Eyes of the Calculor Read online

  "The courtyard used to be enclosed, but it got a bit smelly with the horses, so the roof was dismantled," explained Hawker.

  "Have you noticed anything different about Mirrorsun lately?" asked Dramoren, looking up.

  "Er, the moving lights?" said Hawker after staring at it for a moment.

  "Yes. They worry me."

  "They look harmless."

  "So does a piece of paper with 'War is Declared' written on it."

  One pair of horses near the door was driving a large reciprocating pump, which circulated air to cool the calculor. Inside the building, frame and canvas ducts carried air along the passageway just above their heads. It was like being within a vast, warm body as pulses of air dilated the ducts, relays sparked and clattered, and transformers hummed. Some artisans were clustered around patchboards, others heated soldering irons on charcoal burners, and yet more drew diagrams on portable chalkboards and argued about impedance, resistance, and capacitance. There were armed Tiger Dragons at every door, and the place was lit by flickering oil lamps.

  "Two hundred souls are needed to maintain the ZAR 2 calculor," said Hawker proudly, "and it is still the largest anywhere."

  A pervasive, hissing, clattering sound was gradually growing louder. They climbed one final flight of stairs, then Hawker opened a small door. A wave of sound surged out over them. Dramoren hesitated, then followed Hawker out onto a balcony of blackstone and marble.

  Dramoren stood beside Hawker at the marble rail, looking out across the electric calculor. The air was warm, and laced with the

  smell of beeswax, oil, and ozone, while the clatter of many thousands of electric relays was as insistent a hailstorm. Compared with some of the rediscovered ancient devices now in use the old electric cal-culor was clumsy, noisy, and unreliable, yet it had one redeeming feature in the eyes of Highliber Dramoren. It was entirely comprehensible to mere mortals. Admittedly, not more than half a dozen mortals understood the workings of its seventeen thousand relays and the plugboard operating system, but they were sufficient to tend its maintenance.

  "So, this thing was built in 1708 GW," said Dramoren above the din.

  "Yes, and I was here when it was carried in through the door," replied Hawker. "I was still a component in those days."

  "You must be a lot older than you look."

  "I'm only sixty, Fras Highliber," replied Hawker, a trace of affront in his voice.

  "Forgive me, Fras, but the prototype had been disbanded when I was eight years old, so to me it seems a very long time ago."

  "This place was renamed Dolorian Hall when the ZAR 2 machine was moved in."

  "Did you ever meet Frelle Dolorian?" asked Dramoren.

  "Ah, yes, she was a regulator in the prototype. What a charmer, aye, and she sweetened the life of several components over the years. Have you ever heard of John Glasken?"

  "Yes, he presented me with the Bouros Prize for mathematics when I was fourteen."

  "Hah, well did you know he met Dolorian on the battlefield at the end of the Milderellen Invasion, and she bedded him?"

  "I do know that, Fras Hawker. Dolorian was my aunt."

  Hawker made a choking sound and turned bright red. Dramoren put his elbows on the railing and rested his chin on his clasped hands. The silence between them began to lengthen.

  "The, ah, regulators are concerned about the electric machine," said Hawker awkwardly. "Parts are very old, and need complete rebuilding."

  "What do you think?" asked Dramoren, looking down at two regulators replacing a bank of relays in one of the racks.

  "I have been following the work being done at the University, Highliber. A whole new generation of relays is near to being perfected. They will be three times faster and a tenth the size of what is here, we should phase them in and simply discard this old machine."

  "What about the regulators?"

  "They worry that they may soon be lacking their jobs. So little has been spent on the calculor for so long that they think nobody cares about it."

  "People care, Fras Hawker. Important people care. Libris is an arm of government. Librarians and libraries are the glue that binds the Commonwealth together, and the politics of control are what drives—"

  Dramoren was cut short by a crackling cascade of sparks and violet fire from the relay banks, interspersed with cries of alarm from the regulators on duty. Smoke began to billow from all corridors of the huge machine.

