Fever Crumb Part 13

"As the panic grew, I took you from your basket and ran and hid. I snuggled down with you on the floor of a cupboard in one of the bedrooms and listened to the men as they shouted to one another, asking where the Skinner was, and the clang of his spring gun as he appeared out of the shadows to shoot them down one by one, and the screams. Gradually, the house grew quiet. A horrible silence. I whispered lullabies to you, and your little hands pulled at my nose and ears. And you made a sound. Not crying, just a little baby gurgle. And the Skinner heard you.

"I could sense him padding toward us through the house. I put my hand over your face, but I dared not hold it too tight for fear I'd smother you. And you were happy, Fever, snuggled up with me there in that place full of soft things. You started laughing. You made trilling sounds, and little wicked chuckles.

"And then, bang. A hole appeared in the cupboard door, just in the place where my head would have been if I'd been standing up. Light was coming in. The force of the shot made the door swing open. I tried to stop it. I clawed at the wood, but my fingers couldn't find a purchase on it. The door swung wide open, and there outside it stood the Skinner, with his long black coat and his black hat and his pale eyes and his spring gun.

"I held you so tight, Fever. You sensed, I think, the danger we were in. Or else his first shot had shocked you quiet; quiet you were, anyway. I watched him, waiting for him to raise that gun. And I waited. And after a while he let out a long breath, and a cough -- he'd been sunk in the marsh all day -- and he put the gun away.

"'Well,' he said, looking around the room as if I weren't there. 'I suppose I'd better burn this place. It'll take me ten minutes, I reckon, to set the fire.'

"And he turned and went out of the room.

"For one whole minute I just sat there. Then I jumped up, and rummaged in the cupboard for an outdoor coat, and found some boots down on the floor -- I'd been wondering what they were, digging into my bottom, all the time that we'd been hiding there. I pulled on the boots and wrapped that cloak around us both and I was off, down the hill and out across the marshes. And after ten minutes I looked back and there was fire in all the windows of Nonesuch House.

"When morning came I struck out for a dig I knew, owned by a man named Unthank who had worked for my father sometimes. He welcomed me, but he said he couldn't hide me long. I decided to go north and seek shelter among the nomad empires. But I knew I couldn't take you with me. You were too small for such a journey, and besides, what if my Skinner had regretted his mercifulness and told his friends of me? What if the Skinners' Guilds and the new guards on the Moatway were all looking out for a woman with a baby girl?

"There was only one thing to do, Fever, dear. I left you there with Unthank, and I told him to call Dr. Crumb there on some pretence. 'Dr. Crumb is a good man,' I told him. 'He'll take care of the child.'

"And he did, didn't he, Fever Crumb? Because look at you. You're a young woman, nearly. And I've no doubt you're just as sweet and clever as your father."

Chapter 31 Hidden Treasures.

Mother," said Fever, very quietly and self-consciously, because it was the first time she'd ever used the word. "What did G.o.dshawk do to me?"

Wavey's dark eyes darkened further; she glanced away. "What do you mean?"

"I remember things. Things that happened to him, not to me."

There was a little silence. They could hear people moving around somewhere below them in the fortress's engine rooms; the clangs and clatter of refueling. Nikola Quercus stirred and shifted, over by the chamber door. "What does the girl mean?" he asked. "You never told me anything of this."

"G.o.dshawk did something to me, didn't he?" Fever prompted. "He performed some operation on my brain, to give me his memories."

"Oh, Fever," said Wavey, wondering.

"Is this true?" asked Quercus, coming nearer. "She has the old man's knowledge in her? His thoughts?"

Wavey looked quickly at him, then back to Fever. "It might be. It is possible...."

"And you were keeping this secret to yourself perhaps, Snow Leopard?"

"I did not know," said Wavey. "At least, I could not be certain. I guessed that he had placed some engine in her head. There was that scar, still fresh when she came back to me. But I did not know what its purpose was...."

