Superior Saturday (11 page)

Leaf’s eyes narrowed and she blinked hard several times. Arthur had vanished. One second he was there, and then he wasn’t.

She looked around and scowled. Not only had Arthur disappeared but everyone else had become frozen –

The army is going to fire nukes at somewhere very close by,
Leaf suddenly remembered.
At one minute past midnight. So why I am standing here with my mouth open like some stupid goldfish?

‘Arthur!’ she shouted again. Then she started running, out through the ward with its frozen statues of sleepers. ‘Arthur!’

No one answered her. Leaf stopped at the end of the ward and looked around. Not only was everyone frozen, but there was also a kind of weird red light around them. Like a faint aura that she could only see when she looked out of the corner of her eyes. That same red glow was around the ward clock, high on the wall, which was stuck at three minutes to twelve.

Or not stuck. As Leaf looked, the red haze vanished. The minute hand sprang forward, and simultaneously the ward came alive with shuffling sleepers. Leaf heard someone call out from the office. Not Arthur—a woman’s voice. Probably Vess or Martine.

Two minutes!
thought Leaf in panic.
There’s not enough time to do anything. We’re all going to die!

The clock stopped. The sleepers became petrified once more. The red aura effect came back.

But Leaf could still hear the woman’s voice, and it got louder and louder until Martine burst into the ward.

‘What is going on? Where’s Lord Arthur?’

‘I don’t know,’ Leaf said. ‘Is there anything underneath this hospital? I mean underground levels ... even a bomb shelter?’

‘I haven’t been here for twenty years!’ exclaimed Martine. ‘Ask Vess.’

Leaf looked around, then pointed. Vess was standing frozen in a corner of the ward.

‘Oh,’ Martine said. ‘Well, twenty years ago there were operating theatres on B3, and there was a bomb shelter once. I mean, this place was built in the fifties, so what do you expect?’

‘We have to get everyone down there,’ said Leaf firmly. ‘You and me. As quickly as we can.’

‘But they’re like statues ...’

‘We’ll wheel them in beds. Two or three to a bed.

I wonder if the elevators work? The lights do.’ Leaf saw the hesitation on Martine’s face. ‘Come on—help me load these two into this bed.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Martine said. ‘I thought that once I finally got back home, everything would be all right. But I still don’t understand anything. Why are we taking everyone downstairs? Why do we need a bomb shelter?’

‘Arthur said the army is going to nuke East Area Hospital at 12:01 because it’s a plague nexus. And East Area is not so far from here. Arthur’s done something to stop time, I guess, but it restarted a moment ago. It could restart again in a second, or a minute, who knows? Please, we have to get going!’

‘No,’ said Martine. ‘No.’

She turned and ran away sobbing, crashing through the swing doors and disappearing.

Leaf stared after her for a microsecond, then went and examined the closest hospital bed. It had wheels with brakes on them, which she clicked off. There was already a sleeper in the bed, so she grabbed hold of the rail and pulled the bed out and swung it around. It was harder than she’d expected, possibly because the bed had not been moved in a long time.

‘You’re number one,’ she said to the man asleep in the bed. ‘We’ll pick up Aunt Mango on the way, and that’ll be two. After you, I’ll only have approximately one thousand nine hundred and ninety-eight people to get to safety. In two and a half minutes.’

It took Leaf a lot longer than two minutes to find the elevators, and then she was dismayed to find that they weren’t working. Clearly, things that stayed the same from one moment to the next—like lightglobes—continued to work while things that moved were stuck in place. Luckily, there was a map next to the elevator bank that showed where there was a wheelchair ramp to get to the lower floors.

She’d loaded not only her aunt Mango but two other people onto the bed. They were the two smallest she could find in the immediate vicinity of her aunt, but even so, her back ached from dragging them across the floor and then levering them onto the bed. They actually were like statues to move, though fortunately ones made of flesh and blood, not marble. Still, their rigidity made them difficult to shift and manoeuvre.

There was another wall map near the top of the ramp, but it didn’t indicate where the operating theatres used to be, or the old bomb shelter. Leaf would just have to find them through trial and error. As she wheeled the bed along, she noticed a frozen TV at one of the nurse’s stations. The corner of the screen said it was 11:57, and a video image of some news was paused mid-sentence. The newscaster’s mouth was wide open and a frozen type crawl across the bottom said only
measures may include drastic
.

Once she got to the bottom floor, she saw it had long been deserted. It was dusty, there were cobwebs trailing from the ceiling, and only one in three ceiling light panels worked.

But there was also a faded sign on the wall, and colour-coded trails on the floor, which she could just make out through the dust. The red trail was to the operating theatres and there was a blue trail to something euphemistically called ‘Survival Centre,’ which was almost certainly the bomb shelter.

