From his description of the vehicle the thugs had driven and the clothes they had worn, Cord knew them. “They are a local—” she said, and stopped.
“Gang?” Delrakhones offered.
She shrugged. “A gang that keeps pictures of fictional gangs from old speelys on their walls.”
“How fascinating!” Arsibalt proclaimed, while Fraa Delrakhones was absorbing this detail. “It is, then, a sort of meta-gang….”
“But they still do gangy stuff for real,” Cord said, “as I don’t have to tell you.”
It became clear from the nature of the questions Delrakhones asked that he was trying to work out which iconography the gang subscribed to. He did not seem to grasp something that was clear enough to me and Cord: namely, that there were extras who would beat up avout simply because it was more entertaining than not beating them up—not because they subscribed to some ridiculous theory of what we were. He was assuming that rapscallions bothered to have theories.
Cord and I therefore became frustrated, then bored (and as Orolo liked to say, boredom is a mask that frustration wears). I caught her eye. We drifted to one side. When no one objected, we fled.
As mentioned, we Tenners had a bundle of turrets instead of a proper nave. The skinniest turret was a spiral stair that led up to the triforium, which was a sort of raised gallery that ran all the way around the inside of the chancel above the screens and below the soaring clerestory windows. At one end of our triforium was another little stair that led up to the bell-ringers’ place. Cord was interested in that. I watched her gaze traveling up the bell-ropes to where they vanished into the heights of the Praesidium. I could tell she wouldn’t rest until she had seen what was at the other ends of those ropes. So we went to the other end of the triforium and began to climb another stair. This one zigzagged up the tower that anchored the southwestern corner of the Mynster.
Mathic architects were helpless when it came to walls. Pillars they could do. Arches they were fine with. Vaults, which were just three-dimensional arches, they knew everything about. But ask them to construct a simple wall and they would go to pieces. Where anyone else in the world would construct a wall, they’d fill in the space with a system of arches and tracery. When people complained about wind, vermin, and other things that would be kept out of a normal building by walls, they might be troubled to fill up a vacancy with a stained-glass window. But we hadn’t got round to putting all of those in yet. On a windy and rainy day it made buildings like this hellish. But on a day like this one it was fine because you could always see. As we scaled the flights of the southwestern tower we had views down into the Mynster, and out over the concent.
The upper reaches of this tower—the place where it devolved into piers and pinnacles, the highest part, in other words, that you could get to without ladders and mountaineering equipment—was at about the same altitude as the Warden Regulant’s headquarters. It sported one of the most elaborate works of stone-carving in the whole concent, a sort of cupola/tower/walk-through statue depicting planets and moons and some of the early cosmographers who had studied them. Built into the middle of this was a portcullis: a grid of bars that could be cranked up and down. At the moment, it had been drawn up out of the way, giving us the freedom to attack yet another stair. This one was cut right into the top of a flying buttress. It would take us up and inwards to the Praesidium. If the portcullis had been closed, we’d have had nowhere else to go, unless we wanted to cross over a sort of bridge into the Warden Regulant’s quarters.
Cord and I passed through the cupola, moving slowly so that she could take in the carvings and the mechanism. Then we were on our way up. I let her go ahead of me so that she could get an unobstructed view, and so that I could steady her if she got dizzy. For we were high above the ground here, climbing over the curve of a stone buttress that seemed about as thick as a bird’s bone when you looked at it from the ground. She gripped the iron banisters with both hands and took it slowly and seemed to enjoy it. Then we passed through an embrasure (sort of a deep complicated Mathic archway), built into the corner of the Praesidium at about the level of the belfries.
From here there was only one way up: a series of stairs that spiraled up the inside of the Praesidium just within its tracery walls. Few tourists were game for that much climbing, and many of the avout were extramuros, so we had the whole Praesidium to ourselves. I let her enjoy the view down to the chancel floor. The courts of the Wardens, immediately below us, were cloister-shaped, which is to say that each had a big square hole in the middle where the Praesidium shot through it, lined with a walkway with sight-lines down to the chancel and up to the starhenge.
Cord traced the bell-ropes up from the balcony and satisfied herself that they were in fact connected to a carillon. But from here it was obvious that other things too were connected to the bells: shafts and chains leading down from the chronochasm, where automatic mechanisms chimed the hours. It was inevitable that she’d want to see this. Up we went, trudging around like a couple of ants spiraling up a well shaft, pausing now and then to catch our breaths and to give Cord leisure to inspect the clock-work, and to figure out how the stones had been fitted together. This part of the building was much simpler because there was no need to contend with vaults and buttresses, so the architects had really gotten out of hand with the tracery. The walls were a fractal foam of hand-carved, interlocking stone. She was fascinated. I couldn’t stand to look at it. The amount of time I had spent, as a fid, cleaning bird droppings off this stone, and the clock-works inside…
“So, you can’t come up here except during Apert,” she asserted at one point.
“What makes you think that?”
“Well, you’re not allowed to have contact with people outside your math, right? But if you and the One-offs and the Hundreders and Thousanders could all use this stairway any time you wanted, you’d be bumping into each other.”
