K-Machines

by Damien Broderick

  "A burnoose is a cape, you ignorant dog. This is a qutrah and a kaffiyah, and as for El'Awrence, I could tell you some interesting stories. For God's sake, it goes on like this." He fitted the Arab headgear in place for me, tightened the two bands that held it there. I felt like a fool, or somebody posing for a gay porn Web site, or both, but I was more comfortable. I tried to look imperturbable rather than humiliated.

  "I suppose Lawrence gave you that dinky little insignia?"

  "This?" Marchmain lifted the gold emblem off his sweaty chest, let it drop back again. "Actually, no. That's borrowed from a sage I knew, in one of the worlds. An Auger, almost, had he been one of us and not a human. A wonderful storyteller, blessed with astonishing insights—again, for a human. I wonder if you know his work? A writer named Ed Hunter Waldo."

  "Sorry, never heard of him. So let's get to the next question, already."

  "I can loan you a copy of... oh, what would be the point? I might as well try teaching a turnip to tap dance." Under his straw hat, he looked sulky. "You want to know where our parents have gone this time. Answer: I haven't a clue. Last time I saw them, I was dead. So to speak."

  I took a deep, harrowed breath, let it out slowly, squeezed my eyes shut. That had been my question, of course. One of them, certainly, the one at the top of the list. I had lost my parents once to a fatal plane crash, or so I'd been told as a child, had lost them again in my presence when the K-machine filth pounded a planet of dinosaurs with a rock half the size of an asteroid. Had hoped against hope that my magician brother might have word for me of their recovery and the place to which they had retreated once more. I should have known better.

  Surely Dramen and Angelica would have been in touch with me by now had they wished to do so, if only to set my mind at rest, as loving parents might be expected to do. But then it was just as likely, precisely because they were loving parents, that they had chosen against their deeper instincts to sequester themselves in some extremity of the multiverse so that their dozen children might be that much safer by their absence.

  It was small comfort, but it was comfort.

  I opened my eyes, still dizzy with time lag and the heat. "All right. Let's go back a couple of steps. Unless," I said with some bitterness, "that'd be a shocking infraction of the rule against telling that ignorant dog August anything at all the least fucking bit useful."

  Shaking his head reproachfully, Marchmain leaned away from me again, murmured to the operating system, shoved his hand into nothingness, threw me a frosty can of beer, popped the lid on one himself. I pressed mine against my forehead for a moment, then scoffed the suds gratefully. I belched, surprising myself, and my brother sniggered. He said, "I take it you've been talking to Septimus. 'Tempered by fire,' that sort of thing?"

  "You know the family better than I do," I said, nodding. "But that's Septima now."

  That did take him aback. "So the old bitch has returned, eh? Mark my words, young August, we're moving toward the end-game." He rose, brushing off sand from his buttocks. With a self-pitying groan, he added, "Time to kick myself back into gear, I dare say. You'd think that being murdered by a bolide would earn a man more than a week's reprieve from duty. Ah well, life is just a bowl of cherries."

  I stayed where I was. "I'm so tired of this runaround," I said. "Sit down, you bloody penny-ante Frankenstein. I want some answers, and I want them now."

  Marchmain stared at me in astonishment, then scowled. He flung his half-empty can onto the pure sand. It teetered, tipped over; foam gushed, drained away, like a metaphor of the sea, like a metaphor of my life. "You will not speak to me like that." He puffed himself up. I've heard of toads that do that, and then explode, spraying their guts about the place. At that moment, I would not have been surprised to see this happen. I suspect I'd have trudged down to the water, washed the crap off me, then gone home. Wherever home was. I waited in silence, staring stonily back up at him.

  After a long moment, his indignant expression faded. He did the most extraordinary thing. He flipped backwards from a standing jump, knees and feet rising toward his chest as he spun upon his own axis, penis and balls jumping, landed squarely in a perfect dismount, winked at me, cartwheeled away like a Leonardo da Vinci on the move, sand spraying in his wake. He fetched up at the edge of the water, threw himself into a long, flat dive that, I swear, had him skipping off the surface once or twice like a flung flat stone. I shook my head, and my borrowed headgear clapped against my shoulders. One way out of a sticky social impasse, I decided. I realized I was grinning again. The man was clearly demented.