She pursed her lips, shook her head, looked down, and looked up at Fever. She reached out to fondle the faint, scratchy stubble of the girl's regrowing hair. She said, "G.o.dshawk spent decades studying the brains of Stalkers. He made expeditions to the uttermost north, where the old Stalker builders lived in the years after the Downsizing. He traded with the natives there for certain artifacts; rare Stalker brains of strange design taken from temples on the high ice. Things made in the long ago, by people for whom Stalkers were much more than the mere fighting machines we know today. Machines which could capture and curate memories, even the memories of the dead.

"For years G.o.dshawk and his friend Unthank studied them, back at Nonesuch House. G.o.dshawk did not want to die, you see. And he was convinced that he did not have to. He hoped to copy his consciousness into one of those ancient brains and install it in a new body when his old one failed. He talked of doing the same with all the Scriven. Then we truly will be h.o.m.o superior,' he used to say. 'Immortal, unperishing. Imagine the things a man might do if he had eternity to do them in, not just our present measly span of years.'"'

"But it didn't work, did it?" Fever asked.

Another shrug. A shy, wry smile. "I helped him to imprint his mind onto the brains. That worked, as far as he could tell. But when he tried to put those brains in new bodies, something always went wrong. He placed them in dead men, and they remembered nothing, just like ordinary Stalkers. He put them into living men -- slaves and Skinner prisoners -- and they simply died. I thought he had given up, moved on to other projects...."

"But then ... said Fever, "he put one into me... ."

Wavey nodded. The tears that had been forming in her eyes spilled out and trickled down her face. "And you did not die. A young body, perhaps that was what it required. A newborn body, where the Stalker brain would have plenty of time to bed in before it was activated by the tides of adolescence."

"He told you that?" said Fever, actually ducking to avoid a memory Wavey's words called up of G.o.dshawk's own adolescence, and a girl he'd kissed at Rag Fair on a snowy afternoon.

"I'm guessing," said Wavey. "It might have been simple desperation that made him try it. The Skinners' Guilds had grown horribly strong by the time you were born, and he knew his days were numbered. You were on the brink of death anyway, poor little thing. What had he to lose by putting the device in your head? He would have injected you at the same time with microscopic machines that he harvested from the bodies of ancient Stalkers. They would have helped to repair the damage to your brain, and stop infections forming. At least, that was his belief. They never worked in his other subjects. But here you are, alive!"

"Here I am," said Fever numbly. But was she? Was this her, or was it Auric G.o.dshawk? She reached behind her head and let her fingers trace the faint, rippled line of the scar, the zipper where G.o.dshawk had opened her skull and slipped in his machine. The shape of a walnut, the size of an almond. The spring from which all those unfamiliar memories flowed. More washed over her now; memories of Wavey, mostly, pleasant memories, but still upsetting, because she wanted to get used to the idea that this woman was her mother, but she kept seeing her as someone younger than herself, a little girl, a favorite daughter, a workroom protegee.

She had no memories, thankfully, of the experiments G.o.dshawk must have done, the operations he had carried out on both the living and the dead in an attempt to preserve his selfish self. She supposed his consciousness had been crammed into the Stalker brain at a time before those experiments were done. She was glad of that, for she could already sense things surfacing that made her feel giddy with disgust. The fights at Pickled Eel Circus, and G.o.dshawk's excitement as he sat watching in the royal enclosure. His satisfaction as he viewed the progress of his huge portrait-head, ignoring what Fever could not ignore, the suffering of the slave gangs who were constructing it. She began to shudder, and suddenly hot tears were running down her face, and Wavey was reaching out to hold her, but she pulled away.

Wavey said, "Poor Fever! All these years you've been hidden in G.o.dshawk's Head, and now you find out that he's been hiding in yours...."

Fever sniffled and choked and swallowed salty snot. She hadn't cried since she was tiny; it made her feel irrational and ashamed. "Can you get it out of me?" she whispered, clutching her head, battered by the storms of alien memories. "Can you turn it off?"

"I don't think so," said Wavey.

"We cannot," said Quercus, very firmly, sounding like a soldier for the first time. Fever saw his shiny boots approach across the oak-planked deck, "if this is true, Miss Crumb, then we need the knowledge that you carry. My G.o.ds! All G.o.dshawk's genius at our disposal. You're a greater treasure than any in that vault."

