No machine constructed by just one engineer, even Father, could possibly settle or divert this much Turbulence. As more of the machine coalesced into being, Ritter realized what Father intended to do. Ritter redoubled his sprint, his arms pumping furiously and his thighs burning. He shouted at the engineers in front of him to stop Father, but they simply continued to erect their retaining wall. Maybe they didn’t understand Father’s machine. Maybe they were too focused on building the retaining wall. Or, more likely, they were too loyal to Father.
The barricade ruptured. Wild gears and belts flew away before they dissipated. The shrieking in Ritter’s head stopped, leaving only a hollow ringing in his ears. Turbulence burst through like a flood of heavy spring rain. Multicolored skeins entangled engineers who’d fled too slowly or too late. Threads flayed the shelves of their minds. Volumes of knowledge split and fell. Engineers slumped to the ground as they forgot they needed to breathe or, for that matter, how.
Father’s machine unfolded, stretching like wings just behind the failing parts of the barricade. Hinges droned as machinery cantilevered into place. The ground trembled when the machine landed, a solid wall that ran the length of the breach. Father stood in the middle, tiny compared to the oncoming storm.
Turbulence pelted Father’s machine like random splotches of paint. They unspooled with uncharacteristic order. Threads wormed through Father’s machine from all directions to converge on him. They swirled around him, swallowing him inside a multicolored cocoon. He lifted into the air as his machine funneled the storm into him.
Imagined machines consumed Turbulence well. A person consumed Turbulence even better. An engineer who might have stepped out of one of the Five Great Classical Novels consumed Turbulence best of all. By the time Father forgot how to breathe, the storm would be no more trouble than a gentle mist.
Hands grasped Ritter’s shoulders, lifting him off the ground before he could charge over the half-constructed retaining wall. Ritter’s legs kicked uselessly for a few steps before he let them dangle.
“No.” Deck set him on the ground, but didn’t let go. “Let them finish first.”
Engineers swarmed over and around Ritter, leaping from girder to girder, securing tubing to pistons. So many minds crashed into his that Ritter could barely nod his head to agree. The designs for the retaining wall lit in his mind like the sun and blinded him.
Deck was taller and longer-limbed but Ritter had been lifting heavy machinery since he was a child. However, Ritter kept his boots still and his arms by his side. Removing Father now would overwhelm the retaining wall and the engineers still hanging off it.
They connected isolated pieces of machinery with belts and tubing. The retaining wall lurched into life. Meanwhile, the shelves of Father’s mind dimmed and splintered. The tracks they slid on crumbled into pieces. Books, their bindings cracked and pages torn, fell out of their proper places. Ritter’s eyes hurt and air refused to stay in his lungs.
Ritter shook off Deck’s grip, or maybe Deck had let go. His boots pounded the dusty ground. He leapt onto the wall, warping its machinery so that he could squeeze through. No one tried to stop him.
Engineers were still straggling back to the retaining wall from the breach. Father’s machine, clanking and puffing in a steady, complex pattern, loomed before Ritter. Above him, Turbulence knotted Father to the machine. An amorphous cocoon billowed around Father, bright colors swirling through his skin.
Ritter climbed Father’s machine, pulling himself up girders and dodging flares of Turbulence. Heat scraped his body. The almost subliminal scent of imagined parts about to burn filled his lungs. This machine might have had even less time left than Father. Still, Ritter substituted in new control gears, swapped tubing to form a new set of connections, and shoved what he hadn’t changed into new positions. The pattern of clanks and puffs grew simpler and quieter. Sweat soaked his shirt and stung his eyes.
Threads of Turbulence shifted course above Father. At first, they fluttered like ribbons in a breeze. As the Turbulence approached the retaining wall, threads tangled back into knotted skeins. Engineers shouted at each other. Men and women, seeming the size of rats, scurried up and down the invisible wall.
The cocoon that enveloped Father shrank into him and he began to fall. Ritter stretched out. His arm hit Father’s back and he hugged Father to him. Father’s head fell on Ritter’s shoulders but Father’s chest swelled, straining against Ritter’s arm.
