The Red Queen (40 page)

God answered, ‘I can reroute the feed from the androne’s eye sensors to a monitor screen.’

I was still trying to unravel its words when Ana asked, ‘Where can we find such a screen, God?’

‘There are many screens within the city to which the feed can be streamed, but the monitor of Kelver Rhonin is already set up to accept feeds from both andrones and from me,’ God told her.

‘Here? I asked. ‘There is a monitor screen here?’

‘There is a monitor screen fitted to this residence, but there is no active link in operation.’

‘I suppose it was cut off at the same time as the computers were cut off from one another,’ I said absently.

‘No, User Seeker,’ God said. ‘The domicile links had not yet been connected to the mainframe in the Pellmar Quadrants. Prime User Kelver Rhonin used the large screen in his workspace at the Galon Facility to track the activities of the andrones. User Hannah also used this screen.’

I rose, suggesting we go at once to the Galon Institute to see the screen, and we decided that Ana and Swallow would go with me. I had thought we might go directly from there to see if we could locate Miryum, but God said that we would have to wait for an androne to go with us, because all visitors to Sector C had to be accompanied by an androne. It had asked if I wanted Unit A to abort its mission and return immediately, for Unit B’s memory cache was being downloaded and was receiving maintenance that would take some time. I had barely understood what I was being told, but Ana had managed to explain most of it. I decided we would go first to look at the screen that would let us see what the other androne was seeing, and then return to Kelver Rhonin’s residence until the androne was available to escort us to Sector C. We did not need to wait for its return to go to the Galon Institute because I had been there and knew the way. The fact that Midland was now daylit would make it even easier.

Ana, Swallow and I parted from the others, who were to make a list of supplies we would need, both for the time we would spend in Midland, and for the journey to Northport. God had said it could enable us to speak directly to one another, though we were apart. We would return before evening in the light cycle governing Midland, which, Ana said, was reflecting the true cycle of day and night. Once we returned, Unit B would be dispatched to acquire the supplies the girls had listed and Swallow would make his way to the surface with God’s guidance, in order to find and begin to set up a surface camp. The second androne would assist him upon its return.

I was glad to be moving and doing something, and eager to search Kelver Rhonin’s workspace, in case Hannah might have left a message for me, since she had used it after him. I had asked Dragon about the other chambers in the residence and had been told the room she shared with Tash and the ones prepared for the others had all been empty of personal belongings. I was less disappointed by this news than I might have been, since it was more likely that Hannah had scribed and kept her records at the Galon Institute. I was also glad of the journey we would make without the androne, because it would give me a chance to speak privately with Swallow and Ana about Tash.

I waited until we were on the black road that rose up into the air, before broaching the subject.

‘I have been thinking about her, too,’ Ana said at once. ‘As soon as Dragon told us what God had said about the tag.’ She held up her wrist and only then did I realise it was bare. The bracelet had been removed.

‘When did that happen?’ I asked.

‘Unit B removed them before bringing us to you,’ Ana said. ‘He said they served no purpose now that we had been redesignated technicians, because the implant they had been connected to had been disabled.’

‘It told us we could go where you went and you can go where you want now,’ Swallow said, frowning at his bare wrist. ‘It said without the tags, the little thing inside our wrists would have made us fall asleep. It offered to cut open our wrists and take them out if we liked, but that they would do us no harm by remaining inside us.’ He rubbed a thumb over his wrist. ‘I do not like the idea of some device being inside me, but even less do I like the idea of a small machine being cut out of me by a large one.’

‘It said mine doesn’t work,’ I said, better understanding now what God had been telling me in the Hub. ‘I think my body dealt with it. But what about Dragon?’

‘Unit B said that the thing inside her had been deactivated too,’ Ana said, clearly relishing the strange computermachine words. She glanced dismissively at her own wrist and said, ‘I think it is very small. Garth told me the Beforetimers had machines as tiny as the head of a pin.’

‘I wonder how they were stopped from working,’ I said, wondering also if there was a machine that did it, and if we could get hold of it and use it on Tash. Did the others realise the devices inside them had also allowed God to hear what they were saying – that these, in fact, were the means by which God heard everything in Habitat?

