Fever Crumb (16 page)

"I'll do my best, sir," said Gideon. But Godshawk had already gone striding on his way.

***

Days went by. Weeks went by. Slowly, Gideon worked his way through the mountains of machinery, studying, describing, puzzling. Had this battered plastic frame been part of a TV set, or only a window? Could this crushed orange rubber ball really have hopped into space, as its name suggested? He made drawings and notes in a circular ledger. He grew bored. He thought often of asking Godshawk to release him from this work, which any half-trained scavenger could have done, and let him return to the Engineerium. But he never did. At the Engineerium he would not be near Wavey Godshawk.

Wavey worked as her father's assistant. When she was in that role she wore her hair tied back and put on a white coat, tailored to spread over the wide bell of her skirts. Each afternoon she would come in and listen carefully while Gideon explained the more interesting pieces he had found and catalogued. She dropped in with questions and suggestions, always perfectly timed. She set him thinking. She challenged his assumptions. The Order had taught him that women were weak, unreasonable creatures, but Wavey was neither. The Scriven dapplings on her face and neck made chains of little V-shapes, like wild geese flying. He imagined mathematical formulae that might describe the angle of her cheekbones.

***

In the summertime, some of the objects that Gideon had studied were shipped north to the city to be sold at auction in the Tech Exchange, and the rest were cleared into a smaller room, for Nonesuch House was to host a party. As Lord of London, Godshawk was expected to be hospitable. His Suomi mercenaries went to and fro along the causeway, checking for booby traps and clearing stands of trees where Skinner terrorists might lurk. Canopies and marquees flowered on Godshawk's lawns, and famous scent artists like Eldritch Hooter and Odourita arrived to load the scent lanterns with their specially composed perfumes.

Gideon's work languished as the day of the party drew near. Godshawk seemed to have forgotten all about the remainder of his collection, and even Wavey stopped visiting, spending her afternoons instead trying on dresses with the help of a new slave girl her father had bought for her in the city. Gideon sat in his room, thinking about her, listlessly trying to concentrate on his notes and drawings, distracted by the tuning-up of power shawms and pneumatic sackbuts in the bandstand below his window.

He wasn't invited to the party, of course. But nor was he forbidden from attending, and when the whole of Nonesuch House was filled with revellers and rowdy as a St Kylie boozer, there was not much else that he could do. He wandered through the crowded rooms, listening to the music and sniffing the rich odors that unfurled from the scent lanterns. Wavey had told him that her people could see scents, and had spoken passionately about the great perfume symphonies of Hooter, Klopstock, and DeFries, which to her were not just smells but shimmering, luminous fields of subtle color. Gideon tried to imagine what that would be like, but he couldn't; the scents just made him sneeze. He swiped a glass from a passing waiter's tray and wandered on, ignored by the Scriven, who shouted small talk at one another over his head.

"Hooter's in good form! What does he call this scent?"

"I think it's
Nocturne in Blue
."

"Did you hear about Stefan Destrier? The Skinners got him, laid in wait for him by his own gate."

"Disgraceful! Godshawk must do something to discipline these monkeys...."

The Scriven men wore stack-heeled boots and pearl-studded evening coats; the ladies in their vast skirts looked like mythical creatures, half woman, half sofa. Wavey Godshawk glided by, heading to the dance floor, arm in arm with some old Scriven lord. Her face was lifted toward her partner's, and her eyes were smiling, but she kept her mouth closed, and Gideon knew that it was because she felt self-conscious about the brace on her teeth. She was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

"There goes Odo Bolventor with the Godshawk girl," said a Scriven, leaning over Gideon's shoulder to point out the couple to his friend.

"I hear Godshawk's been trying to arrange a marriage. He needs an heir."

"And Bolventor needs her dowry. He calls himself Margrave of Thurrock, but he's as poor as a gnat!"

They moved on, still gossiping, never realizing that they had just squashed Gideon's dreams. He pushed his way out of the room. He did not want to watch Wavey dancing with her Margrave. He went out into the gardens, glad to be away from the heat and noise of the party and the cloying odors of the scent lanterns. He walked past the ghostly marquees, past the gangs of servants who were busy lighting float lamps and setting them adrift upon the evening air. The sounds of music and chitchat faded as he went downhill toward the still lagoons.

"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 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 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 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.

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 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 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.

***

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 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.