The Windrose Chronicles 1 - The Silent Tower (4 page)

“True.” A smile flicked across the old man's face. “But the problem with Antryg is that no one has ever been able to tell just how mad.” Then the lightness died from his eyes. “And for the past seven years he has been a prisoner in the Silent Tower, whose very stones are spelled against the working of magic. After that long, held prisoner by the Church and separated from the magic that is the core of any wizard's being, I can only hope that Antryg Windrose is still sane enough to help us. For I fear that, if we are dealing with some threat from another world than our own, we may need his help very badly.”

**ERROR: UNRECOGNIZED CONDITION IN BINARY TREE STRUCTURE

"CORRECT AND RE-TRY:

OK >

“Binary tree?” Joanna Sheraton groaned. “I just corrected the goddam binary tree.”

Patiently, she typed:

> SEARCH: TREE. DATA.O

OK >

> EXECUTE TIGER.REVH

A moment later, green letters materialized on the gray of the screen:

**ERROR: UNRECOGNIZED CONDITION IN BINARY TREE STRUCTURE "CORRECT AND RE-TRY:

OK >

“I'll give you an unrecognized condition,” she muttered. She scanned up the screen, looking for anything else in the miles of data that could conceivably be preventing the running of the program. “Well, what's wrong with it? You didn't like my tone of voice? I didn't say `Mother, may I'?” She tried again:

]SEARCH: TREE.DATA.O

OK

> EXECUTE 11GER.REV8

**ERROR. UNRECOGNIZED CONDITION IN BINARY TREE STRUCTURE

"CORRECT AND RE-TRY:

OK >

“You know, I'm getting very tired of your OK.” She pushed the soft tangle of her shoulder-length, too-curly blond hair from her eyes and reached for the much-thumbed program that rested on top of the precarious stacks of printouts, manuals, schematic drawings of Tiger missiles, and scrawly handwritten ads for the in-plant newspaper, the San Serano Spectrum, that heaped the desk on all sides of the keyboard. “And I'm also getting very tired of you,” she added, scanning the long, cryptic columns on the screen. “You're supposed to be the hottest mainframe west of Houston, you know. We shouldn't have to play Twenty Questions in binary every time I want to run a . . .”

Her hand froze in mid-gesture.

There was someone out in the hall.

But when she listened, she heard nothing but the faint hum of air conditioning. Even the massive radios of the janitorial staff, which generally drove her to take long walks to the coffee machines in the far corners of Building Six, had ceased, she realized, some time ago.

It occurred to her that it must be very late.

Security,
she told herself and turned back to the monitor.

She didn't believe it.

She'd worked enough overtime, running analyses of missile test-flight results, to know well the sounds of the security staff as they patrolled the corridors. That swift, breathing rush of light footfalls outside her cubicle had nothing in common with the familiar hobnailed tread and jingle of keys.

With reflex reassurance, part of her said, If it isn't Security, Security will take care of it. Another part, with equally reflex dismissal, added, Don't be silly. It was probably some poor technician wandering around looking for the john or for a coffee machine that still had coffee—or what passed, at San Serano, for coffee—in it at this hour, whatever this hour was.

It was nothing to worry about.

Nevertheless, Joanna worried.

She was a small girl, with an air of compact sturdiness to her despite her rather delicate build. Ruth, the artist who lived downstairs from her, was of the often-expressed opinion that Joanna could be beautiful if she'd take the time, but Joanna had never seen the point of taking the time—or anyway not the hours a day Ruth put into it. Now she soundlessly hooked the toe of her sneaker under the pull of the desk drawer and slid the metal bin open far enough to allow her to dip into her mailsack of a purse and produce a hammer.

Then she sat still and listened again. This time she heard nothing.

It occurred to her that she had a throbbing headache. It must be after ten, she thought—there had still been people around when she'd started working on the program for analyzing the Tiger missile test results for next week's Navy review. There was no telling how much longer she'd...

Her eyes sought the green luminosity of the clock.

2:00 A.M.

Two! She could have sworn it wasn't later than ten—well, eleven, since the janitors had gone home.

