K-Machines

by Damien Broderick

  At a loss, unclad, I wandered through Toby's unexplored house from room to room, opening doors, glancing inside, learning again how much larger this small cottage seemed on the inside. Away from the fire, the air was cool on my skin. I frowned. Why doors anyway, why corridors? Toby was a master of Schwellen, those gates between realities and parts of realities. They had fetched the machine Fenimore through a mirror, like some robotic Alice in Looking Glass territory, had brought me here from my own Earth. The shower I'd just enjoyed, for that matter, was a Schwelle artifact, gushing sweet water from some alternative reality that Toby had found and turned to his use. Why, then, build a house with doors, when the utterance of a word of power might take you anywhere you wish? Maybe the place was not of his design, perhaps it was a delightful objet trouvé abandoned, with this whole Earth, by its owners and inhabitants. And yet the watery domain of the Sibyl Avril, my creepy astrological sister, was surely tailored to her every specification.

  I turned at an L intersection, found myself in an unexpected nook framing a large, plain, pale door without a knob or keyhole. A triangular copper or perhaps bronze plate stood embossed in its center. Well, hell. I poked it with one stiff finger, like a doorbell. Nothing rang. No gigantic mastiffs bayed on the far side of the door. My fingertip tingled. I pressed my whole palm to the plate, felt a jolt from my Vorpal implant. Soundlessly, the door slid open.

  Impossible morning light flooded across the great cedar staircase extending down from the landing beyond the door to a floor of polished white and burnt-sienna stones in a chessboard array, a large, formal space decorated principally with suits of mediaeval armor catching glowing light from the immense leaded windows to left and right. Beyond, I saw lovely formal gardens. At the far end of the space, a pair of great doors patterned with the pyramidal heads of iron bolts stood closed.

  I was hardly dressed for the occasion, but I felt as if I were in a dream. I went down the cool steps, crossed the marble silently, stood before the doors. Again, why doors in a world of Schwellen? Symbolism, I told myself. Ancient and grave. Once more I found no latch, doorknob, keyhole. Knocking on those great timbers with my knuckles was not going to cut it. The nearest plate-steel suit was outfitted handily with scabbard and sword hilt. Probably purely decorative, but hey. I flipped up the visor of the empty suit. Sightless eye sockets of white bone looked back, toppled toward me, skull clunking against the inside of the helmet. I dropped the visor with a clang.

  "Christ! Don't do that!"

  After a shivery moment I reached out again, raised the visor, prodded at the skull. The jawbone had fallen down into the neck of the suit; all sinew, gristle, skin had been eaten by decades if not centuries. Maybe the soft tissue had oozed and dripped down into the leggings and armadillo footwear, greaves, sabatons, whatever they were called. Must have read that somewhere. He'd been dead a long time, although his suit gleamed. I closed the visor again, left him to his long sleep.

  So it wasn't really theft. I took the sword's grip in my right hand, lifted the blade against slight scabbard resistance, felt the sword slip free and come beautifully into my grasp. Good grief. "My name," I muttered sarcastically, "is not Arthur. Trust me." Nobody said anything. Nobody home. Okay.

  I raised the wonderfully balanced mass of the sword, making sure not to slice off any tender parts, brought it above my shoulder, and beat thrice, heavily, on the closed double door.

  It opened like the wings of a bird in a dream.

  Darkness was all, within.

  I stayed where I was, at the threshold.

  Of course, some light entered in there from the great windows. I narrowed my eyes. Something hung in the middle of the air, in the midst of the darkness, above an expanse of deep-varnished wooden flooring smooth as silk. It glowed with an uncanny radiance close to the end of the visual spectrum: ultraviolet, something like that. It was a polygon of rare device. It reminded me weirdly of a shape I'd seen during my high school year in Chicago.

  "Good God," I said, and lowered the sword by my side. "It's a Susan B. Anthony dollar coin."

  It wasn't, of course, but I had recognized the form. Josie Todd had teased me with it, since its design seemed so abnormal for a piece of negotiable currency designed by the severe custodians of the Mint. Approximating a circle, one vertical line running across the top, straight lines of equal length tracing the rim, to the flattened V at its base. Now my eyes darted, counting the number of sides; eleven, as I'd thought.