“Look at how the stairway is designed,” I said. “There’s almost no part of it that we can’t see. So, we just keep our distance from each other.”
“What if it’s dark? Or what if you go to the top and bump into someone at the starhenge?”
“Remember that portcullis we went through?”
“On top of the tower?”
“Yeah. Well, remember there’s three more towers. Each one has a similar portcullis.”
“One for each of the maths?”
“Exactly. During the hours of darkness, all but one of them is closed by the Master of the Keys. That’s a hierarch—a deputy of the Warden Regulant. So on one night, the Tenners might have sole access to the stair and the starhenge. Next night it might be the Hundreders. And so on.”
When we reached the altitude where the Century weight was poised on its rail, we paused for a minute so that Cord could look at it. We also looked out through the tracery of the south wall to the machine hall where she worked. I retraced my morning’s walk, and picked out the house of Jesry’s family on the hill.
Cord was still looking for flaws in our Discipline. “These wardens and so on—”
“Hierarchs,” I said.
“They communicate with all of the maths, I guess?”
“And also with the Ita, and the Saecular world, and other concents.”
“So, when you talk to one of them—”
“Well, look,” I said, “one of the misconceptions people have is that the maths are supposed to be hermetically sealed. But that was never the idea. The kinds of cases you are asking about are handled by disciplined conduct. We keep our distance from those not of our math. We are silent and hooded when necessary to avoid leakage of information. If we absolutely must communicate with someone in another math, we do it through the hierarchs. And they have all sorts of special training so that they can talk to, say, a Thousander in a way that won’t allow any Saecular information to pass into his mind. That’s why hierarchs have those outfits, those hairstyles—those literally have not changed in 3700 years. They speak only in a very con
servative ancient version of Orth. And we also have ways to communicate without speech. So, for example, if Fraa Orolo wishes to observe a particular star five nights in a row, he’ll explain his plan to the Primate, and if it seems reasonable, the Primate will direct the Master of the Keys to keep our portcullis open those nights but leave all the others closed. All of them are visible from the maths, so the Millenarian cosmographers can look down and see how it is and know that they won’t be using the starhenge tonight. And we can also use the labyrinths between the maths for certain kinds of communication, such as passing objects or people back and forth. But there’s nothing we can do to prevent aerocraft from flying over, or loud music from being heard over the walls. In an earlier age, skyscrapers looked down on us for two centuries!”
That last detail was of interest to Cord. “Did you see those old I-beams stacked in the machine hall?”
“Ah—were those the frames of the skyscrapers?”
“It’s hard to imagine what else they’d be. We have a box of old phototypes showing those things being dragged to our place by teams of slaves.”
“Do the phototypes have date prints?”
“Yeah. They’re from about seven hundred years ago.”
“What does the landscape in the background look like? A ruined city, or—”
She shook her head. “Forest with big trees. In some of those pictures they are rolling the beams over logs.”
“Well, there was a collapse of civilization right around 2800, so it all fits together,” I said.
The chronochasm was laced through with shafts and chains that in some places converged to clock-movements. The chains that led up from the weights terminated up here in clusters of bearings and gears.
Cord had been growingly exasperated by something, and now, finally, she let it out: “This just isn’t the way to do it!”
“Do what?”
“Build a clock that’s supposed to keep going for thousands of years!”
“Why not?”
“Well, just look at all those chains, for one thing! All the pins, the bearing surfaces, the linkages—each one a place where something can break, wear out, get dirty, corrode…what were the designers thinking, anyway?”
“They were thinking that plenty of avout would always be here to maintain it,” I answered. “But I take your point. Some of the other Millennium Clocks are more like what you have in mind: designed so that they can run for millennia with no maintenance at all. It just depends on what sort of statement the designer wanted to make.”
That gave her much food for thought, so we climbed in silence for a while. I took the lead, since, above a certain point, there was no direct route. We had to dodge and wind among diverse catwalks and stairs, each of which had been put there to provide access to a movement. Which was fine with Cord. In fact she spent so much time working out how the clock functioned that I became restless, and thought about the meal being served at this moment in our refectory. Then I recollected that it was Apert and I could go extramuros if I wanted, and beg for a cheeseburg. Cord, accustomed to being able to eat whenever she pleased, wasn’t concerned about this at all.
She watched a complex of bone-like levers wrestling with one another. “Those remind me of the part I made for Sammann this morning.”
I held up my hands. “Don’t tell me his name—or anything,” I pleaded.
“Why can’t you talk to the Ita?” she asked, suddenly irritated. “It’s stupid. Some of them are very intelligent.”
Yesterday I would have laughed at any artisan who was so presumptuous as to pass judgment on the intelligence of anyone who lived in a concent—even an Ita—but Cord was my sib. She shared a lot of my sequences and had as much intrinsic intelligence as I. Fraas were kept sterile by substances in our food so that we could not impregnate suurs and breed a species of more intelligent humans inside the concents. Genetically, we were all cut from the same cloth.
“It’s kind of like hygiene,” I said.
“You think the Ita are dirty?”