‘What do you think God means to do about Tash?’ Ana asked, cutting across my thoughts.

‘I fear it keeps her awake only because it is trying to decide if she is a special anomaly or not, because that will affect how she is stored,’ I said. ‘If God decides she is not an anomaly, the likelihood is that she will be returned to Habitat.’

‘We can’t allow her to be put into a cryopod or returned to Habitat,’ Ana said decisively. ‘She saved you and Dragon and ultimately the rest of us as well, since you would not have been able to stop God nullifying us, if you had been asleep.’

‘They openly regretted sending Ana and Dameon to be nullified, but I think they found the prospect of nullifying me rather appealing,’ Swallow said grimly.

Ana shuddered. ‘Don’t even joke about it. I felt so helpless when they had us bound, and all the more because they were being so nice and kind to me, thinking I had been corrupted by you. I felt positively murderous!’

I laughed a little at her fury and some of my apprehension about Tash faded. ‘We will find a way to free her, but the real question is whether she is to go with us.’

That silenced them for a little, then Ana shook her head decisively. ‘The voices did not choose her. But she can go back to the Land with Ahmedri.’

‘They didn’t choose Miryum either,’ Swallow pointed out.

‘And we don’t know yet if Miryum will go with us,’ Ana said firmly. ‘Myself, I suspect she will tell Elspeth what is needed and choose death so that her spirit will be free to follow Straaka’s.’

‘You do not think she will have the courage to go on and live?’ Swallow said, an odd note in his voice.

Ana gave him a puzzled look. ‘You think it would not take courage to die?’

‘I think it always takes more courage to live than to die,’ he said. ‘And there might be things for her to live for.’

‘Obernewtyn, you mean?’ I asked, somewhat confused by his tone.

He gave me a sombre look. ‘I am only saying that I think it is always better to choose life, for death comes to us all in the end. If Straaka’s spirit survives in a form that will know Miryum’s, then he will be glad to hear how she lived her life.’ He laughed suddenly and waved his own words away. ‘As for Tash, from what you have said, I think the best course would be to try to find a way that will enable God to regard her as a technician rather than a Speci. It is not as if God has any real desire to keep her, it is only that it must follow the rules of its making.’

‘That is true,’ Ana said thoughtfully. ‘We know it is possible to make God change its mind because it turned us from Speci into technicians, and from what Dragon told us, you talked it into letting Tash out of Habitat while she was still awake.’

‘I was only able to persuade it because Hannah enabled God to regard me as a User,’ I said. ‘Maybe there is our answer. Hannah made God accept her as a User, and if she left notes or even a message to me in Kelver Rhonin’s workspace, it might tell us how that was done, and we can use it to have God regard Tash as a technician, too.’

I walked faster, eager to find any message Hannah might have left, for I was counting on her to tell me where we were to go after Northport. I said as much and the others fell to speculating about why Jacob had been buried in Northport, and how Hannah had managed to be buried there, too, given that she had died in Habitat. I told them of Astyanax then, and what he had told me of the oldOnes, and they fell silent, perhaps grappling with the strangeness of the idea that the voice that had summoned them to my quest was now locked at the outer edge of the spirit realm, along with the spirits of its ancestors.

Or maybe, like me, they were simply absorbed by the city we were travelling through. It seemed less inimical in daylight, but less real also, because it shone and gleamed as if it had been newly made, yet it was utterly lifeless. Truly it did not feel like a city where hundreds of people had lived. There was none of the debris we had seen in other Beforetime places, but maybe the strange bareness of the city was simply the result of God operating the cleaning devices. After all, a city where there had been no humans for hundreds of years might be very clean indeed, if the devices had been running all that time.

But what had happened to all the people?

‘Maybe it is the lack of trees and grass and birds and the air that never moves that makes it feel so lifeless,’ Swallow said as we were approaching the Galon Institute, telling me that his mind had been following a similar course.

But I was now absorbed by the sight of the Galon Institute, visible beyond the end of the high road that spanned a section of the pristine city. I had thought it very plain, but in the false sunlight, it gleamed like a great, soaring many-sided crystal, reflecting the sky, although it was now clear that it was not the sky overhead but some sort of high and smoothly undulant roof upon which a shifting picture of the sky showed, just like the leaf shadow and light pattern and the desert dunes showed on the passage walls within Kelver Rhonin’s residence.

