Glass (15 page)

CHAPTER 14

Vitrescence was worsening. The foundations of the Rusty Quarter houses showed dim-spot, the characteristic sign of infection, while much of the Empty Quarter was now dark and sharp, with shards covering every street, the skyline an encircling row of knives. The Water Purification House standing on Feverfew Street had not yet succumbed, but everybody knew that soon it would. Elsewhere, the Cold Quarter was in some sectors a continuous sheet of cracked glass, gloomy and deadly, a place that only the mad and the dead did not leave.

Because the consequence of glass was cuts and blood, the fervour displayed by the followers of Selene lessened a little across the city, despite the continuing transformation of the Spacefish. And at last Noct’s inevitable answer arrived. From the smoking factories of the Nocturnal Quarter came black plastic ladies on sticks, thousands upon thousands of them, idols superior to previous efforts in that they could be filled with water by an act of trepanning and squeezed, thus making the image weep black tears. It was noted, however, that although these idols initiated waves of high spirits to counter the lunar acolytes, they were of poor manufacture, since when squeezed the black tegument came off to stain hands and fingers. Many people wondered if this was an omen of strife and secret discord in high circles, since to certain clerks these inferior products would constitute an act of schism.

Dwllis was far too busy to notice any of this. One day at the Cowhorn Tower he was disturbed by noise at the door, and upon investigating he discovered Crimson Boney jumping up and down and trying to get inside. Dwllis let him in, shutting the door after making one round of the tower’s circumference; the gnostician had no lunar follower, so far as he could see.

At once he was confronted with the problem of communication. For some weeks now he had realised that the gnosticians were important to the Crayan scheme of things, the words of Hedalgwadey making this hunch even more plausible. Despite Umia’s threat he desperately wanted to sit down with Crimson Boney and chat. It would solve so many mysteries.

Working for Lord Archivist Subadwan had displaced his other activities. Now, a gnostician at his side, he felt the overwhelming urge to create a translator. Vivid, dreamy minutes passed as he considered the problem, oblivious to the creaking of the tower, the pattering footfall of the gnostician, to the purr and burble of on-line pyuters.

Pyuters.
That was the key. It was the only way. He would have to create a pyuter powerful enough and with enough memory to become a translation machine. It could be done. An inner certainty drove him. The fact that he was the only person in all of Cray to consider gnosticians an already conscious species made him puff up with pride.

Hours of reverie passed. Thousands of discrete thoughts entered his mind.

‘I’ll do it,’ he suddenly said, standing. ‘I’ll crack this damnable thing once and for all.’

Crimson Boney showed no sign of leaving. This both worried and reassured Dwllis: because of the connection with the Archive of Selene, and because he felt a bond was forming between himself and the gnostician. All Crimson Boney did was eat leaves from his backpack and drink water.

And now Dwllis worked with intensity. Touring the Cowhorn Tower, he realised that none of his pyuters would be able to hold the abstract architecture required for something so complex as translation. One avenue remained. City wall pyuters featured vast memories. Unfortunately they were electronically and physically connected to the networks. Dwllis would have to steal one.

Placating Crimson Boney with food gestures that the gnostician seemed to understand, Dwllis departed the Cowhorn Tower, keeping his visitor inside. For some hours he strode the streets, hunting northerly sectors even to the edge of the Stellar Quarter, until he found what he wanted – a wall pyuter in a dark alley, untouched by glass. The few houses opposite seemed unoccupied. He walked past it a few times, popping a fresh lump of qe’lib’we into his mouth. The previous user had carelessly left the liquid screen undrained, and now it was a slimy mess patterned with soot, dust and glass splinters. Checking again for people walking along nearby Wool Street, he took from his toolkit a crowbar and some wedges. Risking damage, and struggling one-handed, he levered one side of the pyuter away from the wall, inserting the wedges. So far so good. Two more pulls on the crowbar, a loud
crack!
that penetrated his earmuffs, and the pyuter was loose. Dwllis pulled it out, bit off the optical fibres, poured away the screen, then ran.

He had succeeded in pulling off his crime. He did not know what the penalty might be if he was discovered, but he did not care. The niggling thought that he had descended from perfect citizenship to common criminality he shrugged off.