  "Is it supposed to do that?" asked Dramoren, but already Hawker had dashed out and could be heard shouting "Sabotage!" in the distance.

  Down in the Dolorian Hall the regulators were running to and fro through the billows of acrid smoke with buckets of sand and fire blankets. Parts of the vast machine were already well alight. The system herald hurried across the floor calling "System Alert, Category 1, Class F!" and ringing a handbell. A technician ran shrieking out of the smoke, his clothing on fire, another technician chasing him with a pitcher of coffee.

  "Attention all souls! Attention all souls!" shouted the supervisor of security. "Evacuate the calculor immediately."

  "Prepare to initiate an orderly shutdown of the operating system!" shouted Hawker somewhere in the distance.

  "Bring water!" shouted a voice. "There's no electrical essence now."

  Obviously never tested their disaster contingency plan, thought Dramoren, if they have one. He was oddly calm in the face of this catastrophe. No electrical essence. Somehow that seemed significant. He turned away to look at the electric clock on the wall above him. It was smoking and had stopped at 10:36 p.m., barely a minute earlier. Standing on a chair, he lifted it from the wall mounting and noted that no wires trailed from it. After dousing it with the remains of his coffee, he saw that it was blackened within, and that its chemical battery had burst. The clock was quite independent of the calculous supply of electricity, yet it had been destroyed at precisely the same time.

  Implications began to tumble through Dramoren's head. Right across the mayorate all electrical devices might well be smoking, melting, and burning. Across the mayorate, the Commonwealth, perhaps even the entire continent. Perhaps all electrical devices everywhere had been struck down by some celestial sword that spared everything else.

  "Mirrorsun," said Dramoren to himself, rubbing his hands together as he turned away from the ruins of the electric calculor and made for the door. "Well, fortune favors those who react exceedingly fast."

  TOUCH OF APOCALYPSE

  Twelve miles above Eastern Australica

  Kelations between Earth's intelligent species had been less than satisfactory for a very long time. For several hundred years humans had hunted whales and dolphins so intensively that many of their clans, attractens, and associons were wiped out. Those memories were fresh and raw when the humans managed to revive a cetacean warrior from a civilization older than the human race itself, a warrior skilled in the ways of warfare that had unleashed an undersea Armageddon nine million years earlier. There is nothing like a common enemy to inspire unity, and humanity was certainly that. The Call, a mind weapon, began to sweep over the land, permanently blanketing some areas, especially near the coast. Lured to the sea to drown, or held starving in a mindless reverie, the human population declined by nearly three orders of magnitude. The cetezoids could easily have wiped Homo sapiens from the earth, but then there would have been no common enemy left. Humanity was suffered to survive through sheer political convenience.

  In the dying years of the Anglaic civilization, however, one last and desperate attempt was made to counter the cetaceans' weapon. Noting that birds were not affected by the Call, some of the last genetic engineers on the continent of Australia added tracts of bird DNA to the human genome. Overseas, frightened and confused ar-

  mies flung nuclear weapons at each other, then chaos descended in the form of a nightmare winter that lasted centuries. As the world warmed again it was noticed that some people were immune to the Call, people who were also lighter, stronger, faster, and generally more
intelligent than humans. These bird-people, the aviads, were slaughtered whenever they were recognized, and the genocide continued for two thousand years. Slowly, unobtrusively, the aviads began to organize their own nations in areas permanently blanketed by the cetezoids' Call, and their hatred for humanity was no less intense than that of the cetezoids. Within the Calldeath lands they were safe, secure beyond the reach of humans and their predilection to annihilate anything superior than themselves.

  Then, on the 13th of September, a.d. 3961 the Call ceased to exist. Completely. Humans were free from the Call weapon that had ravaged their numbers and rendered vast areas of land uninhabitable for two millennia. The aviads of the continent now known as Australia were suddenly at the mercy of a human population a thousand times its number.

