Eyes of the Calculor (2 page)

"So should we become the Rochestrian Dragon Librarian Service, and abandon our brothers and sisters elsewhere on the continent?"

"I am tracing a logical path, Highliber. Logic leads where it will."

Dramoren nodded his agreement. Perhaps Hawker has a brain but has learned to keep quiet about it, he decided.

"Your thoughts on this matter are very constructive, Systems Controller Hawker," he declared. "I look forward to speaking with you further this evening, during my tour of your electric cal-culor."

I he day passed slowly, and Dramoren was deluged with agendas, petitions, and requests wherever he went. Late in the evening he called in at the refectory again and secured a mug of coffee, which he took with him.

'"Ere, who does 'e think 'e is?" demanded a servingmaid.

"The new Highliber, ,, replied the refectory supervisor.

The Libris refectory was beside the dormitory wing of the vast library complex, and separated from the older buildings by a wall and bluestone plaza. The wall also separated the artisan workshops, bookstores, calculor hall offices, and armory of Libris from the lower security areas. Dramoren passed through a gate that was guarded by bluestone grotesques and live Tiger Dragon guards. Glancing up at Mirrorsun, he noted that the pulsing lights had by now become a faint, twinkling torrent of light across the sky.

"It means something," he said to a guard, who responded by saluting.

Dramoren entered the old central store where Hawker was waiting.

"Even after twenty years this place seems unnaturally quiet," said Hawker as they walked past a vast array of small, partitioned rooms packed with odd jumbles of woodwork and wire. "These cells are where the components were kept when they were not on duty."

"So, you saw this place when the components of the original Libris Calculor were housed here?" asked Dramoren.

"I was one of those components," replied Hawker.

"And which component was that?" asked Dramoren, quickly recovering from his surprise.

"MULTIPLIER 17. I was there from the first experiments until the upgrading to the electric calculor, ZAR 2."

"And what is all that rubbish in the cells?"

"Why Highliber, it's the abacus frames, desks, seats, and transmission wires of the original Calculor. Ironic, is it not? The great machine is now in the cells where its components used to sit."

"I read that it had been smashed up."

"About a quarter of it was destroyed, the rest was moved down here for salvage."

"And nothing has actually been salvaged?"

"When the space is needed, the salvage will begin."

They passed out into another courtyard, where two dozen horses were walking treadcircles while munching chaff from nosebags. They were powering gearboxes that were attached to generators, and from these ran wires wrapped in beeswax-soaked cloth spaced by porcelain insulators that led to the next building, a thousand-year-old cathedral to knowledge in red abandonstone.

"The courtyard used to be enclosed, but it got a bit smelly with the horses, so the roof was dismantled," explained Hawker.

"Have you noticed anything different about Mirrorsun lately?" asked Dramoren, looking up.

"Er, the moving lights?" said Hawker after staring at it for a moment.

"Yes. They worry me."

"They look harmless."

"So does a piece of paper with 'War is Declared' written on it."

One pair of horses near the door was driving a large reciprocating pump, which circulated air to cool the calculor. Inside the building, frame and canvas ducts carried air along the passageway just above their heads. It was like being within a vast, warm body as pulses of air dilated the ducts, relays sparked and clattered, and transformers hummed. Some artisans were clustered around patchboards, others heated soldering irons on charcoal burners, and yet more drew diagrams on portable chalkboards and argued about impedance, resistance, and capacitance. There were armed Tiger Dragons at every door, and the place was lit by flickering oil lamps.

"Two hundred souls are needed to maintain the ZAR 2 calculor," said Hawker proudly, "and it is still the largest anywhere."

A pervasive, hissing, clattering sound was gradually growing louder. They climbed one final flight of stairs, then Hawker opened a small door. A wave of sound surged out over them. Dramoren hesitated, then followed Hawker out onto a balcony of blackstone and marble.

Dramoren stood beside Hawker at the marble rail, looking out across the electric calculor. The air was warm, and laced with the

smell of beeswax, oil, and ozone, while the clatter of many thousands of electric relays was as insistent a hailstorm. Compared with some of the rediscovered ancient devices now in use the old electric cal-culor was clumsy, noisy, and unreliable, yet it had one redeeming feature in the eyes of Highliber Dramoren. It was entirely comprehensible to mere mortals. Admittedly, not more than half a dozen mortals understood the workings of its seventeen thousand relays and the plugboard operating system, but they were sufficient to tend its maintenance.

"So, this thing was built in 1708 GW," said Dramoren above the din.

"Yes, and I was here when it was carried in through the door," replied Hawker. "I was still a component in those days."

"You must be a lot older than you look."

"I'm only sixty, Fras Highliber," replied Hawker, a trace of affront in his voice.

"Forgive me, Fras, but the prototype had been disbanded when I was eight years old, so to me it seems a very long time ago."

"This place was renamed Dolorian Hall when the ZAR 2 machine was moved in."

"Did you ever meet Frelle Dolorian?" asked Dramoren.

"Ah, yes, she was a regulator in the prototype. What a charmer, aye, and she sweetened the life of several components over the years. Have you ever heard of John Glasken?"

"Yes, he presented me with the Bouros Prize for mathematics when I was fourteen."

"Hah, well did you know he met Dolorian on the battlefield at the end of the Milderellen Invasion, and she bedded him?"

"I do know that, Fras Hawker. Dolorian was my aunt."

Hawker made a choking sound and turned bright red. Dramoren put his elbows on the railing and rested his chin on his clasped hands. The silence between them began to lengthen.

"The, ah, regulators are concerned about the electric machine," said Hawker awkwardly. "Parts are very old, and need complete rebuilding."

