The Stone Key

  “I am so sorry, Domick. I needed to weaken him,” I whispered. I could feel sweat trickling down my spine.

  “Elspeth, listen to me,” Domick rasped. “Ariel wants you to live, because he needs you to get something that he wants…. I…Elspeth, I think it might be a weapon. Something terrible. That is the center of Ariel’s mind, and all the rest is a chaotic whirl of madness and brilliance and cruelty. I felt it when he bound himself to me so he could enter Rushton when I did. The One is mad, but Ariel is worse.”

  I heard a movement behind me but did not turn. At any second, Mika might again take over. My whole body ached from tension, and I hoped whoever was behind me would have the sense not to speak. But it was already too late. Domick gave a cry and seemed to struggle with an invisible assailant before sinking back. Mika leered at me, panting. “You think you are so smart! He tells you things he should not, but my master is stronger. You think he failed with Rushton? You are wrong! He serves my master yet!” His white face shone like polished marble in the bloody light, and his eyes seemed to bulge. He continued speaking, but now there was only a mad babble. Then he convulsed again and fell back, unconscious.

  The plast hand reached out and began to wash the sweat from his body.

  “It begins,” Jak said. He was behind the bank of computermachines. “He is obviously delirious.”

  I swallowed, tasted blood, and realized I had bitten the inside of my cheek. I asked, “Did you hear what he said?”

  “Some of it, but I would not strive to find meaning in the mad babble of delirium. After all, he said that Ariel took Rushton to Norseland, but Dell foresaw that he had been found in Sutrium.”

  “He was, but it is possible he was taken to Norseland first. It would…explain much if it is true,” I said with difficulty. “What did you mean by saying it had begun?”

  “I meant that the first stage is ended. Domick is contagious now.”

  I had guessed it, but the words said aloud made me feel as if he had struck me. “Have you found a way to heal him yet?”

  “We have still not been able to identify the plague,” Jak said. “Elspeth, you should get some food and rest. Pavo has given Domick something to make him sleep now, for his pulse was racing dangerously, and there was a risk that his heart would give out. He will not wake again for some hours. Seely will come for you the minute there is something to tell.”

  I shivered and nodded, and he took my elbow and made me sit down, saying that Seely would return soon to take me to my sleeping chamber.

  “I do not think I will be able to sleep after this,” I said.

  “I could give you something to help,” Jak said, “but I know you eschew such remedies. Why not bathe and eat and have a look around if you cannot sleep immediately. This is truly an amazing place, Elspeth. You might find Dell and ask her to tell you how she began to communicate with the main computermachine here. Without that, none of this would have been possible.”

  That got through the haze of confusion I was feeling. “Dell communicated with computermachines?” I asked.

  He smiled. “Not just any one. Dell communicated with the central computermachine, which masters this entire complex and all of the lesser machines.” Then he sobered, looking past me to Domick. “We have named the computermachine that runs this healing center ‘Pavo’ in tribute to my old master, but I do not truly think of it as a live being. Dell has taken the opposite point of view. She believes that a computermachine is simply a different kind of being. This approach enabled her to do what I could not, for all my rational theories. Indeed, it was her struggle to communicate with it as one life-form to another that led to the discovery that it can both speak and listen.”

  “Speak and listen?” I said in flat disbelief. I stood and Jak led me to his machine.

  Jak nodded. “The Beforetimers gave computermachines voices. The one here sounds like a woman. I learned to communicate with computermachines by tapping on the scribed letters, and I continue to communicate in this way, making instructional sentences on the screen. But Dell speaks to it aloud, asking it to explain words and concepts and explaining her own questions. I would like to do as she does, for I see her results. But although I am a teknoguilder with machine empathy, I simply cannot make myself regard a computermachine as a live thing. I see it as a tool, but Dell sees it as a living thing with its own intelligence and ideas, and that approach has allowed her to do far more with it. Dell made the computermachine grow crops of hay and wheat and lucerne in vats on the thirteenth level, which we give to the wild herd. But her true interest is in what the computermachine will not explain or show us. You see, there are whole areas on some levels that we cannot enter, because we need code words or sets of numbers that we do not have.

