End of the Century (68 page)

Alice passed the time, waiting for the knights, examining the data stores of the Change Engine. She discovered something interesting. There was all manner of technology recorded in there, things like the macromolecular blades and the disks and the plans for the Change Engine itself. And there was scientific information, exhaustive data about the universe from which the Change Engine had come, information about the interplay between the higher and lower dimensions, about the nature of space-time itself. There were engineering schematics, plans for molecular machines, information about how to extend organic life, and store and edit memories, and all manner of things hardly dreamed about by the scientists in Alice's world.

But there was something missing from the data store.

There was no music. No dramas. No books. No fiction.

In short, no stories.

Perhaps it was all stored in the minds recorded on the disks. Or maybe the builders of the Change Engine had abandoned anything that wasn't science or engineering or technology long ago, if they ever had it. But whatever the reason, one thing was clear. The Change Engine itself, and the Dialectic by extension, had no knowledge whatsoever of anything that wasn't
real.

By the time the surviving knights reached the skin of the Change Engine, it was too late. The Red had taken note of her activities and closed off access to vital systems. The White's tactic in engaging Alice's help appeared to have failed.

Mervyn and the Red were aware that she was within the heart, but unable to do anything about it beyond blinding her and cutting off her control of the Change Engine's systems. The White was able to protect her that much, at least. But knowing that she was there, an irritant in the heart of the Change Engine, Mervyn decided to secure his own position and help ensure his own survival. The White, powerless to stop him, had monitored his movements and relayed them to Alice.

Mervyn had taken the corpse of one of the fallen knights and animated it by remote presence. A robot, or zombie, guided by remote control. He'd modified the body so that it could survive in the universe beyond the affected biosphere, unliving but undead, unchanging and virtually immortal, though able to operate for only brief periods of time without resting. Then, along with similarly modified doglike rath, this modified corpse, this zombie, this Huntsman, would be sent back into the outside universe, as a kind of insurance policy. But he would not go unarmed. Mervyn had already used one of the macromolecular blades himself, and he added the Huntsman's genetic data to his own; the Huntsman would carry it down through the centuries and, if need be, Mervyn's younger self might one day wield it, as well.

This Huntsman would be sent walking to the future, one step at a time, to the Change Engine's own past, with two principle protocols: protect Mervyn and prevent Alice or any others from entering the Change Engine.

Alice wasn't sure what that kind of paradox would do. If the Huntsman killed her younger self in the future, before she entered the Change Engine, she wouldn't be here in the Change Engine now, right? Or would it just create a new timeline, a new Change Engine without Alice falling eternally in its heart?

She didn't know. But she didn't want to risk finding out.

If Mervyn wanted to send insurance into the future, one step at a time, then perhaps Alice would do the same. And then it would be time for her to try a logic problem of her own.

Alice waited. It seemed an eternity, falling there, in the silent whiteness at the heart of the Change Engine. Eventually, though, she knew that help would arrive. And she'd long before worked out who it would be.

She was an old woman when the two surviving knights reached the Change Engine's heart. Luckily, she'd had time to work on her Latin in all the time since, and was able to communicate with them a little more freely.

One of them was beyond helping. He would die soon, that much was clear. Alice knew that she could reanimate his body when he was dead, a
corpse turned into a zombie puppet like the Red King's Huntsman, but she couldn't bring herself to do that. Besides, it wasn't necessary. There was another option.

Galaad

Galaad and Artor came at last to the heart of the Unworld, the place to which all of the corridors and passages led. It was a multifaceted room, and on entering through the wall, they slid down the roughly curved floor. Artor's blood streaked behind them, until they finally came to rest in the bottom of the bowl. The floor, walls, and ceiling were an innumerable number of planes of silvery metal, all of different shapes and sizes, broken here and there by openings of various sizes and shapes, of which the door they'd exited had been just one. It was as if they were within some many-faced jewel.

Something hung in the center of the sphere, though at first it hurt Galaad's eyes just to look at it.

“You have come,” said a voice from above, and the strange curves and shapes before Galaad's eyes began slowly to resolve into a figure. “It has been so long, I had almost given up hope.”