Leaf pushed the bed into the corridor, then left it to scout out where she should push it to, her running footsteps sending up clouds of dust as she raced along the corridor.

The Survival Centre was a disappointment. It was definitely a bomb shelter, featuring a reinforced door with a hydraulic wheel to open and shut it. But it was way too small and could only ever have sheltered perhaps twenty people standing up. All its pipes and fittings had been removed as well, leaving ugly holes and hanging wires. Leaf figured she might be stuck wherever she was going to be for some time, and she didn’t want that place to have no toilet or running water.

She raced on, flinging open doors. Most of the rooms were small and useless, but the operating theatre complex was more promising. Though it had been cleared out, there were four big operating theatres clustered around a large central room that had several sinks with taps that worked, and there was a bathroom with at least one flushing toilet reached from the corridor outside.

Leaf propped the doors open and ran back to get her first bed-load. As she pushed the bed back to the theatre complex, she wondered what on earth she was going to do. There was no way she could bring all the sleepers down here on beds. Even loading them up was very hard for her, given that nearly all of them were bigger than her, some of them weighed at least twice what she did, and their rigidity just added to the level of difficulty. She would be exhausted before she transported a dozen of them, even if she could do that before time restarted for everyone else.

I’ll have to just pick out the smallest,
she thought.
And do my best.

‘What have you got me into now, Arthur?’ she said aloud. ‘And where have you gone?’

Arthur didn’t feel a sudden shock of pain as he was mangled by the rising chain, and Alyse was still holding his hand, so he flipped back the peak of his cap and shook his head to get the water out of his eyes.

‘Careful!’ said Alyse. ‘No sudden moves. Grab hold of the ring, there.’

They were standing in the chain link that was rapidly rising up through the middle of the stacked office units. Arthur grabbed the ring welded into the link’s left inner wall, and Alyse let go of his hand to nonchalantly step over and hold the ring on the other side.

‘Good view of one of the Drasils coming up,’ Alyse pointed out. ‘Or as good a view as you can get with the rain. Level 6222 is always empty, so you can see through it.’

‘Why is it empty?’ asked Arthur. ‘And what’s a Drasil?’

He was still wondering what the Will had tried to say, and why it had only spoken to him at that moment, and for such a brief time, so he forgot to put on the vacant, gormless expression of the recently washed-between—the-ears.

Alyse looked at him sharply before answering, but Arthur’s mind was still on the Will and he didn’t notice.

‘Dunno why they’re empty. There’s empty offices from 6222 to 6300, at 6733 to 6800, and I’ve heard there’s a bunch just below the top as well, whatever the top is now. It’s probably near 61700, or something like that.’

‘Sixty-one thousand seven hundred levels?’ Arthur was paying attention now. ‘But each of the office cubes is about ten feet high, which would make the tower six hundred thousand feet high—’

‘Nah, the levels just have a six in front for some reason. They start at sixty-one,’ said Alyse. ‘Tradition, I suppose. Depending on where the top has got to this week, it’ll be about seventeen thousand feet. I’d love to see up there.’

‘We don’t go up that far?’ asked Arthur, somewhat reassured.

‘Not yet, we haven’t,’ said Alyse. ‘Other gangs do a bit up there. Most of the top construction work is done by automatons. Hey, triple two’s coming up. Look that way.’

Arthur stared out at the offices flashing by, blurred images of green lamps and different-coloured umbrellas and Denizens in black or dark-grey coats hunched over identical desks.

Then that view suddenly disappeared. Arthur could see the skeleton of the tower, empty office units that were just cubes of wrought iron, with exposed horizontal and ver tical driving chains here and there, and the network of pneumatic message pipes. The view was broken in places by closed vertical shafts or walled-off rooms, but for the most part he could see through and out of the tower to the rain-swept sky beyond.

Far off in the distance, there was something he thought was another tower—a dark, vertical smudge on the horizon that went up and up until it disappeared into the sky.

‘Good view of that Drasil today,’ said Alyse. ‘I wouldn’t mind climbing one of them too, if it weren’t for the insects.’

‘Insects?’ Arthur didn’t like the sound of that. He wanted to ask more about what a Drasil was, but he had finally noticed that Alyse was looking at him suspiciously, and he was wondering if he had pushed the washed-out memory excuse too far.

‘Yes, Sunday’s guard insects that patrol the Drasils. And the trees defend themselves too, I’ve heard. You know, now that you’re clean, Ray, you don’t look much like a Piper’s child.’

‘I don’t?’ asked Arthur. The cascade of water had taken all the mud off his face.