  I stayed put, skin growing chilly. You'll never get me into one of those newfangled devices, I thought in a dizzy moment of self-mockery. Or perhaps I muttered the words aloud, because the polygon—what had Josie called it? an undecagon? a hendecagon?—tilted in the air, obtuse angle toward me, hardened like glass or crystal, hung waist high. Ghostly figures sat on simple benches, one at each sharp-drawn edge of the floating polygonal table. Was it brighter now inside that room? Had my eyes adjusted? The figures were clad in antique apparel, some fanciful blend of Elizabethan finery and moody fin de siècle styling from Aubrey Beardsley. There was nothing of the twenty-first century, at least of my version of it, in their 'dos.

  It was jolting. These were my brothers and sisters. My eyes darted, and I caught my breath. They were motionless. A sort of hologram or diorama, a high-tech family portrait. My parents—our parents—were, I saw, absent. Nothing new in that. I gazed from face to face, putting names to those I'd met, however briefly.

  At the far side of the room, facing me directly from what I couldn't help but regard as the head of the table, was the Seebeck sibling everyone had kept assuming was my father. Really, I didn't see the resemblance. Good-looking, I guess, in a sly and self-satisfied sort of way.

  To Ember's left, from where I stood, which is to say at his right hand, sturdy Toby sat. Dread Septimus, all shoulders, wild gray hair restrained by a gold circlet, pent ferocious masculinity, stared into his golden chalice. A premier vintage presumably, or maybe some roughgut more appropriate to a warrior in charge of a hell world. At my leftmost, Marchmain gazed at his siblings in a fine ironic humor. The Reverend Jules, arrayed as a bishop in some gaudy Eastern rite, completed the male contingent to my left.

  Directly before me, where the great hendecagon came to its closest angle, I looked across the shoulders of a woman I took to be the one they called Juni, and beside her the stocky young woman named Maybelline, whom I'd caught lugging a dead body in through the window of Great-aunt Tansy's upstairs bathroom. It seemed a lifetime ago; in reality, whatever that meant—well, by my body's own clock—I'd found Maybelline and Lune about their gruesome business with the terminated Deformer no more than two weeks ago. Incredible.

  I squeezed my eyes shut. I was naked, and cold, and holding a sharp sword in my lethal right hand, and I couldn't make all of this go away. I clung to the image of Lune, the one person I didn't see at this spectral table. Well, of course, luckily, my beloved Lune was not a Seebeck. Incest, at least, was ruled out. I glanced again at Maybelline's beefy shoulders and smiled. No temptation there.

  Avril, at Maybelline's right, appeared to be addressing what remained of a large steamed fish, reduced to bones, head, and tail. To my rightmost, Ruth, the forensic librarian, maker and unmaker of robots and strange whimsical mechanical things of all kinds, carver of dead deformers, sat straight and gazed to her right with a look of intense disapproval. Understandable enough, in such a tight-ass: Jan, my wonderful space pilot sister, was the only one not dressed for the table. Her ensemble appeared to be something she'd thrown together by grabbing at random in a thrift store run by and for tasteless blind holdouts from a half-century ago.

  Admittedly, that was a very provincial assessment. For all I knew, her garb was the height of fashion in whatever strange cognate Jan made her home, when she wasn't tearing around the Solar System in borrowed flying saucers or hunting for her lost dark energy starship. I liked her a hell of a lot. Actually, about that incest thing—if I weren't madly in love with Lune...

  Beyond
Jan, and bringing us all the way around once more to Ember, I recognized with a jolt the man I had last seen transfigured, wrapped like some damned prophet in a white bedsheet blazing with a reflected light of Angels, in the high places of Yggdrasil Station, at the boundaries of spacetime where time and space closed in on themselves, smashed together into Xon foam, birthing the godthings that had retrieved me from pain, anguish, death. And those I loved with me.

  I squeezed my burning eyes shut, heart clutched in remembered terror and gratitude. My mother and father, Dramen and Angelina, lost and found again, had died with me, broken in the colossal firefall of one world flung into another by the might and deranged hatred of the K-machine deformers. And now were gone again. Players in the game, the Contest, the enigma at the heart of the computational cosmos. Or maybe just scurf and trash flung on the surface of the frothy and entangled quantum foam. I supposed that Decius remained pent there, at the fountain of reality, basking in the worshipful vision of the godthings born from that Omega Point catastrophe. Or triumph.

