Edda (21 page)

“Well, Princess, shall we return to work?”

“Yes, Ambassador, let
us
return to work.” He was sufficiently familiar with her ways to recognize the sarcasm. The point was to remind him that while she was working, all Ambassador did was stand still, watching her. Presumably, he was bored beyond belief. Or perhaps he just switched off in some way.

Returning to her tower through the great halls and long corridors, Penelope’s step was a lot lighter than it had been on her anxious journey to the planning room. Lord Scanthax was worried, genuinely worried, and he had no idea of her nocturnal journeys to the Feast Hall in preparation for the redistribution ceremony. Circumstances could not be better for the realization of her plan to humble him.

Chapter 21

THE PRINCESS AND THE PAUPER

That night, Penelope
crept once again through the shadowy corridors of the castle toward the Feast Hall. Ever since she had discovered the secret door in the fireplace, her curiosity had been aroused. Strictly speaking, she probably did not need to explore beyond the door. In order to seal Lord Scanthax and his manifestations in the hall, all she needed to do was wait for the right moment and then weld it tight to the wall. But, she told herself, the more intelligence she had about Lord Scanthax the better. There was a risk—each time she traveled by moonlight to this part of the castle, there was a risk—yet every night since finding the door, as she lay her avatar down to bed, she had toyed in her thoughts with the idea of further explorations. In the end, the secret door had proved irresistible.

The castle was quiet. With their decisions made, the various manifestations were off performing their duties. As a result, the planning room was not in use and none of the lanterns in the hallways leading to it were lit. Penelope liked the darkness—it hid her—and there was no difficulty in walking with her fingers gently running along the wall to keep her oriented in the blackest stretches of the corridors. In any case, she was soon at the halls, their windows on this cloudless night letting in plenty of silver moonlight to see by.

It was only when she actually stood in the stone fireplace once more, touching the secret door, that Penelope felt nervous. What if someone was back there? Was it really worth risking the upset of her plans to satisfy her curiosity? Gently, very gently, she started lifting the catch, even before she realized she had come to a decision. The secret door moved a fraction, creating a gap of just an inch. It was dark beyond and there was no sound. Pushing the door open just wide enough to let her through, she stepped into the room beyond and then closed the door behind her. It was now completely black in the small chamber and it was easy to become confused about where the hole in the floor was. Rather than take even one step in that darkness, Penelope lowered herself to her hands and knees and shuffled carefully forward until her seeking fingers felt nothing but space. Still concentrating on making as little noise as possible—although her confidence was growing—Penelope found the rungs of the metal ladder and, holding tight to the top one, lowered herself carefully into the pit.

After she descended about twenty steps, it seemed that there was a hint of light below her. She paused. A very faint but consistent humming sound was audible. Five more steps and it was definitely becoming a little lighter. She continued descending and was surprised when her foot could not find the expected rung. Instead, lower down, it touched what felt like the ground. Was she all the way down? Why was it still so dim?

Looking around, Penelope found herself in a room about the size of her bedchamber. This was evident from several small blue lights, and their reflections in some kind of glass. More out of the corners of her eyes than by looking directly, she could see the outline of a very large desk on the far side of the room. The blue lights were all above the desk and as she edged closer she realized they were familiar from her room in the human world. When electrical equipment was connected to a power supply, a small light of exactly this kind was switched on.

This was unexpected and rather bewildering. She had thought the passage would lead to a supply of weapons or to an escape route from the castle. Perhaps other exits did lead to a way out. But this room clearly had a purpose of its own. Her next step caused her avatar to stumble and she accidentally kicked a chair away from her, creating a horribly loud noise. At least she did not have to put up with the pain of her avatar’s stubbed toe. Holding on to the back of the chair to steady herself, Penelope paused for a minute, listening. Nothing. She waited for a while, until her calm was restored, and sat down.