‘Nope.’ Alyse had her hand on her wrench, and her eyes behind her rain-washed goggles were very cold.

Arthur let his hand fall onto his own wrench, and he tensed a little, ready to draw.

‘I reckon you must be some sort of short Denizen spy for the Big Boss. It’s bad enough having the Sorcerous Supernumeraries following us about, without a spy among us. So it’s time for you to—’

Arthur blocked her sudden swing at his legs with his own wrench. Sparks flew as the silver tools met. Alyse let go of the ring and struck again, a two-handed blow that would have overcome any normal Piper’s child. Arthur met it one-handed, and it was Alyse who reeled back and would have fallen if Arthur hadn’t hooked his foot around her ankle just before she went over.

‘I’m not a spy!’ Arthur shouted. ‘Or a Denizen!’

Alyse grabbed hold of the ring again and eyed him warily.

‘What are you, then?’

‘I’m Arthur, the Rightful Heir of the Architect. I’ve come here to find and free Part Six of the Will.’

‘No, you’re not!’ exclaimed Alyse. ‘Arthur’s eight feet tall, and he’s got a pointy beard down to his waist!’

‘Those stupid books!’ groaned Arthur. Some Denizen (or group of Denizens) somewhere in the House was writing and distributing very much fictionalised accounts of Arthur and his activities in the House. ‘Those books are all lies. I really am Arthur.’

‘You
are
very strong,’ said Alyse. ‘And you are more like us than a Denizen ... no pointy beard, hey?’

‘No.’

‘If you are Arthur, then you’re an enemy of the Big Boss, right?’

‘If you mean Superior Saturday, yes I am.’

‘Who doesn’t trust us anymore, on account of the Piper being out and about again.’

‘Yes. Neither does Dame Primus—I mean, the Will of the Architect. The Parts I’ve already gathered, that is. But I trust you. I mean I trust Piper’s children in general. In fact, I reckon the children are the smartest and most sensible people of anyone in the whole House.’

‘That’s true,’ Alyse agreed easily. ‘But speaking for the gang, we don’t care for politics. We just want to get our work done.’

‘I’m not going to interfere with your work,’ Arthur promised. ‘Just don’t report me. As soon as I can figure out where the Will is, we’ll be off.’

‘That Suze who’s with you—she really
is
a Piper’s child, isn’t she?’

‘Yes.’ Out of the corner of his eye, Arthur saw that they had passed the empty office blocks, and the cubes were all full of green lamps and working Denizens again. Only here the umbrellas were all orange.

Alyse looked at Arthur thoughtfully.

‘I suppose we could just go along with it for today,’ she said. ‘I mean, accept you for what you say you are. If there’s any trouble, I’ll act as surprised as anyone.’

‘That’d be great!’ exclaimed Arthur. ‘I just need some time to track down the Will. I’ll stay out of your way.’

‘Just do your work,’ said Alyse. ‘Otherwise it’ll look suspicious. You can sneak out of the depot tonight. I want you gone before morning.’

‘Very well,’ said Arthur. ‘Hopefully I’ll know where I need to go by then.’

‘You don’t know where this Will is?’

‘No. But the Will can speak inside my mind, tell me how to find it. I’ve already heard it twice. I heard it just before we got on this chain, when all that water splashed on my head.’

‘There’s always a lot of splashes,’ said Alyse. ‘The full sorcerers, up above 61000, they like to play games, weave spell-nets to catch the rain and then let it all go at once on their inferiors below. Can be dangerous. We’ve lost a few workers, washed right out of an office and into a shaft, or even out of one side.’

‘It’s odd,’ said Arthur. ‘This constant rain. I mean, the weather was broken in the Middle House, but it must be on purpose here, since Superior Saturday has all her sorcerers to fix it.’

Alyse shrugged. ‘It’s just the way it’s always been,’ she said. ‘Least for the last ten thousand years. Same as when the Boss started building this tower.’

‘Ten thousand years?’ asked Arthur. ‘It’s been raining for ten thousand years in House time? How do you know? Haven’t you been washed between the ears?’

‘Course I have,’ said Alyse. ‘That’s what the Denizens say. They’re always talking about the plan, and building the tower, and how it’s been ten thousand years, and if only the tower would reach the Gardens, then the rain will stop and all that. Look, there’s the Drasil again—we’re going through the seven hundreds.’

‘Reach the Gardens?’ asked Arthur. ‘The Incomparable Gardens? That’s what Saturday is trying to do?’

‘That’s what the sorcerers say. We just do our job. Can’t be worrying about all the top-level stuff and plans and that.’

