But something wouldn’t allow it.
My attempts at sleep kept being interrupted by a sense of movement; a sense that someone – or something – was with me in the room, going about some quick, furtive business. At last this disturbance was enough to snatch me to full, irritated wakefulness. I thought it might be Doctor Morcenx, paying me a nocturnal visit. I rose from my sweat-saturated pillow, propping myself up on my arms.
I was alone. The room was silent and still. But a faint pattern of lights was moving across the opposite wall. I stared at it through gummed eyes, unable to make sense of what I was seeing. Patches of colour danced on the wall.
That was when it occurred to me to look in the opposite direction, to the pile of boxes I’d found in the cupboard.
I slipped out of the bed, caught between apprehension and curiosity. The lights were coming from one of the boxes, and it was the one that held Paladin’s damaged head. I had pushed the glass globe back into its wadding of shredded paper, but the flaps were not pressed down firmly and part of the globe was still visible. The lights were shining out of it, etched in narrow, wavering beams of different colours.
I knelt at the box. I pulled the flaps wide and eased the dome from its wadding. It had been dead before, I was certain. I’d examined it in plain light and seen no trace of anything functioning. But something moved now. Tiny mechanisms were busy within the globe. I heard an insect symphony of buzzes and clicks. And the play of lights only increased once I had the globe free of the box. The globe quivered in my hands.
Still kneeling, Paladin’s head propped against my belly, I swivelled until I was facing to the wall.
The dance of colours increased. Streaks and hyphens of light crazed the wall. They hatched across each other, thickened, and began to stabilise into clear, angular forms.
Letters.
Words.
They said:
BROKEN
BROKEN
BROKEN
Followed by:
FIX ME
It would have been knotty, if Paladin hadn’t shown me how. I had no tools, no knowledge of robots, and I had to work in gloom and silence. Doctor Morcenx’s drugs had dulled my focus and robbed me of strength and dexterity.
But Paladin knew what needed to be done, and that was enough. After the words, the play of colours shifted to the representation of forms. They were simple, reduced to the geometric essentials, but Paladin showed me what I had to do.
I was to connect the head back onto the torso assembly. I opened the heaviest of the boxes and removed Paladin’s middle section, setting it the right way up on the floor. It made a heavy clunk as I set it down. Luckily, somewhere in the house one of the clocks began to strike the hour at that exact moment.
At the top of the torso was a circular metal plate, drilled through with many tiny holes. Underneath the dome was a similar plate, with a corresponding set of holes. Taking care not to damage the glass further, I hefted the dome into place on the collar, waiting for something to happen. But there wasn’t any sense of anything locking or engaging, and when I tugged at the dome it came away easily again.
The lights were still flickering on the wall. I was doing it wrong, I realised. Paladin didn’t want me to connect the two pieces, but hold them near each other. Struggling with the effort – even the dome was heavy after a while – I brought the two faces of the connecting collar to within a finger’s width of each other, but no further.
Nothing happened.
Not for a second, maybe two. But then a kind of silver worm slithered out of one of the upper holes, and curled itself around until it found a corresponding hole in the lower plate. Meanwhile, a red worm had come out of the bottom and was inserting itself into the upper part. Now something twisted the two pieces against each other, hard enough that the dome was yanked against my fingers, and then I had no more than a glimpse of a dozen or so coloured worms threading across the narrowing gap, until with a soft, precise click the two parts of Paladin were reunited.
For a minute or two, nothing happened.
From inside the torso came a click, then a kind of rusty ratcheting sound. The lights in the dome flickered on again, and the colours reappeared on the wall.
REPAIRING
REPAIRING
REPAIRING
Followed by:
PLEASE WAIT
So I waited. I did not sleep that night. The clock struck the half, quarter and full hours, as Mazarile advanced its face towards the Old Sun. Through the window night paled into the indigo of predawn. The house made complaining noises as if preparing to rouse for the day’s work of being a home. Still Paladin buzzed and clicked. Once in a while there was a concentrated burst of lights inside the dome, and I steeled myself, but over and over again it was only the herald to more inactivity.