  Dripping, he came back lightly on his toes and the balls of his feet, spraying water from his hair. He bent to retrieve his straw hat, popped it on at a jaunty angle. "All right," he said calmly. "Now that we've annoyed each other sufficiently, ask your questions and be damned. I'll answer three of them free of charge. After that, if I'm still in the mood, there'll be a penalty."

  That ruined my mood. "Penalty? You think this is a fairy story, Marchmain?"

  "No, I've already told you. I think this is a bowl of cherries." From beneath the brim of his hat, he gave me an arch look, and scratched his balls. "Those are your first two questions. And the third?"

  I stood up. "Fuck this bullshit. I came to you for help, not to provide a chorus for your fatuous one-liners. Here's a question, you fraud." I'm sure he was enjoying every moment. "Do you know how Maybelline and Lune managed to drop off Deformer corpses once a week in Tansy's upstairs bathroom without anyone noticing? Anyone—Tansy, the K-machines, the guard dog my father. I think I do."

  In the shadow of his hat's brim, his eyes gleamed with a sort of delight. "Good lad! You've finally started to think your way through the puzzle, I see. You might recall that the first time we met, I complimented you on posing the puzzle we Seebecks each wish ardently to solve."

  "What?"

  " 'Why is the Xon star such a big deal?' I believe that's the elegant way you framed your inquiry."

  "Forget that," I said impatiently, ignoring his sarcasm. "I have more pressing matters on my mind. I want to know about the nexus point that Tansy—"

  "Let's get out of the sun. Don't forget your clothes." Turning aside, he opened the Schwelle at an angle that prevented me seeing more than a portion of a laboratory, all glass and gleaming steel. Again, I stayed put.

  "Answer my question."

  "Don't be petulant. Come with me or stay where you are. It's all one to me."

  Petulant? It seemed a word more appropriate to his own changeable nature, such as I had seen of it. But I wasn't really interested in a pissing contest. I picked up my clothes and boots and followed him through the portal into a dream of 1950s sci-fi B-movies. To one side, in a farther room behind glass, a large brushed-aluminum drum thrust out a padded tongue. Some sort of physiological resonance scanner, presumably. I found a cluttered lab bench, pushed aside beakers and containers marked as reagents and more mysterious substances, dumped my clothes on the cleared bench, brushed sand all over the floor, got dressed. The temperature inside was about 20°C, wonderfully cool after the blazing sun but not cold. I found a four-legged stool, pulled on my boots. When I glanced up, I found that my brother was wearing a white lab coat over a rich scarlet robe and bare feet. Hey, it was his place, he could wear a horse collar and paisley pantyhose for all I cared. When I was done, I put my elbows on the lab bench and watched him fiddling about with glassware. I said, "Searching for a good retort?"

  Marchmain raised one eyebrow, drew an imaginary mark in the air with his right index finger. "Ha, the Quip Modest! Not bad. Some of the others think you're stupid. Not me. There is an immense difference between mental incapacity and ignorance, especially when ignorance is not of your own choosing."

  "Gee, thanks." Actually, that rankled. I shrugged, but I suspect I flushed a little. I remembered a conversation I'd had with something enormous and terrible pretending to be a gypsy fortune-teller in the Matrioshka Brain system, where my brother Jules seemed to hang out;
I found it hard to believe that he presided over it, as he tried to imply by his lordly demeanor, or, come to that, had any significant role at all. A mouse in the wainscoting, that's how Jules seemed to me. A pet mouse fed each day with scraps of cheese, and the house cats kept carefully at bay or belled. I'd asked the gypsy whether I were a bug or a feature. She assured me, in a haze of whiskey fumes, "August, you're the upgrade." Despite rumors, I'm pretty sure Microsoft and those other guys don't release stupid upgrades. I said to Marchmain, "This is your Fortress of Solitude, I take it."

  "I think we've got off in the wrong foot, August. Let's not waste our energies sniping at one another. Let me ask you—has anything tried to kill you lately?"

  I slapped my hand down hard on the bench, a cracking that resounded from the crisp surfaces. "Yes. And this is absolutely typical. Evasion, ducking and weaving, anything except a straight answer. You people make me sick. You in particular."

