Souls in the Great Machine Read online

  "Milderellen, yes, that paper on the directional distribution of the Call," Lewrick said as he carried a cane chair over for her. "Excellent work. Did you work out the mathematics yourself?."

  "Yes, Fras Lewrick. It took five months." "Months? It would have taken me decades--by myself, that is. Of course I could do the work in days using the Highliber's, yes, ah, what you are about to see." He rummaged about among the papers on his desk, then brought over a form on a clipboard. It was headed Capital Secrets Act.

  "You are about to learn of a secret machine, and the secret is a close one," Tarrin explained. "Please read this form and sign where indicated."

  Lemorel read. It was an act endorsed by the Mayor, but was internal to Libris. Something known as the Calculor was mentioned in nearly every clause, and most of the penalties for breaches of the rules were death. Those that were not involved a life sentence in the very same Calculor, but the text gave no clue to the Calculor's nature. Taking the goose quill that Lewrick held out, Lemorel dipped it in a porcelain ink jar held in a silver dragon's jaws. A drop spattered the poor paper form.

  "Don't worry, Frelle, you can be shot whether you sign the form or not,"

  said Tarrin, reaching for a jar of powder.

  Lemorel signed. "Welcome to our family," declared Lewrick as Tarrin dusted powder on the "Who eats Dragon Colors faster than I can recruit them," interjected Tarrin. "I've seen it all before, I'll stay here." He sat behind Lewrick's desk and tugged at a cord hanging from the ceiling, then picked up a reel of perforated paper tape and began to read the code directly from the patterns of holes.

  Lewrick unlocked a thick ironwood door and took Lemorel down an unlit corridor lined with limestone slabs. It opened into another chamber. Two Tiger Dragons saluted as they emerged, alert and hard-muscled youths who were armed with two double-barreled flintlocks each. Lemorel could see that they were not for show.

  "The Highliber's machine is called the Calculor, and is a calculation engine of really prodigious power and versatility," Lewrick explained as he gestured to a small door hung with thick felt curtains. "It can process tasks in days that any lone clerk might labor over for years."

  He held the curtain aside and Lemorel walked out onto an observation gallery. It was set high in one wall of the Calculor hall, right above the double partitions that separated Dexter and Sinister processors. Wildly differing impressions swept over Lemorel. A hall full of students doing exams, the weaving championships at the regional fair, a vineyard crowded with pickers at harvest time.." but there could be no real comparison with anything else. The Calculor was an echo of something all but incomprehensible from the distant past. It was an engine like a river galley or galley train, yet so much more. This was not just a device to move cargo, it multiplied the skills of whoever used it.

  "So, Frelle Lemorel, what do you think of our Great Machine?" Lewrick asked eagerly, like a proud parent presenting a gifted child.

  "It--a device to enhance the mind, just as a telescope enhances the eye," she said slowly, mesmerized by what she saw.

  "Very good, a good analogy!" Lewrick exclaimed. "I'll note that one. Come now, let's return to the office." He began explaining some elements of the design as they walked, but they were back with Tarrin before he had even covered the logistics of shift work for the Calculor's components.

  "As a Dragon Green you will be working in Systems Design--ah, that is when you are at work. When yon are not at work you will be studying at the University, I hope?"

  "She has been enrolled already," Tarrin assured him.

  "Splendid, our expansion activities require more Dragon Blue librarians in a year than Libris used to promote in a century."

  "Which brings me to my interesting news," said Tarrin.

  "Could I sit at my own desk as you tell me?" asked Lewrick hopefully, rubbing his hands together and bowing a little. "Oh, my apologies," replied Tarrin, mopping up a coffee ring with his sleeve as he stood up. "You are about to get the services of the Chief Cataloguer."

  Lewrick frowned suspiciously. "As a Dragon or a component?"

  "A component." "Splendid, splendid!" exclaimed Lewrick, slapping his hands on the leather facing of his desk. "Whatever his faults he does have a head for figures. He can be a trainee function in Sinister--"

  He was interrupted by a sharp knock on the door, and before Lewrick could speak the door was flung open. Highliber Zarvora strode in.

  "Fras Tarfin, the guards said that you were here--who is this?"