Fever looked sharply at him.

"Oh, yes, Miss Crumb. We know about the vault."

"From Dr. Stayling?" she asked.

The northerner shook his head. "I have not told Stayling of it. We could not risk having your Order of Engineers helping themselves to its contents. No, it was your mother who told me of it, many years ago. Back then, we had no reason to believe it still existed; we a.s.sumed that it had been looted or destroyed during your Skinners' Riots. Then one of my agents, the woman you know as Mistress Gloomstove, became aware of Master Solent's activities. That is what convinced me to advance on London."

Fever blinked. It felt strange, having to recast Mistress Gloomstove as a Movement spy, but stranger things had happened that day. She said, "What's in the vault anyway?"

Wavey did not answer her, but looked instead at Nikola Quercus.

"More Stalker stuff?" Fever prompted. "More things like this one inside me?"

"No, no," said Wavey. "G.o.dshawk had given up that project long before you were born. He was working on something else. That statue he began to build was just a cover, an excuse to start constructing great factory sheds and importing tons of steel and raw materials. He was afraid that if he told people what he was really planning they would think it madness."

"What -- madder than a mile-high statue of himself?" asked Fever.

Wavey ignored her, smiling shyly toward Quercus. "After I left you at Unthank's dig, Fever, I wandered for years, all through the Minarchies and up into the nomad empires, earning my living as a traveling technomancer. I never spoke to anyone of what I was, and who my father had been. I never hoped to return to London. But when I came aboard this castle and met Quercus, I saw at once that here was a man who could appreciate G.o.dshawk's vision. I told him about the vault and what it contained, and he decided that the Movement must have it."

Again her mother looked at Quercus, and Fever realized that she was waiting for him to decide whether they should share the secret of the vault with Fever.

"What is it?" she said. She thought of those loose pencil sketches of cogs and heat exchangers in the notebook on Kit Solent's library table, and dim memories of imaginary machines woke and whirred in her mind, but there was nothing that she could make sense of. "What was G.o.dshawk working on? What is in the vault?"

Behind her, softly, Nikola Quercus said, "The future."

Chapter 32 Technomancy.

Down on the under-decks of the fortress, preparations were under way for the final a.s.sault on London. The technomancers who guarded the mysteries of its engines went about their work, opening the fuel c.o.c.ks, oiling the pistons, coaxing the aged machinery into noisy motion, chanting prayers and incantations to keep it running. And at the same time, gangs of slaves from the barrack barges were marched aboard the fortress to take their places in the giant wooden drums that flanked the engine rooms. When forty men were shackled in each drum they, too, became engines of a kind; the energy they generated as they tramped endlessly along the rolling inner surface of their treadmills was transferred by means of cogs and camshafts to the drive wheels.

Slowly, as the lower decks filled with the smells of engine fumes and slave sweat, the fortress began to move. Barrel-shaped wheels, studded to grip the snows of the northern frost barrens, coped easily with the mud and scrub of Hampster's Heath. By the light of the rising moon it pushed its blunt prow through the Orbital Moatway, and from its funnels came a shrill, triumphant, woot ! as, with its escort of armored barges spread out like wings on either side of it, it began to roll toward the lights of London.

They let Fever have a little narrow cabin, and she lay down on the cot in the corner of it and tried to sleep. But how could she sleep, with the whole place shuddering and her mind a stew of someone else's memories? There seemed to be more of them every minute, and she was starting to be afraid that if they kept multiplying there would soon be no room left for her inside her own head, if the decisions she made about the future weren't based on her own experience but on G.o.dshawk's, mightn't she start to behave more and more like him? Perhaps her own personality would fade completely, and she would be nothing but G.o.dshawk's avatar; the evil old man reborn in a new body.

She climbed off the cot, which was really more like a padded shelf, s.p.a.ce being precious in a traction fortress. She had not bothered to take off her trousers or shirt when she lay down. Quickly she pulled on her boots and the coat that Wavey G.o.dshawk had brought to replace her own bloodstained, mud-stained one. It was a Movement woman's coat, cut long and slender out of red silk with a deeper red snowflake pattern and a fox-fur collar. Part of Fever thought it most irrational, but another part, the G.o.dshawk part, thought she looked the bee's knees as she left the cabin.