Ritter shifted Father over his shoulder. One arm steadied Father while the other slid along girders as Ritter worked his way down. Pain radiated up his fingers as he climbed and shocked his knees as he jumped to the ground. He ran to the retaining wall, set Father down where the wall lay, climbed through a hole he created for himself, then dragged Father through.
One last group of fleeing engineers followed Ritter. The engineers, their brows creased with concern, pooled around him as he threw Father onto his back.
“Are you all right?” Ritter asked. When they muttered and nodded, Ritter pointed at the retaining wall, then dug out his best command voice. “Then what are you waiting for?”
The question stunned them out of their grief. They joined the men and women shoring up the already failing wall. Anything thrown together in a matter of minutes would need constant maintenance until this storm broke.
“You.” Ritter stared up at Deck. “You can repair his mind.”
Deck stared at Father then frowned. “Maybe, with help.”
“I’ve taken classes in archive restoration.”
“Junior, if you help me repair your father’s mind, eliminating what makes you a librarian will kill you. Everything you’ve learned, everything you can do, will be too integrated with the rest of you for me to excise. If you help me, I can never make you the engineer you want to be.”
“That’s my trade-off, then.”
Deck started away from the wall in long strides. “The canteen ought to be empty. We can set up in there.”
Ritter followed, matching pace when Deck broke into a sprint. Father weighed on him with each pounding step.
* * *
One moment, Ritter and Deck stood alone in the canteen with Father spread flat on a table. The next moment, Father’s mind surrounded Ritter. Disparate shelves, rather than revolving around each other in elegant curves, had congealed into vast, static walls arranged in a flat lattice. The equal of the best engineers in the Five Great Classical Novels, right now, had the sentience of only the simplest libraries.
Ritter’s fingers pinched the thin edge of a shelf jammed with books. His boots pressed against the back of a shelf that wasn’t. Disheveled books lay half open, scattered on splintered shelving that protruded at odd angles out of the case. Rust filled his lungs. Creaking pierced the air. Ritter hadn’t dared to do anything yet. The creaking must have been Deck somewhere else in Father’s mind.
The archivist had left him in the section of Father’s mind Ritter knew best, reminded Ritter of the archive restoration classes he’d taken, then disappeared. Day in, day out, for as long as Ritter had lived, he’d witnessed shelves of Father’s mind slide and rotate around each other. If he couldn’t restore Father’s intellect, Deck had told him, no one else was likely to do any better.
Pain radiated up Ritter’s fingers. Time to do something before he lost his grip and fell to the unseen floor below. If librarians ever let themselves maintain less than three points of contact with a book wall, they’d have a life expectancy as short as that of engineers. One of the many miracles of Father was that he’d not only lived but remained an engineer long enough to see his child become one.
Turbulence had smashed shelves and pushed books out of place, but these shelves had lost little actual knowledge. Ritter was librarian enough to rebuild shelves, repair broken bindings, and mend ripped pages. In time, those books would heal and become indistinguishable from the originals. Turbulence hadn’t torn any pages out or rent any book to pieces. Every book slid into its proper plac
e, each hissing a puff of air as it did that still smelled disconcertingly of rust.
Father, however, was more than an immaculately organized collection of knowledge. Ritter scrambled onto the top of the wall. The toes of his boots jutted out past the plank that capped it. The machinery of Father’s reasoning lay below him. Rusted tracks extended, cracked and kinked out to nowhere from every wall. What ought to have been patterns of elegant curves was instead a thicket of thorns. A glowing slick stained bearings and brackets that jostled and jittered but couldn’t spin or bend.
The materials were lighter and more delicate, but the math was analogous to what Father had drilled into Ritter every day since before he could walk. He reached down for a rusted track and began to restore Father’s intellect to what he’d always seen.