But the niggling thought was true. He had been, by choice and with pride, a man of unsoiled repute and selfless integrity. People laughed at his stiff ways, but he had right on his side. Until he broke into the Archive of Selene... until he stole a wall pyuter...

The thoughts vanished like dust sucked into a vent. He ran on. All that mattered was speaking with Crimson Boney.

Back at the Cowhorn Tower he first tried to reassure the gnostician, realising after some minutes of Crimson Boney trying to examine his pockets that the object of the search was the food he had signed earlier. What did they eat? He looked inside the gnostician’s bag, finding dried blue leaves from a plant he knew grew alongside the lane leading up to his tower. Outside, torch in hand, he found this plant. Though winter was approaching, its kissleaves were touching the kissleaves of adjacent plants, so that the whole area was cross-fertilising. No fruits here, then: they would appear in spring. Dwllis hunted up and down the lane, trying to recall the dishes Cuensheley set before gnostician guests at the Copper Courtyard, looking for a plant with kissleaves shrivelled and plump fruits. But it was not the season. There: a yellow-leafed ball-plant, its runners underground. One handed, torch stuck in his armpit, he plucked three fruits and took them to a grateful Crimson Boney.

All night he spent working with the stolen pyuter, evacuating the electronic dross, cleaning the memory of images, recalculating response times, finally recreating optical links to the tower system so that his own sub-systems could colonise the pyuter. He set the device in a barrel of bio-gel. The plan was for the pyuter to recreate itself. Once receptive, it would first experience the environment he had devised, then, as he and the gnostician tried to communicate, the sub-systems would evolve into an abstract ecology devoted to the translation of human and gnostician words... if such words existed.

When the optical links grew, the environment appeared. The pyuter rejected nothing, accepting knowledge of Cray, of Dwllis and the gnostician, and of the concepts of language. It became as a year-old child, ready to speak.

Dwllis began collecting oddments from his rooms. He sat next to Crimson Boney and showed him a shoe. ‘Shoe,’ he said. ‘Shoe?’ He stared at the gnostician, waving the shoe in front of the creature’s dark eyes. Above these eyes, a wide mouth slobbered with the remains of yellow fruit: below, tentacles shivered.

The gnostician made a sound. Dwllis squeezed a bulb on the end of a wire to alert the pyuter to what he hoped was a gnostician word. Later on, when the system became intelligent, he wanted it to perform this task itself, as it evolved an understanding of the rules of gnostician sounds.

‘Cloth,’ he said, waving a cloth. ‘Cloth.’

Crimson Boney took the cloth and drew it close to his tentacles, before emitting a grunt.

‘Glass.’ A squeal.

‘Plant.’ A purr.

‘Metal.’ A musical whine.

And so the process continued. With no feedback from the pyuter Dwllis was forced to continue until he ran out of objects, at which point he paused for rest. The pyuter had already developed a level into which he could not inquire, a level below the symbolic, like the invisible molecules that made up a visible chunk of plastic. But despite the intense needs that he had programmed into the pyuter by means of its environment, it was not acting autonomously. Groups of symbols were floating through its electronic core, but not joining. It must need more data.

Suddenly Crimson Boney began a continuous sound like a squealing song, and he paced up and down the chamber, head bobbing and hairs erect as if he was declaiming to an invisible audience. ‘Are you all right?’ Dwllis pointlessly said, following with more questions along the same line. Crimson Boney seemed upset, and although Dwllis could not tell if this guess was correct, he did have the eerie sensation of strong emotions coursing through the body of the gnostician.

And then the barrel of bio-gel burst.

He had not noticed sub-systems evolving with manic speed. The barrel burst and a solid block of quivering gel emerged. This was an autonomous protein structured by artificial DNA, appropriated, so it was said, from the depths of the Swamps by Noct’s dark aquanauts. Noct alone knew what it could do.

Crimson Boney stood still, tentacles rigid, eyes slitted, frozen in a pose of tension.

With the plastic struts of the barrel cast aside, the bio-gel, holding the pyuter firm like a child holds a doll, expanded into a column five feet tall, becoming translucent. Inside, filaments snaked with time-lapse speed, growing into nodules, and then into a range of shapes like organs. Dwllis was reminded of what he had seen at the Cemetery. Something here was growing. The pyuter was becoming its brain, held in what looked like the chest of a person.