The workplace of Kelver Rhonin turned out to be a Beforetime laboratory. I recognised it from the remnants of such chambers gradually being resurrected beneath the Teknoguild caves, as well as from similar chambers in the vast complex under Ariel’s old residence on Norseland and in Oldhaven. It was full of similar mysterious devices, several of which had small shining squares like the vision screens of computermachines. God had directed us to it and then to a strange small anteroom which had a number of chairs fixed to the floor, all facing an enormous black screen. Ana gasped, seeing it over my shoulder, saying the two women in her Beforetime dream gazing at images of devastation and destruction had been sitting in a room that was exactly the same, though upon reflection, she thought the screen had not been quite so large.

I asked God if we could see on this screen what the androne saw, and instead of an answer, immediately, incredibly, the large screen flashed to bright life, and we were looking at the desert, but it was not a picture of the desert. It moved jerkily and this puzzled me until I realised we were seeing it as if we were walking over it. Then I understood. It was like seeing through Matthew’s eyes. We were not seeing the androne crossing the desert but seeing
what the androne saw.

After a moment of astonished silence, Swallow pointed out that, from the shape and angle of its shadow over the dunes, we were truly seeing through the androne’s eyes, or maybe through the place in its forehead from which its headlight flowed. There was no sign of anything but dunes, and after gazing at them for a while, Ana and Swallow grew restless and wandered off to explore.

I remained, entranced by the similarity of the experience to seeing through Matthew’s eyes. I gasped aloud to see a bird arc in and out of the androne’s vision, only wishing it would move its head to track the bird, for it seemed to me it had been an owl. But an androne did not have any attention to catch. It was no more or less than a machine with a task, and it was entirely bent upon fulfilling that task.

Ana came back to urge me to come and see what she had found and I followed her from the little room to a chamber lined from floor to ceiling with shelves. On its door was scribed the name Kelver Rhonin, followed by several little groups of letters.

‘See!’ Ana said triumphantly.

Disappointingly, there was nothing in the chamber but a long bench pushed against the wall behind the door and a chair beside a table upon which sat a very small computermachine almost exactly like the one Cassy had left for me in the Earthtemple. It even had the small recess from which the memory seed had come, but there was nothing in it. I wondered idly what would happen if I had the little device, and what would happen if I pushed it into the little space.

That reminded me that I needed to find my clothes so that I could retrieve the memory seed Cassy had left. I ought to have been worried that it was missing but somehow I had the feeling God would know exactly where it was.

Leaving the desk, I walked along the shelves. They were stacked with hundreds of little cubes of the kind Jak had once told me were probably a sort of book, though he had never been able to discover how they could be read. I thought of my dream of Cassy giving Doktaruth a paper book, and her reaction, and then of walking through the Beforetime library at Oldhaven when we had gone there that first time, with its thousands of books. It had not been a library such as we had at Obernewtyn, I now knew, but a storage for paper books, a safe repository set atop another kind of safe repository, the latter intended to be a safe haven for humans in the case of a disaster such as the Great White. Sadly, people had not managed to get to it in time, and the few who had had died horribly, trapped between the surface and the proper levels. I thought of the research being done at the Galon Institute to enable machines to rescue survivors and wondered again why, since they had known enough of the dangers to make preparations like these, they had not been able to prevent any accident from happening.

I picked up a cube and examined it, and then the one beside it, but they were as featureless as those the Teknoguild had unearthed, save for the few symbols and letters stamped into the surface, like the lines of numbers and letters and symbols I had seen on the grave markers. I had an impulse to ask God how the cubes worked, and then decided to delegate the task to Ana. She would relish learning how to use them. Looking around the rather barren chamber I found myself comparing it to the small chamber of Doktaruth, who had devoted an entire shelf in her tiny workspace to paper books she had regarded as precious. Perhaps, like the woman from whom Cassy had bought a paper book as a gift, Kelver Rhonin had thought paper books unhygienic.