  "Dragon Green Lemorel Milderellen," Tarrin said as Lemorel stood up and bowed smartly. "Milderellen... Demographic Analysis of the Call Vectors in the Southeast, yes a good paper." She turned to Tardn. "But I remember seeing her name on the Dragon Orange promotions listing only last month."

  "I tested her the day she arrived and double-promoted her," Tan-in explained "Gave you quite a shock, didn't I, Frelle? Quite an ordeal, she fainted in my office."

  "Put this on and try not to faint," said Zarvora, throwing a band of gold cloth to Tarrin. "The Chief Cataloguer challenged, but was unable to name a champion. You are now Chief Cataloguer."

  Tarrin opened his mouth and his jaw worked, but no words formed. Zarvora turned to Lemorel.

  "It is a shock when you get an unexpected promotion, yes?"

  "Yes, Frelle Highliber."

  "But my work as Examiner, there's nobody qualified to take over," Tan'in protested. "Then you will have to carry both positions. Make your clerk a Dragon White. She knows your basic office procedures. Send her to the local Unitech to study administration, raise her salary, anything, just keep both offices working." "Couldn't I make her Chief Cataloguer?" "No."

  Lewrick laughed. "Chief Cataloguer, may I be the first to congratulate you?" "Highliber this is impossible--" "Fras Tan-in, it is very easy. Just get the cataloguers working. Break up the entrenched groups and send any troublemakers to the Calculor." "Oh yes," said Lewrick, "they'd be most welcome." "It's not as easy as that, Frelle Highliber!"

  "Fras Tarrin, listen. Cataloguing must be made an extension of the data storage register of the Calculor by the end of the year. My lackey has some papers for you to sign and a charter for your office wall." "There will be challenges." "So? Do what I do: shoot them." "I'm a terrible shot."

  "Engage a champion."

  The Highliber left. Nobody spoke for a full minute.

  "A wonderful lady, the Highliber," said Lewrick. "Were I thirty years younger I might propose a liaison." "You're either mad or senile, or both," said Tarrin, rubbing his temples. "Frelle Lemorel, I'm afraid that I cannot complete your tour of Libris, but I did manage to get you as far as your Department Head, Dragon Gold Lewfick MacKention."

  "See you on the Executive Committee," Lewrick called as Tarrin left. The newly appointed Chief Cataloguer slammed the door behind him. "This is all a strain, my dear Frelle," Lewrick said kindly as he sat back at his desk. "The Highliber needs calculating power for both the Mayor's projects and her own researches. Expanding the Calculor is proving disruptive enough, yet there is something worse. The Calculor has become unreliable and we don't know why. Frelle Zarvora's temper is strung tight enough to play a tune upon and we, her staff, are being run ragged."

  I've met the Highliber herself, thought Lemorel, barely following his words. And the Highliber had actually seen--and remembered---her paper on Call vectors.

  "How long has the Calculor been operational?" she asked, abruptly pulling herself out of the reverie. "It isn't. We have been running tests for many months and have even done some important projects for the Mayor, but it's not operational. There were plans for a commissioning ceremony, but they have been held over. It has begun to make strange errors--but more of that later. Come now, let us find a desk for you. People need their own desk, just as they need their own bed. Desks are intensely personal things, don't you think so?"

  The sun had been down two hours when Lemorel finally returned to Darien's rooms, flopped onto the spare bunk, and blanked out. After anot
her hour Darien entered, looked at the limp figure sprawled on the bunk, and shook her head. Lemorel did not wake as her boots were pulled off and a blanket was draped over her.

  COURTSHIP

  FUNCTION 9 recognized the sequence of numbers as they appeared on the wheels of his reception register. The Calculor had been through the same sequence a dozen times already, but now there was a slight rounding error. A lot of testing was being conducted, the Calculor's masters were very agitated about something, and other components had been flogged for both oversights and initiatives. FUNCTION 9 was too skilled for oversights, and he preferred his initiatives to be invisible.