It
was
a person! Now that image had come to mind he saw that two legs were forming, two arms, and a head from which yellow hair sprouted.

The thing was turning into a pyuton. Outer layers were now opaque, pink skin just like his. The face was appearing, with nose and mouth. The eyes were black as night, as if declaring that the pyuton had no soul, and they seemed to stare with macabre intensity at Dwllis, until, much to his relief, a brown iris and a bloodshot white appeared. Creaking and squeaking, the body stretched and filled, its skin drying. And it was Etwe.

Dwllis had never expected to see her again. Seeing her here, naked, made him tremble, and he wanted to run away, though he could not. Nor could Crimson Boney, who, likewise, was fascinated.

Tentatively Etwe moved. She twirled about, took hesitant steps. Then she spoke to Dwllis and a musical babble simultaneously emerged from her mouth, giving her words that electronic tinge of two sounds modulating one another.

‘Dwllis... we speak... you, me... me, you.’

Crimson Boney approached Etwe with tentacles twitching. The holes at the side of his head flexed. It seemed to Dwllis that he spoke back in the gnostician tongue.

Etwe said, ‘Yes... I speak you... you, me.’

This, Dwllis realised, was his translator, which had become autonomous in a most fiendish way.

‘Metal,’ Etwe said, ‘string, head, leg, plastic, silicon, nose.’ As she spoke these words their equivalents, or what Dwllis presumed must be their equivalents, were spoken in the musical gnostician tongue, and he was both appalled and astonished to see Crimson Boney running around the chamber to fetch examples of these substances.

‘Etwe, are you really here?’ he asked.

Etwe looked at him. ‘I never go... not go...’

She had returned to him. What would Cuensheley say?

He tried to get a grip on himself. Severely, he said, ‘Etwe, tell me the route to your room upstairs. Now!’

She looked at him, looked up at the ceiling, but was not able to reply coherently. ‘Go up... up plastic...’

So this was far from a complete translator. The one-year-old child had developed a year or two. Dwllis felt some relief at this. The last thing he wanted was Etwe around again, if this was Etwe. How had the pyuton formed so? Had Etwe been spying on him through the networks, waiting for her chance to pounce, to become once again his servant? The thought was dreadful. But at least he had some time in which to think. Of course, the work of translation would have to continue; Etwe’s brain must grow and mature. Yet somehow he would have to squash Etwe out.

Dwllis considered the wider picture. Tierquthay had been told by the radio voice from the afterlife that the work of gnostician augmentation was one key to understanding the threat of vitrescence and the luminophagi. In a matter of days, he might be able to question a gnostician directly. He and Cuensheley would not need to break into Selene’s house again. He was close to finding out some answers.

A knock from outside. He bustled Etwe into a side room and ran for the door, opening it to find Cuensheley, lumod in one hand, basket in the other.

‘Hello,’ she said.

‘Good morning, what d’you want?’ he asked.

She frowned. ‘I thought we’d arranged for you to have deliveries every other day, as you’re not going to live with me.’

Dwllis smelled a yeasty smell from the basket. ‘Indeed, we did. It is my damnable memory.’

Cuensheley looked into the tower. ‘Aren’t you going to let me in, then? Is that the loper you were telling me about?’

‘Yes, that is Crimson Boney.’

‘How’s the translator going?’

‘Oh, most well,’ Dwllis said. Desperate, he mentally scrambled for a way to force her away from the tower. If she saw Etwe, all his benefits would vanish.

‘Are you all right?’ she asked again.

Dwllis kissed her on the cheek. She smiled and kissed him back. He said, ‘I am most well, Cuensheley. What say we go for a walk into the city? I have not had much of a chance to see you of late, being beset by the Reeve’s orders.’

‘There is something wrong, isn’t there? You’re practically stuttering’

Dwllis swallowed. ‘Truth be told,’ he began, ‘I may be worried about... about the amount of this damnable sponge I am chewing. You are getting me into bad habits.’ He took the basket from her and stepped out. ‘Come along.’

Cuensheley jumped inside. ‘No.’

Dwllis re-entered the tower. There stood Etwe.

Cuensheley rounded on him. ‘You
liar.
’