There were controls in the desk and, at eye level, some glass screens. Should she risk pressing some of the buttons? Of course she should; there was no way she could leave without finding out more about this mysterious place. Without dwelling on the risk that she might somehow set off an alarm that would bring Lord Scanthax running, her fingers pushed the nearest button. The screen flickered and came on with a hiss and display of static. Its brightness hurt her eyes and she looked away, taking in the fact that there were six seats lined up by the desk, each facing three large screens. In front of her, there was a control that had the same symbol for volume as her film-playing devices, and as she had hoped, Penelope was able to turn the hiss down to a whisper. A moment later, in response to her turning another switch, an image leaped into existence on the active screen. It was a rather dull gray picture of an empty corridor. Turning the switch to another position caused the picture to change: another corridor, this time with some rubble strewn along the floor. Realization hit her hard and she slumped back in the chair. So this was it. This was the room from which Lord Scanthax or his manifestations interacted with the human world. These weren’t recordings; they were live broadcasts of the corridors outside of her air lock. Which meant that . . .

Penelope turned the switch all the way around, rushing through dozens of images until a much more interesting one flashed past. A short scroll back and there it was. Penelope in Edda was looking at Penelope in the human world. The princess at the pauper. Poor helpless creature. So undernourished. So lonely. And so strange-looking, too, like her head and hands were those of an insect. For a long, long time she stared at herself, knowing that she was crying, but that the resolution of the camera was not powerful enough to pick up the trails of moisture that slid from the corners of her eyes.

The wave of unhappiness that had struck her at this unexpected reminder of her helplessness gradually receded and it was replaced by a growing sense of purpose that drew her back to her investigation. This room might have all the answers to her questions. Ready to press on, she reached up to brush away the tears and her avatar’s action made her smile. Of course, there were no tears here in Edda to wipe.

So this was the room that the humans had built so that Lord Scanthax—and others?—could interface with them. It had to be the place that Ambassador came to when he talked to her in the human world or when he directed the robots. He must have spent hours here when she was a baby. Had Lord Scanthax kept any records? Perhaps the other controls would access them. This surely must be the room that also contained the life-support instructions for her body.

The controls at the next seat had a keyboard and switches that lit up three monitors. Again, most showed gray images of scenes that were presumably other rooms of the abandoned human colony. One way to proceed would be to try to find the cameras in the library and send a robot there to search for records. But right now that would take too long. After she had trapped all of Lord Scanthax’s manifestations in the Feast Hall, she could pursue that option at her leisure, especially if she could find the controls for her life-support system.

Meanwhile, not all the screens were displaying video feeds from the human world. There was one that simply had a small > icon flashing in the top left corner. Was it inviting her to write a command? The problem was that all her scripting skills were based on Edda’s menus and her manipulations of three-dimensional objects. It was doubtful that any of the commands she knew would apply here. Still, before moving on, she tried typing on the keyboard to see if the letters appeared on the screen. They did.

>ADFOPWEF
>✱ACCESS DENIED
>RUN
>✱ACCESS DENIED
>LOGIN
>✱ACCESS DENIED
>START
>✱ACCESS DENIED
>LIST
>✱ACCESS DENIED
>LORD SCANTHAX HAS MOLDY UNDERWEAR
>✱ACCESS DENIED

Rather than waste any more time with the computer, if it was a computer, Penelope moved on to the next set of controls. These sent her heart soaring. Before her was a very promising set of dials and sliders, just the sort of instruments you would construct to regulate an environment for the life functions of a human body fixed up to a machine. The three screens, when they came on, were promising, too. Moving and static graphs appeared, showing an enormous amount of information. None seemed immediately relevant to bodily functions, though. There were maps, too; or not exactly maps, but technical drawings of buildings and arrangements of buildings, much like those Architect did for Lord Scanthax. For a while she scrolled through the drawings, recognizing none of the buildings they described. As she continued to search through the drawings for a clue as to what she was looking at, Penelope noticed that the adjacent screen was also changing in association with her actions. It had been merely flickering before, but now it was flaring up with color. Slowly now, she scrolled back until suddenly graphs and charts appeared on the second screen that were alive. Among the readings were those labeled “temperature,” “pressure,” “heart rate,” and “atmospheric composition”—and they were all in motion. It had to concern her! Returning her attention to the first screen that she had been scrolling through, she noticed that one section of the schematic on display was slightly brighter than the lines around it. After a short experiment with the controls, she zoomed in on it until it was a large oval, with two smaller rooms beside it and an air lock labeled at one end. This was it! She’d found herself and the life-function controls for her room.