  “That ought to be the end of it, but Dell has the idea that if she interacts with the main controlling computermachine for long enough, teaching it, stimulating its intelligence, and developing its reasoning ability, she will eventually be able to convince it to allow us access to deeper programs that will tell us more about the Beforetime and give us greater knowledge and power.”

  Seeing my look of consternation, he went on to explain that a program was a set of instructions given to a computermachine, which told it what to do. In the case of the dominant computermachine in the complex, its program gave it access to other computermachines. In a sense, it was the program that was the computermachine. “Unlike all the other computermachines here, such as Pavo, the main computermachine in this complex can learn new information and integrate it with old information. That is why Dell is so certain it is capable of eventually understanding why it should give us access to its deepest secrets.” He shrugged. “I admire all that she has accomplished, but I must say that I think Dell is wrong in imagining a computermachine program can alter itself enough to sympathize with our need. On the other hand, when I think about what her approach has managed to accomplish, I am prepared to be proven wrong.”

  “Do you know what the purpose of this place was in the Beforetime?” We were now walking along the green-lit passages toward the elevating chamber.

  “It was constructed specifically as a shelter in case of exactly such a world-changing disaster as the Great White. I do not know why the Beforetimers did not use it. Maybe the end of that time came too swiftly. But unless Dell succeeds with Ines, we will never know the truth of it.”

  “Ines?” I echoed, my skin prickling, for in one of my visions, the Beforetime Misfits had spoken of contacting Ines at Obernewtyn.

  “INES are the letters representing the specific type of advanced program contained in the central computermachine, but Dell uses it as a proper name.”

  “Where does Dell speak with the main computermachine?” I asked, trying to keep the excitement from my voice.

  “You can address it from anywhere within the complex, and it will respond,” Jak said. “You only need give an order using its letters as a name. I will show you. Ines, can you produce some music?”

  “Do you have a preference, sir?” asked the attractive voice of a woman that came from everywhere, like light. This was the voice I had heard only recently in the recurring dream of walking in a dark tunnel and hearing the drip of water!

  “Just something soft and soothing,” Jak said.

  Music began, of an exquisitely complex type I had never heard before, but I was still reeling at the voice.

  “Ines, stop the music now, please,” Jak said, and the music stopped.

  I was about to ask why he had stopped it when I saw that Seely had arrived with the key to the demon band. Jak took it from her and bade me farewell, saying he needed to return to Domick. Seely led me on to the elevating chamber, asking me anxiously how Domick was. I muttered something, still too astonished by Jak’s demonstration to concentrate on anything else. At the elevating chamber, Seely pressed her palm to a square panel in the wall alongside the door. When we entered, she touched one of the listed numbers on the wall and one in a row of colored buttons. This time I
felt myself grow heavy, and when the chamber’s vibrating ceased, I felt myself become light.

  Out of the elevator, Seely led me only a few steps to a gray door in a corridor filled with gray doors. She touched the door, and it slid open to reveal a small square chamber containing a bed, a table and chair, and a glass box about the height of a tall man in one corner. There was a single door in the room, and Seely said with a slight blush that it led to a privy where I could relieve myself. She pointed to the glass box standing upright in the corner. “You bathe there, and drying sheets and some clothes are there.” She pointed to a cupboard. She indicated a panel against the wall and said I had only to lay my hand on it if I wanted the lights out. Pressed again, the light would be restored.

  After she left, the door hissed closed. I stretched out on the bed, knowing I ought to clean myself but feeling unable to face the intricacies of the bathing box. I thought of Domick’s claim that Rushton still served Ariel. He probably meant that Ariel had foreseen that Rushton would reject me, which would cause me pain. Despite the light’s brightness and my thoughts’ churning, I slept without dreams.