Sweat dripped into his eyes. The restored material of Father’s intelligence was both slippery and sharp. Blood smeared and coated his fingers like thin gloves. He had no idea how long he’d been working when he noticed Deck peering down at him. Time moved differently in archives.
“Not bad.” Deck’s gaze swept a wide arc. “No one will ever be able to tell that Turbulence had ever overrun his intellect.”
Ghostly tracks spiraled around Ritter. They crisscrossed each other, arcing through hundreds of dimensions. Bearings spun with a scarcely audible hiss. Ritter reached for a book and Father’s mind reconfigured around him. Shelves scattered and recombined as though the wind had torn a spiderweb to pieces only to have it coalesce into a different web.
Deck hadn’t even flinched when the shelf he stood on rotated and translated to its new position. Only a slow nod betrayed any sign that he noticed Father’s intellect had changed configuration.
“No one except Father.” Ritter climbed to a bearing and then tapped it, careful not to smear it with his blood. “I still have work left to do.”
Deck frowned. “Follow me.” He offered Ritter a hand. “There’s something you need to see.”
Ritter climbed up to join Deck. Where once a field of darkness had been, the rest of Father’s mind gleamed. Pieces of shelving ferried books in sweeping arcs, then merged to form not walls but something crystalline. The myriad of shelves all seemed adjacent to each other.
Deck slid on a track toward the structure. Gingerly, Ritter followed. At first, he thought Deck just wanted to show him how Father’s mind should look. Father’s intellect still had to be reintegrated into this structure. Then he noticed how barren the shelves were. Translucent slats joined from a sparse, almost hollow structure, rather than one brimming with memories.
“What’s missing?” Given that all of Father’s autonomic processes worked and Ritter had spent who knows how long restoring everything related to Father’s profession, he hadn’t actually needed to ask.
“I’m sorry, Junior.” Deck placed an arm on Ritter’s shoulder but Ritter shrugged it off. “I salvaged as much as I could. He might still remember us as colleagues.”
“Very well. I still have work to do.” If he looked at the empty shelves any longer, his chest would burst. He jumped to a track that led him back to the machinery of Father’s intellect. “Bearings to repack. His intellect to reintegrate with the rest of his mind.”
“Junior.” Deck’s voice shot Ritter between the shoulder blades. “You don’t have to be the brave engineer. Not right now.”
“Actually, I do.” By some miracle, his voice held steady. “Especially right now.”
It was oddly comforting to make bearings run freely, to make the machinery of Father’s intellect swirl around him in the complex patterns Ritter had always found so intimidating. Making and repairing machines was what Father had taught him to do and now that was all Ritter had left of him. That, somehow, didn’t stop Ritter’s rib cage from squeezing his heart.
* * *
Moonlight passed through the much-battered, but still intact, retaining wall. It curved sharply on either end to join up with the rest of the barricade. The few threads of Turbulence sweeping the wall were practically invisible. Ritter felt the retaining wall degrade infinitesimally with each pass but none of the other engineers on tonight’s watch seemed to notice.
Chunks of breached barricade and the wreckage of Father’s machine still littered the ground. Soon, Ritter and the other engineers at Camp Terminus would have to clear all that up. The barricade itself still needed to be replaced. The retaining wall had never been intended to last. Rotating teams of engineers rebuilt it day and night.
Ritter sipped tea from his vacuum flask. He sat against the retaining wall, reviewing his annotations of Father’s plans for the new barricade. The rest of his team sat chatting around a fire. Low rumblings, high-pitched words, smoke and their collective fear drifted toward him. Rescuing Father had given him a reputation, not one he would have chosen.
It was just as well. Nothing would happen to the wall tonight. The large storms were still days away.
Ritter eyed the thin, gray volume he’d set next to his vacuum flask. Deck had left him a text on meditation before he’d left and promised he’d return to go over it with him. It was embarrassing to be the only engineer at camp who still received homework. Maybe he’d just keep living with everyone else’s minds invading his instead.
