Her gun was still pointed at his head.
“Sholt,” he said. “Call me Ted. I came this morning.”
He was holding a glass. She realised after a moment that it had milk in it, that his chest was covered in splatter and what might be milky vomit.
“Don’t corner them,” Ted Sholt said, “and don’t put them in a position where they cannot possibly do whatever they seem to be doing. That makes them …” He glanced up, saw her face. “Oh. You know that.”
“Yes.”
“What … did you have to …” He was asking her if she had killed one of his friends.
“No,” Edie said, and they shared a moment of stark understanding: not that it will probably make a great deal of difference.
One of the zumbi brushed past, very close, and she jerked away. He pursued, brushing against her. She turned. He turned, too, slack-jawed face following her own like a reflection. She bobbed. He bobbed. When she straightened, so did he, and when she stopped still, he did too. She turned, walked straight ahead, and he stopped, his path blocked by a chair. He stood still, hips resting against the chair’s back, making no effort to sidestep, as if the concept was far beyond him.
“I’ve been trying to feed them,” Sholt said, following her gaze. “They don’t swallow. You can make them, but it just comes back up again. I’m not sure why they’re still breathing. I’d have thought …” He stopped. She looked at him again, seeing him properly for the first time. He must have come in here in spite of—no, because of—what had happened. No gun, and no lantern. Just a bottle of milk and a lot of faith, or maybe this counted as charity.
Plucky little hamster.
“I’m Edie.”
He nodded. “Hello.”
“Have you been in?” She gestured up the line of carriages towards Abel Jasmine’s office.
“No,” Ted Sholt said. He raised the milk, lowered it again. Edie saw him for a moment in her mind, patiently pouring the stuff into the mouths of men he knew, even loved, and having them gargle at him, or choke, or let the milk trickle out down their chins.
They moved on. Corridor. Living spaces. Galley kitchen.
And then the Code Room—where Edie worked before the night of Clarissa Foxglove and the great train burglary.
Ted Sholt made a little noise of grief.
There were Ruskinites in the Code Room, or men and women who had been Ruskinites. Edie recognised a boy named Paul, a glassblower. He had made a set of wine glasses for her and Frankie a year ago, beautiful things. He was lying on the ground, staring at the ceiling. She waved her hand in front of his face.
“Glah,” he said. When she did it again, he repeated the one word, with exactly the same intonation, and she thought for a moment he was alive, still in residence, still Paul, but it was the only response she could get from him. Glah, glah, glah, glah … She had a moment of horror when she thought he was never going to stop, that the eerie, sad little noise would follow her through the train, but when he had said it exactly as many times as she had moved her hand across his vision, he stopped.
Edie moved on. Frankie, I love you. Please don’t say “glah.”
At the door to the room which was apparently Frankie’s laboratory, she found two Ruskinites and a crowd of soldiers, and a woman from the support staff. They were moving forward, bouncing gently off the wall, then moving forward again, as if the architecture of the train might somehow be worn away by their repeated attempts. As they walked, they rose and fell slightly, and Edie realised after a moment that they were standing on another man, or his corpse, because he had been slowly flattened and pulped by the footfalls. As she drew closer, she realised that he had not actually died yet. Nor was he trying to scream; whatever had happened had removed even his sense of his own shattering.
Problem: this was the only door.
Problem: these lost ones were in the way and would crush fellow humans who intervened between them and their objective.
Problem: Edie needed to be on the other side of this wall, and not admit the crowd to Frankie’s laboratory.
And then someone grabbed her by the neck and hit her with something, and she saw stars and Ted Sholt rammed against the window, and then the same someone started choking her.
No time. Her assailant was killing her. Strangulation is fast. Her vision was brown already.
She moved.
Drop your weight. Never mind that it constricts your breathing. You can’t breathe anyway. Find your base, your connection to the ground. Yes, there. Now: snuggle closer to your attacker. Lock his arm where it is. Grab him by the elbow and bicep and twist your whole body, pivot on your feet. Ninety degrees, more, away from that bicep. Project your hands forward, as if you were pushing a grand piano with the heels of your hands.