  Fortunately this happened just as the only member of Earth's newest intelligent species decided to annihilate all electrical machines on the face of the planet. This was not entirely coincidence either, for the fourth intelligence had once been an aviad.

  I he sunwing Titan was a half mile in wingspan but barely fifty feet in length. It was pure wing, nothing more than a wing powered by electrical motors driven by direct or stored sunlight. Two thousand years earlier it had been designed to cruise the stratosphere forever, regenerating ozone to restore the delicate balance of Earth's atmosphere, never landing, self-repairing. It was an island of habitat in the sky. An air pressure of just below that of sea level was maintained by pumps to strengthen the Titan's structure, and waste heat provided warmth for the cabins were where maintenance crews had been meant to live. The aviads had boarded the Titan, removed the ozone generators, and learned to steer it. Aviads could now cross

  human territory without fear of lynch mobs, torture, and inquisitions. They could even cross oceans.

  The Titan was cruising twelve miles above southeastern Australia on the 13th day of September 1729 in the Greatwinter calendar of Australica, and 3961 in the Anno Domini calendar of North America. There were twenty-two aviad souls aboard the huge wing: three crew and nineteen passengers.

  Captain Raffe Terian seldom steered the Titan. As captain he tended the running and security of the town-sized wing, managing the provisions, waste disposal, security, and maintenance of the living areas. He had a bridge from which he could adjust the course, but in practice this was little more than his office. This trip was quite routine, it was merely to transport aviad refugees from the humans' Carpenteria mayorate of the far north to Tasmania Island, where the mayorate of Avian was barely six years old. It was ironic that so many aviads were often born to human parents, so that the humans who hated them were their best source of recruits. Terian noted that they were above the Central Confederation's lands, but borders made little difference at a height of twelve miles. Even crawling along at an airspeed of just seventy miles per hour they would be above Tasmania Island in twelve hours.

  "It is hard to believe that there is a battlefield down there," said Watch Officer Varel, standing at the observation plate with her arms folded behind her back.

  "The Central Confederation and the Southmoors, I believe," replied Captain Terian. "It is nice to see humans killing each other instead of us."

  "With respect, Fras, I never like to see anyone killing anyone," retorted Varel.

  "Spoken like someone shielded from the tender attentions of a human mob, Watch Officer. What has been your background with humans?"

  "I have been shot twice and raped once during the course of recruiting five dozen aviad brethren from among the humans. I have also killed eleven times."

  Terian shook his head. "After all that, you still have a trace of compassion for the human exterminators?"

  "They are just afraid of us, Fras Captain. Aviads are so much better in so many ways."

  "That does not make it any more pleasant to be killed by them. Some factions say we should kill them all—"

  The console before the captain suddenly hissed, then billowed acrid smoke. The light strips blackened and failed too, but clear panels in the roof allowed light from Mirrorsun to illuminate the interior of the Titan. Everything electrical had smoked, melted, or exploded at the same instant.

  "What in all hells has happened?" demanded Captain Terian, fanning at the smoke between him and the ruined console.

  "The nearest engine pod is trailing smoke, Fras Captain," reported Varel, staring through a roof panel. "Its propeller is just spinning unpowered."

  "Get up to the navigation bubble, check if any others have failed."

  Watch Officer Seegan burst into the bridge as Varel was climbing the steps. He reported that there was smoke everywhere, and that the passengers were beginning to panic.

  "All engine pods are trailing smoke, Fras Captain," called Varel from the navigation bubble. "Some propellers have jammed, others are just spinning unpowered."

  "All?" cried the incredulous captain.

  "All that I can see from here."

  "Then we are going to lose the sunwing."

  By now the smoke was dispersing, but in the distance someone was having hysterics and screaming that they were all going to die.

  "Even with total loss of power this thing will take over two hours to glide to the ground," Terian pointed out as he hurriedly thought through some figures he had learned for an examination years earlier. "That gives us space to breathe."