"What do you think?" asked Dramoren, looking down at two regulators replacing a bank of relays in one of the racks.

"I have been following the work being done at the University, Highliber. A whole new generation of relays is near to being perfected. They will be three times faster and a tenth the size of what is here, we should phase them in and simply discard this old machine."

"What about the regulators?"

"They worry that they may soon be lacking their jobs. So little has been spent on the calculor for so long that they think nobody cares about it."

"People care, Fras Hawker. Important people care. Libris is an arm of government. Librarians and libraries are the glue that binds the Commonwealth together, and the politics of control are what drives—"

Dramoren was cut short by a crackling cascade of sparks and violet fire from the relay banks, interspersed with cries of alarm from the regulators on duty. Smoke began to billow from all corridors of the huge machine.

"Is it supposed to do that?" asked Dramoren, but already Hawker had dashed out and could be heard shouting "Sabotage!" in the distance.

Down in the Dolorian Hall the regulators were running to and fro through the billows of acrid smoke with buckets of sand and fire blankets. Parts of the vast machine were already well alight. The system herald hurried across the floor calling "System Alert, Category 1, Class F!" and ringing a handbell. A technician ran shrieking out of the smoke, his clothing on fire, another technician chasing him with a pitcher of coffee.

"Attention all souls! Attention all souls!" shouted the supervisor of security. "Evacuate the calculor immediately."

"Prepare to initiate an orderly shutdown of the operating system!" shouted Hawker somewhere in the distance.

"Bring water!" shouted a voice. "There's no electrical essence now."

Obviously never tested their disaster contingency plan, thought Dramoren, if they have one. He was oddly calm in the face of this catastrophe. No electrical essence. Somehow that seemed significant. He turned away to look at the electric clock on the wall above him. It was smoking and had stopped at 10:36 p.m., barely a minute earlier. Standing on a chair, he lifted it from the wall mounting and noted that no wires trailed from it. After dousing it with the remains of his coffee, he saw that it was blackened within, and that its chemical battery had burst. The clock was quite independent of the calculous supply of electricity, yet it had been destroyed at precisely the same time.

Implications began to tumble through Dramoren's head. Right across the mayorate all electrical devices might well be smoking, melting, and burning. Across the mayorate, the Commonwealth, perhaps even the entire continent. Perhaps all electrical devices everywhere had been struck down by some celestial sword that spared everything else.

"Mirrorsun," said Dramoren to himself, rubbing his hands together as he turned away from the ruins of the electric calculor and made for the door. "Well, fortune favors those who react exceedingly fast."

TOUCH OF APOCALYPSE

Twelve miles above Eastern Australica

Kelations between Earth's intelligent species had been less than satisfactory for a very long time. For several hundred years humans had hunted whales and dolphins so intensively that many of their clans, attractens, and associons were wiped out. Those memories were fresh and raw when the humans managed to revive a cetacean warrior from a civilization older than the human race itself, a warrior skilled in the ways of warfare that had unleashed an undersea Armageddon nine million years earlier. There is nothing like a common enemy to inspire unity, and humanity was certainly that. The Call, a mind weapon, began to sweep over the land, permanently blanketing some areas, especially near the coast. Lured to the sea to drown, or held starving in a mindless reverie, the human population declined by nearly three orders of magnitude. The cetezoids could easily have wiped Homo sapiens from the earth, but then there would have been no common enemy left. Humanity was suffered to survive through sheer political convenience.

In the dying years of the Anglaic civilization, however, one last and desperate attempt was made to counter the cetaceans' weapon. Noting that birds were not affected by the Call, some of the last genetic engineers on the continent of Australia added tracts of bird DNA to the human genome. Overseas, frightened and confused ar-

mies flung nuclear weapons at each other, then chaos descended in the form of a nightmare winter that lasted centuries. As the world warmed again it was noticed that some people were immune to the Call, people who were also lighter, stronger, faster, and generally more intelligent than humans. These bird-people, the aviads, were slaughtered whenever they were recognized, and the genocide continued for two thousand years. Slowly, unobtrusively, the aviads began to organize their own nations in areas permanently blanketed by the cetezoids' Call, and their hatred for humanity was no less intense than that of the cetezoids. Within the Calldeath lands they were safe, secure beyond the reach of humans and their predilection to annihilate anything superior than themselves.

Then, on the 13th of September, a.d. 3961 the Call ceased to exist. Completely. Humans were free from the Call weapon that had ravaged their numbers and rendered vast areas of land uninhabitable for two millennia. The aviads of the continent now known as Australia were suddenly at the mercy of a human population a thousand times its number.

Fortunately this happened just as the only member of Earth's newest intelligent species decided to annihilate all electrical machines on the face of the planet. This was not entirely coincidence either, for the fourth intelligence had once been an aviad.

I he sunwing Titan was a half mile in wingspan but barely fifty feet in length. It was pure wing, nothing more than a wing powered by electrical motors driven by direct or stored sunlight. Two thousand years earlier it had been designed to cruise the stratosphere forever, regenerating ozone to restore the delicate balance of Earth's atmosphere, never landing, self-repairing. It was an island of habitat in the sky. An air pressure of just below that of sea level was maintained by pumps to strengthen the Titan's structure, and waste heat provided warmth for the cabins were where maintenance crews had been meant to live. The aviads had boarded the Titan, removed the ozone generators, and learned to steer it. Aviads could now cross

human territory without fear of lynch mobs, torture, and inquisitions. They could even cross oceans.

The Titan was cruising twelve miles above southeastern Australia on the 13th day of September 1729 in the Greatwinter calendar of Australica, and 3961 in the Anno Domini calendar of North America. There were twenty-two aviad souls aboard the huge wing: three crew and nineteen passengers.