Tai Otoshi.
It was like Yama Arashi, but for stranglers.
A man flew over her hip into the desk. He reared up, bloody-faced. There is no compromise in this fight. No pain, no retreat. Edie twisted with his movement and out of the line of his attack, then scooped his neck in a fluid circle and dropped him on his back across the sharp edge of the mahogany veneer. She hoped it would paralyse him for a few seconds, but he was heavier than she had realised and she heard a sharp snap. Iriminage, but she hadn’t meant to kill him. She peered down at the slack face, and recognised it.
Denis. Frankie’s assistant in Addeh Sikkim. Big, friendly, patient Denis.
After a moment, Edie said “Shit.” It came out croaky and loud. And then hated herself. And then hated herself more, because, as she started to say there was no other way, she realised that there was, had always been.
I knew the trick to this one when I was a wee slip of a girl.
She checked on Sholt and found he was conscious, but his collarbone was broken on the left side. She moved him gently back into the previous carriage and told him to stay put, then levered herself up and out, through the skylight, and onto the roof of the train.
It was warm up on the roof, and pleasantly calm. Abruptly, she didn’t want to go back inside. Actually, she wanted desperately not to go back inside. But down at the rear of the train she could see her soldiers. Songbird looked up, hope in his face. Edie sighed.
Yes, of course. He—and the others—needed her to fix all this. Not to be afraid or confused or alarmed. The Bloody Countess never wavers, ey.
She moved forward, and lowered herself through the ventilation panel into the laboratory carriage, holding her breath and praying.
Frankie’s laboratory was empty. In the middle of the room there was a plinth, and on it was a gutted shell of Frankie’s strange making, a Ruskinite casing for a Hakote device. There was nothing inside. Coils of cable hung from the ceiling to the plinth, messy and typically Frankie. The room was calm, and clean.
Edie searched methodically, and tried not to rush. She looked under tables and in cupboards, opening each one with a horrid anticipation of finding Frankie standing inside. A stack of pencils fell on her and she screamed sharply, then threw them with considerable force across the room, her fear changing its face: what if Frankie was not here? If she was not in the lab, then where? Gone, wandering, mindless in the night? Eating the dead outside? Or taken? Was this a kidnapping, rather than an accident? Edie knew of someone who would consider a thousand murdered a good diversion.
She turned, and found her answer: a single word written in chalk on the blackboard: Edie! And underneath, a note, folded neatly. The handwriting was Frankie’s.
Edie grabbed the note and ripped it open.
Edie. I know they will send you. I know that you will come and see what is here and I am sorry. No one should see this.
You will need to know that I have done this. It is not a trick or a trap. It is not Shem Shem Tsien or the Russians or anyone else. It is just me, and I am a prideful idiot. I am alive. In the heart of the storm, there was a safe place, where the field was not projected so strongly. I saw what was happening and I knew, my Hakote eyes could see, and I stood
there to preserve myself. I tried to keep Denis with me, but the penumbra took him. I think he was angry with me.
It began with truth, which was splendid. It was a gentle thing. We asked one another questions and congratulated each other on the rightness of the answers. We played with lies, telling outrageous ones and then subtler ones and taking joy in seeing—though it was not actually like sight, more like touch—that those lies were not in accordance with the objective universe.
Sometimes it was sobering, inside one’s head. I understand that I have treated you poorly. I know exactly how poorly. We cried, all of us, for a while, and then we confessed our sins. They were not so many, nor so exciting. We shared forgiveness, and knew that was real, too. I thought I had achieved everything I had set out to do.
And in the moment of thinking it, I knew that I was wrong. So wrong. The machine was too powerful. We had only to look at one another to see not only truths but outcomes of our future interactions. We had only to consider something in the wider world to know about it. Most of them, Edie, they lacked the background to understand, but I saw the mathematics rolling out in front of me and I knew, immediately, what was coming—my knowing and what was gifted to me by the machine ran together, each trying to outpace the other. I cried out, told them all to leave, but they were raptured by the Engine. The second stage, Edie. Knowledge.