  I woke groggy and needing desperately to relieve myself. I went reluctantly to investigate the small room beside the bed. The light flickered on as I entered what was little more than a small cabinet containing a seat with a hole in the center. It looked like a privy, but it was so smooth and clean and sweet smelling that I sat down uneasily. When I stood, a great jet of water burst out and cleaned the bowl. The loud and unexpected noise made me stagger backward from the cubicle, trip over the threshold, and sit down hard. For a moment I sat there, gaping with shock, then I burst out laughing, thinking how utterly foolish I must have looked.

  But I sobered as I remembered what Ariel had done to Rushton and Domick. I had felt too overwhelmed to make any sense of it before I slept, but now it seemed sheer lunacy that Ariel would prepare Domick physically and mentally to bring plague to the west coast if he intended only to taunt me. Surely he could have gone through the motions of sending Domick with plague, without infecting him. But Domick said Ariel was convinced that what he had seen would alter if he did anything differently. Yet he had done something different. He had told Domick the truth, and he had bidden him taunt me with it. I had long thought him to be defective, but Domick had called him mad. Perhaps his madness, like his hatred for me, arose from the knowledge that I was the Seeker and that he could not fulfill his destiny as the Destroyer without my first attempting to fulfill my quest.

  I had never thought of it before, but Atthis had always said that only if I failed would the Destroyer have his chance. Perhaps what I had always regarded as a race was in fact a complex game in which the Destroyer must wait for the Seeker to make a certain move before he could make his own. Certainly Domick’s words suggested that Ariel intended to allow me to find the Beforetime weaponmachines that had caused the Great White and then prevent my destroying them. It was little wonder he hated me, then, for it meant he must protect the very person who stood in the way of what he most wanted. I had always thought of him as my nemesis, but for the first time, I understood that I was also his nemesis. Even when he knew I would thwart him, he had to allow it, for fear that he might prevent my doing what I needed to as the Seeker!

  The ironic notion made me shiver, because I could imagine the towering rage Rushton would have unleashed in opposing Ariel with an image of me!

  I became aware of a stale odor rising from my body, composed of human and horse sweat and sheer un-cleanliness. Revolted, I sloughed off my filthy clothes and padded across the smooth floor to the glass cabinet. I stepped into it with some trepidation and saw three circles on the wall: blue, red, and yellow. I touched blue hesitantly and gave a shriek as icy water cascaded down. I slapped at the red circle, and the water became instantly a boiling torrent. Pressing myself to one side of the cabinet, I pushed the yellow circle. Deliciously warm water flowed out, and I stepped into it and hastily pulled the glass door closed.

  I stood for a long time under the miniature waterfall, turning and sighing with pleasure, as the sweat and dirt of my long journey sluiced away down a small round drain hole in the floor. Marveling at the constancy of the flow and temperature of the water and wondering without too much urgency how to turn it off, I noticed three small transparent levers against the wall. Curious, I touched one warily. A gleaming blob of scented matter fell to the floor of the closet and washed away, releasing a soft cloud of perfume. Guessing it to be soap, I pressed the lever again, catching the scented blob and rubbing it over my hair and body. The scent of roses enveloped me. The other two levers had different scented matter.

  Once I had washed the bubbles from my body, I pressed the yellow lever again, and to my relief, the water ceased immediately. Pleased to have mastered the cabinet as well as rendering myself clean, I opened the door and took a drying sheet from the cabinet, noticing several pairs of the same blue trousers that Dell and Seely wore and three different-sized pairs of boots. I disliked the smooth stiffness of the cloth, but I could not bear my own clothes. Dressing in the queer trousers, I noticed a second pile of short-sleeved shirts made of some thin, very fine, white material. I put one of these on and pulled on a pair of soft thick socks. The boots looked heavy, but in fact they were light and very soft, and the sole was spongy to the touch. I found a pair that fit and put them on, marveling that something so ugly could be so comfortable. Then I worked the tangles and snarls from my wet hair with a comb I found on another shelf. Leaving it loose to dry, I undertook the difficult business of washing my filthy clothes in the water cupboard. Before long, they were squeezed out and hung around the room to dry. Seely had not come back, and after trying the door for a moment, I gave up and lay on my stomach on the bed.

