Fever Crumb (17 page)

"Do you take me for a fool, Crumb?" the inventor asked.

"No, sir ...

Gideon looked for help. In a corner of the room stood Wavey Godshawk. Her face was stenciled with its familiar markings, that flock of wild geese on her brow and cheeks. He remembered how closely and solemnly she had watched him as they lay together in the summer house amid the shipwreck of her dress. Now she would not even look at him, just stared haughtily at the ceiling.

"Did you think I wouldn't find out about your little romance?" asked Godshawk.

"No, sir," said Gideon. "I thought ...

"Thought what? That I'd
approve?
Great Scrivener, women of childbearing age are in short enough supply among my people as it is, without I go marrying one off to you."

"But --"

"You wretch, Crumb! if I weren't kinder than most of my breed you'd be dead by now, or on your way to meet the death machines at Pickled Eel Circus! As it is, I want you gone. What, do you think I won't be able to find another little scribbler like you to aid me in my work? You're nothing. If you come near Nonesuch House again I'll set the dogs on you. Now go."

Gideon looked again at Wavey, but Wavey was still not looking at him. She seemed bored.

The next thing he remembered was the huge front door of Nonesuch House slamming shut behind him, leaving him alone on the drive in the pounding rain. Twilight was coming on. He was already soaked. He looked at the windows above him, hoping to see Wavey look out. Godshawk would have ordered her not to, but she would take no notice of Godshawk, would she?

He waited while rain trickled down the back of his neck and crept in through the seams of his sleeves and plastered his wet hair across his face and filled up his boots. But he never saw her again.

***

Six months later he would stand once more in Godshawk's garden. It was a few weeks after the Skinners' Riots, and a story had been doing the rounds about how a band of Scriven had been found holed up at Nonesuch House, and how the Skinners had gone there and slaughtered them.

Gideon had not let himself think about Wavey Godshawk since he returned to London the previous summer. He had gone back to the Engineerium, and Dr. Stayling had allowed him to pick up his studies. When thoughts of Wavey came into his mind he forced them away, and made himself concentrate on his work instead. He had worked hard all winter at forgetting her, and he had grown good at it. But when the riots started, he could think of nothing but Wavey.

On the evening when it began he was outside the Engineerium, assaying circuit boards for a digger in Womblesden. Hurrying home, he stopped to watch the Skinners running down Cripplegate in the summer twilight. The smack of their shoes on the cobbles sounded like applause. Some stopped just long enough to hurl burning brands in through the windows of shops and banking houses. They carried things he thought were banners, until one passed close by and he saw that it was the flayed skin of a Scriven. From Ludgate Hill came the crackling, brush-fire sound of muskets.

In some ways it was almost a relief. The anger of London had been building for so long, it had been like living on the flanks of a volcano. Now that the eruption had finally come, there was no time to worry about it, no time to think. Crumb hid among some bins near the tram Terminus to avoid another gang of Skinners, and was then almost shot down as a Skinner himself when he rounded a corner near the Engineerium and came upon a battalion of the Scriven's mercenaries, their crisp white uniforms smudged with soot and powder. Luckily the Scriven officer in charge of them recognized him from his Nonesuch House days and ordered them not to shoot.

"What is happening?" Gideon asked him, as he was bundled through the lines. "Where is Godshawk?"

"Safe in the Barbican, Doctor, waiting for us to finish off this London rabble."

"What about his daughter?"

"Scrivener alone knows! These mobs are everywhere! Get back to your Engineerium, man; you'll be safe there...."

But next morning the mobs broke into the Engineerium itself, smashing and looting, shouting that the Engineers were Scriven lackeys and no better than their masters. The frightened and bewildered Engineers were herded out into the courtyard, and there they might all have been killed, except that a second, larger band of Skinners happened by. They were led by a man named Creech, who scrambled up on an overturned sedan chair and fired his spring gun in the air to call for quiet. He wore a leather apron smeared with brown and crimson stains, and stuck through his belt was a long curved blade like a shard of the moon. But it turned out that, in this mob, he was the voice of reason.