No wonder I have a headache,
she thought, and ran her hands through the feathery tangle of her hair. She recalled vaguely that she'd been too busy to eat dinner; in any case, she'd long ago given up buying the overpriced slumgullion doled out by the junk machines in the breakroom to those who worked on after regular hours. That was the tricky thing about the whole San Serano Aerospace Complex she had learned. The cool, even, white lights never varied; the unscented air never altered its temperature; and as a result no one ever had a very clear idea of what time it was.

But two in the morning . . .

Without warning, a wave of despair crept over her, filling the farthest corners of her tired soul like cold and greasy dishwater. The uselessness of it all suddenly overpowered her—not only getting the program to run, or the tedious documentation that would have to follow, or the fact that the data was going to have to be altered tomorrow in any case. Her whole life seemed suddenly to open before her in a vista of uselessness, an empty freeway leading nowhere.

It was strange to her, for she had, since she left her mother's house, been pretty content with her solitary life. Maybe that was one of the things wrong with her, she reflected. She knew herself to be far less good with people than she was with machines—no matter what you looked like, a computer would never laugh at you behind your back. Computers never expected you to be capable of things you had not been taught to do, or cared one way or the other what you did in your spare time.

She was familiar with the vague sense of an obligation to be other than she was—to be more like her bright and sociable co-workers—but she had never experienced this hollow, gray feeling of the futility of either staying as she was or changing to what she ought to be.

The image of Gary Fairchild returned to her mind—handsome, smiling, and enamored. Her loneliness seemed suddenly overwhelming, her vacillations over his constant request for her to move in with him suddenly petty and futile. Why not? she thought. If this is all there is ever going to be . . . Maybe everybody's right about living with someone, and I'm wrong . . .

Yet the thought of giving up what she had filled her with the dread of some inevitable doom.

Within her, a small voice struggled to insist, In any case there isn't anything you can do about it at two in the morning. Tomorrow I'll see him ....

As swiftly as it had come, the dull sense of hopeless grief ebbed away. Joanna blinked, rubbed her eyes, and wondered with the calm detachment that had gotten her into trouble in the past, What the hell was that all about?

The thought that she had, for one second, seriously been planning to accede to Gary's next demand that she live with him made her shudder. She might, she knew, be the sort of mousy little woman men never went out with, sealed like an anchoress in a chapel with a pile of books, computers, and cats, but it was preferable to the struggle between her conscientious efforts to please Gary, her boredom with watching TV in his enormous, gray-upholstered party room, and her sneaky sense that she'd rather be by herself, reading. It was not, she knew, the way she ought to act or feel about the man who loved her. But shame her though it did, it was how she felt, despite all her efforts to convince herself otherwise.

I must be hungrier than I thought, she reflected. They say low blood sugar can make you depressed—they didn't mention it could make you suicidal. With a sigh, she began backup procedures, to save what she'd done for tomorrow. At this point, she knew, she would make more errors through sheer exhaustion than she would correct. She chucked the floppies on top of the general heap. Her co-workers never believed her when she said that she located things in the heaps of printouts, programs, floppies, data, reports, management bulletins, journals, and ads on her desk by the oil company principle of geological stratification. They were all mystified by it—Joanna herself would scarcely have been surprised to find trilobites in the bottom layer.

It was only when she stood up that she remembered the stealthy footfalls outside her cubicle.

Don't be silly, she told herself again. San Serano is a security installation. The idea that anyone could get in without being checked out by the guards is ridiculous.

But somehow, she felt unconvinced.

She patted the pockets of her faded jeans for her car keys, dug her purse—an enormous accessory of Hopiweave and rabbit skins bulging with rolled-up printouts, computer journals, and an incredible quantity of miscellaneous junk—out of the desk drawer, and made a move to slip the hammer back into it. Then she hesitated. She'd feel awfully silly if she met a guard or a co-worker—what co-worker's going to be around at 2:00 a. m.?-walking down the corridor with a hammer in her hand. But still . . .

You are twenty-six years old,
she told herself sharply. The odds against your meeting the boogieman in the corridors of the San Serano Bomb and Novelty Shop are astronomical.

