Fever Crumb

by Philip Reeve

  "Having fun, Dr. Crumb?"

  There were statues among the shrubbery. As Gideon turned to see who'd spoken, one of them seemed to come to life. Auric Godshawk strolled toward him, the night wind flipping the skirts of his printed silk evening gown. There was a glass of brandy in

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  his hand. It slopped and glittered as he gestured uphill toward the house. "They make a racket, don't they? Parties are meant for the young, not old men like me."

  "Yes, sir."

  He came closer, peering at Gideon's face in the light of the moon, which hung low and yellowish above the hill.

  "You look crushed, Crumb. Like a well-trodden biscuit. What's wrong?"

  "Nothing, sir," said Gideon. He wondered if the old Scriven understood what he felt for Wavey. He said, "Sir, do you think that some of my fellow Engineers are right when they say that emotion should be avoided? That we must suppress all feelings if we are to be truly rational?"

  Godshawk looked surprised, the way that people generally do when you ask them philosophical questions in shrubberies in the middle of the night. He snorted, and took another sip of his brandy. "I don't know about that, Crumb. We Scriven have always been very keen on emotions. Sensations, feelings, that sort of thing. We live only once, and we might as well enjoy all the pleasures that the old world has to offer us on our journey through it."

  "But emotions are so painful," said Gideon. He felt as if he were confessing, I am in love with your daughter. He felt sure the old Scriven must understand him.

  Godshawk nodded, looking out over the lagoons. Lanterns

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  drifted above the water, and beyond the marshes the lights of London twinkled in the mist.

  "Yes, pain's a part of it," he said. "When we see something beautiful we want to possess it. But we know we can't, don't we? And that hurts. Beauty fades, things change, time moves us on." He drained his glass and raised it to Gideon before throwing it aside. Then, reaching inside his robes, he took out a small silver case. "Look at this," he said. He flipped it open. Inside, on the crumpled silk lining, lay a shining thing of polished steel, or maybe some other alloy that no one any longer knew a name for. Something from the Ancient world. Godshawk took it out, holding it carefully between the tips of his forefinger and thumb. Just a wee thing it was, the shape of a walnut, the size of an almond. "Look at this, Crumb. In theory, a man's whole life could be recorded in a seed like this, all his hopes and loves and fears, and all his knowledge."

  Gideon looked at the object, and wondered what Godshawk expected him to say. "I see," he murmured at last, trying to sound impressed, but fearing he sounded merely foolish.

  Godshawk chuckled, for no reason that Gideon could understand. He snapped the case shut and put it back in whatever inner pocket it had come from. The moon had risen higher, and shone ghostly in the garden's mysterious pools. "It's a pretty world," he said. "What a pity we Scriven won't inherit it. And now I must return to my guests. They'll probably expect a speech or some

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  such nonsense. Don't stay out here in the cold too long, Dr. Crumb! Back to bed with you, and get some sleep."

  But Gideon knew that sleep would be impossible. The party was set to go on all night. He walked along the water's edge, all the way around the hill. Long after midnight he started to climb back up the terraces. Glass broke somewhere nearby; a small prickling sound. He looked toward the summer house and saw a movement there. Went closer, and heard the sound of soft sobs. Someone weeping.

  "Wavey?" He recognized her dress, in the summer house dark. She stood with her back to him, a hand raised to her face. The shards of a glass glittered on the floor nearby. She held a little jar in her hand. As he watched she upended it, tipping out some of its contents onto a lint pad. Then she went on rubbing her face.

  "Miss Godshawk?" he said.

  She turned with a little gasp. "What are you doing here?" she asked. Her words wobbled in the middle and blurred at the edges. She was a little drunk, and he thought she had been crying. And then, as he went toward her, he saw that the markings on her face had gone. He thought at first that it must be a trick of that dim light, but it was not. Those Scriven stains which had showed so strikingly on her forehead and high cheekbones and along the curve of her jaw had been washed away.

  "You are not really a Scriven!" he said.