  And where was I supposed to sit, with no place for me at the table of my brothers and sisters? On the floor with the cat? Oh, that's right, they hadn't known about me back then, when this family shot was taken. Well, fuck that. I stepped across the boundary into the room. It was cold, cold.

  "Why, hello, folks," I said cheerily to the holograms. None of them looked my way. You couldn't blame them, they were only photographs, after all. But I was pissed. "I had to step outside for a moment, you know, a decade or two while I was growing up. Allow me to introduce myself. I'm August. Not Augie, nor Gus. August Seebeck. Your brother, can you dig it?"

  Something terrible happened. The world crushed shut like a deck of cards and splayed open again, as if a cardsharp had riffled through the stars and plucked a spare one from his sleeve, adding it to the pack. The Joker, I shouldn't be surprised. The table contorted, bulged slightly, like an optical illusion opened a new angle between Avril and Ruth. An empty bench stood before the empty space in the... what was it now? Dodecagon.

  Oh dear Christ. The great floating crystal table now had twelve sides. Had always possessed twelve sides. Just as the calendar had always owned and displayed twelve months.

  I leaned forward, dizzy and sickened, leaned with two hands clenched on the hilt of the sword. After a time, I straightened, walked further into the darkly ultraviolet room, stopped before the empty bench. A golden plate was in place there, with silver utensils, a crystal chalice awaiting wine, another filled with clear water. I looked across the table into the ferocious gaze of Septimus. It'd be enough to put a man off his meal, I thought, and found myself grinning.

  "That's mighty neighborly of you," I told the diorama, or the entity or subsystem or whatever the hell was behind it. "I'd love to stop for a chat, but I don't seem to be dressed properly. Have you ever had that dream? You know, late for the exam and you've forgotten to put your pants on. Time to wake up now, August."

  Like a cunning illusion in two parts, the second more subtle and extraordinary than the first, the diorama flickered. Septimus was gone. In his place, directly across the reconfigured table from me, sat a small woman in dark robes, heavy long black hair piled in a bun and clipped with silver. Her eyes gazed into my soul. An instance later, the second part of the illusion caused me to blink and grunt. Avril had been seated at my left, Ruth at my right. Now they sat across the table, flanking this woman I had never seen in my life, presumably one of the family. I glanced incredulously to either side. Marchmain now at my right hand, Toby at my left. What the fuck?

  Morgette had mentioned the name Septima. Superiore Septima, one of the founders of her own order. Of course this was her. Sister of Septimus, presumably. Perhaps his twin. I glanced again at Marchmain. Now he appeared to be smiling directly at me with a look of faintly disdainful pleasure. His work? Not impossibly: he had taken my parents, Dramen and Angelina, and torn them in four. Had rebuilt their segmented psyches into illusionary partial manifestations designed to evade the scrutiny and malignity of the K-machines. Presumably, then, this was his doing as well.

  Was it possible that Septimus, a walking archetype of potent masculinity, was Septima in a new guise? The idea made me dizzy.

  The diorama folded together, then, cards back into their box, and the table floated vertical, symmetrical, twelve-sided, hung there for a moment like a highway sign that some idiot had forgotten to paint the directions on, and faded into the darkness. I pulled the tip of the sword out of the timber floor—I'd been leaning on it pretty hard there for a moment—and took myself back through the great doors to the place of marble and light, tipped my nonexistent hat to the bone man in the suit of armor, retained his sword for good luck, and tramped upstairs to look for some clothes. With any luck, Lune would be back in time for dinner. Not that I had any objection to Toby as a dinner companion, but it's just not the same, probably not even at a dodecagonal table with gold and crystal settings.