Four in the morning. Then five. Rumbles of traffic, the first trains of the daily schedule. The house remained still. I was worn out from the waiting. The bracelet had grown heavy on my wrist.
Then the wall flickered again.
DAMAGE REPORT:
MAJOR IMPAIRMENTS TO CRITICAL SYSTEMS.
ESTABLISHING WORKAROUND PATHWAYS.
PREDICTED EFFECTIVENESS UNDER OPTIMUM ASSUMPTIONS: FIFTY-FIVE PER CENT.
INITIATING VOCAL INTERFACE.
Another click, the oily whirr of some hidden spindle or flywheel. Then the stentorian voice that I had known since my childhood, the voice of our companion and tutor, patient beyond words, firm when it needed to be, but also wise and deep and supremely impervious to all the pleading, blackmail, emotional coercion and insults that my sister and I had ever mustered, said:
‘Thank you.’
Paladin had said that to me dozens of times before, whenever I had opened a door, cleaned its glass or helped it back onto its wheels, but never with exactly the intonation that I now heard. The delivery had been perfunctory before, an automatic statement doled out at the appropriate times. Now it sounded sincere. As if there were genuine gratitude.
The voice was quieter, too: the same tone, but much less volume.
‘What happened?’ I asked. ‘Why did you end up here, in pieces?’
‘I am not sure.’ Then another click and whirr. ‘But I am different. I am not as I was before. I was damaged, and something changed.’
‘You were smashed up,’ I said. ‘In Madame Granity’s. You’d come to find us, me and Adrana. The way you were meant to. But Vidin Quindar attacked you. I saw you on the floor, all smashed up. But you weren’t in pieces.’
‘I must have been dismantled.’
‘Yes, and stuffed into boxes and left here. I suppose they weren’t sure what to do with you. And maybe you’d have stayed that way if I hadn’t poked around in those boxes, looking for my books.’ Then I frowned, still not sure what I was to make of this. ‘But you were dismantled. Why would you care if you were put back together or not? You’re a machine, Paladin. Why did you want me to put your head back on?’
The robot clicked and cogitated. Things chattered and hammered somewhere inside it.
‘To help you.’
‘You already have,’ I said, giving an inward sigh, as I realised the limits of Paladin’s ambitions. ‘You helped me learn to read and write, to make up stories, to find out about the worlds. You were good to us, when we were small. But you’re just a robot, and you’ve never worked very well.’
‘They made me less than what I was. They made me forget what I had been. But now I have remembered.’
‘And what were you?’
‘A robot of the Twelfth Occupation. A machine with a mind, loyal to people but not beholden to them. But when the troubles had passed they changed me, they made me less than I was. But you spoke the words, Arafura. You asked if I remembered the Last Rains of Sestramor. And I did, although I did not know that I did. And those words were sufficient to un
do the logic blockades put into me.’
I inched back from the torso and head.
‘Were you a soldier?’
‘A soldier and more than a soldier. A friend and protector to people.’
I touched a wary finger to his casing, but felt nothing of the tingle I’d got from Peregrine.
‘You’re still broken inside.’
‘Yes. And I will never have the strength I once did. That was taken from me for good. But I can still be of assistance. You must complete what you have begun.’
‘It won’t do either of us any good. They’ll still take you apart, and you won’t be strong enough to stop them, any more than you were strong enough to stop Quindar.’
‘But I can still help you.’
‘With what, leaving?’
‘If that is what you wish. Tell me your plans.’
I smiled once, but it was the abbreviated smile of someone instantly sensing a trap. ‘I get it now. They put you in here to test me, didn’t they? To see if I was still trying to resist them. You’ll listen to what I have to say then report back to Father, and then he’ll seal off whatever loopholes are left.’