There was a scent of smoke and metal in the cramped corridors. Movement warriors hurried to and fro, holding on to the handrails on the wall each time the fortress juddered over some obstacle. They stared at Fever as she pa.s.sed, but none tried to stop or question her -- she was the Land Admiral's guest, after all. She took a few wrong turnings, confused by the many pa.s.sageways and sublevels, but she found her way at last to the big chamber where she had first met Quercus. He was there again, sitting in his big chair, listening to a report which one of his captains was shouting at him above the steady clangor of the fortress's progress. He had put on a coat of mail over his tunic, and there was steel armor on his neck and forearms. The other people in the chamber were all soldiers, armed and armored; the women had been banished below.

Quercus looked round and saw Fever standing there. "Miss Crumb," he said. "You should not be here." He spoke politely, but in a way that made it plain that he did not expect her to argue. "It may get dangerous as we approach the city. There is trouble in London and our agents there are no longer sure who is in charge. There may be resistance, and you are too important to risk." He rose from his seat and came closer, looking curiously at Fever's face. "It will be one thing to capture G.o.dshawk's invention, but quite another to make it work, and build replicas, and do all the thousand things that must be done, if you really have the old man's thoughts inside you, you will be invaluable. It will be like having G.o.dshawk himself there to help us."

"You still haven't told me what is in the vault," said Fever. "What has my mother promised you, that made it worth bringing your castle all this way?"

Quercus laughed. "Look inside yourself, Miss Crumb. Search among the old man's memories!" Then he glanced past her and snapped his fingers. "Captain Andringa!" he shouted.

A young warrior came hurrying to take Fever by the arm and escort her out of the command chamber. He was polite and respectful, but firm. "No women, no girls, not here, not when we are going into action. It is bad luck!"

"Is there going to be more fighting?" asked Fever.

"We hope not, but your people may have placed some artillery pieces among their northern suburbs. Don't worry. Our big guns can knock out their batteries before they do us any damage. May I help you back to your cabin?"

"Where is my mother?" asked Fever, who didn't want to be alone if there was to be a battle.

"The Snow Leopard?" He looked wary. "She is at work. In the Resurrectory."

"Where's that?"

The young man was doubtful. He looked back at the door of the command chamber as if he was thinking of asking permission from his Land Admiral. But Quercus had a battle to direct. He shrugged, and took Fever's arm again. "Come. I'll take you."

The Resurrectory was deep in the castle's rumbling innards, down among the engines and the straining slaves. Fever, recalling that her mother was a technomancer and that the nomads thought of technology as magic or a gift from the G.o.ds, imagined that it would be some sort of temple. When her guide showed her in through its heavy doors she saw at once that she'd been quite wrong.

It was a place of science. Science of a sort. The sort of science that felt almost like magic even to an Engineer; stuff that no one understood, but which stubbornly went on working anyway. A 'lectric lamp swung from the center of the low roof, lighting up a bench where Wavey G.o.dshawk and two red-robed a.s.sistants bent over a dead man, turning him patiently and carefully into another Stalker for the Movement's army.

Wavey turned from her work as her daughter came in. She pushed up the bra.s.s goggles that she wore and smiled, as if there were no corpse lying on the zinc-topped slab in front of her. But there was, and because it was not yet fully sheathed in its Stalker armor, Fever could see that it was the corpse of Kit Solent.

She put a hand to her mouth, and backed against the door, which the man who led her there had closed behind him as he left. Her Engineer upbringing had never been so tested. Her reason told her that Kit Solent was dead, and that it did not matter what happened to his remains. Her instincts all screamed at her that it was wrong, wrong, wrong to strip and mutilate him like that, and fill the hollow of his chest with whatever those weird, gleaming devices were, to fit those flashlights in the craters where his eyes had been.

"Fever!" said Wavey, pulling off soiled rubber gloves as she came round the worktable to greet her daughter. "Are you all right? You look quite pale. Don't be afraid. Quercus has fought ever so many battles, and always brings us safely through."

