Clockwork Heart (21 page)

Taya stared up at the sky again and gave a long, pained sigh.
Oh, Lady. I need to learn how to be hard-hearted.

“You're a real slagging pain in my tailset, you know that, Exalted? I don't know how much more of you I can take. I've got lots of other people I could spend my time with.”

“I don't.” The gas lamps turned Cristof's glasses into white flames against the darkness as he pushed them higher on his nose and turned away. “Fly safely, Icarus.”

She stared after him, then lifted her arms and shrugged her wings back into their locked position.
Forgefire
, she thought.
What else am I going to do tonight? Sit in my bedroom and brood?

“We already shared a meal, anyway,” she called after him. “Back when you weren't being so rude.”

He stopped, the hem of his greatcoat swinging around his legs.

“I said I'm sorry.”

“Among icarii,” she said, to his back, “when two friends fight, one of them buys the other a drink to make up.”

He stared straight ahead, into the darkness.

“What kind of drink?”

“A cold beer to wash down a spicy Cabisi stew would be perfect.” She folded her arms over her chest. “I told you I'm starving.”

He turned.

“Then I'll buy your dinner, too,” he said, his grave tone leavened by the profound relief in his face.

Chapter Eleven

Taya's favorite Cabisi restaurant was close to the University campus. Cristof stuck to his decision to fast while she dined, only nibbling on shreds of the flatbread served with the meal. They discussed what they knew so far. It wasn't much, but it was safe. Taya didn't know what to think about Cristof envying Alister. She didn't know what to think about Cristof, period.

It was easier not to.

When she finished, they walked the four blocks to the University, heading back down to the basement of the Science and Technology building. The familiar sound of an argument greeted them, but Taya didn't hear the clatter of the analytical engine.

“Hello,” she sang out as they entered the room. The argument stopped as the programmers looked up. Palms hit foreheads and heads bobbed when they saw Cristof.

“This isn't a good time for a visit,” Kyle cautioned them. A large schematic was spread on the table in front of him. “A bug cropped up this morning and we've been trying to hunt it down all day.”

“Did something go wrong with one of your programs?” Taya looked at the huge analytical engine that stood motionless across half the room. The thick cables that led down to the steam engines in the subbasement were disconnected.

“No, it's mechanical, we think.” Lars was inspecting a gear assembly. Cristof crossed the room to join him. “Some torsion in the spindles, maybe some gear drift…”

“What happened?”

“We came in this morning—”

“Afternoon,” Victor corrected. He was sitting next to a box of punch cards, glancing at each and then setting it to one side. “We were hung over this morning.”

“This afternoon, early, and we found the engine running on its own.”

“Is that bad?” Taya pulled around a chair and sat in it backward, her wings rising behind her.

“It couldn't be very good,” Cristof murmured, squinting as he examined the gears. “This is a precision machine, like a clock. Does it lose accuracy with metal wear?”

“Absolutely.” Lars rubbed oil off a spindle.

“Lars thinks mechanical problems affected the Heart's results,” Emelie said, smirking.

“That, or Alister had a serious glitch in his program,” Lars growled. “Anyway, it's not just the fact that the engine ran all night. Its encryption keys were overridden, too, so anyone could have gotten in and used it while we were gone.”

“Did they?” Cristof asked, suddenly intent.

“Not that we can tell, but…” Isobel shrugged. “The place was a mess when we left. We couldn't tell if anything had been moved when we got in this morning.”

“Afternoon.” Victor tapped a card on the table and then put it back into his stack.

“Whenever.”

“So, what went wrong with Clockwork Heart?” Taya inquired.

“It told us that Lars and Kyle had the best chance of a successful marriage,” Emelie replied, grinning.

“The deal was, if any of us scored well together, we'd go on a date and see if the program was right.” Kyle glanced up and smiled impishly. “But Lars has cold feet.”

“I'd rather be ground through the Great Engine's gears,” Lars grumbled.

“We all agreed to it,” Kyle pointed out. “Don't worry. I'll take you someplace nice.”

Taya laughed. “Isn't there some kind of — I don't know, some kind of program rule about couples being men and women?”

“That's what Victor's looking for.” Kyle was still smiling to himself as he glanced down at the schematic again. “Either another function overrode it, or Alister was more of a free thinker than we thought.”