  "Of course I'm a Scriven, you fool," replied Wavey Godshawk.

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  The soft, consoling scent of the cream she'd used to clean her face came wafting toward him. She threw the wet lint pad on the floor. "I am as much a Scriven as he is. Look!" And she came closer to Gideon and twisted her head and lifted her hair to show him a sepia patch on the side of her neck. "Look ... She tore open her lace collar and undid the top two buttons of her bodice and pulled it open to show him another speckle, black in the moonlight, which lay in the hollow above her collarbone like a pool of ink. "Not good enough for Odo Bolventor!" she said nastily. "Odo Bolventor, Margrave of Thurrock. Margrave of Puke! I'm better without him. To think I would have married him!"

  Gideon took a nervous step away from her, alarmed by the unsettling impulses that were telling him to go closer. Wavey had always seemed to him so haughty and so self-assured. He would never have imagined that she would behave in such an emotional, undignified way, and in front of a mere human like him. He said awkwardly, "I don't understand...."

  "Of course, you don't. How could you understand? You're just a dull old Homo sapiens, and I am Scriven!" She lifted her head, tilting her pale chin proudly at him. Her dress rustled; beneath the silk, stays, and corsets, the stiff wicker frame that gave her skirt its shape creaked softly in time to her hurried breathing. Then, turning away, she said weepily, "I was born like this. Some Scriven are nowadays. Our race is failing. I have a few markings, but not many, and none on my face. When I was little the other

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  girls used to say that the Scrivener ran out of ink when he came to write on me.

  "So I used makeup. Wendigo's Patent Body Ink. I spray it on through a stencil mask, so my marks look always the same. But Scriven society is such a small world, and there is so much gossip, that of course the Margrave came to hear of it. Tonight, while we were dancing, he asked me if it was true, and when I said it was he said he would not be made a fool of, and would not marry a freak, and risk having his sons born blank like me. He said I was as ugly as boiled fish."

  Gideon wanted to say, "You aren't ugly." He wanted to tell her how beautiful she was. But instead he said, "Your father says that the time of the Scriven is over. Perhaps it will be an advantage to have no speckles, which would show what you are to the commons...."

  "The commons," said Wavey dismissively, and then looked up at him as if she had remembered something. "It was you who saved me from them. That day in the city ... She laughed, a soft, wondering laugh. "Why did you do that?"

  "I don't know," said Gideon truthfully.

  A floating lantern drifted past, and its light came through the glass roof and brushed Wavey's face. She smiled, sudden and bewitching. "I don't believe I ever thanked you," she said. "We can be so thoughtless, can't we, we Homo superiors?" She took his hands and drew him close to her. She smelled of wine and cosmetics. Her breath felt hot against his face. "Why are you

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  shaking like that?" she asked. "What is your name, anyway? I can't just call you Dr. Crumb."

  "I'm G-gideon," he managed to say.

  "Then thank you, G-gideon," she said, and at last she kissed him, and her lips were parted, and the wires of the brace on her teeth gently grazed his mouth.

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  ***

  22 the fifth word

  It had not lasted, of course. A love affair between a Londoner and a Scriven? It had not lasted out the month. But for a while the whole balance of Gideon's life had shifted. Instead of reason he was guided by the unfathomable feelings that Wavey aroused in him. He neglected his work and sat waiting for her brief, stolen
visits. He once or twice considered writing poems. He didn't know if she loved him as much as he loved her or if he was just a distraction for her. At night sometimes, while the rest of the house slept, he would go quietly out into the gardens, and she would be waiting for him in their summer house. "Godshawk must never know of this," she said, holding him in her strong, speckled arms.

  But Godshawk knew almost everything that went on in his house. He had been suspicious of his daughter's reasons for choosing Gideon ever since the young Engineer arrived. That new slave girl he had bought her was his spy. One afternoon, in

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  the middle of a hissing storm of cold gray rain, Gideon was called before him.