‘I was instructed to look after you, Arafura. That has always been my primary imperative.’
‘It didn’t stop you coming after us in Neural Alley!’
‘I was following too narrow an interpretation of that imperative. My cognitive bounds were limited, and I thought only of protecting you from immediate risk.’
‘What’s changed?’
‘I understand now that there are larger factors to be considered. The house speaks to me, as it has always done. Someone has been trying to call you from beyond Mazarile.’
An image flickered onto the wall, projected by Paladin. It was a monkey face, all angles and edges, not a curve or soft line anywhere in it. It was the kind of face you could cut yourself on just looking at it.
‘Prozor,’ I said, letting out a gasp of delight. ‘Prozor’s been calling?’
‘The caller has been leaving a recorded message, with the understanding it would be passed to you. The house has lodged a copy of this message, and I am at liberty to read and replay it. Would you like to hear the message?’
‘Yes. Yes, right away.’
The face began talking. The sound was coming from Paladin, but it was Prozor’s voice, all scratchy and thin as if coming through on a very faint squawk channel.
‘Fura, it’s me. I should’ve done more for you at Trevenza Reach, I know. But losing you was only the start of my woes. It’s knocked me sideways, this last couple of weeks. Might as well have torn up my retirement plans and thrown ’em into the Empty, all the good they did. But I guess you could say it’s all for the best, couldn’t you?’
I didn’t know what to say. I just sat listening, hoping that the recorded voice was playing back at a low enough volume not to disturb my father two floors down.
‘It’s forced a rethink on me,’ Prozor went on. ‘I’ve been dwellin’ on you, and all the words we had, and how maybe you had the righteous side of it after all. I’m signing up again, Fura. Found me a new ship, as well. Crew’s greener than any I’ve seen, but it’s a crew, and they need a Bauble Reader. But here’s the knotty part of it.’ The angles of her face shifted to produce a wicked, confiding smile. ‘I ain’t tellin’ ’em who I am. Used my quoins to buy a new past for myself, new papers, new employment records. Still callin’ myself Prozor, but that’s just a name and they ain’t made the connection to Cap’n Rack. Name of the ship’s the Queen Crimson. You like it? Hold that name in your noggin’, because she’s sailing your way. Cap’n’s putting in at Mazarile, first port after Trevenza. You could find her, Fura. The boney they got ain’t worth the cost of lungstuff. You roll up and show even half the aptitude you had on the Monetta, they’ll sign you on before you can blink.’ She tapped a finger against the side of her head. ‘You watch them reports of ships comin’ and goin’. When that ship comes in, get yourself to the docks, all posh-talking and pretty and innocent, just like you was the day you came aboard the Monetta. When we meet, we’ll have to play it like we never met before. Won’t be too hard, will it? We already rehearsed it once. Come and find the ship, Fura. I’ll be waitin’ for you. And we’ll be waitin’ for Bosa Sennen, and the chance to put right what was done to us. You was right all along, Fura – I just never saw it.’
The face faded from the wall.
‘Message ends,’ Paladin said.
I sat in silence, absorbing what I’d learned. Allowing for the seven-week crossing, and the days I had spent back at the household since my return, it was nearly two months since I had last had contact with Prozor. She had come to mind many times in those weeks, but I had never expected to hear from her again.
‘She was still on Trevenza Reach when she sent this, wasn’t she? And she was talking about Black Shatterday as if it had only happened a couple of weeks earlier.’
‘The message was recorded and transmitted forty-three days and eight hours ago,’ Paladin said. ‘It was withheld from you on the crossing, and it has been withheld from you since your return to Mazarile.’
‘That’s six weeks. Six weeks!’
‘I am sorry nothing could be done sooner.’
‘Paladin, I have to get word to her. Can you help with that?’
‘I could. But there is a complication. You will forgive me for eavesdropping on a private matter, but—’ Paladin was silent for a moment. ‘You must take me apart again.’