  I thought of Rushton with sorrow and guilt, knowing that he had been tortured simply because he had loved me. I could not bear to think how he must have suffered whenever he looked at me, despite suppressing the memories of what had happened to him. No wonder he had turned away from me. I shuddered to remember that Dameon had pressed me to force Rushton to look at me and speak with me and face me, so certain had he been that Rushton loved me! He had not known, as I now did, that love had been most cruelly bonded to pain and fear and torment in the Master of Obernewtyn. Every time Rushton had to deal with me, it must have rocked his sanity. Perhaps Ariel had hoped that the sight of me would eventually drive him mad, and this might have happened, had I remained in the Land and taken the Empath guildmaster’s advice. Maybe that was what Mika had meant by saying that Rushton still served Ariel.

  Before I saw Rushton again, I must think well and long about what to do.

  I must have dozed, because I started awake when I heard a soft tap at the door. I called out as I rose, and Seely burst in, saying, “I’m so sorry, Guildmistress, but you need to come at once. The sky is full of smoke. Dell wants you to see if you can farseek Merret to find out what is happening.”

  “Merret? But where is she?”

  “She went last night to take the greathorse back to Halfmoon Bay and to see if your friends are safe.”

  “Last night…but wait! Are you saying there is a fire in Halfmoon Bay?” I asked as we went back out into the purple-lit passage.

  “We do not know, but there is a great deal of smoke coming from that direction. Blyss is frightened for Merret,” Seely said.

  “How long have I been asleep?” I asked as we hastened down the passage.

  “Since yesterday afternoon. It is very early in the morning now,” Seely answered.

  We were soon entering the elevating chamber, and I experienced almost as much nausea and alarm as on the previous day. Unable to help myself, I asked Seely what would happen if the chamber broke and we were caught between levels. She gave me a slightly uneasy look but said that Ines would know how to fix it.

  “Ines,” I echoed.

  She gave me a measuring look, then said, “I know Jak does not like us thinking of a computermachine as being ali
ve, but I find it hard not to do so. Ines speaks to me and responds to me. She remembers what I have said to her, what I like and do not like, and she asks many questions of me. When I ask her questions, she tries her best to answer me and to explain when I don’t understand. I feel like she cares about me.”

  I did not know how to respond, for was it not a computermachine that had once tortured me and Rushton and that had helped Ariel destroy Rushton’s love for me? Was it not a computermachine that had caused the Great White? Had those computermachines all had names and soft, soothing voices that could be evoked?

  The elevating chamber came to a halt, and the doors slid open; the scent of fresh air seemed intoxicating. I almost ran to the metal steps, and as I mounted them two at a time and burst out into the chilly sweetness of the predawn air, I thought of Hannah telling Cassy that the false sunlight that lit Newrome was not as sweet as true sunlight. I stopped to wait for Seely, relishing being outside. The wind riffled my hair, and I was glad I had not braided it.

  Seely joined me and then took the lead as we wove our way through the ruins toward the watchtower. She told me that Alun had first seen the smoke.

  We crossed the square, but there were no signs now of the horses or the saddles and packages they had carried. Someone stumbling into the square would not have the slightest clue that people lived close by. At the watchtower, I followed Seely through a door and up the steps, thinking how cleverly they had been constructed. The top platform was screened by the jagged outer wall, and here sat the beastspeaker and empath Alun, eating an apple. With an exclamation, he leapt to his feet and greeted me with delight. But I could only gape, for beyond him, an immense column of gray smoke was billowing into the pale blue sky.