So were the odds against meeting a mocking and judgemental coworker, but she compromised by sliding the hammer into her purse with the handle sticking out. Then, soundlessly, she pushed open the cubicle door and stepped into the corridor.

Somehow, the bright lighting of the corridors made her uneasiness worse. The doors of the other cubicles she passed and the typing bullpen were wells of eerie, charcoal half-light, the machines all sleeping in unearthy silence. Corridors leading to the test labs on the other side of the building made ominous echo tunnels which picked up the padded swish-swish of Joanna's sneakers on the dark-blue carpet, incredibly loud in that brilliantly lit silence. Once or twice she glimpsed the industrialstrength cockroaches who lived in such numbers in the warm mazes of the backs of the equipment in the test labs, but that was the only other life she saw.

Then light caught her eye.

She stopped. Not the even white illumination of the fluorescents . . . Candlelight? No more than a finger-smudge of gold reflection against the metal molding of the half-open door of the main computer room.

Fire? she thought, her pace quickening. The main computer room contained a lot of printout bins. The mainframe, a Cray the size of a Cadillac, the biggest defense computer west of Houston, could be tapped into by any of the desk stations, but there was a lot of work in the computer room itself. There was no smoking in the room, but one of the yobos on the janitorial staff might have dropped a cigarette into a trash bin, though the light looked too small and too steady for a fire.

It was, as she had thought, a candle. An old-fashioned tin candleholder, rested on a corner of the monitor desk. A gold edge of light danced over the dark edges of the three massive monoliths of the Cray, over the huge six-foot graphics projection monitor screens and the smaller CRTs and keyboards. As she came up the slight ramp which raised the level of the room above the subfloor wiring, the single red eye of the power-light regarded her somberly beside that seed of anachronistic brightness.

Now what the hell was a candle . . . ?

It was her natural nervous timidity which saved her. She knew she hadn't heard the man behind her, but it was as if, half-ready, she felt the dark shape loom up behind her a moment before hands closed around her throat. Certainly her hands were there, clutching at the long, cold fingers as they tightened; she cow-kicked back and up, half-conscious of her foot tangling with fabric.

The grip loosened and fumbled; the gray, buzzing roar which had filled her ears and the terrible clouded feeling in her head abated for one instant, and she whipped her right hand down to the hammer ready in her purse. There was breath, hot against her temple, and the smell of woodsmoke, old wool, and herbs in her nostrils. She struck back over her left shoulder with all her strength.

Then she was falling. Her head struck the floor, hard under the thin, coarse nylon of the rug. She had a last, confused glimpse of the candle propped before the monitor, of a shadow bending over her—of something else on the wall . . .

She came to choking on ammonia. Her flailing fist was caught in a large, black hand, her scream was nothing more than a wheezing croak.

The face bending over hers focused—worried, black, and middle-aged. “You all right, miss?”

She blinked, her heart hammering and her whole body shaking with an adrenaline rush that nearly turned her sick. The upside-down beam of a flashlight at floor level gleamed brassily off a security badge and made dark lines along the regulation creases of the guard's light-blue shirt as he helped her to sit up.

“Did you get him?” she asked confusedly.

“Who?”

Her hands fumbled under the tangle of her blond hair, to feel the bruises on her throat. She swallowed, and it hurt. Her head ached—she realized she was lucky she'd hit the slight give of the raised floor and not the cement subfloor beneath. “Somebody was in here. He grabbed me from behind . . .” She looked back at the desk. The candle was gone.

The guard removed a walkie-talkie from his belt. “Ken? Art here.  We've got a report of an intruder in Building Six, near the main computer room.” He turned back to her. “Did you get a look at him?”

She shook her head. “He was taller than me . . .” She stopped herself ruefully. Everyone was taller than she. “But I think I heard him walking in the hallways earlier.”

“What time?” he asked.

“About two. I—I saw a light in here.”

“And he attacked you with this?” The guard held up the hammer, protected from his hand by a handkerchief and gripped by the very end of the handle.