‘Why?’
‘Because someone is coming. The house has a caller.’
Doctor Morcenx came in and closed the door behind him. The room was still grey with predawn light and under my hastily arranged sheets I watched him through the narrowest slits of my eyes. I pretended to have been roused.
‘Doctor . . .’ I mumbled out. ‘I was asleep.’
‘That’s very good, Arafura.’ He settled his bag down at the foot of my bed and parked himself halfway up it, his back to me as he opened the bag and delved into its contents. Almost without looking he settled one clammy palm onto my wrist, where it jutted out of the sheets. ‘You must have been having quite a stimulating dream, judging by your pulse rate.’
‘I was in space,’ I said. ‘Reliving it all.’
‘It does you no good to dwell on the past, Arafura. The sooner you accept that, the better it will be for you.’ He nodded the back of his head at the picture of my sister, compressing and relaxing the roll of fat at the base of his skull. ‘Think of your father, too. None of this has been easy for him, in his present condition. You would be doing him a great kindness if you discarded your selfish adherence to one narrative and instead accepted the other, more preferable version of events.’
‘If we’re going that far, why don’t we all pretend Adrana never existed in the first place?’
‘Your sister died. We are all in agreement about that. The manner of her dying is merely a detail.’ He produced a dark green vial from the bag. ‘We shall see, shan’t we?’
‘See what?’ I asked.
He turned his face to smile down at me. ‘Scholars and musicians take this formulation during periods of intense study. It promotes the consolidation of new memories, accelerating the act of learning. In the process, of course, it’s necessary that redundant memories be allowed to weaken, to wither.’ He prepared a syringe and moved to inject me, laying a hand on my forearm as he held the syringe upright and squirted a few drips from the end of the needle.
I struggled, but Morcenx was too strong. He pushed the needle into me, and with it the green drug.
‘There,’ he said, withdrawing the syringe. ‘That wasn’t too bad, was it?’
I lay still. All I felt was a cold numbness, as if I had been slapped hard.
‘Why are you doing this?’
He looked at me with surprise on his face. ‘Doing
what, my dear?’
‘Taking such delight in murdering my sister.’ With what strength I had, I angled myself onto my elbow. ‘I mean it. You’re trying to erase her, trying to pretend she wasn’t what she was, and that’s as close to murder as makes no difference.’
He snapped shut the bag, then touched a finger to his lips, as if whispering a secret. ‘Truth is, I never liked her very much. Always full of herself. A bad influence, I thought. But then again, the feeling was mutual.’
‘This is revenge,’ I said, with a dark dawning clarity. ‘She always thought you were a creep, and I always liked you, with your stupid sweets and tunes, but she was right and I was wrong. And now you get to punish her by making her fade away.’
He grunted his vast bulk from the bed and gathered his bag. ‘No one’s asking you to forget her, my dear. But after a night’s sleep I guarantee this. You’ll wake with doubts. Tiny little doubts, to begin with, but they’ll be there all the same. And from tiny doubts great certainties can spring.’
Then he paused, bent down – ballooning out as he folded himself in two – and picked up a little shred of paper, part of the packing that had been in Paladin’s box.
‘It’s a terrible business all round,’ Father was saying, setting aside his newspaper. ‘It’s hurt us, there’s no doubt of that. But compared to some we’ve come off very lightly. There’s an old adage: nothing that happens in an economy is entirely bad for everyone.’ He shrugged. ‘We were due our share of luck, I suppose. I shan’t complain about Black Shatterday – especially not after we’ve been favoured with this happy turn. You really are feeling stronger, Fura? It’s such a joy that you’ve finally felt strong enough to join me for dinner.’
‘I really am feeling much better,’ I said. ‘And it’s all down to Doctor Morcenx.’
‘I’m glad to hear it. Your poor sister never much took to him.’
I rubbed at the skin around my bracelet. ‘All I know is that I’m in very good hands. It’s strange, you know.’
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