Galaad squinted overhead. There, in the center of the crooked enclosure of the chamber, hung the figure of a woman. But this was not the young maiden they'd encountered in the corridor, nor yet the mature figure who had appeared in his visions and in their journeys through the Summer Lands. This was an ancient crone, haggard and withered, looking for all the world just like the witches who featured in the stories told to children around smoldering night fires.

She hung in midair, not immobile, but drifting slightly back and forth, arms and legs swaying easily, long snow white hair spreading out in all directions like a nimbus. It was as if she floated under the sea, gently buffeted this way and that by the underwater currents.

“It has been a difficult journey for you,” the Sea Witch went on, her tone
gentler than her wrinkled and fearsome expression would suggest possible. “I am sorry for that.”

“Who…who are you?” Galaad gasped, kneeling at Artor's side and looking up, his eyes watering with the strangeness of the sight.

“I am she whom you came seeking,” the Sea Witch answered, sadly.

“The White Lady? But…But, I don't understand…”

The Sea Witch shook her frail head, the nimbus of white hair shifting around her. “I have been imprisoned here a long, long time.”

“But…but you appeared to us only a short time ago, with the look of one barely past the pink of youth.”

“A short time for you,” the Sea Witch answered, “a long lifetime for me. Time does not flow normally in the Unworld, and still less here at its heart. The tower turns, and in turning generates something like time, something like space. Walk one direction and you advance into the future; walk another, and you return to the past. So it is that you can encounter the same person in their youth, in their mature years, and again at the end of life.” She smiled, slightly, the expression difficult to read amidst the forest of wrinkles. “But not necessarily in that sequence.”

Artor coughed wetly, a red froth bubbling at the corners of his mouth.

Galaad looked from his injured companion up to the Sea Witch floating overhead. “Great lady, whatever your name, please help my friend. My king. He is gravely injured.”

“No,” the Sea Witch said, shaking her head sadly. “He is dead.”

Galaad opened his mouth to object, but looked down at the High King who lay cradled in his arms and saw that she was right. The cough had been his death rattle, all life gone from his eyes.

“But his death will not be the end of his journey, I'm afraid,” she said. “Nor is your own far from over, I'm sorry to say.”

Metal monsters climbed from the multifaceted walls and ceiling, clinging like spiders crawling across a ceiling, and advanced on Galaad and the late High King.

“You carry your disk still,” the Sea Witch said, and pointed a bony finger at the round shield at Galaad's side. Galaad could only nod, dumbly. “Place it near your friend's head,” the Sea Witch instructed.

Galaad was numb, all sense of feeling gone, his senses near shattered. He felt like a puppet, lacking the will to act of his own accord. He was so weary, so beaten down by his long journey, with so much death and blood in his wake, that he would in that moment have obeyed any order, from any source, no more his own creature than the undead servants of the Red King had been.

Galaad did as he was told and set the disk on the floor just above Artor's head. It looked almost like a halo.

The Sea Witch moved her hands before her in a complex sigil, and the chamber seemed to suffuse with a white glow that faded after a moment. The disk began to hum, quietly at first, and then with increasing volume, rising in pitch. Artor's cheek twitched, and one of his eyes seemed to flutter.

Galaad brightened, thinking in an insane moment that the Sea Witch was somehow restoring the fallen king to life. But then the humming ceased, and the twitching and fluttering was stopped, and Artor was again an insensate, lifeless corpse.

“All that your friend was, all that he ever thought or hoped or believed, is now within the disk.” The Sea Witch paused, thoughtfully. “Now,” she said, at length, “we must see to you.”

Alice

Thanks to the White, Alice had control over the systems in the immediate vicinity of the Change Engine's heart. After she had uploaded the dying knight's mind into the disk, she set to work on the other. She rendered him unconscious, telling him that he would sleep, and then sent streams of molecular machines into his body.

While the tiny machines did their work, Alice turned her attention back to the disk.

As she had learned when the White first implanted the history of the Change Engine into her thoughts, the unbreakable disks in the pattern stores were intended for the long-term storage and retrieval of the former inhabitants
of the dead universe. Each of the millions of disks contained a handful of minds, perfectly stored at the moment of recording. Someday, the protocols ran, their original bodies would be remade, fabricated out of extant organic material, and the minds contained within the disks downloaded into them.

The knights had used the disks as unbreakable shields, not guessing the kind of protection they might instead be able to offer. But Alice wanted even more.