"These men are our kind," he shouted, pointing at the captive Engineers. "We got no argument with them. This place of theirs will make good homes for human widows and human orphlings.

You want to do some killing, you better come with me; Godshawk himself is still holding out in the Barbican!"

The Skinners went roaring off, leaving the Engineers to pick up the pieces of their smashed experiments and try to salvage their scattered and damaged books. Pickled Eel Circus was blazing like a colossal brazier, sending thick swathes of smoke across the Engineerium compound. More rioters passed, and this time many of them wore once-white uniforms; the Scriven's mercenary soldiers had decided that the fight could not be won, and were changing sides. A few hours later the Engineers heard the cheering spread from the Barbican all through the city as word came that Auric Godshawk had been killed.

But surely Wavey's blank, unspeckled skin would have saved her? Gideon kept thinking about her all through the confused days which followed the riots, while he helped the Order to move to their new home in the abandoned head of Godshawk's giant statue. As he wheeled the Engineer's belongings on handcarts down the Westerway he was watched by severed Scriven heads, which the Skinners had stuck on the railings outside the houses there. None of them was Wavey's. But how could he know that hers was not among the flayed bodies that lay in the gutters, attracting the attentions of rats and ravens and stray dogs?
Oh
,
surely,
he thought,
when she heard the rioters coming, she would have had the sense to wipe her false markings off
and mingle with the mobs?

But Wavey wasn't logical; she had her prickly Scriven pride, and he could well imagine her stencilling darker markings on just to taunt the Skinners....

***

When he neared Nonesuch Hill that morning he saw that the house he had known so well was scorched and tumbled. Charred grass crumbled into ash as he climbed the terraces. A film of soot lay on the surface of the pools. The blackened roof beams ticked softly, embers glowing red as the breeze fanned them. Metal had melted and flowed in silvery puddles and lacings over the blackened tiles underfoot.

"Wavey?" called Gideon, over the cawing of the carrion birds.

He started looking for her among the crumpled outbuildings, hoping that she might have hidden somehow, but all he found were the dead. Whether Wavey was among them or not, it was impossible to know; they all looked like heather roots scorched by a brush fire.

***

It was on his way back to London that day that Gideon decided to turn off his feelings. He had seen for himself now how dangerous emotions were. Tenderness and anger, love and hate, they all led to nothing but trouble; he blamed them for his own broken heart, as well as the feverish violence of the Skinners' Guilds. He was not an animal. From now on, he decided, he would live without feelings.

Looking carefully at himself in the speckled mirror which hung from a nail on his workspace wall, Gideon shaved his head, and gathered up the pile of chestnut curls, and carried them to the stove, and threw them in and watched them burn.

***

It was a few weeks later that a note arrived in the careful, childish writing of Chigley Unthank, asking him to come and assess a new dig far out on the marshes. Dr. Crumb remembered Unthank, an archaeologist who had worked for Godshawk and been a frequent visitor to Nonesuch House. Now he was an outcast, scratching a living for himself and his daughter in the Brick Marsh. His note claimed he had unearthed the fragments of an Ancient computer brain, but when Gideon reached the place, Unthank could only show him a few scraps of ruined circuit board lashed together with wire and strung with animal bones -- a common tribal totem from the time of the Downsizing. When Dr. Crumb explained patiently that such things could be dug up almost anywhere, and were of no use except as an illustration of how far mankind had sunk into savagery and superstition after the fall of the Ancient world, Master Unthank had grown embarrassed, and even Gideon could tell that the tale of the computer brain had been just a ruse to bring him there.

Nervously, almost shyly, Unthank beckoned him into the miserable little smoke-filled, scrap-plastic hut that was his home. His daughter, Katie, a scruffy-looking teenager, was scrubbing circuit shards in a tub of muddy water. Beside the fire a basket lay, and in the basket was a child, kicking its legs, jerking its tiny fists about. It stared up at Gideon with odd-colored eyes.

