to her underwear, then skinned out of that as well, kicking her sandals aside, handed the bundle over. Toby withdrew without a glance. I was dumbfounded but not fool enough to make a fuss.

  "I'll get you a towel," I said, and did that thing. While she dried herself to a glow, I slouched in a leather chair and regarded my stolen sword. It felt like a metaphor, somehow, but I couldn't parse it. Probably a good thing that I'd given up medicine and taken on philosophy—I might learn a thing or two. Assuming I ever got back to Room 102 and completed my admission form.

  ***

  "You seem troubled, August," Toby told me.

  "I feel as if I've fallen into a fairy tale," I said grouchily. "A Grimm fairy tale, at that." It was a rotten pun but it expressed my sentiment fairly exactly. I'd had the same realization when I first met my family, or a good handful of them, in Maybelline's Heimat.

  "In a sense, that's exactly what's happened. But the other way round." Toby glanced across the table to Lune, dipped his head ever so slightly, as if deferring to her authority. She watched him in silence, tucking a pastry between her lips. He added, speaking directly to her, "You haven't told him much, then, I take it?"

  She said, "We preferred—"

  I spoke over her in a hard tone. "What we discussed is our business, Master Toby. Think of our time away as a sort of honeymoon." How we conducted our lives was our business, not Toby's, however concerned he appeared to be for our welfare and comfort. Not the Seebeck family's. Call me bull-headed, but I'd walked away before and I would walk away again if need be, if busybody interference were in the offing.

  His eyes flicked, automatically I suppose, to Lune's left hand, to my own, flicked instantly to the plate in front of him. Perhaps he shook his head a fraction. Lune smiled, shook her own, said, "We are not wed, Toby But you may regard us as a couple."

  He smiled now broadly, raised his glass of rich red claret. "This much, I am happy to say, is apparent. I wish you, of course, the greatest joy in one another." He quaffed his glass. "I would not intrude upon your privacy, but I feel there are questions teasing at my brother's mind. Would you care to voice them, August? If not, I have one of my own."

  I laughed out loud, felt my tense shoulders relax. "I have a thousand questions, Toby. Yes, I put them aside during our... idyll is probably the word, especially in a fairy tale. Now I'm bursting with the damned things. I intended to plague Lune this afternoon, until her strange friend Morgette put in an appearance, and we ended up fighting a monster that could just as easily have come straight out of one of Grimm's fairy tales, and probably did."

  "A Jammervoch," Lune explained. "I have no idea who imported it."

  Toby freshened my glass. I left it untouched, tasting again the filthy flavors of the half-incinerated beast. "Madame Smith's Daughter," he said, "is sufficiently monstrous for one day's work. And didst thou slay the Jabberwock?" It came from his lips oddly, like a familiar quotation. Not one I recognized. Shakespeare, maybe? Actually it sounded like something whimsical that might have made its way into one of Lewis Carroll's Alice books in another cognate, or out of it. Hard j rather than
y, b's instead of m's. English w, not Germanic v.

  "They spoke its name differently, but yeah," I said, watching Lune. She added nothing. "Jesus Christ, what the hell is this? Some sort of goddamned fraternity initiation?" My traps, deltoids, and splenius were tight again, my thighs and calves ready to fling me angrily from the table. "Some sort of Dungeons and Dragons quest game?"

  The taunt sounded feeble even as I spoke. Hadn't they told me this was a game, shown me that this entire cosmos was some sort of multidimensional board upon which we Players strutted our stuff? That was a preposterous conceit in itself, but I could not deny the memory, the truth of it. I recalled too vividly, too bitingly, our progression through the levels and paradoxes and confusions of the many worlds. I remembered the recovery of my father and mother from the revenants that had masked them in protective disguise for a generation, and their deaths under the assault of the K-machines, and my own destruction and rebirth. It was too much to accept yet it was too vivid, too stony hard, to deny and disown.

  They waited patiently for me to work myself through from defensive anger to some sort of acceptance, if not understanding. My brother and my beloved. I was lucky beyond measure, I decided. If you're going to get stuck in a nightmare, make sure you have people like this at your back and your side.