I grabbed Denis and I ran for the place in front of the machine which was clear of its function, but he shrugged me off. He shouted that I was a fool, that I had killed them all, and when he said it there was one of those awful silences and they all heard and knew, knew it was true. In that moment, each and every one of them knew that death was inevitable. And worse, Edie. They knew what death was. I have never heard such screams. I did not see death, Edie. I was in the eye of the storm. I went to switch off the machine, but it was too late.
Too late. The third stage began. They began to know everything. The air was thick. Everything seemed to become solid around me, safe in my little cocoon of life. I watched the world around me become sterile. Devoid of life. And yet they did not fall. Their bodies continued.
Denis was right, Edie. I was careless. I must spread the load—but that is enough. I will not tell my secrets now. The government will want this, as a weapon, and they cannot have it. It is so much more awful than it seems.
Have my people taken care of, please. They deserve that much. They have died for their country, or their God. But do not misunderstand: they will not recover. I have killed them.
I have taken the heart of the machine. I will carry on my work one way and another. And Edie, there is one other thing also which I realise now, as I picture you standing, reading this, shaking your head at my foolishness and still so glad that I am safe, even in the face of this horror that I have made. I have taken the heart of the machine, but I have left my own behind.
You are my heart, Edie. Always, you.
Edie stood in Frankie’s lab for ten minutes and stared at the empty plinth. She looked up, and realised that Frankie must have gone out the same way she came in. How many hours? Ten? Twelve? Frankie was doing a flat drop. She would take what she had and run. She might have a bag somewhere, or she might not, but she was gone as best she knew how.
Edie gathered the papers, the victims, and hid them away. She hid the Lovelace. She mothballed her only real home. Because it was her job. Because she believed more than ever that the world didn’t need Frankie’s machine or Frankie’s desperate conviction or anything of Frankie except her silence. Build a better mousetrap. Fix the mill wheel before it breaks. Leave the bloody secrets of the universe alone.
“Bring her home, Edie,” Abel Jasmine said in Whitehall. “If someone else gets hold of her, they might force her to … well. Bring her home.”
Edie went.
She traced Frankie to Salzburg, then Budapest, then Delhi and Beijing, then back again. Frankie was a genius. She had a way of distracting you. People saw curious machines and worried about them. They celebrated breakthroughs in mathematics made by obscure, hard-working local academics who had had a random conversation with a slender, bookish woman in a café or a bar. They got stock tips derived from some strange, inspired formula, made a fortune and went on holiday. Frankie herself, with a schoolmistress’s bag in one hand and the secrets of the universe in her head, leaving a trail of brilliant, cometary solutions to impossible problems, was weirdly invisible. All the same, you could find her from time to time, if you knew how. Edie could. Shem Shem Tsien could.
They played cat and mouse—or cat and mouse and dog, perhaps—from one corner of the world to another. It got to be a bad joke among the intelligence services of thirty countries. Where one went, so also the other two, and mayhem and bombs and guns inevitably followed. They fought, they fled, they raged, and nothing changed. It was as if the world was elastic, and always returned to the same rotten, stupid shape.
To this day, Edie has no idea where or when Frankie died, only that she must have, because at last she truly wasn’t there any longer.
On the bus, Edie cries dry tears and silently tells Frankie she is sorry for waiting so long to change everything. From the ugly handbag comes a consoling nose. She laughs. Yes. Whatever else, Bastion is for ever.
He arrived very small and badly injured, late on a September evening. He had marbles instead of eyes and a vague, confused expression of discontent. A stray, Edie thought, of course. Frankie could never resist such a thing. And with the dog, a last letter.
Edie tipped the waiting cabman and carried the whole package indoors. She knew she should call Abel Jasmine, or rather, whoever had taken over his job. But by then she had persuaded herself she no longer cared, and for sure she no longer trusted anything to do with governments.
Dearest Edie,
Please look after this one. He has a hero’s heart, for he was raised among elephants from Addeh Sikkim, and all his brothers and sisters were casualties of Shem Shem Tsien’s most recent monstrousness. I have done what I can for him. He reminds me a little of you. He does not know when to give up. He loves hugely and imprudently and his forgiveness inspires awe in me, as does your own.