"Woman brought it here soon after the riots," said Unthank, from the doorway. "She kept her face hid, wouldn't give her name. Said she had to go on a journey, and couldn't take the kid. Said I was to send word for you."

"Why me?" asked Gideon.

Unthank did not reply. His daughter had stopped scrubbing and was watching Gideon curiously, as if waiting to see what he would do. Gingerly he reached into the basket and lifted the luggage label that was tied around the child's wrist.

He knew the handwriting at once. Wavey Godshawk had been her father's assistant for a long time; each drawer and library shelf at Nonesuch House had been labelled in the same careful script that he saw on that brown paper tag, in the smoky light of Unthank's hut. There were just five words.

***

Then you are my father?" asked Fever, when he had told her everything. She was shocked, of course; terribly shocked and disappointed that Dr. Crumb had ever given in to such fervid and unreasonable emotions. (And there was another feeling in her, too, a quivering, fluttering feeling that arose at the thought that he really was her father. But feelings did not matter, they were a distraction; all that mattered now was finding out the truth.)

"That's what she meant, isn't it?
Her
name is Fever Crumb
. Wavey Godshawk was my mother, and she was saying that you were my father."

Dr. Crumb looked away, toward the rain-wet windows and the city outside them. He set down the cup he had been holding, and the sound made Fever start. "You are her child, of that I'm sure. It has always been thought that
Homo
sapiens
and
Homo
superior
could not have children together...."

"But perhaps Wavey was not like other Scriven," suggested Fever. "She had hardly any markings. Or perhaps Godshawk was telling you the truth, and there was never as much difference between us and them as they liked to claim...."

"Both those things are possible," admitted Dr. Crumb. "But we have no evidence. All I know is that the label was in Wavey's handwriting, and that it said Her
name
is Fever
Crumb.
At the time I thought she had just written that to make me think that you were mine, hoping that would make me take care of you. I didn't mind. I would have taken care of you anyway. It was the only reasonable thing to do. But later, as you grew, you seemed so like me in so many ways that I began to wonder if you might be mine after all."

Fever went to the mirror on the wall, which she had stood before so often to shave her head. She could see herself reflected there, and Dr. Crumb behind her. She saw now that they had the same narrow faces, the same sticky-out ears. But she hadn't inherited his small mouth or long nose. Her mouth and nose were echoes of another face -- the face of Wavey Godshawk.

"Didn't you try to find her?" she asked. "After you'd found me, I mean. After you knew she must still be alive?"

Dr. Crumb shook his head. "It was impossible, Fever. I had no way of knowing which way she had fled. North, south, east, or west? I had no contacts outside London whom I could ask about a fugitive Scriven. And if I did ask, and they had seen her, I might only have caused her to be recognized, and killed. For all I know she died in the Marshes somewhere, after she left you at Unthank's hut. The Skinners still had patrols and watchers out there. She vanished, Fever. She was swallowed up by history, and we shall probably never know what became of her. I am just glad that at least I have you."

"The other Engineers? Dr. Stayling? Do they know all this?"

Dr. Crumb shook his head. "I have always told them what I told you. That I found you in a basket on the marsh ...

Fever kept looking at herself.
Half-Scriven,
she thought.
Wavey's daughter
.
Godshawk's
granddaughter.
She said, 'There's more. I
remember
things. Things that happened before I was born; things that only Godshawk could have seen ..."

Dr. Crumb frowned. "Some sort of inherited memory? It does not sound likely...."

Something slammed against Godshawk's Head with a sound like a huge bell ringing.

Dr. Crumb went to the window. 'There is a mob out there!" he said.

Fever joined him, looking down. The rain had slackened, but an ominous, end-of-the-world gloom still hung Over the abandoned factories. A tide of people was flooding onto the wasteland that surrounded Godshawk's Head. Sedan chairs bobbed upon it, and burning torches made bright points of saffron light behind the rain. Those at the front of the crowd were throwing things, and a few of them threw hard enough to hit the Head. Tiles and half bricks clanged and sang against the metal, and from some neighboring room came the clash of a smashed window.