  He performed his operations on the numbers, then sent the results to the Dragon Green who was in charge of the correlator components by setting a register of levers to represent us answer and pressing the transmission pedal below the desk. The Calculor was designed so that the independent Dexter and Sinister sides checked each other's work. Their correlation subsections passed results to the Central Verification Unit, and if the results differed that particular calculation would be repeated. FUNCTION 9 had a good memory and he knew that some of the tests being performed on the machine were invalid because of rounding errors and such, yet they did not come back for reprocessing. He knew it was odd, but he did nothing about the errors. He did not want a flogging.

  The correlator sat behind a screen several feet away from FUNCTION 9's desk, and the component could hear the clacking as he fed the data into his register for transmission to the Verification Unit--then there was a faint thump and hum of tensed wires. A moment later he heard a thump from the correlator on the other side, but the accompanying chord was not quite the same. Another thump, and this time the chord matched that of his own side. FUNCTION 9 smiled as much as his gag would allow.

  From the Verification Unit the results went to the System Control Room, where Lewrick and a team of Dragon Greens and Blues analyzed them. The librarians in the Calculor were carefully isolated from those who were checking the output, and of course none of them knew why the tests were being performed.

  Lemorel's initial work in Libris was part of this massive check of the system. Tables of figures were fed in and processed, with both Dexter and Sinister processors alternately disabled. The results came out roughly as expected: the two processors made randomly different mistakes. Teams of Dragon Librarians were used as components, and they could find no way to break the system after getting an insider's view. The Calculor was returned to normal operation, but after a week the errors began to reappear. The backlog of important work continued to pile up.

  Even in the atmosphere of impossible workloads, flayed tempers, and impenetrable secrecy, Lemorel was happy. She was new to the place and relatively junior, so she was assigned nothing more than analysis of the Calculor's output. While others exchanged insults and argued about the demarcation of duties, Lemorel did her calculations quickly, accurately, and anonymously. At last her past had lost her; she could merge with the Highliber's machine.

  She decided to accept Darien's offer to permanently share the twin-room apart let in the Libris hostelry. It was a long climb to the top floor, but they had a good view of the mayoral gardens, the lake, and the farms and forests beyond. Lemorel and Darien got along very well, in part because they had the bond of sign language, but also because both knew what it was like to be an outcast.

  The Rochester market lay between the par aline terminus and the University, and helped to divide the city between the affluent classes of the eastern side and everyone else. Through the market one could travel the known world, and even go a little farther. Southmoor carpets woven from dyed wool and emu down hung from terraced frames to form a gaudy little city of facades. Finely tailored clothing from Griffith insured a permanent crowd at the Central Confederation's stalls, while the clockwork and gunsmiths' stalls of the Wangaratta, Shepparton, and Rutherglen may orates attracted more foreigners than locals. There were flesh vegetables from local farms a mile or two distant, beside Northmoor coffee from the Northernmost regions of the known world.

  Darien and Lemorel visited the market on their scheduled free days. After buying food they went to the vagary stalls at the University end. Darien always came away with books in obscure languages or classics in older variants of Anglaic, while Lemorel searched for books on mathematics and natural philosophy. The dealers put some of the more interesting volumes aside for them.

  Lemorel now wore her hair down, retiring behind the dark, wavy cascades that nobody in Rutherglen had ever seen unbound. A change in image could not go without a change in appearance, after all. Darien persuaded her to buy a brightly patterned Cargelligo scarf, and to have the Libris uniform run up in Cowra silks by a master tailor who was the endorsed tailor to members of the Libris Executive. As the weeks passed the newest Dragon Green began to think about new weapons.

  "A pair of duelers' throwing knives, or a long-bore matchlock that has seen better days," Lemorel said as she stood before Tantyrak, former Powdermonger to the Emir of Cowra. "I can throw a knife, and they seem elegant."

  Darien held up her hands. "Would you ever enter a duel with a knife?" "Oh no!"

  "Then don't buy them."

  "Then it must be the musket."

  "What good is a musket to a librarian?"

  "It has Inglewood filigree work along the barrel, and greenstone inlay on the stock. It might get me into ceremonial guard squads."

  "More likely you will be put into firing squads for important felons."

  Lemorel lifted the musket down from the rack. Tantyrak smiled, bowed, and rubbed his hands together. "It once had a ram lock mechanism, you can see by the holes here and here. The mechanism was removed and replaced by a matchlock fuse for use by a musketeer from Deniliquin. See the poker work Deniliquin crest on the stock that someone has tried to file away?"