  CHAPTER TEN

  SgrA*: 1966, Aged Twenty-Two

  They have drunk deep, dancing like fools at a campus ball in the company of giggling and flirty girls in black wispy garments. This is not, alas, Brideshead Revisited, nor is it Oxford in the 1920s, the rare glory of her summer days... when the chestnut was in flower and the bells rang out high and clear over her gables and cupolas, exhaled the soft airs of centuries of youth, but then he was half a world and more from Oxford, burbling as a passenger down Burke Road, Melbourne, in a topless Goggomobile at the height of winter, rank smoke pouring from the driver's briar. The giggling girlets have been returned to their chaste habitation. Burly Dale is crushed into the backseat, tweed-capped Thomas at the wheel. Stunned pleasantly by beer, he gazes with distant terror through the scratched plastic windshield as Thomas accelerates, turning from one major thoroughfare into another, tram powerlines glinting overhead in the frosty sky, the Goggomobile relentless in its trajectory as a huge truck or two bears down upon them, the motor mower engine uttering its roar, the car turning to the right, lights smeared by motion, turning, in fact, rather more than anyone inside it might have wished it to turn, the too-abundantly quaffed booze rising to choke the gullet as the vehicle goes onto its side, sliding gracefully and at surprising speed toward the looming, immovable, steel streetlight pole, the car tipping a little more with each meter so that it is clear it will end up scratched like the blazing head of a wooden match along the road, the curb gutter, into the pole, crumpled, but not before the defenseless mammals inside its roofless fiberglass hull have been decapitated, rubbed to the bloody nubbin, headless torsos crushed into its sardine container, the urbane driver poised through all this prolepsis with perfect confidence, eye clear, pipe puffing like something from Magritte, scarf waving in the gust of their impending deaths. Lurch. Bump. Stop. There are no seat belts. Scrambling across each other, checking for blood and missing bits. There are none. They had been moving quite slowly, after all, by that point. All they had to tell their future children was the slenderest of fables, feeblest of war trophies: the shivering wait for the Royal Auto Club man, in the hungover night, while their borrowed girls, miles behind them in their narrow teachers'-college beds, slept drunken dreams of pointless virtue.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Jules

  Outfitted in full clerical drag, Jules Seebeck opened a Schwelle. "Give me the bordello." He stepped into a fantasia of perfumes, pheromones, silks, satins, leather, reeking juices. For two and a half hours, he had delirious and gratuitous sex with a red-haired Irish Catholic, a brunette Jewess, a lush, whip-scarred bottle-blonde Zulu drawn from the racist imagination of a plantation cognate, and an equally imaginary choirboy in black cassock and white lacy surplice. Finally, he lay back in a pool of his own sweat and semen, drained, limp in every sense, as always curiously unsatisfied. It was like eating sixteen bowls of strawberry ice cream one after the other: eventually it just became hard work, and your tongue ended up numb. He sniggered to himself. Not so much hard work as soft, now. With a pa
t to his catamite's luscious buttocks, he dismissed them back into the Star Doll database from whence they had sprung.

  "Bathe me," he said, and settled into steaming, fragrant water lightly frothing against a black marble jacuzzi. Two stern Swedish masseurs stood on either side of him, waist deep in the warm bathtub. They scrubbed him with brisk precision, laved his hair, cleaned his fingernails, washed between his toes, dried him with soft towels and warm gusts of air. When they were done, Jules inclined naked on a couch, toyed with the thing in his left ankle. The Xon imprint was cool to his touch, cooler than his own flesh, metallic yet yielding. He knew it was what loaned him authority in this place, among the trillions, quadrillions, whatever awful number of minds darting in the concentric Dyson swarms of the Matrioshka Brain that once, two thousand ago, had been a Solar System. The Seebeck trademark, he thought with some complacency. But no, not really. All the Players of the Contest of Worlds were pierced by such an enigma. It made no earthly difference to him what the stuff was, no, nor heavenly difference, either. He tapped at the thing with a fingernail, acknowledged distantly the temptation, the whisper, the tropism toward complicated action that would unfold as such things did, probably lethally. For some reason, the Vorpal implant fascinated the denizens of the M-Brain.

  And here was one of them now, pestering him as his butler put out his fresh garments and dressed him as a lesser aristocrat of a northern Gondwana culture trapped by ice and tradition. Glaciers were funny that way. They stressed primitive humans in just the right way to drive their brains toward invention, community, murder, and dominion. And they locked more complex peoples in the bonds of routine, privation, fancy rituals frozen for centuries. Probably he would have to kill some king or ecclesiastic. Suited him just fine. And this suit of white-and-brown-speckled fur, bone or maybe tooth clasps, snug heavy boots, patiently carved ivory scrimshaw ornaments that clung and clattered, it suited him fine as well. The ambient temperature had dropped, of course, to keep him comfortable instead of sweltering, to prepare him for the transition. The M-Brain representative thing waited silently.