“Good for Alister,” Isobel said, unscrewing a metal panel.

Taya glanced at Cristof, wondering what he thought, but he was crouching and regarding the analytical engine with a furrowed brow.

“You'd think he'd put sex selection on top of the deck,” Victor griped, “but it's not there. And some of these cards are ridiculous. He's got registers in here that don't make any sense at all.”

“Did he write the whole program himself?” Cristof asked.

“Pretty much. It was his project.” Victor put another card into the stack. “I would have written this routine with much more elegance. It's as though he didn't care how much slagging computational power or time his program would take.”

“That's not the Great Engine's version of the program, is it?” Cristof asked. “The cards are too small.”

“It's his test version, the one he ran here. Nobody tests a program on the Great Engine. It costs too much, and you wouldn't want to cause a crash,” Kyle said.

“What would happen if the Great Engine crashed?” Taya imagined huge gears tumbling down against each other. “Is it something the Torn Cards might try?”

“It wouldn't be the end of the world,” Lars said, handing Cristof a clean gear. The exalted began piecing the cleaned assembly back together again, looking as engrossed as he'd been while dismantling the eyrie clock. “But you'd panic a lot of engineers. An abrupt stop would throw gears and spindles out of alignment, and it might ruin a storage drum if data were being written. Everything would have to be recalibrated before the Engine was started up again. That would take a few days. The program schedule would fall behind, you'd lose some data, and Ondinium might get stuck with a surplus of widgets. Nothing serious.”

“You keep saying that the Great Engine isn't important, but I thought it was the main reason Ondinium's so powerful.”

“Don't listen to the Organicists
or
the Social Engineers,” Kyle advised, glancing up from the schematic. “They both credit the Engine with far too much power. It's just a fancy calculating machine. If you looked at your watch and it said five o'clock, but you knew it was the middle of the night, would you believe your watch or your senses? Same with the Great Engine. If it gives the Council obviously inaccurate data, the Council will notice and make corrections.”

“‘Obviously' being the key word, of course,” Isobel said as she pieced together more metal parts.

“By the way,” Taya said, “did you take that program from Alister's house? His copy is missing.”

“This is his copy, but we found it here. He must have been working on it the night before he died,” Emelie replied. Taya winced at her matter-of-fact tone.

“He was at a party that night.”

“He might have come here afterward. He did things like that. Sometimes the best time to work is after midnight, when nobody else is around.” Victor scrutinized a card. “Emelie, can you figure this out?”

She leaned over his shoulder, then picked up the cards that preceded it.

“Looks like it should loop. Where's the end?”

Kyle set down the schematic.

“If a loop set the program buzzing, it could keep the engine's gears spinning all night,” he observed. “But an error that obvious should have come up during testing.”

“This card is pretty new. Maybe he was experimenting,” Victor suggested. He held up two cards. Even Taya could see the smudges of oil and wear around the perforations on the older card.

“Could a loop bypass the security on this engine?” Cristof asked, joining them.

“No, but take a look at this.” The programmers huddled around Victor as he pulled out cards and spread them over Kyle's schematic.

Taya and Cristof backed away, giving each other blank looks.

“How soon can we get up to the tower?” Cristof asked, his voice low.

“Not until there's light. We can leave as soon as we can make out shapes, but you wouldn't want to fly into a tree or a cliff on your first time out.”

“Or ever.” He jammed his hands into his pockets, frowning at the motionless analytical engine.

“What are you thinking?”

“You don't want to know.”

“How'd you like me to drop you while we're flying?”

His frown deepened.

“What if Emelie was right?” His voice dropped to an uncertain murmur. “What if Alister
had
given Neuillan too much information? Enough for Neuillan to circumvent the loyalty test?”

Taya was confused. “If he did, it was just an accident.”

“Let's say it wasn't. Neuillan was a family friend, and Alister's judgment wasn't always the best when it came to keeping secrets. What if Neuillan convinced Alister to tell him how to get around Refinery? And what if somebody found out what Alister had done, used it to blackmail him into writing a program that would harm the Great Engine, and then killed him to keep him quiet?”

“You think he wrote Clockwork Heart to sabotage the Engine? He wouldn't do that,” Taya objected. “He was passionate about this program.”

“He fooled you before. He could be very convincing, when he wanted to be.”

