The Book of Fire (22 page)

Later, still damp from her Ritual Bathing, Paia hikes up the thin white Robe of Purity that her priestesses have swathed her in as she stepped naked from the gold-tiled pool beside the Sacred Well. She takes the stone stairs two at a time, exulting in her temporary freedom. She has done something unprecedented. She has ordered the red-veiled Twelve not to attend her on her daily Progress to Lunch. She wishes, she announces to them, to ponder in silence as she walks. This took them completely by surprise. In their
confusion, she has managed to evade them by vanishing with an airy wave into a privy, then immediately out the other door and down the hall, several turns to the right and left—she has planned this escape carefully—under an arch and around a hairpin corner that opens onto a hidden inner stair, used in her childhood by servants and now known only to her. And to the God, Paia supposes, for the God knows everything. But he’d be forced to shrink his man-form to an undignified size in order to appear in this rough-hewn passage, and she considers this to be unlikely enough to verge on the “not-on-your-life.” So perhaps this passage has eluded him. It becomes Paia’s favorite for that reason alone.

The secret stair empties into darkened back corridors where she must feel her way, burrowing deep into the bedrock. The builders of the Citadel wanted their computer facility well protected. No one will think to search for her here. No one but she (and occasionally, the God) ever ventures this far. Eventually, Paia arrives at the massive leather-and-brass doors of the Library. The entrance is never guarded. It’s merely locked, keyed to the palm prints of family members and staff long since dead—except one. A single recessed light glows softly overhead. Neither she nor the God has been able to figure out how to turn that one off, and Paia doesn’t mind this minor squandering of energy. She’s sure the House Comp has chosen to keep it burning, perhaps in an act of defiance for having to deactivate so many of its other Monitor functions. Paia understands such gestures, made to maintain some small sense of personal power in the face of an irresistible and tyrannical force such as the God. Like her own concealment of the note, or this secret visit.

Paia’s palm print admits her to a part of the Citadel where no one else, other than the God, can go. The God, of course, can merely materialize within. He does that now and again. But once inside, he shows little interest in the banks of screens and keypads and storage racks. He uses Paia’s hands and her experience with the system to keep a particular function running, or to turn one off, but he has never asked her help in accessing the Comp’s less overt functions, its vast data banks or its sophisticated analytical abilities. He once informed her, in his high-handed way,
that there was nothing a machine could tell him that he didn’t already know. Paia is willing to believe this, and probably because she doesn’t try to convince him otherwise, he lets her amuse herself now and then in the Library, when he’s feeling particularly magnanimous. But Paia suspects that the God does not really understand the House Comp, or rather, he underestimates it. He treats it like any other of the myriad mechanical devices that make the Citadel run: admirably efficient but without any individual consciousness. At first, this seemed to her a sign of the God’s obvious superiority, of his supernatural strength and wisdom, the House Comp’s odd and indeterminate consciousness being below his godly notice. Now she sees it could be a weakness, the only one he’s shown to her so far.

And she has never dared to come here without asking him before. Mostly, she comes to call up pictures of her dead parents, or to sift around the data banks in search of her family’s past, very nearly an exercise in the heretical nostalgia. For the childish comfort it offers her, the God allows it. But what about the present? What could the House Comp tell her about that? No one, not the God, not even the gossipy Luco, talks about what goes on outside Citadel and Temple and the small circle of dependent villages that supply them with food and labor. The God does not want his servants distracted from their attendance to his proper worship. But if she should ask the House Comp to look outside the Citadel walls, can it do so? And will the God find out?

Standing frozen beneath the single hall light, Paia shudders through a flood of second thoughts. He’s irritated with her already. Why risk worse? But her newly defiant momentum has carried her into uncharted territory. She doesn’t want to waste it, as she’s done too often before. She sets her palm to the bronzed glass plate. The leather-bound doors part and breathe open.