  "It was probably looted from a body on some battlefield. Why would he have the ram lock removed?" "Reliability and ease of reloading. A smoldering fuse means a shot every time. A weak shower of sparks from a ram lock or flintlock means click when your life depends on boom. On the other hand, a well-maintained ram lock under a rain sleeve can allow you to shoot even when all other guns are washed out. Fras Tantyrak, how much?"

  "Ah, very fine gun, Frelle, special rebuilding of mechanism as matchlock. Forty-nine silver nobles."

  "Terrible gun, I hate matchlocks. Smelly fuse smoke, always going out. Do you have the original ram lock

  "Alas Frelle, the faithless pestilent who owned it previously had no regard for the elegant and virtuous principle of ram lock sparking."

  "Fifteen nobles."

  "Fifteen nobles? Frelle, the greenstone in the stock is worth more than fifteen nobles." ' Ten minutes of haggling secured the musket for thirty-seven silver nobles, and Lemorel insisted that she had been robbed even when out of earshot of the merchant.

  "It should take me three months to rebuild the ram lock

  "You?"

  "Why not? I have a toolkit of files, demi-saws and such. I'm a clock maker daughter, after all."

  "Why not have the Libris workshops do it for you?"

  "Darien, I use my head all day. I need to do something with my hands to relax." They stopped at a metal foundry, and Lemorel ordered blank plates and springs to be made for her ram lock As the metalsmith took measurements and made drawings Darien looked around the shop. There was a tiny forge fired by anthracite, as prescribed by law and holy scripture. Chain links for pedal tricycles hung on pegs, and the shelves were piled with gears, sprockets, cams, and axles. Several larger, heavier chains hung waiting for repairs, chains that could only be from galley trains. So, there was more work than the par aline workshops on the northern edge of the lake could handle. That usually meant fighting somewhere, or fighting soon to be. Wind trains ran for practically nothing, but they were slow and depended on the weather. Galley trains were expensive but fast, and speed often won wars.

  A troop of armed runners marched past outside, escort
ing the Market Rectifier and his accountant. Tall orange plumes marked them above the undulating sea of heads, and their butt-leather armor creaked as they marched, brass-tipped swagger sticks rapping the cobbles in unison at every second step. The Rectifier carried his standard of office, while the accountant walked behind him with the leather and gilt work Register of Merchants beneath his arm. Several lackeys followed carrying record boxes, and behind them were more runners and a sullen prisoner. Darien did not recognize him, but noted that he was wearing a barge cap of the river-merchant service. An agent of the Warren, quite probably. Catcalls and hisses sniped at him from the onlookers.

  The Rectifier had been unraveling fraudulent dealings at an astonishing rate in recent months, so much so that two underground cartels had been forced to disband and even the mighty Warren was reduced to no more than a few legal fronts. The crushing of organized crime in the Rochester market had lowered both prices and overheads, so that honest traders were better off.

  "Could you take this back to Libris, Dar?" Darien turned from the door and Lemorel thrust her musket and a wicker bag into her arms. "I have to go on to the University now."

  With her hands full Darien could not reply. The University was a mile or so from the walls of Libris, and was nearly as old as the library itself. Its beautiful gardens were famous, and both mayors and highlibers had been educated there for over a thousand years. Lemorel was comforted by its size. Nobody knew her there, and she could just sit quietly and listen to the edutors expound theorems and proofs as if she were the respectable young daughter of rich parents from the southeast quadrant of the city. She was indeed being given a second chance at life.

  In Libris she was set dozens of incomprehensible tasks in symbolic logic and set theory each day, and was even trained as a component in the Calculor. Tarrin looked increasingly haggard, and Lewrick snapped at anyone who spoke the word "edutor" in his presence. Once Lemorel had even seen the Mayor himself coming out of the Highliber's rooms. Months passed, but whatever the problem was, it moved no closer to resolution. Her ram lock mechanism slowly took shape over dozens of nights by the fireside, and by December she was testing the fully restored musket in the practice range of the Libris dueling chambers. "The Calculor really is alive," insisted Lewrick as Zarvora paced the floor in front of him.