“Hygiene isn’t really about dirt. It’s about germs. It’s to prevent the spread of sequences that are dangerous if they are allowed to propagate. We don’t think the Ita are dirty in the sense of not washing. But their whole purpose is to work with information that spreads in a promiscuous way.”
“Why—what is the point? Who came up with all these stupid rules? What were they afraid of?”
She was quite loud. I’d have cringed if she’d talked this way in the Refectory. But I was happy to hear her out alone in this chasm of patient, deaf machines. As we resumed our ascent, I searched for some explanation to which her mind might be open. We had passed above most of the complicated stuff now—the machines that moved the clock’s dials. All that remained were half a dozen vertical shafts that ran up through holes in the roof to connect with things on the starhenge: polar drives for the telescopes, and the zenith synchronizer that adjusted the clock’s time every day at noon—every clear day, anyway. Our final approach to the starhenge was a spiral stair that coiled around the largest of those shafts: the one that rotated the great Telescope of Saunts Mithra and Mylax.
“That big machine you use to cut the metal—”
“It’s called a five-axis electrical discharge mill.”
“I noticed it had cranks, made for human hands. After the job was finished, you turned them to move the table this way and that. And I’ll bet you could also use those cranks to cut a shape, couldn’t you?”
She shrugged. “Sure, a very simple shape.”
“But when you take your hands off the cranks and turn control over to the syntactic device, it becomes a much more capable tool, doesn’t it?”
“Infinitely more. There’s almost no shape you couldn’t make with a syndev-controlled machine.” She slid her hand down to her hip and drew out a pocket-watch, and let it dangle at the end of a silver chain made of fluid, seamless links. “This chain is my journeyman piece. I cut it from a solid bar of titanium.”
I took a moment to feel the chain. It was like a trickle of ice water over my fingers.
“Well, syndevs can have the same amplifying effect on other kinds of tools. Tools for reading and writing genetic sequences, for example. For adjusting proteins. For programmatic nucleosynthesis.”
“I don’t know what those are.”
“Because no one does them any more.”
“Then how do you know about them?”
“We study them—in the abstract—when we are learning about the First and Second Sacks.”
“Well, I don’t know what those are either, so I wish you would just get to the point.”
We’d been standing at the top of the stair that led up to the starhenge. I pushed the door open and we walked outside, squinting in the light. Cord had gotten a little testy. From watching Orolo talk to artisans like Flec and Quin, I knew how impatient they could be with what they saw as our winding and indirect way of talking. So I shut up for a minute, and let her look around.
We were on the roof of the Praesidium, which was a great disk of stone reinforced by vault-work. It was nearly flat, but bulged up slightly in the middle to shed rainwater. Its stones were graven and inlaid with curves and symbols of cosmography. Around its perimeter, megaliths stood to mark where certain cosmic bodies rose and set at different times of the year. Inside of that ring, several freestanding structures had been erected. The tallest of these, right in the center, was the Pinnacle, wrapped in a double helix of external stairs. Its top was the highest part of the Mynster.
The most voluminous structures up here were the twin domes of the big telescope. Dotted around from place to place were a few much smaller telescope-domes, a windowless laboratory where we worked with the photomnemonic tablets, and a heated chapel where Orolo liked to work and to lecture his fids. I led Cord in that direction. We passed through two consecutive doors of massive iron-bound hardwood (the weather could get rough up here) and came into a small quiet room that, with its arches and it
s stained-glass rosettes, looked like something out of the Old Mathic Age. Resting on a table, just where I’d left it, was the photomnemonic tablet that Orolo had given me. It was a disk, about the size of my two hands held side by side, and three fingers thick, made of dark glassy stuff. Buried in it was the image of Saunt Tancred’s Nebula, dull and hard to make out until I slid it away from the pool of sunlight coming in the window.
“That’s about the bulkiest phototype I’ve ever seen,” Cord said. “Is that like some ancient technology?”
“It’s more than that. A phototype captures one moment—it doesn’t have a time dimension. You see how the image seems close to the upper surface?”
“Yeah.”
I put a fingertip to the side of the tablet and slid it downwards. The image receded into the glass, following my finger. As it did, the nebula changed, contracting into itself. The fixed stars around it did not change their positions. When my fingertip reached the bottom of the tablet, the nebula had focused itself into a single star of extraordinary brilliance. “At the bottom layer of the tablet, we’re looking at Tancred’s Star, on the very night it exploded, in 490. Practically at the same moment that its light penetrated our atmosphere, Saunt Tancred looked up and noticed it. He ran and put a photomnemonic tablet, just like this one, into the great telescope of his concent, and aimed it at that supernova. The tablet remained lodged there, taking pictures of the explosion every single clear night, until 2999, when finally they took it out and made a number of copies for distribution to the Thousanders.”
“I see things like this all the time in the background of spec-fiction speelys,” Cord said, “but I didn’t realize that they were explosions.” She traced her finger up the side of the tablet a few times, running it forward thousands of years in a second. “But it couldn’t be more obvious.”
“The tablet has all kinds of other functions,” I said, and showed her how to zoom in on one part of the image, up to its resolution limit.