Inside, a row of green-shaded globes awake to faint life. As she moves into the tall, vaulted central aisle and down along the stacks of shelving, the globes brighten ahead of her to light her way, then dim again when she’s passed. To right and left, long darkened alleys are lined with climate-controlled storage: her father’s collection of rare and antique books. Rolling ladders lead to shelves high above
hand reach. When the God ordered Paia to disconnect the House Monitor’s HVAC, Paia claimed that the Library’s climate-control was special, like the light outside the door, and could not be disabled. Miraculously, he has not yet discovered that she lied to him, or that the House Comp helped her do it. She’s not even sure why she risked the God’s disfavor in order to protect these essentially useless artifacts. She only knew she must. What else, she wonders now, could she be tampering with?

The Book Room is cool and very dry, instantly wicking all the moisture from her skin and robe. Paia pads along the axis of the room, her bare feet digging into thick maroon carpet that swallows up even the sound of her breathing. At the far end is an elaborate portal, three stone archways closed by much-worn and battered wooden doors. It was rescued, her father once told her, from an ancient castle in Germany. It has paired marble columns between each doorway, and capitals carved in the image of fantastical creatures that remind Paia of the Winged God himself.

Paia touches the pale smooth stone reverently, thinking of the men and women, living thirteen hundred years ago, who might have laid their hand just where hers is now. They have nothing to do with her life, yet she feels strengthened by the sense of physical connection through Time. She pushes on the central wooden door, which creaks realistically on its huge iron hinges. And there in the opening, she is halted by a sudden memory of the painting in the tower. The image is so present in her mind’s eye, so vivid, so . . . green. She can almost believe that when she opens this ancient door the rest of the way, she will find that imagined landscape right there, on the other side. Shaken, she hesitates, then laughs at her own foolishness. She swings the big door aside and enters the den of the House Comp.

Since she was a child, Paia has thought of this quirky and increasingly unpredictable machine as if it was some kind of preternaturally brilliant animal that never leaves its cave. She knows it’s only a machine, like the God says, but she talks to it as if it were alive. For in many things, the House Comp seems to have a mind of its own.

For instance, it keeps its room as dark as any wild animal’s lair, no matter what Paia might request by way of
additional illumination. Dark, and colder even than the rare book stacks in the next room. The chill raises goose bumps beneath Paia’s thin robe. She feels like a white ghost gliding about in the darkness, groping for the back of the padded leather chair tucked in under the main console. She locates it, hauls it out, and sits, pressing her palm to the screen to awaken the system.

“Hello, House,” she murmurs.

“Hello, Paia. It’s been a long time.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“No apologies necessary.” The House’s voice is her father’s, a calm, rough-edged baritone that always sparks a bright fire-shower of childhood memories. It was unsettling at first, after she’d lost him, and remains so even now, but she’s glad he preserved at least this little part of himself for her to remember him by. “How can I help you today?”

“I need some information, House.”

“Of course. That’s what I’m here for.”

This is what he always says. In fact, while the House Comp’s vocabulary is limitless, his mode of expressing himself is not. Once he has settled on a clear and efficient way to convey a given meaning, he varies from it only if a better choice appears or is pointed out to him. Paia finds the utter predictability of his rhetoric both amusing and comforting, but a conversation with him is not quite like a conversation with another human.

Tiny lights flicker like fireflies on the console. “Where would you like to start today?”

“I’d like to take a look around outside.” She says it without thinking, then wishes she could take the words back. There might be a subtler way to say it, a way that doesn’t sound so much like a direct contradiction of the God’s expressed wishes.

“Any particular direction?”

Did she detect a fractional hesitation before he replied? She leans forward over the keypad and whispers, “House, do you understand this might be dangerous for me?”

Another fractional pause. “Knowledge is power.”

“I know.”

“You are safe with me.”

“You mean, he won’t find out?”

“You are safe with me.”

Paia wonders. What power could a machine muster against a God? “Well . . . toward the south, then.”

“Range and resolution?”

“I . . . I’m not sure. What’s the biggest? How about . . . well, there was fire out over the hills last night. More than usual.”