‘What is a Drasil?’ Arthur looked through the empty, spare structure of the tower at the distant, vertical line.

‘A very, very big tree. There’s four Drasils. They hold up the Incomparable Gardens and they’re always grow ing. I don’t know how high they are, but everyone says the tower is not even close.’

‘Maybe the rain makes them grow,’ said Arthur.

‘Maybe.’

Arthur kept looking at the Drasil until they passed through the empty section and the view was once more obscured by thousands of offices. Alyse didn’t talk, but that suited Arthur. He had a lot to think about.

The rain is important,
he thought.
It must be, if it started ten thousand years ago, when the Trustees broke the Will. I wonder if it’s Sunday who makes it rain, for the Drasil trees? But that couldn’t be right, because Saturday has the Sixth Key, and it would be strongest here ... only I kind of remember someone saying the Seventh Key was paramount or the strongest overall or something like that ...

‘We’re coming up to the eight hundreds.’

Alyse’s voice interrupted Arthur’s train of thought. He looked out and wondered how she knew what level they were at. Then he saw green umbrellas everywhere, in many different shades. The sorcerers, or would-be sorcerers, had umbrellas of dark green, bright emerald green and lime green, as well as ones that had graduated washes of green and patterns of green.

‘Green umbrellas in the eight hundreds,’ said Arthur. ‘That’s how you know where we are—from the colour change in the umbrellas.’

‘Yep,’ Alyse confirmed. ‘Yellow at nine hundred, then you count. There are numbers on the framework, but they’re too small and hard to read from the Big Chain. Now get ready—we’ll have to step off in a minute.’

She took his hand again and they shuffled to the edge of the link. The offices were flashing past very swiftly, Arthur thought. Suddenly the umbrellas changed to yellow. He glanced at Alyse and saw her lips moving as she counted. He tried to count too, but couldn’t keep up.

‘Eighty-five—get ready!’ snapped Alyse.

Arthur started counting again in his head.

‘Ninety-four! Go!’

They stepped off the link, Alyse dragging Arthur, timing it to perfection so that it felt like no more dangerous than stepping down from a high kerb.

‘Move!’ Alyse snapped again. Arthur followed her, splashing past the desk and its oblivious Denizen under his yellow umbrella.

‘Got to make room,’ explained Alyse as she led the way through to a neighbouring office. Behind them, two more grease monkeys stepped off the link and quickly moved diagonally through to an adjacent office.

Arthur looked around and noticed that for the first time, the Denizens at their desks were covertly watching the grease monkeys. While most of them were continuing to write with both hands, they all slowed down to get a better sidelong look.

‘Why are they watching us?’ Arthur whispered to Alyse.

‘Because they know we’re here to shift someone up or
down,
’ said Alyse loudly. She glared at the Denizen behind the desk next to her. He immediately looked back at his shaving mirror screen and his writing sped up.

‘Right,’ said Arthur. More grease monkeys stepped off the chain and one waved as they splashed their way across. It was Suzy, who looked like she was enjoying herself. He waved back, and learned that he shouldn’t tip his head back when doing so, because a sheet of rain fell on his face.

Alyse had her notebook out again and was studying an entry, her finger moving along the lines. Arthur noticed that all the closer Denizens were watching intently despite Alyse’s earlier glaring.

More grease monkeys arrived in pairs and moved through the offices, until the last, Whrod, stepped off alone.

Alyse shut her notebook with a snap and pointed deeper into the tower.

‘This way!’ she declared.

‘Is it a promotion?’ asked a Denizen. He had given up all pretense of work, and was staring at Alyse, his mouth twisted up in an ugly expression that didn’t match his handsome features.

Alyse ignored him. Striding through a waterfall that had just started coming down, she led the gang deeper into the tower, pausing every now and then to check the numbers that were embossed on the red iron posts that made up the framework of the building.

As the grease monkeys marched, Arthur heard the Denizens whispering all around them.

‘Promotion ... it must be ... promotion ... who is it ... promotion ... anyone see a purple capsule ... promotion ... promotion ...’

‘There she is, four offices ahead,’ Alyse whispered to Arthur. ‘With the saffron checks on the darker yellow. You wait here and join Whrod—he’ll tell you what to do. And look out.’

‘For what?’ asked Arthur.

‘The others will throw things as soon as they know it’s a promotion. Wait for Whrod now.’

Arthur nodded and stopped where he was. Whrod was close behind, and the other grease monkeys were approaching in an extended line across a dozen offices.

‘Go!’ shouted Alyse. She ran ahead to the chosen office, jumped on the desk, and then from there to a corner of the cube. Holding on to the frame with one hand, she started working on something with a wrench.