  "Brother, you wound me. Why, only the other week—"

  "—you slaughtered the woman who raised me." And my beloved dog, I thought, with a spurt of anger. Poor innocent Do Good. I waved away his objection even as he opened his mouth. "Yes, yes. I know they didn't really exist, I know they were a kind of disguise that my mother and father were forced to wear when they took me into hiding."

  "Half the disguise," Marchmain said pedantically. "Why, you too—" He seemed ready to go on and defend himself, his obscene manipulations with the flesh and the minds of my parents. My body ached with time lag. How long had it been since my lunch with Septima? Minutes? It felt like hours. How long since I'd slept? I spoke more loudly over the top of him, truly exhausted by the man's equivocations and prevarications.

  "At this point I don't fucking care. For what it's worth, a thing called a Jabberwock did try to kill me and Lune a few hours ago. I burned it to death, and then I helped cut it to pieces and shove them through a mirror. How did it find me? It wasn't able to do so in all the years I spent in Tansy's house. Then people started dropping in. Brother Jules set himself up just down the road as some sort of fake cleric and inveigled my poor great-aunt and her friends into his congregation. My dear sister Maybelline, Lune, God knows who-all else, started leaving corpses for collection by that good old renovated K-machine calling itself James Cooper Fenimore. And during all this nobody noticed Tansy, or me, or Dugald O'Brien, until I woke up after a shot of patented green ray and screwed everything up by charging off through the bathroom mirror in search of..."

  I trailed away. None of his business. "And within hours the deformers turned up and smashed the place to shreds. Why did they care? Well, it's obvious—they cared because they'd found Tansy and the dog, maybe me, too, for that matter. They'd found my father and mother, or some remnant portion of them, and they must have been out of their minds with delight. How long have Dramen and Angelina been in hiding? Years, decades, centuries? Longer than that, maybe? Well, not in that house, at any rate, or that country. Less than a hundred years. Plenty of time to settle in, change identities now and then, move from one city and state to another. But that's not the question, is it?"

  "There might have been a question buried in there somewhere," Marchmain said judiciously. He was messing about with water and a beaker. "If so, I didn't catch it."

  "Why the house? That's the question. What was Jules hanging about there for? Why was it effectively invisible for so long? And why that place as a nexus point to lug the guts?"

  "You're picking up the vernacular quite nicely," he said. "And speaking of Jules, he'd be pleased. For him, everything is metaphor. Phenomenology as semiotics. Representational ontology. He's got a point, I'll grant him that. We might as well be uttering spells when we open up the Schwellen with a code word or two." He raised his hands in mock self-defense at my impatient look. "The house. Okay, I never went there. Possibly Jules dropped everyone off there after I completed my work. Or perhaps they made arrangements with somebody else. The whole family has been discussing it, of course, since you turned up. Obviously I knew everyone was tucked away safely somewhere. I preferred not to ask for the details. None of my business, really. I'm a surgeon, not a real estate agent."

  "Christ! You're all as bad as each other. This is why the house was important: it was off the board, outside your goddamned Contest arena, a small secure locality beyond the map—or was, until I fucked things up by going through the mirror and drawing everyone's attention to us." My limbs were trembling with frustration; I was a hair away from blowing a hole in his slick lab with sunfire from my extended right hand, just to wake the bastard up, just to get his attention, just to show him how very serious I was about this. I gritted my teeth, tried to keep my temper, remembering that poor innocent woman in the car I'd very nearly slain in my fit of paranoia. "I'm starting to wonder whether you've all been programmed like goddamned machines yourselves to avoid facing the real questions. 'Ask the next question' my ass! Avoid the next question, avoid all the questions, that's the way you pests prefer it. You call yourself Players, but as far as I can see you might as well be playing cards without a functioning brain between the lot of you." My nostrils twitched. The lab was filling with a wonderful odor, and a gurgling, and a hissing.

  "I see." Marchmain crossed the room, found two large mugs on a bench, filled them with black coffee from the beaker. He pushed one across to me. "Can I get you cream or sweetener?"