  The great man was waiting for him in the vault beneath the house, a place that Gideon had never visited before. It seemed devoted to the study of Stalkers. Dozens stood or lay about like charmless statues with their heads prized open. In the vats that lined the walls floated dead people -- or at least, Gideon hoped they were dead. Severed heads in jars lined a shelf behind Godshawk's desk, and the glare that the inventor shot at him as he came in made Gideon fear for a moment that his own would shortly join them.

  "Do you take me for a fool, Crumb?" the inventor asked.

  "No, sir ...

  Gideon looked for help. In a corner of the room stood Wavey Godshawk. Her face was stenciled with its familiar markings, that flock of wild geese on her brow and cheeks. He remembered how closely and solemnly she had watched him as they lay together in the summer house amid the shipwreck of her dress. Now she would not even look at him, just stared haughtily at the ceiling.

  "Did you think I wouldn't find out about your little romance?" asked Godshawk.

  "No, sir," said Gideon. "I thought ...

  "Thought what? That I'd approve? Great Scrivener, women of childbearing age are in short enough supply among my people as it is, without I go marrying one off to you."

  "But --"

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  "You wretch, Crumb! if I weren't kinder than most of my breed you'd be dead by now, or on your way to meet the death machines at Pickled Eel Circus! As it is, I want you gone. What, do you think I won't be able to find another little scribbler like you to aid me in my work? You're nothing. If you come near Nonesuch House again I'll set the dogs on you. Now go."

  Gideon looked again at Wavey, but Wavey was still not looking at him. She seemed bored.

  The next thing he remembered was the huge front door of Nonesuch House slamming shut behind him, leaving him alone on the drive in the pounding rain. Twilight was coming on. He was already soaked. He looked at the windows above him, hoping to see Wavey look out. Godshawk would have ordered her not to, but she would take no notice of Godshawk, would she?

  He waited while rain trickled down the back of his neck and crept in through the seams of his sleeves and plastered his wet hair across his face and filled up his boots. But he never saw her again.

  ***

  Six months later he would stand once more in Godshawk's garden. It was a few weeks after the Skinners' Riots, and a story had been doing the rounds about how a band of Scriven had been found holed up at Nonesuch House, and how the Skinners had gone there and slaughtered them.

  Gideon had not let himself think about Wavey Godshawk

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  since he returned to London the previous summer. He had gone back to the Engineerium, and Dr. Stayling had allowed him to pick up his studies. When thoughts of Wavey came into his mind he forced them away, and made himself concentrate on his work instead. He had worked hard all winter at forgetting her, and he had grown good at it. But when the riots started, he could think of nothing but Wavey.

  On the evening when it began he was outside the Engineerium, assaying circuit boards for a digger in Womblesden. Hurrying home, he stopped to watch the Skinners running down Cripplegate in the summer twilight. The smack of their shoes on the cobbles sounded like applause. Some stopped just long enough to hurl burning brands in through the windows of shops and banking houses. They carried things he thought were banners, until one passed close by and he saw that it was the flayed skin of a Scriven. From Ludgate Hill came the crackling, brush-fire sound of muskets.

  In some ways it was almost a relief. The anger of London had been building for so long, it had been like living on the flanks of a volcano. Now that the eruption had finally come, there was no time to worry about it, no time to think. Crumb hid among some bins near the tram Terminus to avoid another gang of Skinners, and was then almost shot down as a Skinner himself when he rounded a corner near the Engineerium and came upon a battalion of the Scriven's mercenaries, their crisp white uniforms

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  smudged with soot and powder. Luckily the Scriven officer in charge of them recognized him from his Nonesuch House days and ordered them not to shoot.

  "What is happening?" Gideon asked him, as he was bundled through the lines. "Where is Godshawk?"

  "Safe in the Barbican, Doctor, waiting for us to finish off this London rabble."

  "What about his daughter?"

  "Scrivener alone knows! These mobs are everywhere! Get back to your Engineerium, man; you'll be safe there...."