Fever could not stop staring at what was left of Kit. Plastic tubes led from his veins, pumping out blood, pumping in chemicals. The robed a.s.sistants were busy fitting clumsy-looking metal hands to the armor that encased his arms. His real hands, discarded, stuck out of a soggy basket on the deck, looking pale and stupid and unreal.

"Quercus said he would be treated with honor," she said, in a tiny voice.

"But this is an honor, Fever, according to the customs of the Movement," replied her mother. "Only the best fighters are reborn as Stalkers, so that their bodies may go on serving the Movement even after their souls have gone to the High Halls. It is a privilege extended to very few enemies. Your Master Solent was a brave man, and this is Quercus's way of acknowledging that bravery." She put a comforting arm around Fever's shoulders, but Fever shrugged it off. She hated being touched, and she didn't want comfort. She had done quite well without a mother for fourteen years; why did Wavey think that she suddenly needed so much stroking and hugging?

She mastered her feeling of nausea and stepped closer to the horrid table. She saw that the machines that had been packed into Kit's torso were already old; Ancient technology recycled down the centuries in Stalker after Stalker, just as she and Dr. Crumb had recycled the New Council's stock of brains and claws and eyes into generations of paper boys. In some ways, she supposed, this was a fitting end for an archaeologist. "I didn't know you did this," she said thinly.

"How do you think I managed to become Quercus's technomancer in the first placer" asked Wavey. "I spent so long a.s.sisting G.o.dshawk that I can build Stalkers in my sleep. Though not for much longer, I fear. Our supplies of Stalker brains are running out, and the art of making new ones is long lost. That makes it even grander, in a way, that Quercus has ordered your friend to be Resurrected. The new brain in Master Solent's head is the best we have in stock, brought from a Snowmad trader who found it high, high upon the northern ice. I think you really impressed him, Fever; Quercus, I mean. I'm sure he likes you. We really must try and do something with your hair...."

"But will he remember anything?" asked Fever.

"Quercus?"

"No, Master Solent!"

"Nothing," Wavey promised her. "Your friend is dead. This new warrior we are building will not be Master Solent at all, but a Stalker, implacable and undying."

"What power source keeps all those devices running inside him? How is he fueled?"

"No fuel is required."

"But that would break the laws of thermodynamics...."

"Oh, you Engineers and your laws," said her mother. "They work, Fever. What does it matter how? They draw the power they need from the environment somehow. G.o.dshawk called it 'Molecular Clockwork,' but even he could not discover how it was done. Yet the Stalkers go on. Your friend Solent may still be stalking around long after you and I and the Movement are forgotten."

Fever stood with her and watched while Kit's chest was closed, and a plate of armor fitted over the dead flesh. The red-robed mechanics then set to work upon his helmet, attaching a complicated sliding visor arrangement to the metal skull-piece that now sheathed his head. They had just finished stencilling his new name on it when the body began to stir, making small restless movements with its feet and fingers. A green light flared up in its eyes. The mechanics drew back.

"What is happening?" asked Fever.

Wavey drew her carefully away from the creature. "It is quickening. The Stalker brain is taking control of its new body. It is ...

With a hard clang, sharp, steel-blue blades extended from the Stalker's hands. It began to thrash its arms about. Its mouth opened and a terrible, deep, wordless cry came from it. One of the mechanics ran to a red locker on the wall and took out a clumsy-looking gun with a thick copper disc in place of a muzzle. He trained the weapon on the new Stalker's head and looked up at Wavey, waiting for her order.

"No," said Wavey. Avoiding the flailing blades she went close to the Stalker and laid her hand upon its chest. "Listen to me!" she shouted, over the ceaseless scream. "You are a Stalker of the Lazarus Brigade. You are not yet operational. You will be quiet, and lie still, while you are made ready. Obey."

The Stalker fell quiet. After a moment more the blades slid back into its hands, and it lowered its arms. Wavey G.o.dshawk looked up at her a.s.sistants, and the one with the gun returned it to its locker.