  "Fras Captain, breathing could actually be a problem; we are also losing air pressure," reported Seegan, staring at a large me-

  chanical dial. "We will be dead ninety minutes before the air can be breathed."

  Terian closed his eyes and put his hands over his ears as he thought for a frantic moment.

  "Perhaps not," he decided. "Draw your guns, come with me."

  Although there had been safety drills aboard the Titan, there was no precedent for total failure of all electrical systems with no warning whatsoever. They were at twice the height of Mount Everest, although none of them knew of Mount Everest as anything more than a folktale.

  The first thought of the passengers was to escape from the smoke, and the evacuation drills had made the location of the parachutes common knowledge. One of the musketeers strapped on a parachute, then led a group of passengers to the ferry bay of the Titan. The ramp was normally released by electrical relays when at lower altitudes, but now the switches remained firmly locked. Selecting an area of the low, sloping roof, the musketeer began slashing at the tough fabric. The already depleted air rushed out all the more quickly, sucking acrid smoke and fumes from the sunwing.

  Eight of the passengers tumbled out through the hole, but within minutes five of them were dead, suffocated as they hung from their parachute straps in the rarefied air. Three others knew that survival depended upon reaching breathable air quickly, and did not open their parachutes. By the time they had reached denser air, however, they were dead from the wind chill. They had been dressed for the warm, comfortable cabins of the Titan.

  Back aboard the crippled sunwing another three had died, suffocated by the smoke, but the captain had been quick to grasp what options were available for those aboard the doomed craft. Crippled the Titan might be, but it was descending in a long, shallow glide and would take a very long time to hit the ground. He and the two officers left the smoking control deck, shouting for all that could hear to make for the captain's cabin, and to ignore the parachutes. He got a mixed reception from the passengers, and even his authority could not convince them that true safety did not lie with immediate

  escape. The captain seized a woman who was leading her two children aft, shouting at her to come with him. A confused man knocked him to the deck and tried to lead the family away. Watch Officer Varel shot the man dead.

  Fifteen minutes after the catastrophic failure, three more passengers on the Titan were dead, asphyxiated in the corridors whose air pressure had by now become equal with the rarefied atmosphere outside. After half an hour the sunwing had shed six miles of its height and was down to thirty thousand feet. In the
captain's cabin, two men, three women, and two children were huddled together in the increasing cold, yet they could still breathe. The cabin was airtight, and had contained no electrical devices. Through the single forward observation plate they watched as detail on the Mirrorsun-lit ground gradually grew more distinct. They moved little. One of the crew, a monk of the Avianese Gentheist Church, talked them through meditative breathing exercises. They were down to eighteen thousand feet at the end of the first hour. Slowly the captain bled the air from the cabin, and breathing became more difficult.

  "I thought the idea was to save air," said the mother of the children.

  "The Titan is descending more slowly in the denser air, so I don't know how long it will take to reach a level safe for parachuting."

  "What do you mean?"

  "The pressure in here is that of two thousand feet above the ground, and we are nine times higher. The air outside can be breathed but it is very thin. Decompression sickness will soon kill us if we open the door and jump now, so we need to slowly accustom our bodies to the lower pressure."

  "And if we are approaching the salt water before we are accustomed?"

  "Then we take a chance and jump anyway."

  After two hours they were a mere mile above ground.

  "We are over Southmoor territory," said the captain. "Not a good place to jump."

  "Fras Captain, will we reach the Rochestrian Commonwealth?" asked the watch officer.

  "Yes. In ten minutes, I estimate. Now listen to me, and listen carefully. The pressure outside must be nearly the same as in here, so I am about to open the door. Go to your cabins and collect all your money and papers. Put on the heaviest clothing and boots that you have, then come back here for your parachutes."

  The air outside the cabin was cold but breathable as they emerged, but Captain Terian discovered another problem. There had only been twelve parachutes aboard the Titan. Eight had been taken by those who had jumped at twelve miles.