  But next morning the mobs broke into the Engineerium itself, smashing and looting, shouting that the Engineers were Scriven lackeys and no better than their masters. The frightened and bewildered Engineers were herded out into the courtyard, and there they might all have been killed, except that a second, larger band of Skinners happened by. They were led by a man named Creech, who scrambled up on an overturned sedan chair and fired his spring gun in the air to call for quiet. He wore a leather apron smeared with brown and crimson stains, and stuck through his belt was a long curved blade like a shard of the moon. But it turned out that, in this mob, he was the voice of reason.

  "These men are our kind," he shouted, pointing at the captive Engineers. "We got no argument with them. This place of theirs will make good homes for human widows and human orphlings.

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  You want to do some killing, you better come with me; Godshawk himself is still holding out in the Barbican!"

  The Skinners went roaring off, leaving the Engineers to pick up the pieces of their smashed experiments and try to salvage their scattered and damaged books. Pickled Eel Circus was blazing like a colossal brazier, sending thick swathes of smoke across the Engineerium compound. More rioters passed, and this time many of them wore once-white uniforms; the Scriven's mercenary soldiers had decided that the fight could not be won, and were changing sides. A few hours later the Engineers heard the cheering spread from the Barbican all through the city as word came that Auric Godshawk had been killed.

  But surely Wavey's blank, unspeckled skin would have saved her? Gideon kept thinking about her all through the confused days which followed the riots, while he helped the Order to move to their new home in the abandoned head of Godshawk's giant statue. As he wheeled the Engineer's belongings on handcarts down the Westerway he was watched by severed Scriven heads, which the Skinners had stuck on the railings outside the houses there. None of them was Wavey's. But how could he know that hers was not among the flayed bodies that lay in the gutters, attracting the attentions of rats and ravens and stray dogs? Oh , surely, he thought, when she heard the rioters coming, she would have had the sense to wipe her false markings off and mingle with the mobs?

  But Wavey wasn't logical; she had her prickly Scriven pride,

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  and he could well imagine her stencilling darker markings on just to taunt the Skinners....

  ***

  When he neared Nonesuch Hill that morning he saw that the house he had known so well was scorched and tumbled. Charred grass crumbled into ash as he climbed the terraces. A film of soot lay on the surface of the pools. The blackened roof beams ticked softly, embers glowing red as the breeze fanned them. Metal had melted and flowed in silvery puddles and lacings over the blackened tiles underfoot.

  "Wavey?" called Gideon, over the cawing of the carrio
n birds.

  He started looking for her among the crumpled outbuildings, hoping that she might have hidden somehow, but all he found were the dead. Whether Wavey was among them or not, it was impossible to know; they all looked like heather roots scorched by a brush fire.

  ***

  It was on his way back to London that day that Gideon decided to turn off his feelings. He had seen for himself now how dangerous emotions were. Tenderness and anger, love and hate, they all led to nothing but trouble; he blamed them for his own broken heart, as well as the feverish violence of the Skinners' Guilds. He was not an animal. From now on, he decided, he would live without feelings.

  Looking carefully at himself in the speckled mirror which hung from a nail on his workspace wall, Gideon shaved his head,

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  and gathered up the pile of chestnut curls, and carried them to the stove, and threw them in and watched them burn.

  ***

  It was a few weeks later that a note arrived in the careful, childish writing of Chigley Unthank, asking him to come and assess a new dig far out on the marshes. Dr. Crumb remembered Unthank, an archaeologist who had worked for Godshawk and been a frequent visitor to Nonesuch House. Now he was an outcast, scratching a living for himself and his daughter in the Brick Marsh. His note claimed he had unearthed the fragments of an Ancient computer brain, but when Gideon reached the place, Unthank could only show him a few scraps of ruined circuit board lashed together with wire and strung with animal bones -- a common tribal totem from the time of the Downsizing. When Dr. Crumb explained patiently that such things could be dug up almost anywhere, and were of no use except as an illustration of how far mankind had sunk into savagery and superstition after the fall of the Ancient world, Master Unthank had grown embarrassed, and even Gideon could tell that the tale of the computer brain had been just a ruse to bring him there.