When I saw Mathew in the street with Daniel the first time, I thought I had gone mad. I saw with my own eyes their deaths listed on the municipal noticeboard. Daniel told me they escaped and came to England, but he thought I was dead.
I do not love him. I do not know my son. But their existence has changed everything in me and now I understand what I must do. Do you remember Germany?
I should have understood then, but I had you, and I had no son. I should have understood when England ignored Hungary’s pain in ’56 or Prague’s in ’68. I should have seen it in Vietnam and in Hiroshima. We can land on the Moon, Edie. We cannot be good. We are wicked. This is a wicked world. There are islands of joy, but they are small and the tide is rising, and even on dry land there are those who would embrace the tide. It cannot be. Not any more.
It cannot stand. The world must change. We must change.
I will make us change. My book will be written in words which cannot be ignored. A veritable Hakote book, a book of mathematics and revolution against the nature of man. I mean to publish it very soon now.
And if I do not, there is another way. I have made a copy of the book and of the calibration drum, Edie. The book alone will only begin the process as I have arranged it. I have sent it to that funny little museum, with a bequest so that they will not discard it. If my copy is lost, that is where you must start. But Edie, this is vital: if ever there is a reason to change the settings of the Engine—I cannot think what it would be—you will need the calibration drum. I have given it to the only other person I trust. He will hide it, Edie, but if you ever need it he knows to give it to you. If I am prevented in my purpose, go to Wistithiel, put things in motion. Change the world for me.
I love you for ever. I am sorry I cannot love you now. Frankie
With decades between her and Frankie’s confessional letter,
Edie alights from the single-decker bus and clutches her bag like a woman who fears the temporal world for its sin and iniquity. She wanders as if aimless or bewildered, and her long, roundabout route brings her by happy coincidence to a convent on a dull, dreary street, where Sister Harriet Spork keeps her vigil for a life lived in wickedness.
Edie sits on a public bench and feeds the pigeons. She sits for an hour, with a Bible propped against her hip in case anyone comes, and watches and waits. And finally, her patience is rewarded. Not Joe Spork, whose approach she suspects will be less direct, but a long black car with tinted windows. Edie peers myopically at a seagull, and gets up to shoo it away from her breadcrumbs. She waggles her hands vaguely at the bird, and it glowers murderously before taking wing. Her return path brings her into the orbit of the car, and she glances in to see a robed, shrouded figure at the wheel and another in the second seat, whose stooping, hesitant motions she finds nauseatingly familiar: quick quick slow. And then she looks into the back and sees the passenger as a car, passing in the other direction, illuminates his shrouded head from the side, and his profile is briefly visible beneath the veil.
Edie stares. Belatedly, she hides her face, panic and outrage rising inside her.
Impossible!
But Edie no longer uses that word, having long ago learned its worth.
XII
Nzzzzzeeeeyaoooooowwww;
not strictly a nun;
taken.
Mercer Cradle stands in his sister’s living room with a vastly valuable and possibly insanely dangerous gold bee in one hand and makes zooming noises. It is the defective bee Joe was given by Ted Sholt, of course, the others being out and about causing consternation in the wider world. Mercer is holding the thing between thumb and forefinger and trying to persuade it, by means of demonstration and sound effects and occasional words of encouragement, to take wing.
Mercer did not begin this scientific experiment immediately upon viewing the small collection of trophies which Joe and his sister brought back from the riverside storeroom. His initial position was that the bee should be imprisoned and X-rayed, MRI’d and electron-microscoped, until it yielded whatever alarming secrets it possessed. Joe Spork observed that these options required equipment they did not have and Polly Cradle speculated that attacking the entity might provoke it, whereupon Mercer adopted a strategy of aloof watchfulness in which Joe was permitted to examine the patient while Mercer loomed nearby with a lump hammer—a sort of short sledge—which Polly had formerly used to drive the iron pilings into the walls of her house.