“Working,” says the computer. The huge mirrored black panel above the console glows, then lights up with a grid of images, six rows of ten. A scattering remain black, several are broken up by static. But in the remaining three or four dozen, Paia sees, as she peers more closely, that the images are contiguous, forming one larger image with pieces left out, largely in shades of blue. Toward the left and right, she notes areas of brown and orange, and here and there bits of green strung out like jewels on a necklace. Mostly in the blue screens, but including all the brown and green bits, is a faintly illuminated outline: a squarish shape with odd legs and arms pushing out at the corners.

“What is this, House?”

“LEO-view, dynamic image function.”

“What’s that?”

“That’s the whole ball o’ wax.”

Paia refuses to ask the exact question again. When House starts using obscure and idiomatic turns of phrase, she knows he’s being evasive and will continue to be so until it pleases him to be otherwise. There is some lesson he wishes her to learn. She rephrases her question. “But what am I looking at?”

“Home. Or what’s left of it.”

“There’s so much blue.”

“Water, water, everywhere . . .” House sings. An earthquake of static shivers across the grid, and when the images resettle into clarity, most of the blanks have shifted one screen to the right. “But perhaps you’d hoped for something a bit more . . . intimate.”

“Okay,” Paia agrees, totally mystified.

In the upper right-hand corner, one screen fades and refreshes itself immediately. There, Paia sees as the God in flight might see from high above, miles of barren granite hills, scoured valleys with narrow, boulder-strewn flatlands cut by the snake tracings of empty riverbeds.

“Resolution, one thousand meters.”

“Closer,” Paia says.

“Five hundred meters.”

The image jumps, enlarges, then swallows the grid, swelling and filling the entire bank with a dry contour map of wilderness. A few of the black squares remain black.

“There are some monitors that need replacing,” the computer notes reproachfully. “Also, there are a few sectors I cannot reach due to satellite failures. Fortunately, ours is not one of them.”

“Shouldn’t we be grateful there are still this many in working order?”

“Everyone wanted the satellites to keep working. Up to the end, a lot of money was put into making them self-maintaining and self-repairing.”

Paia thinks this is a lot of information for the computer to volunteer. “Like you, House?”

“Yes, Paia, like me. But there is a serious oversight in my design: without hands, I cannot replace my own monitors.”

Is that a hint? The God would be furious. She stares up at the gray-and-brown landscape, scanning for familiar details. “But it’s good you can do some repairs. There’s nobody else around who’d know how to fix you.”

“Not locally, no.”

She’d like him to elaborate on that odd remark, but the image distracts her. “Wait! What’s that?”

In the middle row of screens, way off to the right, Paia spots a thin pale curl rising from the side of a rocky valley. “Smoke! Can you get in any closer?”

The computer makes an odd sound, soft and indistinct, like laughter. “I can kiss the hair on a bee.”

“Really?” Paia wishes there was a human face built into this machine. She wouldn’t care if it was real or not, but she’d like a pair of eyes she could look into, and know she’d made contact.

“Here we go. Magnifying. Resolution, five meters.”

“Yes! Look!” She spots the telltale geometry of broken roadways and struggling kitchen gardens bounded by fieldstone walls. “Close in.”

“Resolution, one meter and zooming. Beginning enhancement and scintillation correction.”

The image dances and implodes. Suddenly it’s like standing
in among them, or like floating just above their heads: scrawny, ragged, soot-faced people racing about, trying to beat out the last embers of the fire that has consumed their hamlet. Blackened stone foundations smolder. Paia counts several dozen crumbling squares that recently were houses and barns. Lone figures, a man with one arm, an older woman, stand forlornly beside small piles of salvaged possessions. A naked child gingerly picks through smoking rubble.

“Is this one of our villages?” Paia asks. She means the God’s. These people look different from the usual run of the Faithful in the Temple. No healthier or more prosperous, but . . . well, brisker in their movements, more determined somehow, even in this moment of grief and desolation.

“Working.” The House Comp can be remarkably terse where the God is concerned.