“Ha! Well, well, Lord Scanthax. Who needs
you
anymore?”

The fact that she’d spoken aloud drew her attention back to her dimly lit surroundings and her sense of elation faded slightly as she reminded herself that the longer she remained here, the higher the risk of discovery. Nevertheless, for a delicious moment she sat back, suffused with happiness, looking at the plan of her room, its position in relation to the rest of the base—which itself was very interesting and warranted further exploration sometime—and, above all, the graphs on the adjacent screen measuring the state of her body and the environment around it.

In the wrestling match between her and Lord Scanthax, their positions had changed dramatically. Having been pinned to the floor, nearly helpless, she had wriggled free and was now stalking him. The discovery she had made tonight meant she was no longer dependent on his survival for her own. Even if the invaders destroyed him, so long as they didn’t find this room, she would remain alive. If she wanted to—not that she did—she could go back to her own daydream of blowing up Lord Scanthax and all his manifestations in the Feast Hall on Redistribution Day. She didn’t need him anymore!

Repeating the phrase over and over to herself, Penelope felt giddy. For the first time in her life, she really didn’t need Lord Scanthax for anything. She wasn’t completely free of him yet, though. Even now, if she was discovered here or missing from her room, the advantage would shift back toward him. To have total freedom, she would have to be able to prevent Lord Scanthax from ever using these controls again. Then she could roam as she pleased in avatar form and there would be nothing he could do to stop her. She’d leave the castle for good and somewhere out there—in Saga, if not in Epic, Ruin, or Myth—she would find other humans.

Deciding not to linger too long and risk being caught away from her bedroom, Penelope got up from her seat. There was, however, one more set of controls and although she had intended to switch everything off and leave, the buttons and labels in front of the last chair were too intriguing. They were almost the same as those that she used upstairs when she wanted to watch a film. She simply could not pass up the chance to see what they actually represented and so she slipped into the seat. Two screens came on, one just a pale light and the other displaying a menu that was easy to navigate, leading to thousands and thousands of what Penelope assumed were indeed film titles. Films of the entertainment sort held no interest for her, but from the way the files were grouped, it seemed that the back catalogue of human cultural activity was only part of the total. The other part had lots of subcategories, but above them all was a curious-sounding title: “A Farewell to Edda.” She selected the file and pressed “play.”

“To the lords and ladies of Edda.”

A middle-aged woman was sitting before a large glass window. Outside was a landscape of rugged mountains. Her expression was somber.

“We are leaving our colony in the next few days, and we have decided to leave Edda behind. For some years now the conditions on this planet have been worsening, and life support is taking up more and more of our resources. We have located a planet that looks far more suitable to our needs, and our ships are nearly ready for departure.

“Why are we leaving you here, when, after all, Edda was designed to occupy us during spaceflight? Because we learned from Earth of a terrible onslaught against humans by electronic lifeforms similar to you, but derived from the game of Saga. While you have shown no sign of antipathy toward humans, you have, understandably, desired to interact more with our environment through robots and so on.

“We leave you with interface rooms in every lordship so that you can continue to learn about the universe in which your own is contained. We also leave you with enough battery power to last about two hundred years; or two hundred years at a minimum, because so long as you maintain in working order the solar panels we also leave you with, you will be able to generate enough power to continue Edda indefinitely. Perhaps, with your increasing control over the robots, you will be able to make a better success of this colony than we managed to.

“Our fear, however, is that after our departure, you will set about attempting to conquer one another within Edda. It is in your nature, after all. But if there are survivors who learn to cooperate, then perhaps you will not think too unkindly of those who brought your world into being and who have taken measures to ensure it continues to exist into the far future.