“Clockwork Heart wasn't about impressing me. It was personal.”

Cristof looked troubled. “Maybe. But he also cared what people thought about him. If someone threatened to tell the world that he had a hand in Neuillan's treason…”

“But if Clockwork Heart doesn't work right, that would make him look bad too, wouldn't it?”

“A programming error is one thing. Aiding and abetting a traitor is another.” Cristof rubbed his eyes, knocking his glasses askew. “I don't want to believe he would sabotage the Engine, but think about it. If he wrote a program that compromised the Engine's operation, someone would have a very good reason to kill him and Caster. Killing Alister would keep the program's secret safe, and killing Caster would swing the Council vote in the program's favor.”

“But that doesn't explain the stolen Labyrinth cards. Alister thought you did that.”

“Hey, Exalted.” Lars looked over, his round face troubled.

“What?”

“No offense, but I think your brother was writing more just than a matchmaking program.”

Cristof gave Taya a heavy look, then stepped up to the table.

“What is it?”

“Well, we haven't gone through the whole thing, but he's got routines here that look more like decryption functions than compatibility match-ups.”

“This is the last program we ran last night,” Kyle added. “It has to be the one that affected the engine, unless Lars finds a mechanical problem.”

“I haven't found anything yet, and I've been over about two-thirds of the metal. It's still a possibility, but after seeing these…” Lars shook his head.

“Could someone else have inserted those cards into his program?” Taya asked, casting about for a better explanation.

“No, it's his work,” Victor assured her. “I've seen him use some of these functions before.”

“Was the program sitting here when you came in yesterday?” Cristof asked.

“It was in his storage area.”

“Locked?”

“Yes, but we all have each other's keys. When we heard he was dead, we decided to pull it out and run it.”

“It doesn't make sense,” Cristof muttered. “If it's a decryption program, why would he leave it here?”

“You don't want to carry a program around all day,” Victor said. “A box of punch cards is heavy.”

“Besides, this room's secure,” Lars added. “And nobody would have any reason to think Clockwork Heart was anything other than a matchmaking program.”

“Hey, wait a minute,” Isobel protested. “You don't think Heart was specifically written to get access to an engine, do you? Alister wouldn't do that.”

Cristof pulled his coat around him. “If he did, somebody will be coming after this copy.”

Taya and Kyle both spoke at once.

“Not necessarily.” “If he is—”

They looked at each other. Kyle gestured for Taya to go first.

“If we're assuming this was written to run on the Great Engine, these are the wrong kind of cards, right? The Engine copy is probably still up in Oporphyr Tower,” she said. “That's the one a criminal would want.”

“The only other engine worth accessing would be the one in the Bank of Ondinium,” Kyle added.

Taya felt a surge of excitement.

“A bank robbery! Maybe that's what this is all about!”

“But the stolen Labyrinth Code…” Cristof objected.

“Does the bank use it?”

“Not that I know of,” Lars said. “But you could be right, Kyle. Accessing bank records makes more sense than tampering with the Great Engine, and the bank uses paper punch cards.”

Cristof stood deep in thought, his usual frown in place.

“As much as I'd prefer to stake out the bank than fly up to the tower,” he said at last, “there's too much evidence pointing to the Great Engine.”

“But how would anyone get up there?” Emelie asked.

“You can hike up to the Tower,” Isobel pointed out. “It's dangerous, but it's possible. The wireferry service path runs all the way to the top.”

“So somebody could already be up there.” Cristof looked at Taya. “Is there any way—”

“I'm not taking you up in the dark.”

“But if someone's trying to sabotage the Great Engine—”

“They're not climbing up in the dark, either. It's too dangerous.”

“How long does the hike take?” Cristof asked Isobel.

“Depends. From Primus, at this time of year, two or three days, depending on how athletic and well-equipped you are. The cliffs are the hardest part. You'd need to know what you were doing, and you wouldn't want to get caught scaling them at night.”

“Is the only access to the Great Engine through the Council tower?” Taya asked.

“As far as I know, yes,” Kyle replied. “All the construction tunnels were blocked and sealed after the Engine was put into place.”

“There must be a maintenance tunnel. What if one of the steam engines needs replacing? Or a megagear?” Cristof insisted.

“Well, if there's another way in, it's a state secret. You'd know it better than we would.”