Someone tall yet stocky emerged from the dark. The engineers around the fire all stopped talking and rushed to a stand. A few of them pointed at Ritter. Not-Father waved the engineers away and they all abandoned their posts without question. Destroyed then restored, not-Father commanded the loyalty that Father had. After his sacrifice, maybe that loyalty was now devotion. He was still every bit the engineer Father had been. Ritter had seen to that.
Ritter rushed to stand as not-Father approached. Pages of intricate plans spilled from his lap. Not-Father gestured at him to sit back down and Ritter complied. He could have only avoided not-Father for so long. Not-Father loomed over Ritter. His eyebrows arched at the spray of paper settling on the ground. He crouched down and gathered the papers into a neat stack.
“Even if I hadn’t been told you were my son, I would have guessed.” Not-Father placed the stack on Ritter’s lap. “I’m not convinced that I wanted to be rescued.”
“I’m not convinced that you have been, sir.” Ritter focused on sorting the papers on his lap.
Not-Father nodded slowly. He had Father’s appraising gaze, the one that squeezed the air out of Ritter’s lungs.
“Fair enough.” He sat next to Ritter, his back resting against the wall. “My proposed redesign of the barricade. You’re the only reason why I remember working on it, much less understand it. Thank you. Your father asked you for an analysis weeks ago. I expected you’d be done by now.”
Ritter looked up. “Excuse me, sir?” He couldn’t hide the puzzlement on his face. Father had wanted the analysis, but why would anyone else? “I’m fresh out of the academy, sir.”
For a moment, not-Father seemed at a loss for words. He patted Ritter’s shoulder.
“Modest, as always. I haven’t forgotten everything.” Not-Father took the now sorted pile of paper from Ritter. “Your instructors have sent me detailed reports about your progress for years. So, what does the best theorist in a generation think of my proposal?”
Ritter’s eyebrows raised. He resisted making a deprecating remark, although that would have bought him some time. Everything he had ever known about chaotic phenomena seemed to have fallen out of his mind. He swallowed hard, wishing he, rather than not-Father, were leafing through Father’s plans.
“Well, sir, it’s ambitious. A wall built of bricks of small, densely packed, cross-linked redundant machines. It should be easier to maintain and more robust against the ever more violent and unpredictable storms of Turbulence as we push farther into the frontier.”
Not-Father frowned. “All engineering is a matter of trade-offs, Ritter.”
“I don’t know how many engineers, besides you, will be able to create the machinery you’ve designed. The feature size is too small and the toleranc
es too strict. I’ve come up with some alternatives, but…” Ritter shrugged. “If it’s just the two of us alone on the barricade, I think I might be able to—”
“No, you’re too easily distracted. Your best work is behind the barricade, not on it.” Not-Father stood. “Very good, Ritter. I’ll go over your annotations and we’ll discuss them in the morning.”
Not-Father nodded his goodbye then walked away. His boots, creased and dun-colored, their treads worn smooth, left blurred prints on the ground. He’d broken them down from new in just weeks from manning the retaining wall, not to mention surveying and repairing the barricade as a whole.
Ritter curled as though not-Father had punched him in the gut. He missed the man who’d decided Ritter could do anything and was always exasperated when it seemed Ritter couldn’t.
Engineers gathered again around the fire to finish their shift. Ritter didn’t need to see them to know that. The slim volume Deck had given him felt oddly heavy in his hands. He worked through its first exercises as shelves swirling around the barricade echoed through his mind.
Copyright © 2014 by John Chu
Art copyright © 2014 by Julie Dillon
eISBN: 978-1-4668-7648-4
eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to [email protected].
The last thing they did, before sending me into the past, was shove me to the end of the world.
The Project Mayfly nurse waited as I raised myself onto a wicker table with a surface made of tightly-strung hide, a grid that put me in mind of a tennis racket. The squares of string pressed against the thin fabric of my hospital gown.
As I climbed on, I couldn’t help noticing the drain in the floor. It was a hand’s width away from the letters scratched into the concrete: “16—Hungry.”
Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2014: A Tor.Com Original Page 17