  I pulled the decorated white mug toward me. It showed a ragged old tomcat strumming a guitar. A Kliban cartoon. I looked at the verse the cat was singing. Love to eat them mousies. Cathooks, I thought. Nibble on they tiny feet. The godthing, the Angel. I shook my head, lifted the hot stuff to my lips, blew across it, wondered for a moment if it might be doped with some heinous substance that would turn me into a toad or leave me blind and deaf. I decided that was pretty unlikely, and sipped the finest coffee I've ever drunk, including Toby's. Being a superscience magician clearly had its rewards.

  Marchmain said judiciously, "I take it you've not yet been initiated into the protocols and callings of the Contest?"

  "All I know about your blessed Contest," I said, still testily, "is a mishmash of words splattered about by you lot. It's like some sort of moronic hazing ritual. Even Lune's avoided the topic." It hurt me to admit it, but it was true—the woman I loved had been just as evasive as the rest.

  "Drink your coffee and have a breather, that'd be my recommendation. You're spinning your wheels. You're running in circles chasing your tail. A moment ago, you informed me that Septimus—sorry, Septima—had explained that you're still in page training, one might say undergoing a species of hieratic military apprenticeship. You can't expect to look in the back of the textbook for answers. What's more," he said, raising his voice as I opened my mouth, "the answers to some of your questions—in particular those you probably have not even thought of yet—are unknown to us. Has it not occurred to you, young August, have you not noticed even when we declared it explicitly, that we are in pursuit of questions of our own? That the essence of a contest is mystery as well as valor, strategy and tactics evolved in the absence of complete knowledge, which Gödel and Chaitin assure us is out of reach anyway? Oh, good grief, uncross your eyes. I see I'm back to teaching abstract expressionism to a field mouse."

  With considerable effort, I clung to the small amount of information he'd managed to let slip. "What protocols? And what are callings?"

  "Ah, the creature stirs from its sleep. A calling is a—" For a moment, Marchmain seemed taken aback, for the first time lost for words. He shrugged. "Might as well try to explain an orgasm to a three-year-old, or one's burning hunger to see the final act of Götterdämmerung to a twelve-year-old. Or the sweet tang of fresh honey to a fish." He shook his head, waved his hands helplessly. "You'll know it when you feel it, boy, like a tropism, like the memory of a dream where your task lay ahead of you, a pattern of bright lights in mist. Like..."

  "My God," I said. I could not believe it, yet there it was. "I was right. You poor gullible brain
washed ninnies. You're tools. You're the tokens in the game, not the Players. Something else has you dangling from strings. My God," I said again. "How trite. How pitiful. How sad." I stood up and walked away from the bench. "Count me out, buddy." All I wanted to do was head for home, but it was gone, and that hurt so bad I needed to scream. I wanted to find Lune, to hold her against me, to defend some last sanctuary of reason and trust. Yet I dared not go to her, not in my current frame of mind. It came to me with an overpowering sense of conviction that the person I needed to speak to, and urgently, was my sister Jan. I imagined her, louche and confident on the bridge of her starship, questing after this Xon star they were all obsessed by, half stoned, dressed like a Goth princess, a cheeky grin... she was the obvious choice. I couldn't work out why I'd bothered coming to question this dismal idiot Marchmain or Septima before him when I could have asked instead for Janine. I said to the operating system, "Give me Jan."

  Tearing; a gust of freaky air, instantly recognizable, utterly unlike any place I'd ever been, in this universe or the others I'd sampled, except Maybelline's haunt. I stepped through onto a slightly raised dais of copper-gold metal. Orichalcum, probably, if I remembered my James Churchward Atlantis and Mu books correctly. Maybe that's where I was. There was a terrific clattering noise. Two of my recently discovered sisters turned as I came through, one of them with a jug in her hand, wiping her red mouth with a forearm.

  "Was just about to call you," Jan said. "Good timing."

  They stepped up to join me from an open scrubby place surrounded by immense growths—not trees, not power stanchions, not gigantic fungi—that poked straight up toward rushing clouds. Daylight reflected dully from metal things that looked, improbably, like flying saucers, high in the growth masses. That's not all we were surrounded by. Creatures resembling ambulant vegetables went this way and that, busy and somewhat martial. I'd caught Maybelline fucking one of these aliens, if that's what you'd call what I'd found them doing. It had been affronted and flown off in its flying saucer.